unfortunately, Atari never really learned how to innovate and compete in the changing market. They defined the console market, and then they owned it. And then they fumbled it, and never recovered.
They came out with some great arcade games, but the arcade market has been in steady decline for the past 20 years. They failed to adequately capitalize on the growth of the PC and console markets.
It's interesting that Activision is still running strong, though. Activision started out by competing with Atari on Atari's own 2600 (they were the first; Sears was selling their own line of game cartridges, but those were simply Atari games with a Sears label on them). Activision was never tied down to one platform, so they had the flexibility to move to whatever game platform was the most popular. I don't think that Atari really made an effort to capitalize on their brands in that way until after they were swallowed up by Hasbro, and by then their portfolio of brands was 20 years old -- far too old to really compete in today's gaming market.
You walk into an arcade and what do you see? 5 different racing games, a couple of gun games, maybe a dance game, and thats it!
WTF happened to arcade games?
The arcade game market collapsed because of two factors: PC gaming and console gaming. Consumers like yourself found and purchased replacements that were in some ways adequate and in some ways superior to arcade games. The money that would have gone into arcade gamaing you spent on home gaming systems, instead.
Back in the late 70's and early 80's, the quantity and quality of arcade games was vastly superior to PC and console games; by the early 90's, the quantity of games was clearly with the home gaming market. And by the late 90's, the quality and features of home gaming had either equalled or exceeded arcade games. The only area where arcade games could really innovate was in elaborate designs like race cars and motorbikes and snowboards. I suspect that such arcade units cost more to build and to maintain, and along with the decreased revenue per unit, forced the arcade manufacturers to raise the cost per game to anywhere from.50 to $2.00. Higher prices are also a contributing factor to lower demand, just accelerating the death spiral that the arcade industry is already in.
You want arcade games to survive? Then you (and 50 million of your closest friends) should stop buying PC and console games and start spending your money exclusively on arcade games.
Me? I prefer the cost, convenience and replayablity of home gaming. I was an arcade fanatic back in the early 80's, but these days, if I find myself in an arcade once a year, that's a lot.
I'm using Mozilla on the Mac, and MSNBC is one of my preferred news sites. I have it all set up with the stocks I want to watch, local stories, et al.
It seems that, every few months, the cookie is reset/deleted/whatever, and I have to go back through and set it up again. Very annoying, though I just accept it as the price I have to pay for accessing a Microsoft site with a non-MS OS and a non-MS browser.
The BSA exists to create publicity that proves that companies should not engage in piracy. To that end, they will persue the company rather than the admin, unless persuing the admin would generate more news coverage.
They are also a shakedown racket, but their purpose is to generate PR.
Yeah, but here's the rub: most business owners are completely unaware that the BSA even exists. Sys admins are acutely aware.
As much as I hate to say this, if the BSA truely wants to deter software piracy, they have to recognize that their target audience is the administrators first and the businesses second.
If the BSA managed to get some jail time and/or stiff fines for the sys admins, themselves, there would be a lot less piracy going on.
The only thing they're chasing is the guy with the money.
I guess it depends on what the primary objective of the BSA is. If their primary goal is to decrease corporate software piracy, then it makes just as much sense to pursue the admin in this particular case as to pursue the company.
If the BSA exists solely to shakedown companies, then yeah, worms like this admin are their allies.
Just make a bunch of space elevators. Then the allure of nailing one declines because a) it's no longer one of a kind, and b) it doesn't inflict as much damage to take one out.
I agree. These things are going to take a helluva long time to build, so the first one is going to be a very attractive target, and difficult to compensate for if it's taken out. Put up 20 or 30, and suddenly each individual one is far less important.
And do you really think that the US Government will let just anybody near the SE, even as a tourist?
I wouldn't imagine that the government would let a plane fly into the Pentagon, either, but that's exactly what happened.
I also wouldn't imagine that the government would let a plane fly into the White House; and if not for some brave passengers, that probably would have happened, too.
Do you think you could fly a plane near a shuttle launch and not get shot down? You won't be able to get near the SE eaither.
We're talking decades down the road for this to happen. Suppose the vehicle that is hijacked is in a low-earth orbit. Are you telling me that we will be able to respond quickly enough? Maybe not even a vehicle, maybe they just hack into a satellite and put it on a collision course with the elevator.
would not be filled with tens of thousands of civilians
Of course not, but killing thousands of civilians was only one of the objectives of 9/11. Al-Qaida specifically targeted the towers because they were in New York's financial district; they were hoping to throw the US into financial chaos.
