That'd be like saying Windows XD (where XD means OH YEAH!!) which is based on new technology that happens to be similar to Linux, is actually copying Linux... when in fact, they hired Linus Torvalds to do the design. And Linus brought along Alan Cox, Ted Tso, Alan Morton, etc.
NT is not a stolen VMS kernel. Microsoft hired the designers from Digital, because Digital did not know what they were doing (which is why they died).
This isn't even new news. They talked about this over 10 years ago. Hell, it's even in the article you link to! ("NT's history is closely tied to that of David N. Cutler, NT's chief architect... In 1988, Digital executives cancelled Cutler's project and laid off many of its group members. Cutler decided to leave Digital,... In August 1988, Bill Gates hired Cutler. One of Cutler's conditions for moving to Microsoft was that he could bring around 20 former Digital employees with him, including several Prism hardware engineers.")
It's hard to call something stolen when you hire everyone responsible for a product.
If you can't own the wires to the house, which means you'd probably get some service fee, why not own the box at the end of the wires? The best part about owning it is that you get to say what QoS you give to the PC, and what you give to the Revolution and DS.
I'm guessing the PC will get "best-effort," while the DS and Revolution get much better service. After all, why launch an internet-enabled console which happens to have a widely touted online game-download service, if you didn't want to give it a great, always-on connection with which to buy new games? This lets you put the Revolution in the family room without running wires, and ensures that any DS expandability has a device tested and checked to work perfectly with it.
Nintendo is intelligent. If they have such a good strategy for getting their devices into the home, I see no reason why they won't continue to make money like no tomorrow!
Sony's strategy seems to be that they announce the crap out of their hardware, cut whatever doesn't work, and then wait for 3rd-party people to make software for it. Nintendo has a fully-baked, complete plan. I'm betting they turn heads if they can execute it.
I was surprised by how terrible the Windows driver support was and is. I hadn't run it in about 5 years, but was setting up a secondary WoW computer, and knew it didn't have the juice to play it under Cedega.
The trick I used was just running the installer, and then alt-tabing to where it extracted the files, and copying out the.inf and other driver bits. Another way that probably would've worked would've been to install an SB card that wasn't there. Either way, you do have to fuck around to get their drivers, because the company itself is stupid.
However, one nice thing I've noticed is that Linux has better audio support (thanks to Alsa) than anything over the past few years, and onboard audio chipsets are no-longer geiger counters that detect mouse movements:)
The problem is that, by and large, the software industry is stupid.
If you work a 9.5hr shift regularly, you are not as productive. If you had just worked 8 hours, you'd notice that you'd do about as much work as in 9.5hr. That extra 1.5hr of labour at the end of the day, a day where you are already tired of work, and likely to make mistakes, is not good. At first you gain a benefit, but then the lack of leisure time cuts into sleep.
At that point, you arrive for work less rested, and productivity keeps declining from there. You can't recover. It's why, over the 17th through early 20th century, labour hours decreased. The most recent being when Henry Ford proclaimed that thereafter the minimum wage in his industries would be five dollars for a day of eight hours.
I don't know why there is this huge cult around working long hours, with no vacations, and killing yourself with overtime in the US and in tech jobs. I don't hear about people dieing from stress in th EU, where they have 6 weeks of vacation a year.
"if I'm smart enough to make the system work for me, I deserve to do less work"
That's 28 grand a year, before taxes. In Canada, that'd be enough to live comfortably (where the poverty line is about 16 grand before taxes). Unless you live in one of the expensive areas of the US, I suspect that'd be enough too. Hotel managers in Hawaii make about that, for example.
Making that much money means you get more money per year than about 60-70% of the population. There is a large gap between rich and poor in the US.
