Hello. My name is Tom. You now know me. I have a 360 and it has not been replaced. You just lost your magical 100% "statistic".
Anecdotal evidence is meaningless. People need to stop mentioning it on Slashdot. You missed the part where several major retailers including EB/gamestop re-affirmed the ~33% stat.
As well I prefaced that section with a "informally" meaning it is anecdotal and people can take it however they want. Failures tend to group together. Although my cohort of 360 buyers didn't get their's at the same time (one guy got it at launch another got is 3 months ago), the route the 360's take to get here is the same so they all share some environmental conditioning. As an aside the actual stat is 15/15 have replaced their 360; 1 person is on his 4th; 2 people are on their 3rd. The one on his 4th was partially due to usage. We always used to hang out at his house, so his 360 saw heavy use (he is also the guy who got it at launch). If you got any version aside from the most recent 65 nm, there is good chance you too will turn it in before the 3 year RROD warranty expires. It's a fairly substantial design flaw.
Why not also mention that the 360 has the best warranty? Why not mention why (hint, red rings for the holidays)? Such a massive failure rate. Estimated to be 33%, informally out of everyone i know who has bought one 100% of them have replaced it at least once with several on their 3rd and 4th.
Sony's target is to ship 11 million PS3s during this fiscal year (April 2007 - March 2008). In the first half of the year (April - September) they shipped 2 million PS3s. Even with increased holiday sales, 9 million in the remaining 6 months is absolutely crazy - it's actually similar to Wii sales.
Let's look at it another way:
In the previous fiscal year, Sony shipped 3.6 million PS3s. 11 + 3.6 = 14.6. 14.6 million PS3s shipped by the 31st of March 2008, which means around 14 million sold to consumers. According to vgchartz (which may be a little off but for the purposes of this discussion is more than accurate enough), the PS3 is at 6.36 million sold (to consumers) as of the 25th of November. 14 - 6.36 = 7.64 PS3s that they need to sell in 4 months... That's 1.91 million PS3s per month, which is more than current Wii levels of production (1.8 million according to Nintendo themselves).
They had shipped 5.9 million in total by march Not sure if they are aiming for a cumulative 11 mil or 11 mil in a single year. but cumulative it's not a hard target.
There will be no changes to our games, our websites, our personnel, or our day-to-day operations as a result of the deal. if this is true, how can:... combining of resources will benefit all of the companies involved and will further strengthen Blizzard's ability to continue delivering high-quality content Also be true? Either nothing is changing or something is, you can't have it both ways. The reason for mergers and aquisitions is generally that the companies involved believe that through the merger some gains can be made. The way that history proves works is through reductions is redundancy. (call these layoffs, retrenchments, rightsizing, as your personal tastes dictate) The other not-so-successful-historically model is the "merge two companies with no redundancies, run them together and lose money" model (ref: AOL-Time-Warner among others) They now have ~twice the advertising clout and a bigger stick to negotiate with retailers. ie. Stock or we will only have limited quantities of SC2 and COD5 for you.
Most rational people wouldn't elect someone to public office who openly claims to psychically commune with an imaginary friend when he needs guidance on making a decision.
But by my definition, a majority of US citizens aren't rational people! Some would argue that it isn't a majority...
So at Best Buy you show your management potential by collecting scalps. How is this different from too many other places? When I was a part of a big faceless corp you had to do some seriously heinous things to get fired. A firing an employee reflected badly on the manager and hurt their managers future prospects if it occurred too often. But I live in Canada so the big faceless corporate evil likely exist in another form.
Homosexuality isn't biological in basis It's not so definite. Biological factors do play a role as do environmental and social factors. They have identified "homosexual" genes in other animals. They have yet to link a specific mutation to Homosexuality in humans but it's highly unlikely to be purely social. Genetics may make an individual predisposed to one side or the other to varying degrees.
