This happens a LOT in the software business. Google is trying to sort out which maps to show to which people based on 'official' boundaries (which may or may not reflect actual boundaries, and some boundaries are not filed with the UN publicly so who the hell knows where they are). I worked on a game recently where we were trying to figure out the official border between france and germany at a particular point in time, the area in question has changed hands something like 17 times. 6 guys in a basement were asking very serious questions like the legal status of egypt and sudan under Britian (and how to model that?) the legal status of Taiwan (and whether that meant our game would get banned in China, and whether or not we cared). There are lots of messy legal areas you sometimes have to pick something and role with it.
Facebook only has one facebook.com/yourname url to give out, and honestly, they don't want to be involved in the fight over who is more Merck than the other, that's why they're telling them both to sort it out themselves. Facebook has no idea who has a more valid claim to the name, and, this is of course muddied by them being in separate areas. Facebook might have to oblige the US trademark for the US branch of the company in the US, and the european version in Europe or just have to oblige the US version or, well, who the hell knows? There's no winning answer here. They may have signed a contract, but my suspicion is that the contract would only be valid if Merck (gmbh) was the legal trademark holder, which, depending on the circumstances, it might not be.
I'm not sure 'smarter' is the right word. Right now a lot of servers are run by the least incompetent tech person in the office. It doesn't really matter if they're actually trained or really paid to do that job, but those young people know a lot about computers.
Putting services into the 'cloud' puts it into the hands of specialists in IT, and leaves non IT people for non IT jobs, which is what they should be doing anyway.
Also, any 'open source' project that runs anything worth real money is going to be backed, directly or indirectly by someone who has cash to pay developers. This is the 'Intel and IBM as major contributors to linux' sort of deal, although for more specialized products. That doesn't mean they do everything, or even necessarily run the show, but no one in their right mind runs a major Open source product shop without some money in a back room somewhere.
The answer is government run healthcare with a government run database. Then if your medical records leak out it is *only* a privacy violation, and cannot effect further access to employment or medical care.
The advantages of a functioning single database are enormous. Depending on where you live, you may have to carry all of your relevant records between specialists as you get sent through the system when something is wrong with you. Each of those steps risks you losing something important, and puts undue pressure on the doctor you are seeing to assess whatever you bring them right there in front of you, while you're waiting. Assuming everything you bring is in a format they can use, and if not, well then there's a lot of time spent faxing/phoning etc. back and forth. The risk that your privacy can be invaded is well outweighed by the fact that your allergy to some random medication, or obscure but potentially serious condition is going to show up in a record somewhere when you get into a car accident on holiday out of province/state.
I'm in canada, so the only people who particularly care about my medical records but wouldn't be granted access to them are, my 'spouse' my kids (which I don't have but you get the idea), and well, that's it. And it doesn't matter who runs the healthcare system, if there's something in there I'm trying to hide, it's equally likely they'll be told regardless of who runs the database. But in a system where that information matters to insurance companies and employers, well then you have a problem.
The DMV thing having SSN's is unfortunate, but I guess it makes sense. Criminal activity (which I guess would be tied to your SSN?) is going to impact your ability to interact with the DMV, and as a government agency they're authorized to collect that data. Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do to secure information they have legal access to under normal circumstances, it doesn't matter if it's paper or electronic.
This is the approach taken in europe. Many places there have 35 hour work weeks or 37.5 compared to the US 40, and far more importantly, far less overtime allowed, and far more mandatory holidays.
I don't think I'd like to have only 10 hours of work worth doing in a week, that would get real boring real fast, and I'd probably be bad at it because you don't maintain the skills. But 40 is, in this day and age, probably a spec too much. Or at least the '2000 hours a year' metric is a bit too much. Having a system where we pay people so little that they need to work more than 2000 hours a year, and a LOT more, to have any sort of lifestyle is depressing.
Of course there's lots of places with lots of work to do that can take more than 40 hours a week, and it's hard to spread that around more ways. I'm in game development and it's decidedly one of them, going from 10 to 12 people but working less accordingly doesn't really equate to equal productivity, sometimes it does. I'm sure BioWare adding on another 80 people to their existing 800 probably works out to 10% more 'levels designed' so to speak, but a lot of small business work doesn't rise to the level of benefiting equally from added employees.
which doesn't necessarily make them all that important. A virus/bacteria/etc that is resistant to all of those things but only gives you a runny nose for 2 days isn't really a big problem.
And of course we know that doing nothing killed people. A lot of them. For centuries. Or have we all forgotten that infant mortality rates used to be over 10%, and deaths by what are now preventable diseases killed millions at a young age?
Ok, so maybe we create diseases that are immune to whatever we're doing, that's why we keep doing drug research. It might be a cat and mouse game, but I prefer being on the side of people who have very fortunately lived through all of these things. And I'm sure so do you, even if you don't realize it.
That would have made sense the last time we went through this. Now that MS and Yahoo are in bed with each other on the search side of things I don't think yahoo has enough value for Apple to want to even consider it.
The other thing is that yahoo would seriously hurt the apple brand. Apple is about new, hip, cool, yahoo is this (by today's standards) old internet company that those of us who had geocities e-mail accounts still use as yahoo accounts. No one in the reality distortion bubble of Apple is going to see acquiring yahoo as a step forward. If yahoo were 1/10th the size and made similar products it might make sense, but on a cheap day yahoo is a 15 billion dollar buyout, and is more like a 20-25 billion buyout to get complete ownership, that's a shitload of money for a huge big outfit and culture that wouldn't really fit with Apple.
MS is a whole other ballgame. Merging yahoo and hotmail would give them a huge base to rival google with, and would bring them into a noticeable share of the search market, and give them a full on portal to the web that they've failed at miserably. All of the things wrong with yahoo for apple apply to MS, but MS has fucked up all of those things enough that buying yahoo might actually look like an improvement over whatever they can manage.
Have you ever worked for the government, ever? The reason you know about this at all is because they need a paper trail a Km long. The government cannot, and does not do anything without layers of approvals, analysis, and more approvals. That cost money.
If the government is going to say it, they probably have to run it by an expert. That's a 10k consulting fee for the guy to talk to you.
The 'unfinished' blackberry app is telling at 40k. 40k is the price of getting a sufficiently working prototype, that they can decide it's not worth the next 60k in testing and everything else. And who knows what exactly they prototyped first (which, by the way, I'd still charge you for, whether it goes live or not) and decided it wasn't worth the price. Or that they prototyped for the other versions before concluding they sucked and axed those features. That happens a lot in this business, you get grand ideas, and when you try and do them, they turn out to be bad ideas, and you have to... scale back.
