And you justify that position in light of how they are locking down this new console...how?

MS has always been a company that has thrown stuff out to the public and then once it became profitable, locked it down with a vengeance. With the XBone they seem to be just accelerating the processes here a bit.

Speaking as someone who had a //e. And not just any //e mine had a Transwarp, a Cider 10M Hard Drive, a Hayes Modem, and an 1M extended 80 col card. My //e was mackin. Further I learned a lot about computers from that system. However that came from my own personal learning and...

Not from my school which had a room full of //e's that were not used really at all. If you are in a room of computers but your teacher/professor does not let you interact with them, or further teach you anything meaningful about how to further your knowledge about computers then they might as well be door stops.

The idea that you can dump a bunch of hardware on schools and make it relevant has been proven ineffectual. I would venture to say that an industry would have to back it up with TON more of resources to make that investment pay off. That MS is about to have to dump a TON of resources into the XBone to make that even break even makes me wonder if they are going to fight a two front war at this point.

What I've seen is that there is a full generation (maybe 1 and 1/2s worth?) of people now who did not grow up during MS's rise to power. About how there was a full blown ecosystem of computers, OSs, and paths that could have been taken to further ITs mainstream adoption. And instead of living though all of that they grew up with WinXP, XBoxen, and a Bill Gates who married a hot chick and is philanthropic. (And how he got all that money is a distant and well polished over memory.)

So while I'm quite sure that there still remain the MS paid shills, fanboys, and the apathetic masses. There also is a new generation of legit geeks that did not live though what MS did. And as such their view on what MS is/does is different than those of us who were around when MS built and then consolidated their empire.

I can see that including some voice commands to a game would be interesting for game play and immersion. But that is a slim upside to the very real downsides that are presented with the always on spycam/mic and phone homeing of the system.

Further what if the game requires you to be yelling at it for that functionality instead of it being an option? Have fun playing it when you need to be quiet like you can currently do.

Everything about this system screams to me that hacking is very much verboten.

While if he is building from scratch I agree but one of the major advantages of PCs is that you rarely have to do that if you are smart about it. (And one would hope that the person in question either can DIY or knows someone who can given that this is a /. post.)

I get that when someone gets overly pedantic it is annoying. However I would argue that it is a result of the fact that we are constantly being bombarded by half truths and or outright lies from every direction. I'm not so naive to suggest that this is a new phenomenon but with the amount of information we are ingesting (and of course outputting) there is bound to be a level of rebellion.

All the more so for those of us who have to work with/within systems that require our output to be correct. Missing a bracket, a bang where you wanted just an equals, or a lower case when it had to be caps? You came up with that value for how much the beam needed to support instead of the correct one? You prescribed drug X instead of drug Y?

And then when your day job of making sure everything was at the five 9's that is expected of you, you have to disseminate bullshit that comes from all sides. That or just unplug which is not very satisfying if you want to feel connected to the society that you are trying to make better.

So I'd say cut those who are sometimes overly anal some slack. They likely are just blowing of some steam.

There are going to be those who have an axe to grind with Obama for being black, for being elected 2 times when the right wing machine did everything in their power to make him a 1 term president, to having a D next to his name, for not doing exactly what they say, for whatever. Those who cry impeachment lose all creditability to me. You lost that chance, for me, when you let Reagan not be impeached for treason by doing things behind congresses back.

So, whatever, that is how the dance is done now. The people who assume power pardon the high crimes of the past. Whatever. Why are we here? Why does the system work like this?

Money.

Money currently, be it oil, the military industrial complex, health care (including pharma), farms, et all; rules the day. We must remove the idea of corporate person hood. We must remove the money, in as much as we can, from our politics. We must get our representatives (reminder, we live in a Republic, NOT a Democracy) to have an interest in our needs and not the needs of those who paid to get them elected.

I personally will die a happy man in the years I have left to see that happen. And right now, as sad as I get about our current system, I know that I am not alone in saying these things.

And just as a follow up: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyqrCHKzkcg

I don't agree with Buddy in any way shape or form in his politics, but his analysis on the state of politics about the money is spot on.

This is way late in the thread but I do want to respond to your post.

Part of what I see here is a philosophical difference between our viewpoints. I'm going to assume that you are some variation of a Libertarian. And while I agree with a lot of (note the big L) Libertarian ideals I think that it has gotten corrupted by money just like everything else. (I'm using the word money here with purpose.)

You use the word Our. I honestly think that you are wrong. That is ok. You can be wrong, I can be wrong, Lawrence Lessig can be wrong. We all can be wrong. However I disagree.

