It's easy to blame the lawyer who's out there attacking some company you support (why do we support companies anyway? They'd all gutt us and hang our corpses to dry if it were legal and profitable). Here's the deal - lawyers act in an adversarial system - the system is built to encourage suits when a plausible cause of action arises. It is because of this system that your razor blades have safety guides and your car no longer has a straight steel steering rod that pierces your sternum when you rear end somebody.
Public safety is a prize for which I am willing to force corporations (even ones that make neat toys!) to defend their acts in court. Nintentdo admitted in the recall that they had considered the heavier duty cords and the potential danger to furniture and bystanders, but they built the system the way they did anyway. I think the system is alot of fun. I think that with enough buisiness, it won't matter that they had to recall the wrist-bands and pay for a few TVs. They will make their money.
We, we won't have to breathe in asbestos particles that some company figured they could get away with puting in packing material because lawyers don't sue lightly. We don't have to worry about car companies choosing not to properly seal gas tanks so our cars don't explode because they're allowed to weigh cost of life against cost of buisiness. This is the system we have, and if you live anywhere in the world you benefit from the improvements the U.S. legal system encourages in product safety.
It's lawyer-speak. They take out a memo they had some intern write a few months ago, and pull the "standard cause of action for products liability template" and then fill it in.
[product name] has [defect] which caused [harm or harm causing act].
This is comparable to me attacking a C++ for using excessive semi-colons.
Still.. should it be proved out that these kinds of tactics increase the risk to the common (enterprise?) user, would you justify them anyway?
I appreciate that argument for releasing data on security breaches under the theory that "the bad guys know this, the good guys don't" if it should turn out that they are instead cheap classes on compromising common system architecture, I would feel the need to wonder what steps could be taken (by law makers) to discourage them.
If it makes you feel better, the guys doing the technical review over at my school are getting good use out of Vista right now. The CDs still make great coasters.:D
Not just third degree burns, third degree burns on her genitals.
Still, the important point isn't the severity of the actual damages - it was that McDonalds was serving coffee that would BOIL YOUR STOMACHE if you drank it immediately. The INTENDED USE was potentially LETHAL. This wasn't "hot coffee" it was a danger to the public.
We could choose to describe any industrial accident as "just" a natural consequence of doing buisiness... the distinction of merit is that the act which has caused harm is of value only to the buisiness, and is a danger to the public.
Hey! This is a unique (and for this mac user, kind of worrisome) oppourtunity to test the MS theory that realeasing this kind of information causes a prolifieration of exploits and only serve to teach people what kind of holes to look through.
If there is a sudden spike in viri and back end hacks on macs, then we'll know. The question is, will the community care either way - if it turns out that this kind of activity rapidly accelerates the spread of black-hat script idiots, will there be reprecussions, or will we fall in along the common mantra that "obsucrity is not protection" (though most snipers would disagree).
The problem: your services as a content mitigator have been rendered useless by the appearance of a medium which is so cheap as to appear free, so fast as to appear instant, and so easy as to appear effortless.
The cure, corrosive, caustic and highly dangerous responses flooded into the arteries of your survival - a general failing of the organs of service, and an increasingly gruesome appearance as you stamp on the consumer and turn on your distributors looking for signs of theft and duplicity.
Live does cost money, it's a subscription service - at least on the 360.
The player-rating and review system does suggest that you might be able to better select the non-14 year old crowd if that's your baliwick. As far as modding.. the marketplace has already been used to support download/install maps and mods for 360 games - why not expand that for mods and let the users sell them for live-points (as few as zero perhaps)?
That said, nobody said you had to use it if you don't want to. Even the article dosen't claim it will be required. Of course, as usual buisiness will drive toward the majority, which may hurt you, but is it fair to blame the effective designer?.
The Live service includes ranking, friend tracking (while in game) built in voice chat.. a few nice things.. but the matching system tries to minimize lag and favors high-bandwidth users to host.
It's easy. Stupid easy. Easier is better if the functionality dosen't suffer.
If you have to link into Live and use the features of Live (sorry gamespy) they might get me to pay attention when I look at a game. "Will this game support pain-free multiplayer set-up? Yehp, it's got that logo thing.. good to go."
