Could it be that most consumers are used to the "old" games by now and are looking for something different?
Something different eh? Please explain how Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Heretic etc. etc. are "different". They're the same game with different weapons, different levels and different graphics. The core concepts are all identical.
USia suffers from a strange dichotomy in that on one hand it has a lot of scientific research done there and a lot of Nobel prize winners, yet on the other hand it seems to produce fewer scientists per head than many other nations. If you look at Nobel prizes for USian scientists, how many of them were born and educated there, and how many were lured there by a higher wage?
The USian education system is geared more towards sports than education in many cases. How can you take a nation seriously that provides college scholarships for people whose only talent is throwing a ball whilst wearing enough padding to keep them safe in the event of a car crash? But it seems that colleges think that their importance is measured by the success of their football team rather than by the success of their graduates.
I think that USia needs a lot more H1-Bs to make up for this lack of homegrown talent. And indeed, as more and more people find that they don't want to work in an industry which demands they devote their life to their job, foreign labor will be the only way to get workers.
I for one lament the slow decline in the quality and originality of computer games. Once upon a time you could buy games which were genuinely a joy to play, but todays games seem to be all flash and no substance. I don't want to be overwhelmed by a half-hour live action introduction, I want to kill some time doing something enjoyable.
All we see today are an endless succession of technically accomplished first-person shooters, each with more graphical prowess than the last. Whilst this may be fine for Americans in love with their right to shoot people, some of us would rather play a game that involved us in something other than violence and hate.
And as the "information" revolution occurs and we move into a new techno-utopia we will be finally able to forget that the real world is not as perfect as it seems to the average geek. We'll drown in so much useless information that we won't have to worry about starving children in Africa any more.
The increasing amount of information watering holes online which are targetted to a certain type of person has a serious negative consequence which you don't often hear about. They encourage conformity and suppress new ideas. Why? Because when the only people whose opinions you read or hear are those who share the same interests as you and agree with your outlook then you're not being challenged.
Just look at Slashdot for a great example of this. Plenty of like-minded people and a lack of tolerance for alternative opinions. Indeed, moderation provides a wonderful mechanism to encourage conformity at the price of healthy argument.
As the trend increases and we enter a true "information" age, it will get to the point where people do have access to all the information they could ever want, but instead they limit themselves to the unchallenging and comfortable. It'll be a million times worse than the television, because it'll be personal.
In this situation who will be bothered about the have-nots? Because there are a lot of have-nots out there, for a lot of different reasons. These people will become an underclass, and the difference will be serious. Today homeless people find themselves trapped because without an address they cannot get jobs or other things we take for granted - how much worse will it be when people are unable to do anything without an online presence?
Filehandles, for instance, are by definition objects, so you would be hard pressed to get any input or output. I also find it difficult to imagine a program of any complexity that didn't go through the sys. or os. hierarchies.
Okay, point conceded in that sense:) I wasn't thinking about the way modules, namespaces and files are treated as objects.
That aside, it was my understanding back when I was working with Python on a regular basis that objects underlie everything in Python, whether or not you use their object-ness in your programs.
See here for more info - function objects, code objects, type objects, stack frame objects, traceback objects etc. etc. They're not really visible unless you're trying to use them though.
As you so much profess to believe in the body being the vehicle for the soul, how can you contradict yourself with this sort of nutso statement? Your soul has left the body after death, your corpse is nothing but wormfood anyway.
Did I say that there was anything magical about the body after death? No, I didn't, I said that respect should be paid that person, which means treating their body with respect. By your rationale, we might as well let necrophiliacs at the corpses as soon as they cool.
This is not a "bizzare folktale of modern science", it is a prime example of how incredibly disrespectful people can be towards the dead. Just because Einstein was somewhat more intelligent than the average person (and it has to be said that tales of his genius are somewhat overrated), what gives someone the right to remove his brain, chop it up into pieces and then keep them stored in jars? None, that's what right.
