I've yet to set one up so I can't offer you any advice based on first-hand experience. But I can tell you that you need to decide if it will be internally hosted or not. It sounds like that's what you're getting at anyway. Maybe check out Openfire (used to be Wildfire)? Java-based. Integrates with AD. I have it on the back burner as something to check out for my own users.
Like the old joke about prison inmates shouting numbers because they've all heard everyone's jokes so many times, and then the new guy stands up and says a number, but no one laughs because apparently he's not good at telling jokes.
(I am not good at telling jokes, look what I did with that one:D )
So you didn't like Netscape (and yes by the end it was by most accounts a bloated piece of crap), but you don't get to make up your own history. In the beginning Netscape cost money, and IE did not. After a while IE came pre-installed (and of course, Netscape did not). What a bunch of chumps the Netscape guys must have been, right? Trying to sell their product when they should have just been selling an OS and bundling the browser with it.
It's not like Netscape wasn't just as bad at "extending" the nascent standards, but they tended to do it in ways that didn't require a particular OS. And IE didn't win because their table tags were somehow better than Netscape's. The browsers were incompatible in various ways, not the least of which was ActiveX. Microsoft even did their own incompatible Java VM. And seeing as free + bundled got IE the majority share quickly, it wasn't long before certain corners of the internet started to look like an extension of the Microsoft platform.
Technical superiority is not what makes you a success in this market. If anything, there's a magical combination of cheap and easy that does it. The *real* reason we're talking about the fall of IE (if you want to call it that) is that the web is mostly mature now, as a platform. That maturity happened in a lot of ways, some because of MS, some in spite of MS, some having nothing to do with MS. I'm not going to get into specifics, nor would I even say I'm qualified to discuss most of it. The point is, the basic technological foundation for the web has been laid, and the time has come to commodify it. Whatever money or power could have been gained from "innovating" a successful browser has dried up. The best engines for both HTML rendering and ECMAScript will be open source from here on out.
Plus it's not all desktops anymore. There are way too many interests now from established players in other industries, like Nokia and Motorola, that also want a say in the web's future. These companies may get along with MS in certain ways but you can bet that when IE kicks the bucket, Motorola et al will sleep late the day of the funeral.
Call it a conspiracy theory, but I always figured that fragmenting Java was the whole point...Sun came up with WORA, and Microsoft tried for a while to make sure that "anywhere" did not include their platform. And got away with it for a while.
You aren't by any chance the author of this documentary piece, are you?
Question: seeing as Americans are overwhelmingly supporting the guy promising universal healthcare, do you see this as (a) people wanting universal healthcare or (b) the tireless work of secret trotskyite sleeper cells?
Just kidding. It's obviously (c) people hate Bush and they want revenge even if it means making the same damn mistake (letting one party have a majority in Congress *and* the presidency).
When I said he'd fit in, I just meant that he's good at basic patriotic/nationalist sentiment. Everyone wants to complain with one side of their mouth but be super-patriotic with the other. No one wants to admit something's wrong, that maybe we're not as great as we think we are, or that manifest destiny played out a long time ago.
I find it weird that the press calls him controversial, but I haven't heard him say anything that didn't amount to verbal flag-waving. I love my country, BTW, but there's nothing controversial about that. All the candidates mention him in speeches now. He's the opposite of controversial, he's a sound bite generator and an example of the armchair "righteous grumpiness" that typifies popular sentiment right now.
It's not that I dislike him or agree with what he says. But it's just too easy. It's too basic. I get frustrated at the real problem: there isn't any real analysis of the bailout, or anything else, on TV. Every network offers a steady stream of supposed experts complaining that we need to get the economy in order. Brilliant. I wish I'd come up with that one.
The "experts" are bad enough. Maybe they do have detailed opinions, but they can't share them in the 15 second slots they're given. Enter JTP. He's content to speak in sound bites because (get this) he's a plumber and that's the extent of his thoughts. The guy's not even qualified to drive. But he's our hero now? He's got all the answers? Really?
Not to worry: America's the greatest country in the world, I'm sure as soon as we stop apologizing for it, we'll be fine.
