Look at the housing market, particularly California.
Of course, since we're talking about actual property that doesn't go away unless there's an earthquake, fire, or act of god (or jihad), the rate at which the collapse occurs (and the corresponding news coverage) is a good deal slower. Also, you didn't see as much VC in home building, so the collapse won't be as violent (except if it gets *really* bad (much, much worse than I currently forsee, in which case major banks will start to go under, and we'll be back in the 1920s).
By and large, modern Web 2.0 tech companies have some sort of plan. Some of them will go out of business, and the majority of those will be purchased by bigger companies who are profitable. We're going to see a lot of M&A in Tech (that's what happens in markets with too many start-up players), but I don't think we're going to see capital flight, mass layoffs, and a stock market crash.
Final Cut Studio >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> OSS or non-free Linux video editing apps, at least in the under $10,000 range. Adobe Creative Suite >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> OSS or non-free Linux desktop image apps, at least when you have to deal with manufacturers that require stuff to be submitted in AI format.
Given the statistical evidence, at least in this country, it would seem to me that protecting children would be *best* accomplished by banning the Roman Catholic Church. Roughly 4% of all priests have been accused of sexual abuse, a far, far, far higher rate than the number of pedophilia oriented websites.
Note: I'm not seriously proposing banning the RCC. I'm merely pointing out *if* you were protecting the kiddies, what train of thought you should be following.
openSuSE does this too; however, even the rate of adoption of these features into the mainline kernel (where they can then be enabled by various distributions without fear of breaking in the next revision) is slower than CK is arguing for.
Why should Linux occasionally focus on desktop features? Why shouldn't there be a desktop performance group who maintains the stuff in mainline, rather than users (or distros!) having to rely on patchsets?
I'm guessing that CK would still be hacking on the kernel if the -CK patchset was part of a "greater" linux-desktop group within the kernel mainline, responsible for "desktop" features.
Hell, call it a new architecture; i386-desktop and x86_64-desktop.
AFAIK (again, from brief experiences and research; I've never actually had it installed or used it for long periods of time) the internet access is very, very similar to their 6 Mbps/ 768 kbps ADSL.
Although your hardware syncs at 25-50 Mbps, it doesn't matter whether or not you purchase TV service. The internet access is limited to 6 Mbps/1 Mbps.
These limitations are a result of the system's design; nodes are being setup at distances where 25 Mbps is what is expected from VDSL/ADSL2+. Someday, they may upgrade that, but they pump your internet, TV, and voice over that 25 Mbps, and that's really not that much bandwidth.
As such, the system design is: 1 HD, 3 SD streams *max*, 6/1 internet *max* (they are marketing slower speeds!), and a couple phone lines. Latency is no where near as good as on FIOS, and often is higher than that of cable. Plus, AT&T's network is notoriously screwy, and their routers often pick strange routes. Furthermore, even though its over fiber, their modems continue to work with the same PPPoE network their DSL network does.
For all of Comcast's terrible customer service, their cable service exceed's AT&T's U-verse in every regard (even upload!), and RCN is even further ahead. All the hype about U-verse is precisely that: hype. Other than running IPTV, and a demonstration of an impressive way to bottleneck a fiber network, there really isn't anything "cool" about it.
OpenOffice has DAV support for any platform, though.
Okay, I might be an idiot, but where is the documentation for this? I use OO.org all the time, and would like to move us to a DAV setup, but I can't find any information on how this works.
Have any of you ever tried to buy a car at a dealer?
"This is a *special* price! It'll go up next week!"
Yeah. Right. I'll believe it when I see it; Sony won't shoot itself in the foot like that. This is just a marketing ploy to drive sales just a little bit more.
Its a Wifi phone with some VoIP capacity. When you are near a wifi hotspot, the phone can connect to T-mobile's servers.
This is nice, because: A)$20 ($10 is the introductory price) will buy you unlimited wifi minutes (including T-mobile hotspots, which are everywhere), and B)You can get coverage in weird places, like your basement, or, for that matter, Tokyo.
