"If you're shocked that students are getting to college and needing to take remedial math, you fix the problem. the problem may be that your system encourages them to avoid math courses so give them an incentive to take them."
Or the university could just up the ante with the entrance exam.
The problem with creating a world "compelling enough" to contain all the different kinds of things Final Fantasy contains would be impossible almost by definition. How many different ways can an evil antagonist seize the power of the gods within any particular universe of discourse? Final Fantasy, unlike Star Wars, has elements of grandure and urgency (one could even call it a negative point in the Final Fantasy series: it's ALWAYS the destruction of EVERYTHING). How can you be the universe's only hope if, well, you're NOT the ONLY hope?
And if the answer to these is "Well, they're different planets in different galaxies that don't necessarily have to interact," then, why bother calling it one giant compelling universe?
"Repeat after me: 'I, state your name, am NOT in Nintendo's target demographic.'"
But surely to "cream the competition" one must steal customers away from your competitors, and therefore targeting people in those competitors' target market.
To be fair, CNN said it, Nintendo didn't. And I'm sorry I called you Shirley.
The engine keeps getting gutted and turned inside out and remade yet it always remains distinctively Final Fantasy. As far as maintaining a franchise goes, Square's done well to not dilute the ingredients too much. Nothing stands still for too long. But TFA isn't talking about that. It's talking about story.
What I always liked about the Final Fantasy series is that, storywise, it wipes it all clean and starts anew. Some characters keep reappearing on and off in various forms like Cid and Moogles and Dark Mage, but essentially each one is an alternate universe with the same kinds of archetypes. Even though Rydia != Terra != Aeris and so on, they all fit into an archtype of the mysterious female lead. It's always been neat looking through the entire world drawn up and picking out the disillusioned, the rebel, the troublemaker, and so on.
When this nonsense started with FFX-2, it started an age of what amounts to Square being lazy. EACH WORLD depicted was supposed to be large and expansive and deep.
Now instead of being creative for the next ten years they're going to mix things up in the same universe?
Back to the game engine. It gets reworked and Square can get away with it because they trash all the backstory and start anew. How is the coherancy going to work out when you have 10 years (that's, what, 5 games?) in the same universe but 5 different game engines? Maybe they're going to cut that out, too.
The point of milking something is to extract everything you can out of it. The big sales weekend in the US just shows the franchise developers that more innovation isn't quite needed yet.
Fads usually don't last this long, though, so I think it's safe to say that the formula works for a reason. Whoa there, cowboy, no need to add chocolate syrup to that milk just yet.
So now that Intel's flagship is head and shoulders ahead of what AMD is making, now they're going to be swell guys and open up their FSB specification?
Some encouragement of competition. "We'll complete as long as we're winning."
I wonder if other companies will decide to get into the desktop CPU markets and use this as a starting point.
There's a little more than just bandwidth. If your botnet can gain one extra machine, that's an advantage of +1. If your bothnet can gain control of a machine belonging to a competing botnet and kick it off that one into yours, you gain one extra machine and remove one from your opponent for an advantage of +2.
When it comes down to botnets being commissioned for Spam and DDoS attacks, the one with the most machines gets the highest bid, and the difference between that bid and the second best is likely directly related to how many computers make up the difference.
There's a bit of an evolutionary war that's continuing. It's not enough to get your bot client installed. It's facing selection pressure from smarter users, better anti-virus/rootkit detection, firewalls making it harder to propagate, and more aggressive opponent bots.
Sounds very similar to nature's natural selection.
If not customers, it'll be retailers and distributors that eat that $600. Sony still gets to claim it since they shipped. (Middle men are making some money on them but it isn't much.)
Consoles don't usually bring in revenue, no, but the PS3 is estimated to cost $800 per unit to get out the door but it's selling for $600. (The $500 model is discontinued.) Typically, the cost per unit is considered proprietary information so it's only an estimate. This means it's hard to pin down but I do believe this is the highest net loss per unit of any console ever. If they already have to sell a bunch of games and accessories (X) to break even, if they drop the price by another $100 they'll just have to have an average of each user now buy (X * 1.5) games and accessories.
They're bleeding on PS3 right now, so should they bleed more? I guess someone crunched some numbers and came to the same conclusion you did.
