Microsoft broke no laws getting DOS onto every PC. They happened to be in the right place at the right time, and the market fell onto them. But from there, Microsoft bended and broke the law every chance they got to ensure that there never was any competition.
Also don't forget that although MS's purchase of DOS was perfectly legal, it was ethically horrible. They arrived at a handshake agreement to license the code from Seattle Computer Company. While the MS paperwork was being finalized by the lawyers, SCC then made arrangements to finance other business ventures using the MS money. MS then presented them a contract to buy the code rather than license it, and told SCC to take it or leave it. As SCC had already committed to the other deals, they had no choice but to take MS's offer. Sure, no one held a gun to the head of the SCC executives forcing them to take the deal, however, they didn't have any other reasonable alternatives. MS's behavior was legal, but certainly not ethical.
If the manufacturing costs of these disks is comparable to HD-DVD/Blu-ray disks, it might just click.
There is one significant difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. With Blu-Ray, Sony went for the best technology possible. Doing so ended up meaning that manufacturing Blu-Ray discs required replacing all the equipment at the factories. The HD-DVD camp said that was unacceptable, and designed a format that only required a small amount of equipment changes at the existing DVD factories. The tradeoff to doing this was a lot less storage space.
Sure, the formats have differences in menus formats and the like, but those differences are trivial and can be dealt with in software. The significant things like video codecs are the same between the formats anyway.
So, back to Total HD. You've now made sacrifices to your storage capacity, and you need all new equipment to manufacture the discs. Movie studios only win here if they're neutral in the format war. The format war wouldn't have existed if most studios were neutral, so this isn't a big deal. Consumers only win if they buy a player in the format that ends up losing the war, then decide to get rid of the player they already have.
It's not that people don't think HD is better. Most people just don't consider it worth the money. Standard definition is good enough for most things. TV's last a long time, and most people don't replace them until they start having problems. An HD TV also costs several times more than an SD TV. On top of that, you usually need to upgrade to digital cable, which is an additional monthly fee, plus requires a $5/month rental fee on a cable box for each TV in your home.
Remember, once quality reaches the level of good enough, people care more about cost and convienence than additional quality. Look at people's willingness to buy 128kb music from iTunes when CDs are available.
Computer gaming is also a much larger audience than consoles.
If you count people who play Solitare and Bejeweled, yeah.
If limit it to people who be willing to spend $20 on a game without agonizing over the decision, you're already significantly smaller than the console market.
If you limit it to people willing to pay $40+ for a game, computer gaming is negligible. It's only profitable because the development & publishing costs are a LOT less than for console games.
If your goal is to get people to play your games, computer gaming is great. If your goal is to make a lot of money making games, consoles are a much safer bet.
The big issue with the dev kits isn't the cost - it's convincing Nintendo to sell it to you. You have to be a legit company. They won't sell it to you if you work from home.
Generally speaking, rich people are rich because they chose to be that way through hard work and sacrifice.
Working hard and sacrificing certainly helps you get rich, but for the vast majority of people, that'll lead to a comfortable middle class life.
Maybe because the media only shows the Paris Hiltons of the world, when most of the working rich do their thing in obscurity.
It's not the working rich that people dislike. It's the Kennedy's and Bush's with their shady fortunes, Microsoft making a mockery of the law to build a monopoly, Halliburton and their no bid war contracts, Carly Fiorina and her giant severage package reward for destroying HP, etc.
It's not that people dislike the working rich, it's that they're essentially invisible in the scheme of things. They don't have the money to influence things like the non-working rich do, and there aren't enough of them to influence things like the middle class does.
Personally, I'd rather live in that world where I can move as high as my talent can take me, than live in a world of enforced "equality" that really means transferring money from the doers to the takers.
I certainly agree with your preferences, but we don't really live in that world. Becoming extremely rich and/or powerful usually means being born into that position, or some combination of luck and breaking the law without being caught.
All most people want is the corruption from the top removed, and a little safety net at the bottom so that a string of bad luck doesn't destroy your life.
