Mr Triquiers critics would disagree with the assertion that torture worked in algeria. He was more making the argument that was just the price insurgents had to pay for being insurgents, not that it worked.
That it wasn't a very effective intel tool
No it wasn't.
How it is used (for example in conjunction with other methods and information) determines its effectiveness.
Not really no, that's the problem. Torture doesn't work - effective interrogation does, torture doesn't add value to the process.
What if you're playing WW2 game as the Nazi's or Japan where the negative reputation is well, consistent with a friendly ideology? So the more jews you murder the more your allies like you sort of thing.
There's certainly a place for reputation - don't break whatever conventions of game setting too much - e.g. don't just rampage around declaring war on everyone.
The Civ example is my point of why the ICRC doesn't get it. If you reward rampant militarism and breaking of modern warfare rules then well... you're rewarding it. You need to find a way to make it a compelling and interesting choice, or it's bad gameplay, and that's precisely what the ICRC doesn't want is good gameplay choices to reward bad behaviour. Sorry, but that's a mutually incompatible view to have. Either the gameplay choices created are interesting gameplay - or they're bad gameplay at which point you don't want them in your game at all.
So again, they're not talking about most aspects of most games. They're basically suggesting that media not sanitize human rights violations. Which is an issue.
This ties in a lot to my research groups area!
And the ICRC doesn't get it.
If you give players consequences for choices then those choices have to be interesting - or they shouldn't be choices. The reason you don't put prisoners of war in a game is because the consequences for improper POW treatment come well after the actual events - and only if you lose. What are the choices with POW's? Follow the geneva conventions and essentially nothing interesting happens. You may have to feed them or not - but not feeding POW's is more food for you, less food for them - win win if you win the war. That's a bad choice because it's essentially reinforcing the idea that starving a million POW's to death is actually a useful idea - and that's problematic because well, that's exactly why people do it. Do you want to reward people for starving POW's to death?
If you give players a choice to torture - and then they do - they have to have some gain out of it, or they'll just reload and not do it. That's a problem, because you've had to deliberately reward torture. When you don't give players a choice - or when you don't put on a consequence (e.g. blowing up an ambulance in a game) then you're neither rewarding nor punishing - it's just.. a game.
Things are banned in the real world because they either don't work and cause all sorts of problems for no benefit, or they are incredibly effective to the point of being too dangerous. Torture on one end of the spectrum, chemical weapons on the other.
Nvidia hardware isn't really clearly superior to AMD.. they rotate on who has the best hardware at various price points.
But sure, the point is that this hardware should do a specific job for gamers at a specific price point, if Nvidia GPU's are the best bet for that in this product price segment there's no reason to be an ideological crusader about it. The point is to be able to play games, not make the average couch potato start writing driver code on his TV.
That's actually a good argument to be rid of him though.
He is nominally in control, but owns very little of it now (~5%), and spends most of his time not doing microsoft related things. If he wants to come back to microsoft that's one thing. But he's got other things to do - and microsoft needs to look out for shareholders of the other 95% of the money.
That said, I think it's somewhat silly - Billg's big job right now is helping to find a successor to Ballmer, which, as a 5% shareholder he is certainly entitled to be involved in.
And they're running out of room to grow without a new transformational product.
At this point a lot of the smartphones they're selling are just replacing the previous smartphone sold by apple 2 years ago. That's fine but it's not massive growth, or entering a new sector, so the price is going to reflect the expectation that they're not going to suddenly start selling 100 million new devices a year.
144k a year is enough that you can live very comfortably if you are responsible. And small enough that you can burn through it very quickly if you aren't. We have a lot of profs here in the 130 range and you can see it all the time. Some rush out and buy big houses, expensive cars and they try and pour on the renovations etc. Or they try and send their kids to expensive schools. And others buy modest houses and modest cars and... aren't broke.
Ya that's my 'well in advance and tried to hide it' statement, and as I said, that seems by far the most likely scenario here.
Someone in the press room leaking the information a small number of ms in advance doesn't really make sense with human reactions to do anything about it. So it's either long in advance and an attempt to hide it, or one of a huge array of computer systems screwing up.
This is I think part of it. If someone knew... 15 minutes in advance, they could have places a series of bets that looked like well, bets.
