The Wii is going to tank? You hope Nintendo has enough cash? Dude, the Wii came out almost three and a half years ago, sales dropping off now means only that it might not have the longevity Nintendo hopes, not that it's tanking, as you say. It's still sold more units than any other Nintendo console. Calling the Wii anything but a success seems silly.

Perhaps they ought to have developed an open source platform for the development of horizontally scalable *forums*.

That's what led me to think this, but if I understand the system correctly and this is what Woz is actually talking about then it's not a "bug," just poor design (which could still be considered a bug, in some sense). Now, I'm not 100% certain about this being the case, but this is based on my experience with my fiancee's Prius and how its cruise control SEEMS to work.

The Prius only usually takes one tap for one mph, as far as I know, it just takes a moment and this is not readily apparent. You're going 50. You hit the button and don't notice a difference, so you hit it again, and hit it again, and by now it's accelerated 1mph. So you go "Ah, I see, 3 bumps = 1mph," when in reality you've just told the car to accelerate to 53, which it is still, gradually, doing.

So you hit it a bunch more times, and by the time it's actually at 53 you've told the car to accelerate to, say, 60. The car is still accelerating, but the Prius's cruise control is very slow, as I've noted before, so you may not even realize you're still accelerating. Now you want to get to 55 so you hit it 6 more times, but now you're at 54 and the car thinks you want it to go 66, so it, noting the disparity in requested speed and actual speed, changes the gear ratio and accelerates more rapidly, jumping up 11mph very quickly.

The fact that he says he has to tap the control again and again is what makes me think this is the case. If so, it's poor design on the part of the cruise control, but it WOULD still be working "as intended."

Also, to the guy above complaining about criticizing other people's grammar... that was me, correcting myself. Rancho relaxo!

Or, to put it another way... it's not a bug, Mr. Wozniak, it's a *feature*.

Its, not it's. Curses!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuously_variable_transmission

"A continuously variable transmission (CVT) is a transmission which can change steplessly through an infinite number of effective gear ratios between maximum and minimum values. This contrasts with other mechanical transmissions that only allow a few different distinct gear ratios to be selected. The flexibility of a CVT allows the driving shaft to maintain a constant angular velocity over a range of output velocities."

It then goes on to note that a Prius actually has something a bit different, since it derives power from both the motor and the engine, and not from a single source.

Also, about Woz's thing... I wonder if it doesn't have more to do with impatience than run-away acceleration. The Prius's cruise control accelerates gradually when you increase the threshhold, it doesn't lurch forward and immediately try to attain the new speed. But I believe if you keep pressing it, the threshhold eventually gets high enough above the current speed that it uses a lower gear ratio and will accelerate more quickly to what the CC is now set at.

I know my VW Golf will eventually downshift and leap forward if you increase the cruise control faster than the car can accelerate in whatever it's current gear is. Since you may, by then, have set the CC to like 20mph above where you're currently at, it may indeed seem like a runaway car.

Frankly, it doesn't matter if it happens to OS X. What matters is that it could become the standard going forward, and if we've learned anything from the iPhone and iPod it's that Apple has tremendous influence in driving the standards of consumer electronics. The reason for the app store has nothing to do with security and everything about Apple wringing every last penny out of developers by taking an arbitrary cut of their sales and providing only limited QC and indexing that could easily be provided by any other site or service. If people want a choice, they should GET a choice - use the app store, or don't. Instead, Apple's making the choice for you. And that's no choice at all.

Of course.

I think the best argument advantage is the ereader function, especially with most commercial ereaders still being fairly expensive. The entry level iPad is almost at a competitive price vs. buying a Kindle DX even at inflated 1st gen Apple product prices, and it inarguably does far more than a Kindle does. The Kindle absolutely does not do the majority of what this does; I think the netbook/media player aspects are less compelling, but certainly bolster the case.

My biggest problem with this is that it seems to be locked into the app store, just like the iPhone. In that sense, it does LESS than a netbook. Not saying this won't be successful, since Apple is nothing if not great at marketing consumer electronics, but what does this do for me task-wise that I can't do on a netbook? It's especially funny because, if you noticed, one of Jobs's slides touted PC software as a downside to netbooks. From where I stand, the huge open architecture of the PC is preferable to a tightly controlled store.

This was doomed from the start. Everyone knows a driver is a poor choice for getting out of a sandtrap.

Yeah, I was misinformed about the extent to which Blizzard was acquired. I read up on the relationship a bit more since. I thought it was more a partnership than an acquisition, but it seems like Vivendi just rebranded itself under the Blizzard name to avoid being Vivendi-Activision.

Asus Says Stuff You Already Bought Is Dead, Hello Stuff We Want You To Buy Soon.

Except Origin Systems was a player in a comparatively tiny niche industry. Blizzard has made money hand over fist in an industry that rivals or surpasses other popular entertainments like music and movies, and managed to expand a particular genre to an entirely new demographic.

Comparing UO and Origin Systems to WoW and Blizzard is comparing apples and oranges... or comparing Daimler Motor Company in the 1900s to Toyota and Honda in the modern world.

Blizzard is not just a developer that had a big success... they're a powerhouse. It'll take more than a couple missteps to bring them down. They'd have to MASSIVELY fuck up in ways that WoW wouldn't even factor into. They've undoubtedly got a sizable enough warchest of capital built up that they could eat a couple failures, even massive ones.

In short, any scenario where Blizzard crashed and burned... couldn't possibly be attributed just to WoW, or even mostly to WoW. They'd need massive mismanagement on a company-wide scale and consistent lack of business vision. Sure, they COULD fail, but there's nothing to this "WoW could kill Blizzard" talk but baseless speculation that has nothing actually to do with WoW.

To date, as far as I can tell, Blizzard has never made a bad (debatable, based on personal taste) or unsuccessful (not up for debate) game. They've got a perfect record. And they're raking in more money every month. If that's a recipe for disaster, sign me up!

Came here to post this very game.

Troika was always an overly ambitious company. Their writing and setting development was top notch, but all their releases demonstrated an apparent lack of management oversight and nitty-gritty game programming/scripting expertise. Bloodlines is a great example: the first two and a half areas are brilliant, with rich characters and excellent writing and comparatively few bugs. It was among the best FPSRPGs I'd ever played.

Then the rest of the game is increasingly a trainwreck, until the last level is just a silly run and gun through a repetitive skyscraper, which was so regressive in terms of design that it smacked of FPS games pre-Half-Life. Tons of stuff was obviously cut from the game, and it seems quite likely they had to rush it out the door to make deadline, with stuff unfinished.

Arcanum had many of the same flaws as Bloodlines - stronger early game than endgame, cut or abandoned gameplay elements, bugs and a lack of fine-tuning - but on nowhere near the same scale.