Jesus Herbert Walker Christ, you're foolish. See the pot-in-pot design has--get this-- TWO POTS. your stuff goes in the inner one, and the sand/water goes in between the two pots. If your post was an explosion, the comic book onomatopoeia would be "Ker-Duh."
Sony's inability to market to a wider audience than the 14-24 year old male. Music games is an appreciably broad market. The real trick to DDR's popularity is that the console version is only an accessory to the public and social arcade version. An expensive accessory, but well worth it for those who like it. Not everybody wants to sit down and think as a leisure activity, and DDR helps break the mold on this. Its like the powerpad with style.
I think Alex Rigopulos has a fairly good grip on why his idea didn't sell to the US, but there's some other reasons as well. He wanted to take a known type of game and add a musical component into it. I suppose the idea was to cast the idea broad and far. Instead they lost most of the fringe who have a playstation, but really aren't interested in playing the typical long and involved games, and they lost the avid gamers who saw music games as some bastardization of their culture.
Starting on the right foot with Frequency is one point, where he mentioned using more popular music. Another point is that you can't just advertise in Sony's magazine and the unofficials if you're aiming for a broader market. Finally, eye candy just won't work with games like this. It needs to be drastically apparent where the "game" is. In DDR, its the arrows. The background is barely noticable if you're playing the game, you're focused on the part that's clearly game. To me, the newer street fighters and Megaman X games suffered from a similar problem. They're both 2d games for the most part, but its difficult to distinguish background from the plane of interaction. Maybe it was because
The good news as I see it is that music is gradually becoming a tool in game designer's chests. Goldeneye used music to indicate the altertness levels of guards, from red alarm to another boring day in Severnaya. Ocarina of Time had a strange focus on music but it wasn't terribly musical. You played a sequence of notes and cast a magic spell. Wind Waker included some more elements, both obvious and subtle. They kept the music magic item, but replaced it with a baton. The improvement was that the music was now a timed sequence of notes, which is far closer to what music is. Less obvious however, is the musical presentation inside the game. When you're in combat, the music fades back to a soft drum beat combined with notes that arise from the blows. Attack swiftly without losing a beat and you'll piece together the meledy, a rising scale. Some of the enemies also bring music into the game, like the imps with pitch forked. With about three in the area, they sound like a jack-in-the box when combined on you. This kind of musical integration may be where games as a whole are headed, and you can't help but rejoice at the improvement.
Linux is looking up? Consider the sample source for a minute. A survey on linuxdevices. Of course there will be a solid linux representation. I'd expect to hear great things about the market trends of QNX based on a survey from QNXZone, too.
Took me a while to figure out what was going on with initrd and my own kernels, but I've finally gotten rid of that hoary beast. From what I can tell, initrd is only useful for installation media where you need to carry a metric shit-ton of network drivers and the likes. I haven't tried the sarge installer -- I assume debian kernels still default to this?
This guy's written a closed emulator, and has taken preorders for it. He advertises with screenshots without mentioning any standard way of interfacing gameboy games into the platform his software runs on. Of course Nintendo's pissed, he's selling tools to pirate games. Ironically, now several of his own customers are pissed as well and want their preorder money back (dipshits, its not like software runs out).
You'll notice in the patent several emulators and website references to emulation. The patent makes several claims, and I'm not certain the only claim made within the patent is an emulator that can determine what kind of game is played. This "innovation" would be to look at offset in the rom that indicates which platform the game is intended for. Its also hardly revolutionary. No$gmb can accomplish this feat. And I believe visual boy advance can as well.
The lesson is that most companies take a dim view of profiting from their hard work. If you just want to build an emulator, the easiest part of steering clear of trouble is to make it open source. It's worked for zsnes and snes9x. And in the process we've seen a far greater application of emulators than before when handled by a small clergy of programmers and friends.
Thats great. Too bad the students have iBooks that are missing both the requirements for Window OR Linux, and the intel or AMD procerssor. Nifty game but useless.
I've successfully run QNX on an aging computer with 32 megs of ram, and done it nicely. Photon has several key features that are very nice. It has tasklets, a start menu, media player, and an X windows compatibility addon, virtual desktops, and probably more that I'm forgetting. And it runs just as smoothly as win98, if not smoother than win98. There's no need to subject anyone to the horrors of gnome pre 2.x. The sun usability document was more than 10 pages long for a reason...
