Slashdot effect.

Yeah, you can still play back AVI containers in Windows, but Windows has been pushing WMV in its stead for years now, for better or for worse. Windows 7 comes with out-of-the-box support for MP4 containers, if I remember correctly, as well.

AVI has been a functionally dead container format for close to decade, in all honesty. It's survived in zombie form because the only alternatives were either too bogged down in proprietary fluff (ASF/WMV) or not user friendly enough to set up for most Windows and Mac users (MKV and MP4). It had its lifespan prolonged by hardware manufacturers like Sony, but its falling further and further behind the technology curve, and the trends seem to be behind MP4, even in the dedicated hardware market.

And as for DivX/Xvid (since TFA fails to grasp the difference between codec and container), well, that's much ado about nothing: HandBrake will still happily encode MPEG-4 Part 2/Xvid-compliant video. It's just eliminating the Xvid encoder itself in favor of FFmpeg. And if you're not familiar enough with the situation to recognize that how little difference this makes, chances are you probably aren't affected by the decision at all.

I suspect that we'll see just that. That's the problem with issuing a C&D letter so late in the game.

Given that it's a ROM hack, there probably isn't "source" in the traditional sense, though.

Oh, please. Square Enix isn't issuing C&D letters to anyone for making games. They've got a legitimate interest in protecting their property. I don't happen to care for current IP law, but the developers of this project really should have recognized that they ran the risk of this sort of thing from day one. I rather doubt they were making any sort of principled stand against the tyranny of intellectual property, and suspect they just figured that SE wouldn't notice them.

Wake me when they start going after folks who aren't directly recycling SE-created characters, settings, resources, and code.

How do you know its decent? What qualifies as "decent," anyway? From your and my perspective, probably just a good game (of course, our tastes and preferences probably vary), but Square Enix, like any company, is probably more concerned with what makes them money. And what's the market for this sort of thing, honestly?

Besides, is this really a precedent that a company like Square Enix wants to be setting? The next thing you know, every wannabe hacker starts bombarding SE with licensing requests, and SE needs a submissions department.

"As a legit cart"? Er, when was the last time you saw a SNES game on sale at Wal-Mart? GameStop? Anywhere this side of eBay?

Seriously, though, "stating their willingness to assign all copyrights... for some nominal fee" would be an incredibly bad idea. Not only would Square Enix have no reason to agree (since they own the original work, and the derivative is worthless without it), it would look like to all the world like extortion.

And the simple fact of the matter is that while Square Enix might be able to find a limited market for such a product on places like Steam, XBLA, PSN, or WiiWare, that market probably wouldn't be sufficient to cover even the costs of testing a 98%-complete amateur hack. It would win them some kudos from a hardcore fan community that is in all likelihood a negligibly small part of their consumer base.

No, it wasn't. It wasn't a particularly impressive remake, I'll grant you, but it did have various features added that were in neither the PlayStation version, nor the SNES original (bonus dungeon, IIRC).

AFAIK there weren't Windows 3.11 but "Windows 3.1" and "Windows 3.11 for Workgroups".

Windows 3.11 (not Windows 3.11 for Workgroups) did exist, but it wasn't a major release. It was primarily an minor, service pack-like upgrade of Windows 3.1. Since this was back in the day before Windows Update, not many people actually installed it, or even knew about it. I don't think Microsoft released it in its own right except for a select few OEMs.

For that matter, there was, IIRC, a Windows 3.1 (not 3.11) for Workgroups, as well, though it didn't get the same amount of traction as its successor, and was quickly replaced/upgraded to the more familiar 3.11. But I believe WfW 3.1 was the first version of Windows to implement SMB shares.

With the exception of maybe one or two episodes (like the one where they wind up going back in time and preventing JFK's assassination while looking for a good Indian restaurant), I found little worthwhile in season 7.

Season 8 was a vast improvement, though, in that it actually bothered to be funny. True, by this point the series had drifted so far from the original premise that it was hardly the same show, but at least it was still amusing. And I enjoyed the addition of Mac McDonald (Captain Hollister) as a semi-regular character.

The ending of "Only the Good...", though, was a brilliant moment. If you ask me, I couldn't have thought of a better way to end the show, the upcoming new episodes notwithstanding.

What you're referring to is baseload, and while you have a point, it's not as simple as you've suggested.

First of all, there's been recent evidence that, if properly planned and distributed, solar and wind plants are actually capable of providing a constant base load. A recent study in the UK suggested that providing a decent distribution of generations over a large enough area could make up for a decreased capacity due to natural factors (cloudy days, poor wind, etc.). Of course, there's been no real practical attempts at this, and even then, solar and wind aren't ideal for baseload production, but it's not impossible.

And that's leaving aside geothermal, which is every bit as reliable as a baseload source as coal or nuclear. It can be argued that geothermal is actually a more reliable baseload source than traditional coal or nuclear plants, since its less dependent on a steady source of external fuel. Traditionally, geothermal plants have been best suited for particular locations, but there are relatively few places where a geothermal plant could not be constructed successfully (in theory, at least).

iTunes doesn't sell MP3s, though. They sell lossy AAC files in an MP4 container. So it's unlikely that they'd have ID3 frames in the first place.

I haven't purchased any DRM-free songs from iTunes, but I'd suspect that the information is stored as standard MP4 atoms, and that the iTunes editing interface just doesn't give you the ability to modify them. In which case you could presumably use a standard MP4 tool to remove the information, if you were so inclined.

That's just a guess, of course. It's obviously not clear from TFA.

I think Win2K was probably the best balance between reliability and functionality that the Windows series ever managed.

That said, I've never had much of a problem with XP, and it fixed some quirky little compatibility issues with some legacy software I'd been using. If you strip away some of the unnecessary cruft like the theme/visual style engine, there really aren't too many differences between it and Win2000.

Of course, I don't have too many quibbles with Vista, either. I actually like the changes to Explorer, and there are a number of minor cosmetic changes of which I approve. But I did need to do some tweaking in a few cases to make it play nicely with some older programs. I got them to work, ultimately, but that's largely because I'm both knowledgeable enough and have sufficient patience to tinker. And that's more than should be expected of your average user, really.

It wasn't a question of total incompatibility. Most software designed for Windows 95/98 worked just fine in Windows 2000. But there were enough bugs that it probably made Microsoft nervous about rushing out the OS.

Windows XP fixed a number of these issues (I have one or two games that refused to run on Windows 2000, for instance, that more or less work in Windows XP). But, really, the biggest factor was probably time. By the time the NT series went consumer with XP, manufacturers had had enough time to get more familiar with programming for WinNT, and the software and hardware issues had receded sufficiently.

There are still a few games, in particular, out there that don't play nicely with the WinNT line (not counting the UAC restrictions introduced in Vista that played merry havoc with a number of older titles). But they tend to be niche titles, and not many people care nowadays.

Ah, ah, but I never said it should. :-)

Mostly, though, it just made the entire thing a bit pointless: it wasn't as capable or as stable as Windows 2000, which predated it. It was an upgrade that, well, wasn't.