It honestly probably doesn't make that much of a difference. The article says they've seen 11 or 12 impacts, I guess compared to the three or four that they were expecting. Spread 12 impacts across the visible surface of the moon, and you're going to end up with a very small percentage of the surface area that was visibly impacted. If the chances of getting hit were very small, 4 times a very small number is still a small number.
I'd imagine that a more dangerous threat is radiation, and that whatever system was developed to shield against that would provide some level of protection against tiny meteor impacts. Once you start talking about bigger rocks, you quickly end up talking about amounts of kinetic energy that really aren't feasible to defend against in any manner approaching near cost-efficiency, and so you just sort of have to play the odds, realizing that the moon is not a particularly inviting or comfortable place.
Beyond that, you compartmentalize your moon base as much as possible to contain any damage to a small area, and you hope for the best.
I take the opposite approach. An MMO operator should allow the sale of in-game items for real currency(it's going to happen anyways), but only through a service that they provide specifically for that. This has a couple benefits. First off, you're making something that there's obviously a demand for more easily available. Second, the developer can keep a very careful watch on what sort of transactions are taking place, and therefore be in a better position to manipulate the game/economy to offset negative changes. Third, if the IRS does take a serious stab at collecting taxes on those sorts of transactions, the company is in good position to facilitate that. And fourth, the company could even take a small cut of each transaction, and maybe make a little more cash.
That's a bit simplistic, but I think it's more realistic than trying to enforce no sales for thousands and thousands of players. The game currency has a "real world" value, because real people want it badly enough to exchange real currency for it. All value is driven by demand and supply. Although the only thing limiting supply in this case is the whim of developers, that supply is still less than the demand, so value is created. The value might not be the same for everyone, but a general average will always emerge. With EVE, CCP has acknolwedged that, and done something similar to what I described above. They just add a third "currency" into the mix, timecards. They allow and encourage players to purchase timecards with real money, and then exchange them for in game ISK. Some people still sell money/characters/loot on ebay, and they try to prevent that. But by providing an supported way of purchasing ISK, they can regulate the market somewhat, and they get a cut out of each of those transactions.
Ah, that makes sense. It didn't occur to me that the magnetic field could travel through the same material that it's stabilizing, working as it goes. Very cool.
I would imagine that this worked via turning on an an electro-magnet when you wanted the neck to stiffen. If this were the case, wouldn't you have a problem with a power failure causing the electro-magnet to turn off, sending the monitor crashing to the desk?
I'm just curious how they engineered it so that that wouldn't happen? Perhaps some sort of persistent magnetic field that kept everything solid by default, and then somehow canceling out that field when the screen needed to be moved? I have only a basic understanding of magnetism and all that, but it sounds quite interesting.
Sony will do reasonably well based on just two things. The Playstation brand, and the Final Fantasy games. For them to really dominate like they did with the PS2, they need a couple more huge exclusives. They've lost GTA3, and MS has at least a rival to the Grand Turismo series.
The PS3 console itself is not different enough from the Xbox360 to give Sony an edge. The two big differences that I see are as follows: Bluray, which only interests a smaller crowd, and price, which Sony is on the bad end of. Ignoring the hardcore, camp outside for 6 hours crowd, I'm not sure that most people would find those differences particularly compelling.
Sony needs to ship a few really stand-out games, and they need to do it soon. I'm not particularly sure what they've got in the pipeline, as I've tried to avoid wanting one (I don't need to spend that much money on video games right now), but they need to get something big out quickly. The Xbox360 has got a decent library going and is starting to hit its stride, and the Wii has all the good publicity at the moment. All the news about the PS3 seems to be about how hard they are to find.
Tiger Woods learned to play golf on the Sega Genesis. Then he snuck into the PGA tour, and instantly dominated everyone else, even though it was his first time playing with real clubs. True story.
