Sony Sucks at Shipping PS3s

Sorry for missing my post last night guys, but I went to Copa and had a ton of fun! I think I'm definitely getting better at the salsa gig. Anyway, what's a four letter word for disaster? I'll give you a hint, it starts with an 'S' and ends with a 'y' and the middle is the opposite of 'off'. That's right, it's Sony! Their goal was to have shipped 400,000 units by now and didn't even make half of that! There's no way they'll even hit 1 million (as the had predicted) before the end of the year, while Nintendo sold nearly half a million Wiis at its debut. They're still idealistically sticking to their goal of 6 million units by March (the same goal as Nintendo, except that they can actually reach it), but I'd be impressed to even see 4 million. Even the Xbox 360 is clobbering the PS3. What went wrong? Planning! Whoever was running logistics for the PS3 release needs some sense. I don't know how Sony lets itself get in these precarious situations. I mean remember when they had their own proprietary format to compete with the mp3?! Once upon a time, they had a product called the PSP, which is funny because for every PSP I've seen in my life I've seen at least 20 different DSs around campus. I know I sound biased, but I speak the truth here: Sony is caught in a downward spiral. Can they be saved? Maybe. People buy consoles for the games. The GameCube was nice and small and cheap, but it just didn't have enough games to back it up whereas the PS2 had some real popular exclusives (*cough*GTA). If Sony can secure some high-profile franchises just for the PS3, or create some new ones, they pull their butts out of the fire. Until then, things are looking grim for them.

BitTorrent has acquired uTorrent, arguably the most efficient implementation of the bit torrent protocol. I found this a sort of surprising move, and the commmunity is pretty pissed because they believe that uTorrent will go from a nice lightweight torrent client to the studios' bitch, and that BitTorrent will decide to bloat it up. I think it's too early to complain, and I can only hope everything works out because I love uTorrent as a program in general. Anyway, Microsoft has released Live Search Books to rival Google's Book Search, which is funny considering how ironic Google's service was. It allows you to search full texts of non-copyrighted materials so far, and I don't see how this isn't just a blatant knock-off of a Google idea. Given the whole James Kim incident, one blogger has taken it upon himself to suggest a survival kit to hide away in your car, but I think he has too many items on there to make it reasonable. Granted, those would ideally all be nice to have when you may need them, but still quite a bit of stuff. Anyway, if you're responsible and smart enough you should definitely invest in that stuff. Lastly, because so few developers have a solid handle on how to design an attractive UI (*cough* like half the Google engineers *cough*), I just had to plug this neat article on color theory. Definitely a worthwhile read, and not even that long.

I have a couple of cool trailers for you guys today. One is for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which I think looks cool despite how bad the quality is on that trailer. What's much cooler though is the new trailer for 300, which I recommend watching in glorious HD because it's just that cool. I definitely want to see this movie at least as much as I wanted to see Sin City, which is saying a lot! Oh, and if you're really interested, there's a Hannibal Rising teaser trailer out there in another language. It's not much, mind you, but still a flash of really cool looking scenes. We have a poster for the next Pirates of the Caribbean movie, and a couple of pictures, which isn't too exciting, but we have so little news about that movie that I thought it was worth mentioning. Lastly, we have a few new posters for Hot Fuzz. They're clearly supposed to be humorous, but they're really not all that funny. I like the promotional images for like Reno 911 better.

The wedding photographer finally put up the pictures from the wedding, and they're stellar. Technically, they're all copyrighted him, but my brother paid big bucks for them so I'm going to take the liberty of posting one of my favorites (sorry, Michael =P):



He got a freaking awesome one of my brother and I (see my Facebook profile) that I'm definitely going to have blown up and framed, but I also kind of want the one framed that you see as my profile pic here on Blogger. Anyway, to counteract the copyright infringement thing, definitely use Michael for your special event because he's a-mazing and unobtrusive.

And now, for your favorite meme and mine, Friday's Feast:

Appetizer
Which language would you like to learn and why?
Probably Hindi because I feel weird to have Indian parents and not know any Indian language! All my friends did in high school (at least their local language). Spanish also, mainly to understand salsa though ;)

Soup
What's the funniest thing you've heard or read so far this week?
I'm not really sure, to be honest. Maybe a debate between Nirav and Nate about where Nirav put "it."

Salad
Which movie was so bad you couldn't watch the whole thing?
I don't think that's happened to me. I like to see the ending of crappy movies to see just how bad they get.

Main Course
If there were a holiday in your honor that didn't use your actual name, what would the day be called?
Tech Day? Day of Dancing? Hell if I know =P

Dessert
Name one movie which is coming out soon that you would like to see.
I'll go with 300.