It's a good first shot, although a lot of the feedback provided by HNers seems to be on point.
It's funny that it only took a few months to get sick of the Twitter Bootstrap look, felt like it took a year to get sick of the 37Signals/Basecamp rip offs.
Typically, "upgrade your browser" techniques are welcomed in HN. Google drops support for IE6, then IE7 - smiles all around. Apps block off IE6 - "good for them".
AT&T does something similar and it's met with frustration?
Requiring IE* should be frowned upon. But anything that says "upgrade from IE6", in end-user land, is probably a good thing.
My frustration was because IE*, and thus some form of Windows was required. I use modern browsers, just never IE, and windows only when I must.
So I agree with your point about upgrading being a good thing, but the underlying absurdity is that something inherently platform independent (a webform) was perverted into something entirely specific to not only a particular OS, but a particular browser.
My ire with IE being updated was that I was never going to use IE ever again (by choice), whether it was 6 or 8; and so whether it was upgraded or not would not affect my browsing experience on sites other than this particular instance. So for me, it was just one additional hoop that I had to grudgingly jump through.
I wonder if anybody at Sony has come up with the conclusion that it's always going to get hacked, and the money they spend trying to secure it(along with the bad press) could be better focused in other areas of the company.
It seems unlikely; if they're not seen as doing something to fight piracy on the platform, even if that something amount to throwing some money down a hole, they could see publishers abandon them, which would cost them more money in the long run than paying a couple of firmware devs to play sisyphus.
You seem to be missing "Business 101" --The continuous
cracking-fixing-cracking cycle results in press coverage and hence, free
advertising for Sony as well as making the product more desirable to
some fraction of potential buyers.
The problem is, most of the revenue is made from licensing to game
producers rather from console sales, so unless there is some token
effort to keep the console "secure," the real revenue stream would
disappear.
Couldn't people take advantage of this by only commenting on high-karma comments, regardless of whether or not it's relevant to the parent-comment, but instead just piggy-backing to stay on the first page?
