It's not just a matter of Gordon not knowing what's going on, it's a matter of the player not knowing. I mean, I know the background and such from what's been around the internet both before and after release, but I'm still pretty uncertain what's happening. I show up in this strange city with very little knowledge of what's going on except that it's rather opressive. The panel fill in some basic information mainly stating who the main human in charge seems to be as well as the fact that someone else "our benefactors" are above him. No real mention of the Combine so far as I can tell. Barney grabs me out of the line and suddenly I'm going to some other place when people start shooting at me for an unknown reason. I get the idea of some sort of resistance, but seem largely herded into it without ever doing anything to deserve it. Before I know it apparently I'm working with them on the assumption that I want to or even know what the political situation is.
So I'm on the run working for a rebellion that I don't understand working to fight an oppressive regime that I know nothing about. Great.
Half-Life gave you more than enough plot and doled it out reasonably. Aliens are rampaging and we're stuck underground and want to reach the surface and saftey. Once you reach the surface you find that it's far less safe and there might be some answers in the Delta labs (just like another, recent game...). I always knew what I was doing and what my goals were. Now I'm more or less totally in the dark. North by Northwest it is not.
The two things I've made certain that everyone I might have to troubleshoot uses are Ad-Aware and Kerio Personal Firewall (anti-virus software already having been taken care of). Between these two (and those whom I've convinced to use Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird/Eudora) I've reduced the level of problems to mainly the ones that they're going to cause on their own by messing with things rather than the easily preventable sort.
Now, troubleshooting the wireless network I installed for them that keeps having problems... that's a whole 'nother story. Forget apartments, it's the suburbs with small lots and lots of clueless people buying WiFi without knowledge of how to configure against collisions that are the real problem.
What? You mean you never had a nice, long, rejuvenating bath in a dilute solution of Ethidium Bromide? It as good for the skin as it is for developing gels!
Then again... I'll never, ever cringe as much as the day I saw my advisor mouth pipetting in my lab (molecular genetics lab, mutation and repair in S. cerevisiae). I thought that was only a story that they recited at the beginning of the semester is chem labs to scare impressionable young Freshmen.
Yes, I agree with you entirely. However, I never meant that this was a wise strategy. My point was that the government will not necessarily even provide the same amount of uninflated return. This is due, in part, to a system where regardless of how much I put in I still get the same amount out.
While I am not wealthy (and considering I'm planning a career in research it's not likely to ever be an issue) I still find it fundamentally wrong to discriminate against those who have more.
One of the greatest problems with SS is that is it a completely non-voluntary system that is, in theory at least, done for our benefit. While there are still problems with the system simply having an opt-out would be very satisfying for me. Personally I'd much rather handle my own investments rather than trust the government to do so for me. Even if I just stash the same amount of money under the bed I can be guaranteed to still have that exact amount in 40 years, ignoring the effects of inflation. With the government I don't even have that simple benefit: that I will get back at least the same amount of money I put in inflation adjusted or not.
Uh... 1)I don't have a Tivo, I am hoping to get one soon though 2)it can't possibly work. One of the biggest problems with Futurama was that it was frequently not shown because Fox was instead showing a football game. The game would run in Futurama's pre-Simpsons timeslot, sometimes even pre-empting the Simpsons.
Assuming that TiVo has a larger installed user base at the time I really wonder what it might have been able to do for shows like Futurama and Family Guy that experienced a great deal of problems with fans being unable to watch due to constant, often unannounced, schedule changes.
If only it could pre-empt football games with episodes of Futurama though instead of the other way round... that would truly be a wonderful box.
Speaking as a biologist with research interests in molecular genetics (mutation specifically) and who spent a good deal of time working in a yeast lab this is just fucking amazing. There is a great deal of potential in this.
If prions are acting as a form of epigenetic plasmids then... wow. I mean, just wow. The sheer possibility for customized prions for gene therapy in somatic eukaryotic cells could be huge.
I find that the blue color goes quite well with WinXP if, and this is the important bit, you reset everything back to "Classic" mode. Personally I find the new versions of just about everything (e.g. the Luna theme, the terrible new start menu, etc.) awful.
Seriously though it's always struck me as highly unusual how much societal pressure there is on people to cover up for others. Starting at a relatively young age children are repeatedly taught either directly or indirectly not to "tattle" on anyone.
I often wonder how things would be different if we lived in a society where reporting people who break the law was seen as a good thing.
