They also used rebates to make their products seem $20 less expensive. There's a new rebate every week, and the rebate expires after a week. So you must file for your rebate the day you purchase, or by the time to go to collect the rebate yours will have expired.Got burned by this once. Didn't turn me into a repeat customer.

the same thought occurred to me

You say Shit Can... I say Shift Plan!

Ouch. And probably true for most games, not just some of them. To be fair though, I think most game developers target intel chips and use intel compilers. I will bet that with both playstation and xbox going aggressively multi-core, developers will change that, and we'll begin to see it in benchmarks.

The slashdot home page, as it is, is clean and simple. I can read my news for nerds headlines quickly and browse through the stories that interest me. The Beta is not an improvement at all.

Given the way the author searched, the title of the article should be "Top 10 worst coded programming languages" or maybe "Top 10 worst Hacked Programming Languages". The article only measures what coders thing of other people's code, not the languages themselves.

But they could certainly install them automatically using a post-installation script

While it may well flop, this seems like a very credible challenge to Microsoft's dominance in gaming. Given a very specific subset of hardware like a steam box will represent, linux can run flawlessly and offer great performance. Valve can throw together tremendous functionality very cheaply by bundling existing applications like XBMC or VLC, not to mention WINE. As with linux in general, many of WINE's configuration problems and glitches go away when you start thinking about a very specific subset of hardware.

The question is, how does Microsoft respond to it? Do they start looking to pursue intellectual property claims against WINE, or against Valve for using it? (or is this the very reason that Valve is pushing for native ports of games?) What else can Microsoft to to put the brakes on Valve?

But Microsoft is unlikely to license any of its OS software to Valve for use on an XBOX competitor. So where does that leave Valve?

i.e. -- mom's basement.

REALITY CHECK: There is absolutely NO WAY it's coming to me. Cars compete with other models at certain price points. I believe this is a case where either Tesla makes an extra few percent profit or has to share that bit with a dealership -- which I may or may not be able to haggle with.

So far, nobody's mentioned in the discussion the following angle on the story:

OK. So dealerships don't like being cut out. And they don't like it. Of course not. They're small businesses. They're owned by families, not giant corporations, and those families are terrified that all the rest of the giant corporations will cut them out the way that Tesla does. Is it really so much better when Tesla Corp (or Elon Musk, for that matter) keeps all the profit instead of sharing a small percent with a local family?

I'm not a car dealer. Just thought maybe this was a point worth considering.

PGP comes to mind. Cant an application developer just create a 1024-bit public key encrypted chat program?

It's a very fine line, but I think you (and the judge) are probably on to something there.That having been said, they knew what they were doing.

I don't particularly want to see apple fined at all.They obviously make very good products that people like. Because of this, they don't need to screw consumers, but they did it anyway. I think they should be prevented from doing so again. Personally, I'd rather see them forced to allow people to be able to buy ebooks through the kindle or nook app than forcing them to pay a big fine.

Seems like Apple is getting let off very easy after carefully organizing the screwing-over of consumers.

So they get to try this again in 5 years?

And shouldn't the solution be forward looking? Is Apple actually doing the same thing with movies or other content besides books now and getting away with it?