6th september 2006

whatever

"the launch of sony's long-awaited playStation 3 games console in europe has been delayed until march 2007".

sony do it again. brilliant.

related:

gadgets

permalink:

http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/09/06/whate...

19th may 2006

oh. great.

so, sony have announced that the price of the "proper" ps3 in the uk will be a whopping £425! yes, £425. £425. can you believe it? £425?

again, we (we in the uk) are being asked to pay more than the us are expected to pay for theirs, and more than the europeans (huh?) are expected to pay for their boxes. in fact, we're being asked to pay £109 more than the us. and, perhaps more importantly, we must pay £146 more than the premium xbox. is it just me, or have sony been getting really good at making themselves unpopular over the last twelve months? and this is from a sony freak.

of course, they are using the "it does play blu-ray discs y'know?" card, which - i guess - is fair enough, but such a claim will only benefit those people who wanted to buy a hd-player pretty soon, as well as a games console (i admit, "those people" includes me). but, obviously the important market for the ps3 are the gamers, the game console owners, who surely are going to find £425 (did i say it's gonna be £425?) a tad... steep. and let's not forget the thousands and thousands of under-18 year olds who own ps2's, and maybe a psp, who are expecting a ps3 for christmas. i'd hate to be one of those parents this year.

and can you imagine if it doesn't live up to the hype?

related:

blog,

gadgets

permalink:

http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/05/19/oh-gr...

24th march 2006

paint my pixels! for cash!

as much as i envy/admire the guy who came up with the million dollar homepage, he really does have a lot to answer for.

the latest one? paint my pixel. or to give it's full name, 'send me cash and i'll stick a 10px by 10px coloured gif on my site'.

what angers me about this thing - and some of the other that have come after million dollar homepage - are the statements they use to justify these things. paint my pixel tells us we can "own a piece of the world's first internet painting". gosh! and, it's actually an amazing experiment in the power of 21st century mass media - "can thousands of people all over the world work together to create a single painting, using only small blocks of colored pixels?"! wow, whatta guy!

at least send the suckers a shirt saying "i painted a pixel and all i got was this lousy t-shirt. oh, and a 10x10 coloured gif".

related:

sites

permalink:

http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/03/24/paint...

31st january 2006

getting the horn in public

this site isn't the place for me to get on my soapbox about blood sports, or have a debate about animal rights, but i have to say that i was filled with joy while watching a story on the bbc over breakfast this morning. during a bullfight in mexico city - in a ring with a capacity of nearly 50,000 - a bull leapt the safety barrier and into the crowd, and embarked on, what the reporters called, a rampage. even better, the bull had jumped into the stadium's most expensive seats. alas, the bull didn't get to do much damage, with the bbc site later reporting only that "one woman spectator received a six-inch gash in her chest". the bull? well, he received a little more than that. a sword. repeatedly, until he was dead. i can only hope that those people involved will never visit a bullfight again and, for at least a few seconds, that they were as scared as the bull.

read the bcc report.

related:

blog

permalink:

http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/01/31/getti...

25th january 2006

the bad news that we knew was coming

so, surprise, surprise, it looks like we won't be seeing a ps3 in our living rooms until 2007. unless you live in japan of course. or the states. an analyst (i love that) claims that japan will see this thing in the summer, the us in november, and we (europe) will have to wait until march 2007.

i've got a bit of a suggestion for next generation console manufacturers (as i'm sure they all regularly visit my site): immediately fire everyone in your company who is involved in setting out the schedule and timetable for your new console's design, development and release. you won't miss them as there isn't a single one who has given an accurate forecast yet. you can then plough the money that you have saved from their salary, pensions, hr costs, etc into the development team, thus increasing the budget and, as a result, creating better consoles in a shorter period of time. i await your emails inviting me to your respective offices so that i may expound on this ingenious strategy further.

in the meantime, read about your slackness: http://www.reghardware.co.uk/...

related:

gadgets

permalink:

http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/01/25/the-b...

19th january 2006

"standards - schmandards! we have sport!"

you know what makes me angry? no? ill tell you... espn - the worldwide leader in sports - have just relaunched their new home page, "streamlining (their) navigation to better organise the most comprehensive sports content on the Web". now you would think that such a major site, with so much money behind them, and the site that gives the most "comprehensive sports content on the Web" would have heard - and have the quality of developers, or at the very least the budget to hire them - about such crazy ideas as standards compliance and accessibility. but no.

i just can't understand how a site as big as this can be happy with producing over 1900 - yes, i said 1900 - errors when their homepage code is passed through the w3 markup validator. why use an xhtml 1.0 transitional doctype if you're gonna completely ignore it's rules? turning the css off produces a list of almost 350 links - and nothing else - before we get to anything that even resembles 'content'. and you've then got a good few full turns on your scroll wheel before we get to the day's 'main story'. so they must have various 'skip' links then? nope.

it just amazes me that, in 2006, such large, popular, important sites can still get away with this. espn, if you're reading this (yeah, right), you need to hire me. espn developers, using "div" instead of "table" does not a quality-built site make.

if you like, you can take a look at this crap.

related:

sites,

standards,

web dev

permalink:

http://www.oneplayer.co.uk/06/01/19/stand...