Would you like it if someone kept a piece of one of your relatives after they died? Without even asking your permission or letting you know what they were doing? No, you wouldn't, yet here is another "scientist" who thinks that he can divine some kind of insight into intelligence from some poor bastard's dead brain! Do these people have no respect for the dead?
I find this to be in the poorest of tastes, and only a step up from necrophilia. Is this tale to be taken as condoning the right of "scientists" to be able to violate your corpse as they will? Let's hope not, but we've all seen what can happen in the name of "science".
And about time too...
on
Qt Going GPL
·
· Score: 2
... because it now means that the vastly unproductive whining about the Qt license that/.ers seem to love can now finally be declared a thing of the past. KDE can now stand (or fall) on its merits rather than on the basis of an ideology devised by a man who doesn't even have to work for a living.
I've been using KDE for a while at home now, and it's slick, especially compared to the lumbering dinosaur that is GNOME. For an operating system with a set of tools designed to be small and modular, it's amazing that most of the applications written for it are so slow and bloated, with "value added" features taking precedence over quality and performance. With people like this on the side of Linux, Microsoft's continued desktop dominance seems to be secured.
Let's hope we see more apps like KDE, where a decent product counts for more than ideological squabbles.
The object-oriented features of Python are more deeply embedded than those of Perl (read: the whole blippin' language is object oriented).
I'm not disagreeing with your post in general, but I do have a question. How is the whole of the language object orientated? Sure, the object orientation is a big part of it, but it's in no way necessary to writing a program, even a complex one.
At least, not for vitally important applications and services. There has been a push recently towards providing every kind of service imaginable over the net, but people have already learnt that some things just aren't safe to do online - the notable failures of internet banks such as Egg to keep their sites secure being one recent incident.
Another foolhardy venture I read about in the paper today (no links, I couldn't find anything online) is of a company in Thailand which has developed a security robot armed with an air gun as standard, but which can be fitted with any other type of weapon, lethal or not. Whilst it can be set to work automatically, it can also be aimed and fired manually, using a command sent over the Internet! Is this the most stupid thing ever or what? Now hackers can shoot people from the comfort of their own bedrooms!
Despite the recent rush to get online, I can see that the craze will die down in years to come, as people and companies realise that some things are much safer in a real world environment where factors such as ease of interception and physical location make every transaction far more secure.
At the end of the day, the amazing lack of online security and privacy means that the net is good only for unimportant information and trivial communications. Who wants every hacker with a root exploit to know their most personal and important details?
What did I do to annoy you then? If you don't like what I have to say, quit replying to each and every post I make. You'll give yourself an ulcer you know.
My friend you only need to look above at those twinkling little stars at night to find proof of God and his creations. You cannot limit the creation to merely just this blue/green orb, for there are many like ours out there. If you do..you are only limiting your beliefs.
Which is why I said in the original post I believed that we were unique but SETI will possibly be able to determine otherwise.
Viruses could be considered a form of life.
And to confuse the issue there are things like viroids, virids and the like which are even smaller...
There are atheistic "fundamentalists" out there just as there are religious fundamentalists you know. People like Dawkins use every piece of scientific knowledge as a weapon in their fight against the idea of God, and are quite outspoken about the "evils" of religion.
And when I said alone, I meant in a spiritual sense. In that sense, an atheist can be assumed to worship themselves as a god, but I think that may be taking it a little too literally.
Unless intelligence is universally self-extinguishing at a certain level of technological development.
You are equating human intelligence with intelligence in general. Our destructive natures come from our predatory background rather than our intelligence. Other intelligences, following different evolutionary paths, would probably have a different set of hard-wired instincts, such as a strong flee instinct rather than a fight one.
It seems to me that the current lack of success in the SETI program is indicative of the fact that we really are alone in the cosmos. If there were other races out there we would see evidence for them - after all, they would likely have been around for millions of years already, and in that time their engineering projects could easily have reached a scale where we could see them from Earth. But we only see natural pheomena. It would be far too much of a coincidence for other forms of life to be at the same technological stage of development as we are.