If you start moving the remote in 3 axes, you can only sustain that motion for a fraction of a second - your arms can only move so far. If it can't figure out the rotation of the controller, it just assumes the last valid rotation until it can figure it out again.
Sure, if you throw your Wiimote off a cliff and put some spin on it in the process, you'll confuse the Wii. But I don't think Nintendo cares if the readings are wrong then. They probably did engineer it to survive the fall though (see the GameBoy at Nintendo World that survived being bombed in the Gulf War).
That's not true, if the ORDER BY column(s) are ordered-indexed, or if it/they are the table's primary storage ordering. Which one would hope applies in a query like "select most recent 5 articles" - if they are stored by date, and any WHERE clause is not too sparse a filter.
Well, I was thinking in more general terms. PostgreSQL tends not to use indexes as often as you would expect it to, so I didn't really think about it too much. You are right, it would use an index here.
For example, somebody else here posted about an application that does a "SELECT * FROM table" then only uses the 5 first rows. Let's compare what happens:
MySQL: Whole table locked while reading, absolutely lousy concurrency as no concurrency is possible on that table.
PostgreSQL: Not very good performance due to reading more than necessary, but no concurrency problems at all.
Just a few details on that...
If you do "SELECT * FROM table", read 5 rows, and close the connection, it won't be too bad. PostgreSQL will start returning results as they are read, and will stop when you close the connection.
If you do "SELECT * FROM table LIMIT 5", PostgreSQL will choose the a query plan that gets the first results fastest. This plan may take longer to return the entire result set, but it will get you data faster. It will do this any time the limit keyword is present. It will obviously stop processing as soon as it hits 5 results.
If you do "SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY field LIMIT 5", PostgreSQL will retrieve the entire data set, sort it, then return the first 5 results. An index won't help on this query, as indexes do not store the visibility information of a row (as in, is a particular row active, deleted, or not yet written from the viewpoint of the current transaction).
This is what blows my mind, too. I've been using postgresql 7.x (yeah, I'm a Debian user) for years and I have never, ever seen it crash, disconnect, dump core, or leak memory. Ever.
Same here. At one point I was coding a C plugin for PostgreSQL (wanted to access data from a sql server box in pg queries), and even then I never saw it crash. If my code had a bug in it, the worst that happened was that one client connection died while everything else was ok.
For those who don't know, PostgreSQL forks off a seperate process for each connection, which makes it hard for an error in one query to effect another one.
SQL is a bit fuzzy once you get beyond simple selects... On one database you might want 'SELECT TOP 5 *...' on another you might want 'SELECT... LIMIT 5', or even 'SELECT... WHERE ROWNUM6'. Or you could just use a forward only cursor - provided the DB backend doesn't try to read the whole thing into memory to implement it...
Once you insert an ORDER BY clause into your query, the DB automatically has to process all the data before it can send you any results. Without an order by, sure, the DB can do what you said.
That's a little too simplistic. Y is the lesser of production capability and market size.
For software, production capability is essentially infinite, but demand is highly variable. If you're talking copies of Windows, the market is so big you might as well consider it infinite for pricing purposes. If you're talking Cobol compilers for BeOS, it's coming awfully close to zero.
Market size may not be the correct term, but it's close enough for discussion.
If you go heavy on the pointers, you will either greatly improve their understanding of things, or completely scare them away. My girlfriend took a class once that essentially covered how to use computer programming to apply engineering concepts. The course had knowledge of C as a prereq, so she asked me to teach her. She really enjoyed programming and kept pushing to learn more until we hit pointers. At first she was ok, until she encountered her first pointer error. Once she understood what happened, she instantly realized all the potential errors and complexity that pointers introduce. At that point, she said to me "How do you deal with this all the time? I could never do that." Shortly after that, the teacher realized that no one in the class knew how to program, and changed the class so that you could do everything in Excel. That was the end of her programming. She wouldn't even consider learning something easier. This was without me ever even implying anything about pointer math. I don't think I ever got to pointers to pointers.