Putting on my tinfoil hat, I'd say these rumors of price drops that simply will NOT die are a combination of 1 part wishful thinking, 1 part wanting to make existing owners panic, and 1 part of helping to stifle sales as consumers who are on the fence about pricing would most certainly not want to buy if they anticipate a drop.
That you're paying a "patent tax" is nothing new. You're paying a "tax" on everything. If you've ever bought a pack of smokes you're paying into their legal fees, for instance. It's really just a cost of doing business not related to development nor profits.
What I'd find more interesting is how much of the cost of Windows goes into licensning patented software. MSPAINT can read and write.GIF files. Windows comes with a media player that can play.MP3 files. Windows natively supports TrueType fonts. How much per copy is going to make sure they're on the up-and-up with those IPs?
... compared to being marked with the Scarlet "Pedo" marker forever.
(disclaimer: from a US perspective)
Before a trial you are destroyed. Your face gets in the local paper. Reporters show up at your home and place of work and hassle you and your family. Your home is ransacked in the name of gathering evidence. Local politicians and big wigs claim it's a victory for the children and call you a monster. News interviews your neighbors who are all amazed and shocked and now they, of course, don't feel safe. They might just deny you bail on a judge's whim and toss you in a jail cell. You better believe that when guards hear "that pedophile pervert" calling for help to protect him from other cellmates they're not going to rush to his aid. You're let out? Expect lots of threatening phone calls and letters.
Assuming you're aquitted because you didn't break any laws, the damage is DONE. Nobody will ever see you the same way again. News of your name being cleared isn't shouted quite as loudly as the accusation. What a surprise.
Can you really blame the falsely accused in this case comitting suicide? It's really tragic how lives can be ruined just by pointing a finger.
I know if I was falsely accused I'd probably kill myself, too.
"(at least a got a refund though...albeit little bitty)"
Because someone has to say it:
Getting a refund compared to having to pay is bad. The government collected too much in taxes (well, more than they are required to by law). This money was denied to you throughout the year. Money which could have been earning interest, used for investments, hell, eating out a few more nights a month.
You get your refund back interest-free from the gov. It's really no different than if you left a $20 in your coat pocket during the winter only to find it the next year. Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.
Then again, there are penalties imposed if you fix your W-4 (and other forms) so that they don't withhold anything and you have to pay all your tax once a year. I think that's too bad.
My guess would be that it would wind up how IE5 included support for VML and AOL graphics formats. They were included by default and inherited a huge install base but, who used them? Did everyone switch away from GIF and JPG? Did everyone start redoing their sites to take advantage of 3D and vector art? Hardly.
There are a lot of really good Flash developers out there. Does Silverlight really offer anything to them? A lot of the big problems with Flash are already worked out with their own scripts and getting used to all the language changes Macromedia kept flipping out onto them.
Even if the install base all of a sudden became 90%, I don't think there will be any real push to move away from Flash. No end user has Flash because they like IT, they have it because they like the content produced on it. It's completely content driven.
While not a zero-sum game, I think the influence of lobbyists isn't as important as the politcal implications of certain decisions. I'd argue one gets into state legislature so that they could climb the ladder into federal legislature or further.
Nobody wants to be the politician whose color picture of their smiling face fades to grayscale and is then overlayed on an image of sick children in hospital beds, then with the image of the hospital crossfading to a picture of a waste-water dumping pipe discharging into a creek all the while ominous music plays in the background.
You could argue one doesn't want to be the politician with his black and white picture on top of pictures of people on fire, but burn victims don't get telethons and specials on 20/20.
I've had an instance when my DSL was down. The router would hold an IP address for five minutes and let some traffic through before it would lose connectivity. I figured it was the router so I replaced that and the same thing was happening. I called the provider and they said everything was fine as far as they could tell. I went through the motions of rebooting my equipment and doing the idiot checks they wanted me to do. In the end they sent a tech and it would take the next day for it to happen.
I took the day off work (on of those "between 10 and 2" deals). I woke up early and decided to give it a shot. It was working. Completely. 100%. As if the problem never occurred. I called the company and they said the tech was already dispatched to the field with their work orders. I guess I'll just send the tech on their way when they arrive so they could enjoy a long lunch.
The tech arrived and said he was there to check the line. I told him everything was fine now but he insisted since it was his job and it wouldn't take a moment. I did, we agreed there was nothing wrong and I signed a paper that he showed up and left with things working.