Essentially, if you are a T-mobile customer, it obsoletes Skype for you.
At the time, Apple gave 2% of its stock to Xerox in exchange for a license to use those designs. Later, when Apple sued MS over "copyright" of the interface, Xerox decided that it, too held copyrights, and decided to sue Apple. As far as I know, the courts held that GUIs can't be copyrighted.
Either way, Apple and Xerox's relationship at the beginning was quite cordial, there was an exchange, and Xerox never decided to market it's technology.
Borrowed, for Apple, is not like "Borrowed", for Microsoft. Microsoft tends to take first, and work out later. Apple tends to license first, and then use that license to the fullest extent possible. Both can be nefarious, but only one is out and out illegal/evil.
Many of T-mobile's devices have built-in WiFi, and their newest devices actually use VoIP when on a WiFi network (unlimited minutes while on WiFI, too!)
Mr. Stephenson: If you think about wireless broadband networks, EDGE is the only ubiquitous nationwide broadband network deployed today. It's a 300-plus kilobit type service. We're selling in the tens of thousands every single month of smart phones that operate on nothing but EDGE. The service experience is really, really good and what you're going to see with the iPhone is the caching technology that Steve and the Apple guys have developed here makes the EDGE experience even better. Between the Wi-Fi and the EDGE coverage, this is a really good experience.
High latency, low bandwidth broadband. Huzzah!
Sprint's EVDO network is deployed as widely as AT&T's EDGE network (not even all of AT&T's GSM network is EDGE). Worse, Sprint's EVDO revA network is deployed in most metropolitan areas, nearly all interstate highways, and nearly all tourist areas.
For AT&T, Edge is "all the speed you need", up until they deploy HSDPA, in which case that will be, "all the speed you need". Just like this: http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2006/03/30/att-proje ct-lightspeed-and-the-jedi-mind-trick/ Mr.Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown 'no discernable difference' between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone.
It's % of GDP spent on medical. 13.5% of the U.S.'s GDP is spent on healthcare. 43% of that is government expenditures. The rest is from corporations and individuals.
Vista and XP have so few programs installed by default. BZZZT!
Have you seen an OEM system with Vista or XP that came with "few programs". There's serious bloatware on there, and I bet all of it has serious security problems. Think of all those sound/video driver applets; those all have administrator access.
On the other hand, OEM Linux systems don't come with that stuff. Not even from Dell.
We give up, we'll go home now, and install Norton Antivirus and Windows Defender with the rest of the lemmings.
The *only* way to "measure" security is to "measure" breakins. You can talk about technological advances in architecture, but abstracting security to bug counting is goofy. Linux systems don't get broken into, because there simply aren't ways to get at them, particularly on the desktop. With things like AppArmor and SELinux your browser is isolated from other processes, every distro ships with the "desktop" version locked down (100% firewalled) by default, and samba, cups, and the other common network daemons (ntp? ssh?) are mature suites with excellent security histories.
I can't get the article to open, but I'm curious as to the vulnerabilities which he counted. How many of them actually have real world applications?
Here is how I would come up with a synthetic benchmark of security: 1. Admit that it will be synthetic, and is ultimately an exercise in mental masturbation 2. Count the bugs. 3. Remove all bugs that have no possibility to be exploited, and all "fixed" bugs. 4. Separate bugs into "server" and "desktop" bugs. 5. Multiple bugs by an index number between 0 and 1, with 0 being harmless bugs, and 1 being bugs that give you "root". 6. Total up bug indexes. 7. Now, count all fixed bugs (excluding impossible to exploit ones), multiple by a "damage index" (see #5), then multiple by (Time to fix bug, measured from release of software)/(Time software has been released). Add this to your result from #6. 8. Voila! You've now posted something that will most likely compete favorably with MS's bug number. It will also still be totally useless.
