I don't think I can bring myself to use Google as a replacement for this service. First, I don't really like the Google Bookmarks interface and features. Second, I really don't like it kind of being mixed into he whole "web history" data mining stuff. And finally, I just kind of feel better keeping my entire bookmark database stored separately from Google. They already have enough and know enough about me. I'd kind of like to keep all my bookmarks away from them. Although . . . I guess maybe that's pointless, since they already know what sites I use and visit, since I often am doing it directly through their search engine. Meh.
Delicious was a bookmarking service that stored your bookmarks online. You tagged them and they were searchable both through the web interface and through your browser, with extensions (in fact, you could entirely replace your browser's bookmarking system). You could also see other people's bookmarks or view a collective stream of most recent/popular links, if you wanted. Mostly, it was just a great service for storing your bookmarks so that they were always accessible through any service that had a web interface. You have Weave/Sync now, in Firefox. And Chrome has its own thing. But with Delicious, you could use any browser or device and not worry about it.
It wasn't a discussion site or a social network or a voting site or a daily news site or even necessarily a place to go to find cool links. It was just a great place to store and access your own links. I've personally got several thousand bookmarks on it dating back about five or six years. I'll export them and find a replacement service, but Delicious really had it nailed. The alternatives I've seen (a few years ago, at least) worked poorly or had too many functions that cluttered things.
I can't imagine it costs that much to operate. Especially if you only have under a million users on it, today. A database, a few servers, and some bandwidth. The site itself hasn't changed in ages and I don't think the API has, either. Hell, I'd pay five bucks a year for a subscription to it.
I'm confused by your statement. I don't see a way in which Delicious is anything like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit? Those sites are link-spam sites with comment threads attached to them. Delicious was a database of your bookmarks, online that you could categorize, tag, and utilize just like a bookmark (most browsers have an extension to allow it to replace your actual bookmarks). You could also view other people's bookmarks and view the current most popular (or simply most recent) bookmarks of the entire collective. The fantastic thing about Delicious is that it isn't really any sort of "community" or "social experience". It's just your fucking bookmarks, stored online and that made it awesome.
Delicious, on the other hand, is kind of the de-facto online bookmarking resource, as far as I'm concerned. They have just enough features with none of the clutter and crap of the other competing sites. It's the only Yahoo! service I use (in fact, I forgot to mention it in another thread when I mentioned that I don't use any Yahoo! stuff -- because I had forgotten they purchased Delicious).
Delicious is an actual useful service and it seems that if you can monetize every other page on the net in some way, you should *certainly* be able to monetize Delicious pages in some way (not that it should cost that much to run a few servers churning out Delicious results for users). I always felt Delicious offered a real "zeitgeist" of the web at any given moment.
Oh well, if they don't want the business, I'm sure others will. I'll just miss how simplistic and non-bloated they were. Everything else tries to be too social or have too many bells and whistles.
Finally, I can just set Google to "filter everything below a third grade level" and never have to see 'Yahoo! Answers' spam cluttering up my search results!
Like most other large charities, they need to continue significant fund-raising to pay for the corporate-CEO level salaries they pay each other. The actual cost of running a bunch of cheap servers on open source software and feed some bandwidth to it can't compare to the expense surely involved in paying themselves ridiculous salaries and/or bonuses.
The Wales banner is only comparable to "advertising" in that it takes up the dimensions that an obtrusive advertistement might. It doesn't include any of the nasty little strings and potential conflicts that actual advertising would. Commercial support corrupts. Look at the history at Game Spot, for example. Or the fact that the financial assistance by the government (and tax payers) to GE were not covered by GE owned news agencies. Convenient, eh? The answer to a corrupt non-profit organization's administration is not to throw more corruption by way of commercial advertisement onto the fire.
And, again, I have a bit of a problem with the whole "you can copy our entire database and use it for any purpose for absolutely free!" thing . . . with "but if you want to look up information on what a laser is, you have to either pay or be bombarded with ads". That seems backwards as fuck.
PBS and NPR are commercial organizations. They just happen to be considered tax free charities. Most of their finances come from major corporations like Siemen's and Monsanto and other multi-nationals. They even refer to the "grants" as "advertising". And you can often see it reflected in the content they run. Siemen's has a pretty big tie to high speed railways and . . . would you look at that? Lots of stories all the time (especially on NPR) about how fantastic high speed railways are and how America should have them all over the place, just like Europe. (see: Siemen's Mobility).