Anyway, my advice is to delay introducing pointers as long as possible.
I did think about Madden, and almost mentioned it, but Winning Eleven soccer plays the same role over there. To a lesser extent, big head baseball games fall into that same niche in Japan.
I think the population is a better gauge than console sales
What the...? So you sell Zelda to people without a console too ? Don't be silly please !
Someone totally missed the discussion... I'm saying the complete opposite - Japan has a large population of console owners that will never even walk into the section of the store that would stock Zelda. Those people are a completely seperate market, which the US has no real counterpart of. I'm saying you shouldn't include those people in your popularity arguments. If you do, 99% of the games that are popular in the US will automatically be substantially less popular in Japan.
I think the population is a better gauge than console sales. Systems sold only gives an upper bound. Japan has categories of gamers that just don't exist in the US. In Japan, you get people who buy a console for things like board games, or strictly for hentai, etc. They're significant enough that one of the three Japanese N64 launch titles was a Mahjongg game. These people are just as likely to consider buying Zelda as your grandmother is. They're a completely different market. In the US, you don't have those gamers. The DS is starting to change that. The Wii may help too, but at this point it's too early to say.
Nah, the internal memory-management load balances the writing across the whole flash memory range. In your example you would just write to 100000 different bytes. Also, a journalling file system is different as well.
Load balancing writes only works if the flash has a significant amount of unused space. In the grandparent's example, if you fill the flash and then change the same byte 100,000 times, you can't do any load balancing. There just isn't anything to spread the load over.
Of course, the answer to that is to have hidden reserved space. Ok, that works, but how much reserved space do you need? 10 additional bytes just means you need to repeatedly change 1 bytes instead of 1 to burn out the flash.
[Change bytes to sectors/blocks/addressable units or whatever you see fit in the above. The units are irrelevant.]
Anyway, I'm not saying load balancing doesn't help things greatly. Just saying that things aren't as simple as you're making them out to be.
Are you really claiming that most people go into the BIOS and change the defaults to save a second off of boot time? I find it very hard to believe that any significant number of people change that setting even among people who know where that setting is. System bootup generally takes at least 30 seconds on any system. The memory test isn't going to take more than a second or two unless you put a ton of ram into a really old computer.
Typing "population of japan" into Google gives: 127,417,244 Typing "population of united states" into Google gives: 295,734,134 That's a ratio of 2.32
Ratio of game sales, based on your numbers:
* The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time(N64); Sales= 4.08(US) 1.46(Japan) = 2.79
* The Legend Of Zelda (NES); Sales= 3.80(US) 1.02(Japan) = 3.73
* The Legend Of Zelda: Link To The Past (SNES);Sales= 2.46(US) 1.16 Japan) = 2.12
* The Legend Of Zelda: Adventure Of Link (NES);Sales= 2.22(US) 1.61(Japan) = 1.38
* The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker (GC); Sales= 2.41(US) 0.86(Japan) = 2.8
* The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle Of Ages / Seasons(GB); Sales= 1.81(US) 1.03(Japan) = 1.76
* The Legend Of Zelda: Links Awakening (GB); Sales= 2.24(US) 0.54(Japan) = 4.15
* The Legend Of Zelda: Majoras Mask; Sales= 1.89(US) 0.74(Japan) = 2.55
* The Legend Of Zelda: Link To The Past (GBA); Sales= 1.61(US) 0.34(Japan) = 4.74
Total US Sales = 22.52 million Total Japan Sales = 8.76 million Ratio = 2.57
Totals ignoring the remake: US = 20.91 Japan = 8.42 Ratio = 2.48
When you factor in the population differences, there isn't much of a difference in sales. Yes, as a whole, the US likes Zelda slightly more than Japan does. But that varies wildly from title to title, with the biggest difference being Japan really didn't care for the GBA remake of the SNES game.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Almost no system is too underpowered to run compiled code, including the SNES.
