Agreed. The flat, ugly UI is just nasty, and they tried to justify it by explaining how the shared UI would save on battery life. My desktop and it's insanely powerful video card doesn't give a shit about battery life on some Windows phone, and that's not a valid reason to uglify your desktop OS. It was a stupid excuse then, and they still haven't retracted it.

I'm sort of looking for a revival of an attractive UI as a touchstone to see if MS is really recanting all the idiocy involved with Windows 8. It probably won't prevent me from buying Windows 9 if I get new hardware, but I'll be damned if I pay for an upgrade to an OS I can't stand looking at. Call me shallow, but when you spend ALL DAY EVERY DAY on the damned OS, I'd like to at least not cringe when I look at it. Besides, there isn't a real compelling technical reason to upgrade at this point either.

Only to about 90% of home computer users who still run Windows applications and such that don't work on other operating systems. On the server, it's a bit more balanced, but Windows is still a major player. And of course, Windows is a relatively small player in the smart device market (a bit more than Linux on the home desktop, for comparison).

If you think Windows isn't relevant, you're living in a *nix or apple bubble. Good for you, but don't mistakenly project your version of reality onto the rest of the world.

You forgot to quote "improvements".

BTW, when has MS ever created incompatibilities with old versions for no reason? I assume you're talking old versions of software? They've historically jumped through ridiculous hoops to provide backward compatibility. It's an area in which they've actually done a rather outstanding job, in my opinion. There's plenty of reason to criticize MS, but seriously, backward compatibility is not one of them.

Why? I'm not in some personal relationship with them. I buy operating systems and other products from them. If they're good, I buy them. If not, I don't, and wait to see if they'll improve, or find an alternative. Why should I worry about their long-term survivability? It's not as though someone wouldn't fill up the market share should they disappear tomorrow. And let's not kid ourselves - MS could completely stop developing new products and they'd probably be around for another decade at least.

Also, as much as I disliked Windows 8 personally, calling it a "horrific mistake" and a "monster" smacks a bit of hyperbole. Many users actually like Windows 8, and honestly, the ones most hurt by the product was MS's bottom line. Other than the UI and usability blunders (and let's not kid ourselves - they're huge blunders), it's actually a fine OS.

I'm betting they did a lot of focus testing, but ignored the result of them at a very high level. There was too much momentum in the wrong direction (the idea that touch/metro should supplant the "legacy" desktop in their main OS) to change it by the time consumers got in front of it.

In the end, the market forced them to acknowledge what the focus groups were probably telling them all along.

You're conflating the issue, because there are two different products and two different markets (game developer kits are typically NOT the exact same hardware as the final product). It makes no sense to expand the developer supply (at potentially enormous cost) to meet the consumer demand. The issue is that developer kits are being taken out of the developer market and being sold to consumers, where it does the company absolutely no good at all.

Developer kits are produced in limited supply at greater costs because the final hardware is likely not ready for manufacturing yet, or else large-scale manufacturing facilities are still being set up. Don't forget that the laws of supply and demand don't exist in some abstract form, especially for manufactured goods. You seem to be ignoring the realities involved in the massive initial infrastructure costs in setting up physical assembly lines, and the inevitable ramp-up time that involves.

I'm not sure how to explain this any more clearly.

"Monster Volcano" is perhaps a bit overstated, but comparing it to a super-volcano-potential such as the Yellowstone Caldera is perhaps a bit unfair. After all, no volcano in the world today can really compare to the potential of that one.

I live nearby (relatively speaking), and got a chance to see the devastation first-hand within the first year or two after it occurred. The forest service built a viewing station where you could look out over the devastated landscape, and, even neater, watch the forest start to grow back. It's easier to dismiss it as geologically minor when you haven't personally seen the miles and miles of trees snapped and laid down like so many matchsticks. On a human scale, it's incredibly massive, and was damn impressive to see.

They track you using your credit card. The cards are because people want them these days. Albertsons finally knuckled under and started offering them. Not because they needed them for tracking, like I said they already did that, but because customers whined they weren't getting a "good deal". So they raised their prices, and introduced a card.

I lived quite a bit further away, about an hour north of Seattle, but we actually felt the blast as a minor tremor. Someone in my family actually joked "Well, there went Mt St Helens". There was quite a bit of news about a possible pending eruption, of course. We were pretty shocked when we heard what had actually happened though.

The last thing I want is my industry to become unionized. I'd prefer to negotiate my own salary rather than be paid some standard scale based on seniority, etc, and pay union dues for the privilege. Maybe that's attractive to some, but not to me. But then again, I'm okay with a higher risk-reward ratio than many, since I threw away a very attractive and well-paying job for a chance to make my own game.