They also tried to sink a Navy ship in a Yemen port. Would that have crippled our Navy? Of course not; but the sinking of a US naval vessel would have been a symbolic blow.
Likewise, destroying the space elevator is a symbolic blow. And given how cheaply it can take payloads into space, a whole industry would rise up around it. If terrorists destroy our one and only space elevator, it would cripple the industries that depend on it.
It would be a VERY difficult think to attack, especially in the paranoid days after 9/11.
Right now, yes. Which is why I said it needed to be isolated and well guarded.
However, the Wired article is talking about building a tourism industry around the thing. That's where you start running into problems, because you can't cater to tourists en masse and still do a background check on everyone who wants a ride.
But let's not even bother thinking about getting on with our lives. Let's just bury our pathetic, frightened heads in the sand and hope those nasty bad mens don't shove another 767 up our pasty fat asses.
Here's a clue: The world has changed. Let's also not bury our heads in the sand to the fact that terrorists can accomplish a great deal of destruction with a relatively small amount of financing and manpower.
I never said don't build it, I just said that we had to take terrorist considerations into account.
Space elevator and terrorism
on
Columbia Coverage
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· Score: 3, Insightful
No matter how good of an idea the space elevator may be, we would definitely have to consider the possibilty and consequences of a terrorist attack on it. Not only would a space elevator be a Huge Damn Target, but it would also be iconic of the US's technical achievements.
Look at how Al-Qaida was obsessed with the twin towers. They made an attempt in 1993 which didn't work, so they regrouped and drew up new plans. I can see terrorist organizations simply salivating at the prospect of destroying a space elevator.
If we attempt this at all, it would definitely have to be on a military base, way out in some desert in the middle of nowhere and surrounded anti-aircraft missles. Even then, that only buys us time.
Apple's reaction will be interesting. If they jump on these developers, they will be sending a strong message about exactly what they are selling with the iPod.
From the uClinux webpage:
Unfortunately the iPod is considered a "closed-platform" by Apple and technical info is virtually non-existant so this has involved a fair bit of guess work, reverse-engineering and experimentation!
If they aren't an authorized Apple developer, and they've completely reverse-engineered everything (because of a lack of documentation), then what can Apple legally do?
Keep in mind that the last person that Apple brought the hammer down on (for iCommune) was an actual Apple developer with Apple documentation, so Apple had a little bit of leverage on him. Whether it would have truly been successful in court is another matter...
Frankly, I can't see Apple doing anything about this. It's not going to threaten their current iPod plans, and it's going to be a marginal group of users who will attempt to install this.
Yeah, but look at the loan amount ($559 million); that's going to take anyone a long time to repay. Is it possible that MS made the loan a few years before the XBox was released (right about Sega dropped the Dreamcast), as a guarantee that Sega would at least *do* some XBox ports?
At the time, Sega had some A-List franchises, but were scaling back dramatically, and the XBox was a big question mark. The money could have funded a full-blown XBox division in Sega.
Not that I have any info, this is all just speculation on a possible scenario.
Uh, next time you're trying to build a persuasive argument to industry executives, you may want to think about quoting someone other than The Artist Currently Known As Prince. He may make some salient points, but he sure sounds like an idiot with his phonetical writing style.
Then it sounds like it wasn't as successful as you think. Just because an ad is being seen doesn't mean it's actually working; if the company name didn't stick in your brain than the whole thing was a waste of money.
Actually, the reason I didn't remember the company name is that I haven't played the game in years. However, I still remember the game, and if I really wanted to, I could go to Google and find it.
Also bear in mind that I was not in the target audience at the time. If I had been looking to add Flash or Shockwave to my Big Commercial Site back in 1997, and I received that game in the email, you better believe I would have been on the phone with those people in a hurry. But again, I wasn't in the target audience, so it didn't really matter what I thought.
Personally, I think the advertainment thing has gotten really old, really fast. There were a few games that came out early on that were memorable (anyone remember the IBM banner ad with the race car game written in Java?) simply by virtue of being first, but now it's really, really overdone. It kind of mirrors the game industry in that the cute little games that can be produced on a shoestring budget just don't cut it anymore, you have to dump some serious money into the production of an advertainment game these days.
Remember Snowcraft?