There is a difference between going out of your way to attack someone because they are not useful and empowering them to pursue their selfishness at the expense of other people. Yes, I think we should definitely bias against those who cut themselves off from the ongoing human society to pursue personal desire, be it base, intellectual, doesn't matter. There are extremely fee people excise themselves from humanity int he manner you speak of. Even the human dregs like Paris Hilton will likely contribute something like a child to the human race. People who often do not have children or do so very late in life often get caught up in a career or education. Which may be selfish but it also may contribute in other ways ala the example of Alan Turing. Children are essential but not the greatest contribution you can make. I'd really prefer if the highly intelligent procreate as well but forcefully doing so may not be the way to do it.
f you're a big fag and end up married to a lesbian wife, have a few kids, raise them right, get a babysitter and go swing both ways on the weekends, no big deal. You're not hurting anyone, and you're still a part of the ongoing fabric of society. True enough. If you raise the kids well who cares what you do on weekends. But how about someone like Dan Savage who adopted a child and raises him with his long term male partner be just as good? He's expending personal resources and passing on a cultural and financial heritage? Would this set up be okay for you or do they need to pass on genetic material too? What if a man is gay but instead of having a lesbian hook up to procreate with he instead contributes financially to the upbringing of his nephew? Now more broadly what if you invented something that contributed to the upbringing or the well being of the next generation?
Personally, I think the way modern civilization turned out makes a strong argument for arranged marriages at a young age and an abandonment of the concept of lifelong marital sexual fidelity. I think fidelity possible but perhaps not ideal for everyone. Fidelity wasn't a universal thing in the past either. Varying biological processes and drives makes it very difficult. Arranged marriages aren't necessarily bad either. I have known a few that have worked really well while the majority of "normal" marriages around me have been train wrecks.
People should have kids while they're young enough to chase em around and flexible enough to relate to them. Then, when they start to think wistfully of what they might have missed, they should just go explore it without shame or resentment after they have started a family. I definitely agree that in general The intellectual and Financial upper class ought to have more kids. And kids are a very good thing for a person. It heavily alters yoru perspective. However i think people can contribute in ways other then children as well. I don't think you should lose a political voice due to lack of children but neither do I see children as a negative thing. Children are the only way we pass on our cultural and genetic linage.
Why does everyone have to have a "Pro" in their name?
Why can't anyone say "I'm anti-abortion, because for thousands of generations the existence of the human race has relied on population created by women who didn't feel ready, and we're not going extinct just so you can spend another decade in childhood."
Breeding ought to be a prerequisite to voting. No person without material social ties to the future of the civilization ought to be put in a position of power over it.
To put it another way, all those rich lawyers and doctors and executives who don't have kids ought to be cast down from their authority to the very lowest class of our society. Their kids aren't going to play with my kids, or help keep my lights on, or wipe my ass for me when I'm too old to reach it. Let them die scrambling for an existence on the edge of civilization. In Biology there are many different set ups. For instance one of the most widespread and successful species only have 1% of it's population capable of reproduction. Ants. Only the queen and her mates have any hand in reproduction. The sister drones merely aid this. Thus it's sort of non-productive to simply bias against childless people. They may still contribute. For instance Alan Turing was very very Gay. But he made an immense and tangible contribution to society. Should we bias against him because of an accident of biology?
A sterile/homosexual/purposefully childless Doctor may still contribute a lot to the continuation of the human race. I'm fairly certain Turing, computers, and a quick end to WWII contributed more to the human race then ShieldW0lf and his or her immediate progeny.
And also, for the record, I have difficulty taking seriously people who criticize activists with the argument "if they really care, what they should really be doing is...". While it's fair to make constructive criticism and offer better ideas, it seems like a cop-out to just dismiss someone else's hard work simply because you were able to come up with a theoretical alternative action that you think would be better. After all, if you really cared, you'd be following your own advice and taking action instead of passively criticizing other's efforts:-) I do take action. I've written my MP(Canada), I push that idea on public forums and within my social circle, I drive a small compact car (not hybrid, out of my price range at the time of purchase). With in my capabilities I do what I can. If green peace really put in hard work I wouldn't be criticizing them. They do lazy well publicized work. Intellectually lazy. They may have students and young people do psychosocially hard work like solicit signatures, harass fishing fleets, and pass out pamphlets but they fail to do mentally hard work like investigate their causes, research their publications and learn about ecology and biology.
