The Legend of 1900 was made by the same dude who made Cinema Paradisio. It was his first english language film.
The thing costed $9 million to make, looked absolutely magical, and is VERY rentable on DVD, however it only ever made $250k in the box office.
Tim Roth stars across Pruitt Taylor Vince, probably the best actor in the world, too:)
The Legend of 1900 is a fable about a man who was born, and lived his entire life on a steam ship. Unfortunately, it came out in 1998, and the world was already getting sick of Titanic.
Yeah, I'm a canuck too, but you missed a valuable point in your list:
4. The Yanks keep accusing us of providing an easy way-in to their country for terrorists and undesirables.
Like, my God, when are they going to notice/remember that EVERY SINGLE ACT OF TERRORISM on the US has come from within their own borders? Remember Tim McVeigh? He was a Yank. Remember the crazy hijackers from November the Ninth 2001? They were living for quite some time in the States, if not full-blown Yanks themselves.
And here's another point you missed:
5. Yanks' economic domination of all of their neighbours and big trading partners.
There's something very upsetting about having to well oil for the Yanks up here, then sell it to the States, then buy back processed oil products from the States again. Our fresh water is not our own, our trees and minerals aren't ours. I'd be a lot less upset at our neighbours to the south if they weren't so freaking colonial.
Eventually, I hope, countries with some economic power over the States band together and say "fsck you, America!" and stop making losing trades with them, in spite of all the economic treaties we've signed.
The Transhab module back in the day was toted in a simmilar way. For those that don't remember the hype, TransHab was going to be a huge, house-sized inflatable living and study area to be added to the International Space Station. It or something exactly like it would have been used on future lunar or Mars missions, and it would become a piece of commodity hardware.
The F1 booster, the first SSTO launch vehicle, was scrapped too after it was made into commodity hardware to launch lunar modules into orbit for testing and deployment.
Now NASA is showing off a new piece of commodity hardware: A drilling robot that could be loaded onto two very different missions. From an engineering perspective, such a reliable piece of equipment would make sense and be considered a useful and productive way to spend taxpayers' money, right?
That's right. It'll make sense. The more sense it makes, the less likely it is that NASA will keep using it.
Actually, it looks kinda like the Canuck series StarHunter, only the guy who plays Dante Montana could be so much better casted as Brian from Queer as Folk...
In fact, the whole show has characters who haven't quite slipped into their roles yet, who really remind me of ones from other shows. We have the Captain, who is a clone of Brian Kinney, the first officer, who is exactly like the black brit girl from StarHunter, the quirky younger engineer, also from StarHunter (actually, she's practically a clone), etc.
On the other hand, scriptwriters know to generate their movies from patterns and formulae, so duplication of a pattern or two that worked in other shows (including Buffy, for example) is to be expected. Otherwise they wouldn't be billing the show as "From the makers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer," etc.
I personally like the show. The CG is almost as good as that in Farscape.:)
Computers make it a lot easier to create perfect replicas of any information that you have deemed important. Even if we lose hundred-year-old spam lists, or the more obscure bits of knowledge Jenny from Tunguska has about her pet dog Fluffy (or even most of geocities, for that matter) we will retain anything useful from this era simply because people will keep downloading it and putting it up for others to download.
The peer-to-peer file sharing systems out there are like a public-access ftp server, or a wiki, or any of the hundreds of different ways that information will stay alive when people care to keep it. With a hundred million users all trying to collect as much interesting information as possible, you end up with a reasonable, thorough data filter to make backups for every important piece of classical knowledge that you'll need a few decades from now.
Simple. Get a mac and run Marathon. This was the Mac Quake-equivalent that came out back when PCs could barely manage with Wolfenstein. If you had three screens, you could put them around your head and have the lefthand one for everyting to your left, the righthand one for your right, and the forward one for your front.
Even better, from the data points we've gathered so far, sentients are able to use tools to adapt their local environments to a state of total comfort. Hell, we have demonstrated the ability to survive in a vacuum, on the bottom of the ocean and on top of the antarctic glacier.
Even if the Milky Way as a whole is inhospitable for microbes, plants and animals, sentient beings seem able to adapt any hostile environment and thrive in it, so even rare earths mean the possibility of life everywhere.
Worst case, the population density is a lot lower than in Star Trek or Star Wars. Big deal. That means more real estate for us humans, and fewer non-extremovores trying to colonize Earth.
I just wish we'd advance our space program a bit faster and set up Von Newmann probes or a permanent offworld base, so our eggs aren't all in one basket.