If he had written up his report, he would have seen a perfectly working line and done zero to fix it. That would have put the blame square on me. Should I have paid $600 for an ISP problem that fixed itself without notice?
"You wouldn't mock someone for having a kick ass computer setup, but there's some kind of geek prejudice against audio - which just seems weird to me"
If said kick ass computer setup included a $59.95 3ft length of cable called "XXXtreme Gamer Cat5e(+++)" connecting it to his cable modem, yeah, I'd probably make fun of them. Particularly if they're going to pretend it gives them an edge in competition gaming and if I don't see if I'm OBVIOUSLY not a good enough gamer.;)
While the green-book standard was already done, IIRC, after the fallout with Sony for getting a CD SNES addon off the ground, Nintendo decided to go partner with a company it thought would have fewer demands of the final result leading to going to Phillips.
CD-i (console) was hurt versus instead of the Playstation I think for a few reasons: development, price and focus. The Playstation had an additional 3 years of development over the CD-i machine and the technology scaled accordingly. It was also an expensive bugger (wiki states $700, which would put it at double the PSX) and it was marketed as an "everything interactive" device and targeted adults considerably heavier than children. Plus the really horrible games that were made with Nintendo IP for that system (granted by contract even though there was no SNES CD marriage in the end) certainly didn't help matters any.
"things" = back and forth negotiations. RIAA-reps = "Let's get the maximum cash for each track," Microsoft-reps = "Let's pay the minimum cash for each track."
And let's face it, licensing terms are usually considered proprietary information, or at the very least "internal-use-only". I'm sure Red Octane didn't show all their cards to Microsoft as far as the licensing terms they got for some songs.
On an aside, I'd be more interested to know if the downloadable content is, in deed, downloadable content or if they're just slyly unlocking stuff that's already on the disc ALA Dance Dance Revolution.
If you remember the transition to CD-ROM based gaming from cartridge based, a lot of the first CD-ROM games were the same crappy things but with video and CD sound. It's easy to pad out the size of the game with that stuff. The first games were, what, early '90s?
Even as late as 1997 you had games like Final Fantasy VII where "WHOA! IT TAKES THREE DISCS!" was a bit of a deception when the actual game content fit on one disc and the sequence of three was only required due to, you guess it, space-filling movies.
In fact, there are still DVD games with dummy files. What's a dummy file? Well, as you know, if a disc spins at a constant angular velocity (which is much simpler to implement in hardware than the alternative constant linear velocity) then more sectors pass over the lens per unit of time the farther out from center it is. Game developers then, to speed up reading from media, would push all the important stuff close together on the outside of the discs. You can't really do that, however, since the standards all have the tracks starting from the center of the disc. The clever way to do it was place a several gigabyte "dummy" file full of data that the game will never read or use. It's purpose was only to provide a platform far away from the center of the disc where REAL content could be housed.
There are games now that can take up both layers on a DVD for a total of 8.5 Gigs, but should that REALLY count as a 8.5 Gig game when half of the disc on both layers is just a completely unnecessary file? With the power of real-time generated graphics on today's systems I'd even argue that pre-rendered video at any compression on disc is about as wasteful.
Exactly. I've seen estimates that extra parts and labor that go into the premium PS3 versus the regular is about $35 and the assembly lines can be diverted late during production to keep a variable ratio of one to the other. It would have been useful if they were having trouble keeping PS3s on the shelves but, evidently not. In practice, the 20GB version has been MIA in retail for a while... it costs $100 more so making all 60GB versions lets Sony takes about $65 less in red ink. It's a good way to mitigate the bleeding since they simply did not sell as many as they wanted to.
With the $480 360 Elite, if Sony REALLY wanted to, they could skip buying this year's ivory back scratchers and drop the PS3 to $500 and really put the pressure on the top end of the 360 consumer. Sure there'd be a lot of PS3 owners pissed off to see a price drop so soon, but, it wouldn't be the first time Sony's spit in the faces of their fanboys.
If he's anything like me, he turns around and makes a mental note to try back some other day. It's not like money burning a hole in your pocket literally burns a hole in your pocket.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you're shocked that students are getting to college and needing to take remedial math, you fix the problem. the problem may be that your system encourages them to avoid math courses so give them an incentive to take them."
Or the university could just up the ante with the entrance exam.