Knowing a small number milliseconds in advance is a very very odd thing (in this case 4-5). It's possible someone knew very well in advance, and was able to try and program the trades to beat everyone by a small number of milliseconds and hoped no one would notice, and that seems the most likely case.
Any other scenario creates a lot of very tricky technical problems which would seem very odd. Did someone in the locked shielded room manage to leak the information a few seconds in advance? For this level of speed you're really talking about computer processing time, is it possible the document to be released was placed on a scanner early or the scanner had a very slight clock drift and was running 10 ms ahead of where it should have been? Why would you even bother trying to do releases like that at exactly 2pm atomic clock time... wouldn't it make more sense to just have the announcement and release the paperwork several minutes later? Maybe not obviously, but when you're talking about 5 ms advanced notice there is just a huge array of equipment that might be involved in automated trading that could just be very slightly off on its timing.
It's not possible for someone to have manually made a bet 5 ms in advance, 5 minutes sure, and then tried to hide it. If it's not a person deliberately hiding things, the technical possibilities for a 5 ms error are just enormous.
The internet is supposed to be bigger than any one country.
The Internet isn't supposed to be tied to country at all.
Oddly, I agree with Eric Schmidt on this - the big risk is if every country starts making their own internet fiefdom and it becomes harder to operate and connect internationally. Of course Eric Schmidt said this, as one of the companies responsible for helping with the spying he's worried about the ripple effects from.
Sure, mobile has texting and that's definitely new, but time spent texting was time on the phone before, and we had handheld games back then. Crappy ones, but handheld games none the less.
For little kids, 4 and 5 ish, I'm not sure that TV today and TV in 1986 are much different. Sure, you have some more choice, but well, that's about it.
Ok but lots of houses had electronic devices in 1986. Maybe electronic typewriters, maybe crappy computers maybe but we had devices you could play games on and write documents on. Which specific device is secondary to the broader capabilities. You could sit around and play games or sit around and watch TV or sit around and write notes to people.
CDs
How are CDs any meaningfully different than a tape or record player in what you actually do with them? Even the radio is very similar. The details of what that specific device does are subtly different sure, but you sit around and listen to music. My mother still has a gramophone from like the great depression lying around. Audio quality on CD's is way better, but you can sit around and listen to a gramophone just as well as you can sit around listening to a CD.
Mobile phones
No, but we had phones, and cordless phones. Sure, you had to call my office number rather than my mobile to tell me to fetch milk on the way home, but you could still do it. Mobile phones haven't actually changed that people stand around talking on the phone. They just mean everyone has their own and can be called everywhere rather than having to plan ahead.
But if one wants to represent the technological experience of an average person living at that time, then it's more questionable if they should be used.
Well so that's the thing. The technological experience from the proliferation of the internet and the WWW might have changed things a little bit, but in 1986 people still sat around and listened to music, played games on electronic devices and listened to music. The average technological experience today is not hugely different from in 1986 for most people. Whether you sat around watching ALF,Matlock and LA law and Oprah, or Futurama, Breaking bad, Law and Order and.. Oprah (or ellen now?) you're still sitting around watching TV. Whether you sat around writing letters by hand, typing them on a typewriter or writing e-mails you still sat around writing. Whether you sat and read the newspaper, or go to the newspaper's website and read there you still basically conducted the same activity. Technology has made all of those things marginally more convenient and marginally higher quality. But you did basically the same stuff.
Certainly kids spend more time on the internet talking and playing games with their friends than they did running around in the yard with them in 1986, but it's still time interacting with friends, and less time for mom and dad to drive the kids around.
I think it's a serious mistake to think the allocation of time between work - eating - goofing off is radically different, or that the time spent goofing off is meaningfully different today than in 1986. Whether you went to an arcade, owned a NES (or atari 2600 or similar) you're still sitting in front of some device playing video games. Whether you stream your TV through netflix or watch it through a cable company you're still watching TV. Whether you are wired to a phone or have a mobile with your own number people still call you and won't shut up.
