We're doomed to a race to the bottom because no amount of government regulation is going to stop corporations from doing everything they can to minimize costs, which incidentally implies paying their workers as little as possible.
Yes, and the point of regulation is to remove undesirable (to us the people) things from the set of "everything they can". Minimum wage laws, in particularly, exist precisely to rise "as little as possible" to the point where one can live on that.
One may as well try to hold back water with a sieve.
I love that analogy. It starts with using a method you know won't work (sieve) and tries to suggest that thus no method can work, when in reality a bucket will work just fine. That's exactly the kind of deception libertarians and other free-market fundamentalists like to engage in.
Your effort is futile, however, since this latest economic crash engineered by the financial geniuses demanding free unregulated market has finally driven home to pretty much everyone just what their place in such a society would be. I expect and hope that we'll finally get some toll barriers back up to protect and encourage domestic industries, as well as tight regulation to keep banks and other financial entities from screwing up again.
What would we have achieved if we'd given the same amount of tax payer's money to private companies instead of a creaking bureaucracy?
We'd enriched a few shareholders, who'd then blame their failure to deliver on government intervention, between rants about how it's wrong to tax that money they've "earned" just to keep some poor bastard from dying in the streets and how any oversight is a horrible insult on their liberty - to crush others beneath their boots, but that's never said outright - of course.
That's my guess anyway, based on how it's worked with every other industry. Capitalism as its finest, unles you count outright feudalism.
We nerds on slashdot know better of course, the problem is Adobe being mindless idiots who can't figure out how to properly use a scaled video surface.
So that's the reason that a machine that can play 720p x264 vids chokes on Flash. I've been wondering about that.
ck's advocates are suffering from observer bias. They try his scheduler, and since they know they're trying his scheduler, and since we have a cognitive bias toward seeing what we expect to find, of course they claim it feels "snappier". Of course they can't bring up numbers to support this perception because there is no real effect.
I haven't tested this scheduler. However, during Con's previous scheduler effort, sound skipped in ZSNES under mainline kernel, and didn't skip under Con's scheduler, in identically loaded machines. However, idle priority was not really idle-only, since a cpu-burning task running at idle priority could cause similar skipping (despite doing nothing but a simple "while(1);").
That's why, in science, we use numbers.
The numbers relevant here are the average, maximum and minimum latency, where latency is defined as the time between a sleeping task becoming eligible to run again and it actually starting to execute or a task exhausting its timeslice and the next time it starts to execute, in idle, lightly loaded and heavily loaded machines.
The argument for a purely forward-looking scheduler that doesn't implement any heuristics is that the maximum latency is a function of the number of tasks running, their priorities, the priority of the current task and whether the task is waking from sleep or has been descheduled due to having used its timeslice. This means that maximum latency is bound (and usually low), resulting in execution that feels snappy (low latency) and smooth (no great variations in latency). A heuristic-using scheduler, on the other hand, can easily end up in a situation where a task is unexpectedly scheduled a lot later than it would in a nonheuristic scheduler; in other words, while the average latency can be low, the maximum is unbound (or at least the bound is very high). These unexpected seemingly random huge latencies (latency variation, to be exact) are what's perceived as "jerky" behaviour, or so the theory goes anyway.
I agree that we need actual objective data to base decisions on. Does the kernel currently have capability of measuring these things (time when a task starts executing, time when a task stops executing and the reason for it, and a time when a task becomes eligible for execution and the reason for it) and if not, could one be added?
The one strong argument against microkernels has always been performance, and as the number of cores increases it is less and less relevant...
The performance penaly of microkernels is caused by context switches when messages pass from one address space to another, and won't go away no matter how many cores you have. However, even on outdated machines (such as my 1Ghz one I'm writing this message on) the multiple context switches associated with these characters flowing from kernel to X and from there to Firefox and the return traffick of writing them to screen seems to not result in any significant slowdown.
I think you missed the first five words of his sentence.
No, I got them, I simply disagree with his conclusions.