Other than the keyboard shortcut to bring up the search, why do you think this is any better than a well done web front end of a library in a web browser? The reason that 3D languages such as VRML fail is because it's a really poor metaphor translation that gives you the worst of both physical and virtual realities. Why would I want to spend time downloading and rendering room information when all I really want to see if the metatdata of the book, perhaps images of the cover, and text from inside the book. The 3D metaphor adds nothing but slows down the process and make it more annoying. The power of computers is that they mean we no longer have to walk down the stacks of a library to find a book and reach out and pick it up to read the dust jacket. Why would we want to bring that back in a pretend world? One of the things web front ends fail at is bringing you to related-but-seperate material in the way a library does. In a library you can go to a book you know, and without knowledge of titles or authors find topic-similar texts. You can quickly grab them, view them, and if necessary stroll down the aisle to find more distantly related texts. It's probably not best to envision this as a "real world" library rendered in 3d, but rather as a series of shevles located on a plain grouped by relevance.
The advantadge of library research is that keyword selection ceases to matter. You don't need to know what your looking for in specific, only a subject or a single text can lead you to volumes and volumes of information - information you would never search for explicitly but would gladly consume if it came to your attention. A simple wed front end (text) is default limited to a certain set of presented data. If you place the entire text on a single page the site becomes jerky and unresponsive, takes forever to access search or alter, and generally dosen't perform well. When you want to enter new data into a standard system (wikipedia) you must create the page and hope you've used the proper title so that it gains linkage. With this kind of format you would go to the "shelf" create a "book" and insert it in the proper section of the library.
The advantadges in my suggestion are admittedly narrow - but as I said, it was just a quick idea, not a final and solitary use for the proposed tool.
One strength of free software is getting the power to innovate into the hands of the public. Maybe this idea sucks, it certainly won't change the way we live anytime soon - but what if it leads someone else to start creating digital theater, new tools for physics and engineering experimentation, or just a whole bunch of freely available entertainment.
As a final comment, I don't find the comparison to VRML compelling - that software was clunky, the enviroments were not compelling in the mode of modern MMORPGs, and the systems of the time couldn't run VRML code at reasonable speed - it was an idea far before its time that was poorly implemented and baddly marketed.
So.. you didn't donnate to the FSF to promote free (as in birds) software?
Look, the ideal here is to create a new culture for the MMORPG community that matches the idea behind all the other open source projects - let you build your own system to your own specs for your own goals, without putting in all the dev time and work it takes to get the foundation down. MUDS have survived for decades on the idea that anyone can write a persistant world where people can come and play.
This is to be the MUDing of 3D worlds. Every person who wants to design a few meshes and work up a couple maps can create a world for their buddies to come play in. With a bit of additional development the community could produce a product which creates "small worlds" for people to get together in. Perhaps even taping some of the other potential uses of MMORPGs, like conducting on-line confrences and visible databases. There are reasons to promote the "freeing" of a generic 3d world interface.
Can't imagine how that would work? Imagine logging into a library as a floating eye-ball (not graphically, but just limiting the avatar to a floating camera). Ctrl-F to bring up a search window. Type in name of author or title.. boom, the camera jumps to the shelf that has a visiual representation of your file.. which you download by double-clicking on it. Around that file are visual representations of other files matching author or subject - just like a real library. just as a quick example.
Why not have large, slow, space ships that use gravity assist etc to take the most economically viable route to Mars, and smaller (safer!) ships to buzz back and forth with people and emergency provisions? We are also not in the same situation as those original explorers, in that we pretty much know what we want to do. We're not "exploring" so much as just travelling. We know what's there (in broad-brush terms), we just want to colonise! By "buzz" you mean in the 1-2 year range? The distances involved don't allow shipment of "emergency goods" in anything resembling a reasonable time line. Unless you want to put a rail-gun on the moon and fire first aid kits down upon the hapless victims of your good intent, there's not much that could be done to get anything to mars "quickly."
Meh, or else they just decided that the cost of enforcing was higher than the prospective reward?
Remember.. this is a buisness not a cartel. Microsoft, love 'em or hate 'em produces a legit product which it sells for a profit. They don't have much cause to use coercive preasure to persuade people to use the industry standard. (at least for desktops)
if business really were that bad they'd have pulled out long ago. Not that I feel for the RIAA members.. but most of them don't have another buisiness to be "in" if they pull out of the media dealing gig. That nitt picking aside, you're probably right. I think we'll know when they're really in trouble when they stop asking the government to protect their racket, and start asking for handouts to "continue to provide the american consumer with culture and entertainment made here at home." A day, I certainly hope never to see.