Using 80 columns is still very important (in my mind at least) when it comes to e-mail. Due to the differences in readers, wrap styles and so on it quickly becomes an issue. When was the last time you got something where the replys quickly screwed up and shattered something readable into a mess of short lines and quoted symbols stuck in the middle of sentences?
A good e-mail program will properly wrap text to fit within these limits (specifically thunderbird comes set by default to wrap to 72 columns). If people are using HTML e-mail though... well, hell, they're already wrong to begin with.
Lucky, I could never manage to properly use the forceps to lift the peritoneal layer so it could be safely snipped. Result? The intestine would constantly get punctured leading to eventual infection. Of course, I was also never able to properly use suction to clean the cavity and suture up the intestine. Not to mention my incisions, despite cutting as much as possible, never being large enough to actually get at the stupid appendix.
Hope you wanted to get an extra gut infection along with that burst appendix that I couldn't remove!
Not just wood, but, in my opinion at least, rather ugly wood. Personally the wood finish on that reminds me of these bulbous arms on the hideous sofa in my apartment right now. The one my girlfriend found two years ago after being abandoned in the storage room of the dorm.
It just looks way too 70s for my tastes. Not to mention the very, very ugly knob used to eject those gameboy cartridges.
I'd much rather just have the original consoles in my house on a shelf along with a composite switcher if I don't have enough inputs already.
Heh... this is what I've been saying for a while now. The two best current examples being the American Express Seinfeld/Superman commercials (as a previous poster also mentioned) and BMW's the Hire series (http://www.bmwfilms.com/).
Take the BMW ads for instance. They're pretty subtle and really not much more than product placement. About the same as paying to have James Bond drive a BMW. Top-notch talent both acting (Gary Oldman, James Brown, Don Cheadle, and Madonna among others) and directing (Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, Tony Scott, Guy Ritchie, and John Woo among others) along with director commentary on all episodes and generally good writing in a variety of styles (all-out car chase action (Ambush), drama (Powderkeg), comedy (Star)) with each director's personal style managing to show through.
This is a series of ads good enough that they can not only ship out DVDs of the series for a nominal fee (or free to BMW owners), but they recently spun off a comic book series. I've heard fair amount of talk about wanting star Clive Owen to be the next James Bond and after watching these I really think it might be a good choice.
Yes it is far more expensive than most companies are going to want to spend. No, this sort of approach does not work for all products. But look at it this way, I've just been rambling on for two paragraphs about what an amazing series of ads I've seen, recommending them to others. Unfortunately for BMW though, I really don't have any interest in buying one and felt most of the cars looked pretty much the same.
Great as a piece of short film, but maybe not so hot as pure advertising.
Honestly it jumps in with the idea that computer gaming is dying and console gaming is the funky-fresh place to be! I mean, really, who bothers to use that computer anyways? It's off in some dusty, disused bedroom where people never use it to post articles to/. or complain on message boards about how "1335" console gaming is.
For all the console-centric bashing of computer gaming the console faithful certainly seem to have at least one computer to use to complain with.
Ah well, I shouldn't be feeding the troll, but who really plays in a "well-lit" room for PC or console games? I keep my living room dark as well. Not only do I have the tv calibrated to be accurate to a darkened room, but with games like Metroid Prime or Eternal Darkness you really don't want to play in bright light. I do notice that many console games tend to be overly dark as well... maybe they just have the brightness set to assume an uncalibrated, overly-bright tv still set at the showroom defaults.
I actually just bought a Gamecube rather recently to fill my occasional desire for more group-oriented gaming. It just doesn't exist with the PC due to the nature of the beast. Maybe with a few games people might sit around and watch if the screen was much larger and you sat further away from it ala consoles, but I doubt many people will be interested in watching me play Civilization ("No! Increase your science budget! C'mon, let me play, I can totally strategize my way through that, you keep falling into the pit of diminishing returns on trade goods!").
Console games and computer games are two totally different things by and large and neither of them seem to be in any particular trouble at the moment. I don't think there are really that many people that want to combine them.
I'm still recovering from the jumper cables they used to hook a car battery up to my nipples. Apple isn't all sunshine and unicorns.
No, they don't actually force you to upgrade at all, but unlike a car company where support is generally expected for the next decade or so (or perhaps, in computer terms, the next two or three years) they tend to support a product for about a year so far before it gets shoved into the basement with the Newton and other things they don't like to talk about. These days iPod means 3G to Apple, the older models might as well be bus mice.
