Drilling even a small hole that deep into the earth seems like it could cause all sorts of problems. A crack in a hard material tends to permeate outward. If you drill down just a little bit into the earth, cracks will be very limited in how far from the origin point they can spread. As you drill deeper into the earth, though, I imagine the cracks that form back up toward the surface can get further and further from the origin point, and increase in severity as you go up (in addition to the fact that a crack five feet below the surface is relatively inconsequential whereas a crack 50 feet below the surface could be catastrophic.
I hope they've really thought this through, 'cause to me it sounds sooooo not worth the risk.
I'm actually of the belief that hands-free phones are more dangerous than holding the physical phone in your hand. I'd love to see some studies done on this...
For me personally, at least, I find myself more distracted on the hands-free phone. I have a theory why this is the case, too. See, when I've got one hand on the wheel, (which is how I prefer to drive, whether I'm on the phone or not), and I've got my phone in the other hand, the fact that I've got one "task" in each hand I think makes it mentally easier for me to feel like I'm multitasking.
That is, speaking into my right hand is one task, and steering with my left hand is the other task. By contrast, when I use hands-free, there's no physical representation of the second task, the conversation I'm having, and I've actually observed that this tends to be a distraction to me on the road, whereas I've never really observed my "in-the-hand" cellphone conversations to distract me to any noticeable extent. I think psychologically humans have a more difficult time multitasking when there's not a simple physical representation of the tasks.
Of course, there are some situations in driving where talking in ANY form is too much of a distraction, like when you're making a difficult merge or shifting lanes through heavy traffic, etc. In those situations I put the phone down, just the same as I would pause my conversation with the passenger sitting next to me.
I think, for people who normally drive with two hands, holding a phone in their other hand is, obviously, going to hinder their driving performance. This is a no-brainer. But for those who can drive comfortably with one hand, the danger is that they become mentally distracted, and I think taking the physical phone out of their hand actually increases this danger rather than decreasing it.
Like I said, though, I'd like to see some studies on this topic, since many states are passing laws that make only hands-free phones legal. I know there have been studies showing that hands-free is no safer than in-the-hand, but I'd like to see some studies addressing the question of whether hands-free is actually more dangerous than in-the-hand. I think the results might surprise some people.
(I am not a lawyer, and most of this post is based on my interpretation of laws that I have no specific knowledge of)
The thing that seems to get lost in these discussions, is that freedom of speech is not the central issue here. IF a reasonable case can be made for legally banning the sale of violent/sexual videogames to minors, THEN we should look at the question of "who could be trusted to decide which games are violent/sexual?" However, these laws have not yet conquered that initial hurdle of proving that there are sufficient grounds to restrict sales to minors. The freedom of speech issue is simply a convenient method for saying "well even if you COULD prove that sales of these games should be restricted, the method of restriction you propose happens to be unconstitutional anyway, so the whole thing should be nixed!"
The debate everyone SHOULD be having is whether there's proper grounds to restrict sales of these games, or of movies/TV/books/music. The courts have so far held that the answer is "no," and that there simply is not a sufficient body of scientific evidence to warrant such a law.
First and foremost, though, recognize that there are two commonly-held reasons to legally ban the sale of a product to minors:
1. The product is harmful to the minor. Because the well-being of minors is considered the responsibility of their legal guardians (for the sole reason that minors are considered too inexperienced in the world to reliably look out for their own best interest), it is thought to be appropriate that, whenever feasible, minors should not have the autonomy to engage in activities that are harmful to themselves.
2. The use of the product is harmful to society. Whether you're a minor or an adult, actions that can be reliably shown to *cause* a net-negative effect on society tend to get banned (as in, the product causes its owner to engage in a harmful act). In some extreme cases the availability of a product may be restricted under the lest strict criteria that it "enables" actions that are harmful to society. However, so long as substantial non-harmful uses can be shown, the product is usually only subject to strict regulations, not outright-banned.
When they finally banned tobacco products, it was only after substantial evidence had been collected to support the claim that tobacco caused harm to smokers. This is why it is only illegal for minors to PURCHASE cigarettes. The legal guardian can purchase cigarettes for the minor if they want. Technically, the only adults who should be legally able to purchase cigarettes for a minor are the minor's legal guardians. I don't know if the actual law says that, but the idea that ANY adult can purchase cigarettes for a minor (as is a common occurrence) doesn't make any particular sense, given the original logic behind the law.
The reason I bring up cigarettes, is that the popular belief is that the sale of tobacco to minors is banned because "we want to protect the children." This is an incomplete view that gets people into trouble. It is not legal to "protect the children" in the general sense. What is legal, is to assist the legal guardians in protecting THEIR children, as they see fit, and also in revoking a legal guardian's custody of a child if deemed appropriate (letting your 2-month-old baby smoke, for example, might indicate that you're unfit to maintain custody). It is for this reason, that adults are not banned from purchasing cigarettes for themselves. It is ALSO for this reason that it is not illegal for children to smoke cigarettes. Namely, because engaging in self-injurious behavior, below a certain extreme threshold, is your RIGHT. As a minor, though, those rights are guarded by the guardian. The guardian's job is to act in the best interest of the child, so for a guardian to "self-injure" the minor who is under their custody, the guardian would have to prove that the action is in the best interest of the minor, which would be almost impossible to justify for any action which you as the guardian know is "se
'If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot.'"
RESTART MANAGER: "An update to NOTEPAD.EXE has been downloaded to your computer. Windows can install this update without a reboot. In order to update this component, Windows must close all dependent applications. The following dependent component will be closed and then re-opened: "NT_OS_KERNEL.EXE". Your other applications and open documents will not be affected. Press OK to continue."
Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't sound like anything that's not already being done. Firstly, antivirus companies I'm sure run honeypot machines to help them "catch" new viruses, and then distribute them via automatic updates to their customers, more or less immediately. Antispyware works the same way, except they also use those user-contributed spyware networks, which serves the same purpose as these proposed honeypots serves (antivirus companies do this too but I don't get the impression it's their primary method of discovering new viruses).
And proposing anything that involves 800,000 dedicated computers is certainly an instant turn-off. For that much work, the idea should do something better than reinvent the wheel.
Legislating otherwise "would be the same thing as saying to Google, 'I think we ought to have regulation on Google that says when I enter a search term, the top search result is always a random event,' " Smith said, claiming that Google allows clients to pay to influence the ranking of search results. In fact, Google does not allow payments to influence general search results, although advertisers pay for top billing on the lists that run on the right side of Google's pages.
My recollection of Internet History, is that once upon a time a company named Yahoo decided to let websites pay for higher rankings, not unlike a certain telephone company now wants to do. Yahoo might have similarly argued, that paid rankings are just a premium above normal rankings, but I'm sure the sites that got bumped to Page 2 of the search results listings didn't see it that way.
Then, another company named Google came along. Their theory was that paid rankings fundamentally undermined the concept of relevance and/or popularity-based searching, and that users wanted relevant sites, not commercials. So they didn't allow paid rankings. Similar to how other ISPs probably won't allow pay-for-performance internet traffic. Though there are many reasons Yahoo was overtaken by Google, the exclusion of paid rankings was unquestionably one of them.