Keep in mind that not every company is like EA. While "crunch time" horror stories abound, there are companies out there that promote a healthy work-life balance as a selling feature of the company, like my last company. I think that more companies are realizing that forcing your best people to burn out on death marches doesn't produce better products and simply makes your best talent flee. From those inside EA, I heard that the "EA Spouse" story helped to turn things around inside the company, although I've only heard this third-hand. I've witnessed myself how a team forced through an insane crunch all but disintegrated at the conclusion of the project. I had a friend who worked at Sierra On-Line, and suffered for many years under incredibly poor and abusive management practices. Eventually, there tends to be something of a Darwinian process at work, where a company will get a very bad reputation inside the industry, and it suffers as a result. I think that this is one of the reasons EA had to clean up its act - you couldn't have paid me or a number of my friends any amount of money to work there.

Many former devs have started at companies with these stupid policies, and have vowed not to make the same mistakes (like my last company, in fact). They understand that "crunch time" is really nothing more than an admittance of poor planning at the management level, or poor execution at the developer level, or even simple exploitation. In well run shops, a certain amount of ramping up is inevitable at the conclusion of a project, but extended death marches are all but an admittance of a poorly run development cycle.

I'm fortunately at a point in my career where I can afford to pick and choose my employer, and can ask questions such as "what's your company policy on work-life balance and extended crunches without overtime pay?". It's harder for someone trying to break into the industry.

What's worse, to me, is when I hear other developers bragging about their death marches as though it's some sort of fucking rite-of-passage or some heroic war story. No, idiots, it just means you were being exploited. Granted, some developers (especially young, single devs) don't seem to mind having no life outside of work, but that's not acceptable to many of us. The sooner that permissive mentality dies a quick death, the better off the industry will be.

I guess I can speak only for myself as a relatively new indie developer. I've been at both ends of the spectrum of game development. My last commercial project before I left was enormous - almost 100 million in development costs and well over a two hundred developers. It was a great job and I had good friends there. It was not an easy decision to leave. I'm now head of my own one-man studio, developing my own game for the past year.

The reason I started my own company was pretty simple. I wanted to chart my own course - make the games that *I* wanted to develop. I'm in this industry because I love games and love making games. I could have made a lot more money by working at Google or Microsoft, but it's hard to beat really enjoying your work. And for me, the ultimate expression of that is to not only program games that someone else designed, but to try my hand at creating the entire thing by myself.

It's an incredibly risky endeavor - I figure I only have about a 50/50 shot at making it past the first game to continue with a sequel. But I'd rather regret trying this and failing then not failing at all. I harbor no illusions about becoming super successful like Notch - it's not wise to plan on lightning striking, but hell, I sure wouldn't mind, because that would let me continue doing this indefinitely. Rather, I'm hoping to be successfully enough to continue self-development. I require only a modest amount of success because I have reasonably low overhead, being just me developing the game. So, that's my definition of success - just successful enough to make a sequel, and I can start building my company from the ground up that way.

When I talked to my colleagues at work, I was surprised to hear how envious they were at what I was attempting. After all, they're working at what I'd consider to be one of the top game companies in the world, and probably the best place I've ever worked in my career over fifteen years. It's not that they were unhappy there, but it seems like every game developer has the same sort of desire - to try their own hand at creating their own game, with no strings attached.

After over a year of working on my own, I'm still loving being independent. I work long hours, but I set those hours myself, of course. It's hard to stay motivated all the time, except that I see my savings slowly draining to zero (I'm funding my own game). When I run into a technical problem, I can't walk over and ask one of my colleagues for advice. Nor can I really do that when making a design decision (a new job for me, as I'm a programmer by profession), and that's sort of difficult. But overall, I wouldn't have traded this experience for anything. If I do have to go back to work for someone else, I know that I'll be a much better programmer as a result of broadening my experience like this (having to build a modern game by myself from start to finish).

It doesn't take in to account the net speeds that people have. So you might well have a provider who has no problem doing HD video from Youtube all day every day, on lines that can handle it. However they sell slower lines and some customers have that, so that skews things.

Like say a phone company offers ADSL and IDSL for customers who are way out in the boonies, but VDSL for people in the city. Well those slow connections will bring down their stats, even if their network is quite fast and makes them look bad, despite them actually being the only option for some people.

A somewhat similar deal with cable companies can be people using old hardware. DOCSIS 2 cable modems only use one channel per segment, and those can get saturated these days. Well cable providers tend to be DOCSIS 3 to deal with that... but not everyone has a new modem. The cable company can recommend they get one, but if it is your equipment they can't make you (I guess other than cutting you off but they don't wanna do that).

Actually, the graph you posted was quite cherry-picked, I moved the start date of each trend to the start of the indicated year or to the previous year (if it was already at the start of a year) and now they all show an upwards slope.

You're just playing games with the data.

The market for dev kits can't expand in time to meet consumer demand, nor would it be cost-effective to try to do so. It takes a lot of capital to ramp up to full consumer production capacities. And, any dev kit taken out of the hands of actual developers will tend to limit eventual dev support at launch time. It's crucial to get those devices into the hands of actual developers in order to ensure there is actual support for the product at launch time. There's no need to expand access to this particular product, because it's not a consumer product.