Don't understate the cost of testing here. Especially if you get hit with a platform revision part way through. God help you with government testing. An 'interactive PDF viewer' may have licence requirements, oh wait, did I just say licence? Even if it doesn't, the government has to do due diligence with a lawyer, there goes some money. But back to testing. You have to test platforms, accessibility, multiple OS versions, multiple devices. That costs a LOT of money. I had dinner with a 6 person outfit last week, and they'll charge you 50-60k for a month of testing, mobile or PC. In that time you send them stuff to test, and then you might be sitting around waiting if you have no other contract for them to send back testing metrics, then you iterate, repeat.
What I can write in a day, if it's coming from a company, takes a week, and if it's coming from the government takes a month, since this is a company for the government, it takes a month. That's not necessarily inefficiency, just different priorities. The government absolutely cannot release an app that destroys your phone. I know, I know, it's not doing anything that would destroy your phone. But the government *HAS* to test that, on every version of the code they submit. A small mobile company wouldn't bother to test it at all against some of those things. The government has to at least try and make it accessible, which means hiring a specialist, testing, testing and more testing, revisions revisions and more revisions (and in the end it might fail, so you're still SOL), physical accessibility, etc. etc. etc. Oh and it has to be tested in spanish too.
If the company is handing it off to the government, source or not, all of that was supposed to be documented. In a private company that documentation might be shorter than this post, but someone has to write a 20 page report on it so the Auditor general (here in canada) or the GAO (general accounting office) in the US can verify how the money was spent.
If you actually try out the app (galaxy S II here), it has some location aware services (which don't work in canada, obviously). So someone has had to coordinate with NOAA about the data format and source, because if that changes the whole app breaks. There is a pile of information in it. Sure, the information (and a LOT of pictures) might have been pulled from other sources, but you need to coordinate that with those other sources, get the info, verify it, test it. It also bases it on the heat index it calculates. Simple calculation by itself, but it combines with a lot of information. Every step of development and prototyping of the app needs to be checked and rechecked with OSHA publications on what to do (notably the first aid procedures, identifying heat problems and then the specific recommendations).
Again, it's not 'hard' but it depends on specifics. If someone handed then the 20 or so pages worth of text and diagrams and said 'here, make an app out of it' 200k might be a bit much, but if they had to write t
Ya, and depending on how involved those tasks are, that doesn't sound all that unreasonable, it's just an excuse of politicians to yell about things. Developer churn is about 10-11k/month at the best of times, so 10 'man months' of developer time (3 people for 3 months + some of a manager) gets you pretty close to those numbers. In all of that you have to develop, verify, test, test compliance (accessibility etc.) before you can distribute.
Those figures actually seem pretty reasonable. Not only do you have a 'developer' but you have to have an artist, there's oversight and meeting time to arrange it etc. Oh and since it's a private company, they need to be making moneywhich is probably 10-20 %. +
I'm working on a mobile project right now, where we have 9 'sub modules' of the app, which are done, and we're going to add 3 more across 3 platforms, one for bus location services, one for building room locations, one for exam schedules. The planning for this involved 7 people, (this is for a student project that will be deployed for a production system), two people from ITS, the two course developers/instructor/TA (one of those is me), two people from legal, and security about how we handle some information with students (or don't), and then the undergraduate chair. We've had two meetings already, which if you price it out, for the work done for the meetings plus development time, you're looking at already having spent 10k or so, and we haven't actually got formal requirements, nor have we let students touch a line of code yet. This is going to run, just on our end, about 40-50k, and that's with students doing the actual programming. And we already have art assets to be pulled from our communications department, but those cost money to make too, and the actual services themselves needed to be created (which cost a LOT of money, we're just doing the client).
So in short, that seems about realistic. And that's the problem, people are going to jump up and down and complain, but from what I can tells this seems about reasonable value for money. You may disagree with if the money should have been spent at all (and that's a valid ideological position I suppose), but it doesn't seem like it's that far off base.
Also, I'd kinda like to see the government offer more web and mobile services where appropriate. That might mean that you spend some time on simple stupid things while you learn just what is involved, and as with any spending programme, some things you spend money on will turn out badly. But that's alright.
We have a bioinformatics PhD where I am, which is half biology, half CS. Maybe you didn't read the part where he mentions machine learning which is decidedly computer science.
The Lead systems guy on WoW (Greg "Ghostcrawler" street) is a PhD in marine biology, so it's clear you can move around easily enough. You can simply omit the Biology part and say "PhD from Ivy league school, thesis: Machine Learning for....".
My PhD is decidedly CS, but it steals a lot of stuff from strategic studies and economics, so just by the title, it's not really possible to know which field is the 'core' area.
The primary cause of the injury is users running executables, there's only so much you can do when the the people using the machine are stupid. There are just a lot more people on windows machines, and a lot of things worth stealing on home user windows machines, and a lot of them stupid.
This notion of security holes, and 'build a more secure OS' is an odd, old, and very misguided one. All the big vendors are pretty good about patching security vulnerabilities as they find them, but therein lies the problem, they find them *after* someone else has discovered them. It doesn't matter if you're Linux, Microsoft or Apple the vast majority of things are found after someone else discovered (not necessarily exploited) a vulnerability. Between when an exploit is discovered and when you can patch the system there is a time delay. And did I mention that users hate installing patches?
The main vulnerabilities in windows these days are actually because adobe does things badly. Injecting a virus through a flash exploit is a question of whether or not flash should have been allowed to do that in the first place. But when MS tries to lock things down (think bootloader for windows 8) people have a bloody fit about them locking out other vendors and other nonsense. Flash, and adobe reader should never be doing things which require administrator access, but microsoft can't exactly block adobe from doing that, because there are other companies that have legitimate reasons to want administrator access (think nvidia, even adobe on some of their collaboration tools).
What does that have to do with antivirus? Security is a layered problem. On the top layer you have users, who are usually stupid. On the next layer down you have things like firewalls and for want of a better phrase, intrusion prevention systems. Then you get into the actual core system. The process space your little program is running in, and whether or not it can get out. Now, if there's a vulnerability either not yet know, or not yet patched by the user, you *need* to have an intrusion detection and intrusion cleaning layer (which are anti virus). It doesn't matter what platform you're on - but the appearance and style of the tools used is very different.
This isn't windows 95. We shouldn't treat Microsoft like they have the same problems they did 15 years ago with writing an OS like it wasn't connected to the internet. They have a whole new set of problems, but overall MS has worked very hard to make Windows much more secure - while still compatible, and still an open platform to develop on (which is also its biggest weakness). In this day age where we are bombarded with people trying to remotely compromise machines, with every sort of exploit imaginable, Windows if you run it properly, holds up as well if not better than OSX, and linux with it's 0.8% of the market is too small to judge. In the server space though, Windows server 2008 is pretty robust and competitive with Linux.