He wasn't saying that not understanding physics makes you a danger, in and of itself, but when that ignorance/disconnect-with-reality motivates you to criminal action society needs to be protected from you, more so than just because of the crime - but because of the future danger you represent due to an incapacity for remorse.
I don't think that it's the hypothethical danger of radio transmitters that motivates these people to destroy such transmitters. I find it more likely that these people were looking for a cause to fight for, and simply picked "radio causes cancer" as an excuse. In other words, if they understood physics, they'd simply pick another target.
He seems to be making the basic distinction between being a vandal, and being a clinically-insane vandal.
Ignorance and insanity aren't even remotely related. If these people were claiming that a squirrel told them to destroy the towers, they would be insane; that they destroyed the towers due to a misunderstanding over the physics of electromagnetic waves makes them merely stupid.
Mind you, I'd say they probably are dangerous and need to be arrested; but it's because they destroyed the towers, rather than because their reason to do so was misguided.
This whole thread is almost completely full of people all asking when Linux will have a feature that it has had for as long as I can remember. Occaisonally the term "pluggable scheduler" is used to mean the ability to choose a scheduler at compile time, which has been in the kernel for as long as I can remember.
This thread is about CPU scheduler, not IO scheduler. The kernel has multiple IO schedulers to choose from, but not multiple CPU schedulers, nor an architechture to support them.
If you are running a server that you also use as a desktop, it isn't Linux's problem that you are either on a shoestring budget or a moron.
That is good to know. Can you recommend an operating system that's geared for the 99% of us who are, in fact, running on such tight budget that we can't get a dedicated machine for every task we might want to perform?
And calling people morons when you don't even know what's being discussed is quite ironic.
Not to mention NASA. The market and private enterprise could never have put a man on the moon in 10 years. Government set the strategy and arranged for private companies to make it happen.
More importantly, no private company could or would had paid the bill. I'd argue that we haven't, in fact, reached Moon yet: sure, we put a few people there for a few days, but it cost so enormously that we had to discontinue the trips, and in fact currently lack the capability to reach it at all.
We have reached the orbit, in that putting equipment there is commonplace and economically sensible and can actually be done by private companies rather than just by nation-states; we haven't reached it in the sense that putting people there was safe or cheap. I argue that we should discontinue efforts to return to Moon - much less reach Mars - and concentrate instead on getting a firm hold on Earth orbit. Once any of us can choose to take a one-night trip to an orbital hotel rather than two weeks in Hawaii, then it's time to reach further.
Blowing up 10 building in Manhattan is not a violent act? You've got to be fucking shitting me.
Blowing up 10 empty buildings is not a violent act. The proper term for destruction of property is vandalism.
They could have easily killed somebody with this action. Do you think somebody who is performing such an act in the middle of the night is going to search the area and make sure that not a single person happens to be in the area? Of course not - they would try to do it as quickly as possible to escape detection. This is an inherently risky behavior, with the very real possibility of harming or killing someone.
Driving a car is inherently risky behavior with the very real possibility of harming or killing someone, so does that make me a terrorist for having a driver's licence?
There was no intent to hurt anyone, nor was anyone actually hurt. Furthermore, this whole thing was likely not meant to strike terror into anyone's heart. Therefore, it's not terrorism.
If you did it because you thought radio waves were doing to hurt you than you should be locked up as a danger to the public.
Not understanding physics doesn't make you a danger to the public. It might make you an uneducated moron, but that's not something you should be locked up for.
These are more than just vandals, I expect these morons will be destroying Air Traffic Control and other vital equipment in no time.
Do you have any kind of evidence or reason to expect this, or are you simply slandering? "His dog shat on my lawn today, so I expect he'll try to kill me tomorrow!"
Atheism, an alternative to wishful thinking!
More importantly, fanatical atheists are an even greater source of lulz than fanatical theists. The latter can always seek sanctuary from blind faith, while the former will engage in amazing contortions of logic to defend the idea that their assertions are based on logic and they are "rational".
