Graham

It's a relief all right. You no longer have to worry about it.

However, to be honest I don't buy the 30% failure rate. At least over here, maybe the US is different (high current power? :), but the stores I've talked to suggest the failure rate *is* actually more like 5%. It's certainly anecdotally no where near 1 in 3.
A few months ago, one store even told me they'd only had one returned system - and that was due to a faulty power cord. This wasn't a small store either, it was the local equivalent of walmart.
Only one of my friends has had to return his unit, and that was due to a damaged video port (4 red lights!).

At work we recently starting using a Nikon d40x, but unfortunatly it died the next day. Had only taken around 150k photos too. :-(

The Wifi addon for the 360 is a/b/g. The PS3 is b/g. b/g is significantly cheaper to produce. Hence it's an addon for the 360 - not standard. 802.11a is more reliable for things that require consistent bandwidth, such as streaming content at higher resolutions. It is less susceptible to interference.
At the time of the 360 launch, the cheapest addin PCI 802.11a wifi card that I could find was the same price as the wifi addon for the 360 (over here at least, I actually looked it up - thinking it was overpriced). Of course now they are probably cheaper.
I don't feel it's overpriced. It's reasonably priced for it's capability.

2004:
http://www.engadget.com/2004/03/04/the-devil-duckie/
Devil duck! I have one... but it doesn't have the USB protrustion.. :-(

2005:
http://www.engadget.com/2005/09/23/new-nintendo-revolution-specs/
Bwahahahaha! Ohh hindsight

2006:
http://www.engadget.com/2006/07/03/million-dollar-bed-floats-on-magnets/
Simply... Awesome..


You guys are great

Nice suspension travel :P

But seriously it is an awesome design. Kudos indeed to the designer

I'm pretty sure a product doing just this came out several years ago... Only to fail miserably in the marketplace

Creators club is only worthwhile if you want to debug and optimise your applications on the 360. For everone else, just download the XNA beta for windows, and get a wired 360 controller (which works with windows just fine - once the driver is installed)

-- Yes, it's a very quick and dirty port of SharpNES:

http://jturner.tapetrade.net/sharpnes/

And you don't need a creators club license to run it under windows, Just the XNA beta.

Ohh and two files are missing... Mario.nes and Zelda.nes.. I wonder what they are

A very quick glance at the source would suggest it is a port of an already existing NES emulator written for SDL.net under Tao...

Large chunks of code are commented out, and there are dates going back as far as 2004.

I'll just say.. Regards the GT HDR rendering, technically it's not the case. GT will almost certainly be rendering in 8bit integer RGBA, just like almost every other PS3 game (with the exception of VF5).

PGR3 on the other hand, will be rendering in 10bit floating point RGB, aka FP10, just like almost every other 360 game. This is technically HDR, as the colour range is 64x larger than int8. (FP10 render targets are a feature unique to the 360)

I'd expect GT is simply bumping up the brightness while in the tunnel, where PGR looks to be actually doing a proper tone mapping pass.
Both have their pros and cons of course, but only the latter is technically HDR.

This also effects the bloom pass, because FP10 allows for colour range greater than what is displayed, the bloom in PGR3 only occurs on very bright pixels (which get saturated back to the 0-1 range when output).. where the bloom in GT replays appears to occur on moderately bright pixels.

In the PGR3 shot they used, the bloom in the pic is only coming from pixels that are totally white or being heavily saturated (and it's still only slight bloom)

As for car detail, well thats a load time and memory usage trade off really. You can always add more detail, however it effects your budget for other resources and load time. You probably have on average 20mb to use per vehicle, and I'd expect the GT demo cars are above that.