I think I nailed where we failed at doing the right thing with TLD's and should go back and fix that for the future. If it ends up that.com and.org end up as basically indistinguishable that's one mistake we can live with, if all of the other possible TLD's have that problem then they really are meaningless, and we should rapidly move to prevent that.
As a practical matter a lot of countries internally refer to themselves differently than outwardly. It's just Her Majesties Government, if you say it properly you mean england, if you say it with a canadian accent you mean canada, if australian accent you mean australia. Or official letters from the MP for Peterborough or something that is in all of the above doesn't help. We have a relatively big, relatively important london in Ontario Canada, which regularly causes confusion with well, the actually London, so.ca vs.co.uk makes a big difference. Even when you're *in* London ontario it causes confusion.
(Another example is that Saudi Arabia only refers to itself as "The Kingdom").
That doesn't really work if you do business in english for french. Sometimes I really mean amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk or amazon.fr. English searches will hit me all 3 regularly (and a few others) and french searches 2 of the above.
I'm sure german has something similar, but since it's all the EU block it matters a lot less.
Those of us outside the US pay a lot more attention to TLD's than the US does. Because the difference between.com, and.ca or.uk can be substantial.
Lets say you're making a display, and you want to call yourself 'vivid' because well, you make displays that are vivid. (Or maybe you're HTC making a phone you want to brand that way, same deal) and someone else wants to equally correctly, but in a completely different context brand themselves 'vivid'.
Maybe you are Apple Records, and this pair of jackass hacker dudes want to be Apple computer, and someone else who wants to do porn was given the unfortunate name of Apple.
TLD's are great for context, and they're great for blocking stuff at work that you don't want employees involved with. Around here makes a lot of sense to block.gov, because well, it's the wrong.gov, but search engines still spit out forms and stuff, and that doesn't do us a lot of favours. It's easier to keep it away from your employees than let them be stupid and waste hours trying to sort out paperwork for the wrong government. (This is somewhat more problematic between various commonwealth governments, which for example share a lot of department names, they're all "Her Majesties Government" on official paper work and so on, it's not so much of an issue with the US because for example, no one else spells defence defense, but I've had issues with NAFTA stuff like that were someone wasn't smart enough to do paperwork for the correct country and we had to do it over). It also gives you more variants on useful words so that you don't have just one monopolizing brand on a name, even when none of Apple Records, Apple Corp, or Apple Inc (Apple Computer) actually sell Apples, nor are they related to any person who has been unfortunately named Apple. Which I guess is an argument for more TLD's that are context sensitive..com and.org at one point were supposed to mean different things potentially.
Right, but you're not going to get the job with 1000 flight hours compared to a fighter pilot with 4000. In the same way that a bachelors could theoretically get the job, but odds are they're going to be taking PhD level people unless you happen to be sleeping with or related to someone on a NASA oversight committee.
But ya, you're right, any old jet pilot can be paid very poorly, but even military pilots, 64k is in the 6-8 years experience range (depending on how you include all their various allowances).
It's basically building another wireless network from scratch, regardless of the spectrum space. Apple has the warchest, it could certainly do that today, but in 2005 or 2006 to get 20 or 30 billion dollars would have A: given up the plan and B: been completely unthinkable for Apple. On top of all that you have enormous chicken and egg problems while the whole thing is getting built.
On one hand, who wouldn't want their own wireless network to stick to the big carriers (I'm in canada, our carriers are equally bad, if not worse than the US ones), but it's a very risky game to play.
You get paid, to train for years, for the possibility of maybe going into space, at some point in the future, if russians will still send people there, or if the US government can actually get something working off the ground, and have enough capacity for you. But if the next government that rolls in says "robots in space!" and the government after that says "manned mission to mars" and then the next government says "satellites! lets refocus on earth's problems" you're going to be 50 years old, have never gone into space, have never worked on a project that actually finished, and will now be bumped out of the roster because you're too old and some 30 year old will now take over for you. And in the end you've accomplished nothing in life except a lot of complaining about unfinished work because the people writing the cheques have no clue how to actually run a space programme.
The "cool technology" you play with is just as cool at boeing or LM or ratheon or the like, becuase it's the same fucking technology, you just get paid 2x as much being at Boeing or LM or Ratheon.
Only about 500 people have been into space, ever. From every country combined. Now sure, that number could explode dramatically if they want to make a big 100 person spacecraft for the hell of it, but odds are not good for most of the astronauts chosen to even make it into space.
You say that to a video game programmer. The cut down in salary for being able to work on games can be big, unless you get really profitable games and a profit sharing arrangement.
That's pretty much the trick. Microsoft is saying 'make a windows version too and you can get in cheap'. Which isn't necessarily a bad plan, they don't want this to look like it's purely a MS-Nokia show (although that's a pretty formidable combination).
64k, even with government benefits would be on the very low side for a PhD in science or a qualified pilot of jet aircraft. It's on the low side for engineering, maths, comp sci, chemistry and physics with just a bachelors and 3 years experience too.
It's not far off from a professors salary (which is low for science or engineering), but the starting is low, and you spend a lot of years training. The 141k isn't bad, and presumably you get promoted out of the astronaut programme eventually.
The big financial draw of something like this is your ability to collect speaking fees, chancellorships at universities, that sort of thing when you're done. But overall, that direct compensation is not that good for the amount of work involved, or the education required, and the risk that you get all the way through the programme only to never fly in space because 10 years from now someone changes their mind on how the programme will be run.
Not really no. Facebook can, and should (correctly) argue that this violation of their terms of service causes their business serious harm, and places a cost burden on them, which they are not obliged to bear without representation in this case.
Facebook, knowing these passwords are compromised can and should lock down both accounts. If the court wishes access to the contents of said accounts it can take it up with Facebook (which they have to comply with), but damaging Facebooks reputation and service for litigation with doesn't actually involve Facebook directly, and without their counsel is very very very bad precedent. Admittedly, I'm not an american, your system might be even more stupid than I'm aware of, but I doubt it. Your system makes a big deal of protecting corporations (whatever one may think of that).
The court could overwrite any agreement between the two parties involved, but it can't just overwrite an agreement with a 3rd party for the fun of it. From Facebooks perspective the Judge is encouraging unauthorized access to their network, and there might be some laws about that.
Again, they can request or even demand Facebook turn over the relevant content, they can demand both parties turn over relevant content, but you cannot simply overwrite a contract with a 3rd party without their representative in the room.
Now the actual issue at hand might be that facebook isn't actually doing anything about this. That's a different problem - because at some point they are implicitly authorizing the activity (even that mentioned in the article of judges logging into facebook pages) by not contesting it.
