Seriously. Its really not THAT hard to BS cases when you're talking about literally thousands of different factors. Just go down the usual list.
1. Calling in and paying the IT guys. Assuming its not covered by insurance/protection plan/special contract, you're looking at thousands of dollars worth of fees right there. NASA doesn't exactly run on closet full of servers converted from unused PCs that can be wiped on a whim just because a hacker got in.
2. Downtime. Whats that? Your staff of hundreds/thousands of researchers across the globe can't do their work because the system is down? Too bad! You still have to pay them even though they're sitting on their asses clicking the refresh button on their browser so that easily costs a couple hundred thousand there.
3. The inevitable "WTF NASA?! Upgrade your computer systems so this will never happen again even though it'll cost millions and take months to complete!" outcry. Just look at the reaction from/. to get an idea of how loud it'll be once the mainstream media picks up on this.
No offense, but have you looked at other media sources lately? I've read reports on CNN complaining about Sony's bungling of the PS3 launch. I read in local newspapers about dozens of people being turned away from local the Target store in tears because they only got a supply of THREE units. Webcomics like Penny-Arcade are basically copy-and-pasting news reports of PS3 launch woes into their comics and recieving POSITIVE responses from their audience.
As for Sony's sales, seeing as anyone buying a PS3 is virtually required to buy at least 1 EA game due to a lack of choices, I'd take EA's word on ~200,000 units being sold seriously.
Seriously. After Sony announced their $500/$600 price tag for the PS3, I was still reading magazines talking about how the PS3 was going to be the greatest video system upgrade since the NES to the SNES. Sony Connect was going to rock Xbox Live, the Sixaxis was supposed to bridge the gap between the Xbox360 controller and the Wii-mote, and Resistance was supposed to negate the 1-year advantage Xbox360 had by blowing people out of the water with its graphics.
Post-launch, in the hands of the customer, people are PISSED. Internet video gaming news sites aren't much better, but they're (mostly) free so an anti-print media backlash is not unexpected.
Geneva Convention IS obsolete. It only applies to nation-states which sign and agree to its contents. Terrorist/guerilla/resistance groups are technically given a free pass.
The U.N. is falling apart. African countries the half size of Iraq is telling the U.N. they can't come in because they deny genocide is being committed within their borders.
NATO should've been dismantled a decade ago. It was formed to fight the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone, mission accomplished. So why are paying billions of dollars to support it?
Stable military? If you count the use of torture and chemical weapons against your own people and troops to maintain order a "stable military" you probably thought Stalin and Mao were the greatest military leaders in history.
A magnet for every disaffected youth? We had THREE places like that before the U.S. entered Iraq; Iran, Lebanon and the Palestinian states/Israel.
Yeah, cause we all know Iran, Syria and Jordan want a democratic peaceful Iraq./sarcasm
Democracy is about the will of the masses. Well if the Iraqi masses want to wage civil war with one another without U.S. interferance, I say give it to them!
I don't know about Capcom (they've had their ups and downs) but Ubisoft isn't exactly France's EA. Other than the Rainbow Six series and its spin-offs (Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell series), Ubisoft has been hit or miss when it comes to sales and successful games.
Well if you count Freedom Force versus The Third Reich, Aztec gods have already been used in video games. Shiva is used in nearly Final Fantasy game and shes based off of a Hindu god. If you dig around games like D&D you could probably find references to Celtic gods as well.
True, almost all of the bubble happened during the 90's, but then you could say the same about the emergence of its major competitors Linux and Google in 2000 and beyond (Apple only catered a niche market so I don't consider them major competitors in the 90's.) Bad timing + media hype != correlation.
They're rare and hard to find but I've been on the subscription list for several game company newsletters for years now. They're all e-mail based but they're still around. The content can be hit or miss at times (some read like advertisement) but others can be really informative (interviews or exclusive screenshots).
Its shares, which soared 9,560% throughout the 1990s, sunk 63% in 2000 when the Internet bubble burst, and they have yet to fully recover.
So Microsoft's stock flies to Mars in the 90's and then comes back to the moon in 2000 after the.com bubble? Someone wanna tell me why Microsoft should take its eyes off the OS market? Sounds like they're not the uber juggernaut they once were, but they're not exactly going to declare bankruptcy anytime soon.
You're talking about the world's largest, horribly coded software. Of course most of the content in documents are worthless. If we're going to nitpick about the content of documents, we should go after the U.S. tax code.