When the weapon of choice among those doing huge damage to the environment is soundbytes and photo-ops, sometimes we have to fight back with the same. It feels dirty and is depressing, but the fact is that you can't change the world today with a strong research paper, or even a well-researched persuasive essay - at least when you have the forces of multi-million dollar PR firms arrayed against you.
I know it offends our geek sensibilities to see people playing fast and loose with the facts, but I'm not sure there's another way. Reasoned research and data has to be the backbone of any legitimate movement, of course, but it alone can't capture the attention of the public to the extent needed to create real change.
The vast, vast majority of people are ignorant about the facts behind environmental issues, and are going to remain stubbornly ignorant of the facts forever, period. Far better that they should be ignorantly in favor of preventing environmental catastrophe than ignorantly apathetic. Like I said, it's depressing, but we have to realize that turning everyone into enlightened statistics geeks is pretty much the worst strategy for actually preserving the environment. The problem is, they aren't making a difference. Mis-information means you are expending resources where the return may not be significant. In the grand scheme of ecology saving the spotted owl was unimportant. Saving 10 sq km of Amazon rain forest is much more important then the spotted owl. But groups like green peace chose to spearhead saving the owl because it looks cuddlier, less inconvenient to get to, and it is easier less life threatening. Thus the primary sin of Green Peace is detracting resources from worthier causes. It doesn't really check where their advocacy would have the most impact but instead where their advocacy will create the most publicity.
In the end this severely weakens the whole ecological movement. They are making themselves into a scarecrow. With each "Down with Apple" and "down with Nintendo" campaign they go through they erode their own credibility and that of the movement as a whole. Far more damaging then what Apple and Nintendo may be doing. IF they want a better target, lobby for closing of the "small truck" tax loophole for SUVs and lobby for higher Taxes on Gas.
Someone tell LevelUp and Edge about Fable. Maybe then we won't have any more of these stupid studies. So they see a hamfisted, poorly implemented, inconsequential morality system?
Meh, Greenpeace is a bunch of rich kids who like to gripe and love to trash anything thats popular, truth be damned.
I wonder if there is an "Environmentalists against Greenpeace" group? I would like to join. When I was taking an ecology course in University my prof always harped about how counterproductive green peace was. Not all ecological goal can be achieved by "Doing nothing to the environment". In some ecologies they are so out of whack that "culling" is indeed required but Green Peace isn't about preserving ecologies but about making headlines, making young activist feel good, and saving cute furry animals (in a short term near sighted way).
Sometimes they are doing good work, for instance when they disrupted Japanese "scientific" research into whales. However the majority of their activities are media friendly, poorly researched, publicity stunts.
ESRB ratings sound so pathetically lame. Why not just use MPAA style ratings, which everyone likes (unless they're also copyrighted or something). .. because I'd like my game rating to reflect the contents of the game not the politics of the rater. The MPAA is one of the very worst ratings organizations out there. Almost every movies that gets a NC-17 gets a "mild adult" in most other markets. Some of the R rated movies gets a "Adults only" in other markets. The MPAA is easily influenced by money, panders to a sexually puritanical, mentally ultra violent ideal. The MPAA is not a good organization to pattern anything after.
Also, Nintendo allows VC transfers for repairs. My roommate managed to kill my disc drive and they transfered my VC stuff over to the replacement Wii, no problem. I am aware, but the odds of getting lower expected lifespan refurbished parts out weighed the $20 i had on the machine. But it discouraged me from purchasing anything from the VC because it is bound to the machine. Future repairs may be okay but cost of repair / cost of new machine will someday be uneven and any VC materials you have are non transferable per eula, and my experience with customer service.
Cue all the Nintendo and Blizzard references ("the game won't ship until it's ready to ship").
See also: Starcraft II, Metroid Prime 3. Even diablo ii. almost 8 years later I picked up a third copy (lost 2 others) last week. Still fun. And it likely has as much to do with blizzard proper as it does with blizzard north as hellsagate wasn't as much fun. The developers of hellsgate are almost the same as the core team for D ii. I think the extra things Blizzard demanded of them made D ii a much more enduring game.