A better question is "what's keeping you from Windows".
Linux is a dead platform on the home market. Somewhere between 0.8 and 2% of marketshare? Really? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems) That's like being the only person using a coal or natural gas car. You can only bet it's going to be the future for so long before you look crazy.
On Linux shit just doesn't work. Nothing works. SSD's, Flash, driver updates, hardware monitoring tools, document rendering. Oh sure, you can do a half assed version of everything on Linux, which is why it works fine on servers, because those guys can do a bang up job on the specific parts they're going to use, and forgot about everything else. Want to view powerpoint files properly? Hmmm... maybe, depends on the version of powerpoint. Word docs, same problem. Want to play games? Sure, they *might* work under WINE, if you can get it set up and configured properly. But most won't, and certainly I couldn't play Skyrim under WINE for a couple of days. Want to play a blu ray disc... hmmm maybe? Depends.
I've got a linux machine. It's great for Fortran programming. Seriously, that's what it's used for, Fortran programming is really big in scientific computing still. It's capable of web browsing (which, as time goes on will make the question of what OS you use less and less relevant). But it's a constant hassle, and I'm constantly trying to remember command line tools and switches to keep it updated and fix the perpetual series of never quite works properly.
Mac? Once you've had the kool aid it's harder to come back to civilization, but even that lot are getting it. It basically works, and it's smooth, but of course a lot of stuff doesn't quite work. The main difference between OSX and Linux is that if money needs to be paid to make it work, Apple will pay it, whereas on Linux you're hoping someone will figure out a hack, or you cope with it not working.
Mac's do a half decent job of content creation, iLife sort of stuff. It's not really professional tools, and it's a much more streamlined experience than anything on Windows, as Bill gates himself has famously criticized. But it's also not really any better. If you're willing to invest in hardware the windows experience is better than the equivalent OSX experience, but if you want a 500 dollar machine there's no Mac option (other than the iPad), and if you don't know enough about hardware to order decent parts for a windows machine OSX will do it. But you still don't have the array of tools, compatibility or software choices Windows has.
The question is: what can I do with this OS that I cannot do with some other OS. With Linux you can use blade servers, ARM chips (not that you care on the desktop yet), so that's not so bad. Mac.. you can lock yourself into a walled garden, but at least it's a nice walled garden. Windows does everything, even servers pretty well. It's not suitable for a large scale blade server or non boring old intel CPU setup, and it's not as cohesive an experience as Macs are, so there's still places those two differentiate themselves, but really, at this point unless you can specifically point to what you need on the other platform, Windows is probably what you should be using.
Oh and I didn't mention the whole business with the EU, where the French are, essentially, asking us to get into their trade sphere so we can help bailout the PIIGS. I'm not really sure why we'd want to do this (VIA the EU at least), and loathe as I am to give the conservative government here credit, they managed to avoid being forced to publicly tell the French to go to hell, but they seem to have managed that behind closed doors.
Oh and they're selling warships to the russians, and well... we and the russians are squabbling over a few things (which might be stupid, but our own allies, selling weapons to our enemies doesn't make them great friends in my book, that worked out so well for the British on the receiving end of exocet missiles in the Falklands).
I said the French, not the Quebecois. The French, as in those bastards (notably De Gaul) who tried to stir up the FLQ into separatism from France. The French, who, in a presidentially election, that has *nothing* to do with Canada pontificate over whether France should support Quebec separatists (or Corsican separatists). The French, who, when we're pushing hard to reduce nuclear weapons in the world, go and test some in the south pacific. The French, who, when we're trying to coordinate a military operation in a foreign country (Libya, Afghanistan) decide they're going to do their own damn thing, and leave the rest of us to sort things out and, we (being gratefully for their help) are trying to not fuck them over in the process.
You know what, if quebec wants to stay or separate, that's their business, and it's not really my place and an English canadian to judge their experience in this country. But it's not the place of the French to stick their noses in the business of Quebec either.
Also, it was somewhat tongue in cheek. The French are right on a lot of things, especially in foreign policy - like the Americans, it's how they go about it that's problematic. But there's a classic sterotype of everyone hating the french (which of course is hyperbole).
No, they're changing because they're hiring professional designers, to understand how average people use UI's, and how to serve their needs. A lot of people are too stupid to figure out start button -> whatever.
The problem with this plan is that there is a huge body of knowledge built up around existing UI's. People who like lists are used to computers that produce lists, have grown up with lists and have no need or desire to change, and, of course, if they suck at using their computer they have no idea what they're missing anyway. There's something to be said for trying to help my mother or my girlfriends sister use their computer for more than e-mail, or the GF's sister can also use itunes (but doesn't know how to put music on her blackberry), and only really knows how to start a web browser to use facebook.
They're also gradually re-envisioning computing from separate box you connect to a monitor to a series of monitors that have computers as part of them. I'm not sure it will entirely pan out, but it current UI's don't make much sense for the rest of us.
I'm taking a graduate HCI course, and it's taught by this old codger who rants about how horrible GUI's are because they're not as efficient as whatever UI he had in 1970, which is when he was 30. He has some other (sometimes legitimate criticisms) but if you look at say, thunderbird vs pine, the first time you use thunderbird it's overwhelming, and you know how to use pine, so you give up and go back to pine. Or you don't. And by the second or third (or now version 8.0) of thunderbird it's pretty good, I can do a lot of stuff with it that I cannot do with pine... yet he's still stuck on Pine. UI designers today are trying to appeal to a computer as an appliance market. Which sounds horribly unappealing to most of us on/.. E.g. Apps. On my phone or tablet. That are basically just custom version of their webpage.. I mean, we have web standards for that, why do we even have a CNN app, or an engadget app or the like? Because most people can't conceptually grasp lists (bookmarks in this case) or searches. So we write apps for this crap. And then you realize, after a while, that people only really use about 8 apps on their computer regularly, and then maybe a few more infrequently, and then a bunch more are sort of there is people need them. And so you start to re-envision your UI around the 80% of the market that uses 20% of the power and accomplishes 20% of the work that the rest of us who are tech nerds do. But of course all of these things are still made by tech nerds, and it's a matter of getting in their heads and seeing how they're envisioning the usage.
Don't think some programmer at microsoft is wondering how he can fuck over his own productivity with a new UI, he's trying to figure out how he can get the tools he needs in the new framework so he can spend more of his time programming and less answering some MBA's question about how to sort E-mail alphabetically.
