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Didn't have to wait too long.

Sony is suing for a restraining order:

http://kotaku.com/5731200/sony-fires-back-at-playstation-3-hackers

I was wondering why I got modded "Funny"...

Didn't have to wait too long.

Sony is suing for a restraining order:

http://kotaku.com/5731200/sony-fires-back-at-playstation-3-hackers

How do you prove (automated) software testing saves money? Many factors are involved. A test suite and unit tests can cost a lot of time to set up. You may very well find your system wasn't designed to allow automated testing and would require refactoring to allow for automated testing. How much time would you spend on setting up a test suite? How much time would it save? (Keep in mind right now you may not be doing manual tests- there is added value to introducing such tests as well). One factor is how long does it takes to re-fix a bug if one comes back every two-three months- some bugs take a bit more, some a bit less, but I find handling two (unknown) bugs a day is typical. Another, more important factor to take in account is how much damage can potentially be done by bugs. Depending on your system this may range anywhere from lost entertainment value in a video game to a plane crashes in air control systems. That is to say, in some systems, automated testing simply matters more than in others.

I believe you 100%, but can you provide a link, so that I can twap other people around the head with it ??

Here you go:

http://kotaku.com/5593259/rumor-microsoft-killed-plans-for-pc-vs-xbox-360-online-play

On the contrary, they are well aware that http://kotaku.com/5700983/south-korean-politician-on-korean-crisis-this-isnt-starcraft

Their greatest trick has been making you believe that you aren't in control already, if you live in the United States. They thrive on your apathy. They rejoice whenever some new mindless form of entertainment takes over. That's why Iran left gaming lines open during their crackdown of democracy.

Personally, I have no pity for the American public. We are receiving the democracy we are asking for, which is "whatever the powerful are willing to give me." The Tea Party just re-elected the only party that openly expresses more support for millionaires than it does for the middle class. The guy in the House who plays a major part in our environmental policy also quotes from Genesis to avoid discussion of the impact of climate change, because God promised that he wouldn't flood the earth again. (Despite some more barbaric claims in Revelation that He will indeed come back to destroy the world, and the claim that the rainbow is a symbol of God's promise, instead of a result of light refraction.)

Regular Joes can't be bothered to give a shit about extrajudicial assassination, or trillions of dollars wasted on war. Until they can address those sorts of issues, I'm afraid the openness of the internet will be easy fodder for elite control.

*sigh*

Who, please name ONE SINGLE person who got killed! One would do.

Repeating spin over and over is not making it any more correct.

Well, they might have gotten someone killed over it...

Fixed that for you. I think that's what you were trying to say, right? Conjecture without any objective evidence is just detrimental to everyone.
Now, I think you're secretly have a ruber birdo fetish. Of course, you'll just deny it, and I have no way to prove it because you wouldn't release a picture of you with it that someone could identify. Who knows? If I could find out that you use 4chan (perhaps you mentioned it previously under your alias? Google is my friend here), then that puts you on the site this was fished from.
If I were to actually try and say something like this seriously, or suggest you might have thought about molesting children (after all, who knows what's going through your mind?), you would slam me for libel - I have no evidence to back up either of these things. To keep repeating the baseless sound bite that Assange has blood on his hands is of the same family of comments.

You would have to be a f**kin idiot as an actor to do that. Every actor/musician/performer in SAG knows enough to be getting residuals... that's how a lot of the D,E, and F- listers get by. No one except the most desperate would sign away their likeness in perpetuity

Some may not go for that anyway-- even Courtney Love sued whatever game company it was that put a robot karaoke Kurt Cobain in their crappy music game, apparently because having him dance along to and sing non "KC" tracks was just too offensive... even for her. Link (kotaku.com) here.

motion control on the PS2 predates the Wii, don't you remember the original PS2 Eyetoy? Didn't you see the SCEfoo tech demo showing off the Eyetoy with a wand controller..pre Wii?

You are referring to demos like this one, no? I'm curious: why didn't that catch on?