Obviously, I can't predict the circumstances which would cause a mass armed revolt against the government in the US, but it'd probably have to be a really big deal to get a big portion of the population to that point. There would have to be some horrendous and really obvious things going down. Were that the case, I have a hard time believing that much of the armed forces would side with the government that's under-seige. We have an all volunteer army, with a lot of diversity among the soldiers. Basically, anything that's going to disgust the general population enough to spurn a revolution would likely affect the soldiers similarly.
Compare this to many countries where military service is one of the easier ways to lead a more privileged life. An extreme example would be somewhere like north korea, where much of the country is below subsistance level, while the military is comparatively very well funded. There a soldier would not only be fighting to defend their political leaders, but also to protect their own position.
If a million people started to converge on Washington DC to oust the president (any president), I don't think the air force would start dropping bombs on them.
More useful would be to break it down by game types, then a person can make a more informed decision based on their particular gaming interests.
If you're into Final Fantasy type games, you're likely to do well with a Playstation. If realistic sports games are your thing, you might want to avoid nintendo. If, on the other hand, you prefer to play with a bunch of drunk people at parties and such, Nintendo definitely has you covered.
Who was the best selection of racing games? Where can I find the best collection of shooter-type games. I really like puzzle games, which systems have a bunch of good ones?
That's a useful way to classify and rank things. It doesn't assume that all gamers are interested in all things, and it provides fairly specific information, instead of just grand generalizations.
Yeah, but a lot of the problems likely have less to do with technology and more to do with people. When you get a big bunch of people together, individual actions might still be hard to predict, but the overall direction that things will move in is fairly predictable. It's why some big name CEO's can move from one company to another and be successful, regardless of what the actual businesses are. Running a company is just as much about managing people as it is creating a product/service/whatever you sell.
From the articles it sounds like MS has fallen into the same pit that many large companies have before it, bloated management bouncing around a lot of random ideas. A project manager finally ships his product, and then hurries up to find/or create a new project, just so he can continue to be a project manager. Multiply this by dozens or even hundreds of project managers, plus this happening at multiple levels of the management chain, and things get really messy.
The solution isn't pretty, because it involves focusing the company's efforts, and getting rid of a lot of the accumulated cruft. That probably means abandoning projects that have already consumed a lot of resources, and people losing their jobs (often through no real fault of their own). Steve Jobs did this at Apple, and he could likely do it at MS as well if through some strange occurrence he was in charge over there. Jobs also brought some vision very specific to Apple's area of expertise, and that'd likely be harder at MS.
A hurricane tie not only spreads out the load, it also allows you to easily avoid "toenailing", so you don't have to nail through a beam/joist/whatever at an angle. Toenails are much more likely to split the wood and/or fail under stress. Instead the tie lets you put all the nails in perpendicular to the face of the lumber. Good stuff.
Glue isn't really good for any sort of connection that's going to be taking forces causing the members to rotate around the connection. It's more for holding together longer flat faces, and keeping long joints together. Even then, it's best used in conjunction with another fastening method (biscuit joining, brad nails maybe).
A properly glued connection will need to be held tight while drying with clamps for at least a few hours, preferably overnight. If you were to glue two 2x4's together across their wide face, it'd be damn hard to pull them apart. If you tried to pry it, it's likely that the wood itself will fail and tear before the glue gives way.
But there's really no easy way to make glue work on something like a catapult or bridge structure.
Your average screw won't pull out easily, but fails to sheer stress much sooner than a framing nail. I'd imagine it's possible to design a screw that resists sheer forces as well as a framing nail, but it'd likely be large and expensive, or else someone would've done it already and they'd be in wide use.
It just seems silly, because so much of what's being said is obvious. MS could've asked some normal people about these features before release and gotten plenty of feedback. The zune still may not have been perfect, but it could've been a lot better. Now this big hyped up project has made a crummy inital impression, and they'll have to overcome that before they can worry about overcoming the iPod.
Add in the fact that while early versions of windows were pretty bad, they weren't that much worse than a lot of other stuff that people were used to. The MacOS might have been better back then, but most people weren't familiar with it, instead they were moving from DOS. Everyone's familiar with the iPod right now, which is a quality device, one that's been continually refined for years.
