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This comment is all kinds of stupid.

No, it's a fairly common viewpoint among rational Nintendo customers. But it does omit Nintendo's battle with pirates. I think the DS and its latest incarnations is a neat little device and so I purchased a certain cartridge for it recently for $5 from some Chinese site. Unfortunately upon visiting the site to retrieve the latest firmware for their cart, I noticed that they were also hosting movies and roms for the latest games (of all regions) in their file directory tree. This is reality. You might not see it here but you can walk down the street in some Asian nations and pick up every game for the DS on a tiny little cart for very little money ($50?). On the other hand, I want to tinker with what I paid for! My device? Then I'll run what I want to run on it.

Nintendo does well because their business model is sensible. They make money on their hardware.

So that's interesting because if they make money on their hardware, why do they care what I do with it after I buy it? Why don't they market it as a gaming/development platform? Why don't they just release all their tool chains for everyone to use to develop on their systems if they already make money on the hardware? I mean, you'd probably sell more platforms that way, right? Why do I need to pay some absurd amount of money for a developer's license and a kit to play with them? Perhaps because their business model also relies on a walled garden and though they may make money on the console, the real money comes from sales of games for that console. I think if you had the numbers, you'd see that their profit model is not a whole lot different than Sony or MS. Everyone plays that game.

They also offer things that everyone wants. MS fanboys need to realise that not everyone wants to play as a big fat space marine or some other "extreme" character doing the same damn thing in every sequel while spurting out god awful dialog that sounds like it was written by the 13 year olds play the game.

Having just played through Beautiful Katamari and Rapala Bass Pro Fishing on my 360 last night, I have to question this statement (not that fishing games don't exist for the Wii). I think your statement works well generically. Observe: (MS|Nintendo|Sony) fanboys need to realise that not everyone wants to play as a (big fat space marine|big fat Italian plumber) or some other ("extreme"|"cute") character doing the same damn thing in every sequel while spurting out (god awful dialog|It's a me, a Mario|PikaPikachu) that sounds like it was written by the (13 year olds|racists) play the game.

So I'm not seeing how you feel Nintendo is worse than the competition. Your comment is uneducated fanboy verbal masturbation at best and not surprisingly all the other little uneducated xbots gave you a +5 interesting for spouting crap.

I think the key here is that the three big names have their ups and downs. Why on earth do you act like there are no "downs" with Nintendo? If price is important to you, go with Nintendo. The Wii was the first of the three I bought. If graphics are important to you, go with the PS3. If online FPS is important to you, go with the XBox 360. If offline multiplayer is important to you, go with the Wii. Etc, etc. I own all three. And I play all three. Your post ironically makes you look like the fan boy and RogueyWon look like a well tempered gamer. Some of your acclamations for Nintendo are more than questionable ...

Block the <video> element using AdBlock Plus.

Don't take my word for it... try it. Once the page loads, add a #video element hiding rule and apply.

More control for one. Flash is essentially a self contained program running in your browser. HTML5 will allow things like audio volume per tab, or per domain, more interaction between the page itself, the content, and the user.

The fact it's self-contained doesn't mean it's isolated from the page. It's in fact a benefit, because it quickly becomes a burden to serve your app as a hundred of tiny images and js files. The "minification" and "sprite" techniques the community is forced to use in JS/HTML/CSS apps, are tedious, limited and just a poor-man's compilation technique, a sign that in practice a compressed one-off-download container is the better choice for web apps.

There is also fast two-way connection between JS and Flash that works in all browsers today. Anything the browser provides as settings and per-tab controls and so on, which is accessible to JavaScript/DOM, is accessible to Flash as well. As an example of this feature in action, you can see the HTML5 features like canvas and SVG implemented transparently via Flash. You can also use most of the essential Flash features directly from JavaScript with libraries like Aflax.