Obviously you can run compiled code on the SNES. You're just not going to get very good performance out of it. You have 3 general purpose registers on the SNES CPU. Compilers don't create very good code when they're that register starved. You can certainly code an average game in C, but if you're trying to do anything impressive, you won't get the performance you need.
There is no system available on the planet right now that cannot be maxed out by one or two people... Even the most advanced renderers can be implemented by a very small number of people.
A renderer isn't a complete game. You also need artists to create the art. You could try creating a commercial grade Xbox 360 title using 3 or 4 people, but by the time your artists finish their work, we'll be well into the life of the next Xbox at least. Also don't forget the time to create all the sound effects necessary. With a GBA game, a few people can create a finished title of commercial quality.
I think allowing development using the SNES dev kit would allow those who want to get into console game development somewhere to start, yet not compromise what they are charging for their professional kit.
SNES games were coded in assembly. They wouldn't gain much by opening that up.
GBA is the sweet spot - powerful enough to code in C/C++, but weak enough that a team of a couple people can max out the power of the system.
3. No matter how many people "came up" with the idea, it does not matter. The patent definition of obviousness is not the human definition. It might seem obvious to place a button in such a location, but did anyone file a patent or design such an item before them? If not, then was it really that obvious for someone to do it?
Remotes with buttons the top and triggers on the bottom are rare simply because they're rarely useful. The only real reason to do it is to make it easy to press two buttons at once with one hand. How often do you have to do that with remote controls?
You'd be surprised how little modern game music is recorded. I was at a recent IGDA meeting where one of the music designers from Neverwinter Nights 2 did a presentation. He played a trailer for the game repeatedly with different sections of the soundtrack removed. Very very little of the music was live music. Even the majority of the singing wasn't real. He went on for a bit about how they had some software that would generate the sound of a choir singing whatever you wanted from samples. You really couldn't tell that it wasn't done live.
Slashdot Mirror
What are you disagreeing with? You seem to be saying the same thing I did.
Microsoft broke no laws getting DOS onto every PC. They happened to be in the right place at the right time, and the market fell onto them. But from there, Microsoft bended and broke the law every chance they got to ensure that there never was any competition.
Also don't forget that although MS's purchase of DOS was perfectly legal, it was ethically horrible. They arrived at a handshake agreement to license the code from Seattle Computer Company. While the MS paperwork was being finalized by the lawyers, SCC then made arrangements to finance other business ventures using the MS money. MS then presented them a contract to buy the code rather than license it, and told SCC to take it or leave it. As SCC had already committed to the other deals, they had no choice but to take MS's offer. Sure, no one held a gun to the head of the SCC executives forcing them to take the deal, however, they didn't have any other reasonable alternatives. MS's behavior was legal, but certainly not ethical.
If the manufacturing costs of these disks is comparable to HD-DVD/Blu-ray disks, it might just click.
There is one significant difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. With Blu-Ray, Sony went for the best technology possible. Doing so ended up meaning that manufacturing Blu-Ray discs required replacing all the equipment at the factories. The HD-DVD camp said that was unacceptable, and designed a format that only required a small amount of equipment changes at the existing DVD factories. The tradeoff to doing this was a lot less storage space.
Sure, the formats have differences in menus formats and the like, but those differences are trivial and can be dealt with in software. The significant things like video codecs are the same between the formats anyway.
So, back to Total HD. You've now made sacrifices to your storage capacity, and you need all new equipment to manufacture the discs. Movie studios only win here if they're neutral in the format war. The format war wouldn't have existed if most studios were neutral, so this isn't a big deal. Consumers only win if they buy a player in the format that ends up losing the war, then decide to get rid of the player they already have.
It's not that people don't think HD is better. Most people just don't consider it worth the money. Standard definition is good enough for most things. TV's last a long time, and most people don't replace them until they start having problems. An HD TV also costs several times more than an SD TV. On top of that, you usually need to upgrade to digital cable, which is an additional monthly fee, plus requires a $5/month rental fee on a cable box for each TV in your home.
