The standards to which I alluded are defined by independent organizations, such as W3C, Ecma, IETF and others, and have been championed by such organizations as the Web Standards Project. Web slices is technically "open" as you said -- and as such, has even been incorporated into Firefox via plug-ins as early as Ff2.0 -- but the "standard" for web slices was actually developed and published by Microsoft, with little or no collaboration from the rest of the industry. So with that, you're really attempting to compare apples and... well, Microsoft.
Webkit is most assuredly not the only browser to strive for (real) standards compliance... if you had followed the news surrounding the release of the Acid3 test a couple of years ago, you would already know this.
My comment about Firefox plug-ins was really more of a reflection upon the days when Firefox was my default browser, and a rumination on the lack of similar add-ins in Safari -- but frankly, I can live without them. And I couldn't possibly care less what language Firefox used to develop their plug-ins; other browsers have plug-ins too, and they're not all based upon XUL. If the folks over at mozilla.org ever did decide to chuck Gecko, and instead built a plug-in framework around Webkit and dubbed it the next version of Firefox, I am confident that they would have no difficulty at all finding a way to make it work. Likewise, I am certain that third-party plug-in developers would moan and groan about having to recode their plug-ins... but most of them would still do the work, and we'd all be quite happy with the end results.
Now, with the red herrings out of the way... to directly address the question you posed: I suppose I can see how you might interpret my comment as "less" competition, but that is the furthest thing from my mind. You state quite accurately that Internet Explorer isn't supplying any competition, but frankly, that's because they're now the incumbent. They don't have to bring the battle at all... someone else needs to bring the battle to them. With that in mind, what I desire is stronger competition against the Microsoft juggernaut, which might ultimately result in real progress across the board, which can only be defined as directly influencing the juggernaut itself. And let's face it: Opera may be almost exactly as standards compliant as Webkit, (and a halfway decent browser in its own right) but it's not exactly big enough to drive the market in any meaningful way on its own, right? So they're not much help. There are several other even smaller players out there, but they'll never even show up on a market share pie chart as anything more then a speck, and it's quite rare indeed for any of them to come up with something so innovative or useful that it actually propagates beyond the narrow scope of that one browser. And obviously the most noticeable non-Microsoft slice on that chart is the open source efforts of Firefox/Mozilla -- but they've been running at a distant second place to Microsoft in this race since their inception, and in all that time, all they've really managed to accomplish for us is to popularize a few key features, such as tabbed browsing, which was actually a concept borrowed from one of those lesser known browsers.
In other words, I'm not saying I want Opera and Konqueror and iCab to all just go away... rather, I simply want to see a new champion come forth to challenge Microsoft's indisputable dominance, picking up the battle that Firefox has effectively abandoned. And more importantly, I would like to see that champion steal enough market share away from Internet
At a glance, I thought that the article title meant that Firefox 4.0 was going to be based upon the Chrome browser, and therefore Webkit... no such luck, I guess. A browser which has full compatibility with the Firefox legacy of plug-ins, and runs on the Webkit rendering engine would almost certainly replace Safari as my default browser on both my Macintosh and my PC -- and I would hazard a guess that I'm not the only one who could say this. What's more, then the "browser wars" would effectively be whittled (back) down to a boxing match between Internet Explorer and Webkit, instead of this wild-and-crazy-free-for-all that's been going on ever since Netscape gave up the fight and sold out to AOL. Maybe then, the collective market share of all of these webkit-based browsers might drive web development more strongly to a "standards centered" philosophy of design and away from the "IE workaround" philosophy of design.
Really, this is a non-issue. Apple stopped trying to make something that no one actually used work.
I'm willing to grant you partial credit: I still use Palm Desktop and the iSync conduit to sync my Palm Treo -- and by the way, it works just fine under Leopard, if somewhat inelegantly. I'm also upgrading to Snow Leopard sometime either this weekend or next, (after one good sync of my contact list, just in case) because like you, I'm fairly convinced that this will all be a non-issue in the long run. I may end up buying a copy of the Missing Sync (for more then the cost of the 10.6 update, I might add) or someone may find another way to make PalmOS devices work on 10.6... but either way, I'm still a devoted MacHead, and I'm still an old school Palm fan who will be a bit disheartened when his Treo finally gives up the ghost.
