I think GP meant digital downloading in general. The big four just aren't giving us very good options for it; old movies especially cost much much more digitally than from a bargain bin. Yeah sure, the bargain bin doesn't help the industry. Well, give me a reason to help the industry and have affordable digital downloads.

Just a few weeks ago, I searched for Mystery Men on Youtube. To my great surprise, a legal version was available for $10 - the $10 allows you to watch it on YouTube as many times as you want. Well, I bought it just to support legal digital downloads, but for hell's sake, how many people are going to pay $10 for Mystery Men in 2013? Newer movies close the price gap a little better, but I never see them being advertised for digital download.

Anyone who would rather pay $10 for a functional software license over paying $60 for an actual copy of the software, and yet detests the idea of paying $60 for just the license, is a hypocrite who has no principles. Especially since the XBone requires a dedicated hardware investment and Steam doesn't.

Not a lot of people would go as far as to get a tethering plan for internet outages; they can do other things when the internet is down, like do errands or play games. That's only part of the problem; the other problem is "despite us saying it would never happen, connection to XBone servers isn't working due to a technical error, high volume, or our system thinking you're a pirate with 90% confidence. Since you just turned your Xbone on and haven't played it for 24 hours, have fun not playing! But don't worry, this doesn't happen all that often." Sure, most people can live with it, but why get used to something that there is no need to get used to? I could get used to having to charge my phone every 30 minutes, but I wouldn't buy such a phone.

So they embedded Zune into their phone OS so they could say it "evolved" its way there rather than being a colossal failure. But then the phone OS also hasn't done well, so what can they do now? Put their phone OS interface into their Desktop OS to save face? ;)

Correct, it had more to do with general distrust with Sega for releasing three(!) pieces of hardware and abandoning them shortly afterwards. The Dreamcast was different but few would take that risk after hearing about the recent history of Sega hardware. There were lots of factors, but this was the one that ensured Sega leaving the hardware business.

A recent relevant example; PS3 entirely removed Linux support a couple years in, even though they were bragging about it quite a lot at launch. Technically, you could keep it, you just can't visit the PS Shop or use any online features (which you paid for, as part of the price of the console) ever again, that's all. Not sure if disc-enforced updates apply to this one or not.

Since early adopters are more savvy, Sony has every reason to tout their lack of DRM compared to the Bone, for now. Will their DRM be better throughout the generation? Unless Sony makes a pledge (and really, even if they do), it's their choice, not ours.

"We're going to try to stop and think before doing and saying stupid things."

(a small amount of time passes)

"This game that refuses to run unless you connect with our servers has no DRM, you're an idiot for thinking so, and we refuse to change it".

svefg cbfg

Depends on if the PS4 and\or XBox3 will have a comparable (or better) tablet. If not, the WiiU will always have the tablet over the others. The PS4 promises interactivity between the Vita and smart phones. Smart phones are increasingly becoming a staple, so being able to interact with a console would be a huge leap in usability. Will smart phones interact with the PS4 and TV screen in the same way the WiiU tablet does? Hope so, far from guaranteed. Sounds more like Sony's doing an OnLive thing with them. Perhaps the XBox3 will be able to use smart phones (including iOS and Android, not just Windows devices) in ways like the WiiU's tablet; that would all but remove Nintendo's edge here. Probably not all that likely, but if any console could integrate with iOS and Android phones to the extent of WiiU tablets, 4 or more at a time, I'd bet on that console leading the generation by a good margin as long as it was ok otherwise.

Also depends on how cheap Nintendo can afford to make the WiiU in comparison of the others. I very much encourage powerful consoles that can bring the power of not-too-old gaming PCs, yet it still should give Nintendo an edge on console price, even counting the extra cost of making the tablet. If they can leverage that, they should sell enough to keep a place in the market, even if the weak specs are a deal-breaker for many.

Finally, while it's up to personal preference, Nintendo is still making games that some people find great. Even New Super Mario Bros. U, which was clearly a quick game they knew they could have ready for launch, and the fourth in the NSMB series, is a lot of fun to play, both for the level design, and the fifth player that gets to place blocks with the tablet. With successes like Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 in their recent history, the hope is that the WiiU's library will have some further winners over the years. So with any luck it will make reasonable sales and achieve that.

The 8th generation of console gaming should be a good one. With the "big three", the Ouya and other Android boxes, Steam Boxes, increasingly easy PC-TV integration, and better tools for porting games across platforms, there should be something for everyone, and a lot of surprises along the way.

Haven't considered it before, but I reached this conclusion as well, as learning a new pattern would be hard for me personally. Maybe a foot pedal mapped to the shift key, etc would help?

The difference is proof against it, well to some abstract degree anyway. With intelligent design, you can say that anything over 6000 years old was set up by [deity] to a) test our faith and\or b) give us an opportunity to learn about things scientifically and guide our civilization by designing a fake evolution that didn't actually happen. It's unlikely, yes, but impossible to disprove.

The Sun revolving around the Earth, we can see on a constant basis that's not true. Sure, it could be some supernatural "smoke and mirrors" but we can continuously prove the Earth is going around the Sun. Sure, by the same logic, we can see an old fossil and carbon date it and all that, but we didn't actually see the fossil get made in the same way we see the Earth go around the Sun.

The good thing about teaching intelligent design is that it takes much much less time to understand than the theory than Evolution. You can give a few weeks to evolution and all of 10 minutes to intelligent design and can claim that you have a better understanding of the latter. Under that system, it's not doing a lot of harm (and actually, most kids would readily dismiss it after hearing about it if they weren't brought up in a religious family to begin with). If you have some zealot saying that more than 10 minutes should be devoted to understanding intelligent design, and go into details about a specific religion (e.g. Christianity) that's the point when student's time is dangerously being wasted.

Namco has a patent on mini-games that run while a program is loading. Yeah, you can patent that. Is anyone surprised?

Another good one is Windows XP Service Pack 3 manual installer. It moves along quite nicely until it gets to the last sliver at which point it's "performing cleanup", but it's actually installing dozens of hotfixes behind the scenes. This can easily take many times longer than the rest of the install, and can only be slightly sped up by keeping an eye on all the Windows Update processes in Task Manager, and giving each one high priority as they come and go.

More specifically, the marketers are perfectly smart, it's the marketing regulations that are at fault. The "large box for small product" thing you mentioned is the worst of it since it actually depletes resources and increases labour in the interest of making the product more sell-able (plus harder to shoplift but that's probably a minor point compared to the marketing).

Which raises another point, instead of using "d"s and "i"s which confuse casual observers, would it be possible to use small case for decimal and large case for binary? As in kB = 1000 bytes, KB = 1024. The small letter being worth less would be intuitive.