As I have purchased every console at launch in the past 15 years on launch day, I picked up my PlayStation 3 on Friday and my Wii on Sunday.  Here are some quick thoughts on both.

Sony had a year to get right what Microsoft screwed up with the 360 at launch.  They fixed none of it, and in fact, made even more mistakes.  The PlayStation Store appears to be bolted on at best.  Want to download a demo that's 800MB?  Great.  Sit there and wait while the entire thing downloads because you can't do anything else.  (Note that the 360 botched this at launch as well, but rectified it.)  Care to interrupt your demo and resume later?  Sure.  Just don't expect the resume portion of that.  Want to buy the game of the demo you purchased?  Ok.  Go back out of the game, over to the store, add it to the cart, check out, and download the entire game again!  At the moment, there is no integrated online gaming like the 360 with …

I have installed a Vista RC1 and Office 2007 Beta 2 on a new partition and am attempting to use it as my primary OS.  So far, so good.  It has come a long way since the first builds I started testing.  There’s certainly more work to be done, but it’s looking more and more like a final product.

On a tangent, symlinks are fantastic.  I know, welcome to UNIX circa 1985.  I am able to symlink my Firefox profile directory, Outlook config and .pst files, and a variety of other things from my XP parition to the Vista parition to share the data easily between the two operating systems.

But, I post to note a few quirks with Visual Studio 2005 and debugging web applications.  By default, I was getting lots of errors about authentication, not being able to debug, and a host of other things.  The fix was quite simple.

1) In the “Internet Options” control panel, go to the Security tab.  Add “http://localhost” to your list of “Trusted Sites”
2) Again, for …

I was really, really excited about the XNA Game Studio announcements the other day.  But, the more I learn, the less excited I become.  Read the FAQ for more information…

The basics:  When the first beta of XNA Game Studio Express is released in 2 weeks, it will allow for Windows-only development.  Sometime before the end of the year, we’ll see an updated version that allows Xbox 360 development on retail hardware for those willing to spend $99 to join the “club”.

That sounds really exciting.

But.

In Spring ‘07, we’ll see something known as XNA Game Studio Professional which is targetted at professional game developers to write approved titles using managed code for XBLA or commercial projects on a development Xbox 360.

So.

At the end of the day, after spending $99 to join the “club” that allows development on the 360, you’ll be able to run your own code on the 360, and that’s about it.  There is no distribution model.  You cannot …

It’s been a few days.  In that time, I upgraded to Firefox 2 Beta 1.  It also locked up on most starts, requiring me to kill it in Task Manager.  So, I decided to fix the problem since it was obviously not the browser.

I created a new profile, copied my bookmarks, cookies, passwords, etc. over one-by-one, and then manually installed the extensions that I use most.  Since doing that, I haven’t had any odd behavior.  So, there’s obviously something busted with my old profile.  I have no idea what that problem is, but at this point, I’m just happy having a stable version of Firefox.

So how’s IE7?  It’s quite nice, actually.  Speedy, tabbed, and very usable.  It took some convincing to make it work with my favorite desk bar (Dave’s Quick Search Deskbar) due to some security changes, but that was the only hurdle, other than the first install problems mentioned in my last post.

After using them both for the past several days, however, I think I’ve …

I broke down and bought a Dell 2407WFP monitor on Monday. It arrived this afternoon. I have read plenty of complaints and negative things about this monitor, and while some of them are true, it’s still a gorgeous piece of equipment.

I have an A02 revision, which is the version that fixes the color banding and blurry text issues that have been widely reported. I've only been using it for a day, but I have not noticed a hint of banding or blurred text in my daily use. And no dead/stuck pixels to boot!

The problems that do exist are not deal-breakers for me. First, there appears to be a bug in the firmware that makes it impossible to display 1600x1200 mode without stretching to fill the screen. I'm not a PC big game player, and the monitor runs natively at 1920x1200, so I can't imagine this would affect me.

Secondly, the video display using the component inputs is pretty horrid. I hooked up my HD cable box via the component input, and it's ugly. Very ugly. However, I …