For a while, each Android phone's physical buttons (back, home, menu, search) were in different places on the bottom row. It's as if not all cars had the accelerator on the right and brake in the middle.

Computers are in essence information copying machines. This means you'll end up having to pay for anything written after 1922 because of a law called copyright. Dead tree libraries use a loophole that avoids problems with copyright by allowing patrons to read a single book one after the other without requiring the making of new copies made.

An Xbox 360 controller works well with a PC, but it doesn't ship with a PC. Having a controller on a PC is currently beyond the least common denominator, as Anonymous Coward explained at length in this discussion. Heck, wireless controllers need an adapter to even work with a PC, and this adapter is hard to find in stores. This means developers and publishers of notable games tend to deprioritize play-testing their games with an Xbox 360 controller, assuming that (unlike you) most PC game buyers won't already own one.

Without sideloading, how will a developer test a game on the Steam Machine before it gets greenlit?

Yes. Compiling from source, installing from a binary tarball, or installing from a PPA is comparable to sideloading on Android.

I have a Turbo Touch for NES, and its Control Pad has ridges and raised dots to tell the thumb where the sensors are. I don't see how this differs.

Perhaps I've been watching too many of Ashen's videos, but Ken Sing Ton just sounds Chinese to me.

They've been doing so since the Apple IIGS days. Perhaps the rationale is 1. that it replaces a mouse, and 2. not to interfere with Atari's Trak-Ball trademark.

When I have reminded people of that, their replies have been to the effect: "But how many people can fit around one desktop PC monitor?" and "Most people prefer to play in pickup groups with strangers because they can't even schedule online matches with their friends, let alone fly them in for an in-person match."

I guess that's part of why some cable companies choose to put up their own parallel poles rather than lease from the telco.

Digital cable TV is essentially a multicast stream, while video over the Internet is most often unicast. If the cable company can get its customers to watch video over a digital cable channel, then it needs to send a stream to a neighborhood only once instead of once for each viewer.

Which is fine for people who happen to already own a PS3, not so fine for those who happen to have chosen some other console years before the Nexus 7 was announced.

Do you know what a USB CF or SD card writer is? Kazzo and Retrode are essentially the same thing for Game Paks: they let you copy the program to a ROM image on your PC to run it in an emulator. Without either making a ROM image or buying an emulator that includes ROM images (like Midway Arcade Treasures or Namco Museum), you can't run a game in an emulator.

In your book, would the Wii have been compatible with GameCube games? Someone who didn't already own a GameCube would have had to spend $30 on a used GameCube controller and memory card.

I tried playing an NES emulator on my own Nexus 7. The on-screen gamepad was unusably clunky in anything with fast action. My Wii Classic Controller worked with emulators until Google changed the Bluetooth stack in Android 4.2 in such a way as to break Wii Remote communication. And you still have "to buy an extra piece of hardware" (a Kazzo for NES or a Retrode for SNES) in order to load your Game Paks into a PC- or Android-based emulator.

Of course, with SteamOS set to take gaming HTPCs mainstream, there shouldn't be quite as much need for a softmod.

Almost. The Atari 7800 could play 2600 games. The Genesis could play most Master System games with an adapter, as could the Game Gear. But the Genesis and 7800 got their back-compat the same way the PS2 got its: by using most of the previous console's hardware as an I/O coprocessor for (say) running audio. The Nintendo DS would end up doing the same thing.

There are still several genres that lean heavily toward consoles, such as sport games, fighting games, party games, or anything else with shared-screen multiplayer. It's common to see games in these genres released on Xbox 360 and PS3 with no PC port or a 2-year-delayed PC port because of publishers' fears of widespread copyright infringement. I guess I'll have to wait and see if the Steam Machine fizzles the way OUYA did.

The Super NES couldn't play NES games, yet it sold. The Xbox 360 never got more than half of the original Xbox library emulated over its lifetime, yet it sold.

It has been commonplace since the PSP to include the latest version of the console's system software on each game disc. That way, all an offline user has to do is insert a new game disc and patch up to the version of system software that was current when the publisher submitted the game to the console maker for lot check.