Why on earth would you need a single server? A proper scalable solution would use load balancing such that a user might login through front-end server but that server might be one of many. Each would host (say) ~500 users depending on load and forward that traffic to specific backends depending on which zone each user is in. At the back end, one or more zones would be hosted by dedicated machines depending on their popularity and other factors. There would also be separate machines for character creation, instanced zones, game level events, chat / messaging / VOIP, databases, account information and so on. They could be tied together with something like JMS, EJB, Corba, Web services or whatever is appropriate for what they're doing.
To the user it would look like a single server but in reality it would be many. I expect EVE works very much in this way although much of the infrastructure challenge would be coping with extreme events such as fleet invasions. But at least each system is effectively a separate zone which would simplify things a lot. It's not like one server has to cope with 100,000 user connections at once.
The upshot is an MMO could start small and scale depending on demand. There is an initial outlay - a very large outlay for some games - and of course a lot of planning in getting the infrastructure right but the hardware could grow naturally with the customer base. I also assume that the subscription costs would be sufficient to fund the expansion, so its never like you'd ever be down 100 million. The biggest danger is in screwing up the architecture so its buggy, or grossly overestimating the appeal of your game such that you never recover the initial expense of developing and deploying the thing.
If its not some kind of bizarre humor piece, I am amazed the guy didn't report it at the time. Even now it almost sounds like racketeering. I wonder what the statute of limitation is on things like this.
Bollocks. A very tiny number of "young people" wouldn't have a TV, the majority would. Even those that don't, such as yourself have just confessed you watch TV shows on it, illegally to boot. So you've really demonstrated that maybe the government has a point to include broadband users under the TV licence bill. I'd add that claiming your flat is "too small" isn't much of an excuse either. A USB TV tuner makes it easy to turn a PC or laptop into a television set.
That's a lot of ifs in there. Microsoft are finding it hard enough to persuade devs to build 64-bit native apps due to the hamfisted way they went about releasing a 32 bit and 64 bit version of Vista and the either/or build model in the tools. Fat / universal binaries would be nice but they haven't even done it for x86. I don't see any possibility of them ever doing anything for as niche as a range of netbooks running ARM.
Even with fat binaries, apps (including all those parts of Windows itself) still need to be compiled and tested on each architecture. Issues caused by endianess, padding and whatnot would demand full regression testing. About the only thing which is mostly unaffected by underlying architecture would be the.NET framework apps but even a lot of them are tainted by dependencies on unmanaged DLLs meaning emulation would have to work with them too.
I just don't see it being feasible for the limited payoff. If a netbook wants full Windows they'd be far better off just shoving an x86 chip in there and be done with it. I don't doubt that more ARM enabled netbooks will turn up but they're more likely to be running Windows Mobile with all that entails.
The problem with full blown Windows running on ARM (assuming they could make it work) is you get all of the bloat but few of the benefits. When NT was officially supported on x86 and Alpha, I can't recall any 3rd party application which were compiled for Alpha. Maybe a few database apps but precious little else. This meant the platform required x86 emulation plus a bunch of stub DLLs for the 99.99% of apps that never bothered to run natively. Perhaps this is feasible on a workstation but I doubt it is on a netbook where space and performance are tight enough already. May as well not bother at all with ARM if you're going to stick a full blown Windows on it.
That is a pretty shit show I grant you. At least RTE does try to produce a fair amount of domestic television - current affairs, news, soap, religious, chat, comedy etc. and some risks with it too. If the licence went, you can guarantee that they would just be showing imports, and not necessarily very good ones either.
Average game turnaround in the industry appears to be between 1 and 4 years depending on the complexity and scope of a project. Yet 3DRealms can't even produce a first person shooter after 13. A lousy first person shooter. Perhaps its unfair to blame the entire company, I think its fairer to point fingers at the leadership, especially George Broussard for prevaricating and vacillating for so long that all the money dried up. I wouldn't be surprised if all sorts of fun revelations appear in the next few days, possibly even threats of legal action. There is no way any above board and competently run company could fuck things up this badly for so long.