IANAL, but... This case could provide a legal precedent for any content, online or on paper, that can be read extra-jurisdictionally.
This generation of judges might treat computers as if they're magical and a special case to the death, but in a few hundred years, when these ones have all died off, we'll end up with case law that will restrict the behavior of smarter judges, who get that print is print, wherever it occurs.
It really is too bad that child genii like RMS, Wolfram and Hawking are so rare in modern society. They do great works in their lifetimes that are viewed as incredible successes for science or society, and create so much value people get excited whenever they speak.
Sadly, we have an education system that works *against* the production of such people. To "create" a child prodigy you need to have them interact primarily with adults, given the freedom to learn and study on their own, with only occasional encouragement, and to keep them primarily at home, away from other kids. Play dates are okay, but daycare keeps them from developing at their own pace.
If we switched to a different state-sponsored style of education, the entire world would benefit, save for the tall, proud, rich few who have a vested interest in the status quo. Prodigies, when they make big changes, destabilize things, and make the world brighter, clearer or more amazing for the rest of us.
I thought the reason we were heading over to mars was to search for water. If we find water, we colonize and REALLY infect the red planet.
Why is it that tree-huggers think life on earth to be so very precious as long as it stays inside our atmosphere? The global ecosystem has adapted itself to foreign asteroids impacting it, so a few new species of microbes probably won't hurt it at all. Plus, on the disease side of things, these Martian microbes will not be drug resistant, once we study them and figure out what drug to use.
Infesting the Martian ecosystem with terrestrial life has about as bad a cost-benefit ratio as trashing the Lunar ecosystem with terrestrial industry. It'll happen anyway, and there's just not enough of it to worry about.
George Lucas... he's the guy who wrote that Foundation parody, right?
Ok let's stop looking for water for a bit
on
Lots of Ice On Mars
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
When you are growing plants, you need to have nitrogen all around in the soil and air or not much will get produced. Where are we going to be getting this vital chemical for life on other planets? Importing huge tanks of nitrogen from Earth limits the size of our hermetic domes, and greatly increases maintenance costs.
Is there enough nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere or soil, or will we have to import it?
Being a computer geek is an act of terrorism, so you can't go looking for security notices. Working on Open Source is Unamerican, so you can't be off browsing CVS trees. Listening to Indy Artist X's music before buying tickets to their concert is Piracy, so you can't download MP3's either.
Looking at smut is about the only moral use of the Internet, according to the media.
Nor are FPGAs. Transputers and other self-modifying pieces of computing equipment are pretty nifty boxen, but until these stories end with descriptions of tools that indicate to scientists exactly *how* their toys are doing these amazing feats, they will not be useful for general consumption.
For example, if the transputer this guy was using generated FPGAs, which were then automatically translated into some forth dialect, then his new processors could be refactored into other, more von Neuman like equipment more easily.
A few months ago when I was first designing my stockbot, I faced simmilar problems trying to work with neural networks and other correlation engines. The process time was slow, and the strategies they used were not easily portable. In the end I went with a stack-based language and randomly generated code that examines historical prices. It has worked out a LOT better in the long run.
People *shouldn't* be given punishments as nasty as violent offenders for crimes like embezzlement, robbing banks and companies, etc. Theft is one thing, murder, rape and assault are another. Sure, it pisses some people off, but nobody dies, and they should act like its just another nuisance, not some act of terrorism!
The company I used to work for was dealing with a lot of Motorola smart card technology, and implementation schemes for it. One thing I don't get about smartcard/chip/cash technology is: Why bother with writable memory on-chip? It sure is useful if you're individualizing peoples' ID cards at a convention, but otherwise there's no point to it.
If someone is tech-savvy enough to hack the on-chip filesystem and change the path that piece of currency followed, then it wouldn't make a lick of difference where the cash has been. If they're tracking it at airports, train stations, or even every doorway, then a centralized database can handle the data mining without worrying about someone changing the non-static ID tags.
Although, increasing the price of currency production with useless features is pretty helpful if you plan on printing huge quantities of it... so watch out.
Contrary to popular belief, _nobody_ dies when someone releases a worm. Sure, the Internet gets slowed down, a headache is made for all kinds of computer people, but outside of the Internet, nobody dies. Production doesn't stop in our factories, our banks and credit cards keep making debt for people, the hospitals don't keel over.
The world is just not that dependant on the Internet, and never will be. Worms are definitely annoying, but they aren't hurting anyone physically, ever.