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This happens a LOT in the software business. Google is trying to sort out which maps to show to which people based on 'official' boundaries (which may or may not reflect actual boundaries, and some boundaries are not filed with the UN publicly so who the hell knows where they are). I worked on a game recently where we were trying to figure out the official border between france and germany at a particular point in time, the area in question has changed hands something like 17 times. 6 guys in a basement were asking very serious questions like the legal status of egypt and sudan under Britian (and how to model that?) the legal status of Taiwan (and whether that meant our game would get banned in China, and whether or not we cared). There are lots of messy legal areas you sometimes have to pick something and role with it.
Facebook only has one facebook.com/yourname url to give out, and honestly, they don't want to be involved in the fight over who is more Merck than the other, that's why they're telling them both to sort it out themselves. Facebook has no idea who has a more valid claim to the name, and, this is of course muddied by them being in separate areas. Facebook might have to oblige the US trademark for the US branch of the company in the US, and the european version in Europe or just have to oblige the US version or, well, who the hell knows? There's no winning answer here. They may have signed a contract, but my suspicion is that the contract would only be valid if Merck (gmbh) was the legal trademark holder, which, depending on the circumstances, it might not be.
I'm not sure 'smarter' is the right word. Right now a lot of servers are run by the least incompetent tech person in the office. It doesn't really matter if they're actually trained or really paid to do that job, but those young people know a lot about computers.
Putting services into the 'cloud' puts it into the hands of specialists in IT, and leaves non IT people for non IT jobs, which is what they should be doing anyway.
Also, any 'open source' project that runs anything worth real money is going to be backed, directly or indirectly by someone who has cash to pay developers. This is the 'Intel and IBM as major contributors to linux' sort of deal, although for more specialized products. That doesn't mean they do everything, or even necessarily run the show, but no one in their right mind runs a major Open source product shop without some money in a back room somewhere.
The answer is government run healthcare with a government run database. Then if your medical records leak out it is *only* a privacy violation, and cannot effect further access to employment or medical care.
The advantages of a functioning single database are enormous. Depending on where you live, you may have to carry all of your relevant records between specialists as you get sent through the system when something is wrong with you. Each of those steps risks you losing something important, and puts undue pressure on the doctor you are seeing to assess whatever you bring them right there in front of you, while you're waiting. Assuming everything you bring is in a format they can use, and if not, well then there's a lot of time spent faxing/phoning etc. back and forth. The risk that your privacy can be invaded is well outweighed by the fact that your allergy to some random medication, or obscure but potentially serious condition is going to show up in a record somewhere when you get into a car accident on holiday out of province/state.
I'm in canada, so the only people who particularly care about my medical records but wouldn't be granted access to them are, my 'spouse' my kids (which I don't have but you get the idea), and well, that's it. And it doesn't matter who runs the healthcare system, if there's something in there I'm trying to hide, it's equally likely they'll be told regardless of who runs the database. But in a system where that information matters to insurance companies and employers, well then you have a problem.
The DMV thing having SSN's is unfortunate, but I guess it makes sense. Criminal activity (which I guess would be tied to your SSN?) is going to impact your ability to interact with the DMV, and as a government agency they're authorized to collect that data. Unfortunately, there's not a lot you can do to secure information they have legal access to under normal circumstances, it doesn't matter if it's paper or electronic.
This is the approach taken in europe. Many places there have 35 hour work weeks or 37.5 compared to the US 40, and far more importantly, far less overtime allowed, and far more mandatory holidays.
I don't think I'd like to have only 10 hours of work worth doing in a week, that would get real boring real fast, and I'd probably be bad at it because you don't maintain the skills. But 40 is, in this day and age, probably a spec too much. Or at least the '2000 hours a year' metric is a bit too much. Having a system where we pay people so little that they need to work more than 2000 hours a year, and a LOT more, to have any sort of lifestyle is depressing.
Of course there's lots of places with lots of work to do that can take more than 40 hours a week, and it's hard to spread that around more ways. I'm in game development and it's decidedly one of them, going from 10 to 12 people but working less accordingly doesn't really equate to equal productivity, sometimes it does. I'm sure BioWare adding on another 80 people to their existing 800 probably works out to 10% more 'levels designed' so to speak, but a lot of small business work doesn't rise to the level of benefiting equally from added employees.
which doesn't necessarily make them all that important. A virus/bacteria/etc that is resistant to all of those things but only gives you a runny nose for 2 days isn't really a big problem.
And of course we know that doing nothing killed people. A lot of them. For centuries. Or have we all forgotten that infant mortality rates used to be over 10%, and deaths by what are now preventable diseases killed millions at a young age?
Ok, so maybe we create diseases that are immune to whatever we're doing, that's why we keep doing drug research. It might be a cat and mouse game, but I prefer being on the side of people who have very fortunately lived through all of these things. And I'm sure so do you, even if you don't realize it.
That would have made sense the last time we went through this. Now that MS and Yahoo are in bed with each other on the search side of things I don't think yahoo has enough value for Apple to want to even consider it.
The other thing is that yahoo would seriously hurt the apple brand. Apple is about new, hip, cool, yahoo is this (by today's standards) old internet company that those of us who had geocities e-mail accounts still use as yahoo accounts. No one in the reality distortion bubble of Apple is going to see acquiring yahoo as a step forward. If yahoo were 1/10th the size and made similar products it might make sense, but on a cheap day yahoo is a 15 billion dollar buyout, and is more like a 20-25 billion buyout to get complete ownership, that's a shitload of money for a huge big outfit and culture that wouldn't really fit with Apple.
MS is a whole other ballgame. Merging yahoo and hotmail would give them a huge base to rival google with, and would bring them into a noticeable share of the search market, and give them a full on portal to the web that they've failed at miserably. All of the things wrong with yahoo for apple apply to MS, but MS has fucked up all of those things enough that buying yahoo might actually look like an improvement over whatever they can manage.
Have you ever worked for the government, ever? The reason you know about this at all is because they need a paper trail a Km long. The government cannot, and does not do anything without layers of approvals, analysis, and more approvals. That cost money.
If the government is going to say it, they probably have to run it by an expert. That's a 10k consulting fee for the guy to talk to you.
The 'unfinished' blackberry app is telling at 40k. 40k is the price of getting a sufficiently working prototype, that they can decide it's not worth the next 60k in testing and everything else. And who knows what exactly they prototyped first (which, by the way, I'd still charge you for, whether it goes live or not) and decided it wasn't worth the price. Or that they prototyped for the other versions before concluding they sucked and axed those features. That happens a lot in this business, you get grand ideas, and when you try and do them, they turn out to be bad ideas, and you have to... scale back.
