You don't have any idea what you're talking about, and that's why you don't understand what he's talking about.

A bicycle is not flying.

With a bike, you control balance directly -- i.e. leaning and whatnot actually dominates the force on the bike, allowing you to control it with the same reflexes that allow you to stand up and run away from tigers.

What they have with this thing is controls. You're once removed from the action -- your reflexes create inputs that the device acts on. It's a second-order effect, and that means it is much, much more difficult to do without concentration.

This is a terrible idea.

If you're running your development environment on the target hardware, how do you deploy? How do you run your game? If it's inside the environment, you've stripped resources from the system. If it's not within the environment, how do you do testing? Debugging? And if you do both (i.e. a limited-resource run for debugging and a separate deploy) how on earth is that better than having a dedicated development machine that can debug the game at full power beside the console that you have to deploy to anyway?

XBox Live sounds pretty good. Where do I download it? What? You're saying a console market and the PC market are the same? So if it's something they've already got figured out, where is the amazing PC version? Because right now what they have is GFWL, and it's awful. That kind of lets the air out of your argument, don't you think?

Oh, and, just so we're in agreement, Steam has features that when using other platforms you have to use "Google" and "open a tab in the browser" to emulate? I rest my case.

So basically what you've said is none of that stuff exists.

Steam sales aren't about the "publisher setting prices", they're about people knowing every day Steam runs a deep discount on a game.

"Up to the developer to implement" means it doesn't exist since there is no common API.

Forums are a requirement -- I always check them (as many people do) before making a purchase. That's a key source of information on support levels, compatibility, and so forth.

And, yes, Clancy, everyone for the past twenty years has had ratings; that's not what I said. Steam has integration with MetaCritic, a review aggregator.

You, like Microsoft, are missing the point of what makes Steam so usable. It's not just another App store. It has a lot of stuff built specifically for games and a culture that encourages purchasing.

Let me put it another way. Valve nailed it in one with Steam. Microsoft gave us Games for Windows Live. Any questions?

This is assuming that Windows Marketplace will offer:
- Deep 50%-75% sales
- Automatic updating/patching of games
- Cloud-based per-application file backup
- Integrated social and communications tools
- Integrated unobtrusive DRM
- Integrated achievement (or similar) tracking
- Integration with MetaCritic, etc.
- Per-product forums
- Et cetera

Pretty tall order for an app store supposedly for general merchandise, no?

Like most stats of this kind, these numbers are from an ad network -- i.e. they're measuring ad views on their network by device. This shows that their ads are displayed more often on Apple products, not "actual usage". Different ad networks are more popular on Android; that's all.

That link in no way supports your assertion that the Secret Service was started for protecting against identity theft. You are being disingenuous or dishonest.

Okay, I'll bite. What would you do with HTML5 or AJAX to improve the Wikipedia experience? For instance, I'm reading the article on cats. What specifically would you do using "modern techs like AJAX and HTML5 to make it faster and show/hide content on demand as needed by the reader"?

Templates carry no run-time overhead, unlike the C# and Java generics, etc. That's why template-driven programming produces such fast code.

That's incorrect. Your version will produce code that is at best as fast as a class with an inline color setter (that should be in the ctor, really) and an inline settable click function. If you use virtual inheritance to override click instead of passing a function pointer, the C++ will be faster, as modern compilers can inline many virtual function calls when they know the type at compile time.

But, as written, the provided class would produce identical assembly to your code, with in addition explicit construction/destruction semantics and easier invocation.

Oh, and by the way, you left color[0] and [1] undefined on both of your Buttons.

If you're pursuing honest discussion, I apologize for the snark.

Generally, on limited (embedded) platforms, the functionality exposed by iostreams isn't needed, as there's no stdio, and no real buffering to speak of. In such situations you'd still get mileage out of STL containers (possibly with a custom allocator), which carry negligible size implications, but not really any of the heavyweight stuff like streaming.

I'm not a huge fan of iostreams myself, but they're worth using for the type safety, and if you can afford a printf call you can typically afford the 250k link.

So write that logic into your allocator. Generally there are two options when your allocator gives you NULL; that's either retry or abort, and writing those into your allocator is trivial. That's what's so good about C++, btw. (You're still incurring no runtime overhead aside from whatever extra cycles you are burning in your allocator with these checks, which you needed anyway.)

Yes, because what he said was clearly "I always demand using iostreams on every single platform regardless of environment restrictions, and there's no such thing as a tradeoff."

So how's that XBox handheld working out for you?