I think it's pretty fair to compare Wikipedia to the Red Cross. Both are charitable organizations that do considerable fundraising and have highly questioning financial practices that cause sensible people to pause and reconsider before throwing their money into the charitable pot of either organization. I donated a good chunk awhile back and have not done so again in at least a couple years, due to my lack of confidence in the integrity and forthrightness of the foundation.
I always found it amusing that every single fucking pokemon character gets their own long wikipedia article, while most real human beings of some reasonable note are flagged and deleted as "not notable", just because they're regional or otherwise not someone that you've seen in People Magazine.
I edited for awhile, Got tired of the navel-gazing bullshit. Quit. I hit wikipedia up now and then to search for something, but not so often.
So let me get this straight. You can copy the entire contents of wikipedia and use it for anything you can conceive of. Even commercial. For absolutely free. But if I want to contribute by editing some pages or maybe just look up the distance from Earth to Saturn, I have to be blasted with ads? Can't there be at least one place on the fucking planet that someone isn't trying to make a buck selling me Viagra or Pepsi? I ran a community site with about a hundred thousand members for over a decade and I stuck by my principals not to ever have ads or charge a dime, even though it sure would have helped with the expense of it all (not to mention the amount of my life that I gave away to the project). But I couldn't stand the thought of trying to monetize every fucking corner of the world. So, I didn't.
Where are all these expenses for Wikipedia? (Yes, I'm sure there's a schedule somewhere with it laid out, but I didn't see it in the article or linked from it). So they need at *least* $11,000,000 per year? For what? I understand they use a lot of bandwidth, but they're mostly just text pages. What do they need besides hardware, bandwidth, and a few guys to maintain the hardware and website? Maybe a lawyer on retainer. It sounds to me like there's a lot of people possibly making a living at this. There are plenty of well known charities out there where the top levels of the charity make six or even seven figure salaries. And there are plenty of startups that get millions of dollars in venture capital when all they really need is two servers at a colo and a sysadmin to keep the boxes running. Instead, they hire 50 guys, get a bunch of aeron chairs, and lease some flashy office space.
If I had to choose between ads or seeing Wale's face on a plea for donations, I'd choose Wales. At least he isn't trying to sell me shit, other than supporting the website I'm directly using. Then again, I'm sure when Siemen's and Monsanto and McDonald's run massive ad campaigns on the site, there's absolutely zero chance that articles about those companies would ever be altered in any way whatsoever and everything would continue to be on the up-and-up, just as they always have been for the execs/chairs on Wikipedia all these years (d'oh . . . well, except for those incidents where that wasn't the case as we've seen reported every now and then).
I guess its time that we face it. There is NOTHING on this planet that is worth PAYING for and there is NOTHING on this planet worth doing if you can't PLASTER IT WITH ADVERTISING. Hell, I think it's time someone started sponsoring every trip I take to the rest room.
I don't know - a paperback may as well cost $200. I hadn't bought a physical non-technical book in ages and was shocked to find that they're no longer $3.99 or $4.99, but are like . . . $10. For a *PAPERBACK*. Holy shit.
People don't like cubicles. Companies like cubicles. They're cheap. More importantly, a company with a huge portfolio of properties that they lease out to businesses can have a largely empty floor plan and the people leasing the space can configure it however they want, with cubicles. Ironically, cubicles were originally created to "break down the fascist walls that divide us" and give us an open, social, level community. Instead, it has become representative of exactly the opposite. They oppose individuality, privacy, and make people feel like cattle.
I've telecommuted almost my entire life, so I have a rather luxurious office space that allows me to focus on my work without interruptions. However, I did have an office for awhile a few years ago and it reminded me exactly why I never want to have one again. It was in a building with about 8,000 other employees and it five feet by five feet. With a giant drawer/table thing in the corner that took up too much room. And a huge building support column right in the middle of the cubicle. And I had to cram three machines in there. And two 21" CRTs. And a 17" CRT. And a thin-client on my desk for the intranet. And a phone.
Yeah, but when a screen is cracked, you can replace the device and still read all the books you had. When a book gets wet, burned, torn, lost, stolen, etc - you're pretty much screwed.
Of course, this is all excepting the DRM situation, which I'm not a fan of and is the main reason I still don't actually own a Kindle. I love the concept and I hate cluttering up a house with books (I'm over the whole nostalgic cocoa and a book by the fire thing).