Well seeing as Microsoft has tied in virtually every piece of software they have into the Windows system, its not hard to imagine documentation being insanely long and complicated. (Microsoft Office alone is probably at least 2000 pages.)
Blizzard has historically done a great job at catching the bad guys without catching innocent people.
Blizzard has a horrible history when it comes to catching bad guys (hackers) and letting the good guys (legit players) go. When WoW came out people would be banned because they found and 'exploited' bugs not knowing they were even bugs. Blizzard still bans people for accessing uncompleted areas using LEGITIMATE means. Blizzard DOES NOT ban players for using map exploits in Battlegrounds despite its obviously disruptive results (people have reported Arathi Basin matches taking hours due to this problem.)
Even during beta testing, Blizzard would ban players for finding bugs and exploiting them weeks after reporting the bug. Blizzard doesn't give a shit about public relations because the masses are too stupid to realize that their so-called 'hard on cheaters' attitude is all smoke and mirrors.
Your analogy is horribly, horribly flawed. Nearly every 'car' has: an internal combustion engine, a trunk or storage area, a steering wheel and car seat(s). The engines may vary, the size and location of the trunk may differ, the steering wheel may be slightly different and the car seat(s) may be of a different fabric; but Joe Average can drive 10 different cars with no problem assuming he has 'basic' automobile training.
Can a Windows user leap into Linux and print photos within 5 minutes? Can a Mac user leap into Windows and setup a private wireless network in 5 minutes? Etc.
I believe the rocket launcher/bazooka controller was called the Super Scope. I remember hearing about it but I think it only supported one game, Battleclash.
The problem with that system is that education is not an exact science, teachers would realistically have no control over a student's grades. A student could do exceptionally well in middle school math, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll do well in statistics. A grammar student wouldn't necessarily do well in literature. Chemistry, biology, physics, geology, astronomy (etc) are uncomparable yet they all fall under the catagory of "science."
We should have fewer cops, pay them very well, and set very high standards for them. (We can only do that, of course, by giving them less to do...get them out of messing with people's private business, and a reduced force will have plenty of time to chase actual bad guys.)
There have been police shortages being reported for years now, in small cities/large towns police officers are some of the best paid and are frequently swamped by domestic calls.
And what are 'actual bad guys'? Do drug dealers count? Child molesters? Rapists?
So the PS3 and the Wii will have a price cut 6 months after release? Uhh... right...
The Xbox only cut the price because Microsoft could afford it and the Gamecube had barely made crossed the starting line no thanks to shitty launch games like Luigi's Mansion. The PS2 only had a price cut a year and a half after launch, far too long to be used in direct comparisons.
Hard drive standard - every PS3 comes with an hard disk, which means every developer can develop for it without excluding anyone.
That is, assuming the developer has the cash to pay off Sony.
No region encoding for games - THIS IS HUGE! Have we as gamers not been waiting for this since the beginning? It's finally here! We don't have to wait for marketing departments to choose what we may or may not like in a foreign game; it's all ours.
Um, the Nintendo Gameboy/Gameboy Advance/Nintendo DS has never had region encoding and neither has Microsoft's Xbox/Xbox360.
Card reader - hellooooo homebrew. While homebrew isn't officially supported, this makes it much easier.
Yeah, and the PSP is such a great homebrewing system./sarcasm
Blu-Ray - 50GB discs allow for an obscene amount of storage.
Who here owns a Blu-Ray disc burner? Who here has a video game over 10GB, compressed?
But does it run Linux? Yea, supposedly it will, which means even more homebrew goodness.
Yeah, I'm sure Sony won't put any software restrictions into the system to keep people out./sarcasm
No offense, but this is an extremely ideal and unrealistic manner to approach this problem. Businesses need to learn how to grow when needed, especially start-ups. Clients don't like it when you tell them "well we can't handle it right now, try us again in 3 to 6 months." Thats not cool. Clients will usually take their business else where and unless their competitor drops the ball, chances are you've lost a customer.
Who says the news has no effect on winning the war? Newsweek published a false report in its May 1, 2006 about the Koran being flushed down the toilet.
Result?
Rioting in a number of countries, at least 15 people killed, countless wounded, insurgent attacks increased and the American public goes haywire (again) not knowing who to believe (the news media which has lost most/all of its legitimacy or the government whom everyone considers to be in a 1984 state at the moment?).
