When a three letter agency cautions you with unspecified malice, even if they can't (yet) drag you out of your house at night, you know they can make your life difficult...
Once the big MMOs shift their client focus to mobile platforms (and that's coming for sure)
Maybe not. Immersion is big in MMO's, which means giant monitors/big screen TV's to play on.
Also, unless everything gets dumbed down to three button mashing and menu based actions (as opposed to having 20-40 keys bound to actions), folks will still need a keyboard or similar input device.
And ruined posture because you either have a vertical screen for readability that requires you to always have your arms extended (and slows you down because of the time to lift hands from the keyboard a lot), or you wind up hunched over the thing.
It might be nice for people who are doing certain kinds of photoshop work, or browsing the web - for those who write in any for a living, it's gonna suck.
To play the devil's advocate, yes. Hack into New York's water and sewage systems. Or a nuke reactor. Or even a power grid. The economic damage (and in some case, loss of life) could be quite large.
With this said, I fear that this sort of anti-terrorism effort will be all about stripping our rights to go after music pirates. And centralization of the 'net, which will actually make each of the above listed targets easier to hit in the end than a distributed defense.
It's all about the fear. Something has changed, and we as a society are suddenly willing to do anything to keep that fear away.
Couple of kids go nuts with guns? Take all the kids rights away.
Terrorists attack? Take all the rights away, period.
What causes this willingness to give into fear is another matter. I think it's complex, but probably has its roots in the fact that even if we don't generally acknowledge it, there's a widespread awareness that Bad Things are probably going to happen given that they usually do when the number of people so outstrip the resources.
So - a good friend of mine, a really high end coder, is a drummer in a gigging metal band. Another is both a really good sys admin and also the lead guitarist in a thrash metal band.
These two both venture into the dens of iniquity and villainy to play their (paying) gigs. And their facebook profiles reflect it.
It would be your loss to not hire these two for this fact, which you would only know about if you went and dug around on their facebooks. They keep the two parts of their professional lives completely seperate.
MS makes hammers and screwdrivers. They want everything to be a hammer. So now there's a secondary market for customizing your mandatory hammer to look like a screwdriver again.
Maybe instead of going lowest common denominator, MS should enhance their development wizards and such so that an app can be easily generated for either platform or something...
The OS makers most likely know what they're doing. However, I suspect that they're being given their marching orders by the business oriented folks, who, as others have theorized, may well well want to use the Win8 platform to drive the windows based tablets and phone application markets.
No, they just don't want to have to learn some new crap that's worse than the old crap.
Rather, it's about not wanting to learn variations on the same damn thing over and over and over and over again. Which is a bit different than learning something new. If someone is going to have to learn yet another variant, then, to prevent angst, said variant should be pretty darned good.
So - the purpose of terror is to affect some change through fear.
Why, then, don't the terrorists go ahead and blow up people in crowded squares and such? It would cause fear, definitely. Anyone - not just travelers - might be killed, at any time.
So, why do they target airplanes and trains and such? Could it be that the change they're trying to affect is that of getting us to spend money foolishly, to spend ourselves into oblivion, while at the same time, getting us to change our form of government and approach to a more totalitarian one? Which, absolutely, would further their causes -they need a permanent evil enemy with no redeeming values just as much as our government seems to at times.
Hmmm.. I see your point, but. I don't know how many times schedule has prevented developers from making the obvious improvements to get something working and out the door.
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When a three letter agency cautions you with unspecified malice, even if they can't (yet) drag you out of your house at night, you know they can make your life difficult...
Once the big MMOs shift their client focus to mobile platforms (and that's coming for sure)
Maybe not. Immersion is big in MMO's, which means giant monitors/big screen TV's to play on.
Also, unless everything gets dumbed down to three button mashing and menu based actions (as opposed to having 20-40 keys bound to actions), folks will still need a keyboard or similar input device.
And ruined posture because you either have a vertical screen for readability that requires you to always have your arms extended (and slows you down because of the time to lift hands from the keyboard a lot), or you wind up hunched over the thing.
It might be nice for people who are doing certain kinds of photoshop work, or browsing the web - for those who write in any for a living, it's gonna suck.
