Pretty much what Automatix does is route around the usability problems in the GUI apt systems. Automatix is good for two reasons: firstly, it hides the apt-get frontend. It handles adding unofficial repos, installing, and configuring the packages. Secondly, it takes the massive array of software ubuntu inherits from the Debian infrastructure and selects some useful stuff they think people might not know about but likely want or need.
This stuff is useful, but things could be better if a lot of effort was put into synaptic and the default repos. Some of this stuff should make its way into upsteam, in this case, base-config and ubuntu-desktop. NumlockX enabled on startup is simply a good idea and a cheap and trivial fix. Ubuntu should be working on getting permissions to distribute the official JVM as part of Ubuntu, and gftp is pretty useful so I don't see why it shouldn't be thrown in. Obviously some of the stuff Automatix does is dangerous or illegal (installing mp3 support) and thus won't ever make it as part of Ubuntu proper, but I'd like to see them cherry pick some of the better ones. The benefit is that everybody gets these improvements rather than just those who've heard of automatix.
The second part of what Automatix does is a very important and thus far unaddressed problem in the Debian model. The ubuntu-desktop virtual package mildly alleviates this problem by selecting a few of the most basic applications you'd want. Plenty of packages are provided, but there's no way for users to know what's useful to them. If you think of synaptic as a software sales tool every bit as a package manager, it's doing a horrible job on the sales front. From a beginner usability standpoint, if Synaptic presented a a list of say the 10 most popular packages you don't have installed, that would improve things a lot. Debian / Ubuntu have a lot of great things packaged, but they have a hard time promoting the use of any particular software they actually distribute. The good news is that a lot of the tools to accomplish this already exist: popcon is a system for reporting software installs back to the central server. One of the most popular installs is the acrobat reader and plugin. On the one hand, reporting this information may be dangerous and also requires an mailer service. On the other hand, raw package downloads don't tell us information like "people who've installed acro-reader also have acro-reader-plugin" or "people who have blah installed usually don't have blah." Much of this will be obvious, but sometimes these sorts of Bayesian inferrences are important. It allows you to say things like, 'hey we noticed you have acroreader-plugin installed, would you like to try out the firefox plugin to mplayer?'
If it was as simple as booting off a usb drive, it would be done already. Long ago. The problem is that windows needs a BIOS. It's looking in the BIOS region for video support and other things that simply aren't there. Apple doesn't have one with the iMac, so booting off the drive can't "create an int 80h" and expect regular BIOS things to happen.
The most plausible trick I've seen thus far is writing a new bootloader that copies one of the open source BIOSes (who would have thought they'd be useful!?) into the region of memory windows / windows installers expect to find this stuff.
How hard would it be to record a video of this demo done on a PC before hand, and then rig up your iMac to display it fullscreen? Surely mplayer or VLC will build on OSX even if quicktime isn't discreet enough about the process.
One thing I might point out is that during the login / welcome to windows thing, the screen doesn't take up the whole screen. Its been some time since I last reinstalled windows, is this normal?
If I'm not allowed to suggest Google as a McDonald's company, then I'll suggest Verisign. McDonald's success is based not on selling hamburgers, but on real estate investment. There were plenty of burger joints before and after McD, but McD's was the first to make the game a real estate play. The closest thing one has to real estate on the internet is DNS. Like all things on the internet, it's mostly a kingdom of the mind. One of the better players out there in the DNS and server market is Verisign.
Businesswise, they've got a pretty good handle on margins, they've got plenty of offerings and new stuff on the slate. Their stock has split like twice in the past 6 years. I'd say that comes close to meeting McDonald's growth. They don't have the history that McD does, but very few internet companies could. More importantly, their P:E is only 14 or so. If you believe they'll be a going concern for the next 15 years, this isn't a bad investment. One spectacular product / idea in the next 15 years from them and they'll make McDonalds look like government securities. Of course, owning Verisign would be an implicit agreement with their business practices.
I think in this case the EULA or Terms of Service represents a social contract. You agree to play by the same base rules as the rest of the players. If it's perceived that this isn't the case, that some are cheating, then they'll either leave the game entirely, or turn to bots themselves. It's just sad that he reocognzied the game is so boring that he had to watch TV while "playing."