I'm not entirely sure what nautilus is doing that provides the "latest features," but its the second biggest task hanging around on my desktop. Clocks in at 23 megabytes, which is way over half of that 32 megabyte limit. As far as I can tell, the biggest omnipresent feature gained in 2.x in GNOME was a menu system that wasn't braindead. It shouldn't take more RAM to remove clickable menu titles on every entry.
Funny, I coulda sworn Vivendi Universal (owners of Sierra) was sending cease and desist letters to open source battle.net clones.
These examples only go against my point if you grossly misunderstood it. My point was that developers are marketable. All three use a publisher. iD made a good deal of shareware, but even then they still had a relationship with a publisher (Apogee). Blizzard is not a publisher, not even in their early days making Gensis games like Lost Vikings (Interplay). And you surely know that Valve has a relationship with Sierra.
Given the amount of confusion over the issue you've displayed, its clear that developer names can carry some strong meaning about who's behind the game, a brand, if you will. I think I've chosen three very good examples. If they're leaving publishers, its because the rule of equivelent trade has become diminished.
Developers aren't marketable? What about iD, Blizzard or Valve? And of course, the grandparent poster indirectly recognized the selling power of the Square brand. The relationship between developer and publisher should be one of equivelent trade: they should be working for you just as much as you work for them.
I keep hearing that multiplayer is big, but everyone translates that into internet play. In reality, one is a subset of the other--remember this dearly. If you're absolutely worried about bringing in incredible numbers of players for "multiplayer," this isn't something guarenteed by a publisher. I recall purchasing an older game called NetStorm published by Activision. The easiest way to bring in players is price point.
The biggest problem facing developers is a lack of a business plan. Sure, there's a couple of projects they're working on and getting paid for, but typically they're either one shot contracts with movie studios (increasingly rare) or somebody's pet project. Now tie-ins are good for making ends meet, and if approached correctly may be a boon for recognition (at least temporarily), and pet projects are why the whole studio was started in the first place! But developers need to examine their revenue streams, and work on stability. Industry analysts always tell you the market is hit drive, and executives will complain about it, but the biggest and hardiest have found ways outside of this. They build franchises and milk them in nearly the same way Microsoft does it's Operating System and Office. EA has turn sports into a steady revenue source, as well as the sims. Square has slowly built Final Fantasy into a series that releases almost yearly. Unreal Tournament has shifted into a yearly purchase, and I expect it will do well.
The other option to reduce risk is to focus on smaller games at a cheaper price point, and maybe examine different ways to distribute them. I've probably rambled on too long already, but popcap springs to mind as a small games studio that does well.
I'm pretty sure most every Fortune 50(0?) executive will tell you that sales people are where the money lies. Not in engineering, not in IT. Where do you think most of the promotions to executive tasks come from?
Engineering is the bitch-- an expense. Sales is where companies look to for profits.
Yea, story drove Halo's popularity, and not the multiplayer. Sure. And it certianly wasn't the forced bundling of games for early adopters. And, whats the story behind multiplayer? Red VS Blue has explored this gaping hole of plot effectively for nearly 25 episodes so far.
Of course, its quite simple to go completely to the other side of this. Look at the "Best Last Adventure Game" or whatver you want to call it, aka The Longest Journey. Lots of exposition, lots of cutscenes, relatively little game. There's plenty of academics ready to analyze and critize games in the same manner in which movies and books are. Most don't really get it at all. For every Warren Spector we have 20 authors who recognize that the stories in games are held to a different and much lower standard than any real writing.
From what I can tell, story and game are completely orthogonal. To make it more clear, imagine describing the quality of a game on a left to right scale or spectrum. The quality of the game's story can be placed on a scale up and down, with no relation whatsoever. Seems like far too many critics can't distinguish between the two. Why else would Xenosaga do so well with critics?
Instead of writing about how story is critical, and how every game needs a story, and even has one (this leads to stretches like the plot of a football game), maybe these critics should spend some time examining if their ideas even work. There's a whole world out there of game design and its relation to story, but you're not going to find it by tacking on story to a game.
I'm a user of both Debian and Gentoo, and I dont see how you can claim that Debian is any less modular than Gentoo, wrt to distro design. They are both choices. Given Progeny's longstanding relationship with enterprise Linux users (i.e. customers), Debian's 11 supported architecture may serve as proof that Debian is somehow more modular. I disagree, but the fact remains that Gentoo supports a limited number of platforms, and poorly.
