There's an unauthorized play with the Peanuts characters called "Dog sees God" that does rather a lot with the theme of Charlie Brown's hopefulness. Some of it's just for shock value (Linus has become a stoner, Pigpen develops a nasty mean streak), but the show is worth it for the ending, where CB's hopefulness is, after sixteen or seventeen years of repeated disappointment, vindicated just a tiny bit.

Simple fix: grab Dosbox. It probably has better compatibility than your '95 based computer ever did, although I admit that the fiddling was part of the fun of those old games.

You'll need to go buy another goat first, obviously.

More or less my point exactly (2DBoy satisfied Nintendo's requirements even as a tiny two-many indie outfit). Actually, all things considered Nintendo is doing *fantastic* with indie PC devs - they have 2DBoy (World of Goo), Nicalis (Cave Story, La Mulana, and Night Game), and the Super Meat Boy guys. Microsoft's presently got Jonathan Blow for Braid and Derek Yu for Spelunky, and Sony has Jenova Chen (flOw, Flower, etc) and Jonathan Mak (Everyday Shooter).

All in all, a good time to be a talented indie dev.

Playing devil's advocate for a moment: what truly amazing stuff have we seen from the "not-a-day-job" indie devs on the Microsoft and Apple stores? There have been several excellent indie games of late (Braid and World of Goo come to mind immediately), but I notice that they came from small teams who put their money where their mouths were and took on game dev full-time. The biggest exception I can think of is the fabled Cave Story, which saw enough success as a freeware game on Win/Mac/PSP that it's getting a WiiWare port from Nicalis... and Nicalis qualifies under Nintendo's requirements.

OK, no more devil's advocate. I think Nintendo is using their dev requirements as a crude quality filter. It doesn't feel fair (speaking as a sometimes indie dev myself), and there's a chance that they'll miss the next big thing that somebody cooks up in their garage... but they appear to be willing to take that risk. Guess it wouldn't sting quite as much in my case if there wasn't so much first-party crapware on the DSiWare store... clocks and calculators? I definitely prefer open platforms, even with the attendant flood of me-too crap.

I believe they mentioned that customers were asking for bigger screens on surveys. Also, speaking anecdotally, I remember my mom wondering aloud "how can you see anything on that tiny screen?" several times with the older Gameboys and the original Nintendo DS. Of course, she now uses a smartphone with a screen that's not much bigger, so I suppose she's got that worked out now.

Fairly simple - in the real world you can go to another store and buy the "you name it" that Wal-Mart refuses to sell. There are no other (definitely legal) app stores you can turn to on the iPhone. There are of course alternative phones, but it's typically neither simple nor inexpensive to make such a switch - and if one does switch, there's usually no guarantee that the next carrier/OS creator won't limit you in similar ways.

Our family once owned an old Sony VAIO desktop. It came with a floppy drive, but as it was the year 2000, floppies were quickly becoming unfashionable. Because of this, Sony hid the floppy drive behind a small plastic hatch. The problem? The hatch attached to the case with a small but fairly powerful magnet... which corrupted every single disk inserted into the drive. To this day I'm wary of Sony products (and VAIOs in particular) because of that little screw-up.

Not to defend ogg vorbis too much, but it has actually achieved success in a few realms - it's the audio format of choice on Wikipedia, which is one of the web's most popular sites, and it's used in tons of video games (precisely because it doesn't need to be licensed, I think). The things that made it successful in those areas (matching ideology and price/compression performance, respectively) don't really mean much to the average MP3 player user, though.

"Man-millenia" - it might only take a year (or less) to reimplement, but the number of hours put into the project (spread across a large number of programmers) would be huge.

Except I'm pretty sure that there are modern languages and libraries that can handle this without Fortran. I don't have much experience with it myself, but I'm pretty sure that's exactly what MATLAB is for, for one.

Plastic is a petroleum product. Can the conversion process be reversed? At what point does that million square miles of plastic gook start to look like a mine-able resource and not simply pollution? Certainly it could be recycled into new products, too.

Hm. Well, give Vernor Vinge a shot. His work can be in a somewhat similar vein to Stross' stuff, but I've liked it.