"The Genesis 3-button and 6-button controllers had identical buttons. You had no idea which ones you were pushing without looking down (or knowing from position). The three-button design was bad, not good"
The six-button one wasn't the best, but you can learn that from muscle memory. In fact, that's how people play Street Fighter and many other 6-face button games. Plus, for the record, the B button had a little nub on it (not unlike the j and f buttons on a qwerty keyboard) to encourage you to "touch type" on the controller. It wasn't the best design, but it was a nice step towards their ultimate design, the Dreamcast controller.
The Dreamcast controller got a lot right: colour coded buttons (like the Super Famicom), nubs in different directions (all buttons felt different), analog shoulder triggers that are useful (I can't race with a PS2 controller), and a decent shape that fits into your hands. But, the article did gloss over these points:)
If your art resources are all bitmaps, scaling them all down is CPU intensive, and can end up looking bad if you use a less accurate interplotation method (cubic vs. linear vs. none).
Perhaps it's my fault. You start off with, " Your local "piss-ant" video game store. Cute. ".. you seem think that piss-ant means something other than small. You've obviously a lot of meanings in your mind for that which are negative and are putting you on the defensive.
On the other hand, you now have the benefit of knowning what it's like to be on the receiving end of a stereotype. Stop being an asshole, please. Not all EBs suck, just like not all Gamestops suck, or all Wal-marts suck. Generalizations suck.
"I stopped shopping there due to an employee asking me to leave my bag at the front of the store ".. Perhaps they didn't handle that correctly, which in easy to do. The fact is, if you're a potenial LP issue, I'll ask you to leave your bag at the cashwrap. I can't guarantee anything about it, and if you make a point about the contents, I'll let you hang on to it (I know what the experience is like), but I'll also watch you. External shrink is never cool.
"Could you do me a favour and send out a chain-wide memo with notes from that meeting? " That training is mandatory within 45 days of employment as a condition of exmployment. If you are a key holder (management or a sales associate with a store key), it's a huge hot button -- I don't think you get 45 days to get versed, it's a within 3-week deal from start of employment.
"but then you had to have a 3 hour meeting to explain something that should be patiently obvious to anyone working in a game store. "
Something is only obvious if you know it already. Not everyone has the same experience as you. As someone working in customer service, you should know that you spend all your time educating your customer about the offers that may interest them, after talking to them trying to determine their needs. Nothing is ever obvious, no one reads signs, etc. It's important to review such things, otherwise you'll never know if everyone is on the same page.
Also, don't take my remark to mean we had to do it because she was female. With the exception of myself and the store manager, all the staff are female, and they know their stuff. The meeting also covered a fair bit more than I mentioned, but that's you making generalizations again. Stop that!
Now, if the managers are trouble at the stores in your area (which they are if they're not reigning in bad employees), you should feel free to contact EB customer support and complain about them. My district doesn't involve the eastern provinces, but in my district, they're firing people for not being good at their jobs.
1-800-800-5166 is the best I can find online. I don't think it's the Canadian one (which starts with 877), but they can probably give it to you. If you can't get that 1-800 # to work at all, just ask politely at the stores in your area until you get it. Bitching about a store will only cause people to not shop there. To actually improve a place, you have to tell someone who cares. If no one cares at home office, then feel free to rag on the company for not having people who care. But don't generalize across all employees.
As I have been and continue to be an employee at EB, despite my better judgement, in a Canadian city, whose only competition are a single piss-ant local run video game store and the usual Wal-mart/Future Shop/Superstore trimunitive, I can say that we're the only place that does things like: Hey, I see you're buying a PS2/GC, I bet you'd like a memory card to save your progress. Or (and we had a 3 hour staff meeting about this one, so the new girl would learn this): if someone wants WoW, ensure they know it's on online only, pay-to-play game. Just because they hear it's shit hot, doesn't mean it's right for them.
Part of making "quality sales that last" is making sure you get as close to 0% returns as possible. That means you don't sell Shrek and an Xbox to someone's 6-y-o when they'd be better off with a GameCube. Perhaps the stores are mismanaged in your part of the world, but in Saskatchewan they are not, and our district is very strongly focusing itself on this.
