They didn't need to at the time, no. They had the motion sensor which was a novel new idea and got a lot of people who had no interest in consoles to buy a Wii. But that wore off fast and those people lost interest years ago. They went for that market because Microsoft and Sony were spending a ton of money making more powerful consoles and selling them at a loss and Nintendo knew they couldn't stay in that game. The console gamers, the ones who buy consoles every generation, are clearly less interested in Nintendo's offerings than the PS or Xbox. And everyone else has no reason to buy a console when their phone/tablet/computer works well enough. If they made a phone or tablet OS the majority of the market wouldn't care and as we're seeing here they aren't having success competing with the other console makers. Sony and Microsoft don't need to make money from their gaming divisions because they have other products that make money. Nintendo doesn't have this luxury so they are at a disadvantage. Thus, they should really consider trying to reach a wider audience by focusing on just the games than trying to control the entire stack. If they have another breakthrough idea it might be smarter to integrate it with Steam Box or something and make a deal with Valve. Then they can capture the PC market as well. Maybe I'm wrong and they'll come up with an amazing console for their next generation, but I think it's much more likely that they will change strategy.

With the Wii they realized they couldn't keep up with the PS and Xbox. Instead of trying to get people to buy their consoles for their games they should switch to just making games. Even if they required custom controllers for some of their games I doubt it would be hard to come out ahead.

That is an amazing idea. Set up my phone to feed a 3D video feed of what I am pointing at directly to my VR headset. That way I can see the world in 3D everywhere I go! Why did they even bother with Google Glass when we could have all been walking around with cardboard boxes on our heads already?

Nothing new. EA is still being EA. People are still calling for boycotts of EA. People are still getting excited about the trailers and preordering anyway. You have to get the special pre-order items, right?

I haven't bought an EA game in a very long time because their bad behavior has been going on for over a decade. If you think gamers are going to boycott them rather than getting sucked up in all the hype you haven't been paying attention. Don't let that stop you from trying though.

In the past I've primarily used Nvidia cards and always used the closed source drivers because they were so much better.

Now I have an AMD card and was having performance problems. I found out that the open source drivers for AMD are better than the proprietary ones.

So I consider it relevant just for the simplicity of the overall system. New users shouldn't have to research whether the proprietary driver is better than the open source one for their card. It's better for the success of Linux when things just work out of the box, and right now the box contains the open source drivers. Personally I think it was not very smart of them to ship with these drivers in the first place until they were mature enough, but that's where we are.

It seems like that would be a little too unpredictable. When someone complains that the unit is confused by the room they're in what do you tell them? Move? Send photos of your entire room so they can troubleshoot the problem? What if it is an intermittent problem? And I'm sure reports of it not working would scare off other potential customers. It may work 90% of the time, but that last 10% would be a pain in the ass.

This is basically it. When you pay for a game up front you know what it costs. When a game is "free" all that means is you don't know up front how much it's going to cost or what you are going to have to pay for. There is some amount of deception in the business model. And of course they always end up introducing more ways to get money from you, making a lot of people feel like all of their time spent on the game is wasted once it hits that breaking point where they ultimately quit.

Presidents these days are mostly elected for their charisma. You have to look at who a candidate associates with to get an idea of what they are actually going to do. For example, Obama putting 5 RIAA lawyers in the DOJ then pushing for things like ACTA. It's usually the advisors that come up with the ideas, so analyze who is advising them. This is probably why the NSA stuff has been consistent between Bush and Obama.

As for the lack of accomplishments that's another plus in an election. Voters tend to react more strongly to the negative stuff and people sometimes make mistakes or do things you might not agree with. A ghost is more electable.

I'm sure the exchanges see value in it when the banks are paying to put servers at the exchange: http://content.time.com/time/b... (5 years old but it was the first hit on Google).

There was actually some brief talk about this I think in 09? The response was predictable. The banks screamed about how it would be the end of the world if we did that and clearly the government doesn't understand what they're doing and need to stay out of it.

You don't seem to understand who you are talking about. Feinstein has always been one of the biggest supporters of pretty much every controversial thing the various government agencies have done. Whatever her motive here I assure you it has nothing to do with speaking up about overreach. Unfortunately she isn't up for re-election for another 4 years or so, which means her strong support of these unpopular activities will be forgotten by then and she will probably be re-elected anyway. (I am a little annoyed because there were some very good candidates on the ballot running against her but people see D and INCUMBENT and vote for them regardless of how bad they are.)

Admittedly I mostly skimmed it the first time and read the conclusions at the end. In a second read through you are right there is a lot of that "it was fine, the users are dumb" attitude. But it does say that Microsoft is making an already inconsistent UI even more inconsistent without trying to justify or downplay it at the end like he typically does. Overall the article doesn't feel like a big sales pitch like most of his other articles.

A Peter Bright article that is actually critical of a Microsoft product without trying to downplay all of its flaws? What is this world coming to?

The scariest part to me is what will happen when the founders leave? This is when most tech companies take a nosedive. For that reason alone it's worth being cautious about them getting too big.

Gnome 3 is becoming usable but I'm thinking it is poorly managed more than anything. I don't know that I would blame designers for this one.

For example, in 3.8 the overlay doesn't let you filter by categories anymore. A feature they actually REMOVED. Apparently it's because in some *future* version they have a new feature that replaces it. But that's not in yet so for now have fun finding anything. If they would stop doing stupid shit like that they are very close to having a good usable desktop.