I too am rather surprised VPN isnt the main story here. Interesting to hear of a matchmaking service up to aid and assist, but I would've assumed the forums and anyone who gave a shit would have rallied together and carved out a niche in whatever VPN system needed. Honestly I was really hoping it'd prompt that kind of hacker spirit in gamers, that the closure would be a net good thing by getting people involved with their infrastructure and technology again. Who knows, maybe they are doing cool things, it just doesnt make as good a story. Albiet, yes, VPN is not a cure-all; matchmaking in particular seems like a very very difficult thing to deal with. I have no idea what happens when you throw 1000 XBox's on a LAN and start up System Link, but I dont think its very pretty / usable (iirc system link tended to assume there would only be one lan session per game going on). Would love to know!

"LAN play" is referred to in system, btw, as "System Link", and is just a crossover cable or LAN connection. Support is fairly comprehensive -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Xbox_System_Link_games -- but sometimes limited to two player.

The hard part was continuing backwards compatibility for the XBox Live service. It would've been maybe couple hundred man hours of devel/test costs a year just to make sure XBox1 was still working as they continue to roll out enhanced Xbox360 software.

That said, they're definitely a bunch of penny pinching scrooges. I've been businesses make similar heavyhanded "profit saving" measures w/r/t what they will and will not support, and lets just say the customers ended up not being very understanding or pleased finding their "working fine" setup kicked to the curb and them being saddled with a compromised "upgraded" hardware unit of dubious parity.

I had a BP6 with dual 450's running 575. Not nearly the same % increase, but the 450's were barely more expensive than the 300's by the time I mustered up the cash for the mobo and first cpu.

is your svn hosted on a 386? is it in someone's closet, on a dsl line? why is your source repository humiliatingly unbearably slow, and why does it take minutes for an svn update to even start? is the abominable performance a hardware, or software issue?

The 2.3kW of this sterling engine doesnt speak to that promise. The 40kW they hope to have a ground system producing doesnt instill much confidenc either. ISS produces around 130kW, via a colossal truss-work of solar panels. These are all far short of the 400kW power needed for the target baseline VASIMR engine, and well short of the multi MW power levels VASIMR really is designed for.

Nuclear power generates heat. Heat differential is then used to drive turbines. In space, you may be able to make heat, but what is there for the other end of this power generation equation; where does the cool body of mass come from, the essential other integral to power generation?

VASIMR itself, at high ISP's, is generating 10 megakelvin plasma. That itself has cooling challenges.

Right now, I dont see how these ideas are practical.

I wonder what the improvement of NX v. XCB is. XCB, I believe, does away with the sychronous request/reply nature of X and allows for async event handling. Pure conjecture, but that might provide a comparable advantage to the round-trip reductions provided by NX.

I used NX server for a hot six weeks as a persistent desktop I could remotely attach to; its main duty was holding open a session of XMMS. But the NX server was a perpetual pain. Configuring it was hellish, and sometimes it would crash. Lack of a rootless mode and the undocumented/proprietary nature were the final nails: I gave up the experiment. This was a long long time ago.

adding more disks is not the solution. the solution is more active and correcting consistency checking. the reason raid 5 and raid 1 rebuilds fail is because data is replicated, but errors are only discovered when something fails, when the shits already hit the fan. zfs, hammer, btrfs, they're all running headlong towards consitency checking because that is not good enough and not pre-emptive enough.

maybe now the cock-arsed moderators at wikipedia will stop deleting the 4.2.2.2 article.

Worth nothing PERHAPS, but does this transformation make it now without value?

Moralizing aside, I disagree about worth nothing: there are plenty of album sales that happen only because of music discovered via piracy. Plenty of artists are jumping on the bandwagon and finding that it takes making valueable art free (without worth) to make good money... Trent Reznor, TMBG, and every band under the sun with a MySpace page.

I'm sympathetic, but thats stretching it friend. Dont push your luck.

Sure, I agree content producers have the right to try and get payed. But VCR's have given us the legal power to view content under our own terms for ages. You cant turn that off and say, content producers, you have the right to produce content that can be viewed only under your own terms. You cant say "you can only view this standing on your head" and expect people to, like cattle to your call, all dutifully turn and stand on their heads for you. If content producers want payment, they need to find a way to get payed that doesnt involve dictating how users view the media, in part because users wont consume burdensome content, and in part because you cant build a system strong enough to enforce usage rights. Users dont expect free content, but they have ready access to colossal amounts of it, and they'd prefer consuming poor media on their terms above good media on someone elses terms. Its up the content producers to figure out how to monetize good content, but you're incorrectly assuming that the content producer gets to dictate the entire experience and gets to package content, just as TV packed ads bypassed by VCR.

People have already voted with their feet & said that they have the right to access the content you send us in whatever form we want. If your business model revolves around force feeding us bullshit we dont want to see, you've been outvoted. It sucks that it hurts small indie sites, but its more important that we have 2.0 Voltaire: "I may not agree with how you view your content, but I will defend to the death your right to view as you choose." And that, brother, is liberty.

Yes but they're technologically better i.e. not cobbled together XPCOM & XUL running in a single thread. They also have more cohesive direction and leadership. I'd cite Chrome's Extensions as a perfect example of everything Jetpack ought to have been, for one example of where that direction shows.

Users dont care about the technological background of what they use is irrelevant, but my hope is that as embedded takes off, we'll see the better designed solutions are more adaptable to stranger & more limited environments. This will grow the user base of the margin browsers without users knowing or having choice: pre and iphone are forerunning examples.

Also, better design, such as Chrome Extensions, will hopefully lead to a better ecosystem surrounding the product. Thats really the key. Firefox has a colossal lead in building an ecosystem, as for ten years its been the only one building an ecosystem at all, but developers are finnicky people, and its ultimately them and their preference of technologies that dictates where cool shit gets built. If Chrome or Safari or Opera comes up with a more compelling more empowering developer experience, it can shift the balance of where new edgy innovative shit gets made. Whether or not that cool edgy innovative shit is compelling enough to herd the rest of the cats following is TBD. Its up to the competing browsers to potentiate the space to make that move compelling.

Users need compelling reason to switch. Technological superiority doesnt sell itself, there needs to be a reason to move, a reason to download something else and to relearn a new interface and to shuffle bookmarks and customizations into a new system.

Systems like Extensions and Jetpack exist as precursors to incentives: they themselves offer nothing of value to end users, and only serve as progenitors for incentives to be created.

These incentives are still highly detached: a user isnt saying, I'm switching to Firefox so I can use Vimperator, they're saying, I'm switching to firefox so I can go find and install the Vimperator plugin. And typically its not one particular plugin, its the accrued group of plugins each user build that makes them dedicated to Firefox, there are very few killer features. To answer your question, the immediate value proposition of switching to Firefox is minimal: it and IE are both web browsers, and they generally render most sites with parity.

Jetpack and its father-in-kind Chrome Extensions in particular are trying to close the loop some, and at least increase accessibility of enhancements.

Jetpack is just a weekend knock off of the much better done Chrome Extensions, true story. Compare their couple month old API v. Jetpack's API and its blatantly obvious where Jetpack came from.

I'm hoping Safari and Opera adopt the Chrome Extensions model.