Because Google's got a solid reputation with the important half of the equation: making money. Getting money for Advertising is the hard part. Google's automated system nets them a lot of cash, and their reputation brings them enough customers that they automate the process. And it's not like Google isn't busy acquiring and building out new stuff. They rolled out pay per download content in what, less than a year? Their ability to move through internet technologies like a fish moves through water is why they're highly valued. Sure, plenty of people can hack up a flickr clone in five minutes that stands up to testing by their five friends. But making highly available, widely distributed systems involves something more than a couple javascripts. Google's got that part down pat. There aren't that many people out there that are talented in maintaining a cluster of the kind you need to really compete with Google. And you have to recognize, people will always be part of this equation. With hundreds of computers, at least one will fail permentently per day. If you bought quality stuff. If you didn't, oops. Yes, the hardware is being commoditized. But we're a long ways from open source easily maintained cluster computing.
Long term, there's no value in any single investment in an open market. Returns diminish, and profits approach zero. The only way you stay ahead of the curve is to keep investing in newer stuff. Google appears to have a solid group behind them capable of doing exactly that, and doing it well enough, repeatedly. How valuable is a computer from five years ago? Or a car from ten years ago? Or a printing press from 100 years ago? How valuable is an ad campaign from 15 years ago?
Thank you sir, for clarifying. I was hoping to see something on your blog about the details, but a reply to my post on slashdot is also adequate;). Unfortunately, I don't have the moderation power any more to make your response more visible to the public =(
I'm gonna have to dissent with you there. Clearly someone knew the rammifcations of storing a password in a file, if they went to the effort of writing a script to fix it after the fact. I'm sure someone during the process thought it was a complete hack and hoped in time a better solution would come forward. As we can see, this hasn't happened. The better solution is to either move creating the first user account until after base has been installed, or to not store the question at all. I don't know why it needed to be stored on disk in the past, but this needs to be fixed posthaste.
I expect some sarcastic words from Joey Hess to be forthcoming on Monday.
The design of the installer is naturally at fault. The way it works currently is it stores the answers to a bunch of questions asked during install, and then feeds them into the install system. If the answers list was simply a log, the easy fix would have happened ages ago: simply don't output the password to the file. Clearly the system is using that to send to the create first user script. That script is supposed to remove that entry, but it appears to have temporarily broken. I gather its generally useful for repeated installs, but storing plaintext passwords in a file is still a bad idea, reguardless of how easy it is to access it. I suspect the guys responsible for the installer will be able to provide a better discussion of what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to test for similar errors in the future. Theoretically, you shouldn't have any storage on disk for it, even for the duration of an install. But realistically, the window during which you could convievably attack this temporary storage is very miniscule. The answers list is pretty long and deleting a line from it wouldn't likely result in data getting duplicated on disk. Maybe with a full journaled FS, but I'm not sure on that one. Still, I'd much rather see a fix more along the lines you've described above.
The bigger scare factor here is that the Ubuntu repos are presumably running Ubuntu. You can moan on about md5 security and RSA signatures, but when the private keys are readable all bets are off. Let's hope they run netBSD.
I should point out that while I am using breezy, I don't have this problem in my install log and neither did anyone else I know using Ubuntu. Probably because I installed it long long ago, before this particular vuln existed. Additionally, I've read it doesn't happen in dapper, the next version in testing. Oh, and calling Ubuntu's installer "graphical" would be far too generous.
I don't think they nessecarily need to push the next deadlines to accomodate this one, as many of the polishing etc is coming from additional members. I've always wondered why there are so many Asian specific distributions of Linux, and maybe Mark has found an answer. Here's to hoping it gets fixed. It's possible that in the mean time Compiz will be improved, which is certainly still on the leading edge of GUI stuff.
Furthermore, it's also the case that anyone who really wants Dapper now can get it via the Flights. Unfortunately, this path of thought is what brought Debian stable to its knees. I may upgrade to Dapper over Spring Break when I get the chance.