The problem with creating a world "compelling enough" to contain all the different kinds of things Final Fantasy contains would be impossible almost by definition. How many different ways can an evil antagonist seize the power of the gods within any particular universe of discourse? Final Fantasy, unlike Star Wars, has elements of grandure and urgency (one could even call it a negative point in the Final Fantasy series: it's ALWAYS the destruction of EVERYTHING). How can you be the universe's only hope if, well, you're NOT the ONLY hope?
And if the answer to these is "Well, they're different planets in different galaxies that don't necessarily have to interact," then, why bother calling it one giant compelling universe?
"Repeat after me: 'I, state your name, am NOT in Nintendo's target demographic.'"
But surely to "cream the competition" one must steal customers away from your competitors, and therefore targeting people in those competitors' target market.
To be fair, CNN said it, Nintendo didn't. And I'm sorry I called you Shirley.
What we do with the transistors? Run software of course. Enter Wirth's Law:
"Software is decelerating faster than hardware is accelerating."
Final fantasy XIII? Ten years of lucky # 13.
The engine keeps getting gutted and turned inside out and remade yet it always remains distinctively Final Fantasy. As far as maintaining a franchise goes, Square's done well to not dilute the ingredients too much. Nothing stands still for too long. But TFA isn't talking about that. It's talking about story.
What I always liked about the Final Fantasy series is that, storywise, it wipes it all clean and starts anew. Some characters keep reappearing on and off in various forms like Cid and Moogles and Dark Mage, but essentially each one is an alternate universe with the same kinds of archetypes. Even though Rydia != Terra != Aeris and so on, they all fit into an archtype of the mysterious female lead. It's always been neat looking through the entire world drawn up and picking out the disillusioned, the rebel, the troublemaker, and so on.
When this nonsense started with FFX-2, it started an age of what amounts to Square being lazy. EACH WORLD depicted was supposed to be large and expansive and deep.
Now instead of being creative for the next ten years they're going to mix things up in the same universe?
Back to the game engine. It gets reworked and Square can get away with it because they trash all the backstory and start anew. How is the coherancy going to work out when you have 10 years (that's, what, 5 games?) in the same universe but 5 different game engines? Maybe they're going to cut that out, too.
What a shame.
>You're assuming the sysadmin wasn't the one that started the fire! =)
The things we do to get a free beer these days.
The point of milking something is to extract everything you can out of it. The big sales weekend in the US just shows the franchise developers that more innovation isn't quite needed yet.
Fads usually don't last this long, though, so I think it's safe to say that the formula works for a reason. Whoa there, cowboy, no need to add chocolate syrup to that milk just yet.
So now that Intel's flagship is head and shoulders ahead of what AMD is making, now they're going to be swell guys and open up their FSB specification?
Some encouragement of competition. "We'll complete as long as we're winning."
I wonder if other companies will decide to get into the desktop CPU markets and use this as a starting point.
There's a little more than just bandwidth. If your botnet can gain one extra machine, that's an advantage of +1. If your bothnet can gain control of a machine belonging to a competing botnet and kick it off that one into yours, you gain one extra machine and remove one from your opponent for an advantage of +2.
When it comes down to botnets being commissioned for Spam and DDoS attacks, the one with the most machines gets the highest bid, and the difference between that bid and the second best is likely directly related to how many computers make up the difference.
There's a bit of an evolutionary war that's continuing. It's not enough to get your bot client installed. It's facing selection pressure from smarter users, better anti-virus/rootkit detection, firewalls making it harder to propagate, and more aggressive opponent bots.
Sounds very similar to nature's natural selection.
If not customers, it'll be retailers and distributors that eat that $600. Sony still gets to claim it since they shipped. (Middle men are making some money on them but it isn't much.)
Consoles don't usually bring in revenue, no, but the PS3 is estimated to cost $800 per unit to get out the door but it's selling for $600. (The $500 model is discontinued.) Typically, the cost per unit is considered proprietary information so it's only an estimate. This means it's hard to pin down but I do believe this is the highest net loss per unit of any console ever. If they already have to sell a bunch of games and accessories (X) to break even, if they drop the price by another $100 they'll just have to have an average of each user now buy (X * 1.5) games and accessories.
They're bleeding on PS3 right now, so should they bleed more? I guess someone crunched some numbers and came to the same conclusion you did.
