I agree, I'm not sure I understand Yoshida's comment about them being "too focused on FFXI" because if anything the problem was that they essentially looked at FFXI and decided they were going to try and be as different as possible from it. (Well, at least in some aspects, considering they wholesale lifted things like the various player races from XI.)

People were looking for an updated XI for the then-next gen consoles, and instead of doing that, they did everything they could to distance the mechanics for XIV from XI, and it just didn't work.

Imagine instead of being a long series of hallways that you were linearly lead down, you were instead dumped into a large maze of nearly identical hallways and given absolutely no direction...

The federal regulations required to allow people to receive subsidies under Obamacare. In order for people to fall under Obamacare, they had to re-signup using a website that had to be rewritten from the ground-up to use the new Obamacare subsidies. Basically, none of the existing site could be used because it was state-only, and they had to remake the entire thing to work with the new fed system.

And, when making this decision a year ago, who better to do that than the people building the Healthcare.gov site? Oops!

Really? Really? Try again.

This is a Massachusetts-specific issue. Massachusetts has only just getting around to firing CGI for their incompetence. The website still doesn't work.

You do in Massachusetts! The alternative ways involve having someone plug the information into the website for you. The website that still doesn't work.

And almost all of them have been trying since October. (I know my brother has!) It doesn't matter, because the Massachusetts website doesn't work. The alternative methods don't work, to the point where the state government has resorted to doing it by paper and are slowly working through the paper application backlog because the website doesn't work at all. The backend doesn't work, they simply can't process applications by computer at all. They're going to miss the deadline and have had to ask Obama to extend it.

The ironic thing is that since Obamacare is Romneycare, there was an old website that did work. But unfortunately Obamacare forced Massachusetts to build a brand new site to replace it and forced people to sign up again to meet the new federal requirements. And it's this process that's absolutely broken.

Nothing to do with Healthcare.gov, other than being built by the same chucklefucks who had to be replaced before other people could get Healthcare.gov into its current "sort of almost working" state. Remember, just like Oregon in this story, since Massachusetts has its own site, if you're a Massachusetts resident, you have to sign up using the Massachusetts site. Which still doesn't work.

Well, yeah, you could have just looked at Massachusetts and known this would happen.

Fun fact: the amount of emergency room treatment went up in Massachusetts when Romneycare passed. Fewer people were seeing their doctors than prior. I personally know people who moved to other states because the health insurance requirement meant that they lost their job.

The hugely ironic thing is that, thanks to Obamacare, there are something like 100,000 people in Massachusetts who are going to lose their Romneycare because of the new Obamacare healthcare connector requirements. And because the new Massachusetts website was made by the same people who made Healthcare.gov, it still doesn't work and the people on Romneycare (like my brother) are flat-out screwed. By the end of the month, they still won't have insurance, and the deadline to sign up will pass.

Ah, hope and change.

That's a term that they define earlier in the law, and they're quite clear:

Well, maybe not "quite clear" but it's not like "sexual or other intimate parts" is the phrase that determines the meaning of the law.

Meh, I'm not sure that really applies in this case. The law that was passed is basically a patch. And, like so many laws, I mean that quite literally: it's a list of insertions and deletions into the existing legal code.

Basically the Supreme Judicial Court said that a certain activity that was clearly intended to fall under the law didn't, because of the way the law was written. So the legislature fixed the wording of the law.

All the public debate had already happened, this was just a "bug fix," so to speak.

So while I'm not going to claim that there are definite issues of legislatures ignoring their constituents and sneaking laws through as rapidly as possible to avoid public debate on them (hi, Obamacare!), this really isn't a case of that.

Considering that apparently they didn't actually discover the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto after all, I'd have to go with "no, they shouldn't have revealed anything."

I don't know which is more depressing, honestly, that stories like this do make Slashdot, or that stories like Twitch Plays Pokemon, where someone hooked up Pokemon Red to the Twitch chat system and Twitch viewers managed to play through the entire game don't. As the link demonstrates, it made the freaking BBC. It was even on the front page of NPR at one point. But not Slashdot.

This, on the other hand...

Oh, and Apple Maps is free to them then? Before they were paying Google to deal with gathering the map data (maps, imagery, POIs) and running the servers. Costs that were shared by Google's other users, meaning that economies of scale are in play.

Now, Apple has to collect all that map data on their own, has to run their own back-end for dealing with that data, including writing their own (still hilariously broken) search over it, their own routing software, their own traffic monitoring software, and maintain the servers running said back-end. And don't forget, they had to build all that, so you need to factor in buying servers and writing all that back-end software.

I find it quite likely that sticking with Google would in fact have been far, far cheaper than building their own. The only reason they didn't is because they hate Android that much.

Maybe, but as far as I can tell, they've never fixed the somewhat hilariously misplaced POIs near me. They appear to be untouched from when I first checked them back when iOS 6 was released. (Although I see that the power substation is now a Men's Wearhouse instead of a Nordstroms, so I guess something has been updated.)

The other Apple Maps issue is that they don't show the difference between "there's no traffic here" and "we don't collect data for this road" making their traffic reports entirely useless.

Combine the two, and no one I know with an iDevice bothers with Apple Maps for navigation, they stick with the Google Maps app. It's still better.

Sounds like your Windows 8.1 upgrade experience went more smoothly than mine.

In my case, the upgrade replaced the working graphics drivers with ones that - well, didn't. So as soon as 8.1 got to the point where it was supposed to display the log in screen, I instead got a nice black screen.

Fun fact: how do you boot to "safe mode" in Windows 8.*? Well, by holding down Shift when selecting "Shut down" from the Power menu. How do you do that when the OS won't actually boot? You don't.

Even better getting to the recovery options involves hoping and praying your keypress lands in the incredibly tiny window it bothers checking. I ended up just powering off the laptop during boot in order to make Windows consider it a "failed" boot because I never succeeded in triggering recovery mode using shift-F8.