The guys tone seems to be that he knows best and that his view is commonly held, and that the people arguing are only doing so for the sole purpose of arguing.

He's in charge of policing xbox live. Have you been on xbox live? Cops get jaded from seeing too many meth-heads, drunks, assholes, and wannabe gangsters. It should not be surprising if he gets a bit jaded. I mean, this is the internet. Imagine having to police a million teenagers. I saw him talk at PAX, and he actually was a lot less jaded than I would have anticipated, I was impressed. Here's a transcript of his talk, and includes some of what they clean up on live.

During the Q and A session, one or two people in the audience decided to try to argue that their being banned was unjustified. Needless to say, they said they had done nothing wrong and deserved to be reinstated. Also needless to say, there was no way for the guy at the podium to verify any of that, and yet these people would not shut up or let him continue. Those are the types of people he has to deal with all day, except they're not face to face, so they're more brazen than that. It's easy to see why he might assume they were arguing just to argue: it's undoubtedly happened to him many, many times before. For example, last year, some stupid kid got banned for numerous offenses while playing modern warfare. He put a video, heavily edited to make it look like he did nothing wrong, up online, and started trying to get people on his side. source

Anyway, Mr. Toulouse undoubtedly has little power to decide what MS will allow to be posted on their service, or their policy on users posting swastikas. It doesn't do anyone any good for him to say "Let's talk about this" when he's been told by his boss that he needs to keep swastikas off so that MS doesn't get bad PR from it.

Hey Microsoft, instead of fighting your customers like the RIAA (which has worked so well for them), why don't you just offer a version with drivers and charge double or triple?

The Kinect is amazing, I'd easily pay $300-$450 for on if it meant I could control my PC like the Minority Report but I'm not paying $150 to dance in front of my Xbox

Have you actually read the Kotaku or Cnet reviews? Cnet calls it 'the most fun you can have with your hands free'. Kotaku, while acknowledging there are a number of flaws, says that it 'can be revolutionary'. I wouldn't exactly say either of these reviews are 'trashing' the Kinect.

A bunch of blah blah blah and then "...I'm glad to have you on our side, 'cause I agree with you. Leave your game alone. The people that put together these video games are artists in their own right. If you're gonna start saying that video games are raunchy, then how the hell do you leave cable television alone?"

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_102910/content/01125113.guest.html http://kotaku.com/5677274/rush-limbaugh-defends-video-games-free-speech-says-this-is-where-the-battle-is

While I agree when it comes to just speech, I don't agree with him when it comes to actions. By his logic, it should be fine for companies to dump tons of pollution into rivers with no legal consequence, because then the market will take care of it, right? Except that that river really only matters to the people who depend on it, and even if every one of them boycotted that company, they could still do just fine selling to the rest of the country and the world. It also implies that there's a way for people to get accurate and timely information about what companies are polluting, and that doesn't happen. Then multiply this by the number of other possible transgressions a company can make, and it quickly becomes obvious that the market will not be able to handle it, because there's too much information and no good way to get it to the people who need it in a way they can easily understand. Which is why we need agencies specifically tasked with monitoring and handling these issues. Even then they have a hard time keeping up, but at least something gets done most of the time. We just need to make sure these agencies do their job and don't get overzealous and overstep their bounds, and that they don't get co-opted by those who they're overseeing, a-la the Minerals Management Service.

A bunch of blah blah blah and then "...I'm glad to have you on our side, 'cause I agree with you. Leave your game alone. The people that put together these video games are artists in their own right. If you're gonna start saying that video games are raunchy, then how the hell do you leave cable television alone?"

http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_102910/content/01125113.guest.html
http://kotaku.com/5677274/rush-limbaugh-defends-video-games-free-speech-says-this-is-where-the-battle-is

http://kotaku.com/5675347/woman-kills-baby-for-interrupting-farmville-session

Your stereotypical zombie farmville player.

> They're the "cool" company (in the US) when it comes to videogame consoles.

But apparently not with the U.S. Marines in Iraq.

http://kotaku.com/5672353/marine-firing-squad-shoots-up-xbox-360

Kotaku has been posting a log of their in-game experiences.

