I for one suggest we charge large tariffs for any company that exists in whole or part outside the US. If it happens to keep M$ from selling their crapware within the US then all the better for the rest of us.
It was my impression that the 360 version wasn't going to come with us much content ebcause it didn't offer a hdd by default whereas the PS3 has a hdd and more disc space. Maybe that's changed?
Yeah, for some of us that'd set us back to prenatal mindsets. I think Eternal Sunshine was convincing enough that doing this is a bad idea. IMO there is just about nothing as bad as someone you cared about forgetting you.
The only real reason, IMO, to bother w/ a console at all is the lack of effort needed for installing and running games. I get annoyed at PC gaming because there are always hoops to jump through to get a game installed and running. I have a powerful CPU and video card and IMO I shouldn't have to put up with the kind of BS many games put you through.
Also, it's more comfortable to sit on the couch and play than to sit at my desk. I do like mind-oriented games like Civ on the PC better though because a keyboard and monitor work better for that sort of thing.:)
It's just stupid for Sony to chase off their own developers. They have the best hardware. They have loyal fans, like myself, waiting to buy a PS3 when given a reason to. Are they going to lose the console war because they didn't feel like getting games produced for their console? Morons.
Sadly, I think I've bumped the PS3 from my next-to-buy list to a Wii (Worst console name ever and all.) because the Wii actually has games coming out for it that look interesting.
MUDs are cool but I never did game-MUDs. I'm a programmer so for fun I mostly hung around popular MOOs and banged out code night and day. If I could ever find someone with the graphic talent to help me turn some of my cool MUD code into something people today would use I think we could kick the ass of stuff like EverQuest and WoW. The wide selection of MUDs back in the day at least created a lot of options and the ones that let users code their own stuff really kept things interesting as you never knew what you might find.
I think I actually had some of the first graphical MUDs as I started creating RIP graphics (old vector based BBS format) for some of mine. To bad that level of graphics doesn't cut it today.:)
I'd buy a remake of FF8 for PS3 - which would require I buy a PS3. I want to buy a PS3 because I do think they are the best game console currently available - there just has yet to be any compelling title to give me an excuse to do it. Grant Theft Auto 4 might be a reason if the PS3 version is better enough than 360 versions to be worth it. (Past info about GTA4 made it seem that the 360's weak points were going to result in a lesser version of GTA4 for it.)
Sony needs to step up. They delivered a kick ass console and since then they've done exactly nothing with it. I need at least half a dozen awesome games that aren't just as good on other consoles before I'll drop $600 on a PS3. What good is buying a Porsche if you can't put gas in it?
Mario is definately one of the best. I'd have to go somewhat in order of my history of playing as to my list of best games.
Zork Wishbringer Dig Dug Atari tanks game (name?) Excite Bike Super Mario Brothers Commander Keen Doom Quake Civilization Final Fantasy 8 + 9 Parasite Eve Sheep Raider Chrono Cross Grand Theft Auto Toy Commander Crazy Taxi Skies of Arcadia Unreal Worms Painkiller
I haven't seen any really recent games I've been horribly impressed by. A couple I played were okay but nothing really worthy of honorable mention.
Blah! I hope you aren't responsible for setting up the support lines there at the IRS. I've been having an issue and the online system doesn't tell me anything at all, the phone system keeps routing me to an automated system that also doesn't tell me anything (and every number I've tried where I followed the prompts eventually gets me to that same system), and when I cheated and pressed the wrong numbers to get to a real person they refussed to help me because I couldn't answer the security questions which are evidently from the tax paperwork submitted, not by me - which is why I'm trying to find out what someone else submitted and if I'm going to get my refund or if they got my refund, so that there is no possible way for me to answer the questions. The real person on the phone couldn't even direct me to a fruad line or tell me if going to an IRS office in person will allow me to prove my identity.
I'm tempted to just correct the situation by not paying my taxes next year. Maybe then someone would contact me. Maybe I can just deny that I'm me since obviously they have someone else pretending to be me. Maybe that person can get stuck paying my taxes.