That would be the Turkey which frequently runs adverts OVER the show in question would it? It's highly reminiscent of all the ads surrounding Ow My Balls in Idiocracy.
Anyway the commercial reality is RTE1 & 2 and the various radio stations can't fund themselves from just adverts or just TV licence. So unless the people want the quality of their TV channels take a dump, they're basically going to have to pay for a licence. Considering that a service like Sky or Chorus costs 4x as much AND has adverts, I don't think its especially bad value.
I don't disagree, Windows mobile would run great on ARM processors. However anyone expecting a desktop experience from a netbook with ARM and Windows mobile is going to be sorely, sorely disappointed. The apps are nowhere near sophisticated enough for desktop use meaning the overall experience will be pretty lousy, more like a glorified PDA.
By contrast virtually all of a standard Linux desktop will compile to ARM. You might be missing some important pieces like Flash player, Sun Java and some other stuff, but the core experience would all be there. You'd get Firefox, OpenOffice, media players and everything else, subject to the system's other limitations such as memory & disk footprint.
The likelihood of someone having broadband but no TV in their household seems so small that I really don't see many people being caught by this unless they were dodging the TV licence fee in the first place.
Seriously, E-book is about the stupidest invention I can think of. How about a device that I can use to read the thousands of.pdf files I have. There is no use waiting for all of the academic papers in the world to be re-done in some e-book format. How about all the pdf versions of books available through torrent that I shouldn't have to fire up my laptop to read? I know there are technical problems involved with pdf, but it can't be that hard. I would guess that the first effective.pdf document display device would catch on like a new ipod. DRM? Fuck 'em, everybody can afford a scanner.
Some ebook devices do read PDF. But you're right, the e-book scene has torn itself apart with a raft of proprietary formats, proprietary readers, store lock-in, excessive DRM and other abuses. Everyone wants a piece of the pie and everyone is too selfish to come together for their own mutual self-interest.
At the very least there needs to be a single industry wide standard for delivery of books, for signing of those books, for activation of devices and so on. There also needs to be a single industry wide standard for the format of books that all devices at a minimum must support. I am surprised that publishers have let the market fracture like this. Don't they have an industry group that represents their interests? Why can't they impose and licence the standard rather than dancing to Amazon's tune? Do they really want to be slaves to Amazon? Shouldn't a publisher like O'Reilly be at the forefront of this?
The net result of a single common platform would be a veritable explosion in ebook devices. Consumers would see the funky ebook logo on their device and confidently buy into the format since they still have the freedom to buy their books from countless vendors and play them on devices of their choosing. Of course, while things continue the way they are, the whole scene will be a wasteland of failed formats, consumer disinterest and 1000lb gorillas battling it out.
This issue isn't exclusive to ebooks either. Digital video downloads are going down the same path and will suffer pretty much the same fallout. DRM is inevitable but at the very least it should be common to all devices and vendors.
Since Lord of the Rings is mentioned... recall that when the movie trilogy appeared there was a fair amount of fuming and ranting from certain fans that their favourite minor character had been excised or composited with another, or that the timeline of the episodes was modestly different, or that new or changed events appeared in places. Guess what effect all of that ranting had? Nothing. The aspergers level of ranting over minutiae was for naught. The movies clearly tried their best to follow the books without being slaves to them and the result was something that a mainstream and the reasonable fans could appreciate.
In the video game domain, Fallout 3 is another example of a game where a small and vocal minority wigged out that Bethesda DARE change anything about their beloved isometric franchise. Even so, Fallout 3 was able to strike a balance between offering a modern realtime experience while adhering fairly close to what came before. The ranting of more obsessive fans had no impact on the game's popularity.
I'm sure games franchises do benefit from fan approval but it isn't necessary to make every last one happy, especially the fanatics.
