"Yes sir we got troubles,
Right here in Boston city!
With capital Ts that rhymes with Ps
and that stands for PlayStation!"
Posted on 11/18/2006 5:12:46 AM PST by Living Free in NH
A furious Mayor Thomas M. Menino vowed yesterday to bill Sony Corp. for the chaos that swirled around the release of its PlayStation 3 machine after Boston police had to quell crowds grown frenzied and unruly by the hype surrounding the coveted consoles.
“We had to rush in 12 police cars with officers there and take them off the streets of our city where they’re doing their patrols, to squelch the crowd that we had there,” Menino said, referring to a throng of 500 at Copley Place.
“It’s something that should not be tolerated,” he said. “It’s wrong to take advantage of the public that way, wrong by the manufacturer and by the retailer.”
Japan-based Sony made only 400,000 PlayStation 3’s available for the product’s launch, and thousands camped out for days at stores across the nation for a shot at shelling out $500-plus for the holiday must-have.
“The mayor feels this is a ploy by big business to fill the pockets of their stockholders on the public’s back without any regard for public safety,” said Menino’s spokeswoman, Dot Joyce.
Police had to control crowds at the Copley Plaza Mall’s Sony Style, where throngs rushed the doors at 5 a.m., and at the Fenway Best Buy, where more than 400 people were lined up by noon Thursday.
“It was ridiculous,” said Fernando Villanueva, 22, of the South End, who camped out in the rain starting Wednesday and paid $630 for a PS3. “We tried to keep it orderly by creating a list and having a roll call every half hour,” he said. “But the store said our list was meaningless; it’s going to be a mad rush, and whoever gets through the doors first gets one.”
Police eventually convinced Best Buy to honor the list. But elsewhere, mobs of customers stampeded into stores, injuring a man in Wisconsin and forcing authorities to close a Wal-Mart in California.
In Connecticut, two armed thugs tried to rob a line of people outside a Putnam Wal-Mart at 3 a.m. Michael Penkala of Webster refused to give up his money and was shot, police said. He was in stable condition yesterday at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in Worcester with non-life-threatening injuries, said Connecticut State Police Lt. J. Paul Vance.
Sony spokesman Dave Karraker said 400,000 PS3’s were all the company could produce for the launch. The chaos “is not something we planned or foresaw,” he said.
If Sony didn’t, nearly everyone else seemed to know that limited supplies and high demand were a formula for trouble.
“All this hype was created by some marketing ‘genius’ who didn’t think out the end game,” said Hub public relations guru George Regan. “When you have people waiting for hours, even days, in the rain, and someone gets hurt, all for the ‘privilege’ of paying $600 for some game, sooner or later, it’s going to backfire.”
This kind of nuts is nuts.
My kids were young during The Cabbage Patch Insanity. Instead of playing that game, I just made my daughter a Cabbage Patch Doll. Since I couldn't make this "3" thing, my kids would be doing without or waiting for sanity to allow them one.
This may well be the dumbest thing that I've ever heard a politician say, and that's REALLY saying a lot!
Which reminds me... In a civilized society, in that sort of situation, the "alley cats" are locked up and neutered. Hmmm... Maybe that's the solution, given the imams statement.
Mark
I certainly can't find any reason to flame you for that statement. Heck, I know people who think I'm nuts for spending tens of hours a week Freeping... On the other hand, the whole "I MUST HAVE IT NOW" group-think is an interesting thing to watch, from the outside. But the response of the mayor's office is just... Well, it's just right out of a Monty Python sketch...
Mark
Here, let me fix that for you...
I cannot stress how much better my life got when I gave it up traded an addiction to video games for an addiction to Freeping!
There, isn't that better now?
Mark
Oooohhh! I remember that! I worked in the hardware department of a Monkey Wards, and the toy department was right across the aisle. I swear that these women would lie in wait, and pounce on the associates as they would bring out the stock of cabbage patch dolls!
Mark
Actually, for $600, you could get a better PC than the PS3. It wouldn't have the same graphics capabilities, but only having 256mb of RAM pretty much disqualifies the PS3 from being a "high-powered computer" right out of the box.
Consoles don't have the same kind of raw power as PCs; they get away with it because software can be so highly optimized for such a specific platform, and because most of the issues that come with a general computing operating systems aren't present. There are already CPUs and GPUs on the market that far outdo the PS3's.