(During oral argument last October, one judge wondered aloud: "Destroying a person's data--that's as bad as you can do to a computer.")
This Judge doesn't really know how a computer works.
Deleting files is certainly not the worst thing you can do to a computer. Hell, go ahead and delete critical operating system files. A restore disk, OS installation disk, or re-image later and the computer is back up and running.
Noticably, none of the files you mention by name is a "person's data." A person's data would be the things generated by a person, like a list of clients and contact information, an email written to one of them soliciting a sale, etc. Reinstalling may make the computer operational again, but the things you actually used the computer for are gone. I find that the judge knows more about how a computer works than you know about law or the English language. If you want to argue that reflashing the BIOS is more destructive fine, but I saw not a word on that front.
The Mozilla Foundation's charter, like many non-profits, is to maximize good done. Normal companies maximize shareholder profits. They're both still businesses, but with different goals in mind. In a private business, there are shareholders that deserve some amount of information pertaining to how their interest is being served. The SEC in fact maintains a set of minimum disclosure standards to publicly traded companies. More importantly, as an organization dedicated to developing and promoting "good software", Mozilla should, not must, make their affairs public as a sign of trust to the community. If they don't then it can be interpreted as a sign that they aren't playing by the rules established for non-profits, when reality is that they simply haven't invested the time in this.
This article gives a few scant details at the bottom about how it's accomplished. Apparently they plan to "offload" part of the work the server does over the internet to your computer's anti-lag card. Might be useful in a MMO where "server lag" does happen. On the other hand, you might as well just buy one of these damn cards for the server and be done with it.
So this might work to improve things, but it seems that your software would have to be rewritten to use it. And I don't know mow significant it is, but one of the guys behind it is a former Intel chip designer. I guess there's plenty of stupid shitty intel chips in the world, but even they didn't want a piece of this.
This happens a lot. Not just with Apple. People say the strategy is to "buy on the rumor, sell on the news." Of course, the article to posted also has a few incidents where the stock was up long after the news and down before it. I don't have earnnigs tables and charts handy but its possible that MacCon or whatever isn't the only influence on the stock.
And by the same token, because some of the big company developers don't innovate, nobody does? All the man's saying is that people who prefer "Indie Gaming" because Independent Developers are "innovators," they're sadly mistaken. And when you say "historically, most innovation comes from...", did you acquire this information from means other than direct empirical observation (ie pull it out of your ass)?
Actually, even some of the DS games look a bit washed out. Advance Wars DS gets pretty bad when the in-game weather is snowy. But my GBA games all look pretty fine on the SP. I realize that developers occasionally compensate for the original GBA, leading to stuff like the FFT:A color options.
Note that the DS's screen is already significantly brighter than the SP. The SP had a goofy front light with a reflective panel or something that spread the light across. When I bought the DS and threw in some games the first thing I noticed was that it was even brighter than the GBA. On some games it seems to be bright enough to wash out the colors a bit. I hope the DS Lite's adjustable brightness isn't tipped even further.
Gamestop and EB merged according to wikipedia. A member just said an hour ago in #kclug that EB didn't take PC games. I've only seen one place take used PC games, and only one place that rented PC games, neither of which were national franchises likely to draw the attention of lawyers.
Amusingly, Wal-mart has a better selection of PC games than EB does. I was looking for warcraft 3 for a roommate and the brick and mortar walmart had it in where a lot of online places had stopped carrying it. They've got some pretty decent shelf space dedicated to PC games, if you bother to actually look. Perhaps its a regional thing?
PC games aren't dead, they're just in a state of suspended animation. Console games have pretty much always outsold PC games. Obvious reasons include ease of use and the price consumers have to lay down to enjoy the goods. Babbages (now a part of EB I think) went down the toilet pretty much because this gap grew wider instead of narrower. Still, games like WoW, Everquest and halflife are pretty big items for their owners. Why doesn't EB dedicate more shelf space to them?