These manufactured piracy figures would be even remotely useful if they included demographics for each group of software pirates. If the majority of that 25% were, say, Mercedes Benz driving, diamond-clad rich folk who light cigars with hundred dollar bills, then we would be worried.
At present, these buckaneers seem to mostly be low-income students and others who have a compulsion to use the latest and greatest software, without the funding to back it up. Rather than paying bazillions of dollars towards enforcement and purchasing new laws, software companies could stand to make a huge tax write-off if they called this willful taking of their software a Charitable Donation.
Big software companies practically print their own money giving out these wares as name brand commercial products, and they enjoy insane profit margins once the development costs get paid off. Since profit==taxes, they should try to encourage software piracy, pull a figure out of their ass equivalent to their taxable income, and then end up paying a few dollars, rather than a few hundred million.
Even the transistors used to draw Mickey Mouse on the die? What are all those transistors used for? Is there supposed to be some one-to-n correlation between "transistor" and "computing element" in Intel marketing?
EEK! A COMPUTER! HIDE! RUN!
on
Gadgets of 2002
·
· Score: 2, Funny
>"Consumers don't want to figure out hardware or software.
>They're so jaded by how hard it is to set up a computer that
>anything that smells like it scares them to death," said Rob
>Enderle, analyst with the Giga Information Group.
In a related story, the US Government has started issuing grants to researchers looking to genetically modify the housecat. "Children no longer wish to clean up their pets' litter boxes. Anything resembling cat poop scares them to death, so we must tailor the cat to suit their needs." The funding for the research grant was gathered by closing down a number of pet care education programmes.
If Lindows stops being able to run i386 ELF executables, then we have a problem. In the best of all worlds, Linux could have a compatibility module for Java bytecode, 68000 and PPC Mac apps, Windows, ELF, and all the other major platforms out there, just so people have no excuse when using the other, less fun operating systems.
>Let me rephrase the question for any who missed it: "Suppose you discover
>that P=NP. What is the right thing to do?" Do I cover it up, or do I release?
>What if I proved that P=NP, but I don't know of an algorithm to actually
>convert any known problem? Or, what if I did know the algorithm and the
>proof, and I believed that the algorithm couldn't be reconstructed from the
>proof -- should I release the proof?
The question of whether or not such a world-altering technology would "make it into the wrong hands" is easy to avoid if you get this world-altering technology into *everyone's* hands, all at once.
For example, if you showed someone 50 years ago a PC from nowadays, they'd be like "Oh my god I could take over the world with this thing!" and possibly make a huge fortune. If, however, you gave one computer to every one of the billion people living back then, and showed them exactly how to manufacture more, they'd be like, "Oh, a new, faster, cheaper computer. So what?"
So, if you ever find that P=NP, spam EVERYONE with the solution. That way the "wrong hands" and the "right hands" think its a pretty commonplace thing.
>In a typical capiltalist world, businesses are
>kept in check by the market and the government,
>and can't become monopolies. How do you
>believe Microsoft surpassed thse checks?
The Software Industry is like the Entertainment Industry. They produce non-tangible items on media that costs next to nothing, and distribute them at an enourmous markup. Any industry that prints money like this tends to be complained about for being corrupt, and those complaints are usually well founded.
My big question is: Rather than giving Microsoft and other big media companies the ability to rake in enormous profits through insane markups on their product, would it be possible to legislate away the sale of OSes for more than their distribution is worth, and instead focus on the support side of things?
While it wouldn't un-proprietary-ize their file formats, another big and important move, it might help to level the playing field a bit for other operating system companies, and companies who can give better customer support, for cheaper.
The trend in home computing for the past ten years has been and will continue to be away from the WIMP interface and towards the FILTH interface.
The desktop metaphor of Windows, Icons, Menus and Programs was nice for quite some time, and does have some advantages over the console (sometimes,) but it still left too much of the work to the user.
Forms, Images, Links, Text and Hypermedia interfaces let you treat the system you're handling like a web page. These are already all around us, in web pages, some authoring tools, etc. Rather than worrying about menus full of cryptic commands and window after window that you have to cycle through, imagine navigating the OS or filesystem as if it were a web site, perhaps with a WYSIWYG text editor so people can once again "turn it on and write."
The majority of users have a hard time cycling windows, understanding the difference between closing an application and quitting it, etc. They also tend to only want web, email and word processing. Games and specialty applications can come later, but you won't see them running in a window floating around above the FILTH much.
Slashdot Mirror
The Legend of 1900 was made by the same dude who made Cinema Paradisio. It was his first english language film.