Putting on my tinfoil hat, I'd say these rumors of price drops that simply will NOT die are a combination of 1 part wishful thinking, 1 part wanting to make existing owners panic, and 1 part of helping to stifle sales as consumers who are on the fence about pricing would most certainly not want to buy if they anticipate a drop.
That you're paying a "patent tax" is nothing new. You're paying a "tax" on everything. If you've ever bought a pack of smokes you're paying into their legal fees, for instance. It's really just a cost of doing business not related to development nor profits.
.GIF files. Windows comes with a media player that can play .MP3 files. Windows natively supports TrueType fonts. How much per copy is going to make sure they're on the up-and-up with those IPs?
What I'd find more interesting is how much of the cost of Windows goes into licensning patented software. MSPAINT can read and write
... compared to being marked with the Scarlet "Pedo" marker forever.
(disclaimer: from a US perspective)
Before a trial you are destroyed. Your face gets in the local paper. Reporters show up at your home and place of work and hassle you and your family. Your home is ransacked in the name of gathering evidence. Local politicians and big wigs claim it's a victory for the children and call you a monster. News interviews your neighbors who are all amazed and shocked and now they, of course, don't feel safe. They might just deny you bail on a judge's whim and toss you in a jail cell. You better believe that when guards hear "that pedophile pervert" calling for help to protect him from other cellmates they're not going to rush to his aid. You're let out? Expect lots of threatening phone calls and letters.
Assuming you're aquitted because you didn't break any laws, the damage is DONE. Nobody will ever see you the same way again. News of your name being cleared isn't shouted quite as loudly as the accusation. What a surprise.
Can you really blame the falsely accused in this case comitting suicide? It's really tragic how lives can be ruined just by pointing a finger.
I know if I was falsely accused I'd probably kill myself, too.
What about what's in development right now?
"(at least a got a refund though...albeit little bitty)"
Because someone has to say it:
Getting a refund compared to having to pay is bad. The government collected too much in taxes (well, more than they are required to by law). This money was denied to you throughout the year. Money which could have been earning interest, used for investments, hell, eating out a few more nights a month.
You get your refund back interest-free from the gov. It's really no different than if you left a $20 in your coat pocket during the winter only to find it the next year. Sure it FEELS GOOD, but, that could have been doing something much more useful than just sleeping in a pocket.
Then again, there are penalties imposed if you fix your W-4 (and other forms) so that they don't withhold anything and you have to pay all your tax once a year. I think that's too bad.
My guess would be that it would wind up how IE5 included support for VML and AOL graphics formats. They were included by default and inherited a huge install base but, who used them? Did everyone switch away from GIF and JPG? Did everyone start redoing their sites to take advantage of 3D and vector art? Hardly.
There are a lot of really good Flash developers out there. Does Silverlight really offer anything to them? A lot of the big problems with Flash are already worked out with their own scripts and getting used to all the language changes Macromedia kept flipping out onto them.
Even if the install base all of a sudden became 90%, I don't think there will be any real push to move away from Flash. No end user has Flash because they like IT, they have it because they like the content produced on it. It's completely content driven.
While not a zero-sum game, I think the influence of lobbyists isn't as important as the politcal implications of certain decisions. I'd argue one gets into state legislature so that they could climb the ladder into federal legislature or further.
Nobody wants to be the politician whose color picture of their smiling face fades to grayscale and is then overlayed on an image of sick children in hospital beds, then with the image of the hospital crossfading to a picture of a waste-water dumping pipe discharging into a creek all the while ominous music plays in the background.
You could argue one doesn't want to be the politician with his black and white picture on top of pictures of people on fire, but burn victims don't get telethons and specials on 20/20.
Who rules whose fault it is?
I've had an instance when my DSL was down. The router would hold an IP address for five minutes and let some traffic through before it would lose connectivity. I figured it was the router so I replaced that and the same thing was happening. I called the provider and they said everything was fine as far as they could tell. I went through the motions of rebooting my equipment and doing the idiot checks they wanted me to do. In the end they sent a tech and it would take the next day for it to happen.
I took the day off work (on of those "between 10 and 2" deals). I woke up early and decided to give it a shot. It was working. Completely. 100%. As if the problem never occurred. I called the company and they said the tech was already dispatched to the field with their work orders. I guess I'll just send the tech on their way when they arrive so they could enjoy a long lunch.
The tech arrived and said he was there to check the line. I told him everything was fine now but he insisted since it was his job and it wouldn't take a moment. I did, we agreed there was nothing wrong and I signed a paper that he showed up and left with things working.