Because they can't carry used PC games. Go back and look at those walls, you'll notice that a lot of it is dedicated to used games. Consumers are price sensative (cheapassgamer.com is a testament to this), and used games are not only cheaper, but the markup is higher, so the stores naturally gravitate that way. In contrast, there's no market for used PC games. Hell, you can't even return them if they're opened a lot of times. It's called fighting piracy, but the net effect appears to be fighting customers. And of course, a used copy of halflife 2 or WoW is close to worthless because there's monthly fees or non-transferrable accounts associated with the game's key number.
Your best bet for finding PC games is to look in places that don't sell used games. Target, Walmart, and Best Buy (but that may soon dissapear). And online stores can easily stock both new and used games, so that's another place to look.
Skimping on price to ditch features you know you won't need (3d accelleration) or don't want your employees to have (loudspeakers) is a good idea, but what about part longevity? I looked up newegg real quick and it looks like one could build a computer for about a 100 less than what ars came to. Does Ars have some secret list of who makes parts that last longer than 3 months that caused them to pick parts I didn't?
"By contrast, the N64 titles didn't put free-look on one stick and movement on the buttons, they mixed them"
On the contrary, Turok used this mode by default, and Goldeneye allowed you to choose this style in the options. I much prefer the Turok controls over Goldeneye, especially on multiplayer. You might argue that the Goldeneye defaults allowed one to move slowly, suitable to a game partly oriented to sneaking around. But the Halo controls were still difficult for me to pick up. Unfortunately for RARE, their investment in the Bond franchise was not repaid kindly. Despite a pretty good improvement over Goldeneye, Perfect Dark didn't catch nearly as much sales, and by the time PD Zero came out, Rare had lost a lot of the talented people involved with the originals.
Many FPS's on the n64 used the Iguana engine and left the Turok controls to default. In contrast, Rare only put out two games (this isn't a bad thing, really). So to say that "the n64 titles" had such and such controls is to demonstrate your ignoring much of the actual n64 games.
Call it a guess, but now that the auction houses are linked, there's less reasons for everyone to hang out at iron forge all day. Of course, Iron Forge is also pretty heavy on the geometry, but the massive amount of player movement may have contributed to that old lag.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much what Automatix does is route around the usability problems in the GUI apt systems. Automatix is good for two reasons: firstly, it hides the apt-get frontend. It handles adding unofficial repos, installing, and configuring the packages. Secondly, it takes the massive array of software ubuntu inherits from the Debian infrastructure and selects some useful stuff they think people might not know about but likely want or need.
This stuff is useful, but things could be better if a lot of effort was put into synaptic and the default repos. Some of this stuff should make its way into upsteam, in this case, base-config and ubuntu-desktop. NumlockX enabled on startup is simply a good idea and a cheap and trivial fix. Ubuntu should be working on getting permissions to distribute the official JVM as part of Ubuntu, and gftp is pretty useful so I don't see why it shouldn't be thrown in. Obviously some of the stuff Automatix does is dangerous or illegal (installing mp3 support) and thus won't ever make it as part of Ubuntu proper, but I'd like to see them cherry pick some of the better ones. The benefit is that everybody gets these improvements rather than just those who've heard of automatix.
The second part of what Automatix does is a very important and thus far unaddressed problem in the Debian model. The ubuntu-desktop virtual package mildly alleviates this problem by selecting a few of the most basic applications you'd want. Plenty of packages are provided, but there's no way for users to know what's useful to them. If you think of synaptic as a software sales tool every bit as a package manager, it's doing a horrible job on the sales front. From a beginner usability standpoint, if Synaptic presented a a list of say the 10 most popular packages you don't have installed, that would improve things a lot. Debian / Ubuntu have a lot of great things packaged, but they have a hard time promoting the use of any particular software they actually distribute. The good news is that a lot of the tools to accomplish this already exist: popcon is a system for reporting software installs back to the central server. One of the most popular installs is the acrobat reader and plugin. On the one hand, reporting this information may be dangerous and also requires an mailer service. On the other hand, raw package downloads don't tell us information like "people who've installed acro-reader also have acro-reader-plugin" or "people who have blah installed usually don't have blah." Much of this will be obvious, but sometimes these sorts of Bayesian inferrences are important. It allows you to say things like, 'hey we noticed you have acroreader-plugin installed, would you like to try out the firefox plugin to mplayer?'