Many reasons really. Venus is so close to the sun that it would be near impossible to get the temperature down to a reasonable level until we have the power to move the planet or at least adjust the rotation to something more reasonable, which will be thousands of years from now, if ever. By the time the technology to handle the positioning and rotational issue will come along, we will long have figured out how to adjust the atmosphere to suit us.
Nonsense. There are other ways to control heating. We've even planned for some of them, such as setting up giant solar reflectors, or seeding of the upper atmosphere with particulate matter.
In fact, I'm guessing you could get much of Venus' atmosphere to condense into something manageable (possibly something you could use nuclear explosives to remove) by reducing the solar heat. Perhaps we could use a series of asteroids and nuclear explosives to generate a large dust cloud that blocks sunlight to venus?
You can do (it terms of energy) do wonders with nuclear explosions. Nuclear bombs are our only technologies capable of near instantaneous planet-wide effects. Any "solution" to these issues will require levels of energy approaching nuclear blasts; the main problem is the creative engineering needed to harness these effects.
Personally, I'm partial to trying to destabilize Venus's atmosphere using high-altitude air bursts.
In the cosmic scheme of things, 7500 ly is not far. Think of it this way; if we're wrong, and something bizarre happened, and one of the "gamma ray bursts" is aimed at us rather than another direction, by the time we visually see the hypernova we'll be dying and/or dead.
As it is, assuming that the gamma ray blasts follow its rotational axis, we'll be fine on the planet, but anything we've put into space has a good chance at being toast.
The unfortunate part is that the killer won't be a superheated cloud of gas travelling at.1 c . It's going to be a burst of gamma radiation, so by the time we sense it, we're dead.
If a woman walked into my workplace and started acting like an air-headed bimbo I'd have a hard time taking her seriously too, even if turns out that she developed a public key encryption method that isn't defeated by quantum computing. Especially if she was always asking the men around to 'help' her.
I hope you don't plan on being in the upper echelons of whatever social order you are engaged in, at least not in the U.S., and most of Europe.
From my experience, people at or near the top use whatever skills, capability, and appearances they have in order to manipulate those around them.
That air-headed PhD/MBA bimbo is counting on you having a hard time taking her seriously. She's going to rip you a new asshole as she applies for the position above yours, and you'll never see her coming. And she'll probably "ask" you carry some of the furniture into her office.
As I've glimpsed at the upper realms of several different companies, it shocked me how many people we "working" some kind of angle. Either they were acting stupid, manipulating sex appeal, or using some other emotional/social play. I've seen people fake hot-blooded rage at a social gathering so they could see how an opponent would react.
But when you hear them a whole bunch of things you didn't notice before suddenly pop out and it's really hard to ignore them and just pay attention to the important thing. This may not apply to 11-year olds, but this line between the "important thing" and the "whole bunch of other things" is something that some people manipulative masterfully. It's hard not to be taken in by it.
I'm a serious introvert. Occasionally, with one or two other people, I'll speak (and have conversations) in Vent. Otherwise, I limit it to gameplay stuff, and listen to other people. Particularly in raids. If I'm with a lot of people I don't know well in raid, I break out into a sweat just thinking about speaking.
Listening, however, I find it strangely like people watching. I don't mind listening to mature people talk on their own tangents, occasionally with me piping in with a comment. And sometimes, when I group with other introverts, nobody talks (except very occasionally, and almost 90% gameplay stuff), but it isn't *uncomfortable*.
In-game voice is gravy, that's all. I'm glad that Blizzard decided not to implement it via proximity; the party/raid thing makes a lot of sense. As long as you get to choose who you are "in chat" with, and you have full control over whether or not you'll speak (text chat still available), I'm all for an additional tool inside of WoW. Yes, the barrier to fucktards is lower (some people are far ruder on voice). It'll be a minor adaption, that's all.
From another perspective: if Microsoft was releasing a new browser, and it flunked some of its security tests, NOBODY would allow people to get away with saying, "but, its just beta software" or "its just the SDK for people writing AJAX apps."