Nintendo will allow you to transfer titles under limited circumtances.
If you replace your Wii, they will transfer them to the new console.
I was taking mine to a friends house to play when I slipped on some ice and crushed it. It didn't really smash, but it never really worked again. Needless to say it wasn't covered under warranty.
When I picked up the new one, I called Nintendo Canada, explained the situation, and they transferred my virtual console purchases without hassle.
If you mean between you and a buddy like you might lend or borrow cartridges, ok yes, then they won't. I suppose they could put some sort of capability to unregister your Wii, transfer by SD card, then reregister on another. Odd, I got a defective one but I had spent ~$20 on wii points. I went to exchanged it phoned Nintendo Canada and they informed me they would nto allow the transfer even with cc receipts, sales and echange reciepts, myNintendo linking, or any other record. They stated specifically games are non transferable. They didn't even offer to refund my VC purchases. Refused when I brought it up. I wasn't up for sending it back for warranty repair due to turn around time (2 days for exchange, 2 weeks for repair) and the likelihood of getting refurbed used parts.
Exactly. There's no Wii-shortage here, quite the opposite, even the biggest franchises in the big cities have plenty of Wiis and see no shortage whatsoever come christmas.
Why Nintendo fails to reallocate them I can't understand. Power supply differences and NTSC vs PAL.
No. I just think Nintendo have done far more to make fun interesting games than Microsoft or Sony have.
Plus I've never bought a music CD protected by a Nintendo rootkit or stayed up into the small hours reinstalling Nintendo Windows XP on a relative's PC because of viruses and spyware.:-) Nintendo does some things well but they aren't' the "saviors of gaming". Sony and Microsoft have contributed as well. Without MS pushing live, online console play may still be a minute market. Without Sony laying the sales smackdown for two generations Nintendo may still be the monopolistic nanny corp it was back in it's hey day. Without MS pushing online content we may not have the PSN store or the wii shopping. Each of the three have made contributions.
As well Nintendo DRMs all it's games and their VC items. They will not allow VC purchases to transfer under any circumstance.
My personal opinions on the wii are that it is a great party machine but it has yet to come into it's own for solo play.
It's so hard to find one because so many people want one, they're a reasonable price (compared to the current generation of consoles), they're fun for the family, and they have less reclusive geek stigma attached to them compared to the PS3 or XBox 360. I'd say PC's have the reclusive geek stigma. 360's have tourettes fratboy stigma, and PS3 has sticker shock.
Because when the heat comes down that will somehow matter? it might seem like it should, but it wont It's the difference between getting a new project lead and getting a new resume typed up.
A lawsuit may disrupt that product but isn't necessarily going to destroy that company.
why is it that you people still deny that piracy has an effect on the music industry? you guys are really fooling yourself or at least you're trying to fool others into thinking that your activities do not effect an economy. you music pirates have created a negative effect on the economy regardless of your inability to be honest about it. I have not stolen a single song. I either listen to the radio, rip Cd's, buy from the artist, or buy from iTunes. However anti-Piracy impact how i am able to use music i purchased. The rationale behind the overzealous anti-piracy policies is the decline of music sales. It's just as likely that the economic model is impacted by competition as much as piracy. It is at least a co-factor.
It's likely eating at other parts of the entertainment industry. $50 and 20h spent on COD 4 is $50 and 20h not spend going to movies or buying CD's. Music and cinema have declined in the last 10 years. This may be why (not piracy).
Granted, as long as you do not distribute the source, nobody will spot a 200 line piece of code and this kind of copying indeed happens all the time, but that does not make it legal in the strict sense of the word. I once wanted to use a small library that is floating about out there without any license/copyright statement. As it would have been possible for our customers to spot the use, I checked with our legal department and they were very firm: if I could get the author to explicitly approve it, it was OK, otherwise not. He did not reply, so I had to scrap the idea. Unless off course you padded the CD with the contents of ram ala Zelda, or someone decompiles the bins and compares it to their code ala ICO, or internal leaks.