Pesonally, I think people are making far too big a deal out of this whole thing. After all, if two of your closest friends were squabbling and had somehow decided that they weren't willing and/or able to reconcile their differences, would you suddenly conclude that you just can't be friends with one or the other any longer?
I think the "it's my car, but it wasn't me" is a valid defense, and why I so loathe red light cameras and photo radar. All an investigator can say from either of these is that a specific car was captured on film.
Quite so... and in some jurisdictions, red light cameras can be disputed very readily, specifically because of this issue. If your car is caught running a red light, and your teenage kid was the one driving the car, then the ticket can be invalidated by a very simple process: You (as in, the vehicle owner) sign a notarized affidavit stating that you were not the person driving the vehicle at the time of the traffic infraction, and you mail that back to the address indicated on the ticket that was mailed to you. The ticket is immediately dismissed without question.
Of course, in my example above (and frankly, in most cases) the owner of the vehicle knows perfectly well who the driver of the vehicle was... so the premise behind these mailed out tickets is that the owners outrage at the person who ran through the red light is going to exceed their outrage at the system which misidentified the owner as the person who violated the law. So the number of people who avoid the fine by taking the trouble to actually get a signed affidavit is likely negligible compared to the profitability of the cameras overall.
(Unfortunately, I can't really find a good way to relate all of that to the primary discussion about IP addresses...)
Okay... so I read this posting, and then I go on over to the sega.com website to see what their current offerings are... and "Daisy Fuentes Pilates" pops up as the initially displayed game. Is there no end to the irony around here?
In addition to Rock n Roll, the mormon crickets are repelled by alchohol, caffine, premarital sex, and gay marriage.
Haven't you heard? The Mormon church has renounced their previous stand against caffeine, since they just purchased PepsiCo and all of its subsidiary brands. Now, they no longer believe that it's a sin to consume caffeinated drinks -- but it absolutely is a sin to consume any product sold by that evil spawn of the devil, Coca-cola!
(I know it's true, 'cause I read it in an e-mail from a friend of a friend of a friend.........)
The moral of the story: don't watch TV, especially commercials.
That... or DVR all of your TV shows with something like EyeTV, add automatic commercial skipping with something like Comskip, and never watch television on the TV studios terms again... watch your shows whenever you want, and without commercials.
Well gee, of course an all-Apple household would cost more... because after all, previous studies have already show that MacHeads are more honest than their Windows brethren... so likewise, MacHeads are obviously more likely to pay for all of their software (as well as their media files) instead of pirating it, right?;-)
Well... that, or both studies are contrived and worth less then the ad-click-throughs that they generated for the sites reporting on them. Like Mark Twain was so fond of saying... "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies... and statistics."
A variation on this has been available at the OnMac forum for over a year now: http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=2793
(Alas, the forum has pretty much become overrun with spam, and the administrator has been MIA for quite some time... so it's fairly difficult to find anything new over there these days.)
If his case is valid, you'll see some true bi-partisan cooperation in Austin as they speedily pass a repeal of the relevant section of the state code.
Not likely: Texas is a pretty strong Republican stronghold. More likely you'll see the Democrats standing fast behind the Libertarians, in the hopes that the Republican write-ins will somehow still lose to the prominently displayed Libertarian candidate -- thus handing the entire election over to the Democrats quite handily.
I won't argue that point -- but I would suggest that even that makes very little difference, as every government office I've ever been in already uses Microsoft Office exclusively.
(Of course, I'm in the United States, so that may have something to do with my observations...)
It seems to me that it doesn't matter in the least if OOXML becomes a standard -- because frankly, nobody but Microsoft is going to put any significant effort into supporting it. A "standard" which is only supported by one product is about as useful as a two inch long drinking straw in a world of six inch tall soda cans... what's the point in even worrying about it?
Another example of this same problem is the Acid3 browser test. While I applaud the guys who came up with the tests for pointing out how many "standards" have been ignored by modern browsers, and I am quite impressed with the folks developing Opera and Safari/Webkit for their efforts to meet those standards... it still won't genuinely mean much until the forty foot gorilla in the room (Microsoft's Internet Explorer, of course) decides to play nice too.
In the case of Acid3, this is a regrettable fact of life that actually works to Microsoft's advantage -- which is why they aren't chomping at the bit to actually fix their browser. In the case of OOXML... Microsoft probably doesn't realize it yet, but they're pretty much screwed no matter how this thing ends.