I've said this before, but perhaps people aren't reading the documentation or Apple is being vague about it or something. Hell, maybe the Mini is somehow different, but I doubt it.
The iPod will NOT turn OFF. Holding down the play/pause button merely manually puts it into sleep mode. It still loses power, but at a rather low rate.
Oh, it still works, yes, but it's irritating when a company makes a product that does solve a problem (i.e. the deal-breaker on the iSkin for me is the lack of screen protection, otherwise I think it's the best iPod case on the market. The screen protector, however, is only available in the version that supports the 3G iPod) but chooses to only support a marginally newer product. In many cases 1G and 2G accessories are no longer being made and Apple doesn't support them with firmware anymore. It's like Logan's Run or something and nobody acknowledges that a very slightly less new product even exists.
I don't bitch about the lack of a dock connector. Yeah, it would be nice, but there's no fixing that. I do dislike the lack of software updates and third-party support that is merely being denied because it isn't the newest version on the market.
Depends on the iPod you have perhaps. With my 2G iPod I got a small, glossy manual that looked like a promotional brochure. Very much an issue of style over substance and preaching to the choir. It told me how easy to use it was and how to press "play" to make it play and "fast forward" to make it skip a song. The feature I remember specifically not being mentioned was "scrubbing". I noticed that clicking on the button in the middle of a song changed the display, but I honestly just didn't mess with it since whenever that happened I was typically trying to change the volume. At the same time I complained about only skipping 5 seconds at a time:). Eventually I figured it out.
I don't have it around at the moment, but I do believe it mentioned that holding play/pause would put it into sleep mode (NOT 'off', the iPod never, ever, ever turns itself off, it can just be manually put into sleep) and menu activating the backlight. I don't think it mentioned the very important menu/play combination to reset it though. Something I've found I use far more often than I should (i.e. it skips and locks up on me when I walk around at a reasonable pace with the iPod in a cargo pocket, I can't imagine actually jogging with it).
I'm a student, or rather, until graduating recently, was a student. During the week I'd use it pretty consistently as a source of music when walking around campus or working in my lab. Now that I've graduated and am merely looking for a job I rarely use it as I'm always at home.
Personally though I leave it on my desk, not in a drawer.
Not really. The buttons are no longer right under the screen so one of the most common and useful accessories, a case, will no longer be supported (or rather, supported as well as the buttons will be obscured).
My personal hope is that the 1G and 2G models will be able to use the new cases and such.
That does not turn the unit off, it merely puts it into a manual sleep. If you do that to an iPod and then leave it on your desk for two weeks or so you'll come back to find that what was originally fully charged is now almost assuredly drained or quite close to it.
As Apple puts it (link): "Charge the battery every 14 to 18 days when not in use. Even when iPod is off it is in a sleeping state that requires power. Without use, iPod's battery needs to be charged about every 14 to 18 days to be ready for use."
(link) " If iPod is inactive for a period of time, it turns off to save battery power.
To turn iPod on, press any button. To turn it off, press and hold the Play button. "
As far as I've been able to tell the primary difference between the two is that when you manually put it to sleep it loses track of where you were in a playlist.
The problem is that Apple keeps coming out with a new model every year or so. I got my 2G the winter before the 3G came out so by that point it was barely six months old.
For a product this expensive it seems very unreasonable to assume that people are going to be upgrading that often. Car companies likewise have a very expensive product that upgrades on a yearly basis, but they don't introduce such radical changes each year that the owner is coerced into buying a new car every year.
As is often the case it's not the early adopters who get screwed, the know what to expect and often have the surplus cash to lose. The people who really get screwed are the middle adopters. People who buy into a product in the median time between when it becomes widespread, but not mainstream. Sort of like everyone who bought a DVD player around 2001-2002 when they were just cresting into ubiquity. It was at a point where you could still pay $200 for a good quality entry-level model that today (i.e. after the mainstream acceptance) would retail for $100 or less.
That was indeed part of the issue, but the newer cases (like the new iSkin case that I greatly desire where they finally added in a screen protector) still wouldn't work quite as well with the old 2G models due to the new button placement and the slight change in size.
I still see no reason why firmware couldn't be updated for all models.
