Rats. No PS3 until November

Until today, Sony had been telling the world that the PlayStation 3 would ship this spring - meaning any time between now and June. The rumor mill, however, was saying that there's no way they can meet this date.

Well, Sony now agrees. The official word is now "November". We hope.

Apparently, the console itself is ready to go, but the PS3 is supposed to double-up as a player for Blu-Ray Disc movies (Blu-Ray Disc, or BD, is a high-definition successor to DVD). Unfortunately, the BD standards body hasn't yet nailed down all the specifics of the copy protection tech that BD will use. Sony can't ship a BD drive without the final protection code, or the drive won't be able to play BD movies (expected to ship soon after BD is officially released to the world.)

Personally, I think this is a cop-out. If they have the BD drive working for data discs and are waiting on copy protection schemes, they should be able to ship it now and release a firmware update later on. I don't think it would be that terrible for them to ship a PS3 that can't play BD movies without a firmware update that they can release when BD movies actually become available.

I was going to wait for the PS3 in order to have a console to play Katamari Damacy on, but I'm not going to wait until November, and maybe later if the BD people create even more delays. So, it's time for me to go get a PS2 now, and that PS3 purchase will be delayed indefinitely (until some must-have game comes out for it.)

Oh well. Such is life.