I want to drive to Seattle and set fire to the ELF's office, plus any other ELF offices I pass along the way, because I think they need to be taught a lesson that losing millions of dollars of property HURTS. Eye-for-an-eye, "walk in your victim's shoes", and all that stuff.
So which category am I in?
Middle class: "They did it, so they deserve to have it done to them. It's justice."
That's assuming you actually act on your desire, of course, since you aren't a criminal until you have.
What if we can distribute this trust better - use "non-standard" schedulers etc - then the benchmarking will reach the users and the truth will be distilled eventually. If Cons new scheduler is as good as he tries to paint it, build kernel and use it in thousands. Currently, all eyes are on mainline, which is what prevents choice, even though the choice is "potentially" there.
Unfortunately, the internal interfaces of Linux kernel are constantly being modified, so maintaining an "alternative" kernel has a huge overhead. You either miss out on updates to the mainline kernel, or keep on changing your patches to keep them compatible with it.
The more cynical part of me wonders if Linus is doing that on purpose, to reduce competition? Make it a pain to maintain a forked kernel, and people will improve mainline. Of course that also means that desktop users are stuck with data center optimizations, but it also keeps them from having good alternatives, so Linux usage will keep on growing.
To demonstrate THAT, you would have to perform multiplication without doing any multiplication or division. Hiding the multiplication by moving the radix point around without calling it multiplication doesn't satisfy the requirements. Moving the radix point around isn't addition. Its multiplication/division.
Moving the radix point around is taking advantage of the properties of decimal representation. It is, of course, multiplication, and a very efficient form of multiplication; but multiplying by ten can also be expressed as "add this number to itself ten times", and dividing by ten as "find the number which, when added to itself ten times, produces this number". Base-n notational systems have the useful property that when you multiply or divide by n, the only difference in the representation of the final number and the original number is the location of the radix point. That is convenient, but has nothing to do with the theoretical bases of multiplication or division themselves.
I don't dispute that you can do multiplication without knowing your times tables. I'm only disputing the more abstract assertion that addition is shorthand for multiplication. (ie that multiplication can be defined in terms of addition.) You can for integers, but not it over rational or real numbers. And attempting to convert rational numbers to integers requires the very multiplation/division you supposed to be proving you don't need.
Every rational number can be written as a fraction. We usually write them as decimals, but that's simply notation. So, in your example 1.5 is actually 15/10 or 3/2 at its simplest form, and 0.8 is 8/10 or 4/5. 3/2 * 4/5 = (3*4)/(2*5) = (4+4+4)/(5+5) = 12/10, which can be written as 6/5 or 1.2, whichever you prefer.
Please note that writing 1.5 as 15/10 isn't converting anything, any more than writing percentages as decimals would be; it's simply switching notation. Rewriting 15/10 as 3/2 is simply common factor elimination; factorization of an integer is simply a matter of trying to multiply all pairs of integers smaller than that and seeing if the result is this integer (in which case this pair were factors) and then recursively doing the same to them until no further pairs can be found; and that integer multiplication is really just shorthand for addition. This is obviously a very inefficient way of doing problems like this, but that was not the point under consideration.
Multiplication really is defined in terms of addition, just as addition is defined in terms of the successor function, and exponentiation in terms of multiplication. Look up Peano axioms for details.
I just don't understand the stance that most people on this board seem to take regarding this issue. How can everyone be so supportive of what very obviously amounts to theft? It appears to me that somehow people think it is their "right" to obtain copyrighted material for free. I just don't buy for a second that people who claim to only use file-sharing apps for legitimate purposes only actually do so.
As long as the Mickey Mouse Protection Acts and the resulting infinite copyright and any form of legal protection for any form of DRM remain in place, I shall refuse to acknowledge the validity of any form of copyright law, and will copy/share ("steal") to my heart's content, as well as help others do the same.
Fuck you MAFIAA/Teosto. You should had listened to Lord Macaulay, but you didn't, and now it's far too late. Burn in Hell, where you belong, and cease hindering the progress of the human species.