The only thing keeping me from it at the moment is that I want an experience like I have with a book store. I can get the same book at any store I want to buy it from without having to worry about what device or store or author or technology or DRM. They have the same problem as digital game sales, right now. Amazon is the big guy, like Steam. However, they don't carry EVERYTHING just like Steam doesn't carry EVERYTHING. So you end up facing half a dozen different retailers, each with their own set of products, their own method of distribution, their own method of protection, their own method of redundancy (backup/download/etc), their own devices, their own sales process, their own download clients, their own gaming clients, etc.
I want to buy any device and any book from any retailers and access them on each other, have them backed up for free, retrieve them any time, and be allowed to print them out, modify them (for personal use), annotate them, transfer them, etc.
So no, I'm not saying that digital is perfect by any means. I'm just saying that I'm so completely over the whole "tactile experience" of holding a book in my hands and all that. As long as it's easy on my eyes, cheap, reliable, etc... I don't care if I'm reading it from a laser zapped onto the surface of the moon.
I haven't used Yahoo! in this century. The only thing Yahoo! seems to do is clutter my google searches with "Yahoo! Answers" results, where the stupidest people humanity has to offer ask questions like (and these are actual questions from the site):
ok im kinda worryed here since my g/f got pregnant and all she isnt been havein her period do u think the baby is drinkin the blood??? she 6 month pregnant
and
I have been with my boyfriend for 6 months now,he's my absolute everything.But last week he got told he has bad 'Skin Cancer',When he told me i was heartbroken.Should i tell him that we should end it ? or should we stay together?:( x
They have news, using the same AP news wire that every newspaper and website on the planet has. They have webmail, which every other site offers. They have stupid flash games, like every other site on the planet. They have IM (which must have a whole ten or twelve users, at this point). And, mostly, they just have a super cluttered shitty design filled with constant ads. The only thing they are contributing to the world is making the internet seriously fucking stupider, by way of their search-poisoning "Yahoo! Answers" bullshit.
Yeah, I used to think that, too. However, digital books don't get bent spines, torn pages, fingerprints, or decay from sunlight or acid in the paper. Give me e-ink, no censorship, and no strings tethered to yank back my content (and maybe eternal re-downloading/backup/etc) and we're totally on.
Hey, don't worry yourself over this. They may be banning books that involve any sort of incest within them, but I notice that they still make over a dozen different versions of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' available as well as copies of the Turner Diaries.
I think this rules out not only Christian mythology, but nearly any books regarding mythology. Not to mention a significant part of history. And, for that matter, countless other subjects that happen to contain this sort of thing. Or is it only up for censorship if we're talking about incest for the sake of sexual arousal? What about all sorts of stories by or about victims, where it's biographical or autobiographical and not intended for titillation? What if it's Mckenzie Phillips writing a book about the incest in her family that isn't intended to titillate, but someone gets off on it anyway? Does that make it just as "bad" and therefore open to censorship?
I couldn't care less about co-op. It always seems like a big waste in a game, to me. I'm not ten years old, so I don't know a bunch of people who play videogames. In fact, I could count the videogamers I know on one hand. The ones who own the same platform as me cuts that down. The ones using the same *games* as me even fewer. The ones playing often enough that I can hook up with them and play a game, even less. In fact, the only few people I know who game *at all* are almost ALWAYS doing one thing when I log into xbox: watching netflix. That's it. Any time of day - they're not playing games (or if they are, it's like . . . a rhythm game) . . . just netflix.
As for multiplayer? What a failure of an idea. Only some games need it and even most of those fail. Adding multiplayer into every game will just fragment the playerbase even more. We've seen what happens with most multiplayer games, already. At best, people play them for about a month or two. Then when you decide to try and play it, you're the only person on the PLANET trying to play multiplayer. Meanwhile, it'll continue to detract from the quality of the single player.
These guys are damned determine to misunderstand gaming and ruin it. Sometimes a great single player experience is all you want.
Oh - and multiplayer *local* on the same screen? Hell no. You go play on your OWN screen. I like my big giant screen without the image being deformed or squashed. I don't care how big it is, I still want it for myself. I hate split screen and never ever ever would use it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think I can bring myself to use Google as a replacement for this service. First, I don't really like the Google Bookmarks interface and features. Second, I really don't like it kind of being mixed into he whole "web history" data mining stuff. And finally, I just kind of feel better keeping my entire bookmark database stored separately from Google. They already have enough and know enough about me. I'd kind of like to keep all my bookmarks away from them. Although . . . I guess maybe that's pointless, since they already know what sites I use and visit, since I often am doing it directly through their search engine. Meh.
