Teh interesting (non-PHL-related) news stub thread

[Sforza]

WoW's Astounding Numbers

With about 12 million subscribers, chart-topping sales and enough pop culture cred to warrant both an Emmy-winning turn in South Park and shout-outs from William Shatner and Ozzy Osbourne, we knew World of Warcraft was big.

But during a game conference in Austin covered by Gamasutra, the game's developers dropped some stats that make it out to be, well, really, really big.

To operate a game as massive as Warcraft, Blizzard employs over 4,600 staffers and uses 20,000 computer systems, 75,000 CPU cores and a staggering 1.3 petabytes (that's over 1 billion MBs) of storage. And you thought your 32 GB iPhone was cool.

http://videogames.yahoo.com/events/plugg...rs/1355608

Added note from me:

If WoW were a country, it would be 73rd out of 223 countries. That would be more people than Greece, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, and a lot more...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cou...population