The face that life on Earth arose so quickly after it's formation - about 500 million years later - is a sure sign of the Lord's hand at work. The real question we need to know is whether His work was unique to this planet or spread across the cosmos. SETI's lack of results would tend to favour the argument that the Earth is unique, and that the words of the Bible are true in asserting that God made us in his image.
Hawking and Berkenstein came up with this concept in the 70s. Since Hawking radiation implies that black holes have a temperature it follows that they have an entropy as well, and the relationship is S=A/4h, where A is the surface area in appropriate units.
This theory has recently been proved using string theory. Since entropy has its basis in the number of available quantum states of a system, Strominger and Vafa showed this relationship to be true by counting the degeneracy of configurations for strings and D-branes corresponding to black holes in string theory. This is a real result for string theory, since up till then the theory only had a semiclassical derivation.
For more information, see here for more information on the superstring proof or here for the semiclassical derivation.
This is the limit at which a star is too massive to form a neutron star and instead collapses to a black hole. IIRC, it is equal to about 2.4 solar masses.
No, Hawking radiation applies to all black holes, but the effect is proportional to the mass of the hole and so it would take something like 10^18 years for a massive black hole to evaporate through this process (the number is probably wrong, but you get the idea of a long, long time).
There isn't an infrastructure for this, and any such infrastructure could and would be abused to silence critics of the people in power.
Why? There are far better mediums for people to spread propaganda than the net, and the only people allowed online would be those sanctioned by the government anyway.
When you have examples of the lack of freedom in front of you, and the importance of a free Internet for tearing down the oppressive regimes (Iran, China, N. Korea), I'm shocked that you would even consider such a thing.
I think you need to get out a bit more - what exactly has the internet done for people in these three countries? Nothing, that's what. Despite what you seem to think, the net is nothing more than a fancy version of services like Teletext, and not some kind of magic device that will emancipate the unwashed hordes.
If institutions have codes of conduct for access to I2 (like Usenet2), that's fine; people could always set up Internet3, Internet4, etc. ad infinitum if they didn't like the rules. But it shouldn't be a government deal.
Why? What's the difference? In modern USia the corporations might as well be the government for all the difference it makes. Each is as bad as each other.
Does anyone else here remember the net back before the web was around? Does anyone remember how it was at the start of the world wide web? Sure, it was a little sparse and there wasn't much in the way of fancy presentation, but it was full of content. And by that I mean real, useful content.
In contrast, what do we have today? Every company on the face of the planet attempting to make easy cash by exploting people. Geocities homepages with pictures of non-entities and their dog on holiday. And AOL with its hordes of perpetual newbies with no manners and no clue. Is this what we want on the net?
The Internet 2 is the chance to get rid of all of this noise and return to a net where you can get high-speed access to a vast range of informative content rather than pirate software and illegal pornography. What I suggest is that rather than allowing everyone to access the Internet 2 it be limited to people who are reponsible enough to use it properly.
Firstly, anyone under a minimum age (16 or 18 most likely) should only be allowed to use it with adult supervision, or not at all. This will stop teenage morons (like the "first post"ers) from spouting garbage, hacking websites and trying to find porn. And we wouldn't need filtering software then either.
Secondly everyone who wants to use the net should have to take an exam to ensure that they are the sort of person we'd want online. This would ensure that they'd know at least the basics (such as no opening mail attachments) and could have politeness instilled in them. Anyone failing the exam wouldn't be allowed online.
Sure this seems harsh, but it would weed out the undesirables and make the Internet 2 a better place for all of us.
I think you're being too pedantic about this. The meanings of words do change with popular usage, and FUD can be used in this context and be understood, just as "hacking" has changed in meaning to mean breaking into computer systems.