Money is power in this day and age. It is not absolute but if you don't think that money is power in a real sense then again I think we have a real disconnect. If you have not watched that TED talk, if you have not seen the numbers on how money influences our elections (hint, it is not just about the informed voters, if you have money you can essentially buy votes with the media) and how the person with the most money wins 90% of the time (congressional races), if you don't see the effect that money has then on those "representatives" who were bought and paid for by corporations who then write the bills (ALEC, look it up) which are signed into law, if you don't see any of that as being driven by money but only by the idea of power...well then.

I'd ask you what money is. Money is an abstract for a lot of things. Fungible is a good word to learn. Oil is money. Gold used to be the same way but how often do you need gold for anything? Food is money but we have a LOT of food so it is not nearly as fungible as it once was. Money is a way we use to abstract power. Money IS power.

Back after the Iraq invasion happened and I was chatting with a US Army Ranger buddy we were playing a lot of RTS games together. (For the record once I showed him how to play the game, he kicked my ass up and down the maps.) He told me point blank that the reason we invaded Iraq included a lot of things and a few, as we know now, lies, but one very important reason. They had a lot of fucking oil and they were about to move their oil to the EU currency instead of having it back the US Dollar.

So I'm going to end on that note. Money IS power in this day and age. You almost need a degree in Econ to see the depth of it but for any real geek that wants to be on /. you should be able to get the gist of it.

There will be no real party other than the money party until we get money of out of the system.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_the_republic_we_must_reclaim.html

There are some very real and good ways we can get the money out of our system. And of course money will always be a part of any system but it will not be the same as since:

Buckley v. Valeo: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckley_v._Valeo

And then we let the floodgates open with:

Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission

We are not in any way shape or form a democracy if a small percentage of people are allowed to vote with their dollars as well as their individual vote.

So what you are saying is that the media at large is going to fill in any gaps by saying "something is dying!"

To whit, I say le sigh. Yeah I can buy that.

With the rise of the click driven revenue model I can see them wanting to just write whatever hyperbolic story that they can and bank on people forgetting what they said a day, month, or year from now.

I still however, as a PC gamer who has not had a console since my SNES, view them as being hacks. And that tainted the whole "official" media for me. Personally now I view the "official" media is just another arm of the gov/corps marketing platforms. But there was a time that I actually thought that the media was trying to do its job.

There is some stupid saying that as you grow older you grow more to the right wing of a viewpoint. I laugh at that. To me that was only true like 30-40 years ago if it was ever. Right now as I grow older I view the right, authoritarian and "free market", as pretty freaking evil. Maybe back before we had the knowledge that we do now about what authoritarian and "free market" people do with such power it was viewed as a good thing. However now that they do not totally control the flow of information I can see how evil such practices can be.

I'd also like to point out that there needs to be a big mea culpa from all those over the past 10 years who kept beating the "PC Gaming is DEAD!" drum. Only to be dead wrong and now those same "experts" talk about how consoles are in trouble.

I think that, and granted the mobile market had a huge impact too, they kept drinking that kool-aid and kept betting on PCs truly dying out. That somehow though a combination of the rise of consoles, smartphones, and more recently tablets and such that there would never be a need again computers. As if somehow the ability to hack away at a spreadsheet, advanced graphics program, or any of the numerous other things that PCs excel at was going to be viable on lesser platforms. (Never mind the flexibility of a general purpose PC; hence why Win8 is such a bag of suckage. Narrowing the power of what PCs do best is stupid.)

I think that consoles will continue to have relevance but only if they stay as user friendly as they can. That has always been their advantage but with what we have seen from MS they are struggling mightily with that in the name of DRM/Market Data driven revenue.

Ah the we can't do anything to lets do nothing apathy that they are counting on.

First of all shareholder reports are real. Sure they can try to spin the numbers to say that low sales were do to X, Y, or Z which have just enough basis in fact to not be an outright lie. But most shareholders know better as they have also taken the marketing classes which leads to the real problem...

Marketing/Risk Management and how propaganda is the order of the day every day. And how now the media, which was supposed to hold everything in check, has been bought by those who they are supposed to keep checks on! (And since the gov is "bought" it also turtles all the way down to that function as well.)

We HAVE to get money out of our gov. That is the 1st step. Nothing else matters. Get that to happen we have a gov that will then be incentivized to represent us. From that we can then repair the other damage.

So, just so we are clear:

I win. You lose. Point to me. Me 1 you 0.

My point was that a desktop would have more power than any sort of mobile solution. You, via your humor, declined to even address that point. I win. You lose. Point to me. Me 2 you 0.

You talk a lot of game about not being an Apple fanboy, but you seem to still shill for them rather well...even thou the point is that Apple is not the end all be all of what PCs can do on the desktop. Whatever. We need more data to see if you really fail on this point so let us pass. Me 2 you 0.

I gave other examples of how HTPCs can be used. You based your opinion on what you were told by /. users? Fail. Point to me. Me 3 you 0.

You fail. I win 3 to 0. Please insert another coin and try again!