I think the real question is whether or not quantum computing can solve the Travelling Salesman problem.:)
Assuming that quantum computer is Turing complete, of course it can: simply enumerate every route and keep track of which is the shortest this far, and at the end of the enumeration you have the shortest one. Now, whether a quantum computer (or a normal computer, for that matter) can do this in a faster time than O(n!), that's the question.
I have a feeling a lot of innocent people will find themselves being arrested for past communication their government or some big corporation disapproves of once quantum computers do come about as all their past recorded conversations, no matter how encrypted, suddenly become decryptable.
Fixed that for you.
It's frightening how corporations and governments seem to be in a race to see who can cause the most harm in the least amount of time. Breaking secure communications at this point in history is a very worrisome development.
If you buy a physical book from Barnes & Noble and it turns out that the printer didn't have copyrights to produce it, B&N doesn't call you demanding you return the book-they resolve the issue between the copyright holder and publisher behind the scenes.
Unless it's a Harry Potter book. In that case, you'll be issued a gag order by a court. But hey, fair is fair: why should Disney be the only billionaire entity that gets to abuse copyright law?
Somehow what Amazon actually did is considered being handled "poorly"?
The mistake was in designing Kindle with the ability to "pull" material in the first place. I'm sticking to paper and text files for this exact reason. That the first already-published thing to vanish without a trace was 1984 is irony, dire warning and a giant big "fuck you serfs" all in one action.
Heck, for all I know it could be some moral Amazon employee trying to make a point who made the decision. It's a rather big coincidence otherwise.
Maybe we can get a retcon. Marvel does it all the time anyhow...
It wasn't actually Marvel that was sold but a generic clone made by Mr. Sinister. The whole thing was a brilliant plot by Stan Lee to get rid of said lame clone that has made crap comics for a decade and bring back the real Marvel, but little did he suspect that he wasn't really dealing with Mickey but Ralph the Rat who'd escaped Muppets, kidnapped Mickey and taken his place. It'll all come to light when the Great Gonzo comes looking for his errant sidekick, and climax in an epic battle between Kermit and the Toad, who has kidnapped Stan to for him to retcon him into an omega-class mutant in the confusion.
It is nothing that Marvel did wrong, just eventually fictional universes run out of steam.
No they don't, at least those as big as Marvel, it's simply that writers come and go. Fictional universes become popular if they have good writers making interesting stories for them, so any that's remembered has had a "golden age" at some point. And then the good writers leave or become lazy, and the golden age is over and people say that the universe has "lost steam". It hasn't, the coal guy has simply fallen asleep on the job.
As evidence, I refer to fan fiction. All fandoms I've ever bothered checking have produced some good stories. Marvel itself has produced a truly obscene amount of stuff, but besides that there's been anything from high-drama Powerpuff Girls stories to epic sci-fi Sailor Moon ones. And of course Lovecraft goes well with anything.
That's one of the reasons current copyright is so damaging, BTW: it makes it illegal to combine ideas from (an)other author(s) with your own, preventing or at least hindering the expansion of fictional universes into full-blown mythology. Good thing copyright abuse has pretty much destroyed its credibility, but still...
After you fill the pipeline, given enough women you can have as many babies as you want per month.
Yes, but when your marketing machine needs to start months - and, for some elements, thousands of years - in advance, you must get a particular baby out just in time for Christmas. There would be Hell to pay otherwise.
I wonder how long it will be before developers are able to effectively develop and distribute their own titles without the big publishers?
Developers have always been able to do that - or have you forgotten about shareware? Nowadays it's easier than ever, thanks to the Internet and downloadable content for consoles.
No, it's the cost of development that's the bottleneck. It takes a lot of money to make a game with near-photorealistic 3D graphics, CD-quality music and voice acting. It's technological progress that's what's killing the industry, ironically enough. But even then, some make it, such as World of Goo.
Just don't expect long term (5+ year) success out of it.