Sorry to be a negative nancy and all, but an "anonymous ex-Microsoft employee" is hardly the most reliable of sources, even on the internet where verification of information seems optional. And, like so many other "news" stories on websites this seems like an attempt to stir up activity through tried and tested FUD for the purpose of advertising dollars. And we've seen websites pander to the/. effect before, and yet we still visit them whenever they post a "Linux sucks" or "Linux r00lz" story don't we?
Maybe it is true, but I doubt it. After all, it doesn't really seem all that likely does it? Sure these places may have once run other OSes, but it has been Microsoft's policy to implement everything using Windows for several years now, and a sensible policy it is. They're not going to use competing products when their own is comaparible - it may be slightly less stable but it does perform better under heavy loads.
What this sounds like at best is a bitter ex-employee spreading FUD about what MS companies are using, and at worst a blatent fabrication designed to pull in traffic. Yet another strike for internet "journalism".
These archive the web projects are great in principle, and would constitute a valuable historical resource for future researchers, but they do have a major drawback - they are only ever going to cover a small portion of the available online content.
Even search engines like Google and Lycos, with all of their resources dedicated to searching and indexing new sites, only cover less than 10% of available web pages, and the growth of the net is expanding faster than the ability of these sites to keep up. And if search engines cannot keep up with the Internet's growth, how the hell is an archiving project going to? It's just not possible.
So at best this is only going to get a small number of pages, and which pages they get will be related to their choices of spidering techniques. It's kind of hard to get a truly random sample of pages from the entire selection of content - you're either forced to use what the search engines have indexed or just attempt tor randomly follow links. You'll always miss sites.
Anyway, my point is nice idea, but not really worth as much as they promise.
Slashdot Mirror
Could it be that most consumers are used to the "old" games by now and are looking for something different?
Something different eh? Please explain how Doom, Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3, Heretic etc. etc. are "different". They're the same game with different weapons, different levels and different graphics. The core concepts are all identical.
USia suffers from a strange dichotomy in that on one hand it has a lot of scientific research done there and a lot of Nobel prize winners, yet on the other hand it seems to produce fewer scientists per head than many other nations. If you look at Nobel prizes for USian scientists, how many of them were born and educated there, and how many were lured there by a higher wage?
The USian education system is geared more towards sports than education in many cases. How can you take a nation seriously that provides college scholarships for people whose only talent is throwing a ball whilst wearing enough padding to keep them safe in the event of a car crash? But it seems that colleges think that their importance is measured by the success of their football team rather than by the success of their graduates.
I think that USia needs a lot more H1-Bs to make up for this lack of homegrown talent. And indeed, as more and more people find that they don't want to work in an industry which demands they devote their life to their job, foreign labor will be the only way to get workers.
I for one lament the slow decline in the quality and originality of computer games. Once upon a time you could buy games which were genuinely a joy to play, but todays games seem to be all flash and no substance. I don't want to be overwhelmed by a half-hour live action introduction, I want to kill some time doing something enjoyable.
All we see today are an endless succession of technically accomplished first-person shooters, each with more graphical prowess than the last. Whilst this may be fine for Americans in love with their right to shoot people, some of us would rather play a game that involved us in something other than violence and hate.
Has all creativity died in the gaming industry?
And as the "information" revolution occurs and we move into a new techno-utopia we will be finally able to forget that the real world is not as perfect as it seems to the average geek. We'll drown in so much useless information that we won't have to worry about starving children in Africa any more.
The increasing amount of information watering holes online which are targetted to a certain type of person has a serious negative consequence which you don't often hear about. They encourage conformity and suppress new ideas. Why? Because when the only people whose opinions you read or hear are those who share the same interests as you and agree with your outlook then you're not being challenged.
Just look at Slashdot for a great example of this. Plenty of like-minded people and a lack of tolerance for alternative opinions. Indeed, moderation provides a wonderful mechanism to encourage conformity at the price of healthy argument.