If BellSouth truly wanted to look to Google as a historical example, the conclusion should be that pay-for-performance is a bad idea, not a good one. The market's DISTASTE for pay-for-ranking was one of the keys to Google's success.
There's another problem too, though. There's only a finite number of big-tier ISPs. If they ALL decided to switch to this pay-for-performance model, there would be almost nothing the market could do about it. By contrast, the fundamental reason that nobody really complained about Yahoo's paid rankings, was because Yahoo's actions didn't impede consumer choice. An INFINITE number of search engine websites can be started up on the Internet, so if there's a market desire for non-paid rankings, someone is always free to seize on that. And that's exactly what Google did. If all the top-tier ISPs decide to do pay-for-performance (presumably in a legal, non-collusive way), who's going to challenge them? Starting up a Tier-1 ISP is a little different than starting up a website.
However, although it's probably bad for the Internet, that's not to say BellSouth is stupid for considering this. They're betting on whether the money from sites paying for better performance will offset the money lost from customers ditching them for network-neutral ISPs. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that gamble pays off.
It seems a little absurd to me that VOIP providers should be burdened with this as law. What happened to market forces?
Well, there is still some concern with letting the market play itself out. If VOIP providers' "solution" to the problem is to simply implement E911 routing (rather than taking a more appropriate solution like combining their phones with a POTS line, as another poster suggested), a lot of people's lives may be at risk in the short term. In fact, it will probably be a flurry of media stories about people dying because their VOIP-based E911 service didn't work, that eventually compel either the market, or the government, to implement change. It could take some time to get to this point, and then who knows what the timeframe will be for changes to be made once we reach that point.
Instead of people potentially having to die to "correct" the market, it makes more sense for everyone involved to deal with the problem up-front right now. It's simply too dangerous to leave this to the market. The FCC is right to force this issue up right now. Most people are still on POTS lines, and POTS lines work fine for 911. VOIP is starting to gain momentum, despite having not adequately addressed the 911 issue. The FCC is simply saying "we're not going to let you move people from a technology where 911 *works* to a technology where it doesn't. If you don't address 911 compatibility, we're not going to let you continue marketing your product."
The *problem* is that the FCC's solution is a bad one, as has been discussed here. VOIP-based E911, as we've said, will not be reliable if it is independent of the POTS infrastructure. So the FCC is quite right to step in here and make demands, the problem is simply that the demands they've chosen to make are insufficient to address the problem.
Also, a side note: It won't be enough to simply encourage people to keep the POTS line as a backup for 911. POTS was chosen to base 911 on because it's reliable and literally everyone has a POTS line to their residence or office. However, many people aren't going to keep the big red phone plugged in (like the one Batman used to call Commissioner Gordon in the '60s Adam West show). But more notably, if the FCC stands back and lets market forces decide things, VOIP may continue to gain popularity, and people doing construction on new or renovated buildings will inevitably decide to skimp on installing phone lines if, say, they intend to use cable or power lines for broadband and VOIP. So even if the solution is "just keep an old POTS line available as a backup," the FCC should probably mandate this as a regulation, i.e. "Every floor of every residence and office building must have a POTS line WITH a working POTS phone connected to it."
I'm far from an expert on the 911 system, but I do feel pretty safe in asserting one particular detail: 911 call centers were built and are operated by the public, using local/state/federal tax dollars.
Now as I understand it, it varies from pole-to-pole as to who owns the telephone poles -- some are owned by the city, some by the electric company, some the telcos, cable company, etc.
However, the city, using public funding, built the 911 infrastructure, at great expense to the taxpayers. In many cities, 911 calls are routed through a separate circuit, and telco companies are required to route 911 calls even if a phone line is not in service. However, if a line is simply dead, I imagine this doesn't apply. Obviously most people at the time when 911 was first rolled out did not foresee the telcos competing for phone service with Internet/cable/etc, so there was little hesitation in making the last-mile of the 911 infrastructure dependent on the telco infrastructure.
Phone lines, though, are often the one thing that works when power/cable/Internet go down (which is often, and frequently related to and thus coinciding with the particular emergency you're calling about!). In the interest of the public good, an arrangement allowing 911 calls to be made through the existing phone lines ought to be in-place, if it is not already. Yes, VOIP 911 should be implemented as well, but at the end of the day putting the public in a situation where they have to rely on a working power/cable/internet connection to get an emergency operator is dangerous. In fact VOIP-based 911 may actually make things worse, providing a false sense of security. How many callers are going to keep a regular phone hooked up to their POTS line just as a backup for 911? And how much extra time is going to be wasted when they first try 911 on their VOIP line, discover it's dead, then race over to their nearest POTS "backup" phone, which is most likely nowhere near where the victim they're calling for is!
911 was built from the ground up to be extremely reliable, because a service like 911 has to be reliable. Power/cable/internet are very unreliable and have a tendency to be down at exactly the time a 911 call needs to be made.
There are other ways to approach this problem. Hopefully someone will do so, because, like I said, this sounds like a dangerous situation, and getting Vonage to route 911 calls isn't going to fix these reliability problems.
It's not so much that the word is being "misused," it's just being used ambiguously.
Critics "rate" by giving ratings. Gamers "rate" based on what they buy. From a ratings perspective, the closest thing to a rating that gamers give is sales. Sales=rating=popularity. So for gamers "underrated" and "unpopular" are effectively equivalent terms (except when everyone buys some overhyped game and is disappointed by it).
To clarify this you'd need to ask "underrated by whom?"
Bah, ever since they introduced the written word, it has artificially limited the endless depth and power of the imagination. No words can ever truly encompass the richness of a thought. No language can ever capture the true brilliance of the mind's eye. The power of the mind was infinite, but, like that silly mathematical concept of infinite, as soon as you defined it, 'twas infinite no longer.
The gaming industry has spent millions of $US cents creating text adventures. Perhaps I can create a website for games of the mind, to remind gamers of the limitations of text.
Imagination before ASCII, that's what I always say^H^H^H^think.
Or maybe I was just trying to poke fun at Nintendo for humor's sake. PS2 fanboy? Half the comments in my original post aren't even in reference to the GameCube -- they're in reference to the N64, and SNES -- it's simply a joking chronicling of some of Nintendo's more interesting business decisions.
I think a more telling statement would be Nintendo fanboy alert! The post was supposed to be funny, not a serious dig at Nintendo. Jeez.
Bandwagon: "Our system will let you lay next-generation High Definition movies via HD-DVD/Blu-Ray." Nintendo: "That was pretty impressive when we had those little full-motion video clips in Lethal Enforcers for SNES, wasn't it?"
Bandwagon: "Our games will come on CD-ROM/GD-ROM/DVD-ROM/Blu-Ray discs." Nintendo: "Cartridges are the wave of the future!"
Bandwagon: "Our systems will output in high definition" Nintendo: "NTSC is the wave of the future!"