I'm not sure how this is trolling. I thought it was stating the obvious. It's a little off-topic, I guess. But whoever read it as a liberal/conservative thing, you're way off.
Technology: US Army Sees Telephone As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool"
Mike writes:
"A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular communication device, the telphone, as a potential terrorist tool. A chapter titled 'Potential for Terrorist Use of Phones' notes that telephoned loved-ones knew of the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than lonely tv-watchers, and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used mobile phones to keep the police honest. 'Phones are already used by some godless freedom-haters to discuss and/or debate extremist ideologies and perspectives,' the report said. The report goes on to say, 'Terrorists could theoretically use telephones in the US as an operation tool.' Just wait until the Army finds out pen and paper!"
Another difference is that the protagonist of 1984 was pretty resourceful. Joe the plumber just says the same stupid cringe-inducing nonsense that I get to hear every day at the office.
I doubt the government cares, since he's just parroting half of Bush's talking points from 4 years ago. "I'm not going to apologize for being an American, this is the greatest country on earth", etc etc.
He'd fit right in over at IngSoc. The only lesson I think we can take away from this guy is that a lot of us are so dumb that the media can get away with painting someone medium-dumb as a person with "something to say".
And I realize you're not giving them any money if you pirate software, but in the case of a game console, you still have to buy the console. In the case of the PSP, you still have to buy the proprietary memory sticks, too.
Maybe market was the wrong word. I guess what I'm saying is, given two options:
Sony punishes its customers with excessive DRM, and they react by cutting Sony off completely.
and
Sony punishes its customers...they react by cracking the DRM but keep buying the products.
I'd prefer the former. I'm not sure what you're saying about corporate agenda, I think you read my post wrong. I'm saying, it's better for people to not buy "defective by design" at all, rather than to buy it and fix it. You're only doing Sony a favor.
And I realize that it's a high bar to set, which is why I admitted to owning a PSP.
I lost all respect for Sony following the rootkits. But you make it sound like it's their fault people are ripping them off. That's like saying "you shouldn't have gone out dressed like that if you weren't asking for it." People are going to pirate regardless. Sure, less people would have pirated if they made it convenient for those people to get what they want. But that doesn't mean Sony has to or should even be expected to satisfy their customers. The market is supposed to create that pressure, not the threat of piracy.
I have a modded second-hand PSP. I have a couple of PSX games on there that I admit to simply downloading. I'm not going to say it's Sony's fault. I would have done it either way.
Flat out immunity would be nice but I'm not banking on it. But I do feel safe enough that I'm not about to shut off Windows file sharing for most of the workstations. We use it extensively. We've got web-filtering, AV, we stay patched, and I'm lucky to have a small enough network that I never have to guess what's going on.
The users are limited, though not locked down as far as you describe. Most days, I wish they were:D
I should have been clearer...if you're not on a network you trust, definitely shut off Windows file sharing. It *is* buggy. And who are you going to be sharing files with on an unknown network anyway?
But at home, I shoot for convenience. In that situation, both the technical (what the firewall's doing) and social (what his kids are doing) can be taken into account. You don't need to resort to FTP or sneakernetting. When we only had one computer, I had a lot of the network services shut off. But now we have more than one and they're useful to have on.
I do think that the exploit is a big deal, and that it reflects poorly on MS and SMB. All the boxes I'm responsible for were patched within a couple of hours. My issue was with the idea that occasional or potential exploits somehow justifies avoiding useful technology, especially when in a properly secured network, the chances of this affecting you are low enough that you're better off making good use of the technology. Having dealt with crap like LANtastic causes you to not take built-in file sharing for granted.
Also, I got the feeling it was pretty much an "MS sux0rs, other OSes are more secure because they're made from fairy farts" posts. And I misread the "muppet" bit. But OP was wrong anyway: they do ship Windows with file sharing turned off. You have to specifically enable it by either going through a wizard that enables Windows firewall or clicking off a dialog that says something like "this is risky".
I think the problem comes in right at number one: Blizzard is not telling you that if you "earn" something in the game, they have to change their rules/policies to prevent you from ever losing it.