I used to program COM a lot. I actually like COM (strip away legacy OLE and its actually pretty elegant) but the one I thing I hated was reference counting. When you CoCreate an object you set its count to 1, whenever somebody wants to use an interface on the object they AddRef to increment the count and then they Release to decrement it again. Interfaces are essentially "checked out" while in use. When the final reference to the object is released the object is responsible for destroying itself.
Problem was this never worked out perfectly. Somebody would AddRef too many times or Release too many times meaning the object leaked or died while still in use. Releasing early meant a crash occured somewhere else since other consumers had an invalid pointer. Even with smart C++ pointers you always got some situation with inout parameters or thrown exceptions or two objects referencing each other or some unsafe cast or even third party code where things got screwed up. Sometimes it could take hours and hours to find leaks.
While C# and Java don't alleviate all of these issues (objects can still hold strong references), they do basically scrape all of this crap from the developer's plate meaning less and more readable code. Reference counting and garbage collection is automatic and just works. There are even weak reference classes for cases where two classes might need to reference each other.
Of course garbage collection is its own issue but IMO far, far, far better than what preceded it. The biggest issue with GC is it needs tuning, and some novice programmers make stupid mistakes such as creating objects in a loop rather than reusing them - the kind of thing that means 10,000 transient objects suddenly leap into and out of existence giving the GC a hernia. IMO it wouldn't be a bad thing for Java and.NET devs to learn C++ just to understand some of the underlying issues their language is mostly protecting them from.
Hungarian notation is perfectly acceptable in a world where IDEs are stupid, where the language isn't typesafe (or happily lets you cast pointers / references). In the modern world, hungarian is a massive pain in the arse requiring I type m_szFoo instead of just foo when the IDE is quite capable of inferring or introspecting all the information I need about the variable.
I recently worked on a Java project where for some completely unfathomable reason all of the code was in a Hungarian style. Java already has a well accepted and officially endorsed camelCase / UPPER_CASE notation. Even some of the tools developed by the project had to work around the hungarian when it did its own introspection. It would be very tempting to rename the code, but my experience has taught me that you don't fix what isn't broken, therefore we coded new code the correct way and left the remainder alone. Inconsistent to be sure but it was actually a useful way of telling legacy code from new.
The average PDA and I daresay some phones have more computing power than a Kindle. I very much doubt the display adds much to the cost of the device.
Its price might be forgivable if it weren't DRM'd up the wazoo, wasn't tied to a single provider and could display common non-DRM'd book formats. But it doesn't. Amazon are trying to have their cake and eat it too. The Sony Reader perfect either but even that's cheaper than a Kindle and has fairly reasonable format support too.
FTA: A lot of JavaScript is forked. If the DOM is IE, use this version of the code, otherwise use this.
Until this changes throughout the entire web, ECMAScript will only be that other part of css. It's just too problematic to have to code separate DOM funtionality for every browser on the market.
Well not necessarily. Ajax libs like Dojo abstract away the differences so the end program doesn't have to care (too much) whether they're on IE, Firefox or something else. The client code just makes an xml http request via the lib for some JSON but doesn't care how the object was created or the response was evaluated. There would be nothing to stop these libs testing (for example) if json is implemented natively and calling that, otherwise falling back on their own homebrew solution. As far as the calling app is concerned the change will be transparent, except that the browsers with native support will presumably be that little bit faster and safer.
Dinner party is a common variant pyramid scheme. 1 person invites 2 more who invite 2 more who invite 2 more, each paying $1000 to join. 15 people must join the "dinner party" for the person at the top to leave. When they leave they take the $8,000 given by the 8 recent joiners and the dinner party splits in two and the cycle repeats. It can be seen that it doesn't matter how deep or unbalanced the pyramid is that, for someone to profit, 14 others must lose out when the scheme collapses. 93% of people lose. So your odds of winning are 1 in 14 but your return is only 8x your initial investment. Those are really shitty odds.