Bandwagon: "Our new game controller is the best design yet with 8 shoulder buttons, two analog pads, and 12 awkward little buttons at the bottom (*cough* Jaguar *cough*)" Nintendo: "Check out our remote control, it's so retro! Wave it through the air and it senses motion! Now everyone will get tennis elbow and dislocated shoulders instead of carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive stress injuries!"
Bandwagon: "The gamers who owned our last-generation system are now 3 years older, so our games should be more mature, violent, profane, and sexy." Nintendo: "Bright colors, furry creatures, and Super Mario never go out of style!"
Bandwagon: "Games make the system, and third-party companies make games. Let's embrace third-party developers." Nintendo: "Games don't make the system, silly. OUR games make the system!"
IANAL, but IIRC it's a basic tenet of contract law that you CANNOT create a contract in which agreements are made to violate existing laws. For example, if you sign a contract with your neighbor that authorizes you to kill him, and it includes an indemnity clause waiving his family's right to sue you for civil damages, and/or waiving the state's right to charge you with first-degree murder, such a contract would be worthless, A) because, obviously, the rights to press criminal charges belong to the state, not the murder victim, and, more relevantly to this topic, B) you simply can't make a contract whose premise is an illegal act (murder).
This is why California is suing. If Sony's actions breached existing laws, the EULA is irrelevant. And, regarding the third charge they make, not all laws (or "rights") that apply to you are yours to legally waive. Apparently there's a consumer protection law that states as much for that particular waiver in Sony's EULA.
"One point that few people, whatever their viewpoint, could disagree with is that the key to a financially successful open source project rests with the community, rather than just the technology."
Nah, I'll disagree with that, on the grounds that everything can be disagreed with.
Wasn't there a news report a few days ago about how Japan is going to have the technology by 2012 to build a movie set that looks like the Moon?
They seem to have forgotten to write a press release to go with this big story so I wrote it for them:
This is great news for ____! Eventually it will improve ____ for all consumers but initially it will be used in the ____ industry to improve ____. Sony, Samsung, and Toshiba have all announced they will be introducing their own versions, which will be available in 21__ and are eventually expected to saturate the market at prices as low as $...,...,... Said one executive, "We're incredibly excited about this. We have invested $...,...,...,...,... in this project and are very confident it will succeed and dominate the ____ market. The new technology will first be experienced by consumers in selected ____ during a special ____-enhanced presentation of Star Wars: Episode OMG.
Have fun filling in those blanks. I sure couldn't.
Taking into account the technical problems knocks the game down from a 9 to an 8, which was what I was going to give it until I found myself swimming upside down and drowing.:)
What's unfortunate about that particular breed of "technical problems" is that it's sort of like when you go to a restaurant that's generally very well-liked, and by random chance happen to have a bad experience, and you tell all your friends about your bad experience and so they never go, even though if they did go, there might be a 95% chance that their experience would be fantastic. Now let's pretend you're a Zagat reviewer. Your review is intended to inform the Zagat readers of what THEIR experience is likely to be like, and yet, you have instead (knowingly or unknowingly) provided them with a review that would be counter to the experience that 95% of your readers would have if they actually went to the restaurant. Yikes.
In Daytona USA for Sega Saturn there's a tiny piece of wall in the tunnel of one level that, if you aggressively scrape the car against that very specific section of the wall, will cause the game to freeze. I discovered this by accident while playing the game, and it was upsetting because it was on a late lap in a many-lap race. I was able to reproduce the bug with ease, but what are the chances of accidentally stumbling on this (what I believe is one of the only "crash points" in the game)? Miniscule. Without knowing specifically where this "crash point" is, you'd probably never encounter it by chance. We're talking probably less than 1% chance of this happening to you. If I simply wrote in a review that "the game freezes sometimes," the reader has no sense of proportion or perspective. "The game freezes sometimes." Look how bad that sounds, and yet it has such a minor rate of incidence that my statement becomes an unfair distortion of what most readers should expect to see.
Obviously Zonk's intent wasn't to unnecessarily bad-mouth the game, though -- he's clearly a fan of it. If you've only played through the game a couple times there's no way to know how similar or dissimilar your experience was to other people's. Myself, I've played through the game two and a half times now, and I have not had ANY issues like the one you describe. I've seen a small graphical glitch once or twice, (the floor disappearing), but nothing that interfered with gameplay. I've seen a couple similar complaints on the GameFaqs boards, but by and large I don't know that most people playing the game would experience any problems. So what's unfortunate is that although you clearly were affected by that gameplay glitch, because you're only one person and have only played through the game once or twice (or thrice?), you have no way of knowing whether the glitch you experienced is likely to happen in 1% of games played or 50%. If it's around 1%, it's unfortunate for that kind of information to make its way into a review that the other 99% of gamers will read and incorrectly presume is likely to happen to them.
By the way I don't know how common these glitches actually are in SOTC. I was just pointing out the dangers of pointing out glitches.:)
4) You have camera control, if the view sucks it's your own fault.
SOTC has some camera issues that are the fault of the developers, and some camera issues that are simply the result of players not having fully adjusted to the learning curve for the game's controls and camera dynamics.
Firstly this game is such an amazing accomplishment that I cringe at "faulting" the developers for anything. These are REALLY nitpicks AFAIK.
But getting back to the user learning curve, I've noticed that there seems to be a certain biased mentality that gamers have nowadays. See, many games (indeed, many of the "best" games) tend to have a certain learning curve for controlling the main character. It's almost to be expected. And if you're on Level 3 but your mastery of the controls is still around level 1, then it's not really fair to complain and say "the controls suck." It's inherent in the way some people play games, that, once they figure out how to use the controls "well enough," they stop exploring and trying to further master the controls. That's all fine and good, but you can't expect the game to be "fully playable and annoyance-free" at whatever arbitrary point you individually decided to stop improving your understanding of the controls.
Now, having noted that, I think most gamers more or less understand the above premise, and "get" that if you only master the controls 50%, it may have a negative impact on your experience.
So my question is, why are the camera controls not held to the same standard????
"I don't have time to worry about the camera when I'm controlling the main character."
This sounds like a severe, if not absurd, overreaction to a minor nitpick. One of the biggest benefits that came with the advent of 3D gaming was an unlimited range of visual possibilities. You can't expect to have your own persoanl, unique visual tour of a 3D world if you're not willing to control the camera. But, more obviously, the same argument used to apply to FPS games. Prior to Quake, no one really had much interest in controlling the camera separate from the character. It was always fixed relative to the character. Then Quake came along and the benefits of taking explicit control of the camera became obvious (i don't mean for strafing, i mean the ability to freely look around, up/down, etc). Mastering the keyboard/mouse combo was a new "skill" players had to learn, but their gameplay experience suffered greatly if they didn't, and benefitted substantially if they did.
In the world of third-person shooters, the same reasoning should apply. Personally I found that most of the issues I had with the camera were moot by the later stages of the game, as I was more familiar with SOTC's particular camera dynamics. They even let you adjust the camera speed in the options menu.
