I'm really liking Construct (http://www.scirra.com/construct2/) at the moment. It's an HTML5 game engine that's easy enough kids should be able to pick it up and it has the added bonus of being free for non-commercial use. If you want to see it's capabilities, I threw together a little game in around 5 hours of work to learn it's functionality and it turned out ok. You can view it here (http://jemjensen.com/caversrevenge/)

http://sadtrombone.com/

I smell a class action lawsuit!

Holy shit!
~Anonymous Coward

I agree, you *do* solemnly swear

I think he's referring to the "Self-support" option ($349)

According to the rider, he doesn't like egg yolks unless they're completely hard-boiled so eggs for breakfast may be a no-go.

Has anyone actually tried installing this add-on? I figured I'd give it a shot but it just downloads the XPI file and FF mobile won't open them - the 'open' button has no associated action. I've looked around to see why FF would do such a foolish thing but no solutions, only aggravations. Anyone else in the same boat?

Michael Jackson behaving admirably... http://i.imgur.com/Okk86.jpg

There's really no reason why this couldn't have been spun into a positive. They're effectively reverting back to the DVD-only plan they had 3 years ago because the streaming service got too big. And they're even dropping the price of the old plan despite inflation and higher postage. That's a lot of room to spin. Whoever wrote their announcement needs a new career if they can't even spin that into something that resonates empathy.

It's entirely possible to spin something like this without alienating their partners or customers. It would've been a simple formula to do this gracefully. Admit the change isn't great for everyone, (empathize, dammit!) remind everyone that three years ago it was $9.99 without streaming, (this whole thing has been a free add-on) and cushion the blow by making price changes look like price drops for most users. Example:

Thank you to all of our loyal customers who have followed us through our experiment with streaming these last 3 years! Through this time we've seen Netflix Streaming grow in new ways - from what we thought would be a small complimentary service into a product all it's own. All along we've tried to add new value to your Netflix subscription without raising prices but streaming has become too large of a product to make that possible. Starting on (DATE), Netflix Streaming will become it's own stand-alone product, available for $7.99, and will not be included with the classic DVD service. We understand that some might see the reverting of the classic memberships to their original form as a loss of value; after three years of receiving the free streaming add-on, you've come to expect more from your subscription than the DVD-only plan of the past. That's why we're pleased to announce that we're also dropping the price of the classic membership from $9.99 to $7.99.

Tag on a little rally cry or another thank you to the end and you've got some calmer customers. You'd think this would be second nature to PR and marketing people... I'm typecast as an antisocial Java programmer and I understand people better than they did... O.o

I'm of a similar opinion - I haven't heard of many who utilize both streaming and DVDs to their full potential. I used to stream 99% of my content and very rarely added a DVD to my queue. Eventually I realized it was the same price and easier to just switch to the existing $7.99 all-streaming package and pay $2 here and there to VUDU for those odd movies that weren't on Netflix streaming. I've been very happy with that arrangement so far.

ATM has machine in it's name? Kinda like how we get stories about Hasselhoff because he was in Knight Rider. Wait... that doesn't sound right

I concur. Original post is dated 2008... so their prediction is now 7 years away, making it made up

I think the JavaOne experience sums up the current state of Sun and Oracle nicely.

This year's JavaOne was pretty disappointing compared to previous years and many of us Java enthusiasts felt a little unwanted. Most of the focus was on hardware, which we didn't care about at all. Little of the content was geared towards a technical audience. The tech demos of past years were hushed into side rooms, replaced by celebrity meet-and-greets with Lance Armstrong, Apolo Ohno, the Black Eyed Peas, and a yacht racing team.

Someone must've been aware this would have a poor reception from the Sun crowd because they quarantined us away from the Oracle Open World groups much of the time and fed us uncanny amounts of free beer and vodka. The open bar seemed to be specially coordinated to just before and during Ellison's speeches about how lock-in is awesome.

When it came to the actual sessions, the speakers were great but there were moments where you could tell they were intentionally leaving things out. I believe it was a session with eBay's Randy Shoup where someone asked what App Server they ran on and he alluded to not being able to answer that since it "looked a lot like Tomcat." Of course the absence of Google was noticeable as well.

There's a little war going on inside Oracle right now between trying to mesh traditional Oracle marketing and lock-in to the Sun people who dreamed of openness and interchangeability. Obviously the two are ideologically at odds and all the liquor in San Francisco didn't help that. They're certainly trying to make it work and that's commendable but so far the result has just been many of the Sun people walking away. Sun's assets were as much the people and their mission as their patents and products. Oracle has so far ignored that half of Sun and it is rapidly hemorrhaging.

http://search.dilbert.com/comic/Marketing%20Liquor

I use Grooveshark but they charge $3/mo for their mobile app as well. Pandora is still good and free, though