:)
The thing costed $9 million to make, looked absolutely magical, and is VERY rentable on DVD, however it only ever made $250k in the box office.
Tim Roth stars across Pruitt Taylor Vince, probably the best actor in the world, too
The Legend of 1900 is a fable about a man who was born, and lived his entire life on a steam ship. Unfortunately, it came out in 1998, and the world was already getting sick of Titanic.
Yeah, I'm a canuck too, but you missed a valuable point in your list:
4. The Yanks keep accusing us of providing an easy way-in to their country for terrorists and undesirables.
Like, my God, when are they going to notice/remember that EVERY SINGLE ACT OF TERRORISM on the US has come from within their own borders? Remember Tim McVeigh? He was a Yank. Remember the crazy hijackers from November the Ninth 2001? They were living for quite some time in the States, if not full-blown Yanks themselves.
And here's another point you missed:
5. Yanks' economic domination of all of their neighbours and big trading partners.
There's something very upsetting about having to well oil for the Yanks up here, then sell it to the States, then buy back processed oil products from the States again. Our fresh water is not our own, our trees and minerals aren't ours. I'd be a lot less upset at our neighbours to the south if they weren't so freaking colonial.
Eventually, I hope, countries with some economic power over the States band together and say "fsck you, America!" and stop making losing trades with them, in spite of all the economic treaties we've signed.
The Transhab module back in the day was toted in a simmilar way. For those that don't remember the hype, TransHab was going to be a huge, house-sized inflatable living and study area to be added to the International Space Station. It or something exactly like it would have been used on future lunar or Mars missions, and it would become a piece of commodity hardware.
The F1 booster, the first SSTO launch vehicle, was scrapped too after it was made into commodity hardware to launch lunar modules into orbit for testing and deployment.
Now NASA is showing off a new piece of commodity hardware: A drilling robot that could be loaded onto two very different missions. From an engineering perspective, such a reliable piece of equipment would make sense and be considered a useful and productive way to spend taxpayers' money, right?
That's right. It'll make sense. The more sense it makes, the less likely it is that NASA will keep using it.
Actually, it looks kinda like the Canuck series StarHunter, only the guy who plays Dante Montana could be so much better casted as Brian from Queer as Folk...
:)
In fact, the whole show has characters who haven't quite slipped into their roles yet, who really remind me of ones from other shows. We have the Captain, who is a clone of Brian Kinney, the first officer, who is exactly like the black brit girl from StarHunter, the quirky younger engineer, also from StarHunter (actually, she's practically a clone), etc.
On the other hand, scriptwriters know to generate their movies from patterns and formulae, so duplication of a pattern or two that worked in other shows (including Buffy, for example) is to be expected. Otherwise they wouldn't be billing the show as "From the makers of Buffy the Vampire Slayer," etc.
I personally like the show. The CG is almost as good as that in Farscape.
Computers make it a lot easier to create perfect replicas of any information that you have deemed important. Even if we lose hundred-year-old spam lists, or the more obscure bits of knowledge Jenny from Tunguska has about her pet dog Fluffy (or even most of geocities, for that matter) we will retain anything useful from this era simply because people will keep downloading it and putting it up for others to download.
The peer-to-peer file sharing systems out there are like a public-access ftp server, or a wiki, or any of the hundreds of different ways that information will stay alive when people care to keep it. With a hundred million users all trying to collect as much interesting information as possible, you end up with a reasonable, thorough data filter to make backups for every important piece of classical knowledge that you'll need a few decades from now.
Simple. Get a mac and run Marathon. This was the Mac Quake-equivalent that came out back when PCs could barely manage with Wolfenstein. If you had three screens, you could put them around your head and have the lefthand one for everyting to your left, the righthand one for your right, and the forward one for your front.
Even better, from the data points we've gathered so far, sentients are able to use tools to adapt their local environments to a state of total comfort. Hell, we have demonstrated the ability to survive in a vacuum, on the bottom of the ocean and on top of the antarctic glacier.
Even if the Milky Way as a whole is inhospitable for microbes, plants and animals, sentient beings seem able to adapt any hostile environment and thrive in it, so even rare earths mean the possibility of life everywhere.
Worst case, the population density is a lot lower than in Star Trek or Star Wars. Big deal. That means more real estate for us humans, and fewer non-extremovores trying to colonize Earth.
I just wish we'd advance our space program a bit faster and set up Von Newmann probes or a permanent offworld base, so our eggs aren't all in one basket.