Delicious was a bookmarking service that stored your bookmarks online. You tagged them and they were searchable both through the web interface and through your browser, with extensions (in fact, you could entirely replace your browser's bookmarking system). You could also see other people's bookmarks or view a collective stream of most recent/popular links, if you wanted. Mostly, it was just a great service for storing your bookmarks so that they were always accessible through any service that had a web interface. You have Weave/Sync now, in Firefox. And Chrome has its own thing. But with Delicious, you could use any browser or device and not worry about it.
It wasn't a discussion site or a social network or a voting site or a daily news site or even necessarily a place to go to find cool links. It was just a great place to store and access your own links. I've personally got several thousand bookmarks on it dating back about five or six years. I'll export them and find a replacement service, but Delicious really had it nailed. The alternatives I've seen (a few years ago, at least) worked poorly or had too many functions that cluttered things.
I can't imagine it costs that much to operate. Especially if you only have under a million users on it, today. A database, a few servers, and some bandwidth. The site itself hasn't changed in ages and I don't think the API has, either. Hell, I'd pay five bucks a year for a subscription to it.
I'm confused by your statement. I don't see a way in which Delicious is anything like StumbleUpon, Digg, and Reddit? Those sites are link-spam sites with comment threads attached to them. Delicious was a database of your bookmarks, online that you could categorize, tag, and utilize just like a bookmark (most browsers have an extension to allow it to replace your actual bookmarks). You could also view other people's bookmarks and view the current most popular (or simply most recent) bookmarks of the entire collective. The fantastic thing about Delicious is that it isn't really any sort of "community" or "social experience". It's just your fucking bookmarks, stored online and that made it awesome.
Except, it isn't what Google is.
Delicious, on the other hand, is kind of the de-facto online bookmarking resource, as far as I'm concerned. They have just enough features with none of the clutter and crap of the other competing sites. It's the only Yahoo! service I use (in fact, I forgot to mention it in another thread when I mentioned that I don't use any Yahoo! stuff -- because I had forgotten they purchased Delicious).
Delicious is an actual useful service and it seems that if you can monetize every other page on the net in some way, you should *certainly* be able to monetize Delicious pages in some way (not that it should cost that much to run a few servers churning out Delicious results for users). I always felt Delicious offered a real "zeitgeist" of the web at any given moment.
Oh well, if they don't want the business, I'm sure others will. I'll just miss how simplistic and non-bloated they were. Everything else tries to be too social or have too many bells and whistles.
Finally, I can just set Google to "filter everything below a third grade level" and never have to see 'Yahoo! Answers' spam cluttering up my search results!
You misspelled "line their pockets with donations intended to fund the actual site itself" wrong.
Like most other large charities, they need to continue significant fund-raising to pay for the corporate-CEO level salaries they pay each other. The actual cost of running a bunch of cheap servers on open source software and feed some bandwidth to it can't compare to the expense surely involved in paying themselves ridiculous salaries and/or bonuses.
The Wales banner is only comparable to "advertising" in that it takes up the dimensions that an obtrusive advertistement might. It doesn't include any of the nasty little strings and potential conflicts that actual advertising would. Commercial support corrupts. Look at the history at Game Spot, for example. Or the fact that the financial assistance by the government (and tax payers) to GE were not covered by GE owned news agencies. Convenient, eh? The answer to a corrupt non-profit organization's administration is not to throw more corruption by way of commercial advertisement onto the fire.
And, again, I have a bit of a problem with the whole "you can copy our entire database and use it for any purpose for absolutely free!" thing . . . with "but if you want to look up information on what a laser is, you have to either pay or be bombarded with ads". That seems backwards as fuck.
PBS and NPR are commercial organizations. They just happen to be considered tax free charities. Most of their finances come from major corporations like Siemen's and Monsanto and other multi-nationals. They even refer to the "grants" as "advertising". And you can often see it reflected in the content they run. Siemen's has a pretty big tie to high speed railways and . . . would you look at that? Lots of stories all the time (especially on NPR) about how fantastic high speed railways are and how America should have them all over the place, just like Europe. (see: Siemen's Mobility).
A blank square doesn't leverage hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising to get information about itself manipulated within the database.