I don't look through my keyboard to read my code or see the teammate that I'm supposed to be healing...
MS may be right about the changes.
But what is unfortunate is that they're taking away all the hammers to make everything a screwdriver, instead of adding wrenches to the tool kit.
To play the devil's advocate, yes. Hack into New York's water and sewage systems. Or a nuke reactor. Or even a power grid. The economic damage (and in some case, loss of life) could be quite large.
With this said, I fear that this sort of anti-terrorism effort will be all about stripping our rights to go after music pirates. And centralization of the 'net, which will actually make each of the above listed targets easier to hit in the end than a distributed defense.
If you declare war on terror, then terror has already won. Because only a terrified society would declare such a war.
It's all about the fear. Something has changed, and we as a society are suddenly willing to do anything to keep that fear away.
Couple of kids go nuts with guns? Take all the kids rights away.
Terrorists attack? Take all the rights away, period.
What causes this willingness to give into fear is another matter. I think it's complex, but probably has its roots in the fact that even if we don't generally acknowledge it, there's a widespread awareness that Bad Things are probably going to happen given that they usually do when the number of people so outstrip the resources.
Yet.
How about maintain two FB profiles, one for friends and one 'work safe' one with work colleagues on it.
Really wouldn't work. You have to assume that the hiring HR has already gone and searched out your profile(s).
So - a good friend of mine, a really high end coder, is a drummer in a gigging metal band. Another is both a really good sys admin and also the lead guitarist in a thrash metal band.
These two both venture into the dens of iniquity and villainy to play their (paying) gigs. And their facebook profiles reflect it.
It would be your loss to not hire these two for this fact, which you would only know about if you went and dug around on their facebooks. They keep the two parts of their professional lives completely seperate.
http://issa.house.gov/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=581&Itemid=70
He's posting copyrighted material on the internet!
Even if all flat panel monitors were suddenly magically touch enabled, drag to exit would still be a really bad idea.
Why?
Because you'd constantly be having to wipe the screen down to read the text of the spreadsheet you were working on.
MS makes hammers and screwdrivers. They want everything to be a hammer. So now there's a secondary market for customizing your mandatory hammer to look like a screwdriver again.
Maybe instead of going lowest common denominator, MS should enhance their development wizards and such so that an app can be easily generated for either platform or something...
The OS makers most likely know what they're doing. However, I suspect that they're being given their marching orders by the business oriented folks, who, as others have theorized, may well well want to use the Win8 platform to drive the windows based tablets and phone application markets.
So - in addition to all the other regressions, we've now got requisite registry edits inbound? Ooooh... shiny!
Notepad is not an editor. It's a second clipboard....
No, they just don't want to have to learn some new crap that's worse than the old crap.
Rather, it's about not wanting to learn variations on the same damn thing over and over and over and over again. Which is a bit different than learning something new. If someone is going to have to learn yet another variant, then, to prevent angst, said variant should be pretty darned good.
Or even self modifying assembly....
That would be a real pisser to figure out.
No stars - horrible show. I want my money back.
Being able to ship 100,000 quasi-functional at best units: 10 points
Having lots of buzzwords: 15 points
Having a device that claims to work like a Total Recall Scanner: 25 points
Coming in behind the competition in actual usability: -30 points
Hiring Michael Chertoff: priceless.
For some things, effort and merit will get you there. For everything else, there's bribery and corruption.
So - the purpose of terror is to affect some change through fear.
Why, then, don't the terrorists go ahead and blow up people in crowded squares and such? It would cause fear, definitely. Anyone - not just travelers - might be killed, at any time.
So, why do they target airplanes and trains and such? Could it be that the change they're trying to affect is that of getting us to spend money foolishly, to spend ourselves into oblivion, while at the same time, getting us to change our form of government and approach to a more totalitarian one? Which, absolutely, would further their causes -they need a permanent evil enemy with no redeeming values just as much as our government seems to at times.
They installed the gopher on their new 300 million dollar VAX systems.
Hmmm.. I see your point, but. I don't know how many times schedule has prevented developers from making the obvious improvements to get something working and out the door.