Remember, once quality reaches the level of good enough, people care more about cost and convienence than additional quality. Look at people's willingness to buy 128kb music from iTunes when CDs are available.
Computer gaming is also a much larger audience than consoles.
If you count people who play Solitare and Bejeweled, yeah.
If limit it to people who be willing to spend $20 on a game without agonizing over the decision, you're already significantly smaller than the console market.
If you limit it to people willing to pay $40+ for a game, computer gaming is negligible. It's only profitable because the development & publishing costs are a LOT less than for console games.
If your goal is to get people to play your games, computer gaming is great. If your goal is to make a lot of money making games, consoles are a much safer bet.
The big issue with the dev kits isn't the cost - it's convincing Nintendo to sell it to you. You have to be a legit company. They won't sell it to you if you work from home.
Generally speaking, rich people are rich because they chose to be that way through hard work and sacrifice.
Working hard and sacrificing certainly helps you get rich, but for the vast majority of people, that'll lead to a comfortable middle class life.
Maybe because the media only shows the Paris Hiltons of the world, when most of the working rich do their thing in obscurity.
It's not the working rich that people dislike. It's the Kennedy's and Bush's with their shady fortunes, Microsoft making a mockery of the law to build a monopoly, Halliburton and their no bid war contracts, Carly Fiorina and her giant severage package reward for destroying HP, etc.
It's not that people dislike the working rich, it's that they're essentially invisible in the scheme of things. They don't have the money to influence things like the non-working rich do, and there aren't enough of them to influence things like the middle class does.
Personally, I'd rather live in that world where I can move as high as my talent can take me, than live in a world of enforced "equality" that really means transferring money from the doers to the takers.
I certainly agree with your preferences, but we don't really live in that world. Becoming extremely rich and/or powerful usually means being born into that position, or some combination of luck and breaking the law without being caught.
All most people want is the corruption from the top removed, and a little safety net at the bottom so that a string of bad luck doesn't destroy your life.
If you start moving the remote in 3 axes, you can only sustain that motion for a fraction of a second - your arms can only move so far. If it can't figure out the rotation of the controller, it just assumes the last valid rotation until it can figure it out again.
Sure, if you throw your Wiimote off a cliff and put some spin on it in the process, you'll confuse the Wii. But I don't think Nintendo cares if the readings are wrong then. They probably did engineer it to survive the fall though (see the GameBoy at Nintendo World that survived being bombed in the Gulf War).
That's not true, if the ORDER BY column(s) are ordered-indexed, or if it/they are the table's primary storage ordering. Which one would hope applies in a query like "select most recent 5 articles" - if they are stored by date, and any WHERE clause is not too sparse a filter.
Well, I was thinking in more general terms. PostgreSQL tends not to use indexes as often as you would expect it to, so I didn't really think about it too much. You are right, it would use an index here.
For example, somebody else here posted about an application that does a "SELECT * FROM table" then only uses the 5 first rows. Let's compare what happens:
MySQL: Whole table locked while reading, absolutely lousy concurrency as no concurrency is possible on that table.
PostgreSQL: Not very good performance due to reading more than necessary, but no concurrency problems at all.
Just a few details on that...
If you do "SELECT * FROM table", read 5 rows, and close the connection, it won't be too bad. PostgreSQL will start returning results as they are read, and will stop when you close the connection.
If you do "SELECT * FROM table LIMIT 5", PostgreSQL will choose the a query plan that gets the first results fastest. This plan may take longer to return the entire result set, but it will get you data faster. It will do this any time the limit keyword is present. It will obviously stop processing as soon as it hits 5 results.
If you do "SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY field LIMIT 5", PostgreSQL will retrieve the entire data set, sort it, then return the first 5 results. An index won't help on this query, as indexes do not store the visibility information of a row (as in, is a particular row active, deleted, or not yet written from the viewpoint of the current transaction).