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Advergames
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· Score: 3, Interesting
For those that don't know, Snowcraft was a really cute little Shockwave game that came out around 1997, I believe. The object was, simply, to win a snowball fight against the opposing team. The game was distributed as a standalone app, and was emailed EVERYWHERE. When you lost the game, a message came up that said, "Merry Christmas from..." (sorry, forgot the name of the web design company that produced it), along with an email link.
That design firm got swallowed up by a bigger web design firm less than a year later. I've tried to guess at what they spent to produce the game ($15k, maybe?), and this was right at the time that Shockwave and Flash were becoming hot properties, but the talent was in short supply. No doubt they recovered their investment many times over, especially when they principals sold out the business.
Online advertainment has been around for a long time, it's funny that it's just now getting recognition.
The waste is converted "through a three-step purifying process of UV light filtration, ozonation and ultra-filtration", and they say it's "even cleaner than that made from nearby creek water."
Uhhh... why not just use the water from the nearby creek?
Did someone actually stand up at a board meeting and say, "No, let's not use the creek water, let's use human waste water instead!"
Now when you tell someone there's an "ice sheet" on the mountain, you may have to clarify what you mean...
And detecting their presence wouldn't be that hard. Simple electronics would notice a large ammount of radiation being emitted from an empty field.
Even simpler than that, I would image. If you've got thousands or tiny systems operating independently out there and chatting on the network, and they suddenly all fell silent, then you have a pretty good idea that something is going on.
Although, I suppose a really sophisticated army could capture all of the network chatter for, say, half an hour, then zap the sensors.
To fool the network, just play back the network chatter with updated headers on all of the packets with an updated time stamp.
The problem is not the 9,999 messages that you know are going to come from good senders; the problem is the one message that may be coming for an unexpected source that is going to cause you to sift through 50,000 spam emails looking for it.
That is why filtering fails as a solution.
You know that email from the headhunter that wanted to double your current pay rate and cut your hours by a third? No you don't, because it got flagged as spam and accidentally deleted.
Filtering is not a true spam solution. All it takes is for one false positive on a Really Important Email and be accidentally deleted to totally destroy the value of any filtering system.
Given that, the alternative to having tagged emails automativally deleted is to collect them in a folder and scan the message senders and subject lines. If you're doing that, then the spammer is getting a pitch through to you in the subject line. This therefore does not lessen the incentive for the spammer, but simply causes him to change tactics and put his best pitch in his subject line.
Right now, I get 60-80 spams a day. What happens when I start getting 600-800 a day? Again, filtering starts to break down, because I have SO MANY messages to scan everyday that the possibility of me missing a legitimate one is very high.
These ventures require money. Who will want to risk money on a venture that has a high likelyhood of getting smashed?
90 million captive users watching your banner ads while they download? This is a golden business model of cat-and-mouse; by the time the courts shut them down, they will have made hundreds of millions, stashed away in private overseas accounts, and then they just declare bankruptcy to avoid paying anything out.
The reward is too great to discourage future Kazaa-wannabees, and all that is going to happen is that the rogue file swappers will perfect their business models based on all of the previous litigation and judgements. I suspect the RIAA will exhaust their legal war chest before they make a dent in online file swapping.
It just reinforces the fact that the music industry needs to offer a competitive product (not the token ones they are tossing us now). Start selling songs, from.50 to $1.50, and give the owner complete control over the file. Will that be enough to stop online music piracy? Of course not, but music piracy existed long before Napster came along.
What are you planning to do with it, run an enterprise Oracle server on it?
It's a game system, fer cryin out loud. At $150, it's very reasonable, too. It plays a lot of great games now, and by 2005, there will be a lot more great games.
You also have to figure that any new game system will take at least a year to replace an old system, so developers will still be cranking out great GameCube games through 2006. Some of the PS1's best games came out AFTER the PS2 had been released.
Flash MX does search engines?
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SVG On the Rise
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· Score: 1
Not from what I can tell. The page you linked to says nothing about SE's, and a search on Google shows that Flash developers also say "no".
Slashdot Mirror
unfortunately, Atari never really learned how to innovate and compete in the changing market. They defined the console market, and then they owned it. And then they fumbled it, and never recovered.
They came out with some great arcade games, but the arcade market has been in steady decline for the past 20 years. They failed to adequately capitalize on the growth of the PC and console markets.
