Well, they are a niche genre for sure, but if done well, they can still be interesting today and actually are kinda coming back again a little.

I think the wave of motion-control systems for consoles played a big part in it, starting with the Wii. Because the Wiimote could essentially be used quite nicely as a modern lightgun system and was standard issue on all Wii consoles, games like House of the Dead: Overkill or Dead Space: Extraction for the Wii were made as rail shooters and now with the Playstation Move rail shooters are now in development for the PS3 as well.

I am not sure how successful those rail shooters are financially, but since the modern consoles gave them some legitimacy back, I think those are good signs that there is definitely interest in rail shooters now.

Well, if you could believe that he actually thinks that way and was not just deliberately stirring the pot in order to hawk his book, Tim Wu, who was mentioned in this slashdot story just two stories below this one, should technically feel very stupid right now for saying the Apple is the greatest danger to information freedom right before Facebook announces this.

At least the guy has impeccable timing in regards to putting his foot in his mouth ;)

Android would be a good example of this, as the company that originally made Android was bought by Google and the founder of that company, Andy Rubin is now overseeing all of Googles Android development.

Call me jaded, but the way the patent system is right now (meaning "fucked up"), as far as I am concerned, everything is subject to patent trolling until tested in court (and even then, sometimes another troll shows up later :-P)

Now considering that, why exactly should I assume that H.264 should be subject to patent trolling later and while WebM remains (patent) troll-free? Just because Google said so? Just because Google has an army of lawyers and money in the bank? Guess what, all of those arguments apply to H.264 too (the MPEG LA also says they have all the patents for it, they have lawyers and money in the bank from the license fees). And what Googles promises and their lawyers are actually worth, we will sadly see soon when the Android patent trials against Oracle gets started.

Also, since we already know that WebM and H.264 are technically very similar, I personally think that possible patent lawsuits coming from future patent trolls might be directed at both systems simultaneously, which would make any perceived advantage from WebM moot in that regard.

Now, WebM still has a lot of merit as an open and royalty-free web video codec. But as far as I am concerned, until either of them gets really tested in court against a patent troll, both codecs are still susceptible to litigation and H.264 may actually have an advantage in that regard as it has been on the market (and thus as a target for patent trolls) longer.

I hate to say this, but aside from the usual slashdot bashing (which honestly, I found kinda odd), there actually is a recently released smartphone with greatly increased battery life compared to its predecessor:

The Apple iPhone 4

As far as I have seen the new iPhone usually gets the best scores among all smartphones right now in terms of battery and a lot of user reports seem to suggest that they get great battery life out of it, even without disabling all connectivity options.

Yes, you could pack a spare battery and yes, walled garden and evil Apple and yada yada, but the recent crop of Apple products all seem to have nailed down great battery life for some reason, considering the iPad and the newer Macbooks seem to do well in that area as well.

Good luck trying to get an FCC certification with something like an Open GSM stack and then finding a carrier willing to let you on their network with that.

Try shutup.css

Its a custom stylesheet that autohides comments on a lot of popular web pages. There are even some browser extensions for it so you can toggle it on and off at will.

I think the way Bittorrent works, it does especially well for some specific use cases and might not work so well for other ones.

As far as I understand it, Bittorrent works very well if a lot of people want to get the same download at roughly the same time because then the bandwidth-sharing aspect of Bittorrent makes it scale better in comparison to a direct download. Thus, it makes sense to be used by someone like Blizzard for their updates, because all the players want and should get the Update more or less as soon as it gets out.

But I think it does not work as well if you try to use it for less frequented files or if you use it during less frequented times. I might be wrong here, but I seem to remember that in such cases, the protocol overhead makes the direct download the better choice.

Also (and my understanding might be shady here as well), something like using a local mirror is not quite easy to do via Bittorrent, I believe and local mirrors (for example, the ones sourceforge uses) can be quite useful and give much better bandwith.

In short, I think Bittorrent can be pretty powerful, but does not give advantages in all use cases, which might slow down wider adoption.

I think putting the (former) OpenOffice on independent footing away from a single corporation is a laudable goal and a good idea, but can it work this way?

As far as I remember, one of the problems OpenOffice always had was that most of the developers were paid developers inside Sun who worked on OpenOffice full-time. I thought the code was kind of a mess and hard to decipher for anyone outside, so the project always fought for more volunteers, but could not get many. Has this changed?