I use Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE6, and IE7 on a regular basis. While Firefox, Safari, and Opera all work way better than either IE6 or IE7 (I'm highly disappointed that IE7 has such poor CSS, JS, and DOM support still!) I've noticed a lot more little bugs in Safari and Opera with Javascript and DOM. Firefox seems a little more stable in the basics of CSS while Safari and Opera sometimes support extra little CSS features that Firefox is still missing (shadows). Opera especially sometimes does crazy things, it'd appear to be in an effort to better support made-for-IE sites, but Safari just has annoying little quirks where it isn't quite following the standards. In cases where I'm not following 3 standards that's fine but often I'll have code that passes W3 standards checks just fine but which will have quirks in Safari, Opera, or IE (almost always in IE).
One recent bug I had trouble with in Safari was that it was reserving words in it's Javascript parser that weren't reserved in the specs. It took me a while to figure out why that code just wouldn't work. Maybe this new version of Safari will fix such bugs.:)
Still, I can develop for Firefox, Safari, and Opera way faster than I can for IE. IE7 is at least better than IE6 but still has pretty major bugs in it. If Steve Jobs can kill IE off Windows computers then great. I wish all developers would make an effort to make their sites standards compliant, and using up-to-date technologies, so that IE users that are just trying out alternative browsers would notice the difference as a big improvement.
If they don't want to open the source then I don't want it in my kernel. I need something that has the reliability of peer review and the ability for me to get in there and fix it myself if the shit hits the fan. In areas less essential than the kernel I don't care as much but I don't want to make it easy for hardware companies to offer half-assed support for Linux. If they aren't going to do it right then they should go away and stop wasting our time and resources.
It's great to see more work being done with FUSE but I have to wonder why they can't code a clean implementation of ZFS that doesn't have these licensing issues. This kind of solution is just a bandaid. Great, if you absolutely have to have it but not nearly as good as an open sourced offering.
Sounds like a prime chance for companies to create their own high fee, high interest cash alternatives and force people to pay with those. Sorry - can't pay at Walmart without an EvilWally card. Don't like that? Go shop somewhere else then. What, we already put all the other businesses out of business? Guess your just fscked then.
Seems like any business that has a strong hold ovr their market could easily force people to pay in whatever means they want, with whatever strings they want to attach, and there isn't much consumers can do about it.
I have to lean towards the type of phones and phone networks the nomads had in the book Distraction. Small, disposable, cheap phones with cheap, easy to install, access points.
Once we have WiFi everywhere it'll be a real option. That is one of the reasons I'm against securing access points. (IMHO security should be at the application level.) I made a wireless VoIP phone back in like 2000 after I became disgusted w/ my proprietary cell phone. It was kind of large (it'll be interesting to compare to the iPhone) but worked as a PDA, MP3 player, and digital camera. I would have liked it to be able to use the cell network when it was available and WiFi wasn't but I wasn't able to find a PCMCIA device to let me hook up to the cell networks (at least not one that worked/ Linux).
The revolution will happen when people discover they no longer need a commercial carrier. At some point the wireless infrastructure will get good enough and then there will be nothing to stop companies like Vonage and Skype or even hobby hackers from offering ultra-cheap or free alternatives.
It'll probably work better too because the commercial models are so much more complex due to the need to track usage for billing reasons. If you've ever worked for a phone company you know how much complexity they have that could easily be jettisoned if service was free and didn't need to be monitored.
THAT phone revolution will revolutionize society - yet again.
I'll not buy an iPhone until I can use it with a carrier other than AT&T. They are the most expensive major carrier and in all honesty they suck ass (I worked there for a while - they really are pretty much retarded). I'll probably want to wait for about the third version of the iPhone anyway as the current model is sure to come up short as any first generation product is prone to do.
Most experienced developers should have a goof knowledge of the big three open source licenses at least - GPL, LGPL, and BSD. The vast majority of open source code will be under one of those. Just knowing how those relate to each other and apply to your code should cover most of your needs.
As to not being able to use open source licensed code for your business or having it impact your business model I think that it mostly a FUD issue. It's my experience that the license doesn't make much difference to your business model as those who purchase code are either out-of-the-box types that are paying you to put it in a pretty box, make it easy to install, and easy to use or they are IT department types that want good support and to have their ass covered. Availability of source may be a nice feature to either of the above groups but doesn't much impact sales in any negative way. Maybe it'd be an issue if you plan to change from open source to closed source later because that leads to anger in your customer base.