In fact, I'm sure the EULA says the opposite: it's their game and you play by their rules. Even if no part of the EULA is enforceable, you can't accuse them of creating some expectation when they have attempted to give you the opposite expectation.
Of course, you always ought to be able to sue. But that's basic: you can't say that you ought to not get laughed at for it, or that you ought to get the suit brought into a real court.
I think people come up with the idea that since they did so much grinding, they "earned" that gold. But IMO if anyone gave them that impression, it wasn't Blizzard.
Most of us "muppets" are happy to block 139 and its cousins at the firewall and be done with it. It's a LAN service. Assuming your network is secure from the outside, you can have your cake and eat it to.
If in your paranoia you somehow neglected to secure your WLAN, you *do* need to worry about this.
Either way, shutting off useful parts of the OS because you're afraid of an exploit is more cargo cult thinking than paranoid thinking. If you can't tell at any given time who's on your LAN, you need to get that under control. No OS is immune to the workings of a bad administrator.
I see your later post is an example of the "no true scotsman" fallacy. Plenty of people with a clue use windows file sharing, because they know what's going in in their network and at what layer(s) their security needs to be applied. People who have a clue avoid the "I automatically do X because Y is automatically bad" approach.
I happen to be of the opinion that open source software is more secure by virtue of its openness, which is an opinion that not everyone here shares. But that doesn't mean that I refuse to use Windows file sharing because it may or may not have an exploit. Again, this is not critical if every Tom/Dick/Harry isn't hanging out on your LAN, (or you aren't at a college, hotel or what have you). That said, this *is* ridiculous on MS's part and I have this update deadlined right now.
I agree about Discovery...I think it used to have more science programming but they shifted that to what is now the Science channel. Science Channel still has some decent shows, as well as the occasional really good documentary, but certainly not all of it is high-quality. "Beyond Tomorrow" and the other future-predicting shows are usually pretty annoying.* Supposedly they were running Cosmos, dunno what happened to that as I don't see it on there anymore.
Sometimes History International looks good but it's most of the same crap. There's just something really gut-wrenching about seeing a documentary on quackery that makes it seem legitimate with that "objectivity" smell. People are saying the ancient civ stuff is good though, so I may have to give HC another look.
* pretty sure one time they showed somebody's homebrew touchscreen + earth map UI and said it was the future of computers. laaame.
Second those two. They've got everything under the sun. I was going to recommend McMaster-Carr especially but I couldn't think of the name since it's been a while since I needed anything (at the time it was rubber bearings of a really specific size/shape). Plus, from what I can tell they're pretty cheap and they fill orders quickly.
Funnily enough, History Channel is always at the top of my list of channels that went way downhill. They do still have the veneer of informative programming, but will have things like straight-faced interviews with one of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. They love doing segments on wacky crap nobody takes seriously, and paint their quack subjects like some underdog determined to shine the light of truth.
There was something in New Scientist, but the subject was instant coffee and brazil nuts. I am seeing regular coffee mentioned in other articles, but as far as I can tell it's only because people are getting it wrong (there's also variations on whose research it is and nobody's citing sources).
But the 15 seconds of searching that neither bloggers nor newspaper columnists can be bothered to do led me to Gunter Kuhnle's work on phytoestrogens, which I'm almost sure is the source of all this. But from his own site:
Their biological effect has been investigated for some times but the results so far are inconclusive.
In other words, I'm going to keep drinking coffee and rationalizing it until this goes away. Manboobs be damned.
Also: my favorite part was when he took a break from saying how people still play PC games, and how there's still money in the PC games industry, to say that LucasArts haven't "made a good PC game in a long time".
Maybe they haven't. How terribly convenient, though. Pop quiz, hotshot: what are you going to do when a publisher you like abandons the platform? In other words, at what point does the cognitive dissonance become too much?
In other words, I see nothing to suggest that this guy isn't a huge shill, who will say anything just to make the PC look like a viable gaming platform. I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but this guy is the last person I'd want to hear an opinion on that from, since he's got got more awkward-segues-to-the-talking-points up his sleeve than Sarah Palin.
So basically the difference between one kind of computer vs another is external devices.