MS should've done better with their first big shot. They did a pretty good job with the original xbox. They dropped the ball on the Zune. I'm no MS fan, but I really expected better.
Only a retard would say that. It would make no sense at all for Amazon to fake it. Let's say they lost $200 per xbox selling them in this promotion. With 1000 boxes for sale, that's $200,000. A good chunk of change, no doubt, but not really difficult to come by for a company with a market value in the billions of dollars. They've gotten a ton of press out of it, and all for a fraction of the cost of a 30 second superbowl ad.
Sure, they could've faked it, and then just relied on an overloaded website to avoid having to give out any real deals, but why would they want to have to deal with the potential PR problems if that truth got out? It would be beyond foolish for this to have all been a scam.
I'm just surprised that anyone still has the old xbox's for sale in Japan. I'd have thought they'd have buried all the leftovers in a landfill somewhere.
Wii sports is tons of fun, although I probably won't be playing it for hours at a time two years from now. My girlfriend and I played it for about 4 hours on Sunday, and I'm sore as all hell now. Good times though. She loves it, a non-gaming friend who tried it for 10 minutes thought it was awesome, and I've enjoyed it as well. The bowling game is probably the most complete, because bowling is fairly straightforwards. There's a bowling mini-game where more pins are added each frame, and I can't get enough of that. Like others have noted, the boxing game is less responsive and that annoys me. The girlfriend really liked it however. It has a dodging mini-game that was really fun though (and really tiring). The rest of the sports games are fun, but shallow. All of them show some great potential for more dedicated and flushed out versions of each particular sport. Someone will make a great Wii golfing game eventually.
Excite truck seemed just ok to me, but I'm not the hugest racing game fan. The girlfriend really enjoys it, and informed me that she was planning on spending most of her morning playing it since she gets to go into work late today. We have, so far, been unable to find a second controller, but I'm anticipating that Excite Truck will be a better multi-player than single player experience.
I have mixed feelings on Red Steel. Running around in the game with an Uzi, pointing exactly where you want to shoot and having the controller vibrate as you fire feels much better to me than analog sticks ever had. The sword fighting doesn't work so well, I could do without it. It's a weird mix of mimicing your movements vs. preset animations and it just doesn't feel right. I'm only an hour or so into the game, but I've been entertained for the most part. The AI isn't great, and the graphics aren't great, but I've still had fun with it. It's good enough that I believe that we'll see some great FPS's for the Wii. High hopes for Metroid.
I haven't opened Zelda yet, because it's going to be a serious time investment. Doesn't look like I'll be disappointed there.
There's a difference between good games and the best games. Just because the best games on these new systems are probably still yet to come, doesn't mean that the launch games are going to suck. And when you're talking about a console with something as different as the Wii remote, then it's not all that surprising that people are excited and ready to try that new thing.
People are choosing sides because most of us can't afford to buy one of each console at launch, and nobody wants to think they made the wrong choice. Some people get a bit too excited about it and make it a huge deal because they've got too much free time.
That's all true, but despite all of that, the galaxy in EVE is overall pretty static. I've been playing for about 8 months, and for the most part, the balance of power between all of the big alliances has been consistent. I've read up on a little bit of the history of the in-game politics, and while large alliances have risen and fallen, it hardly is a constant occurrence.
To be fair, as of late things have gotten more interesting. Two of the larger alliances are at war with each other, and there's a new superpower that's quickly making progress.
EVE is an excellent game either way. I rather enjoy it.
Just to play devil's advocate, why should I have to waste my time searching through all of these different websites to see if they have my content on them? Especially because even if I have them take it all down, it could easily be reposted by someone else the next day. My time is valuable to me, and if I have to spend some of it trying to protect my stuff, then that leaves me less time to create new stuff, or go on vacation, or sleep, or whatever.
Everyone knows that YouTube is overflowing with content posted by people who don't have the legal rights to do so. If they were somehow able to filter out all of that content before it got posted, they'd likely lose a huge percentage of their traffic. Their TOS allows them to sort of skirt around that fact and play ignorant, but they know as well as we do that they'd quickly fade into obscurity without it.