Additionally the scammers would load the top 7 names in the first "dinner party" with shill names. So if they pyramid took off they could walk away with 56,000 for no effort or investment at all, and probably more than that if they kept injecting own shills back into the pyramid while it was still healthy. Which they doubtless would do as well. So the number of genuine winners is considerably less than 7%. Oh and its all completely illegal so the cops will laugh at you when you complain.
There are other names for "dinner party" and the terminology but they're all much the same. Some variants of the scam are designed to appeal to women (e.g. women empowering women), some designed to look like magic investment schemes and so on. But at the end of the day, they're all similar and all mathematically doomed.
The point being that you'd have to be stupid to join a pyramid. Paradoxically, really smart people can be really stupid sometimes. Witness how many supposedly clever professionals get suckered by pyramid or Nigerian scams.
Read up on any kind of pyramid scheme and the first thing that strikes you is that when they (ALWAYS) collapse the majority of people will lose their money. In a typical scheme something like 90% of the people come out with nothing. Mathematically guaranteed. And those losers are going to be really pissed off (not with their own stupidity of course) which means acrimonious disputes, assaults and all sorts of fun fall-out as people scramble to come to terms with losing everything.
Thirdly just because 10% of people seem to make money doesn't mean anything. The scammers who set up the scheme loaded the top of the pyramid with their own shill names. So Fred, Jack, Sue and Bob might occupy the top of the pyramid, but really they're all working together and never staked any of their own money either. And they're all gone well before the scheme collapses. So yeah, you might be a lucky non-shill and make some money (at the expense of friendships etc.), but vastly more likely is you will lose everything.
If you really want to blow money, go stick it on a horse or a spin of the roulette wheel.
Selling used goods as new sure would piss off the industry if they must shoulder the burden of returned items. Additionally, the second hand market sure as hell pisses off the industry. They see the likes of Gamestop reselling their games multiple times, and pocketing all the money. I'm quite certain they would be delighted if they could claw back a little revenue of their own from second hand sales.
What part of "Not saying I necessarily agree with the following suggestions but they seem like fairly clear ways for the games industry to fight back against Gamestop. " do you not understand?
Not saying I necessarily agree with the following suggestions but they seem like fairly clear ways for the games industry to fight back against Gamestop.
Shrinkwrap games and slap a holgraphic sticker on the wrap or on the case that must be broken. It would stop Gamestop or anybody else palming off a used game as new. Lots of games already have a holo sticker on the insert, so why not one on the whole box. Also insert a page in the manual telling owners to report stores if the seal was broken.
Send each store plenty of dummy case inserts for display to relieve stores of the bullshit excuse that the game was the "display model".
Use scratch cards. They work once and it's obvious if someone has already scratched the code off.
Use scratch cards even on multiplayer console games. The user can use it to unlock the base map pack or on first play. Employees can't borrow any game without using the code. Additionally Gamestop is screwed because second hand users don't get their map pack essentially crippling the game. GS would be forced to buy refresh codes, or the user would have to buy the pack online. Either way, the game company gets money from a second hand sale they wouldn't have otherwise.
I doubt Windows can claim it's safer than Linux in a broad sense. A competent Linux admin probably stands far more chance of locking down their machines than a competent Windows admin. It's not the Windows admin's fault that their OS is historically a mess of half specified, half implemented, barely enforced switches and settings spread randomly through the registry and the filesystem.
However, Microsoft have been making great strides correcting past mistakes. UAC might be a pain in the ass but it has shook the tree as far as abusive applications go. I also believe Microsoft would now have a case for claiming that Windows is quite suitable from a security perspective for inexperienced users who don't have the benefit of an admin or even security knowledge. Vista and Windows 7 do a pretty good job of protecting users from themselves and has tools like firewalls, spyware/antivirus detection built in too.
