The idea as presented was to create a common reference platform and get multiple HW vendors to build to the spec and compete on price, like they all were doing with VCRs at the time. The 3DO Company itself wouldn't build anything, getting its money from per-disc royalties ($3/copy). Ultimately, three manufacturers put out 3DO-compatible machines -- Matsushita (Panasonic), LG (nee Goldstar), and Sanyo.

However, the 3DO console famously released at a staggering $700 (1993) and, despite several price drops, never really lost the stigma of being, "too expensive." As a consequence, the installed base never really took off to the same degree as Nintendo and Sega (Sony's Playstation didn't exist back then). As such, 3DO started publishing its own games, and doubled the per-disc fees. Still not enough. 3DO eventually shed all of its platform development talent and become another game development house until it died around 2003.

It'll be interesting to see if Newell can succeed where Hawkins failed.

(*uncontrollable giggling*)

Cinelerra works well - and has for years.

You have got to be kidding.

I have tried on several different occasions to get Cinelerra to do something useful, and have failed every time. The program is incredibly unreliable, and will crash or hang at the slightest provocation.

There are two versions in circulation -- the "original" Heroine Virtual version, still occasionally updated; and the "community" version. I have no idea what the alleged differences are.

It claims to accept a wide variety of video codecs, but in my experiments only appears to reliably support DV -- an uncompressed format that will quickly fill every disk you have.

Like Blender 3D, Cinelerra blazes its own trail for the user interface. In fairness, if you have some patience, it will gradually start to make sense. It's ugly as hell, but that ugliness could be forgiven if the program worked reliably and produced decent videos.

There are enough glowing reviews of Cinelerra out there to make me wonder if my setup is the problem, but I rather doubt it, since Kdenlive has worked just fine on the same machine. My current theory is that long-time Cinelerra users have learned over the years what bits are irredeemably flaky and just automatically avoid them.

The last time I tried Cinelerra in earnest was about two years ago. After about half a dozen crashes in an hour just trying to put together a slideshow-ish thing, I gave up and started using Kdenlive fairly successfully. But I still watch for updates to the Cinelerra packages. Given the number of updates I've seen over the past two years (very few), I'm not confident the warts have been addressed.

There are some nice things that Cinelerra (allegedly) does, and its timeline has a few advantages over Kdenline. If you know of some magical incantation that will get Cinelerra working crash-free, I will honestly give it another shot. But I'm not sanguine about the results.

The simple answer is that there is a growing movement to reduce user options that can break applications.

Please try to remember whose machine you're running on. You're a guest under my roof, and guests that behave badly do not get invited back. So no, you don't get to run code in my browser until you've earned a certain level of trust, and you certainly don't get to invite in your friends' code. (I mean, just who the fsck is rpxnow.com, anyway?)

For example, there are websites that not only don't work without JavaScript, but they fail in complex ways [ ... ]

The technical term for sites that behave this way is, "Broken."

Hence, once you remove the disable JavaScript option Firefox suddenly works on a lot of websites.

Firefox already works on a lot of Web sites. Is someone shipping FF with JavaScript turned off by default? What exactly is the alleged problem here?

Today there are a lot of programmers of the opinion that if the user has JavaScript off then its their own fault and consuming the page without JavaScript is as silly as trying to consume it without HTML."

These programmers are called, "Wrong."

Back in the 1990's -- in the days of sneaker-net, recall -- macros in Microsoft Word documents, originally thought to be oh so terribly clever, proved to be a monumental nightmare for their ability to spread viruses and generally wreak havoc. It was so bad that even Microsoft was forced to admit it fscked up, and no longer executed macros in a loaded document by default, but would ask first. So you'd think the lesson on embedding executable content in what was fundamentally a document would have been learned.

Then some allegedly clever person kluges together JavaScript in an afternoon, and suddenly executable content embedded in documents -- over a genuine network, mind -- becomes a fantabulous idea again.

Uh, no, it didn't. JavaScript was a stupid idea, and should never have been allowed to happen. Unless your site is trustworthy and useful, you DO NOT GET TO RUN JAVASCRIPT.

