Going out of the way to piss off customers is never a good business model. However, you have to look who the customers are, and those are the ad sites, whom are treated with deference with "accidental" releases of personal information and such. To the websites, people visiting are considered visitors/consumers at best, whining maggots/leeches at worst.
Welcome to the modern business model where the buyer is considered a necessary evil at best. I have seen software development houses where the people running it say that a person is a customer until the sale goes through, then they become nothing more than a leech or a cost center. You see this attitude in game companies which release beta quality code for their products in stores, then might put out a single patch if that.
If I really like a site, I just pay for a membership. Be it/., Pandora, last.fm, or other sites. This way, they get what is due them, and I don't have to worry about malicious ads trying to exploit browser or add-on security issues.
One idea might be a membership clearinghouse. A customer pays dues every so often, and the clearinghouse divvies out the money in proportion to what member websites get the most hits from members. Of course, some thought will be needed to be put in for click fraud, but it is the same with ads too. This way, websites can be profitable for members that don't want to see ads without having to do a definite mechanism for subscriptions.
Don't forget the unscrupulous ad rotator "services" which allow their clients randomly drop ads with malicious JavaScript or Flash code, and do it in a way where the same IP and machine signature isn't hit twice.
I'm sorry, until ad spewing companies stop being an enabler to botnet installs, compromised code and machine infections, I will continue to make sure their stuff gets blocked. This is a security issue, plain and simple.
Exactly. Another option with handbrake is the fact that it has presets for iPhone friendly output. Of course, a phone isn't the ideal media, but for carrying around a couple movies to watch if stuck somewhere for a few hours, it is better than nothing.
If I did have kids, the first thing I'd be doing is ripping copies and keeping the movies stored either on a hard disk based media player, or as burned copies. This way, the originals are well preserved, and if one of the kids decides to make a peanut butter and DVD sammich, replacing the burns is far easier than trying to find a copy of some movie that is back in the Disney vault for an indefinite time.
This is/., where a lot of us are jaded, cynical IT people who have worked with too much human flocculent. We have seen USB flash drives and "MP3 cds" placed in parking lots in effort to get the company we worked for compromised. We have seen anonymous FTP servers stuffed with warez and child pr0n just because people can. We have seen people open up modems in the '90s to tethering their cellphones today to company equipment in order to get past the pr0n blockers, and then get their company confidential PCs infected.
If someone made a system to scan uploads and mark them clean, good luck. Rapidshare has been trying to find a way to keep people from doing exactly this for years.
This is exactly why I use an anonymous VPN service [1]. As one goes up the food chain to the core fiber links which route the core Internet traffic, the fewer people have access to the traffic and/or logging capability. To boot, if they have logging capability at the core, they would have it at the edges. There are a *lot* fewer people that have access from the core router to Facebook's page than have access (either with admin access, or are on the same subnet and can sniff/change stuff in transit.)
Essentially all someone can do with my network traffic between the endpoint connection and to my VM is drop packets and deny service. If someone is able to intercept/modify traffic going from the VPS to FB, then not just myself, but a lot of people, have very big problems on their hands.
I highly recommend people use a VPS, or if the bandwidth needs are not that high, to consider a VPS (like linode). This not just keeps people from sniffing/intercepting/modifying your traffic, but gets rid of the geotagging ad "services" which love to slurp up where people physically are. It is only a matter of time before crooks use this to find when someone is out of town to time home invasions and/or break-ins.
[1]: There are a lot of anonymous VPN services, with a lot of smoke generated about which ones "log" and which ones don't. It would be nice to get a straight answer on this, but until then, I tend to stay with what the other business users use to secure their traffic.
Exactly. A VM is a full PC with the headaches. It is enough trouble to manage just the base operating systems, much less a hidden OS that is easily infected. Perhaps one could push out a standard image that dumps its changes when unloaded, but even then, until the image is powered down, there is a compromised box on the corporate network doing damage.
This is why I like encapsulating the app with as little to no client side code installed as possible. Combine ThinApp (which requires no client or infrastructure other than a Samba share and perhaps a machine to talk to to ensure the app hasn't been lifted from the corporate network) with sandboxie's ability to not just shed privs (like DropMyRights), but offer low level protection to either deny access or redirect it somewhere safe.
