Live from Austin!

Last week, Sony finally released a PlayStation 3 bundle that actually shipped with the rumble controller included, rather than expecting people to spend an extra $60 to get one. The bundle also comes with <cite><a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000FQ2D5E?ie=UTF8&tag=a0ef8-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B000FQ2D5E”>Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots</a></cite>, the new iteration of one of my favorite games.

This new MGS4 bundle promptly sold out everywhere online. So on Saturday, while rothko was helping to run a local election, I figured I’d try a few stores to see if anyone had one in stock.

I was pretty pessimistic, expecting another Wii/Wii Fit scenario, based on the lack of online availability. However, my first call (to Best Buy) turned up a small cache of units. I wolfed a breakfast burrito and dashed over there. Sure enough, they had 8 new PS3 bundles, so I grabbed one.

However, while I like Metal Gear Solid, it wasn’t the game I had been waiting months to play. So I picked up a copy of <cite><a href=”http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000HKP88C?ie=UTF8&tag=a0ef8-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B000HKP88C”>Grand Theft Auto IV</a></cite> as well.

I already had an HDMI switchbox and suitable cables, purchased from the excellent and awesomely cheap monoprice.com. I was a good husband and got everything installed tidily in the TV stand, no trailing cables. I even cleaned and dusted. Then I settled down for some quality time.

My early impressions of GTA IV are that they’ve pretty much gone in the direction I wanted: greater realism, more interesting locations, and less empty space. Motorcycles are less unbalancing now; it’s harder to corner, and if you hit something, rather than just getting back on and continuing, you tend to tumble like a rag doll across 20 meters of asphalt and cripple yourself. It’s also possible to drive a car into a solid object fast enough that you fly through the windshield in a shower of glass and end up bleeding in the street.

The violence level has been toned down as well. Rather than ridiculous overkill missions with rocket launchers, the initial focus is on small-scale crime. You, a handgun, and a baseball bat. The story is better too; the protagonist gradually gets drawn into crime, reluctantly.

Haven’t tried multiplayer yet.

When the Xbox 360 came out, it was portrayed as something everyone wanted, the amazing new console that was selling out everywhere. Yet the next week, when I walked into Costco they had a pallet piled high with the things.

When the Wii was launched, it became the console that was really selling out everywhere. But by then, Microsoft had moved on to their new story, that the Xbox 360 was the biggest selling next-gen console.

Except that it isn’t.

If you read the small print on Microsoft’s announced sales figures, you find that they’re not actually lying; but they count a console as sold as soon as it leaves the factory. Sony and Nintendo do the same, but there’s a big difference in how that figure relates to the number of consoles actually sold to gamers.

If you walk into any electronics store, you’ll probably see several dozen Xbox 360s piled up in the main store. You won’t see anything like as many PS3s, and you probably still won’t see a Wii. Think about that. Also, think about the fact that electronics stores don’t actually like to pile expensive items up in the middle of the store inside their boxes; it usually indicates that they’ve got even more piles of the things in storage out back, and have run out of space and are trying desperately to shift them. Have you ever seen a big pile of digital cameras in their boxes in Best Buy? A stack of dozens of Denon receivers in Circuit City? Nope. But you’ve probably seen a big stack of $30 Chinese DVD players on clearance…

Someone has put these observations together with some hard sales data. It turns out that the channel is absolutely bloated with unwanted Xbox 360s. Not only that, the 360 was almost matched for sales by the PS2, except during Halo release month, which is clearly visible as a statistical anomaly. When the release of a single game skews your sales that much, that can’t be a good thing either, can it?

In fact, Xbox 360 sales peaked in 2006. And with the PS3 now having a solid library of good games, I don’t see it improving. Also interesting is the analysis of how the 360 is actually more expensive than the PS3, once you factor in the add-ons to make it equivalent in capability.

I’ve beem thinking about how one can actually spot shady businesses. It’s not as easy as it initially seems—there are plenty of dodgy retailers that manage to look totally legitimate, and there are plenty of good companies that you might assume to be crooks because (for instance) they don’t list any kind of address online.

For example, if you’ve ever shopped online for camera equipment, or browsed the ads in magazines, you’ve probably seen lots of stores in New York selling photo equipment at way below MSRP.