In my mind the only difference worth mentioning is whether the system will run unsigned code. Console makers have direct control over what is and isn't published for their hardware. Honestly, the products are so parallel that the only reason I can come up with for this, besides the inertia of history, is that big-name game dev houses are prima donnas, and they want it in writing that they won't have the stiff competition that might arise in an open market (they are paying for the privelege of developing, after all).
XNA,Xbox live.
I think better candidates here would be the GP2X and the upcoming Pandora & Wiz, along with a few others that haven't done quite so well. But you're right: the indie *console* game scene was nonexistent a few years ago, and now it's getting somewhere. But all in all, my sad guess is that indie games will always be like indie films. Occasionally successful, but generally of limited appeal. Why? I don't know why. I do know that Madden 'xx is always a top seller. Joe LCD wants more of the same, and only the big studios can or want to give it to him. The big studios are not going to develop for a system that's (completely) open to hobbyists, since it will be too easy to pirate games on a system that allows unsigned code.
I'd be surprised if the next generation of built-in online game stores was any more open than the last. XNA is awesome but my guess is that's as far as MS can take it as far as letting people develop for their system. Console makers earn money from what they charge third-parties to develop, and by taking their cut of the software sales, and sometimes from the hardware sales. They are in the business of creating a closed platform and skimming money from all the transactions. I think hobbyist games will always be crippled in some fashion on these systems, if not in terms of hardware access (Sony) then in terms of business opportunity (MS), and who gets final say.
I'm beginning to think that if I "sat down with" myself to talk about "DRM and the state of the game industry"* it'd be a featured article on here, and probably get duped to boot. I know the flamebait articles get all the traffic, but I just keep hoping people are going to get sick of trotting out the same arguments when there aren't any new developments.
*Readers will note that the only game I've ever made was one of those origami diamonds you slip over your thumbs. It didn't have DRM. It was a financial failure by most accounts.
Slashdot Mirror
I've yet to set one up so I can't offer you any advice based on first-hand experience. But I can tell you that you need to decide if it will be internally hosted or not. It sounds like that's what you're getting at anyway. Maybe check out Openfire (used to be Wildfire)? Java-based. Integrates with AD. I have it on the back burner as something to check out for my own users.
Like the old joke about prison inmates shouting numbers because they've all heard everyone's jokes so many times, and then the new guy stands up and says a number, but no one laughs because apparently he's not good at telling jokes.
(I am not good at telling jokes, look what I did with that one :D )
So you didn't like Netscape (and yes by the end it was by most accounts a bloated piece of crap), but you don't get to make up your own history. In the beginning Netscape cost money, and IE did not. After a while IE came pre-installed (and of course, Netscape did not). What a bunch of chumps the Netscape guys must have been, right? Trying to sell their product when they should have just been selling an OS and bundling the browser with it.
It's not like Netscape wasn't just as bad at "extending" the nascent standards, but they tended to do it in ways that didn't require a particular OS. And IE didn't win because their table tags were somehow better than Netscape's. The browsers were incompatible in various ways, not the least of which was ActiveX. Microsoft even did their own incompatible Java VM. And seeing as free + bundled got IE the majority share quickly, it wasn't long before certain corners of the internet started to look like an extension of the Microsoft platform.
Technical superiority is not what makes you a success in this market. If anything, there's a magical combination of cheap and easy that does it. The *real* reason we're talking about the fall of IE (if you want to call it that) is that the web is mostly mature now, as a platform. That maturity happened in a lot of ways, some because of MS, some in spite of MS, some having nothing to do with MS. I'm not going to get into specifics, nor would I even say I'm qualified to discuss most of it. The point is, the basic technological foundation for the web has been laid, and the time has come to commodify it. Whatever money or power could have been gained from "innovating" a successful browser has dried up. The best engines for both HTML rendering and ECMAScript will be open source from here on out.
Plus it's not all desktops anymore. There are way too many interests now from established players in other industries, like Nokia and Motorola, that also want a say in the web's future. These companies may get along with MS in certain ways but you can bet that when IE kicks the bucket, Motorola et al will sleep late the day of the funeral.
did a shitty job at writing a VM for it
Call it a conspiracy theory, but I always figured that fragmenting Java was the whole point...Sun came up with WORA, and Microsoft tried for a while to make sure that "anywhere" did not include their platform. And got away with it for a while.