Don't understate the cost of testing here. Especially if you get hit with a platform revision part way through. God help you with government testing. An 'interactive PDF viewer' may have licence requirements, oh wait, did I just say licence? Even if it doesn't, the government has to do due diligence with a lawyer, there goes some money. But back to testing. You have to test platforms, accessibility, multiple OS versions, multiple devices. That costs a LOT of money. I had dinner with a 6 person outfit last week, and they'll charge you 50-60k for a month of testing, mobile or PC. In that time you send them stuff to test, and then you might be sitting around waiting if you have no other contract for them to send back testing metrics, then you iterate, repeat.
What I can write in a day, if it's coming from a company, takes a week, and if it's coming from the government takes a month, since this is a company for the government, it takes a month. That's not necessarily inefficiency, just different priorities. The government absolutely cannot release an app that destroys your phone. I know, I know, it's not doing anything that would destroy your phone. But the government *HAS* to test that, on every version of the code they submit. A small mobile company wouldn't bother to test it at all against some of those things. The government has to at least try and make it accessible, which means hiring a specialist, testing, testing and more testing, revisions revisions and more revisions (and in the end it might fail, so you're still SOL), physical accessibility, etc. etc. etc. Oh and it has to be tested in spanish too.
If the company is handing it off to the government, source or not, all of that was supposed to be documented. In a private company that documentation might be shorter than this post, but someone has to write a 20 page report on it so the Auditor general (here in canada) or the GAO (general accounting office) in the US can verify how the money was spent.
If you actually try out the app (galaxy S II here), it has some location aware services (which don't work in canada, obviously). So someone has had to coordinate with NOAA about the data format and source, because if that changes the whole app breaks. There is a pile of information in it. Sure, the information (and a LOT of pictures) might have been pulled from other sources, but you need to coordinate that with those other sources, get the info, verify it, test it. It also bases it on the heat index it calculates. Simple calculation by itself, but it combines with a lot of information. Every step of development and prototyping of the app needs to be checked and rechecked with OSHA publications on what to do (notably the first aid procedures, identifying heat problems and then the specific recommendations).
Again, it's not 'hard' but it depends on specifics. If someone handed then the 20 or so pages worth of text and diagrams and said 'here, make an app out of it' 200k might be a bit much, but if they had to write t
Ya, and depending on how involved those tasks are, that doesn't sound all that unreasonable, it's just an excuse of politicians to yell about things. Developer churn is about 10-11k/month at the best of times, so 10 'man months' of developer time (3 people for 3 months + some of a manager) gets you pretty close to those numbers. In all of that you have to develop, verify, test, test compliance (accessibility etc.) before you can distribute.
Those figures actually seem pretty reasonable. Not only do you have a 'developer' but you have to have an artist, there's oversight and meeting time to arrange it etc. Oh and since it's a private company, they need to be making moneywhich is probably 10-20 %. +
I'm working on a mobile project right now, where we have 9 'sub modules' of the app, which are done, and we're going to add 3 more across 3 platforms, one for bus location services, one for building room locations, one for exam schedules. The planning for this involved 7 people, (this is for a student project that will be deployed for a production system), two people from ITS, the two course developers/instructor/TA (one of those is me), two people from legal, and security about how we handle some information with students (or don't), and then the undergraduate chair. We've had two meetings already, which if you price it out, for the work done for the meetings plus development time, you're looking at already having spent 10k or so, and we haven't actually got formal requirements, nor have we let students touch a line of code yet. This is going to run, just on our end, about 40-50k, and that's with students doing the actual programming. And we already have art assets to be pulled from our communications department, but those cost money to make too, and the actual services themselves needed to be created (which cost a LOT of money, we're just doing the client).
So in short, that seems about realistic. And that's the problem, people are going to jump up and down and complain, but from what I can tells this seems about reasonable value for money. You may disagree with if the money should have been spent at all (and that's a valid ideological position I suppose), but it doesn't seem like it's that far off base.
Also, I'd kinda like to see the government offer more web and mobile services where appropriate. That might mean that you spend some time on simple stupid things while you learn just what is involved, and as with any spending programme, some things you spend money on will turn out badly. But that's alright.
We have a bioinformatics PhD where I am, which is half biology, half CS. Maybe you didn't read the part where he mentions machine learning which is decidedly computer science.
The Lead systems guy on WoW (Greg "Ghostcrawler" street) is a PhD in marine biology, so it's clear you can move around easily enough. You can simply omit the Biology part and say "PhD from Ivy league school, thesis: Machine Learning for ....".
My PhD is decidedly CS, but it steals a lot of stuff from strategic studies and economics, so just by the title, it's not really possible to know which field is the 'core' area.
The primary cause of the injury is users running executables, there's only so much you can do when the the people using the machine are stupid. There are just a lot more people on windows machines, and a lot of things worth stealing on home user windows machines, and a lot of them stupid.
This notion of security holes, and 'build a more secure OS' is an odd, old, and very misguided one. All the big vendors are pretty good about patching security vulnerabilities as they find them, but therein lies the problem, they find them *after* someone else has discovered them. It doesn't matter if you're Linux, Microsoft or Apple the vast majority of things are found after someone else discovered (not necessarily exploited) a vulnerability. Between when an exploit is discovered and when you can patch the system there is a time delay. And did I mention that users hate installing patches?
The main vulnerabilities in windows these days are actually because adobe does things badly. Injecting a virus through a flash exploit is a question of whether or not flash should have been allowed to do that in the first place. But when MS tries to lock things down (think bootloader for windows 8) people have a bloody fit about them locking out other vendors and other nonsense. Flash, and adobe reader should never be doing things which require administrator access, but microsoft can't exactly block adobe from doing that, because there are other companies that have legitimate reasons to want administrator access (think nvidia, even adobe on some of their collaboration tools).
What does that have to do with antivirus? Security is a layered problem. On the top layer you have users, who are usually stupid. On the next layer down you have things like firewalls and for want of a better phrase, intrusion prevention systems. Then you get into the actual core system. The process space your little program is running in, and whether or not it can get out. Now, if there's a vulnerability either not yet know, or not yet patched by the user, you *need* to have an intrusion detection and intrusion cleaning layer (which are anti virus). It doesn't matter what platform you're on - but the appearance and style of the tools used is very different.
This isn't windows 95. We shouldn't treat Microsoft like they have the same problems they did 15 years ago with writing an OS like it wasn't connected to the internet. They have a whole new set of problems, but overall MS has worked very hard to make Windows much more secure - while still compatible, and still an open platform to develop on (which is also its biggest weakness). In this day age where we are bombarded with people trying to remotely compromise machines, with every sort of exploit imaginable, Windows if you run it properly, holds up as well if not better than OSX, and linux with it's 0.8% of the market is too small to judge. In the server space though, Windows server 2008 is pretty robust and competitive with Linux.