>> Yes, well, we've got these bones. And we're going to test them to make sure they match with the known DNA sequence of Copernicus.
From TFA:
"The grave was in bad condition and not all remains were found, Gassowski said, adding that his team will try to find relatives of Copernicus to do more accurate DNA identification."
I imagine they're talking about finding the graves of his dead relatives, not living descendants. If you find a skeleton that you have independent reasons to believe is some particular relative of his, and the DNA from that skeleton happens to corroborate that relationship when compared to the "Copernicus" DNA, you've increased the accuracy of the Copernicus skull substantially, because the chances of the relative being misidentified AND happening to have the correct DNA relationship with the suspected Copernicus DNA is miniscule, so long as the evidence leading you to the relative's remains was unrelated to the evidence that pointed you to Copernicus' remains, and provided the remains aren't buried, for example, right next to his (if they are then you've got nothing because any group of people buried together are likely to be related).
And, not from TFA (from me):
They may also be able to examine the DNA for certain genetic features that match up with aesthetic and non-aesthetic traits that are historically known about him.
I was about to say they could also compare the DNA attributes with the aesthetic attributes of the skull, but then I slapped myself in the head for not realizing it would be self-referential since that's where the DNA came from. =)
An addendum: Microsoft may face another obstacle, in that Perfect Dark Zero, regardless of whether it turns into a killer app via word-of-mouth, it does not currently have the hype or awareness level of a killer app game. The Perfect Dark series is not well known in the mainstream, and the hype level just isn't there right now, a mere 2 weeks from launch time. PDZ, thus, won't reach "killer app" status at least until it's been on the market for a couple weeks. This may in some part explain MS's strategy for limiting supply: consumer demand is more likely to peak a few weeks after launch than at the initial launch, and they're just not likely to sell out the large supply they have instantly on launch, given the lack of a pre-established killer app.
In short, this is the Halo approach, the same approach used on the first XBox. Halo ultimately did generate the kind of buzz that moved lots of systems. Will PDZ do the same?
If it doesn't, that puts the 360 in the company of the PS2, Dreamcast, Jaguar, 3DO, 32X, Sega CD, and Genesis. What they all have in common is that they all failed to launch with a title that proved to be a killer app. Some of them didn't even attempt to launch with one. Of these, only the Genesis and PS2 would qualify as successes. They both managed to break out the killer app before they were wiped out by their competitors.
Don't forget, though, for a lot of consumers the Genesis was their SECOND system. The Genesis launch failed to catch their eye, the SNES did (effectively, Nintendo "won" the console war for those people), and then they bought the Genesis. But Microsoft, unless they REALLY get some serious exclusive killer apps late in the game, is not going to manage to sell many PS3 owners on the 360. It's just too expensive. So MS has only a limited time to nab 360 buyers, and the price they pay is that they won't be on equal footing to duke it out with the PS3 on its launch date, because PS3 will have all the limelight at that time.
I don't wish ill on the XBox, I think it's generally been a positive influence on the gaming industry. Here's what I think might happen though:
1. XBox 360 is released, and immediately falls into the hands of the "hardcore gamers." Invariably, most people buy a copy of Perfect Dark Zero as one of their two bundled games.
2. Those who didn't buy PDZ will tend to be disappointed, as the rest of the XBox 360 game line-up will fall somewhere between "pathetic" and "not bad but I feel like an idiot for spending $700 to play this. Where are the "OMG THAT'S AMAZING!" games???
3. These gamers, having already spent $700, will be very hesitant to spend money buying any additional games. They MIGHT be convinced to buy PDZ via word-of-mouth, hoping it's the magic game to help them justify the new system the bought.
4. Many will try to return or sell the 360, looking to back out of their $700 commitment. Anyone who *can* jump ship will try their damndest to do so.
5. Those who bought PDZ will either be happy with their system purchase, or majorly disappointed, depending on whether the game turns out to be good or not. If they're disappointed, Microsoft's word-of-mouth strategy will backfire. A consumer who is on the fence, thinking "hmmm it's $700 should I go for it," it's only gonna take a tiny little bit of negative buzz to turn them away.
6. Instead of "it must be awesome it's sold out everywhere," the mindset will be "I'm glad *I* wasn't so crazy as to spend $700 on an XBox 360. That would've been CRAZY." This means they'll need even MORE motivation to buy the system than they did at launch date. The "sold out" strategy, too, has now backfired.
7. By now it's time for the holidays. At $600-700, the 360 systems won't appear under that many Christmas trees. The ones they do appear under, the people who REALLY wanted them and pushed the limits of holiday funds to get them, will also be the first to return them, when the pendulum swings back the other direction. This is especially the case when these people consider that the PS3 launch is only 4 months away and that $700 of holiday money is the only way they'll be able to afford the PS3. It's a chance at redemption from a bad holiday shopping move.
8. At this point it's around January. By now, some more "killer apps" or pseudo-killer apps have hopefully hit the market, bolstering the 360. MS will now have 1 or 2 months to build momentum before the PS3 launch starts to loom near. They now have to fight the initial negative buzz AND the additional negative buzz from the holiday season (which will be a disappointment both in sales and marketing effect).
9. Now it's ~February. Hype is building around the PS3. Pre-orders are piling up. The next-generation graphics the XBox 360 failed to deliver are now the promise of the powerful Playstation 3. Most importantly, XBox 360 sales will grind to a halt for the simple fact that nobody is going to buy the 360 when they can take a wait-and-see approach by waiting 2 months to see what the reaction is to the PS3. And of course the 360 will probably have a price drop to try to better compete with Sony's debut.
10. The PS3 is released. Sony will no doubt make sure they've got some killer apps on launch, most notably Metal Gear Solid 4. The PS3 will likely live up to most of its hype, or at least definitively deliver to gamers what they thought they were getting with the 360 last year. If Blu-Ray high-definition movies have seiged the market by April, this will be another feather in Sony's hat, even amongst those that don't have HD sets. It's a tipping point, a useless tech spec that makes you nervous about buying the "other" system that only plays mere DVDs.
11. The console war "proper" begins. Microsoft, battle-worn, will have its cushy lead, but that lead advantage could easily be wiped out if initial PS3 sales are strong, making all of Microsoft's marketing efforts over the past 6 months all for naught. Also of note, targeting the "hardcore" gamers may prove less lucrativ
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Drilling even a small hole that deep into the earth seems like it could cause all sorts of problems. A crack in a hard material tends to permeate outward. If you drill down just a little bit into the earth, cracks will be very limited in how far from the origin point they can spread. As you drill deeper into the earth, though, I imagine the cracks that form back up toward the surface can get further and further from the origin point, and increase in severity as you go up (in addition to the fact that a crack five feet below the surface is relatively inconsequential whereas a crack 50 feet below the surface could be catastrophic.
I hope they've really thought this through, 'cause to me it sounds sooooo not worth the risk.
I'm actually of the belief that hands-free phones are more dangerous than holding the physical phone in your hand. I'd love to see some studies done on this...
