Yup, it's a Panasonic Plasma 42PX75U. I got it about 3 weeks ago know, and absolutely *love* it. Gorgeous picture, and it was very reasonably priced for 42".

Hey, looks like I'm a special one. Got the Hard Drive space error today, pictures are below. Erased the demo, and there was no issue after that. *Fantastic* game so far, though I can't believe a bug like this got out. As you can see in one of the pictures, I had 36/55GB free space on my PS3 when this happened.

However, does that 80gb box also contain Motorstorm in Canada?  At $500, it's still a pretty good deal for a really good arcade racer and system.

It includes Motorstorm, and Enchanted Arms is free with purchase this week as well.

Great demo, I'm another one that has never play a R&C game. I have some PS2 gaming to catch up on methinks...(once I finish God of War)

Primarily PS2 games on my PS3 as well, only Heavenly Sword breaking it up.

PS2:

God of War 1 & 2
Final Fantasy XII
MGS 3

Canucks start the season with a thud. 3-1 Loss to SJ. Hopefully tonight is better, since I now have my brand new HDTV set up, so I can watch the Canucks on HNIC HD tonight!

Ya, it was a fun night. Saw Wonderpug, LD, Soulchilde and Ceekay on. I think I blew one or two of you up at some point, in between getting constantly slaughtered myself.

PS3
Heavenly Sword - The demo, while so very short, was great. I am really looking forward to it, even if it is a short game.

If true, count me in! I figured it wouldn't be until September, but the earlier the better (as long as Canada gets them as well that is...)

Looks overall pretty disappointing for both of those titles. Shame. Oh well, there is more than enough (hopefully) great games coming out soon enough.

[make the slightest movement]

And Brendon, I don't mean to be condescending.  I seriously do respect the work you all do.  I just was saying that there's no baseline guarentee of competence when you hire someone as in other professional fields, and thus you don't really know what you're getting.

You hire a licensed physician, you're getting someone who's been vetted through a procedure and you're guarenteed some (minimal at least) level of competence, for instance.

What, you think we hire people totally blind?  "Got a degree?  Come on in!!"  No, we vet people pretty throughly with experience and testing and multiple interviews with multiple people.  But no, there's no game programming licensing board, and there shouldn't be, given that unless we're doing work that is in many ways unprecedented, it probably wouldn't be interesting to the consumer.  Of course we add people, but we do it slowly and start them with very targeted applications.  When you hear about a game company that went from 25 to 150 people over a year, you should worry about the state of their project.

And yes, I still maintain that it's a very different problem than all those things you listed.  The base point is not "each person has a piece of the project and if they mess up, it sets us back."  Obviously that applies to any collaborative effort.  But software is different.  It's more along the lines of "Each person has a piece of the project, and if they make the slightest movement, everything goes to shit."  But as Brendan mentioned, we're at the base level of a very well-trodden conversation, one I get to live 5 days a week plus   I can't claim to know the specific management issues that come up in legal or pharmaceutical environments, but I'm willing to bet that if they had a perfect management solution, my Novartis stock might be doing a bit better

Ok I give up.  You are engaged in the most difficult collaborative projects in history...

Welcome to the fun world of computer programming. There are reasons computer projects are amongst the worst for missing deadlines and costs (or at least, they used to be amongst the worst).

I finally saw my first Wii in the wild just last week at a nearby Futureshop. I wanted to shake the box to make sure it was real, but I don't know if the store would appreciate that.

Dear Canucks.

Please f*ing score on Monday. Win or Lose, at least score *something*.

The Canucks are becoming depressing to watch.

Very late response to the thread, but I replaced the Northbridge fan almost a year ago now (sometime in May). The difference in sound is day and night. How that lawnmower of a fan got into an otherwise great board beats me. I used the second one in your pictures (ZM-47J), and the whole procedure was fairly painless (other than having to remove the MB to get the damn thing out).

I just was killing time and told myself, what the hell, if they do I will and if they don't then back to my regularly scheduled not-even-considering-it channel.

No offense, but how in the world do you go from wanting to buy a PS3 and Motorstorm, then when Best Buy doesn't have it....go back to not even considering it at all.  Those seem like really far apart extremes to me.

*shrug*

Oh well, sorry you didn't get it. 

What mikeg described sounds to me like impulse buying, nothing really that extreme to consider. I know I have done it in the past. It always seems to be for me whenever I get a paycheck or tax refund. Having money makes me want to buy stuff. I am a consumerist whore.

[$479.99]

You can’t keep a good rumor down. Just weeks after Microsoft stamped down talk that an HDMI-enabled Xbox 360, codenamed Zephyr, was in the works, the rumors are back. Retailers have confirmed that the new SKU is in their systems, set for a May 1 release for $479.99. In addition to the new video interface, the system would also pack a 120 GB hard drive into its nifty black exterior. Microsoft won’t officially confirm that such a configuration exists, but it’s interesting that so many retailers are wrong in the same way…

That sounds too expensive.

Not reallly.  you figure the premium system is $399 right now, so adding in the HDMI and bigger HD could account for that.  Maybe they'll be smart and include a HDMI cable too.....

I would really love it if the $479 price included the HD-DVD player built in. *That* would make it a day one purchase for me, without question. But, I think that would be too much to ask. 

I'm finally going to get a DS-Lite in the next few months. This will be the first game I pick up. My favorite game of the SNES era, and still one of my favorites overall.