You should know as well as I do that Progeny outdates Gentoo (what I assume you mean by "an existing team") by a significant margin, and that he's already got a team with a huge advantage: they're coworkers he can see and talk to daily. It looks more like "componentized linux" is a marketing angle on Debian without really mentioning Debian. A large percentage of Progeny's money comes from Redhat work, despite the amount of expertise they have elsewhere. In short, when Ian says nobody, you should probably interpret it to mean "nobody you can pay for support."
What I'd like to see in the future is the same thing you would: a nice blend of the best features of Gentoo and Debian. Let me choose packages to install from binaries, or allow me to build from source; if I want to later rebuild the software to replace the binary, I should be able to. Both camps have toy versions of the other camp's method--witness apt-build and the GRP. Of course what I'd really like to see most is a decent GUI surrounding them both. The command lines are fine for many tasks, but sometimes a GUI can help take the bite out of things. synaptic, for example, manages your list of sources so its easier to remove a line and edit a line without breaking syntax.
The drawing and article (sorry, I actually read the article) mentions a turbine used for power. I guess the idea is you take it really high and it skims energy off the forward motion to run a compressor. My intuition says that eventually it would need to be brought back down, but fluid dynamics isn't something which intuition handles well;)
I've played Legend of Zelda. And I've played Link to the Past. I remember being incredibly impressed by the game. It improved upon the first in many unfathomable ways. I've also played the GBA version of link to the past, and I'm looking forward to Four Swords Plus. How you can tell me that Legend of Zelda is some sort of Citizen Kane when it gets better with every reiteration?
Thats the thing with sequals in video games. In cinema sequals suck, they're hampered by continuity and form. With video games its often closer to reiterating the same plot over and over again in more complex and prettier ways.
All my professors have their PhDs, and none of them seem to be under any pressure to provide working code. In fact, I'm reasonably certain its beyond most of them to write a solid and complete program. You sound like a perfect fit.
Interesting. I have acroread installed but no package. Guess I downloaded and installed from a tarball =/ Well, the nvidia drivers are still in non free, and we can pretty much assume they always will be. The value of having non-free Debian installers for the nvidia stuff is that the NVIDIA-*-.run stuff doesn't play well with other files managed by dpkg, and having it in the Debian infastructure means less bugs from poorly done 3rd party packages (just note how many bugs against games have been filed and then attributed to nvidia).
SELinux has been going on for four years now. Moreover, the NSA doesn't certify this as some sort of bulletproof linux, it mostly just adds access controls (I'm guessing aka ACLs). Since nobody's been dumb enough to run around marketing the NSA's involvement and SELinux it really hasn't caught on much. Bandying about that the NSA has somehow "approved" of this kernel would likely result in a very pissed off NSA. Nobody, not even marketing, dicks with the NSA.
This runs deeper than you would think. Debian is built and steered by volunteers. Demonstrate a commitment and aptitude and you will be included in their group. Within this broad association of "Debian Developers" are a few who have some moral stick up their butt about anything not GPL'd.
It comes up reguarly but this is the first time (that I know of -- they don't keep a history of failed resolutions) that it wasn't dismissed out of hand. A few months ago someone came up with a magical list of software in non-free. The result was basically acroread, java and some decompression tools. This data comes from popcon. What they don't tell you there is what sorts of ways the pop-con program distorts things. Pop-con is not well known among users. It also requires a functioning mail server, something many desktop installations forgoe. Nearly every linux installation in our College of Engineering runs Debian, but they don't use pop-con. And the sample size of people reporting with popcon is fairly small compared to the actual size. One can argue that statistical sampling means a lot even at 10 percent of the population, but there's a good chance.
Myself, I run Debian unstable and hardly pay attention to what's non-free. I do know that some of my stuff, like the NVIDIA drivers packaged by Debian, are very non free and very useful. Acroread is also invaluable. If Debian drops support for non-free, I may be looking for a new distro. I wonder how UserLinux feels about the situation, given Bruce's GUI choices were based on being able to make software for any purpose without restriction, including commercial exploitation.
Admittedly I haven't seen this tube racing in action, but it seems possible to wind up driving your car in a circle, and not actually make forward progress. Seems kinda like Tube Slider or Fzero.
Well, I'm reasonably certain the XBox PowerPC chip won't be compatible with your current x86 chip. But the xbox people seem to keep pushing broadband required features. Every time I turn around someone's betting on the prevailance of broadband and it never works. So it wouldn't suprise me to see them bet on it as stupidly as 8 megabyte files across a cable modem.
Slashdot Mirror
It would sure save the effort of making the return trip with the rental ;)
Jesus Herbert Walker Christ, you're foolish. See the pot-in-pot design has--get this-- TWO POTS. your stuff goes in the inner one, and the sand/water goes in between the two pots. If your post was an explosion, the comic book onomatopoeia would be "Ker-Duh."