Once people wise up to your game and stop buying them, simply dismantle and recorporate under another name. Or use your quarterly profits to buy a small quality games studio, fire the people and keep the name.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, and the point of regulation is to remove undesirable (to us the people) things from the set of "everything they can". Minimum wage laws, in particularly, exist precisely to rise "as little as possible" to the point where one can live on that.
I love that analogy. It starts with using a method you know won't work (sieve) and tries to suggest that thus no method can work, when in reality a bucket will work just fine. That's exactly the kind of deception libertarians and other free-market fundamentalists like to engage in.
Your effort is futile, however, since this latest economic crash engineered by the financial geniuses demanding free unregulated market has finally driven home to pretty much everyone just what their place in such a society would be. I expect and hope that we'll finally get some toll barriers back up to protect and encourage domestic industries, as well as tight regulation to keep banks and other financial entities from screwing up again.
We'd enriched a few shareholders, who'd then blame their failure to deliver on government intervention, between rants about how it's wrong to tax that money they've "earned" just to keep some poor bastard from dying in the streets and how any oversight is a horrible insult on their liberty - to crush others beneath their boots, but that's never said outright - of course.
That's my guess anyway, based on how it's worked with every other industry. Capitalism as its finest, unles you count outright feudalism.
So that's the reason that a machine that can play 720p x264 vids chokes on Flash. I've been wondering about that.
I haven't tested this scheduler. However, during Con's previous scheduler effort, sound skipped in ZSNES under mainline kernel, and didn't skip under Con's scheduler, in identically loaded machines. However, idle priority was not really idle-only, since a cpu-burning task running at idle priority could cause similar skipping (despite doing nothing but a simple "while(1);").
The numbers relevant here are the average, maximum and minimum latency, where latency is defined as the time between a sleeping task becoming eligible to run again and it actually starting to execute or a task exhausting its timeslice and the next time it starts to execute, in idle, lightly loaded and heavily loaded machines.
The argument for a purely forward-looking scheduler that doesn't implement any heuristics is that the maximum latency is a function of the number of tasks running, their priorities, the priority of the current task and whether the task is waking from sleep or has been descheduled due to having used its timeslice. This means that maximum latency is bound (and usually low), resulting in execution that feels snappy (low latency) and smooth (no great variations in latency). A heuristic-using scheduler, on the other hand, can easily end up in a situation where a task is unexpectedly scheduled a lot later than it would in a nonheuristic scheduler; in other words, while the average latency can be low, the maximum is unbound (or at least the bound is very high). These unexpected seemingly random huge latencies (latency variation, to be exact) are what's perceived as "jerky" behaviour, or so the theory goes anyway.
I agree that we need actual objective data to base decisions on. Does the kernel currently have capability of measuring these things (time when a task starts executing, time when a task stops executing and the reason for it, and a time when a task becomes eligible for execution and the reason for it) and if not, could one be added?
The performance penaly of microkernels is caused by context switches when messages pass from one address space to another, and won't go away no matter how many cores you have. However, even on outdated machines (such as my 1Ghz one I'm writing this message on) the multiple context switches associated with these characters flowing from kernel to X and from there to Firefox and the return traffick of writing them to screen seems to not result in any significant slowdown.
No, I got them, I simply disagree with his conclusions.
I don't think that it's the hypothethical danger of radio transmitters that motivates these people to destroy such transmitters. I find it more likely that these people were looking for a cause to fight for, and simply picked "radio causes cancer" as an excuse. In other words, if they understood physics, they'd simply pick another target.
Ignorance and insanity aren't even remotely related. If these people were claiming that a squirrel told them to destroy the towers, they would be insane; that they destroyed the towers due to a misunderstanding over the physics of electromagnetic waves makes them merely stupid.
Mind you, I'd say they probably are dangerous and need to be arrested; but it's because they destroyed the towers, rather than because their reason to do so was misguided.
This thread is about CPU scheduler, not IO scheduler. The kernel has multiple IO schedulers to choose from, but not multiple CPU schedulers, nor an architechture to support them.