I think it's pretty fair to compare Wikipedia to the Red Cross. Both are charitable organizations that do considerable fundraising and have highly questioning financial practices that cause sensible people to pause and reconsider before throwing their money into the charitable pot of either organization. I donated a good chunk awhile back and have not done so again in at least a couple years, due to my lack of confidence in the integrity and forthrightness of the foundation.
I always found it amusing that every single fucking pokemon character gets their own long wikipedia article, while most real human beings of some reasonable note are flagged and deleted as "not notable", just because they're regional or otherwise not someone that you've seen in People Magazine.
I edited for awhile, Got tired of the navel-gazing bullshit. Quit. I hit wikipedia up now and then to search for something, but not so often.
So let me get this straight. You can copy the entire contents of wikipedia and use it for anything you can conceive of. Even commercial. For absolutely free. But if I want to contribute by editing some pages or maybe just look up the distance from Earth to Saturn, I have to be blasted with ads? Can't there be at least one place on the fucking planet that someone isn't trying to make a buck selling me Viagra or Pepsi? I ran a community site with about a hundred thousand members for over a decade and I stuck by my principals not to ever have ads or charge a dime, even though it sure would have helped with the expense of it all (not to mention the amount of my life that I gave away to the project). But I couldn't stand the thought of trying to monetize every fucking corner of the world. So, I didn't.
Where are all these expenses for Wikipedia? (Yes, I'm sure there's a schedule somewhere with it laid out, but I didn't see it in the article or linked from it). So they need at *least* $11,000,000 per year? For what? I understand they use a lot of bandwidth, but they're mostly just text pages. What do they need besides hardware, bandwidth, and a few guys to maintain the hardware and website? Maybe a lawyer on retainer. It sounds to me like there's a lot of people possibly making a living at this. There are plenty of well known charities out there where the top levels of the charity make six or even seven figure salaries. And there are plenty of startups that get millions of dollars in venture capital when all they really need is two servers at a colo and a sysadmin to keep the boxes running. Instead, they hire 50 guys, get a bunch of aeron chairs, and lease some flashy office space.
If I had to choose between ads or seeing Wale's face on a plea for donations, I'd choose Wales. At least he isn't trying to sell me shit, other than supporting the website I'm directly using. Then again, I'm sure when Siemen's and Monsanto and McDonald's run massive ad campaigns on the site, there's absolutely zero chance that articles about those companies would ever be altered in any way whatsoever and everything would continue to be on the up-and-up, just as they always have been for the execs/chairs on Wikipedia all these years (d'oh . . . well, except for those incidents where that wasn't the case as we've seen reported every now and then).
I guess its time that we face it. There is NOTHING on this planet that is worth PAYING for and there is NOTHING on this planet worth doing if you can't PLASTER IT WITH ADVERTISING. Hell, I think it's time someone started sponsoring every trip I take to the rest room.
I don't know - a paperback may as well cost $200. I hadn't bought a physical non-technical book in ages and was shocked to find that they're no longer $3.99 or $4.99, but are like . . . $10. For a *PAPERBACK*. Holy shit.
People don't like cubicles. Companies like cubicles. They're cheap. More importantly, a company with a huge portfolio of properties that they lease out to businesses can have a largely empty floor plan and the people leasing the space can configure it however they want, with cubicles. Ironically, cubicles were originally created to "break down the fascist walls that divide us" and give us an open, social, level community. Instead, it has become representative of exactly the opposite. They oppose individuality, privacy, and make people feel like cattle.
I've telecommuted almost my entire life, so I have a rather luxurious office space that allows me to focus on my work without interruptions. However, I did have an office for awhile a few years ago and it reminded me exactly why I never want to have one again. It was in a building with about 8,000 other employees and it five feet by five feet. With a giant drawer/table thing in the corner that took up too much room. And a huge building support column right in the middle of the cubicle. And I had to cram three machines in there. And two 21" CRTs. And a 17" CRT. And a thin-client on my desk for the intranet. And a phone.
Miserable.
Yeah, but when a screen is cracked, you can replace the device and still read all the books you had. When a book gets wet, burned, torn, lost, stolen, etc - you're pretty much screwed.
Of course, this is all excepting the DRM situation, which I'm not a fan of and is the main reason I still don't actually own a Kindle. I love the concept and I hate cluttering up a house with books (I'm over the whole nostalgic cocoa and a book by the fire thing).