You forgot child pornography. "Wait, is that a picture of a school girl being raped by a monster made of tentacles?" "Yeah, it's a new Japanese game." "Oh, that explains it."

Not to mention having panty-shots of just about anything that's conceptually female. Is there a way to exclude Japan from Google image searches? It'd be useful.

There is a good amount of information suggesting that this may in fact be a marketing stunt; have a read of Kotaku's write-up: http://kotaku.com/5642141/what-happened-to-good-old-games. Personally, if this is in fact a marketing stunt, I will -never- purchase from GOG again. Lying to your customers doesn't make them want to spend their money on your products.

Gaming site eXophase claims that, since Sony released firmware update 3.42 earlier today, it has been able to verify that "all variants of the USB-hub emulating exploit (PSFreedom, PSGroove, PSJailbreak) are no longer functional"

Gameplay footage at PAX:

http://kotaku.com/5629655/your-first-look-at-duke-nukem-forever-in-action

I don't know, man - it looks legit (finally). Check out all the coverage from PAX on the Kotaku home page: http://kotaku.com/

http://kotaku.com/5628741/gamestop-pulls-video-game-from-military-stores-over-taliban-inclusion

"The ban, an AAFES representative told Kotaku, also extends to all military PXs worldwide."

TFA doesn't make this clear. Here's a better one: Video Game Pulled Globally From Military Stores Over Taliban Inclusion

The Army and Air Force Exchange Services has confirmed to Kotaku that they requested the game pulled from the 49 GameStop's located on bases in the continent U.S. The ban, an AAFES representative told Kotaku, also extends to all military PXs worldwide.

"Out of respect to those we serve, we will not be stocking this game," the Army & Air Force Exchange Service's Commander Maj. Gen. Bruce Casella, told Kotaku. (emphasis added)

AFAIK, the modchip is a generic microcontroller ( ATmega164PA ) in a simple USB-pluggable board, and the actual jailbreak code is in the wild.

It could be easily done that the microcontroller board is given some minor extras and some legal, common, generic functionality, say, a USB-RS232 converter. Then the customer can buy the dongle, and turn it into a modchip using a PC and a simple package downloaded from torrents.

I have been saving up for new cows.

You walk into a dealership of recreational vehicles.
You see an amphibious car on display. The head of the amphibious car manufacturing division has stopped by the dealership, and is extolling the features of it to customers.
"Drives on land! Operates in water like a boat!"
So you buy one.
After you buy it, you might use both features, you might not. But isn't it awesome knowing if you want to you can just drive down to the lake and go for a spin?
But then there's a knock on the door. A representative of the company says they would like to enter your garage and make some modifications to your amphibious car. They're just going to remove all of the features that work in water. You don't HAVE to let them modify it, but if you don't then your car will not be allowed out of your garage.
You can still go out and start it up, but driving it on the road is will be expressly forbidden.

So now you're stuck with a choice. An amphibious car that doesn't drive in water, or one that doesn't drive at all.

Seems kind of dirty to me.
Especially after they explicitly advertised the PS3 as a computer.
http://kotaku.com/179245/why-the-ps3-is-a-computer-sony-dodges-euro-tax-men

Sony should now be required to pay back taxes on all that hardware.

Still, while people are arguing about whether the buttons should be grey or not, they're diverted from complaining about the recently announced Live price increases - and MS can always then say in a little while, "Hey, we're listening to you, you can have your coloured buttons back" for the bonus PR win.

Ha! I'd love to come last if it meant selling 60 million handhelds.

While I suspect that the PSP is probably in the black and making money quite comfortably for Sony at this point, I'd be wary of making blanket statements like that in general.

From what I remember, MS are still in the red on the XBox 360, despite the fact that it's been around for almost 5 years and seems to be very popular. (Remember that it's MS's *second* generation console, and one would expect them to be recovering some of the costs of market entry which would have been more tolerable on the original XBox).

