Slashdot Mirror

During the hiatus, the Daleks did a little-known movie called "Mr. Dalek Goes to Washington."

Here is a still from the movie.

"Expatiate!"

It is true that Nintendo is third place in the US... And for that they are suffering a bit. Don't get me wrong, I am a Nintendo fanboy (and to a lesser extent Square, and by extension, Sony) who hates Xbox with a passion, but Nintendo isn't going anywhere in the States, and it's got a tough time ahead of it. Best wait for the secret announcement later.

Elsewhere, Nintendo takes the cake, even worldwide it takes second-place with 9.55 million units (as of March) sold to 9.4 million Xboxes (as of July) (consider the fact that Xbox sales are biased towards the US, and you get a more interesting picture of the world sales. For links on the info, look at the link at the bottom of this post.). So Nintendo is hardly down and out.

And that brings me to my anecdote. Earlier this month, I had the privilege to sit in a two-hour open forum featuring four highly respected people in the gaming industry. One of these was Ms. Laura Fryer, Director of the Xbox Advanced Technology Group.

Naturally, as a Slashdotter, I decided to ask Ms. Fryer the two hard hitting questions:

• Why does Microsoft refuse to give Linux a legitimate license for use? (Yes, the ultimate "MS Answer" was obvious, but I wanted to irk her...)
• What does Microsoft plan to do about the fact that they are in third place worldwide?

The initial response? "Them's fighting words!"

She went on to address my second question first, dismissing it as untrue. Of course, I found evidence to the contrary later on, but the fact is that she lied about it.

Then of course, there was the Linux part of the question, which she dodged, mentioning something about "security" before going on about "intellectual property" issues (nVidia and Intel have problems with Linux on the Xbox? This is the way she tried to paint it...)

In any case, though the public opinion coming out of it was quite likely biased for her ("She's in the industry! She knows what she's talking about!") The fact of the matter is she blatently lied and danced around my question. Needless to say, it's quite ego-boosting to realize that a 17-year-old kid had to make a member of MS management lie and dance around the answer...

As for more information on the incident, you can see my blog entry on the subject.

Given that there are web standards out there, and that IE implements them, I just don't undersatnd this attitude that you must design for IE. What's the problem with you people? Sheesh.

The problem lies in the EXACT fact that I wrote this rant [link] on my blog.

To summarize briefly what I say in it: I try to code by standards, but the problem lies in the fact that you cannot code by standards and expect it to look and act the same in every browser, due to the different interpretations OF the standards.

It is due to this fact that people code specifically for browsers, or at the least, have to have browser specific code executed by either JavaScript, PHP, or Perl.

And thus I, in part, lend credence to coding only for IE. It would be nice to put in browser-specific code, but some people have neither the time nor the patience to code as such. And considering the near monopoly IE has on browsers, unless you aim to please all of your users, or you have an abnormal abundance of Mozilla users, it is perfectly acceptable (in my opinion) to code specifically for IE. I choose not to, but it's up to others to make the decision.

One of the reasons *I* prefer to try to make it AT LEAST compatible with Mozilla and IE is for the simple fact that the percentages of browsers may easily shift (though not completely, I'm sure) soon, what with AOL potentially switching its internal browser to Mozilla [link] (which has already been done with Compuserve [link]).