Additionally, and unsatisfied customer is an unhappy, not returning customer. Anyone with sales experience knows this, and EB has a whole retail training program about it (not unlike Future Shop, or other places).
I worked at EB and I own over 400 video games. Ironically, I own no N-Gage games despite owning 2 N-Gage systems.
Since when is dyeing one's hair dressing like a teenager?
Brown is a very boring, common colour. I'd much rather that people had bright, interesting hair colours. It was quite enjoyable having blue hair, and I look forward to doing it again this summer. There are reasons other than parental rebellion for things. Try it sometime.
If they're using text classification, such as Bayesian, all you have to do is have a good concept of whitespace. Just break your tokens up apropriately, and compare the weightings to your corpus.
You just need a good corpus for your text classification.
Uh, you do know what scheduling is, right?
on
AMD Quad Cores, Oh My
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
When I run PS, I see 1 program running: PS. bash, my shell, is blocked because ps has control of the terminal.
If I turn around and run top, I see that, indeed, the main program running is top. All the rest are usually sleeping on some event. Unless that event occurs, they won't be woken up. The speed with which Linux can react to my keypresses, read the key presses, send those keypresses into a user-land safe buffer, wake up the userland program waiting on it (in this case, Mozilla), and then schedule X to run and let it update the screen to display the characters I just typed (which Mozilla also copies to its own local buffer) happens so fast as to not even register as 1 10th of 1 percent on my AMD64 3000+.
Seriously, no one needs a fucking 32-way CPU, not unless they are doing some massively parallel scientific work, or they are emulating many virtual computers at once. To deal with blocking IO that can't be slept, then multiple cores look sexy, but not really past 4 cores -- most applications are single threaded. Perhaps this would be different if we were running BeOS.
Mine needs to be recalibrated every few days. That, or I could get used to clicking on the far-right hand side of the screen to active things in the middle.
The T has annoying bugs, and that's one right there.
I don't have the time that all these high school kids seem to have. That is, between my significant other, managing my house, and work, I've got myself a 60-80 hour week.
If I pick up a game that brags of over 40 hours of gameplay, I put that fucker right back down. I don't have time for more than 8 hours of gaming a week, tops. WoW is nice in that I can have a WoW session that lasts an evening, and not be penalized (thanks to their rest system). Or I can spend a week and some change beat a 10-12 hour game. A 40 hour game usually takes more than a month to beat, especially if it requires that I level characters in repetitive, stupid, RPG combat.
"In other words, when they release a million+ seller, they reap a shitload of money over it. BTW, they do this quite regularly."
MSRP on a 50$ game is like 2-5$ retailer, 15$ Sony/MS/Nintendo, 15$ other guy/gal, 5$ production cost, 10$ overhead (shipper, Nintendo to Wal-mart/EB, etc). For a company like Rockstar to make on GTA what Nintendo makes on Mario Tennis, they'd have to sell it for 20-25$ more than the usual MSRP to cover costs and markup. Are you going to pay 75$ USD for a game? No? Because it's like Nintendo does when you buy a first- (and possibly second-) party title. Sony kinda gets this with their second-party titles, but not to the same effect.
MS lovies Halo for a reason: Halo is the only reason they aren't further in the hole.
It shows that, yes, you can still stay around as long as you make money.
OTOH, that's going to change soon. Most companies release terrible, terrible crap games for the GBA because, since it's the only game in town, and the vast majority of GBA game purchasers are ill-informed parents, shit in a cartridge will sell.
The Nintendo DS is reflecting this port-itis: Madagasdar and SW: Ep 3 are both movie tie-in games (which are the biggest % of the GBA library), and both are unchanged from the GBA version with the exception of the 3D minigames which use the touch screen.