MCV can reveal that Sony solicitors have issued Cease and Desist orders to several companies which have been importing PSPs - a practice Sony deems illegal.
The report never mentions Lik-Sang, whats your point? (And contrary to popular belief, Lik-Sang is not the only importer/exporter of video game hardware.)
I don't care if you've made the best game of the year, I'm not downloading a 1+ GB demo! Waiting several hours to play a demo that may or may not=be good/polished/buggy/have adequate length/hold my interest/work on my computer at all is not cool.
Another talentless hack looking for self promotion with the lamest nick ever in gaming.Considering he clawed his way up from level designer to game designer, he's got some serious talent seeing as level designer is typically a dead-end career. (Not that its a bad career, you just don't see level designers become game designers/public speaker for the company.
Instagib typically favors campers and people who memorize the maps. UT and UT2k4 were the biggest abusers of instagib. (CTF-Face is completely and utter one-sided if one team can spawn kill/pin down the opposing team long enough.)
Yeah, its called growing up. You can't keep something develop something for 10 years, distribute it publicly, tell everyone you know about how great it is and expect it to remain out of public attention.
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1. Calling in and paying the IT guys. Assuming its not covered by insurance/protection plan/special contract, you're looking at thousands of dollars worth of fees right there. NASA doesn't exactly run on closet full of servers converted from unused PCs that can be wiped on a whim just because a hacker got in.
2. Downtime. Whats that? Your staff of hundreds/thousands of researchers across the globe can't do their work because the system is down? Too bad! You still have to pay them even though they're sitting on their asses clicking the refresh button on their browser so that easily costs a couple hundred thousand there.
3. The inevitable "WTF NASA?! Upgrade your computer systems so this will never happen again even though it'll cost millions and take months to complete!" outcry. Just look at the reaction from /. to get an idea of how loud it'll be once the mainstream media picks up on this.
As for Sony's sales, seeing as anyone buying a PS3 is virtually required to buy at least 1 EA game due to a lack of choices, I'd take EA's word on ~200,000 units being sold seriously.
Post-launch, in the hands of the customer, people are PISSED. Internet video gaming news sites aren't much better, but they're (mostly) free so an anti-print media backlash is not unexpected.
The U.N. is falling apart. African countries the half size of Iraq is telling the U.N. they can't come in because they deny genocide is being committed within their borders.
NATO should've been dismantled a decade ago. It was formed to fight the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is gone, mission accomplished. So why are paying billions of dollars to support it?
Stable military? If you count the use of torture and chemical weapons against your own people and troops to maintain order a "stable military" you probably thought Stalin and Mao were the greatest military leaders in history.
A magnet for every disaffected youth? We had THREE places like that before the U.S. entered Iraq; Iran, Lebanon and the Palestinian states/Israel.
Yeah, cause we all know Iran, Syria and Jordan want a democratic peaceful Iraq. /sarcasm
Democracy is about the will of the masses. Well if the Iraqi masses want to wage civil war with one another without U.S. interferance, I say give it to them!
I don't know about Capcom (they've had their ups and downs) but Ubisoft isn't exactly France's EA. Other than the Rainbow Six series and its spin-offs (Ghost Recon and Splinter Cell series), Ubisoft has been hit or miss when it comes to sales and successful games.
Well if you count Freedom Force versus The Third Reich, Aztec gods have already been used in video games. Shiva is used in nearly Final Fantasy game and shes based off of a Hindu god. If you dig around games like D&D you could probably find references to Celtic gods as well.
True, almost all of the bubble happened during the 90's, but then you could say the same about the emergence of its major competitors Linux and Google in 2000 and beyond (Apple only catered a niche market so I don't consider them major competitors in the 90's.) Bad timing + media hype != correlation.
They're rare and hard to find but I've been on the subscription list for several game company newsletters for years now. They're all e-mail based but they're still around. The content can be hit or miss at times (some read like advertisement) but others can be really informative (interviews or exclusive screenshots).
So Microsoft's stock flies to Mars in the 90's and then comes back to the moon in 2000 after the .com bubble? Someone wanna tell me why Microsoft should take its eyes off the OS market? Sounds like they're not the uber juggernaut they once were, but they're not exactly going to declare bankruptcy anytime soon.
You're talking about the world's largest, horribly coded software. Of course most of the content in documents are worthless. If we're going to nitpick about the content of documents, we should go after the U.S. tax code.