Sure, when you can't chat with your friends sure, you talk to your spouse - but that's a bad thing too, because now your friends are going to move past you. It's like that guy in 1986 who didn't have a phone. And yes, there were those people too. You mean I can't call you you and invite you to an event, I *have* to ask you at work or send you a letter? I'll ask the person I can actually call.
1926 maybe, sure, times were different. But I lived through 1986, and people sat around listening to music, reading, watching TV and playing games the same way they do today. Sure, the format has shifted a bit, but it's the same basic activity.
That's kind of it. Their business is in selling adwords and they do that by trawling as much data as they can about as many people as they can. All of their other businesses are either amusing side projects they haven't figured out what to do with yet, or they do evil in support of their main advertising business.
Anything that can't either boost adsense revenue or make money directly is eventually going to get cut.
Windows phone picked up about 3.7% of the market in 2Q 2013 - or 8.7 million devices. Of those Nokia shipped 7 million, and Samsung 1 million + other.
Now lets look at android. Sure, samsung shipped 73 million devices, but numbers 2-5 each shipped between 10 and 12 million units. LG, Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE
So while Nokia - and everyone else is getting completely smoked by samsung, they're actually catching up to the second tier of the pack at around 10 million units a quarter.
So sure, nokia is managing about 1/4 the sales of apple with MS. And had 77% year on year growth. That'... well, is surprisingly good honestly. Even if they get half that much growth this year they'll be in the 2nd rung of smartphone makers behind samsung. Which given that they don't have semiconductor fabs is about as good as you can hope for.
I've seen a few, mostly in the testing sense, or for anyone who makes consumer software as a business, and they need to know how to work with 8.
But ya, I'm scrambling to get a bunch of windows 7 PC's in the next week or two for a LOT of small business customers in case 8.1 makes windows 7 unavailable. Unfortunately windows 8.1 is not actually a meaningful improvement on windows 8.
Right, and I think that was a big win for microsoft, who was aiming at a productivity device. Redesigning around touch is why windows 8 is horrible. It's not that windows 8 is bad for touch necessarily, it's that it's bad for everything else.
When apple went for the iPad they made a gadget. Great for a very limited problem set. But terrible for others. Windows with a pen rather than a mouse works fine, it didn't need to be messed with, and trying to do so has shot themselves in the foot.
You're also thinking like MS is the one trying to innovate, when it's a chicken and egg thing. No one did decent form factors because they didn't think they'd sell, because they didn't sell MS only ever made some stuff for their own Office products and for keyboard input with a pen but no keyboard, but no one really pushed for a killer app because they both thought it was the other guy who should be innovating. MS wanted hardware worth buying, and hardware guys wanted a huge investment in software to create a market that no one was sure they were going to support.
I think it's a big mistake to think you need to redesign to be gimmicky for the sake of it. Touch on an iPad works because it's for the limited problem set of what an iPad is trying to do. Tablets with a stylus are much more capable, though the resolution was never as good as I would have liked.
Oh definitely, there was stuff to be improved on. But none of the hardware makers ever really provided an innovative device like the one Gates held up in whatever it was, 2002, 2003, that was basically an iPad running windows XP. All anyone made were laptops with with a rotating hinge.
So Microsoft are trying to persuade manufacturers to 'make hardware worth buying'... by making hardware hardly anyone buys?
In large part because it's too expensive. That's deliberate. They'd piss off a lot of partners selling it it with no markup (hardware + 100 dollars say, rather than hardware + windows + 100 dollars that everyone else has to charge).
But MS has been pushing touch devices for a decade, and got almost no traction from manufacturers. The only market that really picked it up was lecturing in academia where writing on tablet works very well for some people. They even failed to pick up the student market, which is really where a touch device or one with a capacitive pen should live and breathe.
The vast majority of Windows users would much rather have a $500 laptop running Windows 7 than a $1000 tablet running Windows 8.
Sure, because windows 8 is unbelievably horrid. But the way you get innovative hardware that people want is you make 99 things people don't want, until you find the one they do like. You find something that moves units at the 1000 dollar price point to one segment, then find a way to make it 600 or 700 dollars for the mass market.
Sure, Windows 8.1 is basically as worthless as Windows 8, if you want to rail on them for thinking Windows 8.1 is a step in the right direction that's a fair complaint to make (and you can accompany that with some analysis of the the various 8.1 betas people played with and why you feel that way).