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It's not just a matter of Gordon not knowing what's going on, it's a matter of the player not knowing. I mean, I know the background and such from what's been around the internet both before and after release, but I'm still pretty uncertain what's happening. I show up in this strange city with very little knowledge of what's going on except that it's rather opressive. The panel fill in some basic information mainly stating who the main human in charge seems to be as well as the fact that someone else "our benefactors" are above him. No real mention of the Combine so far as I can tell. Barney grabs me out of the line and suddenly I'm going to some other place when people start shooting at me for an unknown reason. I get the idea of some sort of resistance, but seem largely herded into it without ever doing anything to deserve it. Before I know it apparently I'm working with them on the assumption that I want to or even know what the political situation is.
So I'm on the run working for a rebellion that I don't understand working to fight an oppressive regime that I know nothing about. Great.
Half-Life gave you more than enough plot and doled it out reasonably. Aliens are rampaging and we're stuck underground and want to reach the surface and saftey. Once you reach the surface you find that it's far less safe and there might be some answers in the Delta labs (just like another, recent game...). I always knew what I was doing and what my goals were. Now I'm more or less totally in the dark. North by Northwest it is not.
The two things I've made certain that everyone I might have to troubleshoot uses are Ad-Aware and Kerio Personal Firewall (anti-virus software already having been taken care of). Between these two (and those whom I've convinced to use Mozilla/Firefox/Thunderbird/Eudora) I've reduced the level of problems to mainly the ones that they're going to cause on their own by messing with things rather than the easily preventable sort.
Now, troubleshooting the wireless network I installed for them that keeps having problems... that's a whole 'nother story. Forget apartments, it's the suburbs with small lots and lots of clueless people buying WiFi without knowledge of how to configure against collisions that are the real problem.
What? You mean you never had a nice, long, rejuvenating bath in a dilute solution of Ethidium Bromide? It as good for the skin as it is for developing gels!
Then again... I'll never, ever cringe as much as the day I saw my advisor mouth pipetting in my lab (molecular genetics lab, mutation and repair in S. cerevisiae). I thought that was only a story that they recited at the beginning of the semester is chem labs to scare impressionable young Freshmen.
Yes, I agree with you entirely. However, I never meant that this was a wise strategy. My point was that the government will not necessarily even provide the same amount of uninflated return. This is due, in part, to a system where regardless of how much I put in I still get the same amount out.
While I am not wealthy (and considering I'm planning a career in research it's not likely to ever be an issue) I still find it fundamentally wrong to discriminate against those who have more.
One of the greatest problems with SS is that is it a completely non-voluntary system that is, in theory at least, done for our benefit. While there are still problems with the system simply having an opt-out would be very satisfying for me. Personally I'd much rather handle my own investments rather than trust the government to do so for me. Even if I just stash the same amount of money under the bed I can be guaranteed to still have that exact amount in 40 years, ignoring the effects of inflation. With the government I don't even have that simple benefit: that I will get back at least the same amount of money I put in inflation adjusted or not.
Uh... 1)I don't have a Tivo, I am hoping to get one soon though 2)it can't possibly work. One of the biggest problems with Futurama was that it was frequently not shown because Fox was instead showing a football game. The game would run in Futurama's pre-Simpsons timeslot, sometimes even pre-empting the Simpsons.
Assuming that TiVo has a larger installed user base at the time I really wonder what it might have been able to do for shows like Futurama and Family Guy that experienced a great deal of problems with fans being unable to watch due to constant, often unannounced, schedule changes.
If only it could pre-empt football games with episodes of Futurama though instead of the other way round... that would truly be a wonderful box.
Speaking as a biologist with research interests in molecular genetics (mutation specifically) and who spent a good deal of time working in a yeast lab this is just fucking amazing. There is a great deal of potential in this.
If prions are acting as a form of epigenetic plasmids then... wow. I mean, just wow. The sheer possibility for customized prions for gene therapy in somatic eukaryotic cells could be huge.
I find that the blue color goes quite well with WinXP if, and this is the important bit, you reset everything back to "Classic" mode. Personally I find the new versions of just about everything (e.g. the Luna theme, the terrible new start menu, etc.) awful.
Hey now, I like a snitch!
Seriously though it's always struck me as highly unusual how much societal pressure there is on people to cover up for others. Starting at a relatively young age children are repeatedly taught either directly or indirectly not to "tattle" on anyone.
I often wonder how things would be different if we lived in a society where reporting people who break the law was seen as a good thing.