You know, it occurs to me that the patent office might be able to significantly reduce the time required to research any given technology patent, by simply submitting an article to Slashdot. I think I just read about four or five different posts indicating what might well be genuine prior art, and at least one of those had a link to a business which probably filed their own related patents.
But more importantly, I think that digging through all of the other amusing-but-mostly-irrelevant posts under this article would be much less boring then digging through the reams and reams of existing patents...;-)
"Think Steevie limited playback support to DRM'd and items purchased vis iTunes music store?"
On Apple's new animated home page, it says that you can encode your own home movies, so I would assume that it's not too much of a stretch to get most of your other video files into the iPod as well. (Of course, now you're going to have to re-encode all of your illegal divx files into either H.264 or MPEG4...)
Personally, I think that the TR-1 / iPod comparison is a bit weak... but if we're going to do this, we may as well do it right. Have a look at this link: Walkman History 101
You mean, Apple might have copied the aesthetic design of an old Walkman, and the functionality of an ancient transistor radio?? Could this possibly be an image of the long sought after missing link, between the TR-1 and the iPod?!? Oh no! Technological evolution!! Say it isn't so!!
Honestly! If Apple's aesthetic design team hadn't researched successful designs of years gone by, I would be absolutely astonished! The innovation here wasn't in the physical appearances of the iPod, (as shown by these images of the TR-1 and that random Walkman on the link above) or in the functionality of the iPod (MP3 players already existed from other companies) or even in the interface design (as indicated by recent patent issues brought up by Creative Technology). Apple's innovation here was the integration of all these distinct elements into a single elegantly designed device: the iPod -- which as everyone knows by now, caused the fledgling MP3 market to finally take root! Simply put, Apple did what others had already been trying to do... but they did it right.
(Oh yeah... and I guess the iTunes Music Store may have had something to do with it too.)
The free version just lets you decide which files need to be deleted yourself... but the highly sophisticated commercial version (not yet released) will be bundled with every new computer purchase, for regular verification of the data on your harddrive, and will come with a do-it-yourself home polygraph system! For each and every media file that it finds, you have to speak into the included microphone, (while hooked up to the standard array of probes) telling the software whether or not you really purchased the original media for the file in question. If you lie, it promptly deletes the file and reports your illegal activities to the RIAA (so they can sue you) and to the local authorities. If you tell it that you don't own it, it doesn't call the police on you, but it does delete it for you -- even if it determines that you're lying, and really do own it. And if you really own it and tell it as much, then it shuffles it to the bottom of the list -- so that it can ask you again later, just to be completely sure that the first answer wasn't a false positive. Eventually, you'll get tired of the infinite loop and just let it finish deleting everything!
Oh yeah... and while you're asleep, it auto-magically turns the computer back on and sends copies of all your pr0n files to the local authorities as well. Isn't technology great?!?
In response to: In other news, Yahoo! will be changing its name to "Realhoo!"
That's exactly where my thoughts went too; I was always annoyed by the way RealPlayer puts up a dozen check boxes (some of which you need to scroll down to find) and forces you to opt-out of every single one -- which I always have, in those rare instances when I needed to install RealPlayer. Ironically, within the past couple of years I've kept my computer relatively Real-free, because the vast majority of sites which offer Real streams also offer alternative streams in Windows Media Player, QuickTime, or both. I would imagine that I'm not entirely alone in this. (Come to think of it, I don't believe I've heard much about Real in the news lately... perhaps that corroborates my theory?)
So it seems that the question which Yahoo must ask themselves is this: Does the revenue from all those adware related pop-ups (which I believe -- correct me if I'm wrong -- are consistently seeing fewer click-throughs) outweigh the potential revenue from people actually surfing to the Yahoo portal sites?
Seriously... all this really tells us is that Firefox is becoming ever more popular. A small group of "renegade" users who refuse to use the current de-facto standard browser can only find so many exploits in their alternative browser of choice. When the number of Firefox users swelled past that major threshold back in April, it was utterly inevitable that the discovery of exploits would accelerate.
So if you're a Firefox user -- rejoice! You're no longer a renegade!
Responding to: "If you think Lego is actually happy about this, well, have fun at school tomorrow."