I won't be surprised if the PS3 ends up with more games than the Wii, but the article seems a bit unfair to nintendo in terms of games. An example being that they talk about Madden specifically for the PS3, but didn't bother to mention that it'll also be available for the Wii (customized for the controller even). Instead just panning the Wii for its lack of third party games.
They only listed seven Wii games, while Nintendo's website has a list of 30 that will be available within 5 weeks of launch. That's a pretty damn impressive lineup, especially compared to what we're used to from Nintendo.
First off, I don't think anywhere near the majority of people have a $500 cell phone. You can get a pretty decent phone for free with most plans now-a-days, or buy a good one for a whole lot cheaper.
But besides that, the thing with consoles is, if I spent $500 on a PS3, I'm not getting my money's worth until I spend a bunch more cash. Games are pretty damn expensive. Like $60 expensive. If I buy one game per month, you're talking $720. If I were to give a phone company $720 per year, you can be damn sure I'd get a really nice phone for free.
And really specific to the PS3, everyone knows that the Blu-ray is a major factor in that cost, yet many people are indifferent at best towards blu-ray. It's hard to get excited about giving a company a bunch of extra cash so that they can try to establish a monopoly on the next big storage medium.
Architects design buildings. We've designed them for thousands of years. We make, on average, significantly less than you computer nerds. Why must you take our job title as well?
Like you said, most of us here aren't qualified to suggest easy solutions, but I'm going to throw out an idea anyways, because it seems like it might work.
Why not just set both the shuttle computers and the ground control computers to an arbitrary date where this becomes a non-issue? Make them both July 1st, and go from there. The computers don't actually care what the date is, just how they track the passage of time during the mission. And so the astronauts and mission control work on a different calendar for a couple weeks.
Slashdot Mirror
It honestly probably doesn't make that much of a difference. The article says they've seen 11 or 12 impacts, I guess compared to the three or four that they were expecting. Spread 12 impacts across the visible surface of the moon, and you're going to end up with a very small percentage of the surface area that was visibly impacted. If the chances of getting hit were very small, 4 times a very small number is still a small number.
I'd imagine that a more dangerous threat is radiation, and that whatever system was developed to shield against that would provide some level of protection against tiny meteor impacts. Once you start talking about bigger rocks, you quickly end up talking about amounts of kinetic energy that really aren't feasible to defend against in any manner approaching near cost-efficiency, and so you just sort of have to play the odds, realizing that the moon is not a particularly inviting or comfortable place.
Beyond that, you compartmentalize your moon base as much as possible to contain any damage to a small area, and you hope for the best.
I take the opposite approach. An MMO operator should allow the sale of in-game items for real currency(it's going to happen anyways), but only through a service that they provide specifically for that. This has a couple benefits. First off, you're making something that there's obviously a demand for more easily available. Second, the developer can keep a very careful watch on what sort of transactions are taking place, and therefore be in a better position to manipulate the game/economy to offset negative changes. Third, if the IRS does take a serious stab at collecting taxes on those sorts of transactions, the company is in good position to facilitate that. And fourth, the company could even take a small cut of each transaction, and maybe make a little more cash.
That's a bit simplistic, but I think it's more realistic than trying to enforce no sales for thousands and thousands of players. The game currency has a "real world" value, because real people want it badly enough to exchange real currency for it. All value is driven by demand and supply. Although the only thing limiting supply in this case is the whim of developers, that supply is still less than the demand, so value is created. The value might not be the same for everyone, but a general average will always emerge. With EVE, CCP has acknolwedged that, and done something similar to what I described above. They just add a third "currency" into the mix, timecards. They allow and encourage players to purchase timecards with real money, and then exchange them for in game ISK. Some people still sell money/characters/loot on ebay, and they try to prevent that. But by providing an supported way of purchasing ISK, they can regulate the market somewhat, and they get a cut out of each of those transactions.
