epobirs

The Albertsons supermarket chain has the Jetbook for $150 right now.

I'm hoping they'll blow them out like seasonal candy after New Years.

To be accurate, motion tracking was first demonstrated back in the early 70s. The first consumers products were offered as add-ons to the Commodore Amiga in the 80s.

So it isn't surprising that the passage of time, as with so much in digital electronics, has allowed for the technology to become more sophisticated, yet at a very low cost.

The Natal has buttons readily available. The camera will track a hand holding a controller just as readily as an empty hand. Additionally, it is trivial to produce a controller variant, a baton for example, better suited to generating button presses while gesturing. It's just another set of buttons and sticks to the console.

The better question is whether it is worth the additional cost to accurately track the position/attitude of the controller in addition to the camera tracking of bodily movements. Sony already has this function in their PS3 controller but it hasn't been applied well yet, as seen in the failed 'Lair.' The payoff may be realized in combination with the motion tracking camera. Microsoft could easily add this but it does represent new investment in R&D and in the price of the final product.

I trust everyone realizes his has been built into IE for about ten years. It's called kiosk mode.

I suspect system will have vouchers for a free Win7 upgrade in time for back to school sales. This is the traditional pattern for major new Windows releases.

The story behind the story:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Caroline

It should be kept in mind that there is nothing preventing a DSi from running GBA binaries. They just have to be loaded through the DS or SD slots. The 32 MB GBA game could simply be part of the DS card containing the main game.

Expect to see many classic GBA titles made avaialable as download purchases and compilation bundles on DS cards. You could put many GBA games on a single ROM without coming close to the 128 MB used by the largest games currently offered. Chain of Memories at 32 MB was masive compared to most GBA titles.

Of course, this is one big reason many publishers would be completely happy to go entirely to sales by download. No costly excess inventory to discount and no easy means of transfer to a new owner.

Atleast until such a case goes before the Supreme Court.

It's Game Dude! My favorite used game outlet in the universe, conveniently located at the corner of Laurel Cyn. and Sherman Way in scenic North Hollywood, CA.

I've spent a lot of money at the place but I believe they paid me a lot more for all of the games I brought them. It used to be very easy to find games being blown out by a clueless retailer for half of what Game Dude would pay for the game used. Ah, memories...

The blame is entirely Sony's. If anything, XBLA is a potential source of ports for PSP. If a game is successful in that venue the developer can seek the capital to produce a PSP version with all of the costs that involves. Sony could easily step and provide the capital investment and score a win for themselves.

Provided, of course, that people who play the game paid for it. It looks mighty easy to download the whole PSP library after a casual glance at a few torrent sites.

Sony could also make the platform more atractive by pushing harder to make it a download purchase venue in the style of XBLA. They've done a little here but not nearly enough. One of the huge enticements XBLA offers a small developer is the reduction of investment before reaching consumers. In a conventional disc sale, the dev/publisher has to pay in advance for a large number of discs to be produced, as well as a royalty fee for each unit. The money is swallowed up by the console maker before any revenue comes back and regardless of how well or fast the game sells.

An XBLA game maker doesn't have those concerns. Microsoft only gets a piece of the action when a sale is made. There are no manufacturing or royalty costs before that sale. No manufacturing costs at all, unless the venue charges for the download bandwidth, although that would be more of a distribution expense.

If Sony wants the PSP to have XBLA games, it needs to provide an XBLA-like business model on the PSP.

This is really dubious reasoning. If HP is going to brand their own Linux (A collaboration with Canonical would make sense in terms of maximizing investment value) it will be as an addition to selling Vista, not as a replacement. HP already sells plenty of Vista licenses on a daily basis. The online whinefest creates an illusion of a rebellion that simply doesn't exist. Vista adoption is moving along at a good pace among the clients I visit.

What is holding back using Vista on new systems in the majority of cases I've witnessed is the incompatibility of some horrible but mission critical apps. There are numerous fields where one vertical app has no real competition and so the vendor can get away with terrible coding standards and dragging their feet for years before fixing the problems. I have one client that would happily deploy Vista on new systems tomorrow if not for this kind of situation.

To give you an idea how badly this app is written, if you enter certain portions of it without a printer (even a virtual PDF printer will do the job) installed, the app blows up and dumps the user back at the desktop. I suppose we can be grateful it doesn't manage to take down the whole OS. In Vista, their problem is that they do stuff in the registry that Microsoft said should never be done back when XP first launched. Since so many companies did it anyways (Intuit is one of the biggest offenders) Microsoft made this recommendation an enforced law under Vista. So, no more registry trashing but a lot of stuff stops running until a new version ships.

Anyway, the idea that consumers are going to switch to an HP Linux and then switch back when Windows 7 arrives is just silly. For one, other than incorporating the performance upgrades that have already been released for Vista, there is nothing to suggest that Win7, which is building on the Vista base, is going to be radically different.

Second, customers whose mission critical app cannot be run under Vista are not going to be any better off under a Linux derivative. If anything, they'll lose access to yet more apps. A few things will run under WINE but we're talking about thousands of vertical market apps to get running to make this viable for mainstream desktop use. A big difference between rolling your dedicated app suite for a net book and replacing the immense infrastructure the corporate market relies upon.

The vertical app vendors will fix their Vista problems or find themselves against competition for the first time. The speed with they deliver their updated version will determine that.