It may impact the resale value of your business but that isn't to likely since software that is open source and even free is considered an asset worth having by many companies. The only time it's likely to have a negative impact is if your software isn't very good or your company never develops a working business model at all.
If it's your code you can use whichever licenses you want including making your code available under more than one license. If you're using someone else's code though then you have to stick to their license.
Grab a couple Xeon X5355 CPUs and you can cram them under your desk now. Although you may be surprised at the size of the power supply you'll need and how much cooling you'll need. Can handle a pretty sweet amount of load which is awesome for a server but I don't know how many games would take advantage of such a system yet - haven't tried playing games on it.
I've got a spare water cooled case. I've been thinking of building myself another of these in there to see how the cooling compares. Even with the best upgrade fans for the CPUs I could find, this server is still noisy and hot. It really kicks ass though so if I could just keep it cool enough it'd be awesome.
That'd be why nobody cares about government corruption or stupidity as news anymore. We're so used to it that we just don't think much of it. Most of the voting population thinks that is just how government is and that there is nothing we can do about it. No doubt why fewer and fewer people vote.
If only people could be motivated to revolt before our government, and civilization, collapses. The scary thing to me is that the American population has no will to survive. We'd rather watch a spectacle and whine about what is fair or not instead of making any effort to address any real problems. I hear more about stem cells, immigration, and the war in Iraq than about any issue that really matters. Even with the stuff we hear about it's all smoke and mirrors and nothing substantial. There is no intelligent plan even being considered to deal with stem cell research, immigration, or the war - all we get is sensationalism. We'd rather bicker over non-issues and make a show over who is being the least politically correct than to come together as a nation.
I think democracies are doomed to implode without strong leaders, good education, and a common vision of self. I don't think we currently have any of those in the United States or are likely to get them anytime soon.
As somebody that has used, sold, and supported BlackBerries I have to hope that Apple can create a phone that does a better job with less issues because BBs are ugly and often difficult for users to use. They're not bad exactly - they're just not great. I'd love to see a BlackBerry response to the iPhone that produces a BB that is really powerful, nice looking, and easy to use.
Of course, so far, I'm not sure the iPhone is even going to be that great. We'll have to wait and see how it handles real world usage.
I suspect most people can't handle software installation at all so software should just install, and uninstall, as needed. Package management is the way to make this happen but the desktop environment needs to take proper advantage of it. It should be as seamless as a website loading the Javascript it needs to make the functionality happen. That is a major reason why users like things such as web-based email - nothing has to be installed.
Would you have used Slashdot if you had to initially buy a 'Slash application', install it from cd, fight with some stupid anti-piracy scheme, and reboot three times? Probably not - and non-geeks are even less likely to get that right even if they are willing to work so hard to make it happen.
If someone tries to load an Excel file, or chooses an icon for a spreadsheet app, that app, if not already installed, should install with all dependencies, and run without the user needing to think about it. All they really need to see is a 'Please wait a few moments while this application loads for the first time..' box with no choices, aka decisions to make, other than to cancel the operation or wait. Programs that haven't been used recently should auto-uninstall along with unneeded dependecies to save space, improve security, and keep things simple for the user.
I think a Java-like VM is a rather stupid concept but that something closer to VMWare could be integrated into the desktop environment so that rather than applications we have virtual machines, running whatever the required OS is, that themselves run the needed application or, more often, a collection of applets that work together towards a common task. Each VM would protect the host OS and other VMs by being it's own sandbox but should allow, protected and seamless, sharing of files, clipboard, and similar resources. I'd nix whatever built-in desktop environment each guest OS had for an environment that would be seamless across different guests. For the most part each of my VM-applications would probably run Linux but it'd be handy if Windows, Mac OS, etc could be ran to handle apps that require that specific OS such as games and some commercial apps. I'd intergrate the VM host controls into the desktop environment so that it was all seamless to the user. Each VM would run like an application does now - selected from an app menu with tabs for all open VMs open at the top of the screen. Right now, controls for VMs, like package management, is not well intergrated into the desktop environment. To many programmers still think in outdated concepts such as applications rather than in mashing functionality into one well intergrated, easy to use, interface.