If Nokia hadn't pissed off the only demographic who'd have bought their N-Gage, they could've been a contender (if they could get some good games, which they don't currently have -- Pocket Kingdoms is not strong enough to ship units). The PSP could similarly take over, except that right now the PSP seems to be a really expensive way to play Lumines and WipeOut. For its price, it has too many flaws -- but if Sony cut its price and managed to fix the flaws (pixel death is the major factor), it'd sell. Hell, if the damn thing would really be a future walk-man (with easy movie playback capability, and music support [I'm thinking an mplayer port + xmms or similar), it'd sell great even at its current price point.
The thing is, Nintendo is making money now, and that makes me happy, but most of that is coming from licencing shitty-ass games, and the moment the market shifts away from their portable platform, it's going to be like the N64 all over again: the only way it'll make money is because the Hardcores will buy the Nintendo portable and a full library of first-party games. They're generally good, so that's no big deal, but I'm less likely to carry a Nintendo portable as a 2nd console as I am to own a GCN along side everything else in my (much less portable) console collection.
"It's not inconceivable that he was exercising mind control to help push Anakin over to the dark side."
If you have to start reaching for explanations like this, I think it's pretty clear that the behaviours didn't mesh up well with the rest of the character story arc. If you have to make up a reason why something happened, especially if it's not clear after the fact (simply; not using contrived explanations), the story teller has failed.
This was pretty damn out of character. The sowing of dark side seeds had to be much subtler, and much longer. The only hint of this was when Anakin told Windu about Sidious, rather than just killing him immediately. This hesitation showed dark side tendencies. That could've easily been built upon to be believable.
Slashdot Mirror
That'd be like saying Windows XD (where XD means OH YEAH!!) which is based on new technology that happens to be similar to Linux, is actually copying Linux ... when in fact, they hired Linus Torvalds to do the design. And Linus brought along Alan Cox, Ted Tso, Alan Morton, etc.
... In August 1988, Bill Gates hired Cutler. One of Cutler's conditions for moving to Microsoft was that he could bring around 20 former Digital employees with him, including several Prism hardware engineers.")
NT is not a stolen VMS kernel. Microsoft hired the designers from Digital, because Digital did not know what they were doing (which is why they died).
This isn't even new news. They talked about this over 10 years ago. Hell, it's even in the article you link to! ("NT's history is closely tied to that of David N. Cutler, NT's chief architect... In 1988, Digital executives cancelled Cutler's project and laid off many of its group members. Cutler decided to leave Digital,
It's hard to call something stolen when you hire everyone responsible for a product.
If you can't own the wires to the house, which means you'd probably get some service fee, why not own the box at the end of the wires? The best part about owning it is that you get to say what QoS you give to the PC, and what you give to the Revolution and DS.
I'm guessing the PC will get "best-effort," while the DS and Revolution get much better service. After all, why launch an internet-enabled console which happens to have a widely touted online game-download service, if you didn't want to give it a great, always-on connection with which to buy new games? This lets you put the Revolution in the family room without running wires, and ensures that any DS expandability has a device tested and checked to work perfectly with it.
Nintendo is intelligent. If they have such a good strategy for getting their devices into the home, I see no reason why they won't continue to make money like no tomorrow!
Sony's strategy seems to be that they announce the crap out of their hardware, cut whatever doesn't work, and then wait for 3rd-party people to make software for it. Nintendo has a fully-baked, complete plan. I'm betting they turn heads if they can execute it.
Where the AC qualified "We" as "We, The People of the United States of America."
I was surprised by how terrible the Windows driver support was and is. I hadn't run it in about 5 years, but was setting up a secondary WoW computer, and knew it didn't have the juice to play it under Cedega.
.inf and other driver bits. Another way that probably would've worked would've been to install an SB card that wasn't there. Either way, you do have to fuck around to get their drivers, because the company itself is stupid.
:)
The trick I used was just running the installer, and then alt-tabing to where it extracted the files, and copying out the
However, one nice thing I've noticed is that Linux has better audio support (thanks to Alsa) than anything over the past few years, and onboard audio chipsets are no-longer geiger counters that detect mouse movements
How exactly could a stereotype become also true?