The only thing keeping me from it at the moment is that I want an experience like I have with a book store. I can get the same book at any store I want to buy it from without having to worry about what device or store or author or technology or DRM. They have the same problem as digital game sales, right now. Amazon is the big guy, like Steam. However, they don't carry EVERYTHING just like Steam doesn't carry EVERYTHING. So you end up facing half a dozen different retailers, each with their own set of products, their own method of distribution, their own method of protection, their own method of redundancy (backup/download/etc), their own devices, their own sales process, their own download clients, their own gaming clients, etc.
I want to buy any device and any book from any retailers and access them on each other, have them backed up for free, retrieve them any time, and be allowed to print them out, modify them (for personal use), annotate them, transfer them, etc.
So no, I'm not saying that digital is perfect by any means. I'm just saying that I'm so completely over the whole "tactile experience" of holding a book in my hands and all that. As long as it's easy on my eyes, cheap, reliable, etc... I don't care if I'm reading it from a laser zapped onto the surface of the moon.
You're assuming your eyes haven't melted from the nuclear blast or your brain hasn't been eaten by zombies.
By "sites of its type", I presume you mean "search engine poisoning spam".
I haven't used Yahoo! in this century. The only thing Yahoo! seems to do is clutter my google searches with "Yahoo! Answers" results, where the stupidest people humanity has to offer ask questions like (and these are actual questions from the site):
ok im kinda worryed here since my g/f got pregnant and all she isnt been havein her period do u think the baby is drinkin the blood??? she 6 month pregnant
and
I have been with my boyfriend for 6 months now,he's my absolute everything.But last week he got told he has bad 'Skin Cancer',When he told me i was heartbroken.Should i tell him that we should end it ? or should we stay together?:( x
They have news, using the same AP news wire that every newspaper and website on the planet has. They have webmail, which every other site offers. They have stupid flash games, like every other site on the planet. They have IM (which must have a whole ten or twelve users, at this point). And, mostly, they just have a super cluttered shitty design filled with constant ads. The only thing they are contributing to the world is making the internet seriously fucking stupider, by way of their search-poisoning "Yahoo! Answers" bullshit.
Yeah, I used to think that, too. However, digital books don't get bent spines, torn pages, fingerprints, or decay from sunlight or acid in the paper. Give me e-ink, no censorship, and no strings tethered to yank back my content (and maybe eternal re-downloading/backup/etc) and we're totally on.
Hey, don't worry yourself over this. They may be banning books that involve any sort of incest within them, but I notice that they still make over a dozen different versions of Hitler's 'Mein Kampf' available as well as copies of the Turner Diaries.
Or, you know, you could organize and pressure Amazon to change their policy.
I think this rules out not only Christian mythology, but nearly any books regarding mythology. Not to mention a significant part of history. And, for that matter, countless other subjects that happen to contain this sort of thing. Or is it only up for censorship if we're talking about incest for the sake of sexual arousal? What about all sorts of stories by or about victims, where it's biographical or autobiographical and not intended for titillation? What if it's Mckenzie Phillips writing a book about the incest in her family that isn't intended to titillate, but someone gets off on it anyway? Does that make it just as "bad" and therefore open to censorship?
That's cute and all, but they cost three times more and take up infinitely more space.
I couldn't care less about co-op. It always seems like a big waste in a game, to me. I'm not ten years old, so I don't know a bunch of people who play videogames. In fact, I could count the videogamers I know on one hand. The ones who own the same platform as me cuts that down. The ones using the same *games* as me even fewer. The ones playing often enough that I can hook up with them and play a game, even less. In fact, the only few people I know who game *at all* are almost ALWAYS doing one thing when I log into xbox: watching netflix. That's it. Any time of day - they're not playing games (or if they are, it's like . . . a rhythm game) . . . just netflix.
As for multiplayer? What a failure of an idea. Only some games need it and even most of those fail. Adding multiplayer into every game will just fragment the playerbase even more. We've seen what happens with most multiplayer games, already. At best, people play them for about a month or two. Then when you decide to try and play it, you're the only person on the PLANET trying to play multiplayer. Meanwhile, it'll continue to detract from the quality of the single player.
These guys are damned determine to misunderstand gaming and ruin it. Sometimes a great single player experience is all you want.
Oh - and multiplayer *local* on the same screen? Hell no. You go play on your OWN screen. I like my big giant screen without the image being deformed or squashed. I don't care how big it is, I still want it for myself. I hate split screen and never ever ever would use it.