Well seeing as Microsoft has tied in virtually every piece of software they have into the Windows system, its not hard to imagine documentation being insanely long and complicated. (Microsoft Office alone is probably at least 2000 pages.)
Blizzard has a horrible history when it comes to catching bad guys (hackers) and letting the good guys (legit players) go. When WoW came out people would be banned because they found and 'exploited' bugs not knowing they were even bugs. Blizzard still bans people for accessing uncompleted areas using LEGITIMATE means. Blizzard DOES NOT ban players for using map exploits in Battlegrounds despite its obviously disruptive results (people have reported Arathi Basin matches taking hours due to this problem.)
Even during beta testing, Blizzard would ban players for finding bugs and exploiting them weeks after reporting the bug. Blizzard doesn't give a shit about public relations because the masses are too stupid to realize that their so-called 'hard on cheaters' attitude is all smoke and mirrors.
Can a Windows user leap into Linux and print photos within 5 minutes? Can a Mac user leap into Windows and setup a private wireless network in 5 minutes? Etc.
I believe the rocket launcher/bazooka controller was called the Super Scope. I remember hearing about it but I think it only supported one game, Battleclash.
The problem with that system is that education is not an exact science, teachers would realistically have no control over a student's grades. A student could do exceptionally well in middle school math, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll do well in statistics. A grammar student wouldn't necessarily do well in literature. Chemistry, biology, physics, geology, astronomy (etc) are uncomparable yet they all fall under the catagory of "science."
There have been police shortages being reported for years now, in small cities/large towns police officers are some of the best paid and are frequently swamped by domestic calls.
And what are 'actual bad guys'? Do drug dealers count? Child molesters? Rapists?
The Xbox only cut the price because Microsoft could afford it and the Gamecube had barely made crossed the starting line no thanks to shitty launch games like Luigi's Mansion. The PS2 only had a price cut a year and a half after launch, far too long to be used in direct comparisons.
That is, assuming the developer has the cash to pay off Sony.
No region encoding for games - THIS IS HUGE! Have we as gamers not been waiting for this since the beginning? It's finally here! We don't have to wait for marketing departments to choose what we may or may not like in a foreign game; it's all ours.
Um, the Nintendo Gameboy/Gameboy Advance/Nintendo DS has never had region encoding and neither has Microsoft's Xbox/Xbox360.
Card reader - hellooooo homebrew. While homebrew isn't officially supported, this makes it much easier.
Yeah, and the PSP is such a great homebrewing system. /sarcasm
Blu-Ray - 50GB discs allow for an obscene amount of storage.
Who here owns a Blu-Ray disc burner? Who here has a video game over 10GB, compressed?
But does it run Linux? Yea, supposedly it will, which means even more homebrew goodness.
Yeah, I'm sure Sony won't put any software restrictions into the system to keep people out. /sarcasm
No offense, but this is an extremely ideal and unrealistic manner to approach this problem. Businesses need to learn how to grow when needed, especially start-ups. Clients don't like it when you tell them "well we can't handle it right now, try us again in 3 to 6 months." Thats not cool. Clients will usually take their business else where and unless their competitor drops the ball, chances are you've lost a customer.
Result?
Rioting in a number of countries, at least 15 people killed, countless wounded, insurgent attacks increased and the American public goes haywire (again) not knowing who to believe (the news media which has lost most/all of its legitimacy or the government whom everyone considers to be in a 1984 state at the moment?).
The report never mentions Lik-Sang, whats your point? (And contrary to popular belief, Lik-Sang is not the only importer/exporter of video game hardware.)
I don't care if you've made the best game of the year, I'm not downloading a 1+ GB demo! Waiting several hours to play a demo that may or may not=be good/polished/buggy/have adequate length/hold my interest/work on my computer at all is not cool.
Another talentless hack looking for self promotion with the lamest nick ever in gaming.Considering he clawed his way up from level designer to game designer, he's got some serious talent seeing as level designer is typically a dead-end career. (Not that its a bad career, you just don't see level designers become game designers/public speaker for the company.
Instagib typically favors campers and people who memorize the maps. UT and UT2k4 were the biggest abusers of instagib. (CTF-Face is completely and utter one-sided if one team can spawn kill/pin down the opposing team long enough.)
Yeah, its called growing up. You can't keep something develop something for 10 years, distribute it publicly, tell everyone you know about how great it is and expect it to remain out of public attention.