It's interesting that Activision is still running strong, though. Activision started out by competing with Atari on Atari's own 2600 (they were the first; Sears was selling their own line of game cartridges, but those were simply Atari games with a Sears label on them). Activision was never tied down to one platform, so they had the flexibility to move to whatever game platform was the most popular. I don't think that Atari really made an effort to capitalize on their brands in that way until after they were swallowed up by Hasbro, and by then their portfolio of brands was 20 years old -- far too old to really compete in today's gaming market.
You walk into an arcade and what do you see? 5 different racing games, a couple of gun games, maybe a dance game, and thats it!
.50 to $2.00. Higher prices are also a contributing factor to lower demand, just accelerating the death spiral that the arcade industry is already in.
WTF happened to arcade games?
The arcade game market collapsed because of two factors: PC gaming and console gaming. Consumers like yourself found and purchased replacements that were in some ways adequate and in some ways superior to arcade games. The money that would have gone into arcade gamaing you spent on home gaming systems, instead.
Back in the late 70's and early 80's, the quantity and quality of arcade games was vastly superior to PC and console games; by the early 90's, the quantity of games was clearly with the home gaming market. And by the late 90's, the quality and features of home gaming had either equalled or exceeded arcade games. The only area where arcade games could really innovate was in elaborate designs like race cars and motorbikes and snowboards. I suspect that such arcade units cost more to build and to maintain, and along with the decreased revenue per unit, forced the arcade manufacturers to raise the cost per game to anywhere from
You want arcade games to survive? Then you (and 50 million of your closest friends) should stop buying PC and console games and start spending your money exclusively on arcade games.
Me? I prefer the cost, convenience and replayablity of home gaming. I was an arcade fanatic back in the early 80's, but these days, if I find myself in an arcade once a year, that's a lot.
By default, Mozilla deletes cookies after 90 days, but you can change that in the preferences.
I was unaware of that setting in the Preferences.
I've never changed it, but a quick check reveals that it's not on, anyway. Also, I don't have this problem with any other sites.
FWIW, even IE for Mac loses its MSNBC.com cookie from time to time.
Wait...why would I shop ONLINE for something that's down the street again?
Oh, right, no sales tax.
Typically, the shipping charges would have replaced the sales tax, negating any discount. But now, you have to pay shipping AND sales tax.
I suspect that more people are going to use the web to shop, and drive to the b&m store for an actual purchase.
I'm using Mozilla on the Mac, and MSNBC is one of my preferred news sites. I have it all set up with the stocks I want to watch, local stories, et al.
It seems that, every few months, the cookie is reset/deleted/whatever, and I have to go back through and set it up again. Very annoying, though I just accept it as the price I have to pay for accessing a Microsoft site with a non-MS OS and a non-MS browser.
The BSA exists to create publicity that proves that companies should not engage in piracy. To that end, they will persue the company rather than the admin, unless persuing the admin would generate more news coverage.
They are also a shakedown racket, but their purpose is to generate PR.
Yeah, but here's the rub: most business owners are completely unaware that the BSA even exists. Sys admins are acutely aware.
As much as I hate to say this, if the BSA truely wants to deter software piracy, they have to recognize that their target audience is the administrators first and the businesses second.
If the BSA managed to get some jail time and/or stiff fines for the sys admins, themselves, there would be a lot less piracy going on.
The only thing they're chasing is the guy with the money.
I guess it depends on what the primary objective of the BSA is. If their primary goal is to decrease corporate software piracy, then it makes just as much sense to pursue the admin in this particular case as to pursue the company.
If the BSA exists solely to shakedown companies, then yeah, worms like this admin are their allies.
He installed the software while worknig there, knowing we didn't have licenses, then when he got fired, he called the BSA.
IANAL, but it sounds to me like the company could sue his ass off, and possibly even get criminal charges brought against him.
It also seems to me that, if the comapny is forthright in admitting guilt and ignorance, the BSA may be willing to pursue the network admin instead.
Just make a bunch of space elevators. Then the allure of nailing one declines because a) it's no longer one of a kind, and b) it doesn't inflict as much damage to take one out.
I agree. These things are going to take a helluva long time to build, so the first one is going to be a very attractive target, and difficult to compensate for if it's taken out. Put up 20 or 30, and suddenly each individual one is far less important.
And do you really think that the US Government will let just anybody near the SE, even as a tourist?
I wouldn't imagine that the government would let a plane fly into the Pentagon, either, but that's exactly what happened.