Maybe I'm only one, but I simply don't trust blogs as news sources. Even at their best, their "news" is rehashed from a real news source. Not the only one at all. Can't trust any of those sites that just post news from other sources.. I mean.. who would want that!?
Blogs are way overrated though. Even at their best editorials in newsprint are just opion pieces, interesting only when they offer a really new idea or are authored by an actual news-maker, blogs are basically just editorials written by nobodies. Bleh.
Excellent point. $70MM in net income is an awful lot. But, it's all relative. Apple Computer -- and they're the "good guys" -- made $2B in net income last year and hit a net margin percentage of 10%. Sure, but the question is how did they make their margins larger. Some of the things that come to mind: computer sales (overpriced computer sales at that) in low volume, ipods at decent prices at high volume, a few pennies off every download through itunes, and by setting up deals with the networks to offer movies and tv shows for download.
I'm not one to call apple the good guys (though I buy their laptops because they are tough as rocks) they make their money in fairly direct ways. I won't say they're an honest company, they run their buisiness as ruthlessly as every other company.. but consider why the RIAA dosen't share apple's good will in the community.
Well, for one thing apple products are innovative and generally pretty and fun to use - compare to products produce by RIAA which focuses on limiting usefulness of purchased CDs and mp3s, openly considers the user the enemy who must be 'defeated' with technology, and lobbies for laws which make it a crime to breach their security devices. Apple sets out advertising that is as much about "like me" as "buy me." Consider their recent PC v. Apple commercials, in some of them (couples counceling ad for instance) the Mac even goes so far as to complement the PC, the commercials are funny and not terribly harsh, the Mac guy is good looking, smiles alot, and acts like someone you might not mind having around at a party - but the PC guy isn't protrayed as a evil, just a little lame and borring. The idea there is that you should like apple. They don't want to be your enemy, they don't want to be anyone's enemy. Against this, we can see the RIAA sponsored anti-piracy ads which feature video of people being locked up and raided, money being stolen, and calling the listener thieves.
I don't think the difference in public perception between the two groups has as much to do with methods and means as it does with how each interacts with the public at large.
Personally, I've been waiting for a more convinient way of recieving my newspaper for awhile now. Slices of cut up tree are a waste of space (and trees) but as a medium for spreading information, it's worked for centuries. The promise of digital paper is that I won't have to trust that my newspaper boy will deliver my paper before I leave for school/work (it has yet to happen for me) or pay a marked-up price at the coffee shop on my way in. I'd rather just sigh in frustration and dig through the political leanings of site like drugde than pay for access to the NYT's editorials and deeper content.
But I would be thrilled if I could simply plug my newspaper into my computer every morning, grab the newest issue, and read it on the train, at lunch, when I'm waiting for meetings to start, in class when I'm doing that instead of working, generally when I have a moment. That's the promise of digital paper, and I really hope the news paper guys pick up on it as fast as they can.
I believe (as in a hope or aspiration which I have not verified with evidence or research) that there is still a market for the thoughtful and thorough reporting one recieves from a newspaper which cannot be found on the evening news shows. There is a cultural advantadge in sharing root sources of information which we can all reference, rather than squabling over which version of the news is more Republican or Democrat leaning - this is the traditional role of the newspaper. "Did you see the front page today?" "I know, person Y did X." Check CNN, FOX, and ABC news, they almost never focus on the same stories.. and even when they do, the treatment is often so different that you wouldn't recognize one from the other. For example, as I write this, Fox is pushing the death of James Kim, CNN is running a Pinnochet story, and ABC.. well they're confusedly running a rolling banner which includes everything from Pinnochet to Anna Nicole's baby, with no mention of mr Kim. So, where is the common social icon, the idea we take away together of what happened today that mattered? That's important.. that's what a strong and vibrant local newspaper gives to a community, around which a sense of unity can gather. This kind of seperate news for seperate audiences approaches we have now leads to division and a lack of focus in the social conciousness.
That's another venerable Slashdot meme. Warner Music Group netted a 2% profit margin and an 8% operating margin [yahoo.com] last year. This isn't new -- nobody's going to believe this, but the record industry has always generally had shitty margins. The only record companies that typically do well are the media conglomerates who happen to own a record label; they can absorb bad performance into the company's overall numbers. But the record industry has always been, and probably always will be, a hugely speculative business.