Liar!
You aren't by any chance the author of this documentary piece, are you?
Question: seeing as Americans are overwhelmingly supporting the guy promising universal healthcare, do you see this as (a) people wanting universal healthcare or (b) the tireless work of secret trotskyite sleeper cells?
Just kidding. It's obviously (c) people hate Bush and they want revenge even if it means making the same damn mistake (letting one party have a majority in Congress *and* the presidency).
When I said he'd fit in, I just meant that he's good at basic patriotic/nationalist sentiment. Everyone wants to complain with one side of their mouth but be super-patriotic with the other. No one wants to admit something's wrong, that maybe we're not as great as we think we are, or that manifest destiny played out a long time ago.
I find it weird that the press calls him controversial, but I haven't heard him say anything that didn't amount to verbal flag-waving. I love my country, BTW, but there's nothing controversial about that. All the candidates mention him in speeches now. He's the opposite of controversial, he's a sound bite generator and an example of the armchair "righteous grumpiness" that typifies popular sentiment right now.
It's not that I dislike him or agree with what he says. But it's just too easy. It's too basic. I get frustrated at the real problem: there isn't any real analysis of the bailout, or anything else, on TV. Every network offers a steady stream of supposed experts complaining that we need to get the economy in order. Brilliant. I wish I'd come up with that one.
The "experts" are bad enough. Maybe they do have detailed opinions, but they can't share them in the 15 second slots they're given. Enter JTP. He's content to speak in sound bites because (get this) he's a plumber and that's the extent of his thoughts. The guy's not even qualified to drive. But he's our hero now? He's got all the answers? Really?
Not to worry: America's the greatest country in the world, I'm sure as soon as we stop apologizing for it, we'll be fine.
I'm not sure how this is trolling. I thought it was stating the obvious. It's a little off-topic, I guess. But whoever read it as a liberal/conservative thing, you're way off.
Technology: US Army Sees Telephone As Possible Terrorist "Operation Tool"
Mike writes:
"A draft US Army intelligence report has identified the popular communication device, the telphone, as a potential terrorist tool. A chapter titled 'Potential for Terrorist Use of Phones' notes that telephoned loved-ones knew of the July Los Angeles earthquake faster than lonely tv-watchers, and activists at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis used mobile phones to keep the police honest. 'Phones are already used by some godless freedom-haters to discuss and/or debate extremist ideologies and perspectives,' the report said. The report goes on to say, 'Terrorists could theoretically use telephones in the US as an operation tool.' Just wait until the Army finds out pen and paper!"
Another difference is that the protagonist of 1984 was pretty resourceful. Joe the plumber just says the same stupid cringe-inducing nonsense that I get to hear every day at the office.
I doubt the government cares, since he's just parroting half of Bush's talking points from 4 years ago. "I'm not going to apologize for being an American, this is the greatest country on earth", etc etc.
He'd fit right in over at IngSoc. The only lesson I think we can take away from this guy is that a lot of us are so dumb that the media can get away with painting someone medium-dumb as a person with "something to say".
And I realize you're not giving them any money if you pirate software, but in the case of a game console, you still have to buy the console. In the case of the PSP, you still have to buy the proprietary memory sticks, too.
Maybe market was the wrong word. I guess what I'm saying is, given two options:
Sony punishes its customers with excessive DRM, and they react by cutting Sony off completely.
and
Sony punishes its customers...they react by cracking the DRM but keep buying the products.
I'd prefer the former. I'm not sure what you're saying about corporate agenda, I think you read my post wrong. I'm saying, it's better for people to not buy "defective by design" at all, rather than to buy it and fix it. You're only doing Sony a favor.
And I realize that it's a high bar to set, which is why I admitted to owning a PSP.