Are you saying that anyone even blinks an eye when MS released insecure software? Are you saying that those news stories about insecurities in MS software say anything other than, "along their decade track record of insecure products, MS released XXXX"?
Are you saying that MS security stories are a "scoop", rather than a call to patch?
There are other possibilities, as well. Perhaps Safari for Win32 is a trial balloon for other Windows versions of Mac apps.
Get people using Safari, iChat, iPhoto, iTunes, and maybe even Pages & Keynote for Windows, and you've virtually assured that they'll seriously consider a Mac for their next computer purchase.
If _that's_ the goal, then these apps's "not being Windows-y" is a good thing.
We spend a _vast_ amount on NASA right now. If we were to spend the same amount on the Russian space program, we'd have vastly more equipment. Slightly less safe? Perhaps. But many, many more launches.
The Shuttle is anything but cost effective. Each launch is prohibitively expensive. One of the biggest problems with the American Space Program *is* the Shuttle, and most visions of the future of this program involve more "disposable" rockets, because building cheap, big, disposable rockets for lifting cargo is orders of magnitude cheaper than maintaining the shuttle.
Depending upon how you calculate it, NASA's budget has declined somewhat since the Apollo project. But it hasn't declined by more than 40% or so, yet NASA's output has declined at a much faster rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the housing market, particularly California.
Of course, since we're talking about actual property that doesn't go away unless there's an earthquake, fire, or act of god (or jihad), the rate at which the collapse occurs (and the corresponding news coverage) is a good deal slower. Also, you didn't see as much VC in home building, so the collapse won't be as violent (except if it gets *really* bad (much, much worse than I currently forsee, in which case major banks will start to go under, and we'll be back in the 1920s).
By and large, modern Web 2.0 tech companies have some sort of plan. Some of them will go out of business, and the majority of those will be purchased by bigger companies who are profitable. We're going to see a lot of M&A in Tech (that's what happens in markets with too many start-up players), but I don't think we're going to see capital flight, mass layoffs, and a stock market crash.
I'm a huge Linux proponent, but:
Final Cut Studio >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> OSS or non-free Linux video editing apps, at least in the under $10,000 range.
Adobe Creative Suite >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> OSS or non-free Linux desktop image apps, at least when you have to deal with manufacturers that require stuff to be submitted in AI format.
Those are the two big ones for me, anyways.
Mr. Senator,
Given the statistical evidence, at least in this country, it would seem to me that protecting children would be *best* accomplished by banning the Roman Catholic Church. Roughly 4% of all priests have been accused of sexual abuse, a far, far, far higher rate than the number of pedophilia oriented websites.
Note: I'm not seriously proposing banning the RCC. I'm merely pointing out *if* you were protecting the kiddies, what train of thought you should be following.
Mod parent up.
:)
Parent might have a relevant thing (or two) to say about the story
openSuSE does this too; however, even the rate of adoption of these features into the mainline kernel (where they can then be enabled by various distributions without fear of breaking in the next revision) is slower than CK is arguing for.
Why should Linux occasionally focus on desktop features? Why shouldn't there be a desktop performance group who maintains the stuff in mainline, rather than users (or distros!) having to rely on patchsets?
I'm guessing that CK would still be hacking on the kernel if the -CK patchset was part of a "greater" linux-desktop group within the kernel mainline, responsible for "desktop" features.
Hell, call it a new architecture; i386-desktop and x86_64-desktop.
AFAIK (again, from brief experiences and research; I've never actually had it installed or used it for long periods of time) the internet access is very, very similar to their 6 Mbps/ 768 kbps ADSL.
Although your hardware syncs at 25-50 Mbps, it doesn't matter whether or not you purchase TV service. The internet access is limited to 6 Mbps/1 Mbps.
These limitations are a result of the system's design; nodes are being setup at distances where 25 Mbps is what is expected from VDSL/ADSL2+. Someday, they may upgrade that, but they pump your internet, TV, and voice over that 25 Mbps, and that's really not that much bandwidth.