Perhaps this is something Microsoft should put in on an OS level basis -- the ability to have apps (or even instances of apps so a compromised window won't affect another window doing bank stuff of the same app) redirected completely to their own playpen which is destroyed upon program exit, and the only files saved are the ones the user explicitly saves with a dialog.
By moving virtualization from the system level to the app level [1], it means less overhead (no need to have multiple OSes running even with deduplication technology), and allows for configurability, and even forensic work as malware thinks it is happily scribbling over the Registry and filesystem when in reality, the diffs are there for any white-hat to look at.
[1]: Yes, I am aware that technically applications are virtualized with protected memory, but this going further, isolating not just memory space, but filesystem resources.
It is ironic, but I have been in locked down environments where this was the best thing to do. One SMB's finance department had their machines completely isolated from the Internet, except for a connection to the core servers, and a terminal server. The terminal server allowed people to browse the Web at their leisure, without having any chances of a Web browser compromise making it to the core machines.
If done right, it is a good security method to consider in some environments.
Last time I checked with them, they were asking $3500 just for a ticket to entry, and a price per seat. Glad they came down in price.
ThinApp is really cool if you have messed around with it. In a locked down environment, it allows an admin to install and update most software (including Microsoft Office) without ever needing admin rights on Windows. All changes (Registry and files) are redirected to a spot in the user's home directory. To boot, updates are as simple as making another encapsulated app and renaming it, then when the old app is executed on a server, the bootstrap piece will grab the new code and run that.
One probable answer to this is having the motherboards outsourced, but have a TPM-like daughterboard made in the US under tight working conditions and supervision. This won't protect against all hardware attacks, but at least there will be code in hardware to start with a chain of custody and tamper resistance.
Since TPM chips are not part of the active boot process, the BIOS doesn't know if its signature is valid or not. All it does is scan the next part, pass the hash of the result to the TPM, then call the next chunk of code in line. Finally, there is a point where the OS asks the TPM for the encryption keys, and if the BIOS, MBR, and other parts of the machine have not been touched, it will hand them over.
This could be what malware could do. Take some of the newer botnet clients that have modules for everything, be it trying to climb out of a VMWare machine, try to get around sandboxie, or other items. Malware could try to find items that are flashable, and reflash them with code for hooks to malware, or even worse an active keyboard logger. It was mentioned a while back in a previous/. article about a major computer maker with keyboard HIDs that were flashable with new code. So, if one got root on the box, it wouldn't be hard to reflash the keyboard with a keylogger that could store keystrokes, or just send them as packets to the blackhat's site.
Other than cellphone makers, a lot of devices really don't put much in the way of protecting their BIOS against rogue code, so it isn't farfetched to reflash a sound card, a NIC, a Northbridge/Southbridge controller, a video card, motherboard BIOS, or any other subsystem with malicious programming.
Very true. However it isn't as easy to get set up and pushed out on an enterprise basis as a single app file. Another downside is that because XP Mode is complete VM that can easily get compromised, it requires an instance of antivirus for corporate IT reasons. Having a single executable that runs in a "jail" is a lot better performance-wise, and means one doesn't have to set up virtualization on company desktops.
Probably the simplest solution for a company that needs IE6 on desktops for one task or application would be to use Citrix or Terminal server, and just keep a well locked down copy of IE6 on a dedicated server.
A while back, I remember thindownload.com offering IE6 in a Thinstall (Now VMWare ThinApp) package. It was taken down, but something like that would be the best thing for places that need IE6, but don't have the hardware to virtualize an ACE VM just for this program. Even better would be running the IE6 package under sandboxie so when (not if) it gets compromised, the damage is very limited what malware could attempt.
What I would want, and even if this cost 10-25% more than normal phones, would be a unit with state of the art specs and completely unlocked in every way. I wish Google would come out with an ADP every quarter or two so developers can write and test code on a "modern" phone. When not developing, it would give modders a reference platform to write code on.
Without root, I can run most apps I desire. I want to FTP out? Just fine. I want to compile zsh and slap it on the memory card, it will work. I want to run a P2P client? Frostwire and others are easily downloadable.