I think I nailed where we failed at doing the right thing with TLD's and should go back and fix that for the future. If it ends up that .com and .org end up as basically indistinguishable that's one mistake we can live with, if all of the other possible TLD's have that problem then they really are meaningless, and we should rapidly move to prevent that.
As a practical matter a lot of countries internally refer to themselves differently than outwardly. It's just Her Majesties Government, if you say it properly you mean england, if you say it with a canadian accent you mean canada, if australian accent you mean australia. Or official letters from the MP for Peterborough or something that is in all of the above doesn't help. We have a relatively big, relatively important london in Ontario Canada, which regularly causes confusion with well, the actually London, so .ca vs .co.uk makes a big difference. Even when you're *in* London ontario it causes confusion.
(Another example is that Saudi Arabia only refers to itself as "The Kingdom").
That doesn't really work if you do business in english for french. Sometimes I really mean amazon.com, amazon.ca, amazon.co.uk or amazon.fr. English searches will hit me all 3 regularly (and a few others) and french searches 2 of the above.
I'm sure german has something similar, but since it's all the EU block it matters a lot less.
Let me guess, you are an american?
Those of us outside the US pay a lot more attention to TLD's than the US does. Because the difference between .com, and .ca or .uk can be substantial.
Lets say you're making a display, and you want to call yourself 'vivid' because well, you make displays that are vivid. (Or maybe you're HTC making a phone you want to brand that way, same deal) and someone else wants to equally correctly, but in a completely different context brand themselves 'vivid'.
Maybe you are Apple Records, and this pair of jackass hacker dudes want to be Apple computer, and someone else who wants to do porn was given the unfortunate name of Apple.
TLD's are great for context, and they're great for blocking stuff at work that you don't want employees involved with. Around here makes a lot of sense to block .gov, because well, it's the wrong .gov, but search engines still spit out forms and stuff, and that doesn't do us a lot of favours. It's easier to keep it away from your employees than let them be stupid and waste hours trying to sort out paperwork for the wrong government. (This is somewhat more problematic between various commonwealth governments, which for example share a lot of department names, they're all "Her Majesties Government" on official paper work and so on, it's not so much of an issue with the US because for example, no one else spells defence defense, but I've had issues with NAFTA stuff like that were someone wasn't smart enough to do paperwork for the correct country and we had to do it over). It also gives you more variants on useful words so that you don't have just one monopolizing brand on a name, even when none of Apple Records, Apple Corp, or Apple Inc (Apple Computer) actually sell Apples, nor are they related to any person who has been unfortunately named Apple. Which I guess is an argument for more TLD's that are context sensitive. .com and .org at one point were supposed to mean different things potentially.
Right, but you're not going to get the job with 1000 flight hours compared to a fighter pilot with 4000. In the same way that a bachelors could theoretically get the job, but odds are they're going to be taking PhD level people unless you happen to be sleeping with or related to someone on a NASA oversight committee.
But ya, you're right, any old jet pilot can be paid very poorly, but even military pilots, 64k is in the 6-8 years experience range (depending on how you include all their various allowances).
It's basically building another wireless network from scratch, regardless of the spectrum space. Apple has the warchest, it could certainly do that today, but in 2005 or 2006 to get 20 or 30 billion dollars would have A: given up the plan and B: been completely unthinkable for Apple. On top of all that you have enormous chicken and egg problems while the whole thing is getting built.
On one hand, who wouldn't want their own wireless network to stick to the big carriers (I'm in canada, our carriers are equally bad, if not worse than the US ones), but it's a very risky game to play.
No. You don't necessarily. That's my point.
You get paid, to train for years, for the possibility of maybe going into space, at some point in the future, if russians will still send people there, or if the US government can actually get something working off the ground, and have enough capacity for you. But if the next government that rolls in says "robots in space!" and the government after that says "manned mission to mars" and then the next government says "satellites! lets refocus on earth's problems" you're going to be 50 years old, have never gone into space, have never worked on a project that actually finished, and will now be bumped out of the roster because you're too old and some 30 year old will now take over for you. And in the end you've accomplished nothing in life except a lot of complaining about unfinished work because the people writing the cheques have no clue how to actually run a space programme.
The "cool technology" you play with is just as cool at boeing or LM or ratheon or the like, becuase it's the same fucking technology, you just get paid 2x as much being at Boeing or LM or Ratheon.
Only about 500 people have been into space, ever. From every country combined. Now sure, that number could explode dramatically if they want to make a big 100 person spacecraft for the hell of it, but odds are not good for most of the astronauts chosen to even make it into space.
You say that to a video game programmer. The cut down in salary for being able to work on games can be big, unless you get really profitable games and a profit sharing arrangement.
That's pretty much the trick. Microsoft is saying 'make a windows version too and you can get in cheap'. Which isn't necessarily a bad plan, they don't want this to look like it's purely a MS-Nokia show (although that's a pretty formidable combination).
64k, even with government benefits would be on the very low side for a PhD in science or a qualified pilot of jet aircraft. It's on the low side for engineering, maths, comp sci, chemistry and physics with just a bachelors and 3 years experience too.
It's not far off from a professors salary (which is low for science or engineering), but the starting is low, and you spend a lot of years training. The 141k isn't bad, and presumably you get promoted out of the astronaut programme eventually.
The big financial draw of something like this is your ability to collect speaking fees, chancellorships at universities, that sort of thing when you're done. But overall, that direct compensation is not that good for the amount of work involved, or the education required, and the risk that you get all the way through the programme only to never fly in space because 10 years from now someone changes their mind on how the programme will be run.
Not really no. Facebook can, and should (correctly) argue that this violation of their terms of service causes their business serious harm, and places a cost burden on them, which they are not obliged to bear without representation in this case.
Facebook, knowing these passwords are compromised can and should lock down both accounts. If the court wishes access to the contents of said accounts it can take it up with Facebook (which they have to comply with), but damaging Facebooks reputation and service for litigation with doesn't actually involve Facebook directly, and without their counsel is very very very bad precedent. Admittedly, I'm not an american, your system might be even more stupid than I'm aware of, but I doubt it. Your system makes a big deal of protecting corporations (whatever one may think of that).
The court could overwrite any agreement between the two parties involved, but it can't just overwrite an agreement with a 3rd party for the fun of it. From Facebooks perspective the Judge is encouraging unauthorized access to their network, and there might be some laws about that.
Again, they can request or even demand Facebook turn over the relevant content, they can demand both parties turn over relevant content, but you cannot simply overwrite a contract with a 3rd party without their representative in the room.
Now the actual issue at hand might be that facebook isn't actually doing anything about this. That's a different problem - because at some point they are implicitly authorizing the activity (even that mentioned in the article of judges logging into facebook pages) by not contesting it.