But getting outraged over leaked hardware specs, when the leaked hardware specs are pretty much what you'd expect is pushing it. I specifically haven't bought a convertible laptop right now because the options for Haswell systems are really limited. There are some half decent ivy bridge form factors, but why buy something with 2/3rds the battery life if you can wait a couple of months and get haswell?
Microsoft isn't trying to make the greatest device ever with surface, nor are they trying to subsidize marketshare. They're trying to persuade other manufacturers to step up their game and make hardware worth buying. I'm not sure that's entirely worked, but I've seen good things about a few of the different laptops out there, in direct response to surface.
Is Surface 2 the greatest thing ever? No, definitely not. Should microsoft fire just about everyone responsible for Windows 8 (and now 8.1)? Sure. But taking a decent enough form factor, sticking in a updated CPU, some more ram, hopefully a bigger HDD and... well, that's about what you'd expect.
The Supreme Ruler series has used NASA maps of earth for like a decade.
Unfortunately it's still the same maps as they were using a decade ago, I've been trying to persuade the lead programmer to get higher res maps, but that creates system requirements issues.
The vikings didn't seem to get very far south though.
Columbus 'discovered' a couple of islands (peurto rico and cuba basically), at least initially. The difference was that the vikings seem to have contented themselves with the north, whereas Spanish and Portuguese and British and French sailors started looking for anything else, and importantly, looking for edges once they found the giant land mass that is north, central and south america.
I suppose it's all down to practical differences. The Vikings didn't view trade or colonization as highly competitive races, whereas England, France, Spain and Portugal were very much interested in competition with each other, and if one thought it was an opportunity, they all did.
Slashdot Mirror
Mr Triquiers critics would disagree with the assertion that torture worked in algeria. He was more making the argument that was just the price insurgents had to pay for being insurgents, not that it worked.
That it wasn't a very effective intel tool
No it wasn't.
How it is used (for example in conjunction with other methods and information) determines its effectiveness.
Not really no, that's the problem. Torture doesn't work - effective interrogation does, torture doesn't add value to the process.
If you commit war crimes and win the war, nobody's left to prosecute you. Just like real life. If you lose, it could just be part of the defeat video.
Right, and the ICRC is complaining that we don't have the negative consequences of rule breaking.
Can you use a reputation system?
What if you're playing WW2 game as the Nazi's or Japan where the negative reputation is well, consistent with a friendly ideology? So the more jews you murder the more your allies like you sort of thing.
There's certainly a place for reputation - don't break whatever conventions of game setting too much - e.g. don't just rampage around declaring war on everyone.
The Civ example is my point of why the ICRC doesn't get it. If you reward rampant militarism and breaking of modern warfare rules then well... you're rewarding it. You need to find a way to make it a compelling and interesting choice, or it's bad gameplay, and that's precisely what the ICRC doesn't want is good gameplay choices to reward bad behaviour. Sorry, but that's a mutually incompatible view to have. Either the gameplay choices created are interesting gameplay - or they're bad gameplay at which point you don't want them in your game at all.
So again, they're not talking about most aspects of most games. They're basically suggesting that media not sanitize human rights violations. Which is an issue.
This ties in a lot to my research groups area!
And the ICRC doesn't get it.
If you give players consequences for choices then those choices have to be interesting - or they shouldn't be choices. The reason you don't put prisoners of war in a game is because the consequences for improper POW treatment come well after the actual events - and only if you lose. What are the choices with POW's? Follow the geneva conventions and essentially nothing interesting happens. You may have to feed them or not - but not feeding POW's is more food for you, less food for them - win win if you win the war. That's a bad choice because it's essentially reinforcing the idea that starving a million POW's to death is actually a useful idea - and that's problematic because well, that's exactly why people do it. Do you want to reward people for starving POW's to death?
If you give players a choice to torture - and then they do - they have to have some gain out of it, or they'll just reload and not do it. That's a problem, because you've had to deliberately reward torture. When you don't give players a choice - or when you don't put on a consequence (e.g. blowing up an ambulance in a game) then you're neither rewarding nor punishing - it's just.. a game.
