In mine, history is worth studying.

No one but you believes that.

Yes, and the question is how much. The idea that there would be no new market whatsoever if there were no used market is ridiculous, and you deserve ridicule for expressing it. Maybe 80% of the perceived value is based on the ability to resell, maybe it's 8%, but it's definitely not 100%.

Governments are also special in that they can finance things with your money, the collection of which is backed by threat of violence. They're special in that they control media (at minimum by granting licenses) and thus have an unparalleled ability to influence public opinion. They can thus not only tell you what you are permitted to think, but they can influence most people into thinking it. For example, they've convinced you that building dams is a good idea in spite of the environmental impact, instead of increasing efficiency and getting the power from other genuinely more sustainable sources, like offshore wind.

I used the Trilateral Commission because today, it is a proven fact. There is no question, and notable ex-members do not deny having been members, or that their role was to decide policy in a way that deeply affected the economic and political reality of The United States. But when I was a teenager, someone handed me a flyer on it and I threw it away having decided that it was clearly a bunch of conspiracist bullshit. That doesn't mean other conspiracy theories are true, but it did change my mind about the likelihood of the existence of successful conspiracies designed to control the populace. In fact, since we know them to exist already, the probability is 1.0. And since we know some of them to have been secret before they weren't, odds are pretty good that secret conspiracies to influence or control nations or even the world are a fact of life. They are a fact of history; why should they not be a fact of the present or future? There's a world of difference between believing that the whole world is controlled be one overarching conspiracy, and believing in secret conspiracies to try to control the world, and no amount of bullshit prevarication can change that.

Who told you that shit? You can use gamepads, several work fine. You can use keyboard/mouse, even on many phones! Lots of them have usb host mode and you can plug a powered hub into them and start adding devices if you like. Android has support for USB ethernet devices, fer chrissake. You have no idea what you're talking about. See also: Ouya, Gamestick

Sony shit on the Xperia Play so as not to compete with the PSP. They promised an ICS update for the entire Xperia line, then withdrew it citing problems with gaming. The community has revived it and literally the only problem is some issues with the touchpad driver which are caused by Sony being too lazy to update the driver to work reliably with ICS. Also, the phone has tragic ergonomics as a gaming controller. It is kind of OK to play if you're standing or sitting upright. Further, you will need to replace your screen protector approximately every two weeks if you want to game in full sunlight and you don't take any special care of your phone. Users who have removed the protector and left it off have not experienced scratching, as the glass is very good, but some have experienced digitizer failure. Others have noticed that it is extremely prone to moisture-related failure, which may be related. In short, Sony did not really try very hard with the Xperia Play.

Nobody has ever tried very hard to make a gaming phone. In spite of the many shortcomings of the N-Gage and its successor and the Xperia play, all of these phones still have significant community followings today.

I have a Play because I got it for forty bucks, and refurb'd it. It needed a new back and a new screen protector. It's a pretty mediocre phone. Without community support which has provided a superior kernel including overclocking, it would be crap. Other devices use the same core at 1.5 instead of 1.0 GHz, and it seems to be stable there. Sony didn't bother to test overclocking with their ICS update, either. At best they are incompetent, but more likely they simply shit on the people who bought the Play so as not to compete with the PSP division.

Because it's a game console. Isn't it? If it's not a game console first, they probably spent too much on the other crap, why would I want to pay for that? I mean, as a gamer. The family can't watch TV while the kids play games if both functions are built into one system, so why would they want to concentrate that functionality into one box? They don't think they're going to sell a family an Xbox One for every TV, do they? That would be ha-ha-ha-hilarious on the same order as believing the PS3 was "probably too cheap".

The truth is that the Xbox One just doesn't make sense. If you want to appeal to gamers then it needs to be about the games and if you want to appeal to families you have to not be creating strife by putting the functions that different people want to use at the same time into one box.

Shoulda got a better TV. A good scaler makes the Wii graphics look pretty decent. I am using a 52" AQUOS (old enough to have CCFL backlighting) and the Wii looks fine. For the kind of games they do, which are as you say cartoony, you really don't need HD graphics.

