@takemetamars

A successful April Fools prank is to make people believe something absurd is actually happening. Of course, most people already know to distrust everything on April 1st and the absurd stuff that most websites and companies produce for the occasion gets easily disregarded, even if execution was done really well. So by launching a site a day or two early, you're catching them before their April Fools defences go up, they are then suckered into the prank ready for April 1st to come along and make them seem really silly for believing it, especially when they've shared the prank over social media. Thus, the prank is successful.

There's also the matter that you need to spread your prank by word-of-mouth, it could take a few hours to get sites like Mojang's Mars Effect prank to reach a big enough audience for people to appreciate it. You can't just dump stuff, especially obscure, crazy stuff like this on the internet and expect people to just run across it. Got to get people sharing it sooner rather than later. Remember that there's no such thing as an "early" April Fools, so long the joke ends on April 1st. People generally frown upon late-running April Fools pranks.

@IcehawkDown

Well, that's likely a move not made by GAME management and more by the administrators. Their job is to consolidate and tie-up loose ends in the company's finances, trying to find profitable portions of the company to break up and sell off to cover the debts incurred by the company to make them insolvent in the first place.

I'm not defending them, don't get me wrong, but this is the harsh reality of business. Or business when you bring financial institutions in to the equations. If you want to find the masters of screwing with people, banks and bankers are the people to look to.

@Mcmax3000 SOPA and PIPA will change the rules surrounding how the entertainment industry lays claim to their content online and no longer gives website owners protection against lawsuits based off user-generated content.

Let me paint a scenario for you. You're the head of YouTube back in 2004. You're getting pretty big and its come to the attention of the big movie studios that you're sharing somewhat lengthy clips of movie footage. They see this a violation of copyright. Under the DMCA, they can request you pull down the content within a reasonable time period and you must comply if you or your service is in the US (although as The Pirate Bay trials have shown, DMCA CAN be applied internationally, despite how it isn't an international law.) Under PIPA or SOPA, the company can launch full scale litigation against you over a single infringement, no "please would you remove this", no Cease or Desist, they bypass all that red tape and get to what they really want: your service to shut down. For a single infringement. Which you didn't upload.

And this is why SOPA and PIPA are bad news. The DNS blocking was going to create an internet blacklist, something the US government opposes countries like China from having, but are more than happy to set one up to appease big media. Now this has gone, this will alleviate a lot of fears surrounding the future of the US-facing internet and misuse of the blacklist for political gain. However it doesn't get to the core of the matter. Services like YouTube or Google Images wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for provisions in the DMCA which gave them "safe harbour" from big media throwing their legal weight around. But this is exactly what the media industry wants. YouTube has become competition for them and although they can't stop YouTube anymore, they want to nip any potential, future YouTubes in the bud before they become popular. This way the entertainment industry can get back to fully controlling their markets like they did before the mass adoption of the internet. Game companies are along for the ride since it gives the likes of Nintendo the ability to finally pull down ROM-sharing websites, which Nintendo HATES with a passion, but obviously has no legal grounds to actually do anything about them. PIPA/SOPA will empower them to do so, although they wont be able to take the sites offline without winning litigation against the owners first.

I should also note that it's not just ALL about having content actually on a website. Under PIPA/SOPA, LINKING to copyright infringing content is a punishable offence. Who am I kidding, it already is according to the recent extradition of Richard O'Dwyer from the UK to the US. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-16544335) So if you, as a completely innocent bystander of copyright infringement put a link to say, a video clip from newvideosite.com which was found to be in breach of copyright, they could pull litigation on YOU for the same thing. An extreme case, but you could be found guilty and you could spend up to 10 years in prison. (How many years is it for rape or murder again?)

So no, while the DNS provisions and the establishing of an internet blacklist have subsided for the time being, it just means that companies have to jump through an additional hoop to get what they want. This is why SOPA and PIPA need to be defeated.

@SpikePoint

They could very easily change everything inside the 3DS for the 3DS Lite and still have full compatibility with the old 3DS. No game on the 3DS "talks" directly to the components of the system. They are all abstracted through the underlying framework of the Nintendo 3DS system. They poll system for inputs from various components like the gyroscope, the camera, the face buttons, the touch screen and the system gives them normalised data.

This way, they could easily change supplier for the 3DS' screens or various components and developers need not worry about support as the system itself will handle any variations in hardware, not high-level software.

But that's not all that relevant. It's a simple fix to include a second circle pad, you know, once they solve the physical limitations of the 3DS, namely the fact there was no room in the original 3DS for the circle pad. Not without increasing the bulk of the device. It's like the Wii Motion Plus. Started off as an add-on for normal controllers, then got integrated years down the line. The technology inside the Wii Remote got smaller to the point where they could add in that extra functionality without sacrificing form. Same will happen to the 3DS, eventually. All they need to do is "trick" (if that's the right word) the 3DS into thinking the circle pad is always present and feed the abstracted Circle Pad Pro data to the system. Old games think the Circle Pad Pro is present but really it's just integrated into the system.

tl;dr: It's a lot simpler than you think to implement the new circle pad. It's just a matter of IF Nintendo wants to fragment their new handheld in such a significant way so soon into the life-span of a 5-6 year console and perhaps more importantly WHEN Nintendo will have the technology in place to do so (smaller parts). I don't see it happening next year, but the year after...