Don Wiss decided to start a project to photograph the actual storefronts of all the discount camera businesses in NY and NJ. He has put the photo gallery on his web site.

For instance, I’ve seen legit-looking ads from Cambridge Camera in magazines, so it’s interesting (ahem) to see their actual business premises.

In the UK we call these places “box shifters”. They all used to collect along Tottenham Court Road in London, though that may have changed.

The problem is that not every obscure online store in Brooklyn offering amazingly low prices is run by crooks. I bought our new TV from Best Buy Plasma in Brooklyn. It arrived promptly, in perfect condition, and has made me very happy; so Best Buy Plasma are clearly not to be confused with PC And Plasma.

Similarly, HKFlix are legit and knowledgeable (in my experience), even though it seems to be almost impossible to find out where they’re actually located. (No address on the site, domain hosting points to Hawaii, stuff ships from California.)

Generally speaking, I’ve been able to shop online and save a ton of money and not get ripped off. But I don’t think I could write down a set of objective criteria for working out if a vendor is honest; it’s usually an intuitive decision for me. I do a bunch of research, but ultimately there’s some kind of non-logical synthesis of the available information.

I was in Best Buy today, looking to see if they had any cheap DVD-Rs, when a guy walked up and asked me if I knew about laptops. I said that yes, I did, but that I didn’t work for Best Buy.

To my surprise he said that he knew that, that the people who worked at Best Buy didn’t know what they were talking about, and that I looked like I might be the kind of person who did know stuff about laptops.

I ended up chatting to him for quite a while about PC laptops, features to look for, and tradeoffs between factors like price, size, speed, and battery life. I mentioned that I used Macs at home, and he said that he had an old Mac, but hadn’t been using it much recently. I told him about OS X, and he was really excited to hear that it was based on UNIX. Turned out he was keen to ditch Windows, so long as he could continue to do what he needed to do on Mac or Linux. He was also interested in web development and multimedia, so we talked for a while about what came with Mac OS X in the way of development tools and media applications.

Anyway, I told him where he could look at laptops (both Windows and Mac), told him that he really didn’t want to run XP or OS X in 128MB of RAM no matter what they said, explained the problem of not being able to buy laptops with Linux from the manufacturers, mentioned that it installed pretty well on ThinkPads, explained what he needed to get to set up a secure firewalled home network, and gave him my personal card so he could e-mail me if he had any more questions…

I sometimes wonder if I could pay the rent this way.

Well, the Apple Store finally opened in the CambridgeSide Galleria. I decided I couldn’t resist the temptation any longer, I had to have MacOS X.

First, though, I had to have more RAM. Apple charge about four times as much for RAM as the going market rate; however, the store was honest enough to admit this. I checked on the web, then headed for Best Buy, which turned out to have 512MB of PC133 RAM for about the same as it would cost mail order.

My upgrades to OS 9.21 a while back paid off—OS X installation was absolutely painless. I’m a little disoriented by the new way of arranging things, but I think I can live with it once I spend some time rearranging my files. The dock seems OK so far too.

There’s something indefinably better about the graphics in OS X. Everything seems sharper and smoother. It must be something to do with using the Quartz imaging engine rather than crufty old QuickDraw. I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it for myself.

Speed seems fine. In fact, QuickTime Player and iTunes fire up significantly faster under OS X, and QuickTime plays more smoothly.

RAM prices are low right now. However, Big Blue is really putting the squeeze on expenses.

So I gave in. I went to Best Buy and bought 2x 128MB of unapproved RAM for my ThinkPad. I took out the 32MB and 64MB DIMMs that were in there to replace them with the 128MBs, so with the 32MB on the motherboard I now have a total of 288MB.

This means that finally I’ll be able to run Notes, Domino Designer, Mozilla and Fireworks at the same time without the thing swapping itself to death. This will make development work much easier.

I then took the spare 64MB DIMM and used it to upgrade Evija’s ThinkPad to 160MB, so she can comfortably run Notes and a web browser at the same time.

Of course, if we ever need to send the machines to IS for repair, we’ll have to put everything back the way it was…

Yes, it’s kinda ridiculous that I bought my own RAM. On the other hand, 256MB was only $20… Prices are insane.