What next, the covetous jew? Fuck, grow up.
The problem is that, by and large, the software industry is stupid.
If you work a 9.5hr shift regularly, you are not as productive. If you had just worked 8 hours, you'd notice that you'd do about as much work as in 9.5hr. That extra 1.5hr of labour at the end of the day, a day where you are already tired of work, and likely to make mistakes, is not good. At first you gain a benefit, but then the lack of leisure time cuts into sleep.
At that point, you arrive for work less rested, and productivity keeps declining from there. You can't recover. It's why, over the 17th through early 20th century, labour hours decreased. The most recent being when Henry Ford proclaimed that thereafter the minimum wage in his industries would be five dollars for a day of eight hours.
I don't know why there is this huge cult around working long hours, with no vacations, and killing yourself with overtime in the US and in tech jobs. I don't hear about people dieing from stress in th EU, where they have 6 weeks of vacation a year.
"if I'm smart enough to make the system work for me, I deserve to do less work"
That's about right.
That's 28 grand a year, before taxes. In Canada, that'd be enough to live comfortably (where the poverty line is about 16 grand before taxes). Unless you live in one of the expensive areas of the US, I suspect that'd be enough too. Hotel managers in Hawaii make about that, for example.
Making that much money means you get more money per year than about 60-70% of the population. There is a large gap between rich and poor in the US.
http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 6/28/197256
"Update: 06/28 21:03 GMT by Z : Denis emailed to request we use mirrors, as they're already getting hammered pretty hard."
NOTHING can stop the SLASHDOT ARMADA!
"The Genesis 3-button and 6-button controllers had identical buttons. You had no idea which ones you were pushing without looking down (or knowing from position). The three-button design was bad, not good"
:)
The six-button one wasn't the best, but you can learn that from muscle memory. In fact, that's how people play Street Fighter and many other 6-face button games. Plus, for the record, the B button had a little nub on it (not unlike the j and f buttons on a qwerty keyboard) to encourage you to "touch type" on the controller. It wasn't the best design, but it was a nice step towards their ultimate design, the Dreamcast controller.
The Dreamcast controller got a lot right: colour coded buttons (like the Super Famicom), nubs in different directions (all buttons felt different), analog shoulder triggers that are useful (I can't race with a PS2 controller), and a decent shape that fits into your hands. But, the article did gloss over these points
If your art resources are all bitmaps, scaling them all down is CPU intensive, and can end up looking bad if you use a less accurate interplotation method (cubic vs. linear vs. none).
"has made public its (sic) plans t"
Its is the possesive form of it. It's (the contraction of it was, it has, it is) would not fit in such a space. As such, your (sic) is incorrect.
Remember, friends don't let friends incorrect grammar in a quote!
Get Privoxy. You know you want to.
I've been surfing the web, advertisement free, since 1998.
Perhaps it's my fault. You start off with, " Your local "piss-ant" video game store. Cute. " .. you seem think that piss-ant means something other than small. You've obviously a lot of meanings in your mind for that which are negative and are putting you on the defensive.
On the other hand, you now have the benefit of knowning what it's like to be on the receiving end of a stereotype. Stop being an asshole, please. Not all EBs suck, just like not all Gamestops suck, or all Wal-marts suck. Generalizations suck.
"I stopped shopping there due to an employee asking me to leave my bag at the front of the store ".. Perhaps they didn't handle that correctly, which in easy to do. The fact is, if you're a potenial LP issue, I'll ask you to leave your bag at the cashwrap. I can't guarantee anything about it, and if you make a point about the contents, I'll let you hang on to it (I know what the experience is like), but I'll also watch you. External shrink is never cool.
"Could you do me a favour and send out a chain-wide memo with notes from that meeting? " That training is mandatory within 45 days of employment as a condition of exmployment. If you are a key holder (management or a sales associate with a store key), it's a huge hot button -- I don't think you get 45 days to get versed, it's a within 3-week deal from start of employment.