P.S. I am very annoyed you have to supply this thing AAA batteries, no rechargeable battery, just to power ITSELF, let alone the 3DS system itself. What is Nintendo doing? $20 for a lump of plastic so hilariously empty it reminds me of the Chintendo Vii teardown. ( http://gamevideos.1up.com/video/id/16492 ) Funny how things come around.

@Chris DPSN AggieCEO XBLThe Aggi

I disagree that buying another company and restricting competition is "investing in infrastructure", however I will admit I mis-read this post. I read and re-read under the impression it was a data cap of 20 megs a month, hence my response.

Please disregard, I am wrong.

@Faceless Troll

But 20 megs? Why are you defending this? AT&T doesn't care for your interests, they're taking your/people's money and not re-investing in their out-dated cellular infrastructure but gladly give their bosses millions of dollars in bonuses while they fleece you with extortionate charges.

20 megs might not sound an awful lot if you're not going to browse the web or download games over 3G on the Vita, but you'll quickly find that if you're playing games online fairly frequently that 20 megs will disappear in no time at all. And you may retort by saying "Well, doesn't affect me, I'm getting the 3G model" but that's beside the point. They're offering a service to people (many of whom will buy the 3G model without realising the cap is in place as it'll be hidden in the fine-print) which isn't fit for purpose. It's a sham.

@(Unverified)

I thought that too. Perhaps it's a karma system? You can help people in need and miss your opportunity to get the best pictures or you can ignore them and get the pictures you need. The better your news report, the more "success" you have with your western news affiliate, netting you more money or some reward, while helping those injured or dying will merely serve an intangible moral victory while getting your employer rather annoyed at your lack of pictures.

Personally, that's what I'd angle for in a game like this. Just going around snapping video while having no real impact would seem pretty shallow. Depends on what kind of budget the developers are working on, though. With or without, I'm still very interested in this game.

@SpacePenguinBot

There's a reason for this. Apple pushes developers to charge for their applications so Apple can take a 30% cut of whatever your App makes, not to mention that just to develop on the platform, you need to shell out $99 for the SDK and then keep paying that $99 to push applications to the App Store. (A similar policy which Microsoft uses, however the Windows Phone 7 SDK is free.)

Google on the other hand just hands out it's SDK free of charge and then charges $25 a year to push applications to the Android market. Google, of course, came to dominance off-of advertising and thus, pushes developers to use their Google Ads services, taking an unknown cut of the revenue you make with your application.

So you're not comparing like-with-like. Yes, Apple does have iAds, but they're barely used and failed to launch. Advertisers, Google included, don't like people openly sharing how much money they make off advertisements. Hence why you hardly ever see figures for how much money people make off Android applications, they're forbidden to release that information if they use adverts as the sole means of revenue generation. However, developers still flock to Android as do customers, so they must be doing something right.

As for the current state of games on Android devices, the Android eco-system is a lot like the PC market. Lots of different hardware configurations and some minor fragmentation issues (95% of all Android devices run on 2.x firmware, but only 10% run the absolute latest version of the phone-bound OS; 2.3 "Gingerbread"). This makes things more difficult for developers over iOS, however it's what PC developers have had to deal with since the dawn of gaming itself. This was what kept large companies from developing on the Android system for long complicated reasons I wont bulk this post with. However there are signs of change. Square Enix has said they're looking into bringing Chaos Rings over to Android so the future looks pretty bright for the OS as a gaming platform.

Just remember that mobile gaming is just at the start of it's renaissance, it's still yet to find it's stride.

@(Unverified)

Xbox Fusion? Yeah, I can see that working.

It's how they name it in the trademark though, "entertainment services"... Makes it sound more like an addition to Xbox Live or a game. Not a bad shout, though.

@Aerosol

This wasn't an exploit specific to PSN servers. They were running an outdated distribution of Redhat Linux (and we're speaking version 2.6.24, which is a year old, if that, some PSN servers were pinging back a Linux kernel version number of 2.6.9 which was in 2004. For reference: Current Stable Linux version: 2.6.38.5) which has many, MANY known exploits to acquire things like instant Root access (super user). And to top it off, they were running Apache 2.2.15 (Current stable version: 2.2.17) which, you guessed it, has several known exploits.

And what do I mean by "known" exploits... Well, let's ask Google:
http://www.google.com/#q=apache+2.2.17+exploit
http://www.google.com/#q=linux+2.6.24+exploit

Really, these servers SHOULDN'T have been publicly showing the version number of neither Apache nor the Linux kernel. But perhaps more pressingly, they shouldn't have been running this outdated software. Simple as.