Matt

My point is that a relatively low yield does not necessarily reflect on the quality of the product actually being sold to the customer and that the summary of the article incorrectly implies that the defect rate of shipped units was equivalent to the detected defect rate off the line. 68% is substantially higher than even the highest estimates for the actual defect rate of shipped units.

This is a bit of a sloppy interpretation of the article. What it was talking about was manufacturing yield - 68 of every 100 units was determined to be defective at the factory. Those machines didn't get shipped out to be sold. A low yield like that is common and nothing to be ashamed about as it doesn't affect customers. The real problem, as indicated in the article, is that poor testing standards meant that many of the other 32 machines - those that tested as "good" - ended up failing.

This article doesn't match my experience at all. Towards the end of '07 I got RROD and initiated a repair request. The materials sent to me included a list of potential problems which I was supposed to check off. In addition to RROD, I noted that I had frequent disk read errors and that my disk tray would often fail to open. I was already 6 months past my warranty expiration, but I didn't see any harm in noting these problems.

A bit more than a week later I got back a unit with the same serial number as the one that I sent in, so presumably they repaired it rather than sending me a new one. They did, however, replace the DVD drive with a new unit despite the fact that I was well outside the warranty period for non-RROD issues.

In addition, the warranty status for my Xbox 360 has changed from "out of warranty" to "in warranty" with a three-month term.

It would be nice to have a brand new 1-year warranty on a replaced device, but a 3-month warranty is not uncommon for warranty repairs. This is less than optimal, but the suggestion of the original article is just not true. If you get back a device that is broken from the get-go, it'll be covered by that three-month warranty covering any issues that may come up.

Any of the flood baddies. Brutes are bad-ass, but the flood freaks me out.

I think you meant 'first person shooters. First 'person shooters' sounds like Jack Thompson could call them.

I don't get these comparisons between the 20GB price and the 120GB price. We HAD to pay $99 for the 20GB - that was the price of admission if you wanted a hard drive. You were basically paying $40 buck for the drive (approximate retail price for the drive at the time) and another $60 for the proprietary MS packaging.

Fast forward to the present. A 120GB notebook
runs about $80 retail, so at $180 MS is essentially charging us $100 for the packaging that they used to charge $60 for. Of course they will pay less than retail for the drive, but you get the idea.

Given the cost of materials and the benefit that MS gains by users having lots of space available for purchased HD content, even $150 would be a "premium" price, but I would have been willing to pay it as it represents a nearly proportionate increase based on the cost of the notebook hard drive. $180 is just greedy and I'm not going to bite.

#12 Manufacturing costs are nothing. I'd guess less than $2 per box. Most of the expense is R&D, marketing, license fees, etc. and those expenses don't go away just because it's downloadable.

The 250 achievements points represents the limit imposed by Microsoft for add-on content. It doesn't say anything about how much content there is compared to the full game.

I think people are missing the point here. Slamdance invited the maker of SCMRPG to submit their game. The Slamdance jury then judged the game worthy of a being a finalist in the competition. Only after taking it this far through the process, one man at the head of the Slamdance hierarchy made a unilateral decision to pull the game based on it's objectionable content.

Yes, the game is disgusting AND is not well made, but that's beside the point. This would never have happened with a film. Slamdance is stating that games should be held to a different artistic standard than films.

"Since I do not have any emotional attachment to said individual, why does this one death effect me emotionally?"
Because some of us have kids or younger siblings and that facilitates empathy for those affected by this event.

For the "he should have known better" crowd:
Kids learn that stoves are hot because they know what "hot" means because they've been burned before by other hot things they encounter regularly like seatbelt latches and metal slides. There are few such object lessons in the dangers of high voltage/high current electricity for children to learn from. They depend entirely on being properly educated by their parents and other adults. If this kid didn't know any better, it's not his fault.

#10 WTF are you talking about? Seven-year-olds do plenty of "stupid" things which have nothing to do with their actual intelligence. Critical thinking skills don't start to develop for another year or two - that's why eight or nine is the age that kids tend to stop believing in Santa Claus.