This is what blows my mind, too. I've been using postgresql 7.x (yeah, I'm a Debian user) for years and I have never, ever seen it crash, disconnect, dump core, or leak memory. Ever.
Same here. At one point I was coding a C plugin for PostgreSQL (wanted to access data from a sql server box in pg queries), and even then I never saw it crash. If my code had a bug in it, the worst that happened was that one client connection died while everything else was ok.
For those who don't know, PostgreSQL forks off a seperate process for each connection, which makes it hard for an error in one query to effect another one.
SQL is a bit fuzzy once you get beyond simple selects... On one database you might want 'SELECT TOP 5 * ...' on another you might want 'SELECT ... LIMIT 5', or even 'SELECT ... WHERE ROWNUM6'. Or you could just use a forward only cursor - provided the DB backend doesn't try to read the whole thing into memory to implement it...
Once you insert an ORDER BY clause into your query, the DB automatically has to process all the data before it can send you any results. Without an order by, sure, the DB can do what you said.
That's a little too simplistic. Y is the lesser of production capability and market size.
For software, production capability is essentially infinite, but demand is highly variable. If you're talking copies of Windows, the market is so big you might as well consider it infinite for pricing purposes. If you're talking Cobol compilers for BeOS, it's coming awfully close to zero.
Market size may not be the correct term, but it's close enough for discussion.
If you go heavy on the pointers, you will either greatly improve their understanding of things, or completely scare them away. My girlfriend took a class once that essentially covered how to use computer programming to apply engineering concepts. The course had knowledge of C as a prereq, so she asked me to teach her. She really enjoyed programming and kept pushing to learn more until we hit pointers. At first she was ok, until she encountered her first pointer error. Once she understood what happened, she instantly realized all the potential errors and complexity that pointers introduce. At that point, she said to me "How do you deal with this all the time? I could never do that." Shortly after that, the teacher realized that no one in the class knew how to program, and changed the class so that you could do everything in Excel. That was the end of her programming. She wouldn't even consider learning something easier. This was without me ever even implying anything about pointer math. I don't think I ever got to pointers to pointers.
Anyway, my advice is to delay introducing pointers as long as possible.
I did think about Madden, and almost mentioned it, but Winning Eleven soccer plays the same role over there. To a lesser extent, big head baseball games fall into that same niche in Japan.
I think the population is a better gauge than console sales
...?
What the
So you sell Zelda to people without a console too ? Don't be silly please !
Someone totally missed the discussion... I'm saying the complete opposite - Japan has a large population of console owners that will never even walk into the section of the store that would stock Zelda. Those people are a completely seperate market, which the US has no real counterpart of. I'm saying you shouldn't include those people in your popularity arguments. If you do, 99% of the games that are popular in the US will automatically be substantially less popular in Japan.
I think the population is a better gauge than console sales. Systems sold only gives an upper bound. Japan has categories of gamers that just don't exist in the US. In Japan, you get people who buy a console for things like board games, or strictly for hentai, etc. They're significant enough that one of the three Japanese N64 launch titles was a Mahjongg game. These people are just as likely to consider buying Zelda as your grandmother is. They're a completely different market. In the US, you don't have those gamers. The DS is starting to change that. The Wii may help too, but at this point it's too early to say.
Nah, the internal memory-management load balances the writing across the whole flash memory range. In your example you would just write to 100000 different bytes. Also, a journalling file system is different as well.
Load balancing writes only works if the flash has a significant amount of unused space. In the grandparent's example, if you fill the flash and then change the same byte 100,000 times, you can't do any load balancing. There just isn't anything to spread the load over.
Of course, the answer to that is to have hidden reserved space. Ok, that works, but how much reserved space do you need? 10 additional bytes just means you need to repeatedly change 1 bytes instead of 1 to burn out the flash.
[Change bytes to sectors/blocks/addressable units or whatever you see fit in the above. The units are irrelevant.]