To me, this sounds like the OP is a quite young programmer who is looking for a chance to lead a moral crusade rather than get the job done. In my experience I avoid taking on employees like that because they seem more focused on making sure everyone else follows their ethics than in doing a good job on the task at hand. Or he's a young programmer who is afraid he's the scapegoat.
Slashdot Mirror
Anecdotal evidence is meaningless. People need to stop mentioning it on Slashdot. You missed the part where several major retailers including EB/gamestop re-affirmed the ~33% stat.
As well I prefaced that section with a "informally" meaning it is anecdotal and people can take it however they want. Failures tend to group together. Although my cohort of 360 buyers didn't get their's at the same time (one guy got it at launch another got is 3 months ago), the route the 360's take to get here is the same so they all share some environmental conditioning. As an aside the actual stat is 15/15 have replaced their 360; 1 person is on his 4th; 2 people are on their 3rd. The one on his 4th was partially due to usage. We always used to hang out at his house, so his 360 saw heavy use (he is also the guy who got it at launch). If you got any version aside from the most recent 65 nm, there is good chance you too will turn it in before the 3 year RROD warranty expires. It's a fairly substantial design flaw.
Let's look at it another way:
In the previous fiscal year, Sony shipped 3.6 million PS3s. 11 + 3.6 = 14.6. 14.6 million PS3s shipped by the 31st of March 2008, which means around 14 million sold to consumers. According to vgchartz (which may be a little off but for the purposes of this discussion is more than accurate enough), the PS3 is at 6.36 million sold (to consumers) as of the 25th of November. 14 - 6.36 = 7.64 PS3s that they need to sell in 4 months... That's 1.91 million PS3s per month, which is more than current Wii levels of production (1.8 million according to Nintendo themselves).
They had shipped 5.9 million in total by march Not sure if they are aiming for a cumulative 11 mil or 11 mil in a single year. but cumulative it's not a hard target.
if this is true, how can:
Also be true? Either nothing is changing or something is, you can't have it both ways. The reason for mergers and aquisitions is generally that the companies involved believe that through the merger some gains can be made. The way that history proves works is through reductions is redundancy. (call these layoffs, retrenchments, rightsizing, as your personal tastes dictate) The other not-so-successful-historically model is the "merge two companies with no redundancies, run them together and lose money" model (ref: AOL-Time-Warner among others) They now have ~twice the advertising clout and a bigger stick to negotiate with retailers. ie. Stock or we will only have limited quantities of SC2 and COD5 for you.
But by my definition, a majority of US citizens aren't rational people! Some would argue that it isn't a majority...
Why can't anyone say "I'm anti-abortion, because for thousands of generations the existence of the human race has relied on population created by women who didn't feel ready, and we're not going extinct just so you can spend another decade in childhood."
Breeding ought to be a prerequisite to voting. No person without material social ties to the future of the civilization ought to be put in a position of power over it.
To put it another way, all those rich lawyers and doctors and executives who don't have kids ought to be cast down from their authority to the very lowest class of our society. Their kids aren't going to play with my kids, or help keep my lights on, or wipe my ass for me when I'm too old to reach it. Let them die scrambling for an existence on the edge of civilization. In Biology there are many different set ups. For instance one of the most widespread and successful species only have 1% of it's population capable of reproduction. Ants. Only the queen and her mates have any hand in reproduction. The sister drones merely aid this. Thus it's sort of non-productive to simply bias against childless people. They may still contribute. For instance Alan Turing was very very Gay. But he made an immense and tangible contribution to society. Should we bias against him because of an accident of biology?
A sterile/homosexual/purposefully childless Doctor may still contribute a lot to the continuation of the human race. I'm fairly certain Turing, computers, and a quick end to WWII contributed more to the human race then ShieldW0lf and his or her immediate progeny.
Make that "physically hard work". silly spell checker.
I know it offends our geek sensibilities to see people playing fast and loose with the facts, but I'm not sure there's another way. Reasoned research and data has to be the backbone of any legitimate movement, of course, but it alone can't capture the attention of the public to the extent needed to create real change.