As the trend increases and we enter a true "information" age, it will get to the point where people do have access to all the information they could ever want, but instead they limit themselves to the unchallenging and comfortable. It'll be a million times worse than the television, because it'll be personal.
In this situation who will be bothered about the have-nots? Because there are a lot of have-nots out there, for a lot of different reasons. These people will become an underclass, and the difference will be serious. Today homeless people find themselves trapped because without an address they cannot get jobs or other things we take for granted - how much worse will it be when people are unable to do anything without an online presence?
Filehandles, for instance, are by definition objects, so you would be hard pressed to get any input or output. I also find it difficult to imagine a program of any complexity that didn't go through the sys. or os. hierarchies.
Okay, point conceded in that sense :) I wasn't thinking about the way modules, namespaces and files are treated as objects.
That aside, it was my understanding back when I was working with Python on a regular basis that objects underlie everything in Python, whether or not you use their object-ness in your programs.
See here for more info - function objects, code objects, type objects, stack frame objects, traceback objects etc. etc. They're not really visible unless you're trying to use them though.
But on closer inspection, I see what you meant :)
As you so much profess to believe in the body being the vehicle for the soul, how can you contradict yourself with this sort of nutso statement? Your soul has left the body after death, your corpse is nothing but wormfood anyway.
Did I say that there was anything magical about the body after death? No, I didn't, I said that respect should be paid that person, which means treating their body with respect. By your rationale, we might as well let necrophiliacs at the corpses as soon as they cool.
This is not a "bizzare folktale of modern science", it is a prime example of how incredibly disrespectful people can be towards the dead. Just because Einstein was somewhat more intelligent than the average person (and it has to be said that tales of his genius are somewhat overrated), what gives someone the right to remove his brain, chop it up into pieces and then keep them stored in jars? None, that's what right.
Would you like it if someone kept a piece of one of your relatives after they died? Without even asking your permission or letting you know what they were doing? No, you wouldn't, yet here is another "scientist" who thinks that he can divine some kind of insight into intelligence from some poor bastard's dead brain! Do these people have no respect for the dead?
I find this to be in the poorest of tastes, and only a step up from necrophilia. Is this tale to be taken as condoning the right of "scientists" to be able to violate your corpse as they will? Let's hope not, but we've all seen what can happen in the name of "science".
... because it now means that the vastly unproductive whining about the Qt license that /.ers seem to love can now finally be declared a thing of the past. KDE can now stand (or fall) on its merits rather than on the basis of an ideology devised by a man who doesn't even have to work for a living.
I've been using KDE for a while at home now, and it's slick, especially compared to the lumbering dinosaur that is GNOME. For an operating system with a set of tools designed to be small and modular, it's amazing that most of the applications written for it are so slow and bloated, with "value added" features taking precedence over quality and performance. With people like this on the side of Linux, Microsoft's continued desktop dominance seems to be secured.
Let's hope we see more apps like KDE, where a decent product counts for more than ideological squabbles.
The object-oriented features of Python are more deeply embedded than those of Perl (read: the whole blippin' language is object oriented).
I'm not disagreeing with your post in general, but I do have a question. How is the whole of the language object orientated? Sure, the object orientation is a big part of it, but it's in no way necessary to writing a program, even a complex one.
At least, not for vitally important applications and services. There has been a push recently towards providing every kind of service imaginable over the net, but people have already learnt that some things just aren't safe to do online - the notable failures of internet banks such as Egg to keep their sites secure being one recent incident.
Another foolhardy venture I read about in the paper today (no links, I couldn't find anything online) is of a company in Thailand which has developed a security robot armed with an air gun as standard, but which can be fitted with any other type of weapon, lethal or not. Whilst it can be set to work automatically, it can also be aimed and fired manually, using a command sent over the Internet! Is this the most stupid thing ever or what? Now hackers can shoot people from the comfort of their own bedrooms!
Despite the recent rush to get online, I can see that the craze will die down in years to come, as people and companies realise that some things are much safer in a real world environment where factors such as ease of interception and physical location make every transaction far more secure.