"but then you had to have a 3 hour meeting to explain something that should be patiently obvious to anyone working in a game store. "
Something is only obvious if you know it already. Not everyone has the same experience as you. As someone working in customer service, you should know that you spend all your time educating your customer about the offers that may interest them, after talking to them trying to determine their needs. Nothing is ever obvious, no one reads signs, etc. It's important to review such things, otherwise you'll never know if everyone is on the same page.
Also, don't take my remark to mean we had to do it because she was female. With the exception of myself and the store manager, all the staff are female, and they know their stuff. The meeting also covered a fair bit more than I mentioned, but that's you making generalizations again. Stop that!
Now, if the managers are trouble at the stores in your area (which they are if they're not reigning in bad employees), you should feel free to contact EB customer support and complain about them. My district doesn't involve the eastern provinces, but in my district, they're firing people for not being good at their jobs.
1-800-800-5166 is the best I can find online. I don't think it's the Canadian one (which starts with 877), but they can probably give it to you. If you can't get that 1-800 # to work at all, just ask politely at the stores in your area until you get it. Bitching about a store will only cause people to not shop there. To actually improve a place, you have to tell someone who cares. If no one cares at home office, then feel free to rag on the company for not having people who care. But don't generalize across all employees.
As I have been and continue to be an employee at EB, despite my better judgement, in a Canadian city, whose only competition are a single piss-ant local run video game store and the usual Wal-mart/Future Shop/Superstore trimunitive, I can say that we're the only place that does things like: Hey, I see you're buying a PS2/GC, I bet you'd like a memory card to save your progress. Or (and we had a 3 hour staff meeting about this one, so the new girl would learn this): if someone wants WoW, ensure they know it's on online only, pay-to-play game. Just because they hear it's shit hot, doesn't mean it's right for them.
Part of making "quality sales that last" is making sure you get as close to 0% returns as possible. That means you don't sell Shrek and an Xbox to someone's 6-y-o when they'd be better off with a GameCube. Perhaps the stores are mismanaged in your part of the world, but in Saskatchewan they are not, and our district is very strongly focusing itself on this.
Additionally, and unsatisfied customer is an unhappy, not returning customer. Anyone with sales experience knows this, and EB has a whole retail training program about it (not unlike Future Shop, or other places).
I worked at EB and I own over 400 video games. Ironically, I own no N-Gage games despite owning 2 N-Gage systems.
Since when is dyeing one's hair dressing like a teenager?
Brown is a very boring, common colour. I'd much rather that people had bright, interesting hair colours. It was quite enjoyable having blue hair, and I look forward to doing it again this summer. There are reasons other than parental rebellion for things. Try it sometime.
If they're using text classification, such as Bayesian, all you have to do is have a good concept of whitespace. Just break your tokens up apropriately, and compare the weightings to your corpus.
http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html
You just need a good corpus for your text classification.
When I run PS, I see 1 program running: PS. bash, my shell, is blocked because ps has control of the terminal.
If I turn around and run top, I see that, indeed, the main program running is top. All the rest are usually sleeping on some event. Unless that event occurs, they won't be woken up. The speed with which Linux can react to my keypresses, read the key presses, send those keypresses into a user-land safe buffer, wake up the userland program waiting on it (in this case, Mozilla), and then schedule X to run and let it update the screen to display the characters I just typed (which Mozilla also copies to its own local buffer) happens so fast as to not even register as 1 10th of 1 percent on my AMD64 3000+.
Seriously, no one needs a fucking 32-way CPU, not unless they are doing some massively parallel scientific work, or they are emulating many virtual computers at once. To deal with blocking IO that can't be slept, then multiple cores look sexy, but not really past 4 cores -- most applications are single threaded. Perhaps this would be different if we were running BeOS.
