Yes. It won't play them at maximum settings, but on mainstream display settings the games will run fine. My cheap gaming PC from about the same era as your XBox 360 still plays everything that I throw at it.

You misunderstood the "just click an icon" comment. It was in response to:

The comment was actually saying that all the service did was to save you from having to manually launch iTunes; or in other words click an icon. It was not about how to start or stop a service in Windows (which can be done with a single icon anyway using either sc.exe or net.exe).

The iTunes service really isn't that handy a feature, especially if it is causing problems with overuse of resources when it isn't in use. It is also annoying to have the program pop up when you are just plugging in the phone to charge it.

Songsmith is just a cheap ($30) little program obviously aimed at the casual or party game market to allow people to experience what it is like to be a singer with a backing group. It is not intended for serious use or to replace real musicians. If that had been the intention then they would have priced it much higher to compete with Band-in-a-box.

Similarly, this cartoon drawing system is not part of some plot to put real artists out of work. It is designed to incorporate stylised caricatures within games or for generating avatars.

It may seem like the cat belongs to you, but if it really was your personal army then it would actually have to obey your orders.

In reality, you are more like a squire to your cat; you attend to the cat's personal needs when it isn't off doing heroic battle against a mouse or bug.

Is it that they want to take credit, or do other people keep giving them credit. By the same token you could say that they want to be called a patent troll just because some people call them that!

The CSIRO patent was first used with 802.11a, which was published in 1999. The '97 standard could only do a rather slow 2Mbit/s, a flaw that the patent helped fix. And they did discuss it with CSIRO prior to its release. From the Wikipedia entry that I cited:

In 1998 it became apparent that the CSIRO patent would be pertinent to the standard. In response to a request from Victor Hayes of Lucent Technologies, who was Chair of the 802.11 Working Group, CSIRO confirmed its commitment to make non-exclusive licenses available to implementers of the standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.
Cooper, Dennis (4 December 1998). "Letter to Mr V Hayes, Chair, IEEE P802.11" (PDF). Retrieved 13 May 2012.

That letter is located on the IEEE website, and it confirms the date that appears on the scanned letter. And further to that, they had also built their own chip that implemented their technology (and went around trying to sell it to various companies), so that makes them even less like a patent troll, who usually don't have any way of implementing their own patents.

Which, as they said, was an opening offer and not one that they ever expected. Every time companies negotiate a figure they start high; that is pretty much a standard tactic.

You don't have to do a lot of research to find get the real story rather than just relaying some of the overzealous misinformation that has gone on about this. They never said that they invented 802.11 WiFi, merely that it used some of their patented technology.

And unlike patent trolls who use submarine patents, the CSIRO and the IEEE actually discussed the use of the patent prior to its inclusion in the standard, at which time the CSIRO said they would make non-exclusive licenses available to implementers of the standard on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms.

I'm not sure that the original poster was making an anti-Linux statement there. I read it as having to do with having to hack around the Windows 8 "improvements".

That is your unsupport assertion that this is just about DRM. The PDF that your linked to does actually say that there are benefits to secure boot, something that you have conveniently omitted (to coin your phrase).

And yet it is the OEMs who control the platform keys, or so says your document. There is no reason why you couldn't have an OEM that actively supported open source operating systems by including their required keys (just like they provide Linux drivers now). Or you just switch off secure boot.

I'm not sure which requirements you were talking about here. Is it that motherboards have to implement secure boot, or that they also have to provide a method to turn it off?

I guess the alternative is "Microsoft-hating zealot". You know, the ones who make huge errors, and then "conveniently omit" any further discussion on those points during follow-ups. They are also the ones who know that their claims can be refuted, but try to preempt those arguements by saying:

Great idea! Rather than tell us what is wrong with those claims, just call them lies instead. So how exactly are they lies? Or were you lying when you said that?

Then you obviously don't understand the meaning of the word, and it seems clear that you have no intention of learning it. Vapourware is not a synonym for the word unreleased.