Ah, that makes sense. It didn't occur to me that the magnetic field could travel through the same material that it's stabilizing, working as it goes. Very cool.
I would imagine that this worked via turning on an an electro-magnet when you wanted the neck to stiffen. If this were the case, wouldn't you have a problem with a power failure causing the electro-magnet to turn off, sending the monitor crashing to the desk?
I'm just curious how they engineered it so that that wouldn't happen? Perhaps some sort of persistent magnetic field that kept everything solid by default, and then somehow canceling out that field when the screen needed to be moved? I have only a basic understanding of magnetism and all that, but it sounds quite interesting.
Sony will do reasonably well based on just two things. The Playstation brand, and the Final Fantasy games. For them to really dominate like they did with the PS2, they need a couple more huge exclusives. They've lost GTA3, and MS has at least a rival to the Grand Turismo series.
The PS3 console itself is not different enough from the Xbox360 to give Sony an edge. The two big differences that I see are as follows: Bluray, which only interests a smaller crowd, and price, which Sony is on the bad end of. Ignoring the hardcore, camp outside for 6 hours crowd, I'm not sure that most people would find those differences particularly compelling.
Sony needs to ship a few really stand-out games, and they need to do it soon. I'm not particularly sure what they've got in the pipeline, as I've tried to avoid wanting one (I don't need to spend that much money on video games right now), but they need to get something big out quickly. The Xbox360 has got a decent library going and is starting to hit its stride, and the Wii has all the good publicity at the moment. All the news about the PS3 seems to be about how hard they are to find.
Tiger Woods learned to play golf on the Sega Genesis. Then he snuck into the PGA tour, and instantly dominated everyone else, even though it was his first time playing with real clubs. True story.
Obviously, I can't predict the circumstances which would cause a mass armed revolt against the government in the US, but it'd probably have to be a really big deal to get a big portion of the population to that point. There would have to be some horrendous and really obvious things going down. Were that the case, I have a hard time believing that much of the armed forces would side with the government that's under-seige. We have an all volunteer army, with a lot of diversity among the soldiers. Basically, anything that's going to disgust the general population enough to spurn a revolution would likely affect the soldiers similarly.
Compare this to many countries where military service is one of the easier ways to lead a more privileged life. An extreme example would be somewhere like north korea, where much of the country is below subsistance level, while the military is comparatively very well funded. There a soldier would not only be fighting to defend their political leaders, but also to protect their own position.
If a million people started to converge on Washington DC to oust the president (any president), I don't think the air force would start dropping bombs on them.
More useful would be to break it down by game types, then a person can make a more informed decision based on their particular gaming interests.
If you're into Final Fantasy type games, you're likely to do well with a Playstation. If realistic sports games are your thing, you might want to avoid nintendo. If, on the other hand, you prefer to play with a bunch of drunk people at parties and such, Nintendo definitely has you covered.
Who was the best selection of racing games? Where can I find the best collection of shooter-type games. I really like puzzle games, which systems have a bunch of good ones?
That's a useful way to classify and rank things. It doesn't assume that all gamers are interested in all things, and it provides fairly specific information, instead of just grand generalizations.
Yeah, but a lot of the problems likely have less to do with technology and more to do with people. When you get a big bunch of people together, individual actions might still be hard to predict, but the overall direction that things will move in is fairly predictable. It's why some big name CEO's can move from one company to another and be successful, regardless of what the actual businesses are. Running a company is just as much about managing people as it is creating a product/service/whatever you sell.
From the articles it sounds like MS has fallen into the same pit that many large companies have before it, bloated management bouncing around a lot of random ideas. A project manager finally ships his product, and then hurries up to find/or create a new project, just so he can continue to be a project manager. Multiply this by dozens or even hundreds of project managers, plus this happening at multiple levels of the management chain, and things get really messy.
The solution isn't pretty, because it involves focusing the company's efforts, and getting rid of a lot of the accumulated cruft. That probably means abandoning projects that have already consumed a lot of resources, and people losing their jobs (often through no real fault of their own). Steve Jobs did this at Apple, and he could likely do it at MS as well if through some strange occurrence he was in charge over there. Jobs also brought some vision very specific to Apple's area of expertise, and that'd likely be harder at MS.