If he had written up his report, he would have seen a perfectly working line and done zero to fix it. That would have put the blame square on me. Should I have paid $600 for an ISP problem that fixed itself without notice?
"You wouldn't mock someone for having a kick ass computer setup, but there's some kind of geek prejudice against audio - which just seems weird to me"
;)
If said kick ass computer setup included a $59.95 3ft length of cable called "XXXtreme Gamer Cat5e(+++)" connecting it to his cable modem, yeah, I'd probably make fun of them. Particularly if they're going to pretend it gives them an edge in competition gaming and if I don't see if I'm OBVIOUSLY not a good enough gamer.
While the green-book standard was already done, IIRC, after the fallout with Sony for getting a CD SNES addon off the ground, Nintendo decided to go partner with a company it thought would have fewer demands of the final result leading to going to Phillips.
CD-i (console) was hurt versus instead of the Playstation I think for a few reasons: development, price and focus. The Playstation had an additional 3 years of development over the CD-i machine and the technology scaled accordingly. It was also an expensive bugger (wiki states $700, which would put it at double the PSX) and it was marketed as an "everything interactive" device and targeted adults considerably heavier than children. Plus the really horrible games that were made with Nintendo IP for that system (granted by contract even though there was no SNES CD marriage in the end) certainly didn't help matters any.
That would make their trading symbol
SCOXD
for 20 days.
I know I'd smile every time I saw it.
"Hey hey, guy, buy shares of SCO! XD"
"things" = back and forth negotiations. RIAA-reps = "Let's get the maximum cash for each track," Microsoft-reps = "Let's pay the minimum cash for each track."
And let's face it, licensing terms are usually considered proprietary information, or at the very least "internal-use-only". I'm sure Red Octane didn't show all their cards to Microsoft as far as the licensing terms they got for some songs.
On an aside, I'd be more interested to know if the downloadable content is, in deed, downloadable content or if they're just slyly unlocking stuff that's already on the disc ALA Dance Dance Revolution.
If you remember the transition to CD-ROM based gaming from cartridge based, a lot of the first CD-ROM games were the same crappy things but with video and CD sound. It's easy to pad out the size of the game with that stuff. The first games were, what, early '90s?
Even as late as 1997 you had games like Final Fantasy VII where "WHOA! IT TAKES THREE DISCS!" was a bit of a deception when the actual game content fit on one disc and the sequence of three was only required due to, you guess it, space-filling movies.
In fact, there are still DVD games with dummy files. What's a dummy file? Well, as you know, if a disc spins at a constant angular velocity (which is much simpler to implement in hardware than the alternative constant linear velocity) then more sectors pass over the lens per unit of time the farther out from center it is. Game developers then, to speed up reading from media, would push all the important stuff close together on the outside of the discs. You can't really do that, however, since the standards all have the tracks starting from the center of the disc. The clever way to do it was place a several gigabyte "dummy" file full of data that the game will never read or use. It's purpose was only to provide a platform far away from the center of the disc where REAL content could be housed.
There are games now that can take up both layers on a DVD for a total of 8.5 Gigs, but should that REALLY count as a 8.5 Gig game when half of the disc on both layers is just a completely unnecessary file? With the power of real-time generated graphics on today's systems I'd even argue that pre-rendered video at any compression on disc is about as wasteful.
Exactly. I've seen estimates that extra parts and labor that go into the premium PS3 versus the regular is about $35 and the assembly lines can be diverted late during production to keep a variable ratio of one to the other. It would have been useful if they were having trouble keeping PS3s on the shelves but, evidently not. In practice, the 20GB version has been MIA in retail for a while... it costs $100 more so making all 60GB versions lets Sony takes about $65 less in red ink. It's a good way to mitigate the bleeding since they simply did not sell as many as they wanted to.
With the $480 360 Elite, if Sony REALLY wanted to, they could skip buying this year's ivory back scratchers and drop the PS3 to $500 and really put the pressure on the top end of the 360 consumer. Sure there'd be a lot of PS3 owners pissed off to see a price drop so soon, but, it wouldn't be the first time Sony's spit in the faces of their fanboys.
If he's anything like me, he turns around and makes a mental note to try back some other day. It's not like money burning a hole in your pocket literally burns a hole in your pocket.