Make the hackers waste their computing resources? Once they've infected systems how would you track down the infected systems to know who to send junk traffic to? Why would you even know they existed if all they're doing with machines they take control of is processing information?
Or did you mean send out 500 encrypted messages, with different keys, with only one being useful to decode? That sounds like security through obscurity which is something that isn't really reliable. You end up needing to send other information to tell the intended receiver which message is the real one and if you do that then that information can give away the whole thing. It's hardly a practical way to handle things like encrypted network sessions or encrypted files even if you could get past that problem.
Maybe I'm just not getting whatever point you're trying to make.:)
Regardless, the old concept that it's always easier to encrypt than break a key is breaking down as it's getting easier and easier to get computers to work together to break keys while encryption is still typically done by a single computer. You probably wouldn't even want to use a distributed network to encrypt as in doing so you'd have to share your unencrypted data with many other, possibly untrusted, systems across an unencrpyted network. So even if encrypting is vastly less CPU intensive than breaking a key, it's still a battle between an individual and an army. At what point can the army easily beat whatever the individual throws at them?
I alone, currently, have 13 CPU/cores working on distributed.net most of the time just with my own computers (multi-core CPUs are good stuff) so I can only imagine what someone could do if they borrowed, without permission, thousands of multi-core computers w/ powerful video cards and harnessed all that CPU/GPU power. Such a hacker network could easily dwarf distributed.net I'd imagine given past infection paths.
All you have to do is set up something like distributed.net and you can crank through pretty fast. If hackers can infect millions of systems for massive DDOS attacks I think they could probably create a massive distributed computing platform. Vista will only make things easier because it forces a powerful video card on every system. If the distributed network can harness those video cards for number crunching they'll be a lot faster than networks running on just the CPU.
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I for one suggest we charge large tariffs for any company that exists in whole or part outside the US. If it happens to keep M$ from selling their crapware within the US then all the better for the rest of us.
It was my impression that the 360 version wasn't going to come with us much content ebcause it didn't offer a hdd by default whereas the PS3 has a hdd and more disc space. Maybe that's changed?
If the phone is unlocked you should be able to use it with T-Mobile. If I had an iPhone I'd give it a try. :)
Yeah, for some of us that'd set us back to prenatal mindsets. I think Eternal Sunshine was convincing enough that doing this is a bad idea. IMO there is just about nothing as bad as someone you cared about forgetting you.
The only real reason, IMO, to bother w/ a console at all is the lack of effort needed for installing and running games. I get annoyed at PC gaming because there are always hoops to jump through to get a game installed and running. I have a powerful CPU and video card and IMO I shouldn't have to put up with the kind of BS many games put you through.
:)
Also, it's more comfortable to sit on the couch and play than to sit at my desk. I do like mind-oriented games like Civ on the PC better though because a keyboard and monitor work better for that sort of thing.
It's just stupid for Sony to chase off their own developers. They have the best hardware. They have loyal fans, like myself, waiting to buy a PS3 when given a reason to. Are they going to lose the console war because they didn't feel like getting games produced for their console? Morons.
Sadly, I think I've bumped the PS3 from my next-to-buy list to a Wii (Worst console name ever and all.) because the Wii actually has games coming out for it that look interesting.
MUDs are cool but I never did game-MUDs. I'm a programmer so for fun I mostly hung around popular MOOs and banged out code night and day. If I could ever find someone with the graphic talent to help me turn some of my cool MUD code into something people today would use I think we could kick the ass of stuff like EverQuest and WoW. The wide selection of MUDs back in the day at least created a lot of options and the ones that let users code their own stuff really kept things interesting as you never knew what you might find.
:)
I think I actually had some of the first graphical MUDs as I started creating RIP graphics (old vector based BBS format) for some of mine. To bad that level of graphics doesn't cut it today.