If it was as simple as booting off a usb drive, it would be done already. Long ago. The problem is that windows needs a BIOS. It's looking in the BIOS region for video support and other things that simply aren't there. Apple doesn't have one with the iMac, so booting off the drive can't "create an int 80h" and expect regular BIOS things to happen.
The most plausible trick I've seen thus far is writing a new bootloader that copies one of the open source BIOSes (who would have thought they'd be useful!?) into the region of memory windows / windows installers expect to find this stuff.
How hard would it be to record a video of this demo done on a PC before hand, and then rig up your iMac to display it fullscreen? Surely mplayer or VLC will build on OSX even if quicktime isn't discreet enough about the process.
One thing I might point out is that during the login / welcome to windows thing, the screen doesn't take up the whole screen. Its been some time since I last reinstalled windows, is this normal?
I have no idea if this could ever possibly be thread safe, but it might be possible to have incredibly fast IPC via the cache.
If I'm not allowed to suggest Google as a McDonald's company, then I'll suggest Verisign. McDonald's success is based not on selling hamburgers, but on real estate investment. There were plenty of burger joints before and after McD, but McD's was the first to make the game a real estate play. The closest thing one has to real estate on the internet is DNS. Like all things on the internet, it's mostly a kingdom of the mind. One of the better players out there in the DNS and server market is Verisign.
Businesswise, they've got a pretty good handle on margins, they've got plenty of offerings and new stuff on the slate. Their stock has split like twice in the past 6 years. I'd say that comes close to meeting McDonald's growth. They don't have the history that McD does, but very few internet companies could. More importantly, their P:E is only 14 or so. If you believe they'll be a going concern for the next 15 years, this isn't a bad investment. One spectacular product / idea in the next 15 years from them and they'll make McDonalds look like government securities. Of course, owning Verisign would be an implicit agreement with their business practices.
I think in this case the EULA or Terms of Service represents a social contract. You agree to play by the same base rules as the rest of the players. If it's perceived that this isn't the case, that some are cheating, then they'll either leave the game entirely, or turn to bots themselves. It's just sad that he reocognzied the game is so boring that he had to watch TV while "playing."
Because Google's got a solid reputation with the important half of the equation: making money. Getting money for Advertising is the hard part. Google's automated system nets them a lot of cash, and their reputation brings them enough customers that they automate the process. And it's not like Google isn't busy acquiring and building out new stuff. They rolled out pay per download content in what, less than a year? Their ability to move through internet technologies like a fish moves through water is why they're highly valued. Sure, plenty of people can hack up a flickr clone in five minutes that stands up to testing by their five friends. But making highly available, widely distributed systems involves something more than a couple javascripts. Google's got that part down pat. There aren't that many people out there that are talented in maintaining a cluster of the kind you need to really compete with Google. And you have to recognize, people will always be part of this equation. With hundreds of computers, at least one will fail permentently per day. If you bought quality stuff. If you didn't, oops. Yes, the hardware is being commoditized. But we're a long ways from open source easily maintained cluster computing.
Long term, there's no value in any single investment in an open market. Returns diminish, and profits approach zero. The only way you stay ahead of the curve is to keep investing in newer stuff. Google appears to have a solid group behind them capable of doing exactly that, and doing it well enough, repeatedly. How valuable is a computer from five years ago? Or a car from ten years ago? Or a printing press from 100 years ago? How valuable is an ad campaign from 15 years ago?
Thank you sir, for clarifying. I was hoping to see something on your blog about the details, but a reply to my post on slashdot is also adequate ;). Unfortunately, I don't have the moderation power any more to make your response more visible to the public =(
I'm gonna have to dissent with you there. Clearly someone knew the rammifcations of storing a password in a file, if they went to the effort of writing a script to fix it after the fact. I'm sure someone during the process thought it was a complete hack and hoped in time a better solution would come forward. As we can see, this hasn't happened. The better solution is to either move creating the first user account until after base has been installed, or to not store the question at all. I don't know why it needed to be stored on disk in the past, but this needs to be fixed posthaste.
I expect some sarcastic words from Joey Hess to be forthcoming on Monday.