Are you kidding? I'd be willing to bet that Lego is absolutely thrilled at this hack. Think about it like this: Your business is toys -- not software, so naturally you know from the start that there's a good chance that the software firm you hired isn't going to quite hit your vision. You release a piece of software that almost represents what you wanted, under the standard business practice of releasing a product that's "good enough" rather then waiting for the product to be perfect -- which never happens. Your customers then fix the most glaring issues remaining in your software for you!
Of course this ultimately represents a zero loss for everyone, because it creates a better overall customer experience -- which would have the natural tendency to drive sales up within that demographic of customers. Therefore, Lego's next logical step is probably going to be to obviate the "hack" by having it incorporated directly into the product itself.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow. Someone certainly has a bee in their bonnet.
The standards to which I alluded are defined by independent organizations, such as W3C, Ecma, IETF and others, and have been championed by such organizations as the Web Standards Project. Web slices is technically "open" as you said -- and as such, has even been incorporated into Firefox via plug-ins as early as Ff2.0 -- but the "standard" for web slices was actually developed and published by Microsoft, with little or no collaboration from the rest of the industry. So with that, you're really attempting to compare apples and... well, Microsoft.
Webkit is most assuredly not the only browser to strive for (real) standards compliance... if you had followed the news surrounding the release of the Acid3 test a couple of years ago, you would already know this.
My comment about Firefox plug-ins was really more of a reflection upon the days when Firefox was my default browser, and a rumination on the lack of similar add-ins in Safari -- but frankly, I can live without them. And I couldn't possibly care less what language Firefox used to develop their plug-ins; other browsers have plug-ins too, and they're not all based upon XUL. If the folks over at mozilla.org ever did decide to chuck Gecko, and instead built a plug-in framework around Webkit and dubbed it the next version of Firefox, I am confident that they would have no difficulty at all finding a way to make it work. Likewise, I am certain that third-party plug-in developers would moan and groan about having to recode their plug-ins... but most of them would still do the work, and we'd all be quite happy with the end results.
Now, with the red herrings out of the way... to directly address the question you posed: I suppose I can see how you might interpret my comment as "less" competition, but that is the furthest thing from my mind. You state quite accurately that Internet Explorer isn't supplying any competition, but frankly, that's because they're now the incumbent. They don't have to bring the battle at all... someone else needs to bring the battle to them. With that in mind, what I desire is stronger competition against the Microsoft juggernaut, which might ultimately result in real progress across the board, which can only be defined as directly influencing the juggernaut itself. And let's face it: Opera may be almost exactly as standards compliant as Webkit, (and a halfway decent browser in its own right) but it's not exactly big enough to drive the market in any meaningful way on its own, right? So they're not much help. There are several other even smaller players out there, but they'll never even show up on a market share pie chart as anything more then a speck, and it's quite rare indeed for any of them to come up with something so innovative or useful that it actually propagates beyond the narrow scope of that one browser. And obviously the most noticeable non-Microsoft slice on that chart is the open source efforts of Firefox/Mozilla -- but they've been running at a distant second place to Microsoft in this race since their inception, and in all that time, all they've really managed to accomplish for us is to popularize a few key features, such as tabbed browsing, which was actually a concept borrowed from one of those lesser known browsers.
In other words, I'm not saying I want Opera and Konqueror and iCab to all just go away... rather, I simply want to see a new champion come forth to challenge Microsoft's indisputable dominance, picking up the battle that Firefox has effectively abandoned. And more importantly, I would like to see that champion steal enough market share away from Internet
At a glance, I thought that the article title meant that Firefox 4.0 was going to be based upon the Chrome browser, and therefore Webkit... no such luck, I guess. A browser which has full compatibility with the Firefox legacy of plug-ins, and runs on the Webkit rendering engine would almost certainly replace Safari as my default browser on both my Macintosh and my PC -- and I would hazard a guess that I'm not the only one who could say this. What's more, then the "browser wars" would effectively be whittled (back) down to a boxing match between Internet Explorer and Webkit, instead of this wild-and-crazy-free-for-all that's been going on ever since Netscape gave up the fight and sold out to AOL. Maybe then, the collective market share of all of these webkit-based browsers might drive web development more strongly to a "standards centered" philosophy of design and away from the "IE workaround" philosophy of design.
Ah, well. A guy can dream, can't he?