Dunno why I said modded. Cracked firmware. The xbox is modded :D
I lost all respect for Sony following the rootkits. But you make it sound like it's their fault people are ripping them off. That's like saying "you shouldn't have gone out dressed like that if you weren't asking for it." People are going to pirate regardless. Sure, less people would have pirated if they made it convenient for those people to get what they want. But that doesn't mean Sony has to or should even be expected to satisfy their customers. The market is supposed to create that pressure, not the threat of piracy.
I have a modded second-hand PSP. I have a couple of PSX games on there that I admit to simply downloading. I'm not going to say it's Sony's fault. I would have done it either way.
Reminds me of this:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001125.html
Flat out immunity would be nice but I'm not banking on it. But I do feel safe enough that I'm not about to shut off Windows file sharing for most of the workstations. We use it extensively. We've got web-filtering, AV, we stay patched, and I'm lucky to have a small enough network that I never have to guess what's going on.
The users are limited, though not locked down as far as you describe. Most days, I wish they were :D
I should have been clearer...if you're not on a network you trust, definitely shut off Windows file sharing. It *is* buggy. And who are you going to be sharing files with on an unknown network anyway?
But at home, I shoot for convenience. In that situation, both the technical (what the firewall's doing) and social (what his kids are doing) can be taken into account. You don't need to resort to FTP or sneakernetting. When we only had one computer, I had a lot of the network services shut off. But now we have more than one and they're useful to have on.
I do think that the exploit is a big deal, and that it reflects poorly on MS and SMB. All the boxes I'm responsible for were patched within a couple of hours. My issue was with the idea that occasional or potential exploits somehow justifies avoiding useful technology, especially when in a properly secured network, the chances of this affecting you are low enough that you're better off making good use of the technology. Having dealt with crap like LANtastic causes you to not take built-in file sharing for granted.
Also, I got the feeling it was pretty much an "MS sux0rs, other OSes are more secure because they're made from fairy farts" posts. And I misread the "muppet" bit. But OP was wrong anyway: they do ship Windows with file sharing turned off. You have to specifically enable it by either going through a wizard that enables Windows firewall or clicking off a dialog that says something like "this is risky".
I think the problem comes in right at number one: Blizzard is not telling you that if you "earn" something in the game, they have to change their rules/policies to prevent you from ever losing it.
In fact, I'm sure the EULA says the opposite: it's their game and you play by their rules. Even if no part of the EULA is enforceable, you can't accuse them of creating some expectation when they have attempted to give you the opposite expectation.
Of course, you always ought to be able to sue. But that's basic: you can't say that you ought to not get laughed at for it, or that you ought to get the suit brought into a real court.
I think people come up with the idea that since they did so much grinding, they "earned" that gold. But IMO if anyone gave them that impression, it wasn't Blizzard.
Most of us "muppets" are happy to block 139 and its cousins at the firewall and be done with it. It's a LAN service. Assuming your network is secure from the outside, you can have your cake and eat it to.
If in your paranoia you somehow neglected to secure your WLAN, you *do* need to worry about this.
Either way, shutting off useful parts of the OS because you're afraid of an exploit is more cargo cult thinking than paranoid thinking. If you can't tell at any given time who's on your LAN, you need to get that under control. No OS is immune to the workings of a bad administrator.
I see your later post is an example of the "no true scotsman" fallacy. Plenty of people with a clue use windows file sharing, because they know what's going in in their network and at what layer(s) their security needs to be applied. People who have a clue avoid the "I automatically do X because Y is automatically bad" approach.
I happen to be of the opinion that open source software is more secure by virtue of its openness, which is an opinion that not everyone here shares. But that doesn't mean that I refuse to use Windows file sharing because it may or may not have an exploit. Again, this is not critical if every Tom/Dick/Harry isn't hanging out on your LAN, (or you aren't at a college, hotel or what have you). That said, this *is* ridiculous on MS's part and I have this update deadlined right now.
I agree about Discovery...I think it used to have more science programming but they shifted that to what is now the Science channel. Science Channel still has some decent shows, as well as the occasional really good documentary, but certainly not all of it is high-quality. "Beyond Tomorrow" and the other future-predicting shows are usually pretty annoying.* Supposedly they were running Cosmos, dunno what happened to that as I don't see it on there anymore.
