Oooh, fancy.

Mmmm, iPhone.

Mmmmm, ubertasty camera.

Mmmm, Coby.

Mmmm, tasty hardware.

Starcraft. Classics never die.

One would advocate a lower capacity format when it provides sufficient storage for the content one wants to put upon it, and when that format is cheaper to manufacture.

My favorite scene is the death of the Spartans to the Persians; where Leonidas and the Spartans would rather be slaughtered than surrender.

Why do they have to be the future? Why not GPU or CPU integrated matrix circuitry, and even more pervasively multicore CPUs?

Carmack speaks out about them because he can see the other trends in the industry. Like the trend towards heavily multi-cored CPUs. They completely obliviate the need for dedicated cards of the sort that Ageia peddle.

As for the UE3 vs D3/Q4 engine, of course the UE3's dominating right now. Doom 3 was released in 2004 for crying out loud; the first UE3 game was released over two years after. There's only so much one can do with any given engine before serious rewrites are needed to keep up.

The US price is fine; what's not fine is the shafting that European and Australian customers are getting on price. At current exchange rates the USD $499 is about AUD $640 after tax, yet they've only reduced the thing to AUD $850. Nothing will convince me that it costs an extra AUD $210 per console to ship and sell them here.