Timing is wrapped up in the luck. An idea before its time is still a failure.

I assume you are not trying to explain the resurgence of vinyl?

As someone raised in Hawaii, I'm pretty shocked that people still think that introducing yet another new species into an ecosystem is going to solve any problems. I thought we all figured this out over 100 years ago?

Showing up at a funeral wearing nothing but a bikini, or crapping your pants in a crowded bus are not "sinister" per se, but I would argue that they are nonetheless still in poor taste.

I had thought that burning books of any kind was in poor taste, but I guess it doesn't really matter if the books are still in print ...

Bullshit. Mistakes are roughly stochastic, ergo, there are random elements in chess players' performance. This is why chess matches involve more than just two games.

I can't see anything on a matte screen in bright sunlight. Neither can my wife, or any of my lab mates. Outdoors in sunlight, it's easy to keep the sun from reflecting into your eyes; with a matte screen, all kinds of stray light gets reflected your way. In medium brightness (eg, at my wife's old lab, where they had very bright lighting and everything was white), glossy can be a problem, but I haven't ever had any issues. Currently, I am in sunny southern california, next to an open window, in a white room. No problems.

Off the shelf, these have the best reputation. The Mad Catz ones are pretty easy to mod, if you don't like the parts. That said, the Mad Catz Tournament Edition and Hori Real Arcade Pro sticks come with real high-end arcade parts. I think they are all designed with consoles in mind, but some come with a USB plug. I have Mad Catz's TvC stick and Hori's Wii Fight Stick and they both work fine for me (via cwiid). The Hori stick is one of their "cheap" ones, so it doesn't have good parts and they aren't easy to replace, but probably it's better than anything off of DealExtreme, and it wasn't that expensive before it was discontinued. The X-Gaming ones are probably ok too (though impressions seem more mixed), but I didn't want two sticks attached to each other (the solos have been listed as out of stock for some time now).

I thought most arcade sticks were 8-way digital ones? I was going to say that maybe analog sticks became more common after I stopped playing at arcades, but my experience covers most of the games that run well on MAME. Most of those games were designed with 4 or 8-way digital sticks in mind, so I'm not sure what the problem is. For example, I find it difficult to believe that Gyruss uses an analog stick, given that basically all shoot 'em ups (even the new ones) use 8-way digital sticks.

I think he wants a stick, but I could be wrong. MAME is an arcade emulator, after all.

Well, yeah, I went to the lecturer. Unfortunately, in my case the lecturer was just a post-doc, who also had no pull. We did go to the chair about it, but he wasn't very excited to have to deal with that sort of thing. He was the cynical sort of professor, which I think had something to do with it.

I agree with your sentiment, but not your conclusion. As a TA, I caught no less than 10% of my students literally copying text off of the internet and pasting it into their essays. None of them were punished in the least. The lesson I learned from the experience is that if you don't have any pull in the department, you let cheating slide because it is not worth the hassle. And this wasn't at some no-name school, either. It's one of the top research universities on the west coast.

No one. But most people have phones, and many will be playing games on them. It's like with cameras. Who buys a phone to take pictures? Basically no one, but any compact camera that comes out has to be better than a phone camera or it's DOA. I don't really care for the iPhone's design, particularly the lack of buttons, but the fact of the matter is that dedicated portable gaming devices need to justify themselves to a audience that is likely to own a phone capable of competent gaming. Chief among those phones (at the moment) are the iPhone 4 and EVO.

I used 960x640 for the iPhone 4 resolution, which I got from Wikipedia. Surely they wouldn't change the aspect ratio or use non-square pixels? As for the other numbers, do they really matter? By the time the 3DS comes out (say, March 2011 for NA), the iPhone 4 (or some Android phone we haven't yet heard of) will be the portable to beat.

Even counting both frames, the 3DS has 1/3 the resolution of the iPhone 4, so I would guess that pushing polys would be more important. I have read that the PICA200 is easy to program for, on account of its multitudinous built-in functions. That probably also improves battery life somewhat.