Rooting also doesn't modify the phone much. After I rooted my Droid X, the only files that are different are a su executable and an.apk for the UI frontend to always allow with a curtsy, allow, deny, or always tell an app to get fisted if it wants root. A jailbreak to be usable adds a complete userland, from a shell, to basic UNIX commands, to Debian's packaging mechanism, to gpg, to a graphical front end (Cydia). This is major brain surgery compared to just having a "#" prompt available.
What are the advantages of rooting? Tethering comes to mind first thing, although PDANet is an acceptable substitute in a number of cases. Custom ROMs are another reason. Backups using nandroid for a complete restorable image are good. Backing up apps completely with Titanium Backup is another. Finally, DroidWall is excellent making sure that apps that don't need to phone home do not phone home, especially "crapware" installed on a device.
Jailbreaking is needed if a person wants more than what is available in the App Store. Want an app just for playing Russian Roulette? Have to jailbreak. Want another browser? JB time. Want to see more than just a clock on the lock screen? Fire up Greenpois0n.
So, because so much functionality is gained by jailbreaking compared to "just" a "#" sign when rooting Android, the two processes are quite different.
Android has a lot of good terminal emulator apps. However, the iPhone has a few ssh clients, and there are only two clients for jailbroken devices, one of them supports some gestures, one doesn't. Both are named Mobile Terminal, so good luck finding the right one. To boot, Cydia has a Mobile Terminal app, but will bomb out if installed and an attempted is made to be run.
I'd love to see a full featured terminal app that can both work as a ssh client, as well as locally on Cydia. This, I'd pay decent money for.
The N900 is nice, but like the Nexus 1, it isn't sold in the US anymore, unless one buys it from an importer for an inflated price. Visit store.nokia.com and hit the US link... page not found, and it isn't offered anywhere on the site.
China is way different from Japan. For starters, it has resources, and it can play the game any way it wants to. Japan could only play hardball economically. China can at any time choose to overrun Korea and Taiwan at any time if they choose to, and the only recourse would either be a hard fought conventional war, or a nuclear exchange.
China can fight dirty. Japan cannot. And China is good at fighting dirty, because they "won" two wars (Korea and Vietnam) by proxy, sending in men and materials to do what the native population couldn't. If China chose to, they could easily turn up the heat in other areas hostile to the US by sending in troops and munitions. China could hand Iran the tools to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz and there would be nothing the US could do about it except engage in another theater of war which would be unwinnable.
This rings quite true, although it is slowly changing. Here in the US, you can get out of college with a fresh CS or scientific degree from a good university... and end up sitting on your duff for years waiting tables until you find something relevant. A simialr student who finishes up a generic major in college, then passes the bar exam in their state, will never see an unemployment line in their lifetime.
Until this is changed, Americans will see the cool electronic stuff only appearing in China and India first, just like the cool smartphones end up only in Japan or Korea and never make their way across the pond. Same with Internet stuff. Bandwidth in most parts of the US is actually shrinking, while in virtually every other nation, companies are busy laying fiber or putting up wireless towers.
The issue is I/O. CPU power is one thing. However, getting the data up the storage hierarchy to the CPU and back down again is where people pay the big bucks for real machines and not just fire up stacks of x86 boxes if they have some serious tasks.
This can be explained in a simple way: Build the latest Linux or BSD kernel. The time it takes to build one either has stayed the same, or actually has gotten longer than in times past (when one ran a kernel build of that time on that time's computers). Why is that, even though CPU power should be going up exponentially? I/O is not improving as fast as CPU numbers. It is improving, but it isn't doubling as often. So, even though the CPU is snappy, it still sits there waiting for the fetches from disk, to RAM, finally to the registers. Cache helps ease this pain, but I/O is still the bottleneck for a lot of tasks. If this was not the case, it would take less than a second to rebuild a kernel from a make clean.
Depends on the task at hand. If something is infinitely parallizable such as a ray-trace where a screen can have subsets of pixels be handed off to other cores, CPUs, or separate discrete computers, just chucking more blades in a rack will do the job.