I'd buy a remake of FF8 for PS3 - which would require I buy a PS3. I want to buy a PS3 because I do think they are the best game console currently available - there just has yet to be any compelling title to give me an excuse to do it. Grant Theft Auto 4 might be a reason if the PS3 version is better enough than 360 versions to be worth it. (Past info about GTA4 made it seem that the 360's weak points were going to result in a lesser version of GTA4 for it.)
Sony needs to step up. They delivered a kick ass console and since then they've done exactly nothing with it. I need at least half a dozen awesome games that aren't just as good on other consoles before I'll drop $600 on a PS3. What good is buying a Porsche if you can't put gas in it?
Mario is definately one of the best. I'd have to go somewhat in order of my history of playing as to my list of best games.
Zork
Wishbringer
Dig Dug
Atari tanks game (name?)
Excite Bike
Super Mario Brothers
Commander Keen
Doom
Quake
Civilization
Final Fantasy 8 + 9
Parasite Eve
Sheep Raider
Chrono Cross
Grand Theft Auto
Toy Commander
Crazy Taxi
Skies of Arcadia
Unreal
Worms
Painkiller
I haven't seen any really recent games I've been horribly impressed by. A couple I played were okay but nothing really worthy of honorable mention.
Blah! I hope you aren't responsible for setting up the support lines there at the IRS. I've been having an issue and the online system doesn't tell me anything at all, the phone system keeps routing me to an automated system that also doesn't tell me anything (and every number I've tried where I followed the prompts eventually gets me to that same system), and when I cheated and pressed the wrong numbers to get to a real person they refussed to help me because I couldn't answer the security questions which are evidently from the tax paperwork submitted, not by me - which is why I'm trying to find out what someone else submitted and if I'm going to get my refund or if they got my refund, so that there is no possible way for me to answer the questions. The real person on the phone couldn't even direct me to a fruad line or tell me if going to an IRS office in person will allow me to prove my identity.
I'm tempted to just correct the situation by not paying my taxes next year. Maybe then someone would contact me. Maybe I can just deny that I'm me since obviously they have someone else pretending to be me. Maybe that person can get stuck paying my taxes.
I use Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE6, and IE7 on a regular basis. While Firefox, Safari, and Opera all work way better than either IE6 or IE7 (I'm highly disappointed that IE7 has such poor CSS, JS, and DOM support still!) I've noticed a lot more little bugs in Safari and Opera with Javascript and DOM. Firefox seems a little more stable in the basics of CSS while Safari and Opera sometimes support extra little CSS features that Firefox is still missing (shadows). Opera especially sometimes does crazy things, it'd appear to be in an effort to better support made-for-IE sites, but Safari just has annoying little quirks where it isn't quite following the standards. In cases where I'm not following 3 standards that's fine but often I'll have code that passes W3 standards checks just fine but which will have quirks in Safari, Opera, or IE (almost always in IE).
:)
One recent bug I had trouble with in Safari was that it was reserving words in it's Javascript parser that weren't reserved in the specs. It took me a while to figure out why that code just wouldn't work. Maybe this new version of Safari will fix such bugs.
Still, I can develop for Firefox, Safari, and Opera way faster than I can for IE. IE7 is at least better than IE6 but still has pretty major bugs in it. If Steve Jobs can kill IE off Windows computers then great. I wish all developers would make an effort to make their sites standards compliant, and using up-to-date technologies, so that IE users that are just trying out alternative browsers would notice the difference as a big improvement.
If they don't want to open the source then I don't want it in my kernel. I need something that has the reliability of peer review and the ability for me to get in there and fix it myself if the shit hits the fan. In areas less essential than the kernel I don't care as much but I don't want to make it easy for hardware companies to offer half-assed support for Linux. If they aren't going to do it right then they should go away and stop wasting our time and resources.
It's great to see more work being done with FUSE but I have to wonder why they can't code a clean implementation of ZFS that doesn't have these licensing issues. This kind of solution is just a bandaid. Great, if you absolutely have to have it but not nearly as good as an open sourced offering.
Sounds like a prime chance for companies to create their own high fee, high interest cash alternatives and force people to pay with those. Sorry - can't pay at Walmart without an EvilWally card. Don't like that? Go shop somewhere else then. What, we already put all the other businesses out of business? Guess your just fscked then.
