I think that a better option coulbe be DO NOT DRIVE AWAY TECHNICALLY COMPETENT STAFF using ludicrous, infamous (and almost illegal) arguments.

But hey, it's just my two cents.

No, it was not. =D

You make a very poor judgment of the last decade developers. And somewhat lack of history knowledge.

What did PS3 a good start was the huge Microsoft failure on delivering a faithfully working hardware (that Red Ring of Death issue, remember?). Any other company would had fold, but Microsoft had (and still has) a huge cash cow to milk (Microsoft Office), and that was the sorely reason XBox didn't fold at that time.

But Microsoft people aren't stupid (for the most part, at least), and XBox was fixed. And they did a really big thing: the Microsoft Live. This really changed the game, and Sony got a really nasty bite in the ass. Sony took too much time to get the PSN up to the Live level (still doing it by the way).

By the way, The XBox 360 is also a PowerPC machine - the same core used on sony's PS3. And the NIntendo Wii (and also the WIi-U). And also on GameCube, Apple's failed Pippin and a lot of others dead on arrived videgames. There's absolutely nothing weird on PowerPC being used on videogames. Sony made things complicated for developers by tacking 6 specialized coprocessors inside its chip - what, for programmers used to have just one (MMX, 3DNow!, etc), was clearly a new level of computing. However, parallel computing appears to be here to stay (look at the ARM chips) - and having EIGHT general purposes CPUs competing for the same resources is not for the faint of the heart (Microsoft took years to learn, look at that crappy piece os software called Microsoft Windows). The complexity is still there - we just shifted it to another side.

Videogame Makers choose their hardware based on price, power and next years availability. Power PC had won the maker's heart in the past, but by some reasons IBM choose to abandon this race, giving the PowerPc a low priority on to research and development. AMD, on the other hand, spend a lot of efforts and money by upscaling their CPU to the current levels. The decision on using AMD's x64 over the previous PowerPC one was taken based on CURRENT chip power, CURRENT chip pricing and guarantees for chip supply for the product's lifetime.

The current new chip is easier to program? Beneficial side effect, nothing more. Not a single videogame maker will sacrifice any of the previous requirements to make the developer's life easier. We are not in the 90's anymore, there's a lot more people with programming skills nowadays, and a lot of them will be willing to deal with any extra complexity to take your job from you. (sad but true)

And that's why this kind of abuse should be detected, and the abuser hit in his/her reputation hardly.

The problem is not the moderation system. It's the absolute lack of attitude against the abusers.

Because IBM didn't improve the PowerPC processor line since them, while Intel, AMD et all spent a lot of money on the x86_64 architecture.

In the end, it's not what the architecture did in the past - what matters is what the architecture will do in the future. Now, x86_64 is far more capable than the CELL architecture. So, if you want to build a top performance machine today, you will go with x86_64.

No, it was not.

I think that the old and faithful meta-moderating should come back, and once a bad moderator it's detected, he/she should be silently flagged - and then silently banned from moderating for some time when the flag is downed, and the cycle restarts from scratch, with the previously offender having to rebuild his "reputation".

It's damn too easy to be a troll around here, and damn too hard to prevent the harm. One must be a kind of masochist to be a assidual contributor of this site.

(I frequently get feed up, and spend some weeks ignoring the site until I cool down - I prefer being absent that being abusive)

It happens all the time to me, too.

I just don't care. The 15 mod points will come back, and then someday some mod-troll will hit you again, and you will pass some time with 5 mod points again, and then by some reason the 15 mod points will come back again.

Some time ago, the meta-moderating used to be used against such practices, but no more.

My advice? Just ignore the problem. Enjoy the "free time" from moderating and try to enjoy it - you are not paid to moderate this thing, if Slashdot is OK with mod-trolling fskcing up the good moderators, why should we bother either?

The thief was killed because he raised a gun to an officer, not because he was tracked down by GPS.

Can we mod a submission as "-1 TROLL"?

I don't expect that the GP will be still alive in 2015 AC (After Cataclysm),

Fragmentation is the cost of the freedom: without the rights that can lead to fragmentation, Software would never be free (neither "libre").

A fragmented community is not a software problem - it's a leadership problem: we must learn to choose better our leaders. Since people rarely agree with other - forking is the best (but not always the cheaper) way to decide who's right.

By your statement, Microsoft should not release the patch! :-)

Remember, we're talking about the guys that used to sabotage every competitor on the market (Wordperfect, DR-DOS among many others) and double cross (almost?) every partner.

It's business, you can say. But's still sabotage and double crossing.

The EULA can state anything. If one decides to sue besides it, and the judge agrees with the guy, so that's it.

EULAs are not the ultimante agreement between the parts. This role is played by a bunch os guys that call themselves "congressistes", "judges" and "lawyers".