But not all tasks can be broken up into bits that don't depend on each other. There are tasks such as various types of modeling which require step "A" to be done before step "B" can be handed out, and even with the best of technology, if a box had 1000 cores, these tasks would only run as fast as one lone core.
Super computers (just like mainframes) still have their place. They are not as awesome as in the past because of the compute power available to the average person, but they are still needed.
Since when did supercomputers become useless? They might not be as mainstream as bygone days when supercomputers in the past were the only things that could render stuff well for cool pictures, but they have a critical need in a lot of research, especially complicated models with a ton of variables to consider. Most variables are floating point calculations so the average integer processing unit wouldn't help much.
Of course, a supercomputer won't be that great at regular integer stuff (if you want your BSD or Linux kernel to build in 1-2 seconds, you need integer CPU, as well as big, fast I/O to do all the fetching/storing.) However, if your livelihood is MFLOPS and not MIPS, supercomputers are definitely still relevant.
Westnoth was written by Kyle Poole, the same guy who did Kyle's Quest 1 and 2. If one was bored and stuck in an airport with a Palm device, KQ quests made by people were a great way to kill a lot of time, and a lot of the modules were very original.
I'd like to see more games focused around allowing people to make scenarios, both single player and persistent worlds. Take NWN1 for instance. There is still content made for this platform, and there are still thriving multiplayer areas..
Of course, initially, a game company would go "blah, why make a game like this?" However, what games like KQ, Westnoth, NWN, and others with the ability to create user scenarios have is a VERY long lifespan. The game doesn't have to sell like hotcakes the first week it hits the shelves. If maintained, it will be a hot seller over time. For additional revenue, both expansion packs can be sold that provide more objects (player classes, tiles, models, sounds, music), as well as a playable campaign. For DLC revenue, paid modules could be shipped that use said content. For even more revenue, sell backend items such as a database manager that can run on most UNIX variants (as well as Windows) with a simple untar, configuration shell script, and firing off a daemon as a user. This would be purchased by PW builders easily.
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Going out of the way to piss off customers is never a good business model. However, you have to look who the customers are, and those are the ad sites, whom are treated with deference with "accidental" releases of personal information and such. To the websites, people visiting are considered visitors/consumers at best, whining maggots/leeches at worst.
Welcome to the modern business model where the buyer is considered a necessary evil at best. I have seen software development houses where the people running it say that a person is a customer until the sale goes through, then they become nothing more than a leech or a cost center. You see this attitude in game companies which release beta quality code for their products in stores, then might put out a single patch if that.
If I really like a site, I just pay for a membership. Be it /., Pandora, last.fm, or other sites. This way, they get what is due them, and I don't have to worry about malicious ads trying to exploit browser or add-on security issues.
One idea might be a membership clearinghouse. A customer pays dues every so often, and the clearinghouse divvies out the money in proportion to what member websites get the most hits from members. Of course, some thought will be needed to be put in for click fraud, but it is the same with ads too. This way, websites can be profitable for members that don't want to see ads without having to do a definite mechanism for subscriptions.
Don't forget the unscrupulous ad rotator "services" which allow their clients randomly drop ads with malicious JavaScript or Flash code, and do it in a way where the same IP and machine signature isn't hit twice.
I'm sorry, until ad spewing companies stop being an enabler to botnet installs, compromised code and machine infections, I will continue to make sure their stuff gets blocked. This is a security issue, plain and simple.
Exactly. Another option with handbrake is the fact that it has presets for iPhone friendly output. Of course, a phone isn't the ideal media, but for carrying around a couple movies to watch if stuck somewhere for a few hours, it is better than nothing.
If I did have kids, the first thing I'd be doing is ripping copies and keeping the movies stored either on a hard disk based media player, or as burned copies. This way, the originals are well preserved, and if one of the kids decides to make a peanut butter and DVD sammich, replacing the burns is far easier than trying to find a copy of some movie that is back in the Disney vault for an indefinite time.
This is /., where a lot of us are jaded, cynical IT people who have worked with too much human flocculent. We have seen USB flash drives and "MP3 cds" placed in parking lots in effort to get the company we worked for compromised. We have seen anonymous FTP servers stuffed with warez and child pr0n just because people can. We have seen people open up modems in the '90s to tethering their cellphones today to company equipment in order to get past the pr0n blockers, and then get their company confidential PCs infected.