Anyway, I'm not saying load balancing doesn't help things greatly. Just saying that things aren't as simple as you're making them out to be.
most people turn off their POST memory testing
Are you really claiming that most people go into the BIOS and change the defaults to save a second off of boot time? I find it very hard to believe that any significant number of people change that setting even among people who know where that setting is. System bootup generally takes at least 30 seconds on any system. The memory test isn't going to take more than a second or two unless you put a ton of ram into a really old computer.
Typing "population of japan" into Google gives: 127,417,244
Typing "population of united states" into Google gives: 295,734,134
That's a ratio of 2.32
Ratio of game sales, based on your numbers:
* The Legend Of Zelda: Ocarina Of Time(N64); Sales= 4.08(US) 1.46(Japan) = 2.79
* The Legend Of Zelda (NES); Sales= 3.80(US) 1.02(Japan) = 3.73
* The Legend Of Zelda: Link To The Past (SNES);Sales= 2.46(US) 1.16 Japan) = 2.12
* The Legend Of Zelda: Adventure Of Link (NES);Sales= 2.22(US) 1.61(Japan) = 1.38
* The Legend Of Zelda: Wind Waker (GC); Sales= 2.41(US) 0.86(Japan) = 2.8
* The Legend Of Zelda: Oracle Of Ages / Seasons(GB); Sales= 1.81(US) 1.03(Japan) = 1.76
* The Legend Of Zelda: Links Awakening (GB); Sales= 2.24(US) 0.54(Japan) = 4.15
* The Legend Of Zelda: Majoras Mask; Sales= 1.89(US) 0.74(Japan) = 2.55
* The Legend Of Zelda: Link To The Past (GBA); Sales= 1.61(US) 0.34(Japan) = 4.74
Total US Sales = 22.52 million
Total Japan Sales = 8.76 million
Ratio = 2.57
Totals ignoring the remake:
US = 20.91
Japan = 8.42
Ratio = 2.48
When you factor in the population differences, there isn't much of a difference in sales. Yes, as a whole, the US likes Zelda slightly more than Japan does. But that varies wildly from title to title, with the biggest difference being Japan really didn't care for the GBA remake of the SNES game.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Almost no system is too underpowered to run compiled code, including the SNES.
Obviously you can run compiled code on the SNES. You're just not going to get very good performance out of it. You have 3 general purpose registers on the SNES CPU. Compilers don't create very good code when they're that register starved. You can certainly code an average game in C, but if you're trying to do anything impressive, you won't get the performance you need.
There is no system available on the planet right now that cannot be maxed out by one or two people... Even the most advanced renderers can be implemented by a very small number of people.
A renderer isn't a complete game. You also need artists to create the art. You could try creating a commercial grade Xbox 360 title using 3 or 4 people, but by the time your artists finish their work, we'll be well into the life of the next Xbox at least. Also don't forget the time to create all the sound effects necessary. With a GBA game, a few people can create a finished title of commercial quality.
I think allowing development using the SNES dev kit would allow those who want to get into console game development somewhere to start, yet not compromise what they are charging for their professional kit.
SNES games were coded in assembly. They wouldn't gain much by opening that up.
GBA is the sweet spot - powerful enough to code in C/C++, but weak enough that a team of a couple people can max out the power of the system.
3. No matter how many people "came up" with the idea, it does not matter. The patent definition of obviousness is not the human definition. It might seem obvious to place a button in such a location, but did anyone file a patent or design such an item before them? If not, then was it really that obvious for someone to do it?
Remotes with buttons the top and triggers on the bottom are rare simply because they're rarely useful. The only real reason to do it is to make it easy to press two buttons at once with one hand. How often do you have to do that with remote controls?
You'd be surprised how little modern game music is recorded. I was at a recent IGDA meeting where one of the music designers from Neverwinter Nights 2 did a presentation. He played a trailer for the game repeatedly with different sections of the soundtrack removed. Very very little of the music was live music. Even the majority of the singing wasn't real. He went on for a bit about how they had some software that would generate the sound of a choir singing whatever you wanted from samples. You really couldn't tell that it wasn't done live.