Sometimes History International looks good but it's most of the same crap. There's just something really gut-wrenching about seeing a documentary on quackery that makes it seem legitimate with that "objectivity" smell. People are saying the ancient civ stuff is good though, so I may have to give HC another look.
* pretty sure one time they showed somebody's homebrew touchscreen + earth map UI and said it was the future of computers. laaame.
Second those two. They've got everything under the sun. I was going to recommend McMaster-Carr especially but I couldn't think of the name since it's been a while since I needed anything (at the time it was rubber bearings of a really specific size/shape). Plus, from what I can tell they're pretty cheap and they fill orders quickly.
Funnily enough, History Channel is always at the top of my list of channels that went way downhill. They do still have the veneer of informative programming, but will have things like straight-faced interviews with one of the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail. They love doing segments on wacky crap nobody takes seriously, and paint their quack subjects like some underdog determined to shine the light of truth.
They should call it the conspiracy channel.
There was something in New Scientist, but the subject was instant coffee and brazil nuts. I am seeing regular coffee mentioned in other articles, but as far as I can tell it's only because people are getting it wrong (there's also variations on whose research it is and nobody's citing sources).
But the 15 seconds of searching that neither bloggers nor newspaper columnists can be bothered to do led me to Gunter Kuhnle's work on phytoestrogens, which I'm almost sure is the source of all this. But from his own site:
Their biological effect has been investigated for some times but the results so far are inconclusive.
In other words, I'm going to keep drinking coffee and rationalizing it until this goes away. Manboobs be damned.
Also: my favorite part was when he took a break from saying how people still play PC games, and how there's still money in the PC games industry, to say that LucasArts haven't "made a good PC game in a long time".
Maybe they haven't. How terribly convenient, though. Pop quiz, hotshot: what are you going to do when a publisher you like abandons the platform? In other words, at what point does the cognitive dissonance become too much?
In other words, I see nothing to suggest that this guy isn't a huge shill, who will say anything just to make the PC look like a viable gaming platform. I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but this guy is the last person I'd want to hear an opinion on that from, since he's got got more awkward-segues-to-the-talking-points up his sleeve than Sarah Palin.
So basically the difference between one kind of computer vs another is external devices.
In my mind the only difference worth mentioning is whether the system will run unsigned code. Console makers have direct control over what is and isn't published for their hardware. Honestly, the products are so parallel that the only reason I can come up with for this, besides the inertia of history, is that big-name game dev houses are prima donnas, and they want it in writing that they won't have the stiff competition that might arise in an open market (they are paying for the privelege of developing, after all).
XNA,Xbox live.
I think better candidates here would be the GP2X and the upcoming Pandora & Wiz, along with a few others that haven't done quite so well. But you're right: the indie *console* game scene was nonexistent a few years ago, and now it's getting somewhere. But all in all, my sad guess is that indie games will always be like indie films. Occasionally successful, but generally of limited appeal. Why? I don't know why. I do know that Madden 'xx is always a top seller. Joe LCD wants more of the same, and only the big studios can or want to give it to him. The big studios are not going to develop for a system that's (completely) open to hobbyists, since it will be too easy to pirate games on a system that allows unsigned code.
I'd be surprised if the next generation of built-in online game stores was any more open than the last. XNA is awesome but my guess is that's as far as MS can take it as far as letting people develop for their system. Console makers earn money from what they charge third-parties to develop, and by taking their cut of the software sales, and sometimes from the hardware sales. They are in the business of creating a closed platform and skimming money from all the transactions. I think hobbyist games will always be crippled in some fashion on these systems, if not in terms of hardware access (Sony) then in terms of business opportunity (MS), and who gets final say.
I'm beginning to think that if I "sat down with" myself to talk about "DRM and the state of the game industry"* it'd be a featured article on here, and probably get duped to boot. I know the flamebait articles get all the traffic, but I just keep hoping people are going to get sick of trotting out the same arguments when there aren't any new developments.
*Readers will note that the only game I've ever made was one of those origami diamonds you slip over your thumbs. It didn't have DRM. It was a financial failure by most accounts.