If someone made a system to scan uploads and mark them clean, good luck. Rapidshare has been trying to find a way to keep people from doing exactly this for years.
This is exactly why I use an anonymous VPN service [1]. As one goes up the food chain to the core fiber links which route the core Internet traffic, the fewer people have access to the traffic and/or logging capability. To boot, if they have logging capability at the core, they would have it at the edges. There are a *lot* fewer people that have access from the core router to Facebook's page than have access (either with admin access, or are on the same subnet and can sniff/change stuff in transit.)
Essentially all someone can do with my network traffic between the endpoint connection and to my VM is drop packets and deny service. If someone is able to intercept/modify traffic going from the VPS to FB, then not just myself, but a lot of people, have very big problems on their hands.
I highly recommend people use a VPS, or if the bandwidth needs are not that high, to consider a VPS (like linode). This not just keeps people from sniffing/intercepting/modifying your traffic, but gets rid of the geotagging ad "services" which love to slurp up where people physically are. It is only a matter of time before crooks use this to find when someone is out of town to time home invasions and/or break-ins.
[1]: There are a lot of anonymous VPN services, with a lot of smoke generated about which ones "log" and which ones don't. It would be nice to get a straight answer on this, but until then, I tend to stay with what the other business users use to secure their traffic.
Exactly. A VM is a full PC with the headaches. It is enough trouble to manage just the base operating systems, much less a hidden OS that is easily infected. Perhaps one could push out a standard image that dumps its changes when unloaded, but even then, until the image is powered down, there is a compromised box on the corporate network doing damage.
This is why I like encapsulating the app with as little to no client side code installed as possible. Combine ThinApp (which requires no client or infrastructure other than a Samba share and perhaps a machine to talk to to ensure the app hasn't been lifted from the corporate network) with sandboxie's ability to not just shed privs (like DropMyRights), but offer low level protection to either deny access or redirect it somewhere safe.
Perhaps this is something Microsoft should put in on an OS level basis -- the ability to have apps (or even instances of apps so a compromised window won't affect another window doing bank stuff of the same app) redirected completely to their own playpen which is destroyed upon program exit, and the only files saved are the ones the user explicitly saves with a dialog.
By moving virtualization from the system level to the app level [1], it means less overhead (no need to have multiple OSes running even with deduplication technology), and allows for configurability, and even forensic work as malware thinks it is happily scribbling over the Registry and filesystem when in reality, the diffs are there for any white-hat to look at.
[1]: Yes, I am aware that technically applications are virtualized with protected memory, but this going further, isolating not just memory space, but filesystem resources.
It is ironic, but I have been in locked down environments where this was the best thing to do. One SMB's finance department had their machines completely isolated from the Internet, except for a connection to the core servers, and a terminal server. The terminal server allowed people to browse the Web at their leisure, without having any chances of a Web browser compromise making it to the core machines.
If done right, it is a good security method to consider in some environments.
Last time I checked with them, they were asking $3500 just for a ticket to entry, and a price per seat. Glad they came down in price.
ThinApp is really cool if you have messed around with it. In a locked down environment, it allows an admin to install and update most software (including Microsoft Office) without ever needing admin rights on Windows. All changes (Registry and files) are redirected to a spot in the user's home directory. To boot, updates are as simple as making another encapsulated app and renaming it, then when the old app is executed on a server, the bootstrap piece will grab the new code and run that.
One probable answer to this is having the motherboards outsourced, but have a TPM-like daughterboard made in the US under tight working conditions and supervision. This won't protect against all hardware attacks, but at least there will be code in hardware to start with a chain of custody and tamper resistance.
Since TPM chips are not part of the active boot process, the BIOS doesn't know if its signature is valid or not. All it does is scan the next part, pass the hash of the result to the TPM, then call the next chunk of code in line. Finally, there is a point where the OS asks the TPM for the encryption keys, and if the BIOS, MBR, and other parts of the machine have not been touched, it will hand them over.