The Ouya was not announced to dampen sales of another product. It was not announced prematurely (I don't think a year is excessive for developing a product like this). It is in the process of being released now, whether you can see it or not.

They also don't tell consumers that the OS was written in a mixture of C and C++. Why are they hiding this too? Obviously, because it doesn't matter to the end user.

It doesn't change the user experience knowing the underlying implementation. If anything, by telling people that it is Linux, it will raise expectations that they can run all the software that they have heard about on Linux. I think that the name Chrome is more relevant to the nature of the platform than Linux because it is designed to work with web applications, not programs written to run on Linux distros.

The basis of your whole rant was that Microsoft invented this technology, but you were wrong. I suggest that you go read up on the UEFI before you start making these sorts of proclaimations. The standard was originally developed by Intel, not Microsoft, and they contributed the initial version to the UEFI Forum (which includes reprentatives from ten other companies other than Microsoft on their board).

I have no doubt that you will consider me to be a "Microsoft stooge" for pointing this out.

No, I don't own any console and I have no intention of doing so. However, me saying that the Ouya isn't vapourware is completely unrelated to whether it will survive or not.

And frankly, I don't know why you are taking this so personally?

Ouch! That was uncalled for. My comment was not ever supposed to be the final say in security. But that said, just getting your devices from somewhere other than China is not going to be enough either. All it takes is for a company to employ a programmer who sympathises or is paid by a foreign power and you still have the untrustworthy devices.

So perhaps the best solution is to release the source code anyway. Sure it is not 100% reliable, but no solution will be (unless you want the government to design and build all their own electronics from scratch).

By that logic, it will always be vapourware because there isn't a Fry's within walking distance of me. On the other hand, you could look at the reports of the unit shipping to their backers, then see that they have a release date of April for pre-orders & June for the general public. Perhaps then you might realise that the world doesn't revolve around you. A product can be considered released without you personally being able to find one in a particular store.

We are not talking about Sony or Microsoft, with huge manufacturing and distribution capacity. The difference with this console is that you heard about it at the stage where they would normally be talking to venture capitalists. There wasn't some premature announcement designed to stop people from buying competitor's products. There was never a suggestion that this was a product that was ready to ship, it was always spoken about being in the design stage. It does not deserve to have derogatory labels just because you are impatient.

Actually, it is everyone's tax dollars buying those things, so why should your political values take precedence over anyone else's.

That doesn't sound like a supportable stance. When the economy gets tight the first thing that happens is a round of layoffs to reduce expenditure. This is in direct opposition to your argument.

In the rush to provide cheaper prices, supermarkets in my area are moving towards self-service checkouts rather than employ extra people. If I want to support the jobs of people in my local community and shop at the only store that hasn't done this, then I have to pay more at the checkout.

If a local manufacturing business can't afford to continue pay the wages of workers in this country then they will outsource production to cheaper countries (like China). Those businesses will still survive (at least in the short term), but it doesn't do much for protecting local jobs.

And if the gas station can't charge $2 for a $1 candy bar, just how will the stations afford to pay the same wages to the attendants? You know, back in the day we used to have full service gas stations, rather than just one person stuck behind a counter. How's that job protection going?

You become an economic superpower by being wealthy, which means selling more than you buy (although being a political and military superpower helps too). You can increase your exports in the short term by opening trade bilaterally, but eventually you just have the effect of evening the playing field until you no longer have superpower status and countries are more equal. To maintain the illusion of superpower status you have to live beyond your means and rely on credit.

But I don't want to sound like I am against free trade. It certainly is important, but it is not the final word in economic policy. If you think that you can open your borders to free trade and then tick the box to say that the economy is done then you are being naive. It is more complicated than that, and rigidly sticking to an ideology without looking at real-world exceptions can be detrimental to society. Sometimes you still need to provide subsidies or protection to local businesses to ensure jobs creation, guarantee of supply, manage environmental impact, etc.