I gave it a view a few days ago (don't worry at the seeming length - half of it is Q&A), and found it thought provoking. While it's more a statement of what is and soon will be, with less on action items, the general themes will resonate here on /., I think.

Lot of interesting talks at CCC this year, more broadly: do dig through their list on youtube - lots of neat stuff in there. This talk on timing attacks on websites was pretty darned neat (starts mild, ramps up to "cool!").

Its overuse has pretty much made it a meaningless blogspam word.

How strongly is that the case in FF6? I'm still using 3.6.

*raises hand* It was the UI changes in 4 and on that kinda turned me off.

More difficult to believe the ISI didn't know about this, vs a cave in the boonies.

Because they are, by and large, human derived. It's a system that, like most 'native' systems, arose from daily human uses and generally reflect daily human needs, and the scales appropriate to them.

Brad Wardell, as always, is full of shit. The vast majority of Valve developers do not work on Steam. If I understand it correctly, the Steam team is actually rather small, given it's impact. And please, Brad is telling us that a crew of, say, designers and level designers has not been working on HL2 dlc because ... they are working on Steam?! Yeah. Sure. Those poly-pushing level monkies are all hard at work coding up Steam transaction backend software.

A total tangent, but is narrator's accent Philly or NJ? Or something else? To me, he sounds like a guy burn in the NE, moved to Philly as a kid, then went to school in the west coast.

This is blazingly untrue. Most users don't have a synchronous line, yet with only moderate effort ("stay connected after you're done" and "actually pay attention to how much you have downloaded and take it easy") these millions have no reall issue maintaining a ratio. You're Doing It Wrong.

It's sad to hear that a sidekick is more trouble than it's worth. I often wish games just wouldn't bother with this kind of feature, unless they went into it with it being a seriously core feature of the game at the outset. Game after game results in your comment of "after I tried it out, I just got rid of the sidekick because it was more annoying than it's worth."