Seems like any business that has a strong hold ovr their market could easily force people to pay in whatever means they want, with whatever strings they want to attach, and there isn't much consumers can do about it.
I know - to many people will bend over and take it just to be the first on their block to have the newest toy. Says something about our society huh?
I have to lean towards the type of phones and phone networks the nomads had in the book Distraction. Small, disposable, cheap phones with cheap, easy to install, access points.
Once we have WiFi everywhere it'll be a real option. That is one of the reasons I'm against securing access points. (IMHO security should be at the application level.) I made a wireless VoIP phone back in like 2000 after I became disgusted w/ my proprietary cell phone. It was kind of large (it'll be interesting to compare to the iPhone) but worked as a PDA, MP3 player, and digital camera. I would have liked it to be able to use the cell network when it was available and WiFi wasn't but I wasn't able to find a PCMCIA device to let me hook up to the cell networks (at least not one that worked/ Linux).
The revolution will happen when people discover they no longer need a commercial carrier. At some point the wireless infrastructure will get good enough and then there will be nothing to stop companies like Vonage and Skype or even hobby hackers from offering ultra-cheap or free alternatives.
It'll probably work better too because the commercial models are so much more complex due to the need to track usage for billing reasons. If you've ever worked for a phone company you know how much complexity they have that could easily be jettisoned if service was free and didn't need to be monitored.
THAT phone revolution will revolutionize society - yet again.
I'll not buy an iPhone until I can use it with a carrier other than AT&T. They are the most expensive major carrier and in all honesty they suck ass (I worked there for a while - they really are pretty much retarded). I'll probably want to wait for about the third version of the iPhone anyway as the current model is sure to come up short as any first generation product is prone to do.
Most experienced developers should have a goof knowledge of the big three open source licenses at least - GPL, LGPL, and BSD. The vast majority of open source code will be under one of those. Just knowing how those relate to each other and apply to your code should cover most of your needs.
As to not being able to use open source licensed code for your business or having it impact your business model I think that it mostly a FUD issue. It's my experience that the license doesn't make much difference to your business model as those who purchase code are either out-of-the-box types that are paying you to put it in a pretty box, make it easy to install, and easy to use or they are IT department types that want good support and to have their ass covered. Availability of source may be a nice feature to either of the above groups but doesn't much impact sales in any negative way. Maybe it'd be an issue if you plan to change from open source to closed source later because that leads to anger in your customer base.
It may impact the resale value of your business but that isn't to likely since software that is open source and even free is considered an asset worth having by many companies. The only time it's likely to have a negative impact is if your software isn't very good or your company never develops a working business model at all.
If it's your code you can use whichever licenses you want including making your code available under more than one license. If you're using someone else's code though then you have to stick to their license.
Grab a couple Xeon X5355 CPUs and you can cram them under your desk now. Although you may be surprised at the size of the power supply you'll need and how much cooling you'll need. Can handle a pretty sweet amount of load which is awesome for a server but I don't know how many games would take advantage of such a system yet - haven't tried playing games on it.
I've got a spare water cooled case. I've been thinking of building myself another of these in there to see how the cooling compares. Even with the best upgrade fans for the CPUs I could find, this server is still noisy and hot. It really kicks ass though so if I could just keep it cool enough it'd be awesome.
That'd be why nobody cares about government corruption or stupidity as news anymore. We're so used to it that we just don't think much of it. Most of the voting population thinks that is just how government is and that there is nothing we can do about it. No doubt why fewer and fewer people vote.
If only people could be motivated to revolt before our government, and civilization, collapses. The scary thing to me is that the American population has no will to survive. We'd rather watch a spectacle and whine about what is fair or not instead of making any effort to address any real problems. I hear more about stem cells, immigration, and the war in Iraq than about any issue that really matters. Even with the stuff we hear about it's all smoke and mirrors and nothing substantial. There is no intelligent plan even being considered to deal with stem cell research, immigration, or the war - all we get is sensationalism. We'd rather bicker over non-issues and make a show over who is being the least politically correct than to come together as a nation.
I think democracies are doomed to implode without strong leaders, good education, and a common vision of self. I don't think we currently have any of those in the United States or are likely to get them anytime soon.