As such, the system design is: 1 HD, 3 SD streams *max*, 6/1 internet *max* (they are marketing slower speeds!), and a couple phone lines. Latency is no where near as good as on FIOS, and often is higher than that of cable. Plus, AT&T's network is notoriously screwy, and their routers often pick strange routes. Furthermore, even though its over fiber, their modems continue to work with the same PPPoE network their DSL network does.
For all of Comcast's terrible customer service, their cable service exceed's AT&T's U-verse in every regard (even upload!), and RCN is even further ahead. All the hype about U-verse is precisely that: hype. Other than running IPTV, and a demonstration of an impressive way to bottleneck a fiber network, there really isn't anything "cool" about it.
OpenOffice has DAV support for any platform, though.
Okay, I might be an idiot, but where is the documentation for this? I use OO.org all the time, and would like to move us to a DAV setup, but I can't find any information on how this works.
AT&T's not hawking fiber, to my knowledge. The U-verse (which is being marketing in my area) maxes out at 6 Mbps/1 Mbps, and 1 HD stream.
It sucks.
Aye.
1. It shows the power of X.
2. It works within and "extends" existing frameworks.
This makes it way cooler than .
With MPX, you're starting from all of the tools of "legacy" X, and all your "legacy" applications work.
X development is getting very exciting; and MPX and/or Compiz are just two examples of this.
Have any of you ever tried to buy a car at a dealer?
"This is a *special* price! It'll go up next week!"
Yeah. Right. I'll believe it when I see it; Sony won't shoot itself in the foot like that. This is just a marketing ploy to drive sales just a little bit more.
Not at all.
You would just have to call it something else. Similar to CentrOS; a "fork" of RHEL, but it doesn't say Red Hat anywhere.
They're only talking about the CUPS trademarks here; you could call in Linux Printing Systems, and replace all instances of CUPS with LPS.
And it's already hit stores.
Its a Wifi phone with some VoIP capacity. When you are near a wifi hotspot, the phone can connect to T-mobile's servers.
This is nice, because:
A)$20 ($10 is the introductory price) will buy you unlimited wifi minutes (including T-mobile hotspots, which are everywhere), and
B)You can get coverage in weird places, like your basement, or, for that matter, Tokyo.
Essentially, if you are a T-mobile customer, it obsoletes Skype for you.
Borrowed?
At the time, Apple gave 2% of its stock to Xerox in exchange for a license to use those designs. Later, when Apple sued MS over "copyright" of the interface, Xerox decided that it, too held copyrights, and decided to sue Apple. As far as I know, the courts held that GUIs can't be copyrighted.
Either way, Apple and Xerox's relationship at the beginning was quite cordial, there was an exchange, and Xerox never decided to market it's technology.
Borrowed, for Apple, is not like "Borrowed", for Microsoft. Microsoft tends to take first, and work out later. Apple tends to license first, and then use that license to the fullest extent possible. Both can be nefarious, but only one is out and out illegal/evil.
Many of T-mobile's devices have built-in WiFi, and their newest devices actually use VoIP when on a WiFi network (unlimited minutes while on WiFI, too!)
See http://theonlyphoneyouneed.com/
More bullshit from AT&T:
e ct-lightspeed-and-the-jedi-mind-trick/
Mr. Stephenson: If you think about wireless broadband networks, EDGE is the only ubiquitous nationwide broadband network deployed today. It's a 300-plus kilobit type service. We're selling in the tens of thousands every single month of smart phones that operate on nothing but EDGE. The service experience is really, really good and what you're going to see with the iPhone is the caching technology that Steve and the Apple guys have developed here makes the EDGE experience even better. Between the Wi-Fi and the EDGE coverage, this is a really good experience.
High latency, low bandwidth broadband. Huzzah!