The vast, vast majority of people are ignorant about the facts behind environmental issues, and are going to remain stubbornly ignorant of the facts forever, period. Far better that they should be ignorantly in favor of preventing environmental catastrophe than ignorantly apathetic. Like I said, it's depressing, but we have to realize that turning everyone into enlightened statistics geeks is pretty much the worst strategy for actually preserving the environment. The problem is, they aren't making a difference. Mis-information means you are expending resources where the return may not be significant. In the grand scheme of ecology saving the spotted owl was unimportant. Saving 10 sq km of Amazon rain forest is much more important then the spotted owl. But groups like green peace chose to spearhead saving the owl because it looks cuddlier, less inconvenient to get to, and it is easier less life threatening. Thus the primary sin of Green Peace is detracting resources from worthier causes. It doesn't really check where their advocacy would have the most impact but instead where their advocacy will create the most publicity.
In the end this severely weakens the whole ecological movement. They are making themselves into a scarecrow. With each "Down with Apple" and "down with Nintendo" campaign they go through they erode their own credibility and that of the movement as a whole. Far more damaging then what Apple and Nintendo may be doing. IF they want a better target, lobby for closing of the "small truck" tax loophole for SUVs and lobby for higher Taxes on Gas.
Most of them break down to:
Option 1 - Inconvenient (refuse reward)
Option 2 - Neutral (take reward)
Option 3 - Jerk (take reward, and kill quest NPC)
It can be fun, but KOTOR, KOTOR2, Fable, etc.. all look like that. It's difficult to implement any deeper system.
I wonder if there is an "Environmentalists against Greenpeace" group? I would like to join. When I was taking an ecology course in University my prof always harped about how counterproductive green peace was. Not all ecological goal can be achieved by "Doing nothing to the environment". In some ecologies they are so out of whack that "culling" is indeed required but Green Peace isn't about preserving ecologies but about making headlines, making young activist feel good, and saving cute furry animals (in a short term near sighted way).
Sometimes they are doing good work, for instance when they disrupted Japanese "scientific" research into whales. However the majority of their activities are media friendly, poorly researched, publicity stunts.
See also: Starcraft II, Metroid Prime 3. Even diablo ii. almost 8 years later I picked up a third copy (lost 2 others) last week. Still fun. And it likely has as much to do with blizzard proper as it does with blizzard north as hellsagate wasn't as much fun. The developers of hellsgate are almost the same as the core team for D ii. I think the extra things Blizzard demanded of them made D ii a much more enduring game.
If you replace your Wii, they will transfer them to the new console.
I was taking mine to a friends house to play when I slipped on some ice and crushed it. It didn't really smash, but it never really worked again.
Needless to say it wasn't covered under warranty.
When I picked up the new one, I called Nintendo Canada, explained the situation, and they transferred my virtual console purchases without hassle.
If you mean between you and a buddy like you might lend or borrow cartridges, ok yes, then they won't. I suppose they could put some sort of capability to unregister your Wii, transfer by SD card, then reregister on another. Odd, I got a defective one but I had spent ~$20 on wii points. I went to exchanged it phoned Nintendo Canada and they informed me they would nto allow the transfer even with cc receipts, sales and echange reciepts, myNintendo linking, or any other record. They stated specifically games are non transferable. They didn't even offer to refund my VC purchases. Refused when I brought it up. I wasn't up for sending it back for warranty repair due to turn around time (2 days for exchange, 2 weeks for repair) and the likelihood of getting refurbed used parts.
Why Nintendo fails to reallocate them I can't understand. Power supply differences and NTSC vs PAL.
Plus I've never bought a music CD protected by a Nintendo rootkit or stayed up into the small hours reinstalling Nintendo Windows XP on a relative's PC because of viruses and spyware.
As well Nintendo DRMs all it's games and their VC items. They will not allow VC purchases to transfer under any circumstance.
My personal opinions on the wii are that it is a great party machine but it has yet to come into it's own for solo play.
A lawsuit may disrupt that product but isn't necessarily going to destroy that company.
It's likely eating at other parts of the entertainment industry. $50 and 20h spent on COD 4 is $50 and 20h not spend going to movies or buying CD's. Music and cinema have declined in the last 10 years. This may be why (not piracy).