That is good to know. Can you recommend an operating system that's geared for the 99% of us who are, in fact, running on such tight budget that we can't get a dedicated machine for every task we might want to perform?
And calling people morons when you don't even know what's being discussed is quite ironic.
More importantly, no private company could or would had paid the bill. I'd argue that we haven't, in fact, reached Moon yet: sure, we put a few people there for a few days, but it cost so enormously that we had to discontinue the trips, and in fact currently lack the capability to reach it at all.
We have reached the orbit, in that putting equipment there is commonplace and economically sensible and can actually be done by private companies rather than just by nation-states; we haven't reached it in the sense that putting people there was safe or cheap. I argue that we should discontinue efforts to return to Moon - much less reach Mars - and concentrate instead on getting a firm hold on Earth orbit. Once any of us can choose to take a one-night trip to an orbital hotel rather than two weeks in Hawaii, then it's time to reach further.
Sorry about getting offtopic.
Blowing up 10 empty buildings is not a violent act. The proper term for destruction of property is vandalism.
Driving a car is inherently risky behavior with the very real possibility of harming or killing someone, so does that make me a terrorist for having a driver's licence?
There was no intent to hurt anyone, nor was anyone actually hurt. Furthermore, this whole thing was likely not meant to strike terror into anyone's heart. Therefore, it's not terrorism.
I'm starting to suspect that you're a troll.
Not understanding physics doesn't make you a danger to the public. It might make you an uneducated moron, but that's not something you should be locked up for.
Do you have any kind of evidence or reason to expect this, or are you simply slandering? "His dog shat on my lawn today, so I expect he'll try to kill me tomorrow!"
More importantly, fanatical atheists are an even greater source of lulz than fanatical theists. The latter can always seek sanctuary from blind faith, while the former will engage in amazing contortions of logic to defend the idea that their assertions are based on logic and they are "rational".
Middle class: "They did it, so they deserve to have it done to them. It's justice."
That's assuming you actually act on your desire, of course, since you aren't a criminal until you have.
Unfortunately, the internal interfaces of Linux kernel are constantly being modified, so maintaining an "alternative" kernel has a huge overhead. You either miss out on updates to the mainline kernel, or keep on changing your patches to keep them compatible with it.
The more cynical part of me wonders if Linus is doing that on purpose, to reduce competition? Make it a pain to maintain a forked kernel, and people will improve mainline. Of course that also means that desktop users are stuck with data center optimizations, but it also keeps them from having good alternatives, so Linux usage will keep on growing.
Moving the radix point around is taking advantage of the properties of decimal representation. It is, of course, multiplication, and a very efficient form of multiplication; but multiplying by ten can also be expressed as "add this number to itself ten times", and dividing by ten as "find the number which, when added to itself ten times, produces this number". Base-n notational systems have the useful property that when you multiply or divide by n, the only difference in the representation of the final number and the original number is the location of the radix point. That is convenient, but has nothing to do with the theoretical bases of multiplication or division themselves.
Every rational number can be written as a fraction. We usually write them as decimals, but that's simply notation. So, in your example 1.5 is actually 15/10 or 3/2 at its simplest form, and 0.8 is 8/10 or 4/5. 3/2 * 4/5 = (3*4)/(2*5) = (4+4+4)/(5+5) = 12/10, which can be written as 6/5 or 1.2, whichever you prefer.
Please note that writing 1.5 as 15/10 isn't converting anything, any more than writing percentages as decimals would be; it's simply switching notation. Rewriting 15/10 as 3/2 is simply common factor elimination; factorization of an integer is simply a matter of trying to multiply all pairs of integers smaller than that and seeing if the result is this integer (in which case this pair were factors) and then recursively doing the same to them until no further pairs can be found; and that integer multiplication is really just shorthand for addition. This is obviously a very inefficient way of doing problems like this, but that was not the point under consideration.
Multiplication really is defined in terms of addition, just as addition is defined in terms of the successor function, and exponentiation in terms of multiplication. Look up Peano axioms for details.