I also wouldn't imagine that the government would let a plane fly into the White House; and if not for some brave passengers, that probably would have happened, too.
Do you think you could fly a plane near a shuttle launch and not get shot down? You won't be able to get near the SE eaither.
We're talking decades down the road for this to happen. Suppose the vehicle that is hijacked is in a low-earth orbit. Are you telling me that we will be able to respond quickly enough? Maybe not even a vehicle, maybe they just hack into a satellite and put it on a collision course with the elevator.
would not be filled with tens of thousands of civilians
Of course not, but killing thousands of civilians was only one of the objectives of 9/11. Al-Qaida specifically targeted the towers because they were in New York's financial district; they were hoping to throw the US into financial chaos.
They also tried to sink a Navy ship in a Yemen port. Would that have crippled our Navy? Of course not; but the sinking of a US naval vessel would have been a symbolic blow.
Likewise, destroying the space elevator is a symbolic blow. And given how cheaply it can take payloads into space, a whole industry would rise up around it. If terrorists destroy our one and only space elevator, it would cripple the industries that depend on it.
It would be a VERY difficult think to attack, especially in the paranoid days after 9/11.
Right now, yes. Which is why I said it needed to be isolated and well guarded.
However, the Wired article is talking about building a tourism industry around the thing. That's where you start running into problems, because you can't cater to tourists en masse and still do a background check on everyone who wants a ride.
But let's not even bother thinking about getting on with our lives. Let's just bury our pathetic, frightened heads in the sand and hope those nasty bad mens don't shove another 767 up our pasty fat asses.
Here's a clue: The world has changed. Let's also not bury our heads in the sand to the fact that terrorists can accomplish a great deal of destruction with a relatively small amount of financing and manpower.
I never said don't build it, I just said that we had to take terrorist considerations into account.
No matter how good of an idea the space elevator may be, we would definitely have to consider the possibilty and consequences of a terrorist attack on it. Not only would a space elevator be a Huge Damn Target, but it would also be iconic of the US's technical achievements.
Look at how Al-Qaida was obsessed with the twin towers. They made an attempt in 1993 which didn't work, so they regrouped and drew up new plans. I can see terrorist organizations simply salivating at the prospect of destroying a space elevator.
If we attempt this at all, it would definitely have to be on a military base, way out in some desert in the middle of nowhere and surrounded anti-aircraft missles. Even then, that only buys us time.
Apple's reaction will be interesting. If they jump on these developers, they will be sending a strong message about exactly what they are selling with the iPod.
From the uClinux webpage:
Unfortunately the iPod is considered a "closed-platform" by Apple and technical info is virtually non-existant so this has involved a fair bit of guess work, reverse-engineering and experimentation!
If they aren't an authorized Apple developer, and they've completely reverse-engineered everything (because of a lack of documentation), then what can Apple legally do?
Keep in mind that the last person that Apple brought the hammer down on (for iCommune) was an actual Apple developer with Apple documentation, so Apple had a little bit of leverage on him. Whether it would have truly been successful in court is another matter...
Frankly, I can't see Apple doing anything about this. It's not going to threaten their current iPod plans, and it's going to be a marginal group of users who will attempt to install this.
Yeah, but look at the loan amount ($559 million); that's going to take anyone a long time to repay. Is it possible that MS made the loan a few years before the XBox was released (right about Sega dropped the Dreamcast), as a guarantee that Sega would at least *do* some XBox ports?
At the time, Sega had some A-List franchises, but were scaling back dramatically, and the XBox was a big question mark. The money could have funded a full-blown XBox division in Sega.
Not that I have any info, this is all just speculation on a possible scenario.
Uh, next time you're trying to build a persuasive argument to industry executives, you may want to think about quoting someone other than The Artist Currently Known As Prince. He may make some salient points, but he sure sounds like an idiot with his phonetical writing style.
Then it sounds like it wasn't as successful as you think. Just because an ad is being seen doesn't mean it's actually working; if the company name didn't stick in your brain than the whole thing was a waste of money.
Actually, the reason I didn't remember the company name is that I haven't played the game in years. However, I still remember the game, and if I really wanted to, I could go to Google and find it.
Also bear in mind that I was not in the target audience at the time. If I had been looking to add Flash or Shockwave to my Big Commercial Site back in 1997, and I received that game in the email, you better believe I would have been on the phone with those people in a hurry. But again, I wasn't in the target audience, so it didn't really matter what I thought.