As somebody that has used, sold, and supported BlackBerries I have to hope that Apple can create a phone that does a better job with less issues because BBs are ugly and often difficult for users to use. They're not bad exactly - they're just not great. I'd love to see a BlackBerry response to the iPhone that produces a BB that is really powerful, nice looking, and easy to use.
Of course, so far, I'm not sure the iPhone is even going to be that great. We'll have to wait and see how it handles real world usage.
I suspect most people can't handle software installation at all so software should just install, and uninstall, as needed. Package management is the way to make this happen but the desktop environment needs to take proper advantage of it. It should be as seamless as a website loading the Javascript it needs to make the functionality happen. That is a major reason why users like things such as web-based email - nothing has to be installed.
Would you have used Slashdot if you had to initially buy a 'Slash application', install it from cd, fight with some stupid anti-piracy scheme, and reboot three times? Probably not - and non-geeks are even less likely to get that right even if they are willing to work so hard to make it happen.
If someone tries to load an Excel file, or chooses an icon for a spreadsheet app, that app, if not already installed, should install with all dependencies, and run without the user needing to think about it. All they really need to see is a 'Please wait a few moments while this application loads for the first time..' box with no choices, aka decisions to make, other than to cancel the operation or wait. Programs that haven't been used recently should auto-uninstall along with unneeded dependecies to save space, improve security, and keep things simple for the user.
I think a Java-like VM is a rather stupid concept but that something closer to VMWare could be integrated into the desktop environment so that rather than applications we have virtual machines, running whatever the required OS is, that themselves run the needed application or, more often, a collection of applets that work together towards a common task. Each VM would protect the host OS and other VMs by being it's own sandbox but should allow, protected and seamless, sharing of files, clipboard, and similar resources. I'd nix whatever built-in desktop environment each guest OS had for an environment that would be seamless across different guests. For the most part each of my VM-applications would probably run Linux but it'd be handy if Windows, Mac OS, etc could be ran to handle apps that require that specific OS such as games and some commercial apps. I'd intergrate the VM host controls into the desktop environment so that it was all seamless to the user. Each VM would run like an application does now - selected from an app menu with tabs for all open VMs open at the top of the screen. Right now, controls for VMs, like package management, is not well intergrated into the desktop environment. To many programmers still think in outdated concepts such as applications rather than in mashing functionality into one well intergrated, easy to use, interface.
So you assume nerds are wimps because our candidate wouldn't even think of supporting a war?
Make the hackers waste their computing resources? Once they've infected systems how would you track down the infected systems to know who to send junk traffic to? Why would you even know they existed if all they're doing with machines they take control of is processing information?
:)
Or did you mean send out 500 encrypted messages, with different keys, with only one being useful to decode? That sounds like security through obscurity which is something that isn't really reliable. You end up needing to send other information to tell the intended receiver which message is the real one and if you do that then that information can give away the whole thing. It's hardly a practical way to handle things like encrypted network sessions or encrypted files even if you could get past that problem.
Maybe I'm just not getting whatever point you're trying to make.
Regardless, the old concept that it's always easier to encrypt than break a key is breaking down as it's getting easier and easier to get computers to work together to break keys while encryption is still typically done by a single computer. You probably wouldn't even want to use a distributed network to encrypt as in doing so you'd have to share your unencrypted data with many other, possibly untrusted, systems across an unencrpyted network. So even if encrypting is vastly less CPU intensive than breaking a key, it's still a battle between an individual and an army. At what point can the army easily beat whatever the individual throws at them?
I alone, currently, have 13 CPU/cores working on distributed.net most of the time just with my own computers (multi-core CPUs are good stuff) so I can only imagine what someone could do if they borrowed, without permission, thousands of multi-core computers w/ powerful video cards and harnessed all that CPU/GPU power. Such a hacker network could easily dwarf distributed.net I'd imagine given past infection paths.
All you have to do is set up something like distributed.net and you can crank through pretty fast. If hackers can infect millions of systems for massive DDOS attacks I think they could probably create a massive distributed computing platform. Vista will only make things easier because it forces a powerful video card on every system. If the distributed network can harness those video cards for number crunching they'll be a lot faster than networks running on just the CPU.