Linux isn't exactly the shining knight of security either. Only a few years back the average dist would default install/run all sorts of shit users didn't need - sshd, httpd, telnetd, smbd, postfix and various other daemons. Fortunately things have gotten a lot tighter but Linux really needs to tighten the screws. I can't think of any reason that a default install even needs to expose a single open port to the outside world. If someone needs ssh running, or http then they have enough knowledge to go install it themselves, or activate it through some user interface. A user friendly task-centric interface
I'd love to see the rationale myself. Debian do things which really don't make sense from a real-world practical sense but clearly somebody somewhere is motivated enough to do it. Witness Hurd as another example.
Considering the DSi has double the CPU speed (for some apps), Opera *should* be faster. Another embedding favourite is Netfront which appears in the PSP and PS3.
That said, I have yet to see any mobile browser which works acceptably with real world content. They mangle the layout and usually have half baked HTML, CSS, JS and DOM implementations which means web 2.0 sites (and even traditional ones) are just plain broken.
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To the user it would look like a single server but in reality it would be many. I expect EVE works very much in this way although much of the infrastructure challenge would be coping with extreme events such as fleet invasions. But at least each system is effectively a separate zone which would simplify things a lot. It's not like one server has to cope with 100,000 user connections at once.
The upshot is an MMO could start small and scale depending on demand. There is an initial outlay - a very large outlay for some games - and of course a lot of planning in getting the infrastructure right but the hardware could grow naturally with the customer base. I also assume that the subscription costs would be sufficient to fund the expansion, so its never like you'd ever be down 100 million. The biggest danger is in screwing up the architecture so its buggy, or grossly overestimating the appeal of your game such that you never recover the initial expense of developing and deploying the thing.
"If its not some kind of bizarre humor piece,"
If its not some kind of bizarre humor piece, I am amazed the guy didn't report it at the time. Even now it almost sounds like racketeering. I wonder what the statute of limitation is on things like this.
Bollocks. A very tiny number of "young people" wouldn't have a TV, the majority would. Even those that don't, such as yourself have just confessed you watch TV shows on it, illegally to boot. So you've really demonstrated that maybe the government has a point to include broadband users under the TV licence bill. I'd add that claiming your flat is "too small" isn't much of an excuse either. A USB TV tuner makes it easy to turn a PC or laptop into a television set.
Even with fat binaries, apps (including all those parts of Windows itself) still need to be compiled and tested on each architecture. Issues caused by endianess, padding and whatnot would demand full regression testing. About the only thing which is mostly unaffected by underlying architecture would be the .NET framework apps but even a lot of them are tainted by dependencies on unmanaged DLLs meaning emulation would have to work with them too.
I just don't see it being feasible for the limited payoff. If a netbook wants full Windows they'd be far better off just shoving an x86 chip in there and be done with it. I don't doubt that more ARM enabled netbooks will turn up but they're more likely to be running Windows Mobile with all that entails.
The problem with full blown Windows running on ARM (assuming they could make it work) is you get all of the bloat but few of the benefits. When NT was officially supported on x86 and Alpha, I can't recall any 3rd party application which were compiled for Alpha. Maybe a few database apps but precious little else. This meant the platform required x86 emulation plus a bunch of stub DLLs for the 99.99% of apps that never bothered to run natively. Perhaps this is feasible on a workstation but I doubt it is on a netbook where space and performance are tight enough already. May as well not bother at all with ARM if you're going to stick a full blown Windows on it.
That is a pretty shit show I grant you. At least RTE does try to produce a fair amount of domestic television - current affairs, news, soap, religious, chat, comedy etc. and some risks with it too. If the licence went, you can guarantee that they would just be showing imports, and not necessarily very good ones either.
Average game turnaround in the industry appears to be between 1 and 4 years depending on the complexity and scope of a project. Yet 3DRealms can't even produce a first person shooter after 13. A lousy first person shooter. Perhaps its unfair to blame the entire company, I think its fairer to point fingers at the leadership, especially George Broussard for prevaricating and vacillating for so long that all the money dried up. I wouldn't be surprised if all sorts of fun revelations appear in the next few days, possibly even threats of legal action. There is no way any above board and competently run company could fuck things up this badly for so long.