The design of the installer is naturally at fault. The way it works currently is it stores the answers to a bunch of questions asked during install, and then feeds them into the install system. If the answers list was simply a log, the easy fix would have happened ages ago: simply don't output the password to the file. Clearly the system is using that to send to the create first user script. That script is supposed to remove that entry, but it appears to have temporarily broken. I gather its generally useful for repeated installs, but storing plaintext passwords in a file is still a bad idea, reguardless of how easy it is to access it. I suspect the guys responsible for the installer will be able to provide a better discussion of what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to test for similar errors in the future. Theoretically, you shouldn't have any storage on disk for it, even for the duration of an install. But realistically, the window during which you could convievably attack this temporary storage is very miniscule. The answers list is pretty long and deleting a line from it wouldn't likely result in data getting duplicated on disk. Maybe with a full journaled FS, but I'm not sure on that one. Still, I'd much rather see a fix more along the lines you've described above.
The bigger scare factor here is that the Ubuntu repos are presumably running Ubuntu. You can moan on about md5 security and RSA signatures, but when the private keys are readable all bets are off. Let's hope they run netBSD.
I should point out that while I am using breezy, I don't have this problem in my install log and neither did anyone else I know using Ubuntu. Probably because I installed it long long ago, before this particular vuln existed. Additionally, I've read it doesn't happen in dapper, the next version in testing. Oh, and calling Ubuntu's installer "graphical" would be far too generous.
I don't think they nessecarily need to push the next deadlines to accomodate this one, as many of the polishing etc is coming from additional members. I've always wondered why there are so many Asian specific distributions of Linux, and maybe Mark has found an answer. Here's to hoping it gets fixed. It's possible that in the mean time Compiz will be improved, which is certainly still on the leading edge of GUI stuff.
Furthermore, it's also the case that anyone who really wants Dapper now can get it via the Flights. Unfortunately, this path of thought is what brought Debian stable to its knees. I may upgrade to Dapper over Spring Break when I get the chance.
(During oral argument last October, one judge wondered aloud: "Destroying a person's data--that's as bad as you can do to a computer.")
This Judge doesn't really know how a computer works.
Deleting files is certainly not the worst thing you can do to a computer. Hell, go ahead and delete critical operating system files. A restore disk, OS installation disk, or re-image later and the computer is back up and running.
Noticably, none of the files you mention by name is a "person's data." A person's data would be the things generated by a person, like a list of clients and contact information, an email written to one of them soliciting a sale, etc. Reinstalling may make the computer operational again, but the things you actually used the computer for are gone. I find that the judge knows more about how a computer works than you know about law or the English language. If you want to argue that reflashing the BIOS is more destructive fine, but I saw not a word on that front.
The Mozilla Foundation's charter, like many non-profits, is to maximize good done. Normal companies maximize shareholder profits. They're both still businesses, but with different goals in mind. In a private business, there are shareholders that deserve some amount of information pertaining to how their interest is being served. The SEC in fact maintains a set of minimum disclosure standards to publicly traded companies. More importantly, as an organization dedicated to developing and promoting "good software", Mozilla should, not must, make their affairs public as a sign of trust to the community. If they don't then it can be interpreted as a sign that they aren't playing by the rules established for non-profits, when reality is that they simply haven't invested the time in this.
The only Linux Dell needs to support is kernel.org.
This article gives a few scant details at the bottom about how it's accomplished. Apparently they plan to "offload" part of the work the server does over the internet to your computer's anti-lag card. Might be useful in a MMO where "server lag" does happen. On the other hand, you might as well just buy one of these damn cards for the server and be done with it.
So this might work to improve things, but it seems that your software would have to be rewritten to use it. And I don't know mow significant it is, but one of the guys behind it is a former Intel chip designer. I guess there's plenty of stupid shitty intel chips in the world, but even they didn't want a piece of this.
This happens a lot. Not just with Apple. People say the strategy is to "buy on the rumor, sell on the news." Of course, the article to posted also has a few incidents where the stock was up long after the news and down before it. I don't have earnnigs tables and charts handy but its possible that MacCon or whatever isn't the only influence on the stock.
