They initiated the lawsuit because they felt that Scrolls' existence *could* damage the Elder Scrolls brand. But the lawsuit clearly *is* damaging the brand, deeply. I know this because I'm a diehard fan (I reserved the huge Skyrim collection for $165 a while back) and now I'm finding myself embarrassed instead of proud.

How is it possible that they're actually going through with this?

IDK about you guys but I'd be insulted if someone wanted to track my web usage. Nowhere I've ever worked (Yahoo!, Raptr, etc.) has monitored or restricted our Internet access, and I'd simply not tolerate it if they tried. Are most geeks here similar or is tracking seen as acceptable?

> Yahoo was your thing, Google is mine.

Completely right. I totally understand how Yahoo! (and AOL for that matter) is still around: because people became dependent on it years and years ago and it's still got its barbs sticking in. I can relate to this because that's currently my situation with Google. The only difference being that Google still has their shit together (at least, for now).

In order to evolve, platforms need their boundaries pushed. I'm sure this project is partially intended to reveal to browser makers (including Mozilla themselves) exactly where and how their platform could improve.

https://twitter.com/#!/paulg/status/51528478083923968

First they rebranded the XNA website as App Hub to help push Windows Phone 7, then they had XBLIG displayed after avatar clothing They did at least attempt to help support independent developers somewhat recently, so they have shown some sign of caring.

The flow my girlfriend went through recently when trying to watch a season of a TV show:

1. Checked to see if it was available digitally on standard channels like Netflix and Hulu (it wasn't).
2. Checked Amazon, where it was available digitally, but only per-episode, at a ridiculous price like $3/ep (making it over $100 for the season, more expensive than on DVD).
3. Downloaded torrent.

She was more than willing to buy it, but it has to be easy and reasonable or "other" methods of distribution win.

Pretty sure I got an ulcer after watching Meet the Feebles. But seriously, all the best wishes for him, I'm sure most geeks here have watched the LotR movies multiple times (I'm at 20+ for the Fellowship alone) and have high hopes for The Hobbit. Especially since it'll be a two-parter, we need him in good health.

Get well soon!

The company that ran this promotion (Consumer Watchdog) has been using Google Analytics. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/09/03/businessinsider-anti-google-privacy-group-consumer-watchdog-is-tracking-your-clicks-with-google-analytics-2010-9.DTL Hypocrite, much?

It's actually the audio tag: http://dev.w3.org/html5/spec/Overview.html

That was a fun contest. I entered a game called Onslaught!, check it out :)

I posted an article a while back about a DHTML engine I put on GitHub. I included an example game called Bombada that's also on GitHub. Note: the engine isn't "HTML5" per se (which is becoming more of a buzzword than makes sense) and I've moved on to a canvas engine (which will someday also be open source).

Even better, there was recently a game development contest on Boing Boing which saw 9 pretty cool entires. Ours was called Onslaught! and was written in JavaScript using canvas (though it does fall back to flash for audio).

I've got some substantial experience writing games in JavaScript and HTML5. To me, the biggest hurdle right now is audio. Somebody mentioned the inability to go fullscreen, and while I've seen that handled by the video tag, to me it's not as big a problem as the audio tag being basically unusable for gaming purposes.

Just open up the same API you are using internally and that should reduce the overhead of the API dramatically. I think much of the time the primary problem is that the developers don't have a proper API themselves so they have to build one from scratch.

A good pattern to adopt is: build an API and become your first client, to ensure the API is feature-rich. Twitter did this really well and it's helped to propel their business.

... of visiting the link and the very FIRST thing on the page (very top) is a banner ad, followed by a scrolling Motorola ad, a giant LREC on the right and a popup in the corner.

Holy crap too many ads.

That is absolutely the way to go, is just tell the kid "did you know you can make your own games on the computer?" The kid will likely fall mostly into one of three categories:

1. Disinterested.

2. Is blown away by the thought of making his/her own games and obsesses nonstop on programming of various kinds for probably their entire life. This might sound like an exaggeration, but the video game industry actually has a reputation for having these die-hard developers who work insane hours and love every minute of it (unless they're with a big dumb corporation).

3. Somewhat interested, looks into it, finds that it's really difficult and quits relatively early. Maybe the kid will even put a few demos together or something, but game programming is hard. There are few branches of software more difficult to develop. Most kids will fall into this category, I'd bet. But the good news is, this person may have a chance to still be really interested in programming and go on to have a great career writing other types of software.

It sounds like #3 would be just fine with this person, and I think it's a really common trait. I'm a programmer myself and many of the other devs I've talked to got into it by putting together a little game in QBASIC or whatnot.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/cocoia/4172250707/