Here's a fantastic example of the sorts of things this'll make possible, which simply can't be done with flash: http://www.double.co.nz/video_test/video.svg [double.co.nz]

Would you care to elaborate what is in that demo that Flash can't easily top today. I see scalable rotatable rectangles with transluccent video in them. Nothing Flash couldn't do few years ago. Today, in Flash you can also map videos like that on waving flags in 3D space or have full-blown alpha mask for dynamic compositing, if you wish. I shouldn't need to mention also that Flash provides consistent codec support (including H264/AAC) on all platforms and browsers in turns on, today. All this while even non-MS browser makers can't agree on a common codec to use (let alone Microsoft joining them any time soon).

You have true 3D engines with shader support or full-blown music synthesis and sequencing applications built directly on top of the flash platform.

All in all, most arguments against Flash I've seen, are arguments out of ignorance and bias. I would be the first to call out a poor use of Flash when I see one, but it works the other way too. In the end, can't we have both instead of either? Who stands to win by "eliminating" either option when they both fill different, though partially overlapping roles?

More control for one. Flash is essentially a self contained program running in your browser. HTML5 will allow things like audio volume per tab, or per domain, more interaction between the page itself, the content, and the user.

Here's a fantastic example of the sorts of things this'll make possible, which simply can't be done with flash:
http://www.double.co.nz/video_test/video.svg

I actually think this is a better HTML5 example than the article. There you have video transparency, which can be a variable, you can selective audio based on the last thing you clicked, it can be moved, rotated, and resized freely by dragging the corners, etc. You can pause, play, mute, and adjust volume to each one completely independently of the other (though the volume control is blocked by the draggable corners, remember you can right click the video and click Show Controls in firefox). I once even saw a demo where the edges of video were distortable, allowing you to skew it, etc, and it was smoothly done too, better than most compiled applications I've seen. Not to mention effects like reflecting video content below the video in real-time (like it's on a glassy surface).

What'll be really impressive is when SVG is finally fully implemented, because that'll give us an open standard for filters and many other things (you can alter colors in a video on the fly, generate images, gradients, and effects dynamically, etc, as well as animations without any javascript at all.

What it comes down to is changing the notion of what's possible with just a browser... If you think that AJAX webapps are impressive now, just you wait...

Good News Everybody! This will very soon cease to be the case.

HTML 5 specifies a element. Firefox 3.1 will support this, with the Ogg Theora codec included out of the box.

Yep, it's impressive too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Har-PRP4X9U
http://www.double.co.nz/video_test/test4.html

Nothing to do, just use Firefox and "it just works(tm)".

Uh... DS carts do have a filesystem. If you're asking about why the DS doesn't support off-cart storage of game data and media, well, that's one reason the DS is $70 less than the PSP, is two-thirds the size, and runs about three times as long on a charge.

I just had a crazy idea one day, that it'd be cool to write an emulator for that fancy new Nintendo DS that was yet to be released (this was mid-'04). And I said what the hell, and started on it; eventually, I ended up with DSemu. Of course the code wasn't massively good, and the design of the plugin architecture was horrid; that was the point. I learned much more in a year of writing an emulator, about code structure and good design, than ever I learned at college.

Many people on here have mentioned existing open-source projects to look at, including MAME; if you add DSemu and mic's Dualis to the list, I'd love to see the fruits of the DS emulation scene in your studies at some point. DSemu's maintained by Chris Double now, so feel free to throw any questions at either Chris or myself.

I'm seriously waiting for the first hentai game for the DS, it could be so perfect!

I'm seriously waiting for the first hentai game for the DS, it could be so perfect!

The homebrew space invaders emulator recently made avialable for the Nintendo DS does something useful. Works pretty well infact:

http://www.double.co.nz/nintendo_ds/space_invaders /index.html

I'd like to see a standardized lisp that I can write and read as quickly and Python.

The Lisp people saw no major advantages to it other than the syntax, and they'd already gotten past that barrier

The non-Lisp people apparently didn't understand that it really was better than C++/Java

Lisp does need a better ... community ...

and one standard open source implementation.

It is so sad to see Apple pushing so much of its marketing energies into hawking, as "innovations," what amount to pretty case designs, when they have gone and eliminated truly innovative things like:

• Dylan

  A "kinder, gentler" version of Lisp

• Newton

  A really powerful PDA

• The "here again, gone again" QuickDraw GX scheme