In many ways gaming has gone the way of hollywood. More flash, bigger budgets and more streamlined.

I invite you to look at Shadow of the Colossus. HDR, fur shader, fairy shader, DoF, very nice looking motion blur, IK, and much more flashy effects, on a 200Mhz MIPS machine with 32MB of ram, complete with data streaming. That, and the game is considered to a goddam piece of art if there was ever a game that was worthy of calling art.

Actually it's not a new direction at all. If anything, the PS2 was the new direction. Stick very high speed vector processors next to the a standard CPU and GPU and some low latency ram on a high speed interconnect. The PS3 is just this idea extended to more vector units and current-generation CPU and GPU (at the time it was made).

What Microsoft did was smart - instead on banking on very specialized hardware, it made sure it's development kit could do the optimisation automatically, hence it's MUCH easier to push the xbox to it's limits than the PS3 (read about the ATi shader compiler for R600, and how cool Visual Studio for the Xbox is).

Let me just chip in. I'm a Freenaute too, but i moved from Poland having a UPC (docsis 2, then docsis3) connection. The difference is astounding. Using ADSL2+, the top i can get is 28MB/s, but realistically nobody gets more than 12MB/s (on average) because of the distance to the DSLAM, which tends to be 1km-2kms. I get 10. Is there a way to fix that? No, because Cat3 can't carry frequencies above 2Mhz at that distance.

For comparison, i get 50MB/s back in PL without the line ever breaking a sweat, and if i wanted to i can upgrade to 100MB/s (i haven't since i don't have a router *at home* that can handle the traffic) on a whim. And why? Because with a copper shielded cable the cable doesn't experience interference, and the width of *one channel* is more the total bandwith of one ADSL line.

I really get that for an ISP, Free is trying really hard to make ADSL suck less (by not using PPP for example, all the extras), but from personal experience Docsis > ADSL any time.

not a chance

Expensive $9000 NDA licensed devkits. Just like on home consoles today. You think the idea is outrageous, right? Well, yes, today it is. Not in 5-10 years, when 10.9 finally takes away the ability to run any software except software signed by apple, distributed exclusively on the app store. Locked, right now apps are locked on the iPhone.

Now ask yourself this question : what makes them more money? Which way are they going to stop supporting/lock down as soon as they can get away with it?

Follow the money, follow the greed.

Exactly. OSX, at least in the form that we know it, is dying. The writing is there on the wall. In the end, it will become a dumb vessel for iApps just like the iPad and the iPhone is. Time to jump ship.

Pretty much same opinion here - once it works it's great, but once something breaks - oh the bullshit you have to muddle thru. Not speaking French adds another level of complexity. Thankfully the Free.fr employees on Aduf are very helpfull :)

Not much of them left, that's why.

I'm enjoying Free since i moved to France about 3 months ago, and i don't see any traffic shaping relating to Usenet or SSL, both which i use extensively. The only time i see the link go slower is when i turn on the Freebox HD, or pick up the phone, but that's to be expected.

If it wasn't for shitty outsourced customer support (i have to run to a forum where the *actual* employees post - ADUF, only then stuff gets fixed) and the shitstorm that is connecting lines with France Telecom, I'd say the package is great - nice hardware, native IPv6, pretty cheap. Tho i still prefer my Cable from UPC back in Poland.

With the exception of connectBot, all of those you listed do not in literal sense quit the app, or close it. You can just as well press the home button, with the exact same effect - the application in question will be kept in memory, and the process will not be destroyed, unless Android deems it necessary.

  What IS true however, is that you cannot sign-off, thus Skype marks itself active, and Android will not attempt to close it (and free it's resources) like it should. But I've corrected myself about that.

This is how all of android apps work, by design.

Except, what developer would willingly agree to hand over his product to this kind of a store?
Is having an app that's featured in a walled garden store where other people have control over your app a desirable thing nowadays?

In other words : are there programmers who would like to take in the ass from amazon?

This is more or less how the new game consoles (X360 and PS3) work.