A better question is "what's keeping you from Windows".
Linux is a dead platform on the home market. Somewhere between 0.8 and 2% of marketshare? Really? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems) That's like being the only person using a coal or natural gas car. You can only bet it's going to be the future for so long before you look crazy.
On Linux shit just doesn't work. Nothing works. SSD's, Flash, driver updates, hardware monitoring tools, document rendering. Oh sure, you can do a half assed version of everything on Linux, which is why it works fine on servers, because those guys can do a bang up job on the specific parts they're going to use, and forgot about everything else. Want to view powerpoint files properly? Hmmm... maybe, depends on the version of powerpoint. Word docs, same problem. Want to play games? Sure, they *might* work under WINE, if you can get it set up and configured properly. But most won't, and certainly I couldn't play Skyrim under WINE for a couple of days. Want to play a blu ray disc... hmmm maybe? Depends.
I've got a linux machine. It's great for Fortran programming. Seriously, that's what it's used for, Fortran programming is really big in scientific computing still. It's capable of web browsing (which, as time goes on will make the question of what OS you use less and less relevant). But it's a constant hassle, and I'm constantly trying to remember command line tools and switches to keep it updated and fix the perpetual series of never quite works properly.
Mac? Once you've had the kool aid it's harder to come back to civilization, but even that lot are getting it. It basically works, and it's smooth, but of course a lot of stuff doesn't quite work. The main difference between OSX and Linux is that if money needs to be paid to make it work, Apple will pay it, whereas on Linux you're hoping someone will figure out a hack, or you cope with it not working.
Mac's do a half decent job of content creation, iLife sort of stuff. It's not really professional tools, and it's a much more streamlined experience than anything on Windows, as Bill gates himself has famously criticized. But it's also not really any better. If you're willing to invest in hardware the windows experience is better than the equivalent OSX experience, but if you want a 500 dollar machine there's no Mac option (other than the iPad), and if you don't know enough about hardware to order decent parts for a windows machine OSX will do it. But you still don't have the array of tools, compatibility or software choices Windows has.
The question is: what can I do with this OS that I cannot do with some other OS. With Linux you can use blade servers, ARM chips (not that you care on the desktop yet), so that's not so bad. Mac.. you can lock yourself into a walled garden, but at least it's a nice walled garden. Windows does everything, even servers pretty well. It's not suitable for a large scale blade server or non boring old intel CPU setup, and it's not as cohesive an experience as Macs are, so there's still places those two differentiate themselves, but really, at this point unless you can specifically point to what you need on the other platform, Windows is probably what you should be using.
If anything this might be the start of big companies getting the clue - we already have an app for that*, it's called a web browser.
*obviously that doesn't apply for everything yet, but they're working on it.
Oh and I didn't mention the whole business with the EU, where the French are, essentially, asking us to get into their trade sphere so we can help bailout the PIIGS. I'm not really sure why we'd want to do this (VIA the EU at least), and loathe as I am to give the conservative government here credit, they managed to avoid being forced to publicly tell the French to go to hell, but they seem to have managed that behind closed doors.
Oh and they're selling warships to the russians, and well... we and the russians are squabbling over a few things (which might be stupid, but our own allies, selling weapons to our enemies doesn't make them great friends in my book, that worked out so well for the British on the receiving end of exocet missiles in the Falklands).
I said the French, not the Quebecois. The French, as in those bastards (notably De Gaul) who tried to stir up the FLQ into separatism from France. The French, who, in a presidentially election, that has *nothing* to do with Canada pontificate over whether France should support Quebec separatists (or Corsican separatists). The French, who, when we're pushing hard to reduce nuclear weapons in the world, go and test some in the south pacific. The French, who, when we're trying to coordinate a military operation in a foreign country (Libya, Afghanistan) decide they're going to do their own damn thing, and leave the rest of us to sort things out and, we (being gratefully for their help) are trying to not fuck them over in the process.
You know what, if quebec wants to stay or separate, that's their business, and it's not really my place and an English canadian to judge their experience in this country. But it's not the place of the French to stick their noses in the business of Quebec either.
Also, it was somewhat tongue in cheek. The French are right on a lot of things, especially in foreign policy - like the Americans, it's how they go about it that's problematic. But there's a classic sterotype of everyone hating the french (which of course is hyperbole).
No, they're changing because they're hiring professional designers, to understand how average people use UI's, and how to serve their needs. A lot of people are too stupid to figure out start button -> whatever.
The problem with this plan is that there is a huge body of knowledge built up around existing UI's. People who like lists are used to computers that produce lists, have grown up with lists and have no need or desire to change, and, of course, if they suck at using their computer they have no idea what they're missing anyway. There's something to be said for trying to help my mother or my girlfriends sister use their computer for more than e-mail, or the GF's sister can also use itunes (but doesn't know how to put music on her blackberry), and only really knows how to start a web browser to use facebook.
They're also gradually re-envisioning computing from separate box you connect to a monitor to a series of monitors that have computers as part of them. I'm not sure it will entirely pan out, but it current UI's don't make much sense for the rest of us.
I'm taking a graduate HCI course, and it's taught by this old codger who rants about how horrible GUI's are because they're not as efficient as whatever UI he had in 1970, which is when he was 30. He has some other (sometimes legitimate criticisms) but if you look at say, thunderbird vs pine, the first time you use thunderbird it's overwhelming, and you know how to use pine, so you give up and go back to pine. Or you don't. And by the second or third (or now version 8.0) of thunderbird it's pretty good, I can do a lot of stuff with it that I cannot do with pine... yet he's still stuck on Pine. UI designers today are trying to appeal to a computer as an appliance market. Which sounds horribly unappealing to most of us on /.. E.g. Apps. On my phone or tablet. That are basically just custom version of their webpage.. I mean, we have web standards for that, why do we even have a CNN app, or an engadget app or the like? Because most people can't conceptually grasp lists (bookmarks in this case) or searches. So we write apps for this crap. And then you realize, after a while, that people only really use about 8 apps on their computer regularly, and then maybe a few more infrequently, and then a bunch more are sort of there is people need them. And so you start to re-envision your UI around the 80% of the market that uses 20% of the power and accomplishes 20% of the work that the rest of us who are tech nerds do. But of course all of these things are still made by tech nerds, and it's a matter of getting in their heads and seeing how they're envisioning the usage.
Don't think some programmer at microsoft is wondering how he can fuck over his own productivity with a new UI, he's trying to figure out how he can get the tools he needs in the new framework so he can spend more of his time programming and less answering some MBA's question about how to sort E-mail alphabetically.