Pretty much all software projects fix a massive number of bugs within the final portion of their development; that's pretty much all that's happening at that point and a huge proportion of it is the backlog of stuff that got left while features were still being added or finished. And your anecdote is more or less correct as well in that often a bug is hiding or distracting from others or fixing one actually introduces another so there's a lot of churn during this period. Few projects actually finish this process but instead just fix bugs largely in order of priority and then stop when there's not enough serious stuff left to hold up release any longer. If anything, Mozilla are more conscientious about this than most, I suppose partly because of the fact that they're so open about their process. (You don't even want to know about some of the bugs that will get skipped in commercial stuff. 'Known shippable' quickly becomes the most common phrase you hear towards the end. How do you think any of Bethesda's in-house product ever gets out the door?)

True, and I think that's why this news is so disappointing - Assassin's Creed II was an enormous improvement upon the first one and there was plenty of potential to do the same here with a Mirror's Edge sequel. Oh well.

Personally I've found, having done it on numerous different machines now, that Windows will manage to cope with the phone just fine but usually it takes two attempts at plugging it in for it to work. The first time installs the drivers but usually produces an error message about failing to install the device properly but then if I remove and reattach it then it works fine, and it works every time from then on as well.

Where have Samsung promised 2.3 for the Galaxy S I? I've only seen that tweet from Samsung India from a while ago, which isn't exactly the most official of channels and was swiftly removed. I mean, I'm pretty much assuming they'll be providing it, if they're doing the work for the S II anyway, but I haven't seen an actual statement to that effect.

The worst thing about Kies is how ridiculously fiddly it can be to get it to connect. I have to quit LauncherPro, otherwise the crappy Kies software phone-side thinks the phone isn't idle, and often I need to plug it into my PC more than once for Kies to successfully pick it up. Meanwhile, USB mass storage just works without any problem and connecting with Odin to root it has always been painless.

If everyone thought like you then your supposed inalienable rights would be irrelevant as there'd really be no more games being made for you to download anymore anyway.

Well, ok, there'd still be floods of free Flash games and indie stuff but let's not pretend that anyone downloading this leak is disinterested in the kind of AAA games that depend upon the current publishing models. Making them is simply unsustainable in the face of sufficiently high piracy rates and this is primarily why most publishers barely care about PC anymore. (I work in the industry. This isn't just PC gamers bitching about inferior ports; the publishers really aren't very interested unless it's a low cost by-product of the console versions.)

I find it bizarre that so many people are incapable of appreciating that the economy and the nature of products being made have simply changed over the last decade or so. I see no reason why digital content should be inherently less valuable or worth protecting than physical product. The fact that no-one happens to have invented a way of magically cloning the latter without damaging the original isn't really relevant; the point is that without continuing the long-standing arrangement of someone investing money to make a product and then people paying for it if they want it, thereby providing a return on that investment, no-one will make the product anymore. Who exactly wins in this situation?

The music industry is a different case as there seems to be a very plausible and arguably superior model of artists providing their work more directly via the various alternative distribution channels that have sprung up in recent times. But for anyone that enjoys movies with non-trivial budgets or any form of cutting edge video games then the amount of money they require upfront to create is only viable in something like the traditional arrangement.

Sadly for Crytek, and despite the frequency with which this claim is made, I think you'd be in the extreme minority there. Especially as, looking at a couple of videos on YouTube, this seems close enough to final that most people aren't going to see much value in that.

Someone mod this up. Troll?!

I'm seeing a fairly generic fantasy world and a bunch of nice rendering techniques that by now have pretty much all appeared in released games, on consoles even. Am I missing something?

Oh, that's good. In that case everyone playing, for example, MW2 on 360 didn't need to worry about the huge numbers of players running around with modified content that enables a variety of cheats and Infinity Ward didn't need to rush out all those patches to fix things up. And actually your latter suggestion is not a threat, as far as I'm aware, since all XBL traffic is encrypted and, thus far, unbroken.

No offence particularly intended but if it really took you being on the receiving end of 13 identity thefts to start taking a couple of obvious precautions, maybe you aren't the guy to write this book.

Er, that would be a 128-bit pointer.

PlayStation 3 having OpenGL support is scarcely relevant considering the performance relative to the other available APIs. No-one uses it there. Any game studios targeting a subset of the 3 major HD gaming platforms - ie. Windows, 360, PS3 - are almost certainly not going anywhere near OpenGL. Though you do have a point with regards to anyone doing mobile, Wii, or a game targeting both Windows and MacOS (which is presumably a growing area since Steam's arrival on the latter).

While I'd also disagree with the grandparent, some corrections to this:

I suspect Microsoft recommend XAudio rather than OpenAL, what with that being their intended replacement for DirectSound.

The API has certainly changed, yes - in the sense that DirectInput has been deprecated since, IIRC, DX8. Microsoft recommend a combination of XInput and WM_INPUT these days.

My iPhone 3G is noticeably slower since the upgrade, and also much more prone to mysterious hangs while it thinks deeply about something important. It could be that it's down to the steady accumulation of stuff on the device, Windows registry style, but it certainly seemed to me that iOS 4 resulted in a step change in performance.

I reckon a website displayed on one of these would probably work ok.