For me personally, at least, I find myself more distracted on the hands-free phone. I have a theory why this is the case, too. See, when I've got one hand on the wheel, (which is how I prefer to drive, whether I'm on the phone or not), and I've got my phone in the other hand, the fact that I've got one "task" in each hand I think makes it mentally easier for me to feel like I'm multitasking.
That is, speaking into my right hand is one task, and steering with my left hand is the other task. By contrast, when I use hands-free, there's no physical representation of the second task, the conversation I'm having, and I've actually observed that this tends to be a distraction to me on the road, whereas I've never really observed my "in-the-hand" cellphone conversations to distract me to any noticeable extent. I think psychologically humans have a more difficult time multitasking when there's not a simple physical representation of the tasks.
Of course, there are some situations in driving where talking in ANY form is too much of a distraction, like when you're making a difficult merge or shifting lanes through heavy traffic, etc. In those situations I put the phone down, just the same as I would pause my conversation with the passenger sitting next to me.
I think, for people who normally drive with two hands, holding a phone in their other hand is, obviously, going to hinder their driving performance. This is a no-brainer. But for those who can drive comfortably with one hand, the danger is that they become mentally distracted, and I think taking the physical phone out of their hand actually increases this danger rather than decreasing it.
Like I said, though, I'd like to see some studies on this topic, since many states are passing laws that make only hands-free phones legal. I know there have been studies showing that hands-free is no safer than in-the-hand, but I'd like to see some studies addressing the question of whether hands-free is actually more dangerous than in-the-hand. I think the results might surprise some people.
Your controller is your memory card
(Gets angry at impossible-to-beat final boss on the last level of the game)
(throws controller at wall in fit of rage)
(realize I'll have to start the entire game over again because the memory card had my saved game on it)
(throws Revolution system at wall in fit of rage)
(sighs in relief that the Revolution only cost $149)
Yes, I think me and the Nintendo Revolution will get along just fine.
(I am not a lawyer, and most of this post is based on my interpretation of laws that I have no specific knowledge of)
The thing that seems to get lost in these discussions, is that freedom of speech is not the central issue here. IF a reasonable case can be made for legally banning the sale of violent/sexual videogames to minors, THEN we should look at the question of "who could be trusted to decide which games are violent/sexual?" However, these laws have not yet conquered that initial hurdle of proving that there are sufficient grounds to restrict sales to minors. The freedom of speech issue is simply a convenient method for saying "well even if you COULD prove that sales of these games should be restricted, the method of restriction you propose happens to be unconstitutional anyway, so the whole thing should be nixed!"
The debate everyone SHOULD be having is whether there's proper grounds to restrict sales of these games, or of movies/TV/books/music. The courts have so far held that the answer is "no," and that there simply is not a sufficient body of scientific evidence to warrant such a law.
First and foremost, though, recognize that there are two commonly-held reasons to legally ban the sale of a product to minors:
1. The product is harmful to the minor. Because the well-being of minors is considered the responsibility of their legal guardians (for the sole reason that minors are considered too inexperienced in the world to reliably look out for their own best interest), it is thought to be appropriate that, whenever feasible, minors should not have the autonomy to engage in activities that are harmful to themselves.
2. The use of the product is harmful to society. Whether you're a minor or an adult, actions that can be reliably shown to *cause* a net-negative effect on society tend to get banned (as in, the product causes its owner to engage in a harmful act). In some extreme cases the availability of a product may be restricted under the lest strict criteria that it "enables" actions that are harmful to society. However, so long as substantial non-harmful uses can be shown, the product is usually only subject to strict regulations, not outright-banned.
When they finally banned tobacco products, it was only after substantial evidence had been collected to support the claim that tobacco caused harm to smokers. This is why it is only illegal for minors to PURCHASE cigarettes. The legal guardian can purchase cigarettes for the minor if they want. Technically, the only adults who should be legally able to purchase cigarettes for a minor are the minor's legal guardians. I don't know if the actual law says that, but the idea that ANY adult can purchase cigarettes for a minor (as is a common occurrence) doesn't make any particular sense, given the original logic behind the law.
The reason I bring up cigarettes, is that the popular belief is that the sale of tobacco to minors is banned because "we want to protect the children." This is an incomplete view that gets people into trouble. It is not legal to "protect the children" in the general sense. What is legal, is to assist the legal guardians in protecting THEIR children, as they see fit, and also in revoking a legal guardian's custody of a child if deemed appropriate (letting your 2-month-old baby smoke, for example, might indicate that you're unfit to maintain custody). It is for this reason, that adults are not banned from purchasing cigarettes for themselves. It is ALSO for this reason that it is not illegal for children to smoke cigarettes. Namely, because engaging in self-injurious behavior, below a certain extreme threshold, is your RIGHT. As a minor, though, those rights are guarded by the guardian. The guardian's job is to act in the best interest of the child, so for a guardian to "self-injure" the minor who is under their custody, the guardian would have to prove that the action is in the best interest of the minor, which would be almost impossible to justify for any action which you as the guardian know is "se
'If a part of an application, or the operating system itself, needs to updated, the Installer will call the Restart Manager, which looks to see if it can clear that part of the system so that it can be updated. If it can do that, it does, and that happens without a reboot.'"
RESTART MANAGER: "An update to NOTEPAD.EXE has been downloaded to your computer. Windows can install this update without a reboot. In order to update this component, Windows must close all dependent applications. The following dependent component will be closed and then re-opened: "NT_OS_KERNEL.EXE". Your other applications and open documents will not be affected. Press OK to continue."
Maybe I'm missing something, but doesn't sound like anything that's not already being done. Firstly, antivirus companies I'm sure run honeypot machines to help them "catch" new viruses, and then distribute them via automatic updates to their customers, more or less immediately. Antispyware works the same way, except they also use those user-contributed spyware networks, which serves the same purpose as these proposed honeypots serves (antivirus companies do this too but I don't get the impression it's their primary method of discovering new viruses).
And proposing anything that involves 800,000 dedicated computers is certainly an instant turn-off. For that much work, the idea should do something better than reinvent the wheel.
Legislating otherwise "would be the same thing as saying to Google, 'I think we ought to have regulation on Google that says when I enter a search term, the top search result is always a random event,' " Smith said, claiming that Google allows clients to pay to influence the ranking of search results. In fact, Google does not allow payments to influence general search results, although advertisers pay for top billing on the lists that run on the right side of Google's pages.
My recollection of Internet History, is that once upon a time a company named Yahoo decided to let websites pay for higher rankings, not unlike a certain telephone company now wants to do. Yahoo might have similarly argued, that paid rankings are just a premium above normal rankings, but I'm sure the sites that got bumped to Page 2 of the search results listings didn't see it that way.
Then, another company named Google came along. Their theory was that paid rankings fundamentally undermined the concept of relevance and/or popularity-based searching, and that users wanted relevant sites, not commercials. So they didn't allow paid rankings. Similar to how other ISPs probably won't allow pay-for-performance internet traffic. Though there are many reasons Yahoo was overtaken by Google, the exclusion of paid rankings was unquestionably one of them.