(And Sony and Microsoft actually LOSE money on every console sold)
"bill Sony Corp."
Typical liberal garbage think.
Libs won't blame the materialistic shallow undisciplined greedy products of liberal schools who caused the trouble.
Libs blame corporations.
Libs won't judge people.
Disgusting.
The PS3's 3.2 GHz Cell processor, developed jointly by Sony, Toshiba and IBM ("STI"), is an implementation to dynamically assign physical processor cores to do different types of work independently. It has a PowerPC-based "Power Processing Element" (PPE) and six accessible 3.2 GHz Synergistic Processing Elements (SPEs), a seventh runs in a special mode and is dedicated to OS security, and an eighth disabled to improve production yields. The PPE, SPE's and other elements ("units") are connected via an Element Interconnect Bus which serves to connect all of the units in a ring-style bus. The PPE has a 512 KiB level 2 cache and one VMX vector unit. Each of the SPEs is a RISC processor with 128 128-bit SIMD GPRs and superscalar functions. Each SPE contains 256 KiB of non-cached memory (local storage, "LS") that is shared by program code and work data. SPEs may access more data in the main memory using DMA. The floating point performance of the whole system (CPU + GPU) is reported to be 2.18 TFLOPS[77]. PlayStation 3's Cell CPU achieves 204 GFLOPS single precision float and 15 GFLOPS double precision. The PS3 will ship with 256 MiB of Rambus XDR DRAM, clocked at CPU die speed.
How about this... (and this isn't a gaming machine, more of a "business class" system:
Dell Dimension E521
AMD Athalon 64 X2 Dual Core 5000+
1GB DDR2 SDRAM
256MB NVIDIA Geforce 7300LE TurboCache
$610, including shipping.
Mark
I recall reading articles about how Iraq had sent agents out to the western world, buying up gaming consoles for just this reason: To use in their (non-existant) nuclear weapons program.
Mark
There's an enormous chasm between the theoretical numbers you posted and actual performance.
The Cell derives it's 204 GFLOPS from having a lot of processing cores, but those cores are very stripped down. There is a lot of very complex architecture in a modern AMD or Intel processor that is basically needed to prevent the processor from wasting it's clock cycles. The Cell's cores are much simpler, and aren't capable of using their clock cycles as efficiently in real world applications.
It's also not "business computing" that the Cell is poor at; it's general-purpose computing. All but one of the Cell's cores has a limited instruction set, and isn't capable of general purpose computing. Unless the Cell is doing the exact type of calculations that it was primarily designed to do, then it's not even in the same dimension of power as your average PC processor.
Also, with 256mb of RAM, the PS3 would have to be constantly read an write to the hard drive. Hard drive I/O is far slower that memory I/O, and will effectively bottleneck the system's performance.
The "PS3 is a powerful computer" is 100% Sony hype. Game developers have already worked with it, and it's not even close to being as powerful as it's being sold as.
You're right of course -- people who behave like animals over a video game system are the ones to blame -- but why is that manufacturers can never make enough of the hot new, must-have Christmas gift item? Whether its a toy or a video-game system, this happens almost every year.
I'm not advancing some conspiracy theory here, but rather I am honestly wondering about this.
It can take a while to get a manufacturing line running. New, high-tech devices as especially bad; it's very expensive to build the fabrication processes sometimes, and the companies want to rush their product out by Christmas because that's where all of the sales are.
I don't doubt anything you say, but it just seems that by now, all of these problems would be anticipated, and that maybe they'd be ready to go sooner than the end of the year.
They've been having this problem all year. The PS3 was supposed to launch last April or so, but was delayed. They've had to delay the European launch, and the rumors are that they don't have the number they promised for the US launch. Sony basically screwed up and made a system that they couldn't manufacture easily.
The same ones who can wait for days in line in the cold to get a PS3 but can't wait in line for an hour to vote without yelling disenfranchisement.
yours was the funniest comment I have ever read
you must be a writer
*snort* I remember my Aunt, who HAD to have the lastest and greatest for their kids, got in line and waited for HOURS for a couple of those stupid dolls. I never got the attraction; I always thought they were kinda creepy looking.
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