Yes, their margins are "low" at 2%/8%, but low margins does no refute a claim that they are making a "huge profit." Using your reference, warner claimed $3,500,000,000.00 in revenue last year, or (on a 2% profit margin) $70,000,000.00 in profit. Of course they claim to have earned $1,690,000,000.00 in (gross) profit this year, just a few lines down from their revenue statement. Margins are only important when they begin to scrape around the 1-0% ratio (or lower) where they are spendng nearly as much as they take in. On a buisiness that focuses on volume, margins don't need to be high. Look at wal-mart.
New artists benefit from the exposure of having their CDs appear in wal-mart, their songs get released and downloaded through ITunes, they get played on the radio. We need clearinghouses for music. There's no reason to accept the RIAA's constituents as that clearing-house, but certainly altering the system so that the mega-bands have an even greater systemic advantadge dosen't strike me as "fair" or "productive." -GiH
I think it was very wise to cut the expense of the HD-dvd from the base model. Even assuming sony wasn't out there trying to tear buisiness away from HD-dvd, it wouldn't have been true to the xbox model. The original Xbox didn't play movies without the decoder/remote option. As then, there is no reason to try to make the 360 a true all-things to all people solution - give me what I want, let me leave what I don't care for on the floor.
The lack of Hard Drive in the 360 seemed at first to be a rip-off.. but I went without one for the first few months (relying on a trusty memory card) and I never noticed the lack of storage space, even while downloading some minimal content. the Hard Drive is thus similar to the HD-dvd add on, if you want the space to support movies and make the best out of the machine, you buy the hard drive at a decent price. Not a fair price for sure, but well within reasonable for the demos, movies, and games you can get off Live.
This modular design has allowed me to build my xbox the way I need it, yes to the hard drive, yes to wireless, no to HD-DVD, and 4 wireless controllers. Defraying the cost by spreading it out also helped diminish sticker shock, for what that's worth.
Slashdot Mirror
Public safety is a prize for which I am willing to force corporations (even ones that make neat toys!) to defend their acts in court. Nintentdo admitted in the recall that they had considered the heavier duty cords and the potential danger to furniture and bystanders, but they built the system the way they did anyway. I think the system is alot of fun. I think that with enough buisiness, it won't matter that they had to recall the wrist-bands and pay for a few TVs. They will make their money.
We, we won't have to breathe in asbestos particles that some company figured they could get away with puting in packing material because lawyers don't sue lightly. We don't have to worry about car companies choosing not to properly seal gas tanks so our cars don't explode because they're allowed to weigh cost of life against cost of buisiness. This is the system we have, and if you live anywhere in the world you benefit from the improvements the U.S. legal system encourages in product safety.
-GiH
It's lawyer-speak. They take out a memo they had some intern write a few months ago, and pull the "standard cause of action for products liability template" and then fill it in.
[product name] has [defect] which caused [harm or harm causing act].
This is comparable to me attacking a C++ for using excessive semi-colons.
-GiH
Still.. should it be proved out that these kinds of tactics increase the risk to the common (enterprise?) user, would you justify them anyway?
I appreciate that argument for releasing data on security breaches under the theory that "the bad guys know this, the good guys don't" if it should turn out that they are instead cheap classes on compromising common system architecture, I would feel the need to wonder what steps could be taken (by law makers) to discourage them.
-GiH
Still, the important point isn't the severity of the actual damages - it was that McDonalds was serving coffee that would BOIL YOUR STOMACHE if you drank it immediately. The INTENDED USE was potentially LETHAL. This wasn't "hot coffee" it was a danger to the public.
We could choose to describe any industrial accident as "just" a natural consequence of doing buisiness... the distinction of merit is that the act which has caused harm is of value only to the buisiness, and is a danger to the public.
The word "balancing test" comes to mind.
-GiH
If there is a sudden spike in viri and back end hacks on macs, then we'll know. The question is, will the community care either way - if it turns out that this kind of activity rapidly accelerates the spread of black-hat script idiots, will there be reprecussions, or will we fall in along the common mantra that "obsucrity is not protection" (though most snipers would disagree).
-GiH
The cure, corrosive, caustic and highly dangerous responses flooded into the arteries of your survival - a general failing of the organs of service, and an increasingly gruesome appearance as you stamp on the consumer and turn on your distributors looking for signs of theft and duplicity.