Sprint's EVDO network is deployed as widely as AT&T's EDGE network (not even all of AT&T's GSM network is EDGE). Worse, Sprint's EVDO revA network is deployed in most metropolitan areas, nearly all interstate highways, and nearly all tourist areas.
For AT&T, Edge is "all the speed you need", up until they deploy HSDPA, in which case that will be, "all the speed you need". Just like this: http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2006/03/30/att-proj
Mr.Stephenson said that AT&T's field tests have shown 'no discernable difference' between AT&T's 1.5 Mbps service and Comcast's 6 Mbps because the problem is not in the last mile but in the backbone.
Ridiculous
It's not the government's spending.
It's % of GDP spent on medical. 13.5% of the U.S.'s GDP is spent on healthcare. 43% of that is government expenditures. The rest is from corporations and individuals.
Vista and XP have so few programs installed by default.
BZZZT!
Have you seen an OEM system with Vista or XP that came with "few programs". There's serious bloatware on there, and I bet all of it has serious security problems. Think of all those sound/video driver applets; those all have administrator access.
On the other hand, OEM Linux systems don't come with that stuff. Not even from Dell.
We give up, we'll go home now, and install Norton Antivirus and Windows Defender with the rest of the lemmings.
The *only* way to "measure" security is to "measure" breakins. You can talk about technological advances in architecture, but abstracting security to bug counting is goofy. Linux systems don't get broken into, because there simply aren't ways to get at them, particularly on the desktop. With things like AppArmor and SELinux your browser is isolated from other processes, every distro ships with the "desktop" version locked down (100% firewalled) by default, and samba, cups, and the other common network daemons (ntp? ssh?) are mature suites with excellent security histories.
I can't get the article to open, but I'm curious as to the vulnerabilities which he counted. How many of them actually have real world applications?
Here is how I would come up with a synthetic benchmark of security:
1. Admit that it will be synthetic, and is ultimately an exercise in mental masturbation
2. Count the bugs.
3. Remove all bugs that have no possibility to be exploited, and all "fixed" bugs.
4. Separate bugs into "server" and "desktop" bugs.
5. Multiple bugs by an index number between 0 and 1, with 0 being harmless bugs, and 1 being bugs that give you "root".
6. Total up bug indexes.
7. Now, count all fixed bugs (excluding impossible to exploit ones), multiple by a "damage index" (see #5), then multiple by (Time to fix bug, measured from release of software)/(Time software has been released). Add this to your result from #6.
8. Voila! You've now posted something that will most likely compete favorably with MS's bug number. It will also still be totally useless.
Many reasons really. Venus is so close to the sun that it would be near impossible to get the temperature down to a reasonable level until we have the power to move the planet or at least adjust the rotation to something more reasonable, which will be thousands of years from now, if ever. By the time the technology to handle the positioning and rotational issue will come along, we will long have figured out how to adjust the atmosphere to suit us.
Nonsense. There are other ways to control heating. We've even planned for some of them, such as setting up giant solar reflectors, or seeding of the upper atmosphere with particulate matter.
In fact, I'm guessing you could get much of Venus' atmosphere to condense into something manageable (possibly something you could use nuclear explosives to remove) by reducing the solar heat. Perhaps we could use a series of asteroids and nuclear explosives to generate a large dust cloud that blocks sunlight to venus?
You can do (it terms of energy) do wonders with nuclear explosions. Nuclear bombs are our only technologies capable of near instantaneous planet-wide effects. Any "solution" to these issues will require levels of energy approaching nuclear blasts; the main problem is the creative engineering needed to harness these effects.
Personally, I'm partial to trying to destabilize Venus's atmosphere using high-altitude air bursts.
Local civilizations?
.1 c . It's going to be a burst of gamma radiation, so by the time we sense it, we're dead.
Err... Buddy?
That's us.
In the cosmic scheme of things, 7500 ly is not far. Think of it this way; if we're wrong, and something bizarre happened, and one of the "gamma ray bursts" is aimed at us rather than another direction, by the time we visually see the hypernova we'll be dying and/or dead.