Oh... and I suppose I'll go ahead and add the obligitory old quote in response to my own post...
You should never anthropomorphize computers. They hate that.
Really, this is a non-issue. Apple stopped trying to make something that no one actually used work.
I'm willing to grant you partial credit: I still use Palm Desktop and the iSync conduit to sync my Palm Treo -- and by the way, it works just fine under Leopard, if somewhat inelegantly. I'm also upgrading to Snow Leopard sometime either this weekend or next, (after one good sync of my contact list, just in case) because like you, I'm fairly convinced that this will all be a non-issue in the long run. I may end up buying a copy of the Missing Sync (for more then the cost of the 10.6 update, I might add) or someone may find another way to make PalmOS devices work on 10.6... but either way, I'm still a devoted MacHead, and I'm still an old school Palm fan who will be a bit disheartened when his Treo finally gives up the ghost.
Pesonally, I think people are making far too big a deal out of this whole thing. After all, if two of your closest friends were squabbling and had somehow decided that they weren't willing and/or able to reconcile their differences, would you suddenly conclude that you just can't be friends with one or the other any longer?
How do we KNOW that they'll REALLY last 1,000 years?
I dunno, but I hear they have rock-solid proof... something to do with a borrowed Delorean, if I'm not mistaken.
I think the "it's my car, but it wasn't me" is a valid defense, and why I so loathe red light cameras and photo radar. All an investigator can say from either of these is that a specific car was captured on film.
Quite so... and in some jurisdictions, red light cameras can be disputed very readily, specifically because of this issue. If your car is caught running a red light, and your teenage kid was the one driving the car, then the ticket can be invalidated by a very simple process: You (as in, the vehicle owner) sign a notarized affidavit stating that you were not the person driving the vehicle at the time of the traffic infraction, and you mail that back to the address indicated on the ticket that was mailed to you. The ticket is immediately dismissed without question.
Of course, in my example above (and frankly, in most cases) the owner of the vehicle knows perfectly well who the driver of the vehicle was... so the premise behind these mailed out tickets is that the owners outrage at the person who ran through the red light is going to exceed their outrage at the system which misidentified the owner as the person who violated the law. So the number of people who avoid the fine by taking the trouble to actually get a signed affidavit is likely negligible compared to the profitability of the cameras overall.
(Unfortunately, I can't really find a good way to relate all of that to the primary discussion about IP addresses...)
Okay... so I read this posting, and then I go on over to the sega.com website to see what their current offerings are... and "Daisy Fuentes Pilates" pops up as the initially displayed game. Is there no end to the irony around here?
(For those of you who actually read all three linked articles... or is that, all two?)
In addition to Rock n Roll, the mormon crickets are repelled by alchohol, caffine, premarital sex, and gay marriage.
Haven't you heard? The Mormon church has renounced their previous stand against caffeine, since they just purchased PepsiCo and all of its subsidiary brands. Now, they no longer believe that it's a sin to consume caffeinated drinks -- but it absolutely is a sin to consume any product sold by that evil spawn of the devil, Coca-cola! (I know it's true, 'cause I read it in an e-mail from a friend of a friend of a friend.........)
The moral of the story: don't watch TV, especially commercials.
That... or DVR all of your TV shows with something like EyeTV, add automatic commercial skipping with something like Comskip, and never watch television on the TV studios terms again... watch your shows whenever you want, and without commercials.
Trust me... you'll never go back.
Well gee, of course an all-Apple household would cost more... because after all, previous studies have already show that MacHeads are more honest than their Windows brethren... so likewise, MacHeads are obviously more likely to pay for all of their software (as well as their media files) instead of pirating it, right? ;-)
Well... that, or both studies are contrived and worth less then the ad-click-throughs that they generated for the sites reporting on them. Like Mark Twain was so fond of saying... "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies... and statistics."
A variation on this has been available at the OnMac forum for over a year now: http://forum.onmac.net/showthread.php?t=2793 (Alas, the forum has pretty much become overrun with spam, and the administrator has been MIA for quite some time... so it's fairly difficult to find anything new over there these days.)
If his case is valid, you'll see some true bi-partisan cooperation in Austin as they speedily pass a repeal of the relevant section of the state code.