Prognosis - Death.
Live does cost money, it's a subscription service - at least on the 360.
The player-rating and review system does suggest that you might be able to better select the non-14 year old crowd if that's your baliwick. As far as modding.. the marketplace has already been used to support download/install maps and mods for 360 games - why not expand that for mods and let the users sell them for live-points (as few as zero perhaps)?
That said, nobody said you had to use it if you don't want to. Even the article dosen't claim it will be required. Of course, as usual buisiness will drive toward the majority, which may hurt you, but is it fair to blame the effective designer?.
-GiH
It's easy. Stupid easy. Easier is better if the functionality dosen't suffer.
-GiH
I guess we've reached the point where I say, I see your point, lets wait and see.
-GiH
If you have to link into Live and use the features of Live (sorry gamespy) they might get me to pay attention when I look at a game. "Will this game support pain-free multiplayer set-up? Yehp, it's got that logo thing.. good to go."
-GiH
The advantadge of library research is that keyword selection ceases to matter. You don't need to know what your looking for in specific, only a subject or a single text can lead you to volumes and volumes of information - information you would never search for explicitly but would gladly consume if it came to your attention. A simple wed front end (text) is default limited to a certain set of presented data. If you place the entire text on a single page the site becomes jerky and unresponsive, takes forever to access search or alter, and generally dosen't perform well. When you want to enter new data into a standard system (wikipedia) you must create the page and hope you've used the proper title so that it gains linkage. With this kind of format you would go to the "shelf" create a "book" and insert it in the proper section of the library.
The advantadges in my suggestion are admittedly narrow - but as I said, it was just a quick idea, not a final and solitary use for the proposed tool.
One strength of free software is getting the power to innovate into the hands of the public. Maybe this idea sucks, it certainly won't change the way we live anytime soon - but what if it leads someone else to start creating digital theater, new tools for physics and engineering experimentation, or just a whole bunch of freely available entertainment.
As a final comment, I don't find the comparison to VRML compelling - that software was clunky, the enviroments were not compelling in the mode of modern MMORPGs, and the systems of the time couldn't run VRML code at reasonable speed - it was an idea far before its time that was poorly implemented and baddly marketed.
-GiH
So.. you didn't donnate to the FSF to promote free (as in birds) software?
Look, the ideal here is to create a new culture for the MMORPG community that matches the idea behind all the other open source projects - let you build your own system to your own specs for your own goals, without putting in all the dev time and work it takes to get the foundation down. MUDS have survived for decades on the idea that anyone can write a persistant world where people can come and play.
This is to be the MUDing of 3D worlds. Every person who wants to design a few meshes and work up a couple maps can create a world for their buddies to come play in. With a bit of additional development the community could produce a product which creates "small worlds" for people to get together in. Perhaps even taping some of the other potential uses of MMORPGs, like conducting on-line confrences and visible databases. There are reasons to promote the "freeing" of a generic 3d world interface.
Can't imagine how that would work? Imagine logging into a library as a floating eye-ball (not graphically, but just limiting the avatar to a floating camera). Ctrl-F to bring up a search window. Type in name of author or title.. boom, the camera jumps to the shelf that has a visiual representation of your file.. which you download by double-clicking on it. Around that file are visual representations of other files matching author or subject - just like a real library. just as a quick example.
-GiH
-GiH
Remember.. this is a buisness not a cartel. Microsoft, love 'em or hate 'em produces a legit product which it sells for a profit. They don't have much cause to use coercive preasure to persuade people to use the industry standard. (at least for desktops)
-GiH
-GiH
-GiH
Blogs are way overrated though. Even at their best editorials in newsprint are just opion pieces, interesting only when they offer a really new idea or are authored by an actual news-maker, blogs are basically just editorials written by nobodies. Bleh.
-GiH
I'm not one to call apple the good guys (though I buy their laptops because they are tough as rocks) they make their money in fairly direct ways. I won't say they're an honest company, they run their buisiness as ruthlessly as every other company.. but consider why the RIAA dosen't share apple's good will in the community.