Personally, I think the advertainment thing has gotten really old, really fast. There were a few games that came out early on that were memorable (anyone remember the IBM banner ad with the race car game written in Java?) simply by virtue of being first, but now it's really, really overdone. It kind of mirrors the game industry in that the cute little games that can be produced on a shoestring budget just don't cut it anymore, you have to dump some serious money into the production of an advertainment game these days.
For those that don't know, Snowcraft was a really cute little Shockwave game that came out around 1997, I believe. The object was, simply, to win a snowball fight against the opposing team. The game was distributed as a standalone app, and was emailed EVERYWHERE. When you lost the game, a message came up that said, "Merry Christmas from..." (sorry, forgot the name of the web design company that produced it), along with an email link.
That design firm got swallowed up by a bigger web design firm less than a year later. I've tried to guess at what they spent to produce the game ($15k, maybe?), and this was right at the time that Shockwave and Flash were becoming hot properties, but the talent was in short supply. No doubt they recovered their investment many times over, especially when they principals sold out the business.
Online advertainment has been around for a long time, it's funny that it's just now getting recognition.
The waste is converted "through a three-step purifying process of UV light filtration, ozonation and ultra-filtration", and they say it's "even cleaner than that made from nearby creek water."
Uhhh... why not just use the water from the nearby creek?
Did someone actually stand up at a board meeting and say, "No, let's not use the creek water, let's use human waste water instead!"
Now when you tell someone there's an "ice sheet" on the mountain, you may have to clarify what you mean...
And detecting their presence wouldn't be that hard. Simple electronics would notice a large ammount of radiation being emitted from an empty field.
Even simpler than that, I would image. If you've got thousands or tiny systems operating independently out there and chatting on the network, and they suddenly all fell silent, then you have a pretty good idea that something is going on.
Although, I suppose a really sophisticated army could capture all of the network chatter for, say, half an hour, then zap the sensors.
To fool the network, just play back the network chatter with updated headers on all of the packets with an updated time stamp.
The problem is not the 9,999 messages that you know are going to come from good senders; the problem is the one message that may be coming for an unexpected source that is going to cause you to sift through 50,000 spam emails looking for it.
That is why filtering fails as a solution.
You know that email from the headhunter that wanted to double your current pay rate and cut your hours by a third? No you don't, because it got flagged as spam and accidentally deleted.
Filtering is not a true spam solution. All it takes is for one false positive on a Really Important Email and be accidentally deleted to totally destroy the value of any filtering system.
Given that, the alternative to having tagged emails automativally deleted is to collect them in a folder and scan the message senders and subject lines. If you're doing that, then the spammer is getting a pitch through to you in the subject line. This therefore does not lessen the incentive for the spammer, but simply causes him to change tactics and put his best pitch in his subject line.
Right now, I get 60-80 spams a day. What happens when I start getting 600-800 a day? Again, filtering starts to break down, because I have SO MANY messages to scan everyday that the possibility of me missing a legitimate one is very high.
These ventures require money. Who will want to risk money on a venture that has a high likelyhood of getting smashed?
.50 to $1.50, and give the owner complete control over the file. Will that be enough to stop online music piracy? Of course not, but music piracy existed long before Napster came along.
90 million captive users watching your banner ads while they download? This is a golden business model of cat-and-mouse; by the time the courts shut them down, they will have made hundreds of millions, stashed away in private overseas accounts, and then they just declare bankruptcy to avoid paying anything out.
The reward is too great to discourage future Kazaa-wannabees, and all that is going to happen is that the rogue file swappers will perfect their business models based on all of the previous litigation and judgements. I suspect the RIAA will exhaust their legal war chest before they make a dent in online file swapping.
It just reinforces the fact that the music industry needs to offer a competitive product (not the token ones they are tossing us now). Start selling songs, from
I thought that was the plan to cryogenically freeze Walt until he could be revived by medics of the future...
What are you planning to do with it, run an enterprise Oracle server on it?
It's a game system, fer cryin out loud. At $150, it's very reasonable, too. It plays a lot of great games now, and by 2005, there will be a lot more great games.
You also have to figure that any new game system will take at least a year to replace an old system, so developers will still be cranking out great GameCube games through 2006. Some of the PS1's best games came out AFTER the PS2 had been released.
Not from what I can tell. The page you linked to says nothing about SE's, and a search on Google shows that Flash developers also say "no".