Not likely: Texas is a pretty strong Republican stronghold. More likely you'll see the Democrats standing fast behind the Libertarians, in the hopes that the Republican write-ins will somehow still lose to the prominently displayed Libertarian candidate -- thus handing the entire election over to the Democrats quite handily.
I won't argue that point -- but I would suggest that even that makes very little difference, as every government office I've ever been in already uses Microsoft Office exclusively.
(Of course, I'm in the United States, so that may have something to do with my observations...)
It seems to me that it doesn't matter in the least if OOXML becomes a standard -- because frankly, nobody but Microsoft is going to put any significant effort into supporting it. A "standard" which is only supported by one product is about as useful as a two inch long drinking straw in a world of six inch tall soda cans... what's the point in even worrying about it?
Another example of this same problem is the Acid3 browser test. While I applaud the guys who came up with the tests for pointing out how many "standards" have been ignored by modern browsers, and I am quite impressed with the folks developing Opera and Safari/Webkit for their efforts to meet those standards... it still won't genuinely mean much until the forty foot gorilla in the room (Microsoft's Internet Explorer, of course) decides to play nice too.
In the case of Acid3, this is a regrettable fact of life that actually works to Microsoft's advantage -- which is why they aren't chomping at the bit to actually fix their browser. In the case of OOXML... Microsoft probably doesn't realize it yet, but they're pretty much screwed no matter how this thing ends.
"The doctor gave me a pill, and I grew a new kidney! The doctor gave me a pill, and I grew a new kidney!"
"Fully functional?"
"Fully functional!"
Apple says differently over at Playlist.
You know, it occurs to me that the patent office might be able to significantly reduce the time required to research any given technology patent, by simply submitting an article to Slashdot. I think I just read about four or five different posts indicating what might well be genuine prior art, and at least one of those had a link to a business which probably filed their own related patents. But more importantly, I think that digging through all of the other amusing-but-mostly-irrelevant posts under this article would be much less boring then digging through the reams and reams of existing patents... ;-)
On Apple's new animated home page, it says that you can encode your own home movies, so I would assume that it's not too much of a stretch to get most of your other video files into the iPod as well. (Of course, now you're going to have to re-encode all of your illegal divx files into either H.264 or MPEG4...)
I think you may have missed this article from back in February.
You mean, Apple might have copied the aesthetic design of an old Walkman, and the functionality of an ancient transistor radio?? Could this possibly be an image of the long sought after missing link, between the TR-1 and the iPod?!? Oh no! Technological evolution!! Say it isn't so!!
Honestly! If Apple's aesthetic design team hadn't researched successful designs of years gone by, I would be absolutely astonished! The innovation here wasn't in the physical appearances of the iPod, (as shown by these images of the TR-1 and that random Walkman on the link above) or in the functionality of the iPod (MP3 players already existed from other companies) or even in the interface design (as indicated by recent patent issues brought up by Creative Technology). Apple's innovation here was the integration of all these distinct elements into a single elegantly designed device: the iPod -- which as everyone knows by now, caused the fledgling MP3 market to finally take root! Simply put, Apple did what others had already been trying to do... but they did it right.
(Oh yeah... and I guess the iTunes Music Store may have had something to do with it too.)
Oh yeah... and while you're asleep, it auto-magically turns the computer back on and sends copies of all your pr0n files to the local authorities as well. Isn't technology great?!?
So it seems that the question which Yahoo must ask themselves is this: Does the revenue from all those adware related pop-ups (which I believe -- correct me if I'm wrong -- are consistently seeing fewer click-throughs) outweigh the potential revenue from people actually surfing to the Yahoo portal sites?
So if you're a Firefox user -- rejoice! You're no longer a renegade!
Are you kidding? I'd be willing to bet that Lego is absolutely thrilled at this hack. Think about it like this: Your business is toys -- not software, so naturally you know from the start that there's a good chance that the software firm you hired isn't going to quite hit your vision. You release a piece of software that almost represents what you wanted, under the standard business practice of releasing a product that's "good enough" rather then waiting for the product to be perfect -- which never happens. Your customers then fix the most glaring issues remaining in your software for you!
Of course this ultimately represents a zero loss for everyone, because it creates a better overall customer experience -- which would have the natural tendency to drive sales up within that demographic of customers. Therefore, Lego's next logical step is probably going to be to obviate the "hack" by having it incorporated directly into the product itself.