A hurricane tie not only spreads out the load, it also allows you to easily avoid "toenailing", so you don't have to nail through a beam/joist/whatever at an angle. Toenails are much more likely to split the wood and/or fail under stress. Instead the tie lets you put all the nails in perpendicular to the face of the lumber. Good stuff.
Glue isn't really good for any sort of connection that's going to be taking forces causing the members to rotate around the connection. It's more for holding together longer flat faces, and keeping long joints together. Even then, it's best used in conjunction with another fastening method (biscuit joining, brad nails maybe).
A properly glued connection will need to be held tight while drying with clamps for at least a few hours, preferably overnight. If you were to glue two 2x4's together across their wide face, it'd be damn hard to pull them apart. If you tried to pry it, it's likely that the wood itself will fail and tear before the glue gives way.
But there's really no easy way to make glue work on something like a catapult or bridge structure.
Your average screw won't pull out easily, but fails to sheer stress much sooner than a framing nail. I'd imagine it's possible to design a screw that resists sheer forces as well as a framing nail, but it'd likely be large and expensive, or else someone would've done it already and they'd be in wide use.
Bolts are nice, but expensive and time consuming.
It just seems silly, because so much of what's being said is obvious. MS could've asked some normal people about these features before release and gotten plenty of feedback. The zune still may not have been perfect, but it could've been a lot better. Now this big hyped up project has made a crummy inital impression, and they'll have to overcome that before they can worry about overcoming the iPod.
Add in the fact that while early versions of windows were pretty bad, they weren't that much worse than a lot of other stuff that people were used to. The MacOS might have been better back then, but most people weren't familiar with it, instead they were moving from DOS. Everyone's familiar with the iPod right now, which is a quality device, one that's been continually refined for years.
MS should've done better with their first big shot. They did a pretty good job with the original xbox. They dropped the ball on the Zune. I'm no MS fan, but I really expected better.
Only a retard would say that. It would make no sense at all for Amazon to fake it. Let's say they lost $200 per xbox selling them in this promotion. With 1000 boxes for sale, that's $200,000. A good chunk of change, no doubt, but not really difficult to come by for a company with a market value in the billions of dollars. They've gotten a ton of press out of it, and all for a fraction of the cost of a 30 second superbowl ad.
Sure, they could've faked it, and then just relied on an overloaded website to avoid having to give out any real deals, but why would they want to have to deal with the potential PR problems if that truth got out? It would be beyond foolish for this to have all been a scam.
Fuck you, BSD is better than Nintendo and you know it!
And the PS3 controllers have a way better button layout than an Apple mouse. So much for cupertino's vaunted user friendliness.
I'm just surprised that anyone still has the old xbox's for sale in Japan. I'd have thought they'd have buried all the leftovers in a landfill somewhere.
Wii sports is tons of fun, although I probably won't be playing it for hours at a time two years from now. My girlfriend and I played it for about 4 hours on Sunday, and I'm sore as all hell now. Good times though. She loves it, a non-gaming friend who tried it for 10 minutes thought it was awesome, and I've enjoyed it as well. The bowling game is probably the most complete, because bowling is fairly straightforwards. There's a bowling mini-game where more pins are added each frame, and I can't get enough of that. Like others have noted, the boxing game is less responsive and that annoys me. The girlfriend really liked it however. It has a dodging mini-game that was really fun though (and really tiring). The rest of the sports games are fun, but shallow. All of them show some great potential for more dedicated and flushed out versions of each particular sport. Someone will make a great Wii golfing game eventually.
Excite truck seemed just ok to me, but I'm not the hugest racing game fan. The girlfriend really enjoys it, and informed me that she was planning on spending most of her morning playing it since she gets to go into work late today. We have, so far, been unable to find a second controller, but I'm anticipating that Excite Truck will be a better multi-player than single player experience.