Because otherwise, OpenOffice development, while now technically being independent from Oracle, might still by all accounts be entirely dependent on Oracle goodwill if most of the meaningful development can still only be done by those full-time developers inside Oracle.

This might work however, if that new-founded Foundation can somehow acquire enough funding to ease away those internal developers as well and continue paying them to work on OpenOffice full-time. I am not sure if that is feasible, however.

Well, according to TFA, this includes ALL coverage of Apple, whether it is good or bad.

That means all the negative Apple articles and Apple bashing will be counted in as well. No wonder Apple got the highest number in the media coverage count, I am pretty sure there are very few companies that are so emotionally charged either way right now, so those articles tend to draw huge reactions either way :)

Also, the media selected for this survey is a bit odd. Of the 52 news outlets, 12 are websites, six are television channels, but a whopping 10 radio stations? That seems like the wrong ratio to me.

Thanks, I wish I had mod points right now to mod you up.

I would like to wait how this develops to make a final judgement, but this looks pretty serious and I hate to say this, but if those allegations are found to be true, those tactics look like the bad old days of someone like Microsoft or Intel strong-arming their business partners into shady deals in order to drive their competition out :-P

Good question.

I guess because in that case, Google would have to go against Verizon and I think against a big carrier, the chances of Google getting away with strong-arming one of those are pretty much nil, because Google is dependent on the carriers for Android marketshare and so apparently will let them get away with things like that.

Am I the only one who is concerned that Google abandoning the Nexus One might spell future trouble for the Android platform? They already said they have no plans for a successor, so the Nexus One will for all means remains the only device that gets new Android versions as soon as Google finishes them. If there is no officially "Google-blessed" other phone in the future with the same capability, this could be bad news not only for developers, who will then lose a valuable testing hardware for new Android versions.

I also believe that the Nexus One was a pretty significant kick in the butt for handset makers and carriers as an Android showcase, not only for new Android versions, but also as some sort of a gold standard hardware-wise which gives them a spec target they should aspire to. It enabled us to tell handset makers and carriers "...see, new Android versions on the Nexus One bring pretty nice improvements, we want those in all the other Android phones as well" and "...see, the Nexus One has pretty decent specs, all Android devices should have least something comparable to this under the hood". This put mindshare pressure on them to make better Android devices and equip them with the latest Android versions.

But now, with the Nexus One being slowly phased out and no spiritual successor on the horizon, I fear that Android device makers will be even more lazy in adopting the latest new Android versions. They are already lagging, but until now, there always was at least the Nexus One to show what we were missing, so the handset makers had some pressure to bring newer Android versions even to older devices. But now? What incentive should OEMs have now to make new Android versions available, the Nexus One was the only one to get them on time and the only one which was even promised to get any update at all.If we now try to put mindshare pressure on them, they can all say "well, we would love to, but this is a lot of work and there is no other phone with the brand new Android version anyway, so who cares?". Look at the slow pace of getting Froyo to Android devices and then tell me you are not even a little bit concerned this might happen...

And without something like a regularly updated hardware gold standard like the Nexus One was, maybe Android device makers will try to bring out more cheap Android devices with subpar hardware, which will give you a pretty crappy Android experience. I think this is what is happening in the Android tablet space at the moment: There is no "gold standard" Android tablet, so a lot of the Android tablets seem to be quickly cobbled together, with crappy specs, which slow them down and make for a poor tablet experience. I have no trust in handset makers that they will not try to make somethink similar in the smartphone area.

Lastly, I think the dreaded fragmentation problem could become much worse if Google no longer has a gold standard device like the Nexus One. Android 3.0 and beyond seem to bring quite significant changes to the Android UI and with the Nexus One, you would get at least one device with the pure, unaltered Android UI experience. But without that, things like Sense UI or Motoblur could become even more prominent and dilute Android, especially when the pressure to provide new Android versions goes down without something like the Nexus One. Also, handset makers could try to hang on to old Android versions they have already tested and deployed much longer, which would mean the new features introduced in new Android versions could be delayed, since none of the device makers bothers to catch up.

Sure, the community can alleviate some of those concerns with custom firmware and stuff. But without a successor to the Nexus One, I fear the need for tinkering will become bigger and bigger and would put a serious damper on the mass appeal and the future growth of the Android platform. I think it is no coincidence that all other smartphone makers either design their own hardware or otherwise put pretty strict definitions even on their hardware (like Microsoft will do with WP7), I think in significant part because of some of the concerns I am having.