The MAFIAAs coffin, that is.

They simply do not understand that they with this are chipping away at the very foundation that supports their business; their customers. They might stay afloat for a while but sooner or later something is bound to crack in a big way. I feel sad for every person this happen to, but it's unavoidable.

Yeah, it only took five freaking years to get all classic preorders filled. :)

The OpenPandora is unfortunately too little too late - it was interesting when it came out, but now? Now I can use my Android for everything I wanted to use my Pandora for...

That should read, "ejabberd or Openfire". Gah, stupid typoes! :P

If it's for your own personal use, I reccommend Prosody. Small, simple, stable and with the features you want.

If it's for a larger org like a medium-large company, then Erlang or Openfire is the better way to go though.

Rowling had a day job while writing her first Potter. How would keeping copyright exactly as it is help Rowling 2.0 write her first Potter 2.0 without having a day job?

For that matter, if copyrights were to be reduced to twenty years, how would it prevent Rowling 2.0 to earn just as much money writing Potter 2.0?

Copyright is today a limitation of the consumers ownership rights. Therefore we must always ask ourselves, is it fair that they keep having this right? Why? And is their right outstepping their bounds?

It's not illegal to make a backup copy for fair use.

And I swear to god, should someone go after Byuu for taking on and finishing this monumental task, then I and many with me will pitch in the fundraiser to cover his attorney costs.

Next up, maybe the PAL set? :)

The more people will realise "Hey, wait a second, screw those assholes! I don't have to put up with this. I can say no to their products!"

And when enough shit happens, your Average Joe will go free culture (aka Creative Commons) ON YO ASS, YO!

Either they stop chasing their customers, or they die trying to squeeze their customers every penny they got.

Controller: Give you that one, they sucked harder than a vietnamese prostitute. In the seventies :P

Vibration pack: Oh come ON. Nintendo introduced vibrating controllers to the console market (for PC "Force Feedback" had been available for a loooooong time). Then Sony improved it (Rumble released April 1997, Dual Shock released November 30th 1997 - 6 months after Nintendo).

One analog stick: Nintendo introduced the concept to consoles and gamepads. Before there had been joysticks but never on a controller like this. Yeah, compared to PS1 Dual Analog (and later Dual Shock) it sucked, but do remember that Nintendo had developed this already in 1995 (though the console itself turned up 1996), and Sony had the Dual Analog ready a whole year after that - well into the lifetime of the PS1, so it wasn't on every PS1 the way the N64 controller was.

Cooling: Never happened to my N64, despite having it on for 24-hour marathons of DK64. Might've been a problem with your specific unit or a specific game? Not saying it didn't happen, just that it probably wasn't a general fault.

Cartridges: Aye, they crap out when kids do that, but it's not NEARLY as bad as scratched discs. You seen the kids' DVD collection at your average family? Yeah, they would have been equally scratched in your family.

From what I remember the N64 was more powerful hardware-wise but suffered from the cartridge memory restrictions and the fact that it was hard to develop for and therefore max the performance. When you had the option of having a buttload of textures and CD-quality music on the PS1 vs few-and-compressed textures and synthesized music on the N64, the choice was rather clear. It got better with the GameCube, but 1.5GB vs 4GB again turned out to be a really painful limitation...

Mario 64 is one heck of a platformer - for it's time. Just like Super Mario Bros 3 is a heck of a platformer for the NES, but today it's kinda sorta a bit dated.

However, playing it on an emulator is not quite the same, since you won't have quite as tight controls (controls are off by around 100ms or so). On the N64 the balance of the game is just right IMO, well designed puzzles, new-ish moves like backflips and longjumps, and epic moments like when you meet Bowser for the second time and he makes the ground almost flip you off. And the difficulty is just enough to be challenging without being frustrating, and the size of the game is just enough to make you want more without actuallly making you tire midway because it's so much. :)

I find Mario Galaxy 2 to be the game Mario64 should've been to be honest, except that I find it a bit *too* large... But to each to his own eh?

"why the fuck should they waste all that money? To make some license nazi happy?"

No. To not lose market share.

BSD. License. Is. Compatible. With. GPLv2.

Linux. Kernel. Is. Not. And. Cannot. Ever. Be. GPLv3.

"As for why they can't just "put those parts" into a binary...because it won't fricking work? you are talking about gutting the very HEART of the system, what would that accomplish?"

Spoken like a person who haven't ever refactored code. Yes you can move those business-critical parts into their own functions, and then move those specific functions into a binary blob. BSD allows for that. But seems you can't comprehend this, since it seems UMPOSSIBLE.

Now if the code is spagetthicoded all over the place and thus this isn't possible, then that's a whole other ballpark entirerly. And yes, OSS drivers just work while proprietary needs some love. Even though most of them suffer a bit of performance.

First off: Nvidia can choose any GPLv2 compatible license they want, including GPLv2 itself. It CANNOT choose GPLv3 because it's incompatible with GPLv2 (though not GPLv2+, but kernel is GPLv2 and not GPLv2+).

Secondly: Why can't those few, specific parts that must be closed be pushed into a binary blob with hooks in the more open source core? Sounds to me it should be possible especially with a BSD-style license. It could be possible, for instance, to just keep the encryption closed while everything else is open.

Thirdly: nVidia WAS the best choice for Linux. Now AMD and Intel "just works" on Linux (atleast with OSS drivers) while nVidia requires some maintenance. This gap will only widen further and further, the more nVidia persist with their closed source strategy. This is starting to translate to direct sales to both Intel and AMD. The fact that some nVidia fanboys are recommending the hardware does not change that fact.

Fourthly: Linux has gotten along just fine on servers and other types of devices. And no, I don't count Android as Linux because Android is a platform that happens to use the Linux kernel as it's base, but virtually everything above that is proprietary and/or reworked. Therefore one could rather easily replace the Linux kernel in Android for, say, BSD or Windows kernels.

You can use closed-source software in an open source ecosystem, whatever gave you the idea that you can't? Also, commercial is not the same as open source - look at Quake 1, 2 and 3, totally open yet the games themselves still cost money.

However, Nvidia is a special case - their drivers are NOT their core business model, and developing Open Source ones (or even better, join the Nouveau effort) would, in the long run, gain them so much. Right now it's a bit of a "Meh" situation - but imagine 10 years down the road, when the Nouveau drivers are up to par to the latest and greatest graphics. Where new hardware get full support within six months. And where the current drivers have been optimized out of the wazoo. Even now, the case for staying closed source for nVidia is shrinking, especially as their biggest competitors - Intel and AMD - already went FOSS. In a few years there will be rational reason left to stay closed source.

What Linux devs has said is that, if you develop hardware, and you want to play nice with Linux, then you must go Open Source drivers. However by going open source you do not need to worry too much about driver development in the first place, since 90% of your work will already be done.

Anything that uses windows.forms seemed to be struggling last I looked, but, that was a few years ago, so things might've improved. There are a few other proprietary extensions as well, like XNA. But, yeah...

Not really, Nouveau has come a long way and will get a competitive advantage by this. Though Nouveau is still slow, performance is increasing all the time. Last I heard power management was the final big hurdle to overcome and then a few smaller areas that need to be worked on (as well as performance ofc), so in another 3 years I'm expecting Nouveau to be fully up to par with the blob.