Why he didn't include the classic "The Bench" strip. Its designed for it -- no bubbles, just use lines like the good old days of PA.
The webpage mentions that he showed the class several examples of comics -- did he choose Pokey the Pengiun or something?
Sony's inability to market to a wider audience than the 14-24 year old male. Music games is an appreciably broad market. The real trick to DDR's popularity is that the console version is only an accessory to the public and social arcade version. An expensive accessory, but well worth it for those who like it. Not everybody wants to sit down and think as a leisure activity, and DDR helps break the mold on this. Its like the powerpad with style.
I think Alex Rigopulos has a fairly good grip on why his idea didn't sell to the US, but there's some other reasons as well. He wanted to take a known type of game and add a musical component into it. I suppose the idea was to cast the idea broad and far. Instead they lost most of the fringe who have a playstation, but really aren't interested in playing the typical long and involved games, and they lost the avid gamers who saw music games as some bastardization of their culture.
Starting on the right foot with Frequency is one point, where he mentioned using more popular music. Another point is that you can't just advertise in Sony's magazine and the unofficials if you're aiming for a broader market. Finally, eye candy just won't work with games like this. It needs to be drastically apparent where the "game" is. In DDR, its the arrows. The background is barely noticable if you're playing the game, you're focused on the part that's clearly game. To me, the newer street fighters and Megaman X games suffered from a similar problem. They're both 2d games for the most part, but its difficult to distinguish background from the plane of interaction. Maybe it was because
The good news as I see it is that music is gradually becoming a tool in game designer's chests. Goldeneye used music to indicate the altertness levels of guards, from red alarm to another boring day in Severnaya. Ocarina of Time had a strange focus on music but it wasn't terribly musical. You played a sequence of notes and cast a magic spell. Wind Waker included some more elements, both obvious and subtle. They kept the music magic item, but replaced it with a baton. The improvement was that the music was now a timed sequence of notes, which is far closer to what music is. Less obvious however, is the musical presentation inside the game. When you're in combat, the music fades back to a soft drum beat combined with notes that arise from the blows. Attack swiftly without losing a beat and you'll piece together the meledy, a rising scale. Some of the enemies also bring music into the game, like the imps with pitch forked. With about three in the area, they sound like a jack-in-the box when combined on you. This kind of musical integration may be where games as a whole are headed, and you can't help but rejoice at the improvement.
Linux is looking up? Consider the sample source for a minute. A survey on linuxdevices. Of course there will be a solid linux representation. I'd expect to hear great things about the market trends of QNX based on a survey from QNXZone, too.
Took me a while to figure out what was going on with initrd and my own kernels, but I've finally gotten rid of that hoary beast. From what I can tell, initrd is only useful for installation media where you need to carry a metric shit-ton of network drivers and the likes. I haven't tried the sarge installer -- I assume debian kernels still default to this?
This guy's written a closed emulator, and has taken preorders for it. He advertises with screenshots without mentioning any standard way of interfacing gameboy games into the platform his software runs on. Of course Nintendo's pissed, he's selling tools to pirate games. Ironically, now several of his own customers are pissed as well and want their preorder money back (dipshits, its not like software runs out).
You'll notice in the patent several emulators and website references to emulation. The patent makes several claims, and I'm not certain the only claim made within the patent is an emulator that can determine what kind of game is played. This "innovation" would be to look at offset in the rom that indicates which platform the game is intended for. Its also hardly revolutionary. No$gmb can accomplish this feat. And I believe visual boy advance can as well.
The lesson is that most companies take a dim view of profiting from their hard work. If you just want to build an emulator, the easiest part of steering clear of trouble is to make it open source. It's worked for zsnes and snes9x. And in the process we've seen a far greater application of emulators than before when handled by a small clergy of programmers and friends.
Thats great. Too bad the students have iBooks that are missing both the requirements for Window OR Linux, and the intel or AMD procerssor. Nifty game but useless.
I've successfully run QNX on an aging computer with 32 megs of ram, and done it nicely. Photon has several key features that are very nice. It has tasklets, a start menu, media player, and an X windows compatibility addon, virtual desktops, and probably more that I'm forgetting. And it runs just as smoothly as win98, if not smoother than win98. There's no need to subject anyone to the horrors of gnome pre 2.x. The sun usability document was more than 10 pages long for a reason...