I have mixed feelings on Red Steel. Running around in the game with an Uzi, pointing exactly where you want to shoot and having the controller vibrate as you fire feels much better to me than analog sticks ever had. The sword fighting doesn't work so well, I could do without it. It's a weird mix of mimicing your movements vs. preset animations and it just doesn't feel right. I'm only an hour or so into the game, but I've been entertained for the most part. The AI isn't great, and the graphics aren't great, but I've still had fun with it. It's good enough that I believe that we'll see some great FPS's for the Wii. High hopes for Metroid.
I haven't opened Zelda yet, because it's going to be a serious time investment. Doesn't look like I'll be disappointed there.
There's a difference between good games and the best games. Just because the best games on these new systems are probably still yet to come, doesn't mean that the launch games are going to suck. And when you're talking about a console with something as different as the Wii remote, then it's not all that surprising that people are excited and ready to try that new thing.
People are choosing sides because most of us can't afford to buy one of each console at launch, and nobody wants to think they made the wrong choice. Some people get a bit too excited about it and make it a huge deal because they've got too much free time.
what's your point? you don't like the RIAA?
That's all true, but despite all of that, the galaxy in EVE is overall pretty static. I've been playing for about 8 months, and for the most part, the balance of power between all of the big alliances has been consistent. I've read up on a little bit of the history of the in-game politics, and while large alliances have risen and fallen, it hardly is a constant occurrence.
To be fair, as of late things have gotten more interesting. Two of the larger alliances are at war with each other, and there's a new superpower that's quickly making progress.
EVE is an excellent game either way. I rather enjoy it.
Just to play devil's advocate, why should I have to waste my time searching through all of these different websites to see if they have my content on them? Especially because even if I have them take it all down, it could easily be reposted by someone else the next day. My time is valuable to me, and if I have to spend some of it trying to protect my stuff, then that leaves me less time to create new stuff, or go on vacation, or sleep, or whatever.
Everyone knows that YouTube is overflowing with content posted by people who don't have the legal rights to do so. If they were somehow able to filter out all of that content before it got posted, they'd likely lose a huge percentage of their traffic. Their TOS allows them to sort of skirt around that fact and play ignorant, but they know as well as we do that they'd quickly fade into obscurity without it.
I won't be surprised if the PS3 ends up with more games than the Wii, but the article seems a bit unfair to nintendo in terms of games. An example being that they talk about Madden specifically for the PS3, but didn't bother to mention that it'll also be available for the Wii (customized for the controller even). Instead just panning the Wii for its lack of third party games.
They only listed seven Wii games, while Nintendo's website has a list of 30 that will be available within 5 weeks of launch. That's a pretty damn impressive lineup, especially compared to what we're used to from Nintendo.
First off, I don't think anywhere near the majority of people have a $500 cell phone. You can get a pretty decent phone for free with most plans now-a-days, or buy a good one for a whole lot cheaper.
But besides that, the thing with consoles is, if I spent $500 on a PS3, I'm not getting my money's worth until I spend a bunch more cash. Games are pretty damn expensive. Like $60 expensive. If I buy one game per month, you're talking $720. If I were to give a phone company $720 per year, you can be damn sure I'd get a really nice phone for free.
And really specific to the PS3, everyone knows that the Blu-ray is a major factor in that cost, yet many people are indifferent at best towards blu-ray. It's hard to get excited about giving a company a bunch of extra cash so that they can try to establish a monopoly on the next big storage medium.
Architects design buildings. We've designed them for thousands of years. We make, on average, significantly less than you computer nerds. Why must you take our job title as well?
Like you said, most of us here aren't qualified to suggest easy solutions, but I'm going to throw out an idea anyways, because it seems like it might work.
Why not just set both the shuttle computers and the ground control computers to an arbitrary date where this becomes a non-issue? Make them both July 1st, and go from there. The computers don't actually care what the date is, just how they track the passage of time during the mission. And so the astronauts and mission control work on a different calendar for a couple weeks.
It's likely not as simple as that, but maybe?