At the end of the day, the amazing lack of online security and privacy means that the net is good only for unimportant information and trivial communications. Who wants every hacker with a root exploit to know their most personal and important details?
What did I do to annoy you then? If you don't like what I have to say, quit replying to each and every post I make. You'll give yourself an ulcer you know.
My friend you only need to look above at those twinkling little stars at night to find proof of God and his creations. You cannot limit the creation to merely just this blue/green orb, for there are many like ours out there. If you do ..you are only limiting your beliefs.
Which is why I said in the original post I believed that we were unique but SETI will possibly be able to determine otherwise.
Viruses could be considered a form of life.
And to confuse the issue there are things like viroids, virids and the like which are even smaller...
There are atheistic "fundamentalists" out there just as there are religious fundamentalists you know. People like Dawkins use every piece of scientific knowledge as a weapon in their fight against the idea of God, and are quite outspoken about the "evils" of religion.
And when I said alone, I meant in a spiritual sense. In that sense, an atheist can be assumed to worship themselves as a god, but I think that may be taking it a little too literally.
Unless intelligence is universally self-extinguishing at a certain level of technological development.
You are equating human intelligence with intelligence in general. Our destructive natures come from our predatory background rather than our intelligence. Other intelligences, following different evolutionary paths, would probably have a different set of hard-wired instincts, such as a strong flee instinct rather than a fight one.
Mmmmm. Flamebait.
Why is my comment flamebait? I'm merely stating an opinion and hoping SETI will provide more information on the matter.
Anyways I love these sorts of arguments so let us begin.
I think you're the one who has a problem with flaming...
We may be unique creatures in that we are human and bi-pedual but other than that it would have to be impossible if we were the only life.
Why?
First off, why would God only create us as his only life form?
Because we share a part of the Lord in that we have an eternal soul. This is why we are unqiue.
No, not really. Since the Lord is omnipresent, we are never alone but are instead always in the presence of His eternal love.
It is atheism that preaches that we are alone and that there are no consequences for immoral behaviour.
It seems to me that the current lack of success in the SETI program is indicative of the fact that we really are alone in the cosmos. If there were other races out there we would see evidence for them - after all, they would likely have been around for millions of years already, and in that time their engineering projects could easily have reached a scale where we could see them from Earth. But we only see natural pheomena. It would be far too much of a coincidence for other forms of life to be at the same technological stage of development as we are.
The face that life on Earth arose so quickly after it's formation - about 500 million years later - is a sure sign of the Lord's hand at work. The real question we need to know is whether His work was unique to this planet or spread across the cosmos. SETI's lack of results would tend to favour the argument that the Earth is unique, and that the words of the Bible are true in asserting that God made us in his image.
Hawking and Berkenstein came up with this concept in the 70s. Since Hawking radiation implies that black holes have a temperature it follows that they have an entropy as well, and the relationship is S=A/4h, where A is the surface area in appropriate units.
This theory has recently been proved using string theory. Since entropy has its basis in the number of available quantum states of a system, Strominger and Vafa showed this relationship to be true by counting the degeneracy of configurations for strings and D-branes corresponding to black holes in string theory. This is a real result for string theory, since up till then the theory only had a semiclassical derivation.
For more information, see here for more information on the superstring proof or here for the semiclassical derivation.
This is the limit at which a star is too massive to form a neutron star and instead collapses to a black hole. IIRC, it is equal to about 2.4 solar masses.
No, Hawking radiation applies to all black holes, but the effect is proportional to the mass of the hole and so it would take something like 10^18 years for a massive black hole to evaporate through this process (the number is probably wrong, but you get the idea of a long, long time).
There isn't an infrastructure for this, and any such infrastructure could and would be abused to silence critics of the people in power.
Why? There are far better mediums for people to spread propaganda than the net, and the only people allowed online would be those sanctioned by the government anyway.
