Well, at least it's got a good package manager now.

What happens when it's time to start actually making money off the thing, and you have to hike the price back up to $400-500? If you're eating a couple hundred bucks loss per unit, you can't exactly make that up on volume.

They'd probably hide the activity behind so many shell companies and legal firms that it might as well be coming from the Huffy bicycle company.

That sounds like an objective critique.

What part of "as many as you can ship for that price" eluded you?

Should bring it down from a decade to a couple of hours.

I'll give you $20 for as many as you can ship for that price.

Rule number 2: if you circumvent official company policy, make sure you have an even better explanation why.

That's what I mean. Why isn't it just getting that info from the OS? Is Java still actively supported on any operating systems that don't have some kind of time zone database? Sounds like not-invented-here syndrome to me.

I have a hard time believing that Java has no problem abstracting an operating system's graphics, sound, console I/O, network I/O, etc. into a portable API, but somehow can't manage the same for timezone info.

The problem there is that it allows the end user to resell a game without allowing MS to skim their God-given tithe off the top (or prevent it outright).

Yeah, but in the case of the NES, you can disable it by clipping a single chip pin on the board, and for the SNES, just Dremel off a little bit of plastic in the cartridge slot. And typically, these games would be timed to the video refresh rate, so switching between NTSC or PAL will usually cause the game to run at the wrong speed.

Basically, the long block chains are $2 bills, and the 7.1 client is Taco Bell. Is that about right?

So what you're saying is that they should reduce marketing, spend more on training and staffing, and shrink the clientele, while at the same time lowering prices? Interesting strategy, but I don't think "reduce revenue and increase operational overhead" would have the desired result.

Anti-competitive I'll certainly grant you, but "small-scale" and "monopoly" are pretty contradictory.