Sony is Watching

Sony’s crusade against UK PSP importers continues with the news that they’re now after a list of consumers who bought import machines. They say it’s to do with trademarks and lost revenue, but I can’t remember a more blatant attempt to rip off the British gaming public than the PSP.

Why is it that we have to wait until almost a year after Japan and six months after the US, and pay a hell of a lot more for the privilege? The Japanese pay ¥19,800 (£99.49), the Americans complained that it was too expensive at $249 (£136.66), and so Sony sell it to us at £180 (not even counting the fact that ours will be made in Taiwan by people getting 10p/hour as opposed to the Japanese ones which are actually made in Japan). I know we pay more tax than they do, but not that much more. It’s daylight robbery when importers can bring them over themselves, add their sizable cut on top, and sell it for only £10 more than that. Is it any surprise that people are importing in such huge numbers?

If the price wasn’t insulting enough, it’s the same hardware as everywhere else. They don’t need to go out of their way to make a special PAL version just for us. Hell, they don’t even need to manufacture enough to meet demand since so we’ve all seen them on the shelves of American stores as sales fail to meet projections. They have stock there that can be flashed with UK firmware and put on the next flight here, and they’ve had it for months. There are plenty for the American and Japanese, and most import outlets here have sold hundreds each – more than they’re likely to even see on the UK launch.

As for the lost revenue argument, we all know that the current model within the industry is to sell the console at a loss and then make it up on £40-a-time software sales. Maybe I’m missing something here, but doesn’t the current model mean that SCEJ/SCEA are the ones who take that loss, and then when it comes out here SCEE are left to clean up, making pure profit off those importing early adopters who prefer the convenience of popping down to Game for the new release instead of ordering online and waiting for it to come halfway around the world. That seems like a pretty cushy situation, but apparently they prefer to take the loss. This suggests to me that the price has been bumped up over here simply for the sake of lining their pockets.

Perhaps Sony would also be interested to know that I know of at least three Sony sales reps who own imported PSPs. Maybe they should ask them why people are importing.

That’s What I Call Force Feedback

If I ever saw an advert for surge protectors, this is it. If people invested in a £15 unit that shields your electronics and anything connected to them (in other words: you) from destruction at the hands of vindictive weather patterns. OK, so it wouldn’t have stopped lightning striking and their house would still be fucked, but it would have saved having to replace a PS2 and a TV at least, and there’s the little fact that their kid wouldn’t have been struck by lightning.

Playing Around With Ubuntu

Anyone who has read Slashdot will be very familiar with the rhetoric that Linux is on the verge of taking the desktop crown away from Windows, but also anyone who isn’t an open source zealot who has tried it will know that it still has a long way to go before it can touch Windows and OS X in the usability and overall polish stakes. Recently Ubuntu has become something of a cult within the cult, coming from nothing to being the most popular Linux distro in a little over six months by selling itself (or not selling itself, as the case may be) on the fact that it was “Linux for human beings”, so I got my hands on a bunch of the free CDs to try it out.

I’d never really thought of using anything other than OS X on my iBook so it was with some trepidation that I slid the live CD into the precious. The free CDs that you can order come in a nice card slipcase, each containing both the installation CD and the live CD so that you can test it out before installing, and it really makes the package look professional. Within a few minutes it had detected all my hardware (even the Microsoft Bluetooth mouse, and only the Airport card was unsupported) and booted from the CD into the full GNOME desktop. I’d previously only used KDE under Knoppix and was pleasantly surprised with how nice to use GNOME was.

Obviously a live CD is no way to test the speed of an operating system but performance on files that had been cached was nice and snappy. I messed around with Firefox and played a few rounds of the included Poker game while holding a few chats on Gaim and only recall a slight delay for the disc to spin up upon loading the programs for the first time.

I’d imagine that it would be as fast as can be expected of any OS when running from the HD, but I’m too careful with my iBook and its contents to try that. I might drop it onto one of the spare partitions on my Windows PC at some point but I haven’t even plugged that thing in since I switched to OS X.

Linux had seemed like something too esoteric and impenetrable to the beginner for me to think seriously about trying, but the developers of Ubuntu have done a fantastic job of making it very usable. Even though I admittedly I have more computer knowledge than the average person I still think it would be easy enough for most to use. I’m something of a pessimist in that I can’t see Linux ever becoming the dominant desktop OS platform, but this shows the potential of it to become a viable general use alternative for most with a few years of development. They have a stable and fast OS already, so with some more work on user-friendliness the saving of at least £80 on every PC you own starts to look better and better.

The Parting of the Ways

The new series of Doctor Who has been one of the most enjoyable TV shows that I’ve seen in a long time and should serve as the paragon of how to successfully revive and update an old series, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting the final episode ever since I saw the spectacular-looking trail attached to last week’s episode. The Daleks are cool, so half a million of them getting ready to invade Earth had to be even cooler.

The episode was indeed very good, and the big surprise was seeing Eccleston regenerate into David Tennant when we all thought it was going to happen in the Christmas special. Or at least I did until The Sun published a giant photo of it happening a couple of days ago. Thanks for that, guys…

From what we saw, which was admittedly very little, I didn’t think that he looked like he was going to be as good as he just looks too young for the role. Being in Eccleston’s clothes can’t have helped to be fair, but the casting of a Doctor who looks so young just seems to me to be an attempt to have an even more overt romance between him and Rose. Still, the Cybermen will be cool villains for the second series.

Too…Hot…

It’s barely hitting 25? and I already feel like I’m going to die from the heat. At the height of the summer we’ll be closer to 40? so I’m going to have to survive by never going outside again. Ever. Too many fucking tourists in this town whining about why they can’t fuck off abroad for a holiday instead of coming to pester me about how their cigarettes cost more down here.

I would rant some more, but I’m sweating too much and typing is too much effort. I just want to watch the end of Doctor Who and then pass out.

Missing the Reference

The aforementioned person with a cursory knowledge of Batman was, in fact, my younger brother who asked a howler of a question at the end which deserves a mention all of its own. Those who don’t know the very end of Batman Begins and don’t want to read about it would do well to skip the rest of this post now.

That last scene when Lieutenant Gordon hands Batman a joker card that had been left behind by one of Arkham’s escapees with “a taste for the theatrical” is probably the most overt hint at who will be in the next film possible, and it couldn’t have been more obvious what it meant if Jack Nicholson had turned up with a white face and green hair and started laughing maniacally, as if The Joker isn’t synonymous with Batman anyway. But what did my brother say when we were leaving the cinema?

“Who was that card from at the end?”

Uh…come again?