Things are banned in the real world because they either don't work and cause all sorts of problems for no benefit, or they are incredibly effective to the point of being too dangerous. Torture on one end of the spectrum, chemical weapons on the other.
Nvidia hardware isn't really clearly superior to AMD.. they rotate on who has the best hardware at various price points.
But sure, the point is that this hardware should do a specific job for gamers at a specific price point, if Nvidia GPU's are the best bet for that in this product price segment there's no reason to be an ideological crusader about it. The point is to be able to play games, not make the average couch potato start writing driver code on his TV.
That's actually a good argument to be rid of him though.
He is nominally in control, but owns very little of it now (~5%), and spends most of his time not doing microsoft related things. If he wants to come back to microsoft that's one thing. But he's got other things to do - and microsoft needs to look out for shareholders of the other 95% of the money.
That said, I think it's somewhat silly - Billg's big job right now is helping to find a successor to Ballmer, which, as a 5% shareholder he is certainly entitled to be involved in.
And they're running out of room to grow without a new transformational product.
At this point a lot of the smartphones they're selling are just replacing the previous smartphone sold by apple 2 years ago. That's fine but it's not massive growth, or entering a new sector, so the price is going to reflect the expectation that they're not going to suddenly start selling 100 million new devices a year.
12K a month is not really that much money.
144k a year is enough that you can live very comfortably if you are responsible. And small enough that you can burn through it very quickly if you aren't. We have a lot of profs here in the 130 range and you can see it all the time. Some rush out and buy big houses, expensive cars and they try and pour on the renovations etc. Or they try and send their kids to expensive schools. And others buy modest houses and modest cars and ... aren't broke.
Ya that's my 'well in advance and tried to hide it' statement, and as I said, that seems by far the most likely scenario here.
Someone in the press room leaking the information a small number of ms in advance doesn't really make sense with human reactions to do anything about it. So it's either long in advance and an attempt to hide it, or one of a huge array of computer systems screwing up.
This is I think part of it. If someone knew... 15 minutes in advance, they could have places a series of bets that looked like well, bets.
Knowing a small number milliseconds in advance is a very very odd thing (in this case 4-5). It's possible someone knew very well in advance, and was able to try and program the trades to beat everyone by a small number of milliseconds and hoped no one would notice, and that seems the most likely case.
Any other scenario creates a lot of very tricky technical problems which would seem very odd. Did someone in the locked shielded room manage to leak the information a few seconds in advance? For this level of speed you're really talking about computer processing time, is it possible the document to be released was placed on a scanner early or the scanner had a very slight clock drift and was running 10 ms ahead of where it should have been? Why would you even bother trying to do releases like that at exactly 2pm atomic clock time... wouldn't it make more sense to just have the announcement and release the paperwork several minutes later? Maybe not obviously, but when you're talking about 5 ms advanced notice there is just a huge array of equipment that might be involved in automated trading that could just be very slightly off on its timing.
It's not possible for someone to have manually made a bet 5 ms in advance, 5 minutes sure, and then tried to hide it. If it's not a person deliberately hiding things, the technical possibilities for a 5 ms error are just enormous.
This is how a lot of people in scientific computing use the phrase.. unfortunately.
My GF is an astrophysicist, and as a computer scientists I cringe every time I hear her colleagues discussing their fortran codes.
The internet is supposed to be bigger than any one country.
The Internet isn't supposed to be tied to country at all.
Oddly, I agree with Eric Schmidt on this - the big risk is if every country starts making their own internet fiefdom and it becomes harder to operate and connect internationally. Of course Eric Schmidt said this, as one of the companies responsible for helping with the spying he's worried about the ripple effects from.
Sure, mobile has texting and that's definitely new, but time spent texting was time on the phone before, and we had handheld games back then. Crappy ones, but handheld games none the less.
For little kids, 4 and 5 ish, I'm not sure that TV today and TV in 1986 are much different. Sure, you have some more choice, but well, that's about it.
Ok but lots of houses had electronic devices in 1986. Maybe electronic typewriters, maybe crappy computers maybe but we had devices you could play games on and write documents on. Which specific device is secondary to the broader capabilities. You could sit around and play games or sit around and watch TV or sit around and write notes to people.