This could be what malware could do. Take some of the newer botnet clients that have modules for everything, be it trying to climb out of a VMWare machine, try to get around sandboxie, or other items. Malware could try to find items that are flashable, and reflash them with code for hooks to malware, or even worse an active keyboard logger. It was mentioned a while back in a previous /. article about a major computer maker with keyboard HIDs that were flashable with new code. So, if one got root on the box, it wouldn't be hard to reflash the keyboard with a keylogger that could store keystrokes, or just send them as packets to the blackhat's site.
Other than cellphone makers, a lot of devices really don't put much in the way of protecting their BIOS against rogue code, so it isn't farfetched to reflash a sound card, a NIC, a Northbridge/Southbridge controller, a video card, motherboard BIOS, or any other subsystem with malicious programming.
A good example of this is Lojack for Laptops to see about having stuff in hardware be able to keep a program installed and hidden.
Very true. However it isn't as easy to get set up and pushed out on an enterprise basis as a single app file. Another downside is that because XP Mode is complete VM that can easily get compromised, it requires an instance of antivirus for corporate IT reasons. Having a single executable that runs in a "jail" is a lot better performance-wise, and means one doesn't have to set up virtualization on company desktops.
Probably the simplest solution for a company that needs IE6 on desktops for one task or application would be to use Citrix or Terminal server, and just keep a well locked down copy of IE6 on a dedicated server.
A while back, I remember thindownload.com offering IE6 in a Thinstall (Now VMWare ThinApp) package. It was taken down, but something like that would be the best thing for places that need IE6, but don't have the hardware to virtualize an ACE VM just for this program. Even better would be running the IE6 package under sandboxie so when (not if) it gets compromised, the damage is very limited what malware could attempt.
Very true. However, a number of providers disable it, even on 2.2, so it is up to the user to "fix" that.
What I would want, and even if this cost 10-25% more than normal phones, would be a unit with state of the art specs and completely unlocked in every way. I wish Google would come out with an ADP every quarter or two so developers can write and test code on a "modern" phone. When not developing, it would give modders a reference platform to write code on.
Rooting != jailbreaking.
Without root, I can run most apps I desire. I want to FTP out? Just fine. I want to compile zsh and slap it on the memory card, it will work. I want to run a P2P client? Frostwire and others are easily downloadable.
Rooting also doesn't modify the phone much. After I rooted my Droid X, the only files that are different are a su executable and an .apk for the UI frontend to always allow with a curtsy, allow, deny, or always tell an app to get fisted if it wants root. A jailbreak to be usable adds a complete userland, from a shell, to basic UNIX commands, to Debian's packaging mechanism, to gpg, to a graphical front end (Cydia). This is major brain surgery compared to just having a "#" prompt available.
What are the advantages of rooting? Tethering comes to mind first thing, although PDANet is an acceptable substitute in a number of cases. Custom ROMs are another reason. Backups using nandroid for a complete restorable image are good. Backing up apps completely with Titanium Backup is another. Finally, DroidWall is excellent making sure that apps that don't need to phone home do not phone home, especially "crapware" installed on a device.
Jailbreaking is needed if a person wants more than what is available in the App Store. Want an app just for playing Russian Roulette? Have to jailbreak. Want another browser? JB time. Want to see more than just a clock on the lock screen? Fire up Greenpois0n.
So, because so much functionality is gained by jailbreaking compared to "just" a "#" sign when rooting Android, the two processes are quite different.
Android has a lot of good terminal emulator apps. However, the iPhone has a few ssh clients, and there are only two clients for jailbroken devices, one of them supports some gestures, one doesn't. Both are named Mobile Terminal, so good luck finding the right one. To boot, Cydia has a Mobile Terminal app, but will bomb out if installed and an attempted is made to be run.
I'd love to see a full featured terminal app that can both work as a ssh client, as well as locally on Cydia. This, I'd pay decent money for.
The N900 is nice, but like the Nexus 1, it isn't sold in the US anymore, unless one buys it from an importer for an inflated price. Visit store.nokia.com and hit the US link... page not found, and it isn't offered anywhere on the site.
China is way different from Japan. For starters, it has resources, and it can play the game any way it wants to. Japan could only play hardball economically. China can at any time choose to overrun Korea and Taiwan at any time if they choose to, and the only recourse would either be a hard fought conventional war, or a nuclear exchange.