IANAL, but... This case could provide a legal precedent for any content, online or on paper, that can be read extra-jurisdictionally.
This generation of judges might treat computers as if they're magical and a special case to the death, but in a few hundred years, when these ones have all died off, we'll end up with case law that will restrict the behavior of smarter judges, who get that print is print, wherever it occurs.
It really is too bad that child genii like RMS, Wolfram and Hawking are so rare in modern society. They do great works in their lifetimes that are viewed as incredible successes for science or society, and create so much value people get excited whenever they speak.
Sadly, we have an education system that works *against* the production of such people. To "create" a child prodigy you need to have them interact primarily with adults, given the freedom to learn and study on their own, with only occasional encouragement, and to keep them primarily at home, away from other kids. Play dates are okay, but daycare keeps them from developing at their own pace.
If we switched to a different state-sponsored style of education, the entire world would benefit, save for the tall, proud, rich few who have a vested interest in the status quo. Prodigies, when they make big changes, destabilize things, and make the world brighter, clearer or more amazing for the rest of us.
I thought the reason we were heading over to mars was to search for water. If we find water, we colonize and REALLY infect the red planet.
Why is it that tree-huggers think life on earth to be so very precious as long as it stays inside our atmosphere? The global ecosystem has adapted itself to foreign asteroids impacting it, so a few new species of microbes probably won't hurt it at all. Plus, on the disease side of things, these Martian microbes will not be drug resistant, once we study them and figure out what drug to use.
Infesting the Martian ecosystem with terrestrial life has about as bad a cost-benefit ratio as trashing the Lunar ecosystem with terrestrial industry. It'll happen anyway, and there's just not enough of it to worry about.
George Lucas... he's the guy who wrote that Foundation parody, right?
When you are growing plants, you need to have nitrogen all around in the soil and air or not much will get produced. Where are we going to be getting this vital chemical for life on other planets? Importing huge tanks of nitrogen from Earth limits the size of our hermetic domes, and greatly increases maintenance costs.
Is there enough nitrogen in the Martian atmosphere or soil, or will we have to import it?
are hopefully using the Internet to look at porn.
Being a computer geek is an act of terrorism, so you can't go looking for security notices. Working on Open Source is Unamerican, so you can't be off browsing CVS trees. Listening to Indy Artist X's music before buying tickets to their concert is Piracy, so you can't download MP3's either.
Looking at smut is about the only moral use of the Internet, according to the media.
Nor are FPGAs. Transputers and other self-modifying pieces of computing equipment are pretty nifty boxen, but until these stories end with descriptions of tools that indicate to scientists exactly *how* their toys are doing these amazing feats, they will not be useful for general consumption.
For example, if the transputer this guy was using generated FPGAs, which were then automatically translated into some forth dialect, then his new processors could be refactored into other, more von Neuman like equipment more easily.
A few months ago when I was first designing my stockbot, I faced simmilar problems trying to work with neural networks and other correlation engines. The process time was slow, and the strategies they used were not easily portable. In the end I went with a stack-based language and randomly generated code that examines historical prices. It has worked out a LOT better in the long run.
I agree!
People *shouldn't* be given punishments as nasty as violent offenders for crimes like embezzlement, robbing banks and companies, etc. Theft is one thing, murder, rape and assault are another. Sure, it pisses some people off, but nobody dies, and they should act like its just another nuisance, not some act of terrorism!
The company I used to work for was dealing with a lot of Motorola smart card technology, and implementation schemes for it. One thing I don't get about smartcard/chip/cash technology is: Why bother with writable memory on-chip? It sure is useful if you're individualizing peoples' ID cards at a convention, but otherwise there's no point to it.
If someone is tech-savvy enough to hack the on-chip filesystem and change the path that piece of currency followed, then it wouldn't make a lick of difference where the cash has been. If they're tracking it at airports, train stations, or even every doorway, then a centralized database can handle the data mining without worrying about someone changing the non-static ID tags.
Although, increasing the price of currency production with useless features is pretty helpful if you plan on printing huge quantities of it... so watch out.
Contrary to popular belief, _nobody_ dies when someone releases a worm. Sure, the Internet gets slowed down, a headache is made for all kinds of computer people, but outside of the Internet, nobody dies. Production doesn't stop in our factories, our banks and credit cards keep making debt for people, the hospitals don't keel over.
The world is just not that dependant on the Internet, and never will be. Worms are definitely annoying, but they aren't hurting anyone physically, ever.