I'm not entirely sure what nautilus is doing that provides the "latest features," but its the second biggest task hanging around on my desktop. Clocks in at 23 megabytes, which is way over half of that 32 megabyte limit. As far as I can tell, the biggest omnipresent feature gained in 2.x in GNOME was a menu system that wasn't braindead. It shouldn't take more RAM to remove clickable menu titles on every entry.
Funny, I coulda sworn Vivendi Universal (owners of Sierra) was sending cease and desist letters to open source battle.net clones.
These examples only go against my point if you grossly misunderstood it. My point was that developers are marketable. All three use a publisher. iD made a good deal of shareware, but even then they still had a relationship with a publisher (Apogee). Blizzard is not a publisher, not even in their early days making Gensis games like Lost Vikings (Interplay). And you surely know that Valve has a relationship with Sierra.
Given the amount of confusion over the issue you've displayed, its clear that developer names can carry some strong meaning about who's behind the game, a brand, if you will. I think I've chosen three very good examples. If they're leaving publishers, its because the rule of equivelent trade has become diminished.
Developers aren't marketable? What about iD, Blizzard or Valve? And of course, the grandparent poster indirectly recognized the selling power of the Square brand. The relationship between developer and publisher should be one of equivelent trade: they should be working for you just as much as you work for them.
I keep hearing that multiplayer is big, but everyone translates that into internet play. In reality, one is a subset of the other--remember this dearly. If you're absolutely worried about bringing in incredible numbers of players for "multiplayer," this isn't something guarenteed by a publisher. I recall purchasing an older game called NetStorm published by Activision. The easiest way to bring in players is price point.
The biggest problem facing developers is a lack of a business plan. Sure, there's a couple of projects they're working on and getting paid for, but typically they're either one shot contracts with movie studios (increasingly rare) or somebody's pet project. Now tie-ins are good for making ends meet, and if approached correctly may be a boon for recognition (at least temporarily), and pet projects are why the whole studio was started in the first place! But developers need to examine their revenue streams, and work on stability. Industry analysts always tell you the market is hit drive, and executives will complain about it, but the biggest and hardiest have found ways outside of this. They build franchises and milk them in nearly the same way Microsoft does it's Operating System and Office. EA has turn sports into a steady revenue source, as well as the sims. Square has slowly built Final Fantasy into a series that releases almost yearly. Unreal Tournament has shifted into a yearly purchase, and I expect it will do well.
The other option to reduce risk is to focus on smaller games at a cheaper price point, and maybe examine different ways to distribute them. I've probably rambled on too long already, but popcap springs to mind as a small games studio that does well.
I'm pretty sure most every Fortune 50(0?) executive will tell you that sales people are where the money lies. Not in engineering, not in IT. Where do you think most of the promotions to executive tasks come from?
Engineering is the bitch-- an expense. Sales is where companies look to for profits.
Yea, story drove Halo's popularity, and not the multiplayer. Sure. And it certianly wasn't the forced bundling of games for early adopters. And, whats the story behind multiplayer? Red VS Blue has explored this gaping hole of plot effectively for nearly 25 episodes so far.
Of course, its quite simple to go completely to the other side of this. Look at the "Best Last Adventure Game" or whatver you want to call it, aka The Longest Journey. Lots of exposition, lots of cutscenes, relatively little game. There's plenty of academics ready to analyze and critize games in the same manner in which movies and books are. Most don't really get it at all. For every Warren Spector we have 20 authors who recognize that the stories in games are held to a different and much lower standard than any real writing.
From what I can tell, story and game are completely orthogonal. To make it more clear, imagine describing the quality of a game on a left to right scale or spectrum. The quality of the game's story can be placed on a scale up and down, with no relation whatsoever. Seems like far too many critics can't distinguish between the two. Why else would Xenosaga do so well with critics?
Instead of writing about how story is critical, and how every game needs a story, and even has one (this leads to stretches like the plot of a football game), maybe these critics should spend some time examining if their ideas even work. There's a whole world out there of game design and its relation to story, but you're not going to find it by tacking on story to a game.
I'm a user of both Debian and Gentoo, and I dont see how you can claim that Debian is any less modular than Gentoo, wrt to distro design. They are both choices. Given Progeny's longstanding relationship with enterprise Linux users (i.e. customers), Debian's 11 supported architecture may serve as proof that Debian is somehow more modular. I disagree, but the fact remains that Gentoo supports a limited number of platforms, and poorly.