I would have considered a Wii U if they'd had decent launch games and supported four symmetric controllers. Some games don't need four people to have screens, and some games would benefit from it massively. I think many of us would like a four-player dungeon crawler where we all have our own displays for management, but you can't have that because Nintendo decided it wasn't important, would cost too much, etc. They half-assed it. But they didn't, so really the Wii (which I barely use anyway) is more than enough Nintendo console for me.

The thing is, the Wii is a runty little console which offered little over its predecessor, which had awful controllers, and really shitty motion recognition in spite of the motion recognition being the primary feature. With motionplus it is not too bad, but because the system is so pathetic games have to explicitly support it, it's not automatic. So only some games even have halfway decent motion detection. Most of Nintendo's own Wiimote titles don't even try to do anything interesting, e.g. the original Zelda title where you just wiggle the wiimote to swing the sword. They didn't re-release those with decent controls either. Consequently there's only a small handful of titles which ever really delivered on the promise of the Wii, and most of them don't have much replay value. End result, I am a gamer and my Wii is still just used as a Netflix box. And it's not a very good one of those, with its primitive output (480p? What year did that console come out again?) and recently, its tendency to crash and make a noise like an air horn. It's better at Netflix than it is at Amazon Instant Video though, which runs fine on my PC but buffers every few seconds on the Wii.

The Wii was a brilliant marketing manouever but it's a fairly crap console, poorly implemented. It sold on the basis of the Nintendo name and if it didn't play Netflix I would regret the purchase immensely. As it is, I have got lots of use out of it on that basis. If only the wiimote weren't pathetically confused by the open windows in my living room, and I didn't have to get up and stand halfway between the couch and the TV to actually launch netflix any time but in the dark of night, I might even say it has a decent remote. But it is, so I won't, because it doesn't.

Angrily defending the Wii like you're doing is the sign of a fanboy, and I say this as someone who shakes his fist at Nintendo every time they try to sneak a HBC defeat into a system update, threatening the function of my original Gamecube-friendly Wii. But don't get mad, bro. At least, not on Nintendo's behalf. They're a corporation, they don't care about you. They just want your money.

Hehe, that's the only time my apartment is clean... but then it's proper clean, by myself I can live with all sorts of piles lying around and dust balls (as long as it's not filth and attracts mold and bugs and shit), but when people come over I finally get that incentive to clear everything, vacuum, dust, wash and whatnot. It's the kick in the butt I need.

I feel the same way, but what you need to remember in order to leave an intelligent and useful comment is that the game industry does not care about you. You simply don't represent enough additional revenue. How much do you think your participation in the used game market increases the initial retail value of a game? Five dollars? Ten at the outside? There's just no reason for anyone whose motivation is profit to cater to you. That leaves out anything more serious than a hobby effort. I hope that means that you've already reconciled yourself to playing indie and hobbyist games, because that's what's coming for you at this rate, on consoles at least. There has been some successful push-back against DRM on PCs, but there has also been massive acceptance of Steam even though it features DRM which prevents resale of used games, even if you bought them in a brick and mortar store. Once you're not able to resell console games, PC games will surely follow en masse.

Those of us who only buy one or two new games per year, if that, are simply not able to influence corporate direction in the gaming market. We are going to have to look elsewhere if we want to continue gaming. I've funded one game on kickstarter and I pay (very little, but something) for indie games through humble bundles, but sadly only one of the humble bundle for android games (contre jour) actually runs on my phone without crashing. In spite of most of them being tinkertoy games by comparison to A-list titles, they use as much disk space or even more.

I guess I'll spend more and more of my gaming hours in emulation in the future, being more or less completely unwilling to pay for games... Grand Theft Auto V may be the last A-list title I ever buy new, which I probably will do. I don't have a Wii U (asymmetric controllers THPPPPT) and I'm not planning on buying an Xbox One or a PS4 no matter what. I'm getting an Ouya but I'm buying it on the strength of XBMC (which runs but so far without hardware decoding) and running emulators and I may never buy a game from them. If it even runs games properly that's a side benefit to me. So in short, what reason do corporate publishers have to care about either of us?

Your failure to understand the argument does not constitute a failure on my part to comprehend his comment.