Meanwhile, again from what I remember, the PS3 cost Sony an ungodly amount of money to develop, and they lost billions more subsidising the early models that cost more to make than they sold for. This 2008 report suggests that Sony may have to sell a *lot* of PS3s just to recover those early costs.

Now they've got the cost down significantly (and sales seem to be picking up as a consequence), but while the cost price now appears to be below that of retail (e.g. cost $250 according to Wikipedia, sold by Amazon US for $300, Amazon UK for the equivalent of US $330), by the time marketing, retailer's margins and other overheads are taken into account I doubt they're making a notable amount on the consoles alone.

Sure, handhelds aren't flagship home consoles, and probably cost much less to develop in general. But I wouldn't automatically assume that having sold 60 million of anything automatically means I'm in profit. Actually, that could apply even if you were the market leader.

Except for the fact that sony has lost an absolute truckload of money on the PS3 in general. These little bits are just adding insult to injury.

http://kotaku.com/5018899/sony-lost-over-3-billion-to-ps3-cost-pricing-imbalance

3 billion and thats from back in 2008. The thing only started turning a profit q2 2010 so tack on whatever was lost in the in between time, and sony is still lagging as the 3rd most popular console on a contest field of 3. This is the furthest thing from a successful business model.

I still buy your consoles and games beause I enjoy them...I can't escape that. However, I will NEVER forgive you for what you did to Lik Sang. You will forever be bastards because of that.

Oh, and guess what? I buy all your games USED.

Extremely fun games, raving reviews, appallingly bad graphics.

And still not successful

http://kotaku.com/5620259/steam-sale-saves-developer

From Kotaku

Titan Gaming, a startup company, has purchased Xfire from MTV." ... "I'm just an (eX)fire Web Developer; the Marketing Department is gone too, so you'll have to wait for Titan to issue the press release, sorry."

xfire itself

Team Leaving

August 2, 2010--Xfire has been purchased by another company. Most of the team that has brought you Xfire for the last 6 years is leaving, including me. We've enjoyed our time and I personally am sad that I was only able to do 127 releases. Good bye and game on!

--- Chris

Kotaku

Kotaku has tried to reach Xfire for additional comment through a press inquiry email address. Any that comes will be updated here.

So in other words, 3D Realms seems more of a rumor than anything. Hey, let's just say EA bought it. Or Curse?

http://kotaku.com/5315632/grand-theft-auto-and-pac+man-the-same

The trick is, don't make it look so similar? Since calling out the similarities doesn't seem to be a problem..

How about this one: on its opening month, Modern Warfare 2 moved an impressive 6 million combined on 360 and PS3 in North America, but only 170,000 on PC. If we presume that there is an additional %50 for digital sales, the PC is still seeing less than 10% of the sales of the 360 and PS3 averaged together.

As someone who deals with publishers regularly, you expect a PC title to sell about %10 of what an identical console title will move. Breaking 150k on a PC is a strong achievement. 150k on a console would be beyond a failure.

There are some complicating factors in PC, though. For one, per-unit sales do not map nearly as cleanly with money spent or profitability. There are a lot of titles in the $5 clearance aisle that move on impulse, and buffer up the raw number sold without actually helping developers to eat. There are titles that move better on PC than on console due to interface and other questions. Flight Simulators, RTS, and MMO's, while the floor fell out of all of them a while back, they still do better on PC's than consoles. Sadly, though, the upper end a PC-only game can realistically expect to move these days is about 500k units, which is a break-even point for a moderately conservatively budgeted title.

World of Warcraft also sucks up a genuinely stupid amount of user dollars every year. It is in and of itself 1 Billion dollars per year. But it's really not fair to assess the income potential of future games on that particularly freakishly large nugget (many companies have gone broke trying). And when you're talking about the overall "health" of the PC gaming industry, it is hindering development rather than helping.

Also, PC as a gaming platform is permeated by flash and other downloadable mini titles, many ad-or-microtransaction supported. These do not bridge over to consoles well, which is where developers actually pay the rent. It takes a very different title, development methodology, and mindset to even survive on the PC side of things.