China can fight dirty. Japan cannot. And China is good at fighting dirty, because they "won" two wars (Korea and Vietnam) by proxy, sending in men and materials to do what the native population couldn't. If China chose to, they could easily turn up the heat in other areas hostile to the US by sending in troops and munitions. China could hand Iran the tools to seize control of the Strait of Hormuz and there would be nothing the US could do about it except engage in another theater of war which would be unwinnable.
This rings quite true, although it is slowly changing. Here in the US, you can get out of college with a fresh CS or scientific degree from a good university... and end up sitting on your duff for years waiting tables until you find something relevant. A simialr student who finishes up a generic major in college, then passes the bar exam in their state, will never see an unemployment line in their lifetime.
Until this is changed, Americans will see the cool electronic stuff only appearing in China and India first, just like the cool smartphones end up only in Japan or Korea and never make their way across the pond. Same with Internet stuff. Bandwidth in most parts of the US is actually shrinking, while in virtually every other nation, companies are busy laying fiber or putting up wireless towers.
The issue is I/O. CPU power is one thing. However, getting the data up the storage hierarchy to the CPU and back down again is where people pay the big bucks for real machines and not just fire up stacks of x86 boxes if they have some serious tasks.
This can be explained in a simple way: Build the latest Linux or BSD kernel. The time it takes to build one either has stayed the same, or actually has gotten longer than in times past (when one ran a kernel build of that time on that time's computers). Why is that, even though CPU power should be going up exponentially? I/O is not improving as fast as CPU numbers. It is improving, but it isn't doubling as often. So, even though the CPU is snappy, it still sits there waiting for the fetches from disk, to RAM, finally to the registers. Cache helps ease this pain, but I/O is still the bottleneck for a lot of tasks. If this was not the case, it would take less than a second to rebuild a kernel from a make clean.
CPU is cheap; I/O is expensive, relatively.
Depends on the task at hand. If something is infinitely parallizable such as a ray-trace where a screen can have subsets of pixels be handed off to other cores, CPUs, or separate discrete computers, just chucking more blades in a rack will do the job.
But not all tasks can be broken up into bits that don't depend on each other. There are tasks such as various types of modeling which require step "A" to be done before step "B" can be handed out, and even with the best of technology, if a box had 1000 cores, these tasks would only run as fast as one lone core.
Super computers (just like mainframes) still have their place. They are not as awesome as in the past because of the compute power available to the average person, but they are still needed.
Since when did supercomputers become useless? They might not be as mainstream as bygone days when supercomputers in the past were the only things that could render stuff well for cool pictures, but they have a critical need in a lot of research, especially complicated models with a ton of variables to consider. Most variables are floating point calculations so the average integer processing unit wouldn't help much.
Of course, a supercomputer won't be that great at regular integer stuff (if you want your BSD or Linux kernel to build in 1-2 seconds, you need integer CPU, as well as big, fast I/O to do all the fetching/storing.) However, if your livelihood is MFLOPS and not MIPS, supercomputers are definitely still relevant.
Westnoth was written by Kyle Poole, the same guy who did Kyle's Quest 1 and 2. If one was bored and stuck in an airport with a Palm device, KQ quests made by people were a great way to kill a lot of time, and a lot of the modules were very original.
I'd like to see more games focused around allowing people to make scenarios, both single player and persistent worlds. Take NWN1 for instance. There is still content made for this platform, and there are still thriving multiplayer areas..
Of course, initially, a game company would go "blah, why make a game like this?" However, what games like KQ, Westnoth, NWN, and others with the ability to create user scenarios have is a VERY long lifespan. The game doesn't have to sell like hotcakes the first week it hits the shelves. If maintained, it will be a hot seller over time. For additional revenue, both expansion packs can be sold that provide more objects (player classes, tiles, models, sounds, music), as well as a playable campaign. For DLC revenue, paid modules could be shipped that use said content. For even more revenue, sell backend items such as a database manager that can run on most UNIX variants (as well as Windows) with a simple untar, configuration shell script, and firing off a daemon as a user. This would be purchased by PW builders easily.