As long as the Mickey Mouse Protection Acts and the resulting infinite copyright and any form of legal protection for any form of DRM remain in place, I shall refuse to acknowledge the validity of any form of copyright law, and will copy/share ("steal") to my heart's content, as well as help others do the same.
Fuck you MAFIAA/Teosto. You should had listened to Lord Macaulay, but you didn't, and now it's far too late. Burn in Hell, where you belong, and cease hindering the progress of the human species.
Just in case you didn't get it yet, FUCK YOU .
Assuming that quantum computer is Turing complete, of course it can: simply enumerate every route and keep track of which is the shortest this far, and at the end of the enumeration you have the shortest one. Now, whether a quantum computer (or a normal computer, for that matter) can do this in a faster time than O(n!), that's the question.
Fixed that for you.
It's frightening how corporations and governments seem to be in a race to see who can cause the most harm in the least amount of time. Breaking secure communications at this point in history is a very worrisome development.
Unless it's a Harry Potter book. In that case, you'll be issued a gag order by a court. But hey, fair is fair: why should Disney be the only billionaire entity that gets to abuse copyright law?
The mistake was in designing Kindle with the ability to "pull" material in the first place. I'm sticking to paper and text files for this exact reason. That the first already-published thing to vanish without a trace was 1984 is irony, dire warning and a giant big "fuck you serfs" all in one action.
Heck, for all I know it could be some moral Amazon employee trying to make a point who made the decision. It's a rather big coincidence otherwise.
For that to make sense, they would need to receive more total profits from higher priced comic books. This, in turn, implies that either
I'd bet on option 3: Marvel comics are already priced at what will bring in the most profits, and rising the price would lower them due to less sales.
It wasn't actually Marvel that was sold but a generic clone made by Mr. Sinister. The whole thing was a brilliant plot by Stan Lee to get rid of said lame clone that has made crap comics for a decade and bring back the real Marvel, but little did he suspect that he wasn't really dealing with Mickey but Ralph the Rat who'd escaped Muppets, kidnapped Mickey and taken his place. It'll all come to light when the Great Gonzo comes looking for his errant sidekick, and climax in an epic battle between Kermit and the Toad, who has kidnapped Stan to for him to retcon him into an omega-class mutant in the confusion.
That should be queen. "Black Queen", to be exact.
Dark Phoenix/Maleficent team-up? With Cruella DeVille as a comic sidekick?
Awesome.
No they don't, at least those as big as Marvel, it's simply that writers come and go. Fictional universes become popular if they have good writers making interesting stories for them, so any that's remembered has had a "golden age" at some point. And then the good writers leave or become lazy, and the golden age is over and people say that the universe has "lost steam". It hasn't, the coal guy has simply fallen asleep on the job.
As evidence, I refer to fan fiction. All fandoms I've ever bothered checking have produced some good stories. Marvel itself has produced a truly obscene amount of stuff, but besides that there's been anything from high-drama Powerpuff Girls stories to epic sci-fi Sailor Moon ones. And of course Lovecraft goes well with anything.
That's one of the reasons current copyright is so damaging, BTW: it makes it illegal to combine ideas from (an)other author(s) with your own, preventing or at least hindering the expansion of fictional universes into full-blown mythology. Good thing copyright abuse has pretty much destroyed its credibility, but still...
Yes, but when your marketing machine needs to start months - and, for some elements, thousands of years - in advance, you must get a particular baby out just in time for Christmas. There would be Hell to pay otherwise.
Developers have always been able to do that - or have you forgotten about shareware? Nowadays it's easier than ever, thanks to the Internet and downloadable content for consoles.
No, it's the cost of development that's the bottleneck. It takes a lot of money to make a game with near-photorealistic 3D graphics, CD-quality music and voice acting. It's technological progress that's what's killing the industry, ironically enough. But even then, some make it, such as World of Goo.
Once people wise up to your game and stop buying them, simply dismantle and recorporate under another name. Or use your quarterly profits to buy a small quality games studio, fire the people and keep the name.