CDs
How are CDs any meaningfully different than a tape or record player in what you actually do with them? Even the radio is very similar. The details of what that specific device does are subtly different sure, but you sit around and listen to music. My mother still has a gramophone from like the great depression lying around. Audio quality on CD's is way better, but you can sit around and listen to a gramophone just as well as you can sit around listening to a CD.
Mobile phones
No, but we had phones, and cordless phones. Sure, you had to call my office number rather than my mobile to tell me to fetch milk on the way home, but you could still do it. Mobile phones haven't actually changed that people stand around talking on the phone. They just mean everyone has their own and can be called everywhere rather than having to plan ahead.
But if one wants to represent the technological experience of an average person living at that time, then it's more questionable if they should be used.
Well so that's the thing. The technological experience from the proliferation of the internet and the WWW might have changed things a little bit, but in 1986 people still sat around and listened to music, played games on electronic devices and listened to music. The average technological experience today is not hugely different from in 1986 for most people. Whether you sat around watching ALF,Matlock and LA law and Oprah, or Futurama, Breaking bad, Law and Order and.. Oprah (or ellen now?) you're still sitting around watching TV. Whether you sat around writing letters by hand, typing them on a typewriter or writing e-mails you still sat around writing. Whether you sat and read the newspaper, or go to the newspaper's website and read there you still basically conducted the same activity. Technology has made all of those things marginally more convenient and marginally higher quality. But you did basically the same stuff.
Certainly kids spend more time on the internet talking and playing games with their friends than they did running around in the yard with them in 1986, but it's still time interacting with friends, and less time for mom and dad to drive the kids around.
I think it's a serious mistake to think the allocation of time between work - eating - goofing off is radically different, or that the time spent goofing off is meaningfully different today than in 1986. Whether you went to an arcade, owned a NES (or atari 2600 or similar) you're still sitting in front of some device playing video games. Whether you stream your TV through netflix or watch it through a cable company you're still watching TV. Whether you are wired to a phone or have a mobile with your own number people still call you and won't shut up.
Sure, when you can't chat with your friends sure, you talk to your spouse - but that's a bad thing too, because now your friends are going to move past you. It's like that guy in 1986 who didn't have a phone. And yes, there were those people too. You mean I can't call you you and invite you to an event, I *have* to ask you at work or send you a letter? I'll ask the person I can actually call.
1926 maybe, sure, times were different. But I lived through 1986, and people sat around listening to music, reading, watching TV and playing games the same way they do today. Sure, the format has shifted a bit, but it's the same basic activity.
That's kind of it. Their business is in selling adwords and they do that by trawling as much data as they can about as many people as they can. All of their other businesses are either amusing side projects they haven't figured out what to do with yet, or they do evil in support of their main advertising business.
Anything that can't either boost adsense revenue or make money directly is eventually going to get cut.
Windows phone picked up about 3.7% of the market in 2Q 2013 - or 8.7 million devices. Of those Nokia shipped 7 million, and Samsung 1 million + other.
Now lets look at android. Sure, samsung shipped 73 million devices, but numbers 2-5 each shipped between 10 and 12 million units. LG, Lenovo, Huawei, ZTE
So while Nokia - and everyone else is getting completely smoked by samsung, they're actually catching up to the second tier of the pack at around 10 million units a quarter.
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24257413
So sure, nokia is managing about 1/4 the sales of apple with MS. And had 77% year on year growth. That'... well, is surprisingly good honestly. Even if they get half that much growth this year they'll be in the 2nd rung of smartphone makers behind samsung. Which given that they don't have semiconductor fabs is about as good as you can hope for.
I've seen a few, mostly in the testing sense, or for anyone who makes consumer software as a business, and they need to know how to work with 8.
But ya, I'm scrambling to get a bunch of windows 7 PC's in the next week or two for a LOT of small business customers in case 8.1 makes windows 7 unavailable. Unfortunately windows 8.1 is not actually a meaningful improvement on windows 8.
The way I configure SSD's is as a OS/boot drive, and then I write all user data off to a RAID with traditional HDD's.
The simplest way is a SSD for windows/linux and then put your user directories on a RAID1 of 1TB drives, and then backups from there.
or make a copy and then brute force the password.
