The total amount of money involved, for all students in the country, is not huge. A couple of billion perhaps?

Why doesn't the government just stick that money in a pot, and issue the loans themselves? They can charge a notional low rate of interest, and set favourable rates of return. This is, after all, investing in education, and in the country as a whole, why try to gouge the rates up and punish people for trying to better themselves.

The UK government has a good system (or did 15 years ago, when I graduated). I could:

- choose how much to borrow (up to a limit, but I could borrow less)
- got a good rate of interest (1.2% or 1.3% I think)
- payments started a year after graduating
- didn't have to repay if I was earning around minimum wage (£12000 a year I think)
- could pay it off early if I wanted to

At the end of it, the government gets their money back (plus interest), from almost everyone, and they end up with a more educated workforce. Why exactly would you want to cripple that?

I can't agree with this entirely, you're forgetting that there was life (or rather, there were smartphones) before the iPhone. It's not like there was nothing before, but iPhone wiped the floor and really set the standard.

3 years ago, everyone was clamouring over the new motorola, nokia, treo or what have you. The market was segmented, lots of different standards (anyone remember nGage?), OSes, and phone brands. Then all of a sudden comes the iPhone - one phone, one supplier, one app store, one development environment, and bam, completely flattens everything else. The only remaining phones from beforehand are others with strong brands and purpose/identities - namely the Blackberry.

I don't see how a varied approach can beat the iPhone, in the mainstream arena. It's just too complicated for most people to go back down the multiple options route. To usurp the iPhone, something needs a killer device, and a killer app. You're not going to get something as impactful without a joined-up approach.

Having said that, I'm an iPhone user, really looking forward to Android, and may even develop for it (I hated Objective C and in particular XCode), but I'm a techie, not mainstream. I had a treo, lots of palm apps. Most people want a phone that looks cool, plays good games, has good music playing capability and is fun to use. The iPhone does these incredibly well and simply.

Android will hopefully take off and become a really great niche player for those of us into it, but the iPhone has practically defined the market and expectations single-handedly for mainstream smartphones, and it'll take one hell of an effort to beat that.

Anything from Bloom/HDR to Anisotropic filtering back all the way to 3d textured FPSes. The jump from, say, Doom to Quake was entirely driven by uptake of hardware 3d acceleration.

If you decide to "not see" those as innovation, well, that's your choice. They're certainly innovations in the style of games that can be portrayed. When/if the next change comes to realtime raytracing, that will completely change the way games can be designed (no need to count maximum visible polys, for a start), and that will be hardware-lead, too.

Try Plex, a XBMC derivative, on Mac. IMHO a better experience than XBMC (and FrontRow for that matter)

So far collectors editions generally include vanity items, mild bonuses for the start of play - items that just show off that the user bought the CE, but don't have much impact on the game. Making DLC including an *area* and *new abilities* immediately splits the game into haves and have-nots.

This is less like a CE, and more like WoW when Burning crusade came out - you want to be a blood elf? Well, you can't unless you have the expansion. Want to give your character jewelcrafting? Want to go to new areas (let alone progress pass 60), you can't.

These expansions are fine, though even in WoW's case it really made second class citizens of those who didn't have the expansion. However, to do this on LAUNCH day is nothing short of a money grab.

The version on TPB works just fine.

Just as likely as playing WoW, and nothing else, for 5 years?

The commenter below you thinks TF2 has more replayability than WoW, they are both certainly possibilities.

I think it's important to realise the context of the amounts being talked about. Lets say you play WoW for 5 years, at $14.95 a month. You earn $50K, you pay $2000 a month in rent/bills. You have a Starbucks $4 coffee every working day.

Total income: $250,000
Rent/Bills: $120,000
Starbucks: $5,200
WoW cost: ~$1,000 (subscription plus expansion packs)

In that context, it doesn't look that much, does it?

On the other hand, for about as much fun:

Team Fortress 2 total cost: $20

Well, last time they did, some pertty terrible things happened. Still, not sure correllation = causation... ;)

This is a very shrewd way of Microsoft positioning themselves to benefit from an emerging market.

P2P is growing both in terms of public awareness (thepiratebay, napster) and legal usage (e.g., Aion open beta being available through torrent the last few weeks - I saw over 164000 peers at one point...). However, governments are starting to clamp down on P2P specifically. The UK Government has a paper open to comment until the 29th September and due to be implemented next year, trying to track P2P users and potentially removing their broadband access.

This is likely to culminate in lots of restrictions on P2P technologies, which will end one of two ways:

1) Technology war, where the network is changed in subtle ways to avoid detection (torrents via SSL, mass VPN uptake). I can only see the more technically minded people doing this, though.
2) P2P networks are effectively blocked by mass ISP cooperation brought on by legislation, the only allowable exception added to the legislation is P2P with added DRM, and, lo and behold, if you want to make one of those, you have to pay a licence to Microsoft. Cha-ching.

Microsoft will be of course betting on the latter outcome, whether it works out that way this was a small outlay for them to give a potentially massive return. It's down to the market penetration of a suitable solution, really. Napster made P2P common, but after it shut down, your average mainstream user who wanted to download music didn't go to torrents or anything like that. To properly succeed, the appropriate solution will need to be easy to use and in the wide mainstream consciousness.

I'm not sure I really get what the purpose of this is, if someone can elucidate that would be great.

So people aren't reading enough online, fine, you want to highlight interesting content quickly for them to get to.

I don't see how this view actually helps users identify what is worth reading and what isn't - certainly in the small view, the pages are too small to read, you just get a view on page layout and graphics, nothing about the content or the article. Even the full-size views, are screenshots of the page and as such very inefficient (the one of the BBC article on Eddie Izzard is 80k).

Why not just syndicate/scrape the content and post it as RSS to get through more content, or alternatively, if you're after a view of what it is without the actual text, just grab graphics from sites and display those instead. I don't see how taking screenshots of it helps the provider or the reader.

Some people may consider viewing images as adjunct to browsing. Want to browse the web? Sure! Want to view images embedded in webpages? Well, that's an extra, you'll have to write a script to do that.

I think managing the persistent user experience, such as cookies session to session, is very much a part of browsing as a whole.

Why are these unsuited for business?

Get 2 pods, 100 TB of storage, $16K.
Hosting it in a raq somewhere... I don't know, $10K per year, for somewhere really good?
$10K per year for someone to perform maintenance on it, based on your figure above.

You're still coming in way under $50K, all in, for more storage.

I find it hard to believe that the additional $x00,000 really gives worthwhile "added value" on top of that.

Hahahahahaha! You've obviously never worked in the real world. Are you an academic?

The boss comes in, 5 hours before an unmovable deadline, and says "The client has insisted you change feature X to do Y". Unfortunately, that's a fundamental change in the architecture.

Or a nasty little hack. Which is the point here.

Scope creep/changing requirements is not the developer's fault. It's the managers, but sometimes these things just can't be managed, and the client will get their way or the cheques don't get written.

It's not about the difference between an RTS and an MMO. It's about copy verification (I think DRM is the wrong term here)

Seeing as we don't know the implementation details, seems silly to say it's good or bad yet. It could be something like Steam (connect just once), verify each time it's run, or constant connection to a server, who knows.

Having a unified copy verification scheme for all their games seems sensible. The availability of an internet connection is a computer issue, not a game type issue.

If you're setting up a LAN, does it have internet access? If it doesn't, how easy is it to add internet access? Not very, I'm guessing, especially with internet sharing. So you do that, and there is no problem. Is this really such a damn big deal?