When you have examples of the lack of freedom in front of you, and the importance of a free Internet for tearing down the oppressive regimes (Iran, China, N. Korea), I'm shocked that you would even consider such a thing.
I think you need to get out a bit more - what exactly has the internet done for people in these three countries? Nothing, that's what. Despite what you seem to think, the net is nothing more than a fancy version of services like Teletext, and not some kind of magic device that will emancipate the unwashed hordes.
If institutions have codes of conduct for access to I2 (like Usenet2), that's fine; people could always set up Internet3, Internet4, etc. ad infinitum if they didn't like the rules. But it shouldn't be a government deal.
Why? What's the difference? In modern USia the corporations might as well be the government for all the difference it makes. Each is as bad as each other.
Does anyone else here remember the net back before the web was around? Does anyone remember how it was at the start of the world wide web? Sure, it was a little sparse and there wasn't much in the way of fancy presentation, but it was full of content. And by that I mean real, useful content.
In contrast, what do we have today? Every company on the face of the planet attempting to make easy cash by exploting people. Geocities homepages with pictures of non-entities and their dog on holiday. And AOL with its hordes of perpetual newbies with no manners and no clue. Is this what we want on the net?
The Internet 2 is the chance to get rid of all of this noise and return to a net where you can get high-speed access to a vast range of informative content rather than pirate software and illegal pornography. What I suggest is that rather than allowing everyone to access the Internet 2 it be limited to people who are reponsible enough to use it properly.
Firstly, anyone under a minimum age (16 or 18 most likely) should only be allowed to use it with adult supervision, or not at all. This will stop teenage morons (like the "first post"ers) from spouting garbage, hacking websites and trying to find porn. And we wouldn't need filtering software then either.
Secondly everyone who wants to use the net should have to take an exam to ensure that they are the sort of person we'd want online. This would ensure that they'd know at least the basics (such as no opening mail attachments) and could have politeness instilled in them. Anyone failing the exam wouldn't be allowed online.
Sure this seems harsh, but it would weed out the undesirables and make the Internet 2 a better place for all of us.
I think you're being too pedantic about this. The meanings of words do change with popular usage, and FUD can be used in this context and be understood, just as "hacking" has changed in meaning to mean breaking into computer systems.
Sorry to be a negative nancy and all, but an "anonymous ex-Microsoft employee" is hardly the most reliable of sources, even on the internet where verification of information seems optional. And, like so many other "news" stories on websites this seems like an attempt to stir up activity through tried and tested FUD for the purpose of advertising dollars. And we've seen websites pander to the /. effect before, and yet we still visit them whenever they post a "Linux sucks" or "Linux r00lz" story don't we?
Maybe it is true, but I doubt it. After all, it doesn't really seem all that likely does it? Sure these places may have once run other OSes, but it has been Microsoft's policy to implement everything using Windows for several years now, and a sensible policy it is. They're not going to use competing products when their own is comaparible - it may be slightly less stable but it does perform better under heavy loads.
What this sounds like at best is a bitter ex-employee spreading FUD about what MS companies are using, and at worst a blatent fabrication designed to pull in traffic. Yet another strike for internet "journalism".
These archive the web projects are great in principle, and would constitute a valuable historical resource for future researchers, but they do have a major drawback - they are only ever going to cover a small portion of the available online content.
Even search engines like Google and Lycos, with all of their resources dedicated to searching and indexing new sites, only cover less than 10% of available web pages, and the growth of the net is expanding faster than the ability of these sites to keep up. And if search engines cannot keep up with the Internet's growth, how the hell is an archiving project going to? It's just not possible.
So at best this is only going to get a small number of pages, and which pages they get will be related to their choices of spidering techniques. It's kind of hard to get a truly random sample of pages from the entire selection of content - you're either forced to use what the search engines have indexed or just attempt tor randomly follow links. You'll always miss sites.
Anyway, my point is nice idea, but not really worth as much as they promise.