You should know as well as I do that Progeny outdates Gentoo (what I assume you mean by "an existing team") by a significant margin, and that he's already got a team with a huge advantage: they're coworkers he can see and talk to daily. It looks more like "componentized linux" is a marketing angle on Debian without really mentioning Debian. A large percentage of Progeny's money comes from Redhat work, despite the amount of expertise they have elsewhere. In short, when Ian says nobody, you should probably interpret it to mean "nobody you can pay for support."
What I'd like to see in the future is the same thing you would: a nice blend of the best features of Gentoo and Debian. Let me choose packages to install from binaries, or allow me to build from source; if I want to later rebuild the software to replace the binary, I should be able to. Both camps have toy versions of the other camp's method--witness apt-build and the GRP. Of course what I'd really like to see most is a decent GUI surrounding them both. The command lines are fine for many tasks, but sometimes a GUI can help take the bite out of things. synaptic, for example, manages your list of sources so its easier to remove a line and edit a line without breaking syntax.
The drawing and article (sorry, I actually read the article) mentions a turbine used for power. I guess the idea is you take it really high and it skims energy off the forward motion to run a compressor. My intuition says that eventually it would need to be brought back down, but fluid dynamics isn't something which intuition handles well ;)
I've played Legend of Zelda. And I've played Link to the Past. I remember being incredibly impressed by the game. It improved upon the first in many unfathomable ways. I've also played the GBA version of link to the past, and I'm looking forward to Four Swords Plus. How you can tell me that Legend of Zelda is some sort of Citizen Kane when it gets better with every reiteration?
Thats the thing with sequals in video games. In cinema sequals suck, they're hampered by continuity and form. With video games its often closer to reiterating the same plot over and over again in more complex and prettier ways.
All my professors have their PhDs, and none of them seem to be under any pressure to provide working code. In fact, I'm reasonably certain its beyond most of them to write a solid and complete program. You sound like a perfect fit.
Interesting. I have acroread installed but no package. Guess I downloaded and installed from a tarball =/ Well, the nvidia drivers are still in non free, and we can pretty much assume they always will be. The value of having non-free Debian installers for the nvidia stuff is that the NVIDIA-*-.run stuff doesn't play well with other files managed by dpkg, and having it in the Debian infastructure means less bugs from poorly done 3rd party packages (just note how many bugs against games have been filed and then attributed to nvidia).
SELinux has been going on for four years now. Moreover, the NSA doesn't certify this as some sort of bulletproof linux, it mostly just adds access controls (I'm guessing aka ACLs). Since nobody's been dumb enough to run around marketing the NSA's involvement and SELinux it really hasn't caught on much. Bandying about that the NSA has somehow "approved" of this kernel would likely result in a very pissed off NSA. Nobody, not even marketing, dicks with the NSA.
This runs deeper than you would think. Debian is built and steered by volunteers. Demonstrate a commitment and aptitude and you will be included in their group. Within this broad association of "Debian Developers" are a few who have some moral stick up their butt about anything not GPL'd.
It comes up reguarly but this is the first time (that I know of -- they don't keep a history of failed resolutions) that it wasn't dismissed out of hand. A few months ago someone came up with a magical list of software in non-free. The result was basically acroread, java and some decompression tools. This data comes from popcon. What they don't tell you there is what sorts of ways the pop-con program distorts things. Pop-con is not well known among users. It also requires a functioning mail server, something many desktop installations forgoe. Nearly every linux installation in our College of Engineering runs Debian, but they don't use pop-con. And the sample size of people reporting with popcon is fairly small compared to the actual size. One can argue that statistical sampling means a lot even at 10 percent of the population, but there's a good chance.
Myself, I run Debian unstable and hardly pay attention to what's non-free. I do know that some of my stuff, like the NVIDIA drivers packaged by Debian, are very non free and very useful. Acroread is also invaluable. If Debian drops support for non-free, I may be looking for a new distro. I wonder how UserLinux feels about the situation, given Bruce's GUI choices were based on being able to make software for any purpose without restriction, including commercial exploitation.
Admittedly I haven't seen this tube racing in action, but it seems possible to wind up driving your car in a circle, and not actually make forward progress. Seems kinda like Tube Slider or Fzero.
Do you know of a better way to deploy an operating system than using a distribution?
Well, I'm reasonably certain the XBox PowerPC chip won't be compatible with your current x86 chip. But the xbox people seem to keep pushing broadband required features. Every time I turn around someone's betting on the prevailance of broadband and it never works. So it wouldn't suprise me to see them bet on it as stupidly as 8 megabyte files across a cable modem.