Using 80 columns is still very important (in my mind at least) when it comes to e-mail. Due to the differences in readers, wrap styles and so on it quickly becomes an issue. When was the last time you got something where the replys quickly screwed up and shattered something readable into a mess of short lines and quoted symbols stuck in the middle of sentences?
A good e-mail program will properly wrap text to fit within these limits (specifically thunderbird comes set by default to wrap to 72 columns). If people are using HTML e-mail though... well, hell, they're already wrong to begin with.
Lucky, I could never manage to properly use the forceps to lift the peritoneal layer so it could be safely snipped. Result? The intestine would constantly get punctured leading to eventual infection. Of course, I was also never able to properly use suction to clean the cavity and suture up the intestine. Not to mention my incisions, despite cutting as much as possible, never being large enough to actually get at the stupid appendix.
Hope you wanted to get an extra gut infection along with that burst appendix that I couldn't remove!
Not just wood, but, in my opinion at least, rather ugly wood. Personally the wood finish on that reminds me of these bulbous arms on the hideous sofa in my apartment right now. The one my girlfriend found two years ago after being abandoned in the storage room of the dorm.
It just looks way too 70s for my tastes. Not to mention the very, very ugly knob used to eject those gameboy cartridges.
I'd much rather just have the original consoles in my house on a shelf along with a composite switcher if I don't have enough inputs already.
Heh... this is what I've been saying for a while now. The two best current examples being the American Express Seinfeld/Superman commercials (as a previous poster also mentioned) and BMW's the Hire series (http://www.bmwfilms.com/).
Take the BMW ads for instance. They're pretty subtle and really not much more than product placement. About the same as paying to have James Bond drive a BMW. Top-notch talent both acting (Gary Oldman, James Brown, Don Cheadle, and Madonna among others) and directing (Ang Lee, Wong Kar-Wai, Tony Scott, Guy Ritchie, and John Woo among others) along with director commentary on all episodes and generally good writing in a variety of styles (all-out car chase action (Ambush), drama (Powderkeg), comedy (Star)) with each director's personal style managing to show through.
This is a series of ads good enough that they can not only ship out DVDs of the series for a nominal fee (or free to BMW owners), but they recently spun off a comic book series. I've heard fair amount of talk about wanting star Clive Owen to be the next James Bond and after watching these I really think it might be a good choice.
Yes it is far more expensive than most companies are going to want to spend. No, this sort of approach does not work for all products. But look at it this way, I've just been rambling on for two paragraphs about what an amazing series of ads I've seen, recommending them to others. Unfortunately for BMW though, I really don't have any interest in buying one and felt most of the cars looked pretty much the same.
Great as a piece of short film, but maybe not so hot as pure advertising.
Honestly it jumps in with the idea that computer gaming is dying and console gaming is the funky-fresh place to be! I mean, really, who bothers to use that computer anyways? It's off in some dusty, disused bedroom where people never use it to post articles to /. or complain on message boards about how "1335" console gaming is.
For all the console-centric bashing of computer gaming the console faithful certainly seem to have at least one computer to use to complain with.
Ah well, I shouldn't be feeding the troll, but who really plays in a "well-lit" room for PC or console games? I keep my living room dark as well. Not only do I have the tv calibrated to be accurate to a darkened room, but with games like Metroid Prime or Eternal Darkness you really don't want to play in bright light. I do notice that many console games tend to be overly dark as well... maybe they just have the brightness set to assume an uncalibrated, overly-bright tv still set at the showroom defaults.
I actually just bought a Gamecube rather recently to fill my occasional desire for more group-oriented gaming. It just doesn't exist with the PC due to the nature of the beast. Maybe with a few games people might sit around and watch if the screen was much larger and you sat further away from it ala consoles, but I doubt many people will be interested in watching me play Civilization ("No! Increase your science budget! C'mon, let me play, I can totally strategize my way through that, you keep falling into the pit of diminishing returns on trade goods!").
Console games and computer games are two totally different things by and large and neither of them seem to be in any particular trouble at the moment. I don't think there are really that many people that want to combine them.
"Buy 'em out boys!"
I'm still recovering from the jumper cables they used to hook a car battery up to my nipples. Apple isn't all sunshine and unicorns.