These manufactured piracy figures would be even remotely useful if they included demographics for each group of software pirates. If the majority of that 25% were, say, Mercedes Benz driving, diamond-clad rich folk who light cigars with hundred dollar bills, then we would be worried.
At present, these buckaneers seem to mostly be low-income students and others who have a compulsion to use the latest and greatest software, without the funding to back it up. Rather than paying bazillions of dollars towards enforcement and purchasing new laws, software companies could stand to make a huge tax write-off if they called this willful taking of their software a Charitable Donation.
Big software companies practically print their own money giving out these wares as name brand commercial products, and they enjoy insane profit margins once the development costs get paid off. Since profit==taxes, they should try to encourage software piracy, pull a figure out of their ass equivalent to their taxable income, and then end up paying a few dollars, rather than a few hundred million.
(did I mention, IANAL and IANAA?)
Even the transistors used to draw Mickey Mouse on the die? What are all those transistors used for? Is there supposed to be some one-to-n correlation between "transistor" and "computing element" in Intel marketing?
>"Consumers don't want to figure out hardware or software.
>They're so jaded by how hard it is to set up a computer that
>anything that smells like it scares them to death," said Rob
>Enderle, analyst with the Giga Information Group.
In a related story, the US Government has started issuing grants to researchers looking to genetically modify the housecat. "Children no longer wish to clean up their pets' litter boxes. Anything resembling cat poop scares them to death, so we must tailor the cat to suit their needs." The funding for the research grant was gathered by closing down a number of pet care education programmes.
That's getting pretty close to G4 level! Just another 5 to go!
How come a processor that's about half the speed uses twice the power, at best? 65 watts for an intel P4 chip is insanity.
If Lindows stops being able to run i386 ELF executables, then we have a problem. In the best of all worlds, Linux could have a compatibility module for Java bytecode, 68000 and PPC Mac apps, Windows, ELF, and all the other major platforms out there, just so people have no excuse when using the other, less fun operating systems.
>Let me rephrase the question for any who missed it: "Suppose you discover
>that P=NP. What is the right thing to do?" Do I cover it up, or do I release?
>What if I proved that P=NP, but I don't know of an algorithm to actually
>convert any known problem? Or, what if I did know the algorithm and the
>proof, and I believed that the algorithm couldn't be reconstructed from the
>proof -- should I release the proof?
The question of whether or not such a world-altering technology would "make it into the wrong hands" is easy to avoid if you get this world-altering technology into *everyone's* hands, all at once.
For example, if you showed someone 50 years ago a PC from nowadays, they'd be like "Oh my god I could take over the world with this thing!" and possibly make a huge fortune. If, however, you gave one computer to every one of the billion people living back then, and showed them exactly how to manufacture more, they'd be like, "Oh, a new, faster, cheaper computer. So what?"
So, if you ever find that P=NP, spam EVERYONE with the solution. That way the "wrong hands" and the "right hands" think its a pretty commonplace thing.
>In a typical capiltalist world, businesses are
>kept in check by the market and the government,
>and can't become monopolies. How do you
>believe Microsoft surpassed thse checks?
The Software Industry is like the Entertainment Industry. They produce non-tangible items on media that costs next to nothing, and distribute them at an enourmous markup. Any industry that prints money like this tends to be complained about for being corrupt, and those complaints are usually well founded.
My big question is: Rather than giving Microsoft and other big media companies the ability to rake in enormous profits through insane markups on their product, would it be possible to legislate away the sale of OSes for more than their distribution is worth, and instead focus on the support side of things?
While it wouldn't un-proprietary-ize their file formats, another big and important move, it might help to level the playing field a bit for other operating system companies, and companies who can give better customer support, for cheaper.
The trend in home computing for the past ten years has been and will continue to be away from the WIMP interface and towards the FILTH interface.
The desktop metaphor of Windows, Icons, Menus and Programs was nice for quite some time, and does have some advantages over the console (sometimes,) but it still left too much of the work to the user.
Forms, Images, Links, Text and Hypermedia interfaces let you treat the system you're handling like a web page. These are already all around us, in web pages, some authoring tools, etc. Rather than worrying about menus full of cryptic commands and window after window that you have to cycle through, imagine navigating the OS or filesystem as if it were a web site, perhaps with a WYSIWYG text editor so people can once again "turn it on and write."
The majority of users have a hard time cycling windows, understanding the difference between closing an application and quitting it, etc. They also tend to only want web, email and word processing. Games and specialty applications can come later, but you won't see them running in a window floating around above the FILTH much.