If BellSouth truly wanted to look to Google as a historical example, the conclusion should be that pay-for-performance is a bad idea, not a good one. The market's DISTASTE for pay-for-ranking was one of the keys to Google's success.
There's another problem too, though. There's only a finite number of big-tier ISPs. If they ALL decided to switch to this pay-for-performance model, there would be almost nothing the market could do about it. By contrast, the fundamental reason that nobody really complained about Yahoo's paid rankings, was because Yahoo's actions didn't impede consumer choice. An INFINITE number of search engine websites can be started up on the Internet, so if there's a market desire for non-paid rankings, someone is always free to seize on that. And that's exactly what Google did. If all the top-tier ISPs decide to do pay-for-performance (presumably in a legal, non-collusive way), who's going to challenge them? Starting up a Tier-1 ISP is a little different than starting up a website.
However, although it's probably bad for the Internet, that's not to say BellSouth is stupid for considering this. They're betting on whether the money from sites paying for better performance will offset the money lost from customers ditching them for network-neutral ISPs. I wouldn't be surprised at all if that gamble pays off.
It seems a little absurd to me that VOIP providers should be burdened with this as law. What happened to market forces?
Well, there is still some concern with letting the market play itself out. If VOIP providers' "solution" to the problem is to simply implement E911 routing (rather than taking a more appropriate solution like combining their phones with a POTS line, as another poster suggested), a lot of people's lives may be at risk in the short term. In fact, it will probably be a flurry of media stories about people dying because their VOIP-based E911 service didn't work, that eventually compel either the market, or the government, to implement change. It could take some time to get to this point, and then who knows what the timeframe will be for changes to be made once we reach that point.
Instead of people potentially having to die to "correct" the market, it makes more sense for everyone involved to deal with the problem up-front right now. It's simply too dangerous to leave this to the market. The FCC is right to force this issue up right now. Most people are still on POTS lines, and POTS lines work fine for 911. VOIP is starting to gain momentum, despite having not adequately addressed the 911 issue. The FCC is simply saying "we're not going to let you move people from a technology where 911 *works* to a technology where it doesn't. If you don't address 911 compatibility, we're not going to let you continue marketing your product."
The *problem* is that the FCC's solution is a bad one, as has been discussed here. VOIP-based E911, as we've said, will not be reliable if it is independent of the POTS infrastructure. So the FCC is quite right to step in here and make demands, the problem is simply that the demands they've chosen to make are insufficient to address the problem.
Also, a side note: It won't be enough to simply encourage people to keep the POTS line as a backup for 911. POTS was chosen to base 911 on because it's reliable and literally everyone has a POTS line to their residence or office. However, many people aren't going to keep the big red phone plugged in (like the one Batman used to call Commissioner Gordon in the '60s Adam West show). But more notably, if the FCC stands back and lets market forces decide things, VOIP may continue to gain popularity, and people doing construction on new or renovated buildings will inevitably decide to skimp on installing phone lines if, say, they intend to use cable or power lines for broadband and VOIP. So even if the solution is "just keep an old POTS line available as a backup," the FCC should probably mandate this as a regulation, i.e. "Every floor of every residence and office building must have a POTS line WITH a working POTS phone connected to it."
I'm far from an expert on the 911 system, but I do feel pretty safe in asserting one particular detail: 911 call centers were built and are operated by the public, using local/state/federal tax dollars.
Now as I understand it, it varies from pole-to-pole as to who owns the telephone poles -- some are owned by the city, some by the electric company, some the telcos, cable company, etc.
However, the city, using public funding, built the 911 infrastructure, at great expense to the taxpayers. In many cities, 911 calls are routed through a separate circuit, and telco companies are required to route 911 calls even if a phone line is not in service. However, if a line is simply dead, I imagine this doesn't apply. Obviously most people at the time when 911 was first rolled out did not foresee the telcos competing for phone service with Internet/cable/etc, so there was little hesitation in making the last-mile of the 911 infrastructure dependent on the telco infrastructure.
Phone lines, though, are often the one thing that works when power/cable/Internet go down (which is often, and frequently related to and thus coinciding with the particular emergency you're calling about!). In the interest of the public good, an arrangement allowing 911 calls to be made through the existing phone lines ought to be in-place, if it is not already. Yes, VOIP 911 should be implemented as well, but at the end of the day putting the public in a situation where they have to rely on a working power/cable/internet connection to get an emergency operator is dangerous. In fact VOIP-based 911 may actually make things worse, providing a false sense of security. How many callers are going to keep a regular phone hooked up to their POTS line just as a backup for 911? And how much extra time is going to be wasted when they first try 911 on their VOIP line, discover it's dead, then race over to their nearest POTS "backup" phone, which is most likely nowhere near where the victim they're calling for is!
911 was built from the ground up to be extremely reliable, because a service like 911 has to be reliable. Power/cable/internet are very unreliable and have a tendency to be down at exactly the time a 911 call needs to be made.
There are other ways to approach this problem. Hopefully someone will do so, because, like I said, this sounds like a dangerous situation, and getting Vonage to route 911 calls isn't going to fix these reliability problems.
"When asked for account number, keep hitting ""#"". After 5 or 6 times, a human appears!"
Make sure you save your game at this point as if you get disconnected you'll have to start all the way back at Menu 1.
What is this, a videogame FAQ? lol.
Usenet is deeply flawed. Its democratic dream offers no defence against viruses, spammers, criminals, hucksters or deranged individuals.
Yeah, seriously guys, it's time to stop living in the '90s and adopt a safer, more secure technology like email.
It's not so much that the word is being "misused," it's just being used ambiguously.
Critics "rate" by giving ratings. Gamers "rate" based on what they buy. From a ratings perspective, the closest thing to a rating that gamers give is sales. Sales=rating=popularity. So for gamers "underrated" and "unpopular" are effectively equivalent terms (except when everyone buys some overhyped game and is disappointed by it).
To clarify this you'd need to ask "underrated by whom?"
Bah, ever since they introduced the written word, it has artificially limited the endless depth and power of the imagination. No words can ever truly encompass the richness of a thought. No language can ever capture the true brilliance of the mind's eye. The power of the mind was infinite, but, like that silly mathematical concept of infinite, as soon as you defined it, 'twas infinite no longer.
The gaming industry has spent millions of $US cents creating text adventures. Perhaps I can create a website for games of the mind, to remind gamers of the limitations of text.
Imagination before ASCII, that's what I always say^H^H^H^think.
PS2 fanboy alert
(Sarcastic) Yep, that's me, PS2 fanboy.
Or maybe I was just trying to poke fun at Nintendo for humor's sake. PS2 fanboy? Half the comments in my original post aren't even in reference to the GameCube -- they're in reference to the N64, and SNES -- it's simply a joking chronicling of some of Nintendo's more interesting business decisions.
I think a more telling statement would be Nintendo fanboy alert! The post was supposed to be funny, not a serious dig at Nintendo. Jeez.
Bandwagon: "Our system will let you lay next-generation High Definition movies via HD-DVD/Blu-Ray."