Anyway the commercial reality is RTE1 & 2 and the various radio stations can't fund themselves from just adverts or just TV licence. So unless the people want the quality of their TV channels take a dump, they're basically going to have to pay for a licence. Considering that a service like Sky or Chorus costs 4x as much AND has adverts, I don't think its especially bad value.
By contrast virtually all of a standard Linux desktop will compile to ARM. You might be missing some important pieces like Flash player, Sun Java and some other stuff, but the core experience would all be there. You'd get Firefox, OpenOffice, media players and everything else, subject to the system's other limitations such as memory & disk footprint.
The likelihood of someone having broadband but no TV in their household seems so small that I really don't see many people being caught by this unless they were dodging the TV licence fee in the first place.
Some ebook devices do read PDF. But you're right, the e-book scene has torn itself apart with a raft of proprietary formats, proprietary readers, store lock-in, excessive DRM and other abuses. Everyone wants a piece of the pie and everyone is too selfish to come together for their own mutual self-interest.
At the very least there needs to be a single industry wide standard for delivery of books, for signing of those books, for activation of devices and so on. There also needs to be a single industry wide standard for the format of books that all devices at a minimum must support. I am surprised that publishers have let the market fracture like this. Don't they have an industry group that represents their interests? Why can't they impose and licence the standard rather than dancing to Amazon's tune? Do they really want to be slaves to Amazon? Shouldn't a publisher like O'Reilly be at the forefront of this?
The net result of a single common platform would be a veritable explosion in ebook devices. Consumers would see the funky ebook logo on their device and confidently buy into the format since they still have the freedom to buy their books from countless vendors and play them on devices of their choosing. Of course, while things continue the way they are, the whole scene will be a wasteland of failed formats, consumer disinterest and 1000lb gorillas battling it out.
This issue isn't exclusive to ebooks either. Digital video downloads are going down the same path and will suffer pretty much the same fallout. DRM is inevitable but at the very least it should be common to all devices and vendors.
In the video game domain, Fallout 3 is another example of a game where a small and vocal minority wigged out that Bethesda DARE change anything about their beloved isometric franchise. Even so, Fallout 3 was able to strike a balance between offering a modern realtime experience while adhering fairly close to what came before. The ranting of more obsessive fans had no impact on the game's popularity.
I'm sure games franchises do benefit from fan approval but it isn't necessary to make every last one happy, especially the fanatics.
Problem was this never worked out perfectly. Somebody would AddRef too many times or Release too many times meaning the object leaked or died while still in use. Releasing early meant a crash occured somewhere else since other consumers had an invalid pointer. Even with smart C++ pointers you always got some situation with inout parameters or thrown exceptions or two objects referencing each other or some unsafe cast or even third party code where things got screwed up. Sometimes it could take hours and hours to find leaks.
While C# and Java don't alleviate all of these issues (objects can still hold strong references), they do basically scrape all of this crap from the developer's plate meaning less and more readable code. Reference counting and garbage collection is automatic and just works. There are even weak reference classes for cases where two classes might need to reference each other.
Of course garbage collection is its own issue but IMO far, far, far better than what preceded it. The biggest issue with GC is it needs tuning, and some novice programmers make stupid mistakes such as creating objects in a loop rather than reusing them - the kind of thing that means 10,000 transient objects suddenly leap into and out of existence giving the GC a hernia. IMO it wouldn't be a bad thing for Java and .NET devs to learn C++ just to understand some of the underlying issues their language is mostly protecting them from.
I recently worked on a Java project where for some completely unfathomable reason all of the code was in a Hungarian style. Java already has a well accepted and officially endorsed camelCase / UPPER_CASE notation. Even some of the tools developed by the project had to work around the hungarian when it did its own introspection. It would be very tempting to rename the code, but my experience has taught me that you don't fix what isn't broken, therefore we coded new code the correct way and left the remainder alone. Inconsistent to be sure but it was actually a useful way of telling legacy code from new.