Let's look at another example. Suppose there were a billionaire who made his money making crappy products and pushing those products on people. Suppose that man decided to then dedicate his life to wiping out a series of specific species completely from their native environments. Sounds like a supervillain, right? Well, that man is Bill Gates, and the species in question are the four species of malaria.

This is a tautology; everyone already knows Bill Gates is a super-villain.

And like most power-mad super-villains, I'm quite certain Gates hasn't bothered to consider the possible long-term downsides to putting his fumbling thumb on the scale of evolution and genociding several species of pathogen.

Pursuant to your comments reported on 27 June 2013 on ZDNet.com:

You're fired, for cause, effective immediately. Please collect your personal belongings and vacate W3C premises no later than 17:00 local time today.

Regards,
The Web

Experts from Google, Youtube, Facebook, and others must tell the court in two weeks if this is technically possible.

No.

This has been another edition of Simple Answers to Simple Questions: Simpleton Edition.

Schwab

For those who are, shall we say, less sanguine about these companies being true to their word, can you suggest client-side methods users might try that either block the trackers' ability to collect data in the first place, or would give the trackers useless or conflicting data?

The problem is not laying down fiber or building infrastructure: The problem is that nobody else can because of contractual agreements. [ ... ]

Well, yes, that's part of it, but there are other hurdles as well.

For example, one of the reasons Kansas City got picked is that the municipality owns the poles. More precisely, as I recall, KCK owns all their poles, and KCMO owns many (most?) of the poles, with the rest owned by AT&T.

Another "problem" is local environmental regulations. I put "problem" in quotes because avoiding unnecessary environmental damage is a laudable goal. However, accomplishing this goal is usually a huge pain in the butt -- EIS reports take months to compile, and then can be challenged by essentially anyone for any reason. Where and how are you going to trench? Are there any legacy pollutants in the dirt? How will you handle that? What happens if you discover a culturally significant site while digging (e.g. Native American burial ground)? Will you need to disturb the protected osprey nest sitting on the seventh pole along the 400 block of Horton Street? What kind of fiber bundle are you pulling? Will it leach toxic materials in the heat/rain/snow? How much noise to you intend to make while doing this? Will the city have to re-route traffic around downtown while you're trenching?

So, yeah, it can be a huge pain in the neck even without factoring in whiny incumbent competitors.

A great example of this would be when Germany was allowing the free market to compete for long distance. The incumbent telco basically swore that long distance would go from the present $1 per minute to at least $2 or more per minute. Within 18 months it was down to around $0.05 per minute.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't the incumbent telco in Germany used to be government itself (through the post office)?

Build out a city or two using long ago subsidized infrastructure, add some updated equipment, get kick backs from the city, put a couple of thousand on the internet all for under 200 million [ ... ]

That might be a legitimate assertion to level against AT&T with its pathetic Uverse kluge, but emphatically not so with Google Fiber.

For GFiber, there is no existing subsidized infrastructure. Google trenched and pulled new fiber all over KCK and KCMO. And it's not a fiber-copper hybrid kluge. It's new glass all the way to the side of your house. It's also 1Gbit symmetric . Google also built new NOCs for the traffic and a satellite farm. And while AT&T's press release mumbles, "up to 1 Gbit," that's GFiber's starting point.

Running your own gateway that does actual logging is an eye-opening experience. There are a phenomenal number of jerks out there...

Schwab

Or, conversely, maybe it has a chance to thrive if it's being maintained by people who have an idea of what to do with it?

That was supposed to be the whole point of spinning off WebOS in the first place.

Barely two years ago, HP gave WebOS a modest nest egg and spun them off into its own independent entity (which, from the point of view of WebOS, was a good move, given how badly HP has been mismanaged over the last decade). They shared/leased some of HP's organizational infrastructure, but WebOS has been pretty much on its own since then. They definitely had/have a vision, and they've definitely been executing on it.

I'm not sure what value LG's ownership brings to WebOS -- or indeed what value WebOS brings to LG. But at least now the WebOS guys will be able to get employee discounts on nice flat panels :-).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Predators'_Ball
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_gate
2012 Election coverage of Bain â" Mitt Romneyâ(TM)s old stomping ground.

Also: Storming the Magic Kingdom. Wonderful book -- informative and engaging. The Walt Disney Company was very nearly destroyed by private equity/LBO vultures.