As it is, assuming that the gamma ray blasts follow its rotational axis, we'll be fine on the planet, but anything we've put into space has a good chance at being toast.
The unfortunate part is that the killer won't be a superheated cloud of gas travelling at
If a woman walked into my workplace and started acting like an air-headed bimbo I'd have a hard time taking her seriously too, even if turns out that she developed a public key encryption method that isn't defeated by quantum computing. Especially if she was always asking the men around to 'help' her.
I hope you don't plan on being in the upper echelons of whatever social order you are engaged in, at least not in the U.S., and most of Europe.
From my experience, people at or near the top use whatever skills, capability, and appearances they have in order to manipulate those around them.
That air-headed PhD/MBA bimbo is counting on you having a hard time taking her seriously. She's going to rip you a new asshole as she applies for the position above yours, and you'll never see her coming. And she'll probably "ask" you carry some of the furniture into her office.
As I've glimpsed at the upper realms of several different companies, it shocked me how many people we "working" some kind of angle. Either they were acting stupid, manipulating sex appeal, or using some other emotional/social play. I've seen people fake hot-blooded rage at a social gathering so they could see how an opponent would react.
But when you hear them a whole bunch of things you didn't notice before suddenly pop out and it's really hard to ignore them and just pay attention to the important thing. This may not apply to 11-year olds, but this line between the "important thing" and the "whole bunch of other things" is something that some people manipulative masterfully. It's hard not to be taken in by it.
Agreed.
I'm a serious introvert. Occasionally, with one or two other people, I'll speak (and have conversations) in Vent. Otherwise, I limit it to gameplay stuff, and listen to other people. Particularly in raids. If I'm with a lot of people I don't know well in raid, I break out into a sweat just thinking about speaking.
Listening, however, I find it strangely like people watching. I don't mind listening to mature people talk on their own tangents, occasionally with me piping in with a comment. And sometimes, when I group with other introverts, nobody talks (except very occasionally, and almost 90% gameplay stuff), but it isn't *uncomfortable*.
In-game voice is gravy, that's all. I'm glad that Blizzard decided not to implement it via proximity; the party/raid thing makes a lot of sense. As long as you get to choose who you are "in chat" with, and you have full control over whether or not you'll speak (text chat still available), I'm all for an additional tool inside of WoW. Yes, the barrier to fucktards is lower (some people are far ruder on voice). It'll be a minor adaption, that's all.
From another perspective: if Microsoft was releasing a new browser, and it flunked some of its security tests, NOBODY would allow people to get away with saying, "but, its just beta software" or "its just the SDK for people writing AJAX apps."
Are you saying that anyone even blinks an eye when MS released insecure software? Are you saying that those news stories about insecurities in MS software say anything other than, "along their decade track record of insecure products, MS released XXXX"?
Are you saying that MS security stories are a "scoop", rather than a call to patch?
There are other possibilities, as well. Perhaps Safari for Win32 is a trial balloon for other Windows versions of Mac apps.
Get people using Safari, iChat, iPhoto, iTunes, and maybe even Pages & Keynote for Windows, and you've virtually assured that they'll seriously consider a Mac for their next computer purchase.
If _that's_ the goal, then these apps's "not being Windows-y" is a good thing.
*shrug*
We spend a _vast_ amount on NASA right now. If we were to spend the same amount on the Russian space program, we'd have vastly more equipment. Slightly less safe? Perhaps. But many, many more launches.
The Shuttle is anything but cost effective. Each launch is prohibitively expensive. One of the biggest problems with the American Space Program *is* the Shuttle, and most visions of the future of this program involve more "disposable" rockets, because building cheap, big, disposable rockets for lifting cargo is orders of magnitude cheaper than maintaining the shuttle.
Depending upon how you calculate it, NASA's budget has declined somewhat since the Apollo project. But it hasn't declined by more than 40% or so, yet NASA's output has declined at a much faster rate.