Its price might be forgivable if it weren't DRM'd up the wazoo, wasn't tied to a single provider and could display common non-DRM'd book formats. But it doesn't. Amazon are trying to have their cake and eat it too. The Sony Reader perfect either but even that's cheaper than a Kindle and has fairly reasonable format support too.
Well not necessarily. Ajax libs like Dojo abstract away the differences so the end program doesn't have to care (too much) whether they're on IE, Firefox or something else. The client code just makes an xml http request via the lib for some JSON but doesn't care how the object was created or the response was evaluated. There would be nothing to stop these libs testing (for example) if json is implemented natively and calling that, otherwise falling back on their own homebrew solution. As far as the calling app is concerned the change will be transparent, except that the browsers with native support will presumably be that little bit faster and safer.
Additionally the scammers would load the top 7 names in the first "dinner party" with shill names. So if they pyramid took off they could walk away with 56,000 for no effort or investment at all, and probably more than that if they kept injecting own shills back into the pyramid while it was still healthy. Which they doubtless would do as well. So the number of genuine winners is considerably less than 7%. Oh and its all completely illegal so the cops will laugh at you when you complain.
There are other names for "dinner party" and the terminology but they're all much the same. Some variants of the scam are designed to appeal to women (e.g. women empowering women), some designed to look like magic investment schemes and so on. But at the end of the day, they're all similar and all mathematically doomed.
The point being that you'd have to be stupid to join a pyramid. Paradoxically, really smart people can be really stupid sometimes. Witness how many supposedly clever professionals get suckered by pyramid or Nigerian scams.
Thirdly just because 10% of people seem to make money doesn't mean anything. The scammers who set up the scheme loaded the top of the pyramid with their own shill names. So Fred, Jack, Sue and Bob might occupy the top of the pyramid, but really they're all working together and never staked any of their own money either. And they're all gone well before the scheme collapses. So yeah, you might be a lucky non-shill and make some money (at the expense of friendships etc.), but vastly more likely is you will lose everything.
If you really want to blow money, go stick it on a horse or a spin of the roulette wheel.
Selling used goods as new sure would piss off the industry if they must shoulder the burden of returned items. Additionally, the second hand market sure as hell pisses off the industry. They see the likes of Gamestop reselling their games multiple times, and pocketing all the money. I'm quite certain they would be delighted if they could claw back a little revenue of their own from second hand sales.
What part of "Not saying I necessarily agree with the following suggestions but they seem like fairly clear ways for the games industry to fight back against Gamestop. " do you not understand?
However, Microsoft have been making great strides correcting past mistakes. UAC might be a pain in the ass but it has shook the tree as far as abusive applications go. I also believe Microsoft would now have a case for claiming that Windows is quite suitable from a security perspective for inexperienced users who don't have the benefit of an admin or even security knowledge. Vista and Windows 7 do a pretty good job of protecting users from themselves and has tools like firewalls, spyware/antivirus detection built in too.
Linux isn't exactly the shining knight of security either. Only a few years back the average dist would default install/run all sorts of shit users didn't need - sshd, httpd, telnetd, smbd, postfix and various other daemons. Fortunately things have gotten a lot tighter but Linux really needs to tighten the screws. I can't think of any reason that a default install even needs to expose a single open port to the outside world. If someone needs ssh running, or http then they have enough knowledge to go install it themselves, or activate it through some user interface. A user friendly task-centric interface
I'd love to see the rationale myself. Debian do things which really don't make sense from a real-world practical sense but clearly somebody somewhere is motivated enough to do it. Witness Hurd as another example.
That said, I have yet to see any mobile browser which works acceptably with real world content. They mangle the layout and usually have half baked HTML, CSS, JS and DOM implementations which means web 2.0 sites (and even traditional ones) are just plain broken.