Overall though, it's difficult to make a giant blockbuster-sized game on the PC and expect to make your money back. Blizzard is one of the last developers trying it, with Starcraft and Diablo rehashes coming out soon. But, again, Blizzard is raking in 1 BILLION dollars a year from WoW. They can afford to take risks like that. Other than them, there is an updated Civilization soon, and then nothing but console ports as far as the eye can see. And even those are becoming thinner, as chasing the last 100k in sales might not offset the additional development and supply chain costs.

Poke around http://www.vgchartz.com/ for a while and see how a PC release generally does against a console release. Their numbers aren't thorough, and sometimes they're off by a lot, but they're usually in the right ballpark. I don't see anything released in the past few years that broke 2 million units on the PC.

Hate to link , but in researching some other past apologies, i found Kotaku had a nice list made up. http://kotaku.com/5578254/apple-engineers-totally-wrong-nintendo-misjudged-excitement-and-other-great-corporate-excuses

Here are some articles of people commiting real crimes over MMOs: 1 2 Now lets help people like these by giving real names...

DSLRs can have big lenses on them. How can you tell whether or not its got an RPG hidden inside it

A DSi also has a camera, but people routinely hide RPGs inside them.

1. use conflict minerals to make playstations
2. fund warlords
3. ???
4. profit!

Just pick up an iPed.

No, it was probably Activision/Blizzard, they're bigger than EA now, and Bobby Kotick, the CEO, is a big bully.

it's all steve jobs fault http://kotaku.com/5559201/a-delightful-chat-with-the-most-hated-man-in-video-games

In this interview the president of Nintendo discusses the fact that the 3D affect can be dangerous to developing children. Considering the fact that Nintendo began placing health and safety warnings at the beginning of all of their games in 2004 and has included such a message on the startup screens of both the DS and Wii, we can assume that they will make an effort to warn parents and children of the dangers any time the product is turned on.

disadvantaged households == dipshit parent(s)

If I came home with poor scores, my parents were my biggest worry. I don't care if you gave kids of "disadvantaged households" a full library in their living room, they won't learn jack unless their parent(s) are forcing them. Hell, they've already got access to a full free library within their town! But instead that building's becoming a Chuck E. Cheese.

Uhm, I got the idea from Nintendo PR; specifically from Nintendo president Satoru Iwata

http://www.joystiq.com/2009/10/30/iwata-dsi-xl-is-a-spectator-system/
http://kotaku.com/5393749/iwata-dsi-xl-not-just-for-seniors-its-for-watching-others-play-too

Seems I pay much better attention that you do...

It's actually what a Sony guy said a few days ago when asked about the PSPGo. He said it was an experiment and they learned some lessons from it, like people wanting physical media instead of downloadable only.
Here's the link: http://kotaku.com/5558693/sonys-lessons-learned-from-the-pspgo

According to Kotaku, the effect completely fails if you move out of its small window of effectiveness. So much for playing the game in a truly portable way :\.He goes on to mention that the 3D camera on the back works excellently and was a joy to use, however, and I can definitely understand that.

Oddly enough just after reading I stumbled upon this article: Driving a Real World Car like a Video Game Car.

To be fair, I watched a larger clip on Kotaku, and it looks like less of a demo and more of an interpretive dance. I don't think they were necessarily trying to pass it off as gameplay (but if they were, oh god). Totally cringeworthy.

And if you didn't think that this is the year that PS3 overtakes 360 in total units sold, check out the new hardware! That thing is hideous. Leave it to microsoft to come out five years later with a hardware rev that is larger than the original.

To be fair, I watched a larger clip on Kotaku, and it looks like less of a demo and more of an interpretive dance. I don't think they were necessarily trying to pass it off as gameplay (but if they were, oh god). Totally cringeworthy.

And if you didn't think that this is the year that PS3 overtakes 360 in total units sold, check out the new hardware! That thing is hideous. Leave it to microsoft to come out five years later with a hardware rev that is larger than the original.