Nintendo: "That was pretty impressive when we had those little full-motion video clips in Lethal Enforcers for SNES, wasn't it?"
Bandwagon: "Our games will come on CD-ROM/GD-ROM/DVD-ROM/Blu-Ray discs."
Nintendo: "Cartridges are the wave of the future!"
Bandwagon: "Our systems will output in high definition"
Nintendo: "NTSC is the wave of the future!"
Bandwagon: "Our new game controller is the best design yet with 8 shoulder buttons, two analog pads, and 12 awkward little buttons at the bottom (*cough* Jaguar *cough*)"
Nintendo: "Check out our remote control, it's so retro! Wave it through the air and it senses motion! Now everyone will get tennis elbow and dislocated shoulders instead of carpal tunnel syndrome and repetitive stress injuries!"
Bandwagon: "The gamers who owned our last-generation system are now 3 years older, so our games should be more mature, violent, profane, and sexy."
Nintendo: "Bright colors, furry creatures, and Super Mario never go out of style!"
Bandwagon: "Games make the system, and third-party companies make games. Let's embrace third-party developers."
Nintendo: "Games don't make the system, silly. OUR games make the system!"
IANAL, but IIRC it's a basic tenet of contract law that you CANNOT create a contract in which agreements are made to violate existing laws. For example, if you sign a contract with your neighbor that authorizes you to kill him, and it includes an indemnity clause waiving his family's right to sue you for civil damages, and/or waiving the state's right to charge you with first-degree murder, such a contract would be worthless, A) because, obviously, the rights to press criminal charges belong to the state, not the murder victim, and, more relevantly to this topic, B) you simply can't make a contract whose premise is an illegal act (murder).
This is why California is suing. If Sony's actions breached existing laws, the EULA is irrelevant. And, regarding the third charge they make, not all laws (or "rights") that apply to you are yours to legally waive. Apparently there's a consumer protection law that states as much for that particular waiver in Sony's EULA.
"One point that few people, whatever their viewpoint, could disagree with is that the key to a financially successful open source project rests with the community, rather than just the technology."
Nah, I'll disagree with that, on the grounds that everything can be disagreed with.
Wasn't there a news report a few days ago about how Japan is going to have the technology by 2012 to build a movie set that looks like the Moon?
Ok, so...pranks are great and all, but...it's important that they actually be FUNNY. "The Dude's Fish Store?" Oh yeah, that's real clever.
They seem to have forgotten to write a press release to go with this big story so I wrote it for them:
This is great news for ____! Eventually it will improve ____ for all consumers but initially it will be used in the ____ industry to improve ____. Sony, Samsung, and Toshiba have all announced they will be introducing their own versions, which will be available in 21__ and are eventually expected to saturate the market at prices as low as $...,...,... Said one executive, "We're incredibly excited about this. We have invested $...,...,...,...,... in this project and are very confident it will succeed and dominate the ____ market. The new technology will first be experienced by consumers in selected ____ during a special ____-enhanced presentation of Star Wars: Episode OMG.
Have fun filling in those blanks. I sure couldn't.
Taking into account the technical problems knocks the game down from a 9 to an 8, which was what I was going to give it until I found myself swimming upside down and drowing. :)
:)
What's unfortunate about that particular breed of "technical problems" is that it's sort of like when you go to a restaurant that's generally very well-liked, and by random chance happen to have a bad experience, and you tell all your friends about your bad experience and so they never go, even though if they did go, there might be a 95% chance that their experience would be fantastic. Now let's pretend you're a Zagat reviewer. Your review is intended to inform the Zagat readers of what THEIR experience is likely to be like, and yet, you have instead (knowingly or unknowingly) provided them with a review that would be counter to the experience that 95% of your readers would have if they actually went to the restaurant. Yikes.
In Daytona USA for Sega Saturn there's a tiny piece of wall in the tunnel of one level that, if you aggressively scrape the car against that very specific section of the wall, will cause the game to freeze. I discovered this by accident while playing the game, and it was upsetting because it was on a late lap in a many-lap race. I was able to reproduce the bug with ease, but what are the chances of accidentally stumbling on this (what I believe is one of the only "crash points" in the game)? Miniscule. Without knowing specifically where this "crash point" is, you'd probably never encounter it by chance. We're talking probably less than 1% chance of this happening to you. If I simply wrote in a review that "the game freezes sometimes," the reader has no sense of proportion or perspective. "The game freezes sometimes." Look how bad that sounds, and yet it has such a minor rate of incidence that my statement becomes an unfair distortion of what most readers should expect to see.
Obviously Zonk's intent wasn't to unnecessarily bad-mouth the game, though -- he's clearly a fan of it. If you've only played through the game a couple times there's no way to know how similar or dissimilar your experience was to other people's. Myself, I've played through the game two and a half times now, and I have not had ANY issues like the one you describe. I've seen a small graphical glitch once or twice, (the floor disappearing), but nothing that interfered with gameplay. I've seen a couple similar complaints on the GameFaqs boards, but by and large I don't know that most people playing the game would experience any problems. So what's unfortunate is that although you clearly were affected by that gameplay glitch, because you're only one person and have only played through the game once or twice (or thrice?), you have no way of knowing whether the glitch you experienced is likely to happen in 1% of games played or 50%. If it's around 1%, it's unfortunate for that kind of information to make its way into a review that the other 99% of gamers will read and incorrectly presume is likely to happen to them.
By the way I don't know how common these glitches actually are in SOTC. I was just pointing out the dangers of pointing out glitches.
4) You have camera control, if the view sucks it's your own fault.
SOTC has some camera issues that are the fault of the developers, and some camera issues that are simply the result of players not having fully adjusted to the learning curve for the game's controls and camera dynamics.
Firstly this game is such an amazing accomplishment that I cringe at "faulting" the developers for anything. These are REALLY nitpicks AFAIK.
But getting back to the user learning curve, I've noticed that there seems to be a certain biased mentality that gamers have nowadays. See, many games (indeed, many of the "best" games) tend to have a certain learning curve for controlling the main character. It's almost to be expected. And if you're on Level 3 but your mastery of the controls is still around level 1, then it's not really fair to complain and say "the controls suck." It's inherent in the way some people play games, that, once they figure out how to use the controls "well enough," they stop exploring and trying to further master the controls. That's all fine and good, but you can't expect the game to be "fully playable and annoyance-free" at whatever arbitrary point you individually decided to stop improving your understanding of the controls.
Now, having noted that, I think most gamers more or less understand the above premise, and "get" that if you only master the controls 50%, it may have a negative impact on your experience.
So my question is, why are the camera controls not held to the same standard????
"I don't have time to worry about the camera when I'm controlling the main character."