No, they don't actually force you to upgrade at all, but unlike a car company where support is generally expected for the next decade or so (or perhaps, in computer terms, the next two or three years) they tend to support a product for about a year so far before it gets shoved into the basement with the Newton and other things they don't like to talk about. These days iPod means 3G to Apple, the older models might as well be bus mice.
I've said this before, but perhaps people aren't reading the documentation or Apple is being vague about it or something. Hell, maybe the Mini is somehow different, but I doubt it.
The iPod will NOT turn OFF. Holding down the play/pause button merely manually puts it into sleep mode. It still loses power, but at a rather low rate.
Oh, it still works, yes, but it's irritating when a company makes a product that does solve a problem (i.e. the deal-breaker on the iSkin for me is the lack of screen protection, otherwise I think it's the best iPod case on the market. The screen protector, however, is only available in the version that supports the 3G iPod) but chooses to only support a marginally newer product. In many cases 1G and 2G accessories are no longer being made and Apple doesn't support them with firmware anymore. It's like Logan's Run or something and nobody acknowledges that a very slightly less new product even exists.
I don't bitch about the lack of a dock connector. Yeah, it would be nice, but there's no fixing that. I do dislike the lack of software updates and third-party support that is merely being denied because it isn't the newest version on the market.
Depends on the iPod you have perhaps. With my 2G iPod I got a small, glossy manual that looked like a promotional brochure. Very much an issue of style over substance and preaching to the choir. It told me how easy to use it was and how to press "play" to make it play and "fast forward" to make it skip a song. The feature I remember specifically not being mentioned was "scrubbing". I noticed that clicking on the button in the middle of a song changed the display, but I honestly just didn't mess with it since whenever that happened I was typically trying to change the volume. At the same time I complained about only skipping 5 seconds at a time :). Eventually I figured it out.
I don't have it around at the moment, but I do believe it mentioned that holding play/pause would put it into sleep mode (NOT 'off', the iPod never, ever, ever turns itself off, it can just be manually put into sleep) and menu activating the backlight. I don't think it mentioned the very important menu/play combination to reset it though. Something I've found I use far more often than I should (i.e. it skips and locks up on me when I walk around at a reasonable pace with the iPod in a cargo pocket, I can't imagine actually jogging with it).
I'm a student, or rather, until graduating recently, was a student. During the week I'd use it pretty consistently as a source of music when walking around campus or working in my lab. Now that I've graduated and am merely looking for a job I rarely use it as I'm always at home.
Personally though I leave it on my desk, not in a drawer.
Not really. The buttons are no longer right under the screen so one of the most common and useful accessories, a case, will no longer be supported (or rather, supported as well as the buttons will be obscured).
My personal hope is that the 1G and 2G models will be able to use the new cases and such.
That does not turn the unit off, it merely puts it into a manual sleep. If you do that to an iPod and then leave it on your desk for two weeks or so you'll come back to find that what was originally fully charged is now almost assuredly drained or quite close to it.
As Apple puts it (link):
"Charge the battery every 14 to 18 days when not in use. Even when iPod is off it is in a sleeping state that requires power. Without use, iPod's battery needs to be charged about every 14 to 18 days to be ready for use."
(link)
" If iPod is inactive for a period of time, it turns off to save battery power.
To turn iPod on, press any button. To turn it off, press and hold the Play button. "
As far as I've been able to tell the primary difference between the two is that when you manually put it to sleep it loses track of where you were in a playlist.
The problem is that Apple keeps coming out with a new model every year or so. I got my 2G the winter before the 3G came out so by that point it was barely six months old.
For a product this expensive it seems very unreasonable to assume that people are going to be upgrading that often. Car companies likewise have a very expensive product that upgrades on a yearly basis, but they don't introduce such radical changes each year that the owner is coerced into buying a new car every year.
As is often the case it's not the early adopters who get screwed, the know what to expect and often have the surplus cash to lose. The people who really get screwed are the middle adopters. People who buy into a product in the median time between when it becomes widespread, but not mainstream. Sort of like everyone who bought a DVD player around 2001-2002 when they were just cresting into ubiquity. It was at a point where you could still pay $200 for a good quality entry-level model that today (i.e. after the mainstream acceptance) would retail for $100 or less.
That was indeed part of the issue, but the newer cases (like the new iSkin case that I greatly desire where they finally added in a screen protector) still wouldn't work quite as well with the old 2G models due to the new button placement and the slight change in size.
I still see no reason why firmware couldn't be updated for all models.