And by the same token, because some of the big company developers don't innovate, nobody does? All the man's saying is that people who prefer "Indie Gaming" because Independent Developers are "innovators," they're sadly mistaken. And when you say "historically, most innovation comes from...", did you acquire this information from means other than direct empirical observation (ie pull it out of your ass)?
Actually, even some of the DS games look a bit washed out. Advance Wars DS gets pretty bad when the in-game weather is snowy. But my GBA games all look pretty fine on the SP. I realize that developers occasionally compensate for the original GBA, leading to stuff like the FFT:A color options.
Note that the DS's screen is already significantly brighter than the SP. The SP had a goofy front light with a reflective panel or something that spread the light across. When I bought the DS and threw in some games the first thing I noticed was that it was even brighter than the GBA. On some games it seems to be bright enough to wash out the colors a bit. I hope the DS Lite's adjustable brightness isn't tipped even further.
Gamestop and EB merged according to wikipedia. A member just said an hour ago in #kclug that EB didn't take PC games. I've only seen one place take used PC games, and only one place that rented PC games, neither of which were national franchises likely to draw the attention of lawyers.
Amusingly, Wal-mart has a better selection of PC games than EB does. I was looking for warcraft 3 for a roommate and the brick and mortar walmart had it in where a lot of online places had stopped carrying it. They've got some pretty decent shelf space dedicated to PC games, if you bother to actually look. Perhaps its a regional thing?
PC games aren't dead, they're just in a state of suspended animation. Console games have pretty much always outsold PC games. Obvious reasons include ease of use and the price consumers have to lay down to enjoy the goods. Babbages (now a part of EB I think) went down the toilet pretty much because this gap grew wider instead of narrower. Still, games like WoW, Everquest and halflife are pretty big items for their owners. Why doesn't EB dedicate more shelf space to them?
Because they can't carry used PC games. Go back and look at those walls, you'll notice that a lot of it is dedicated to used games. Consumers are price sensative (cheapassgamer.com is a testament to this), and used games are not only cheaper, but the markup is higher, so the stores naturally gravitate that way. In contrast, there's no market for used PC games. Hell, you can't even return them if they're opened a lot of times. It's called fighting piracy, but the net effect appears to be fighting customers. And of course, a used copy of halflife 2 or WoW is close to worthless because there's monthly fees or non-transferrable accounts associated with the game's key number.
Your best bet for finding PC games is to look in places that don't sell used games. Target, Walmart, and Best Buy (but that may soon dissapear). And online stores can easily stock both new and used games, so that's another place to look.
Skimping on price to ditch features you know you won't need (3d accelleration) or don't want your employees to have (loudspeakers) is a good idea, but what about part longevity? I looked up newegg real quick and it looks like one could build a computer for about a 100 less than what ars came to. Does Ars have some secret list of who makes parts that last longer than 3 months that caused them to pick parts I didn't?
"By contrast, the N64 titles didn't put free-look on one stick and movement on the buttons, they mixed them"
On the contrary, Turok used this mode by default, and Goldeneye allowed you to choose this style in the options. I much prefer the Turok controls over Goldeneye, especially on multiplayer. You might argue that the Goldeneye defaults allowed one to move slowly, suitable to a game partly oriented to sneaking around. But the Halo controls were still difficult for me to pick up. Unfortunately for RARE, their investment in the Bond franchise was not repaid kindly. Despite a pretty good improvement over Goldeneye, Perfect Dark didn't catch nearly as much sales, and by the time PD Zero came out, Rare had lost a lot of the talented people involved with the originals.
Many FPS's on the n64 used the Iguana engine and left the Turok controls to default. In contrast, Rare only put out two games (this isn't a bad thing, really). So to say that "the n64 titles" had such and such controls is to demonstrate your ignoring much of the actual n64 games.
Call it a guess, but now that the auction houses are linked, there's less reasons for everyone to hang out at iron forge all day. Of course, Iron Forge is also pretty heavy on the geometry, but the massive amount of player movement may have contributed to that old lag.
So you made your data publicly available with the expectation that nobody would want to look at it?