PlayStation 3 'Hacker's Paradise', Sales Up 101
Via Game|Life, a story on The Age site suggests that password crackers are really enjoying their PlayStation 3s ... and not because Ratchet is a great game. An NZ-based security researcher stated at a local security conference that the supercomputing power of the PS3 is being put to more nefarious uses than Folding@home. "Speed is important to "brute force" password cracking, which relies on guessing all possible combinations of the characters that make up the password. The accelerated technique means passwords protecting Office, PDF, ZIP and Lotus Notes ID files can be cracked with breathtaking speed. However, many other password types are handled more securely in software and remain unaffected by Breese's claimed speed increase." Sony does have some good news this week, though. Either the holiday season or a price drop here in the states has led to a massive sales increase.
Ratchet and Clank really is an amazing game (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Ratchet and Clank really is an amazing game (Score:3, Informative)
In Japan, at least, its monthly sales lead has evaporated as the PS3 makes a fightback.
You had me nodding until you got here.
Yeah, technically that's true. They went from ~65k+ per week, to ~35k+ per week. And the PS3 recently spiked up (from ~15k to ~55k) But its a very small myopic view of a much bigger picture.
To start, vgchartz.com (which you have to take with giant grain of salt mind you), is showing that the Wii sold some 640,000 units last week world wide. That, if true, is more than it acheived in a single week during its launch frenzy. And while I don't give too much credence to the exact numbers there, I'm sure there was a -massive- surge in the Wii over the last couple weeks. So in any case, Wii sales haven't evaporated in the big picture, not by a long shot.
Additionally, other less disputable facts include:
1) The wii is still largely supply constrained.
2) The wii is still setting sales records all over the place, in the UK, in Japan, in Australia...
3) Wii Fit launches in Japan next week, and I'll be stunned if it doesn't sell extremely well.
4) The Wii is sold at a profit, and hasn't had a price cut yet. Nintendo is doing extremely well and could easily afford a price cut to boost sales (if it actually had more units to sell - see #1 above) The PS3 has been through a couple rounds of price cuts and is sold at a loss. That says a lot. Sort of reminds me of the situation where someone observed that the brown zune at blowout pricing is outselling ipods on amazon.com. It just doesn't mean much.