Well, for one thing apple products are innovative and generally pretty and fun to use - compare to products produce by RIAA which focuses on limiting usefulness of purchased CDs and mp3s, openly considers the user the enemy who must be 'defeated' with technology, and lobbies for laws which make it a crime to breach their security devices. Apple sets out advertising that is as much about "like me" as "buy me." Consider their recent PC v. Apple commercials, in some of them (couples counceling ad for instance) the Mac even goes so far as to complement the PC, the commercials are funny and not terribly harsh, the Mac guy is good looking, smiles alot, and acts like someone you might not mind having around at a party - but the PC guy isn't protrayed as a evil, just a little lame and borring. The idea there is that you should like apple. They don't want to be your enemy, they don't want to be anyone's enemy. Against this, we can see the RIAA sponsored anti-piracy ads which feature video of people being locked up and raided, money being stolen, and calling the listener thieves.
I don't think the difference in public perception between the two groups has as much to do with methods and means as it does with how each interacts with the public at large.
-GiH
But I would be thrilled if I could simply plug my newspaper into my computer every morning, grab the newest issue, and read it on the train, at lunch, when I'm waiting for meetings to start, in class when I'm doing that instead of working, generally when I have a moment. That's the promise of digital paper, and I really hope the news paper guys pick up on it as fast as they can.
I believe (as in a hope or aspiration which I have not verified with evidence or research) that there is still a market for the thoughtful and thorough reporting one recieves from a newspaper which cannot be found on the evening news shows. There is a cultural advantadge in sharing root sources of information which we can all reference, rather than squabling over which version of the news is more Republican or Democrat leaning - this is the traditional role of the newspaper. "Did you see the front page today?" "I know, person Y did X." Check CNN, FOX, and ABC news, they almost never focus on the same stories.. and even when they do, the treatment is often so different that you wouldn't recognize one from the other. For example, as I write this, Fox is pushing the death of James Kim, CNN is running a Pinnochet story, and ABC.. well they're confusedly running a rolling banner which includes everything from Pinnochet to Anna Nicole's baby, with no mention of mr Kim. So, where is the common social icon, the idea we take away together of what happened today that mattered? That's important.. that's what a strong and vibrant local newspaper gives to a community, around which a sense of unity can gather. This kind of seperate news for seperate audiences approaches we have now leads to division and a lack of focus in the social conciousness.
At least that's this hack's opinnion.
-GiH
Yes, their margins are "low" at 2%/8%, but low margins does no refute a claim that they are making a "huge profit." Using your reference, warner claimed $3,500,000,000.00 in revenue last year, or (on a 2% profit margin) $70,000,000.00 in profit.
Of course they claim to have earned $1,690,000,000.00 in (gross) profit this year, just a few lines down from their revenue statement. Margins are only important when they begin to scrape around the 1-0% ratio (or lower) where they are spendng nearly as much as they take in. On a buisiness that focuses on volume, margins don't need to be high. Look at wal-mart.
-GiH
New artists benefit from the exposure of having their CDs appear in wal-mart, their songs get released and downloaded through ITunes, they get played on the radio. We need clearinghouses for music. There's no reason to accept the RIAA's constituents as that clearing-house, but certainly altering the system so that the mega-bands have an even greater systemic advantadge dosen't strike me as "fair" or "productive."
-GiH
The medium (the internet) is owned and operated by buisiness groups. You may remove one middle man, but your statement just adds another.
-GiH
I think it was very wise to cut the expense of the HD-dvd from the base model. Even assuming sony wasn't out there trying to tear buisiness away from HD-dvd, it wouldn't have been true to the xbox model. The original Xbox didn't play movies without the decoder/remote option. As then, there is no reason to try to make the 360 a true all-things to all people solution - give me what I want, let me leave what I don't care for on the floor.
The lack of Hard Drive in the 360 seemed at first to be a rip-off.. but I went without one for the first few months (relying on a trusty memory card) and I never noticed the lack of storage space, even while downloading some minimal content. the Hard Drive is thus similar to the HD-dvd add on, if you want the space to support movies and make the best out of the machine, you buy the hard drive at a decent price. Not a fair price for sure, but well within reasonable for the demos, movies, and games you can get off Live.
This modular design has allowed me to build my xbox the way I need it, yes to the hard drive, yes to wireless, no to HD-DVD, and 4 wireless controllers. Defraying the cost by spreading it out also helped diminish sticker shock, for what that's worth.
-GIH
I don't know about that.. but as soon as I'm done playing this super-fun game, I will KILL you!
-GiH