"The magnetic pole has been within Canada's current boundaries for at least the past 400 years ... "
Given that Canada has not existed for 400 years, I'd say that's a bit of a tall tale.
You have complete control, from a crawl to a full run. You are not just moving or still. Essential for games like Splinter Cell, Metal Gear, etc.
Mine needs to be recalibrated every few days. That, or I could get used to clicking on the far-right hand side of the screen to active things in the middle.
The T has annoying bugs, and that's one right there.
I don't have the time that all these high school kids seem to have. That is, between my significant other, managing my house, and work, I've got myself a 60-80 hour week.
If I pick up a game that brags of over 40 hours of gameplay, I put that fucker right back down. I don't have time for more than 8 hours of gaming a week, tops. WoW is nice in that I can have a WoW session that lasts an evening, and not be penalized (thanks to their rest system). Or I can spend a week and some change beat a 10-12 hour game. A 40 hour game usually takes more than a month to beat, especially if it requires that I level characters in repetitive, stupid, RPG combat.
"In other words, when they release a million+ seller, they reap a shitload of money over it. BTW, they do this quite regularly."
MSRP on a 50$ game is like 2-5$ retailer, 15$ Sony/MS/Nintendo, 15$ other guy/gal, 5$ production cost, 10$ overhead (shipper, Nintendo to Wal-mart/EB, etc). For a company like Rockstar to make on GTA what Nintendo makes on Mario Tennis, they'd have to sell it for 20-25$ more than the usual MSRP to cover costs and markup. Are you going to pay 75$ USD for a game? No? Because it's like Nintendo does when you buy a first- (and possibly second-) party title. Sony kinda gets this with their second-party titles, but not to the same effect.
MS lovies Halo for a reason: Halo is the only reason they aren't further in the hole.
It shows that, yes, you can still stay around as long as you make money.
OTOH, that's going to change soon. Most companies release terrible, terrible crap games for the GBA because, since it's the only game in town, and the vast majority of GBA game purchasers are ill-informed parents, shit in a cartridge will sell.
The Nintendo DS is reflecting this port-itis: Madagasdar and SW: Ep 3 are both movie tie-in games (which are the biggest % of the GBA library), and both are unchanged from the GBA version with the exception of the 3D minigames which use the touch screen.
If Nokia hadn't pissed off the only demographic who'd have bought their N-Gage, they could've been a contender (if they could get some good games, which they don't currently have -- Pocket Kingdoms is not strong enough to ship units). The PSP could similarly take over, except that right now the PSP seems to be a really expensive way to play Lumines and WipeOut. For its price, it has too many flaws -- but if Sony cut its price and managed to fix the flaws (pixel death is the major factor), it'd sell. Hell, if the damn thing would really be a future walk-man (with easy movie playback capability, and music support [I'm thinking an mplayer port + xmms or similar), it'd sell great even at its current price point.
The thing is, Nintendo is making money now, and that makes me happy, but most of that is coming from licencing shitty-ass games, and the moment the market shifts away from their portable platform, it's going to be like the N64 all over again: the only way it'll make money is because the Hardcores will buy the Nintendo portable and a full library of first-party games. They're generally good, so that's no big deal, but I'm less likely to carry a Nintendo portable as a 2nd console as I am to own a GCN along side everything else in my (much less portable) console collection.
"According to the story, there is somewhere around 10,000
You can't fix the subject/predicate to agree on plurality?
"It's not inconceivable that he was exercising mind control to help push Anakin over to the dark side."
If you have to start reaching for explanations like this, I think it's pretty clear that the behaviours didn't mesh up well with the rest of the character story arc. If you have to make up a reason why something happened, especially if it's not clear after the fact (simply; not using contrived explanations), the story teller has failed.
This was pretty damn out of character. The sowing of dark side seeds had to be much subtler, and much longer. The only hint of this was when Anakin told Windu about Sidious, rather than just killing him immediately. This hesitation showed dark side tendencies. That could've easily been built upon to be believable.