This sounds like a severe, if not absurd, overreaction to a minor nitpick. One of the biggest benefits that came with the advent of 3D gaming was an unlimited range of visual possibilities. You can't expect to have your own persoanl, unique visual tour of a 3D world if you're not willing to control the camera. But, more obviously, the same argument used to apply to FPS games. Prior to Quake, no one really had much interest in controlling the camera separate from the character. It was always fixed relative to the character. Then Quake came along and the benefits of taking explicit control of the camera became obvious (i don't mean for strafing, i mean the ability to freely look around, up/down, etc). Mastering the keyboard/mouse combo was a new "skill" players had to learn, but their gameplay experience suffered greatly if they didn't, and benefitted substantially if they did.
In the world of third-person shooters, the same reasoning should apply. Personally I found that most of the issues I had with the camera were moot by the later stages of the game, as I was more familiar with SOTC's particular camera dynamics. They even let you adjust the camera speed in the options menu.
>> Yes, well, we've got these bones. And we're going to test them to make sure they match with the known DNA sequence of Copernicus.
From TFA:
"The grave was in bad condition and not all remains were found, Gassowski said, adding that his team will try to find relatives of Copernicus to do more accurate DNA identification."
I imagine they're talking about finding the graves of his dead relatives, not living descendants. If you find a skeleton that you have independent reasons to believe is some particular relative of his, and the DNA from that skeleton happens to corroborate that relationship when compared to the "Copernicus" DNA, you've increased the accuracy of the Copernicus skull substantially, because the chances of the relative being misidentified AND happening to have the correct DNA relationship with the suspected Copernicus DNA is miniscule, so long as the evidence leading you to the relative's remains was unrelated to the evidence that pointed you to Copernicus' remains, and provided the remains aren't buried, for example, right next to his (if they are then you've got nothing because any group of people buried together are likely to be related).
And, not from TFA (from me):
They may also be able to examine the DNA for certain genetic features that match up with aesthetic and non-aesthetic traits that are historically known about him.
I was about to say they could also compare the DNA attributes with the aesthetic attributes of the skull, but then I slapped myself in the head for not realizing it would be self-referential since that's where the DNA came from. =)
An addendum: Microsoft may face another obstacle, in that Perfect Dark Zero, regardless of whether it turns into a killer app via word-of-mouth, it does not currently have the hype or awareness level of a killer app game. The Perfect Dark series is not well known in the mainstream, and the hype level just isn't there right now, a mere 2 weeks from launch time. PDZ, thus, won't reach "killer app" status at least until it's been on the market for a couple weeks. This may in some part explain MS's strategy for limiting supply: consumer demand is more likely to peak a few weeks after launch than at the initial launch, and they're just not likely to sell out the large supply they have instantly on launch, given the lack of a pre-established killer app.
In short, this is the Halo approach, the same approach used on the first XBox. Halo ultimately did generate the kind of buzz that moved lots of systems. Will PDZ do the same?
If it doesn't, that puts the 360 in the company of the PS2, Dreamcast, Jaguar, 3DO, 32X, Sega CD, and Genesis. What they all have in common is that they all failed to launch with a title that proved to be a killer app. Some of them didn't even attempt to launch with one. Of these, only the Genesis and PS2 would qualify as successes. They both managed to break out the killer app before they were wiped out by their competitors.
Don't forget, though, for a lot of consumers the Genesis was their SECOND system. The Genesis launch failed to catch their eye, the SNES did (effectively, Nintendo "won" the console war for those people), and then they bought the Genesis. But Microsoft, unless they REALLY get some serious exclusive killer apps late in the game, is not going to manage to sell many PS3 owners on the 360. It's just too expensive. So MS has only a limited time to nab 360 buyers, and the price they pay is that they won't be on equal footing to duke it out with the PS3 on its launch date, because PS3 will have all the limelight at that time.
Ermm, fair enough. I had recalled Halo hitting after-launch but I just looked it up, it was released in November 2001 with the system. My bad.
I don't wish ill on the XBox, I think it's generally been a positive influence on the gaming industry. Here's what I think might happen though:
1. XBox 360 is released, and immediately falls into the hands of the "hardcore gamers." Invariably, most people buy a copy of Perfect Dark Zero as one of their two bundled games.
2. Those who didn't buy PDZ will tend to be disappointed, as the rest of the XBox 360 game line-up will fall somewhere between "pathetic" and "not bad but I feel like an idiot for spending $700 to play this. Where are the "OMG THAT'S AMAZING!" games???
3. These gamers, having already spent $700, will be very hesitant to spend money buying any additional games. They MIGHT be convinced to buy PDZ via word-of-mouth, hoping it's the magic game to help them justify the new system the bought.
4. Many will try to return or sell the 360, looking to back out of their $700 commitment. Anyone who *can* jump ship will try their damndest to do so.
5. Those who bought PDZ will either be happy with their system purchase, or majorly disappointed, depending on whether the game turns out to be good or not. If they're disappointed, Microsoft's word-of-mouth strategy will backfire. A consumer who is on the fence, thinking "hmmm it's $700 should I go for it," it's only gonna take a tiny little bit of negative buzz to turn them away.
6. Instead of "it must be awesome it's sold out everywhere," the mindset will be "I'm glad *I* wasn't so crazy as to spend $700 on an XBox 360. That would've been CRAZY." This means they'll need even MORE motivation to buy the system than they did at launch date. The "sold out" strategy, too, has now backfired.
7. By now it's time for the holidays. At $600-700, the 360 systems won't appear under that many Christmas trees. The ones they do appear under, the people who REALLY wanted them and pushed the limits of holiday funds to get them, will also be the first to return them, when the pendulum swings back the other direction. This is especially the case when these people consider that the PS3 launch is only 4 months away and that $700 of holiday money is the only way they'll be able to afford the PS3. It's a chance at redemption from a bad holiday shopping move.
8. At this point it's around January. By now, some more "killer apps" or pseudo-killer apps have hopefully hit the market, bolstering the 360. MS will now have 1 or 2 months to build momentum before the PS3 launch starts to loom near. They now have to fight the initial negative buzz AND the additional negative buzz from the holiday season (which will be a disappointment both in sales and marketing effect).
9. Now it's ~February. Hype is building around the PS3. Pre-orders are piling up. The next-generation graphics the XBox 360 failed to deliver are now the promise of the powerful Playstation 3. Most importantly, XBox 360 sales will grind to a halt for the simple fact that nobody is going to buy the 360 when they can take a wait-and-see approach by waiting 2 months to see what the reaction is to the PS3. And of course the 360 will probably have a price drop to try to better compete with Sony's debut.
10. The PS3 is released. Sony will no doubt make sure they've got some killer apps on launch, most notably Metal Gear Solid 4. The PS3 will likely live up to most of its hype, or at least definitively deliver to gamers what they thought they were getting with the 360 last year. If Blu-Ray high-definition movies have seiged the market by April, this will be another feather in Sony's hat, even amongst those that don't have HD sets. It's a tipping point, a useless tech spec that makes you nervous about buying the "other" system that only plays mere DVDs.
11. The console war "proper" begins. Microsoft, battle-worn, will have its cushy lead, but that lead advantage could easily be wiped out if initial PS3 sales are strong, making all of Microsoft's marketing efforts over the past 6 months all for naught. Also of note, targeting the "hardcore" gamers may prove less lucrativ