Pedantic. Ignoring.

*shrug* I've heard all sorts of things. With or without GV, asterisk isn't niche.

Well yes - your other mentioned products where pretty much the definition of niche. You could make an argument for MD maybe, but everything else didn't nearly hit the level of minidv. DVD and Bluray are way more of a group effort as well.

Uh, minidv? For real? You do know that minidv, though not SUPER popular, was by no means a niche product. It also introduced a whole generation of filmmakers to DIY filmmaking.

Not that I like the Sony of 2000s on or so, but come on now, give credit where credit's due.

I'm not sure where you get your info from, but asterisk is extremely pervasive, either as a complete replacement for phone systems (small business) to OEM'd interfaces (too many to count) to partial replacements for portions of existing calling systems (a similar way to how Linux crept into IT infrastructure). Hell, tons of those offshore call centers are based around asterisk and its queue features.

For real? Asterisk is extremely pervasive from what I've seen. The only place it's NOT pervasive is among hobbyists who a) have no need for a PBX type system and b) have no idea how to get it to interface with anything interesting.

Hint: google voice uses asterisk.

Why do people keep suggesting Lynx? I'm glad you know about 90s-era text browsing, but even that's moved on. If you're going this route, use Links people!!

There are a couple posts alluding to this fact, but I'll just go on a bit more about it.

The general public doesn't care about quality. They care about convenience, then price, then quality. DVDs were way more convenient than VHS tapes, competed decently in terms of price (players and discs were more inline with expectations vs something like Laserdisc), and quality was a significant improvement, especially with progressive scan.

Bluray can be a significant jump over DVDs as well, but to get there you have to invest in a TV that performs well at a size big enough to appreciate the quality. Unfortunately most people just buy mediocre to bad LCD TVs with horrible color reproduction with contrast and brightness settings completely messed up for proper viewing. Then they put a 42" TV in their living room and sit 10 feet or more away from it. At that distance/size ratio, you might as well be watching a DVD; not that it matters, because without TV calibration, your stuff is going to look awful. It's not hard to calibrate a TV, and even with only a rudimentary set of controls (a color slider, a brightness slider, a contrast slider) you can get decent results. These days it's not even that hard to find an ISF capable TV that allows you to dial in each color and black/white levels perfectly.

But it's all lost on the masses because most people don't bother, and don't even know what they're missing. That, plus the fact that the convenience factor is the same and the price is noticeably a notch higher causes slow uptake in sales. Just look at streaming video and downloaded MP3s - even the masses know the quality isn't exactly great, but the convenience factor has caused streaming to explode in popularity.

I'm a total film fanatic. I'm not a crazy audio/videophile, but I DO like to have my stuff set up so that I can really see/hear details; my TV and sound system are calibrated properly (no, I don't use $400 HDMI cable, nor do I buy into any snake oil components - I just calibrate down to standards). That said, I haven't repurchased any of my existing DVD library, unless there's a significant increase in the value of the product. North By Northwest, for example, is a DVD I repurchased as a Bluray because it had a TON of extras, came with a great production book, and the transfer is absolutely, eye burningly beautiful. It's almost up there with a pristine film print. But for the most part, I don't re-purchase any of my existing library. I do buy NEW stuff as Bluray by default.

Just watch the release of North By Northwest. It's absolutely beautiful, sometimes shockingly so, on Bluray. Film res is WAY above standard DVD.

While you may be right that PCs are better for certain classes of games, consoles are just as good at different classes as well. As for being diverse... that's up for debate. Consoles have some crazy niche titles that would never show up on the PC and vice versa. You just don't hear about them as much because they're drowned in the roar of the AAA titles every year.

Ok, you've just gone into fanatic mode and are just tossing around just as much fud. Clearly you've never worked for any business larger than a handful of users that use those apps. WINE is not a solution for any kind of centralized management, even on a terminal server. And even if you could work out all the kinks (handling policies, handling automated rollouts across multiple terminal servers, integrating printers, dealing with UI issues that confuse users), by the time you've done all that, you've already sunk more into time costs versus licensing fees.

While I will say that Windows-only apps are annoying, there are plenty of them, and they are a necessary evil where no counterpart exists (and I'm not talking things like Office here).

And if all the apps are windows based?

Simple. I'm being meta, you're not. YOU'RE feeding the trolls as you responded to such a ridiculous statement with a ridiculous statement of your own. If that doesn't qualify, I don't know what does. And this is where I step off, as I've now explained it to you twice.

Yes, I've owned a PS3 for about 3 years now, and have used the XMB in different iterations on different equipment where it's been implemented. The XBL interface is no better. Just off the top of my head, the general criticisms which have been leveled at it which I agree with:

- The system menu is way to crowded and has a number of different settings which can't be discerned without first going into them to see what the options are, usually resulting in a lot of back and forth.

  - Using left and right to navigate the main bar AND using right to enter submenus is unintuitive for people not used to the xmb.

  - The modality of moving into certain menu items differs; sometimes you get a submenu, sometimes you get a wizard-like string of options, sometimes you get a submenu that doesn't use the xmb.

Basically the xmb would be excellent for FLAT spaces. Hierarchical menu structures make it unwieldy.

ALL of you are ridiculous. You're arguing against a stupid iPhone claim which logic would say is wrong, even without evidence (and I *OWN* an iPhone) with an even dumber argument that is entirely anecdotally based. It's like dance of the dumbasses here.