No, he's complextely wrong. What do you imagine that typical users need single-thread performance for? Most users need this only for games, and poorly-written ones to boot. PC games which require single-thread processing power are now vanishingly rare thanks at least in part to the influence of the tri-core Xbox 360, and the overwhelming tide of console to PC ports. Everything else the user typically does which requires very much CPU is already multithreaded. Most things the user does require virtually no CPU.

Running a GUI, editing files, I literally did these things on machines with single-digit MHz speeds which, when they were less responsive than using applications of today, were only so because of disk access times. And these tasks are today multithreaded, because they are based upon multithreaded libraries. Take a look at the programs running on a typical windows machine today, virtually all of them have a crapload of threads. Windows makes thread creation cheap in the way that Unix makes process creation cheap... not least because Windows is heavily multithreaded itself. And we are talking about what the majority of users will do with this hardware, which means running windows, playing the occasional game, watching cat videos on youtube.

Aside from games, the only times that most users use much CPU is during video encoding or possibly decoding, both of which are aggressively multithreaded and often even GPU accelerated, or while using graphics or video editing applications which are also typically heavily multithreaded, and have been for years. In short, practically no typical user actually needs serious single thread performance any more — what they need is good multithreaded performance, so that their computer can do a million pointless things behind the scenes without causing their cat videos to skip.

The Pentium is only better than the new AMD cores we're talking about at the kind of task that people who buy APUs don't do. Thus, while your statement is factual, it is also irrelevant.

But is it two weeks sprint down a dead end? For a project this size, agile is like trying to build a skyscraper first as a one story building, then two story building, then three story building and so on. Apparently you're making great progress the first sprint and you have a shack up, that's 1/100 floors done already. Except it doesn't work like that, so sometime around the 20th floor you've got people all over the first 19 trying to build in extra support columns and stronger walls and propping up the foundation. Things grind to a halt and you're not making any real progress. Then the orders come to get moving and you start going upwards again more and more rickety until eventually you find the straw that broke the mule's back and it all comes crumbling down.

Agile is nice if you're close enough you can start delivering actual features that would belong in the end product at the end. In practice it often means you build the first iteration with string and duct tape planning to replace it with something more solid on the back end in time, but I think everyone knows how that goes - the string and duct tape has a tendency to stay because that part is "done". Of course hindsight is always much easier but agile I feel lacks foresight, we do this now to meet our sprint goals and then if we need to change something to meet our next sprint goals, we'll deal with that then. In practice, there's not time to go back and rework things every time you figure out this should have been done differently.

No car I've ever seen has had both a digital speedometer and an analog one. I'm going to want to see a picture of some of these incredibly idiotic dashboards that you've been seeing. (I've found one example of such using google image search...) And I've owned at least two of them, I drive one regularly, and I have the gauge cluster for another (not my pic but I have an S13 HUD dash I hope to use for a simulator in the future) sitting here, absolutely none of them are like that. Most of them don't even have a tachometer; most people who want a digital dash don't care how many Rs they're turning, they have an automatic anyway. Of course, the very top-end cars now have all-digital dashes, so that trend will probably finally change the way I thought it would in the 1980s, when manufacturers were experimenting with bar-graph tachometers and the like.

As an aside, what I would like is an analog speedometer with two needles, I supposed it could be emulated but there is no screen which can emulate the resolution of the physical world, period the end, so I prefer a real needle in my gauge. I would like one needle (in a darker color, naturally) to show the speed I'm trying to achieve with my foot, and the other needle to show my calculated speed.

In any case, I have never seen a car with two speedometers. They clearly exist but they are by far in the minority.

Modern consumer society is predicated upon people feeling bad about themselves. That won't change your behavior. You'll still drive, if the average oldster is any indication.

Damned near illegible on some cars, though you can generally read the numbers. The numbers are smaller and in a less-contrasting color, though.

I don't know what percentage of new cars have digital speedometers. That would be an interesting factoid. Maybe you could do some research instead of speculating.

Wow, you have this almost exactly ass backwards.

Sugar is measured in grams, you'll have 1 or 2g

You can certainly take a walk measured in meters. Who goes for a walk for a block? Most walks worthy of the name will be measured in kilometers. Maybe fractional ones if you're superannuated.

Wood furniture? Very commonly done in fractional inches. Imperial units are convenient when you're doing things with your hands.

Meanwhile, in some countries building materials are metric...