Right, and I think that was a big win for microsoft, who was aiming at a productivity device. Redesigning around touch is why windows 8 is horrible. It's not that windows 8 is bad for touch necessarily, it's that it's bad for everything else.
When apple went for the iPad they made a gadget. Great for a very limited problem set. But terrible for others. Windows with a pen rather than a mouse works fine, it didn't need to be messed with, and trying to do so has shot themselves in the foot.
You're also thinking like MS is the one trying to innovate, when it's a chicken and egg thing. No one did decent form factors because they didn't think they'd sell, because they didn't sell MS only ever made some stuff for their own Office products and for keyboard input with a pen but no keyboard, but no one really pushed for a killer app because they both thought it was the other guy who should be innovating. MS wanted hardware worth buying, and hardware guys wanted a huge investment in software to create a market that no one was sure they were going to support.
I think it's a big mistake to think you need to redesign to be gimmicky for the sake of it. Touch on an iPad works because it's for the limited problem set of what an iPad is trying to do. Tablets with a stylus are much more capable, though the resolution was never as good as I would have liked.
Oh definitely, there was stuff to be improved on. But none of the hardware makers ever really provided an innovative device like the one Gates held up in whatever it was, 2002, 2003, that was basically an iPad running windows XP. All anyone made were laptops with with a rotating hinge.
So Microsoft are trying to persuade manufacturers to 'make hardware worth buying'... by making hardware hardly anyone buys?
In large part because it's too expensive. That's deliberate. They'd piss off a lot of partners selling it it with no markup (hardware + 100 dollars say, rather than hardware + windows + 100 dollars that everyone else has to charge).
But MS has been pushing touch devices for a decade, and got almost no traction from manufacturers. The only market that really picked it up was lecturing in academia where writing on tablet works very well for some people. They even failed to pick up the student market, which is really where a touch device or one with a capacitive pen should live and breathe.
The vast majority of Windows users would much rather have a $500 laptop running Windows 7 than a $1000 tablet running Windows 8.
Sure, because windows 8 is unbelievably horrid. But the way you get innovative hardware that people want is you make 99 things people don't want, until you find the one they do like. You find something that moves units at the 1000 dollar price point to one segment, then find a way to make it 600 or 700 dollars for the mass market.
For real.
Sure, Windows 8.1 is basically as worthless as Windows 8, if you want to rail on them for thinking Windows 8.1 is a step in the right direction that's a fair complaint to make (and you can accompany that with some analysis of the the various 8.1 betas people played with and why you feel that way).
But getting outraged over leaked hardware specs, when the leaked hardware specs are pretty much what you'd expect is pushing it. I specifically haven't bought a convertible laptop right now because the options for Haswell systems are really limited. There are some half decent ivy bridge form factors, but why buy something with 2/3rds the battery life if you can wait a couple of months and get haswell?
Microsoft isn't trying to make the greatest device ever with surface, nor are they trying to subsidize marketshare. They're trying to persuade other manufacturers to step up their game and make hardware worth buying. I'm not sure that's entirely worked, but I've seen good things about a few of the different laptops out there, in direct response to surface.
Is Surface 2 the greatest thing ever? No, definitely not. Should microsoft fire just about everyone responsible for Windows 8 (and now 8.1)? Sure. But taking a decent enough form factor, sticking in a updated CPU, some more ram, hopefully a bigger HDD and... well, that's about what you'd expect.
The Supreme Ruler series has used NASA maps of earth for like a decade.
Unfortunately it's still the same maps as they were using a decade ago, I've been trying to persuade the lead programmer to get higher res maps, but that creates system requirements issues.
The vikings didn't seem to get very far south though.
Columbus 'discovered' a couple of islands (peurto rico and cuba basically), at least initially. The difference was that the vikings seem to have contented themselves with the north, whereas Spanish and Portuguese and British and French sailors started looking for anything else, and importantly, looking for edges once they found the giant land mass that is north, central and south america.
I suppose it's all down to practical differences. The Vikings didn't view trade or colonization as highly competitive races, whereas England, France, Spain and Portugal were very much interested in competition with each other, and if one thought it was an opportunity, they all did.