Are you kidding? TOS is still used through-out the computing industry. In fact its normally pretty big news when people make TOS modifications as they are behind some of the biggest pieces of software out there in the world.
What people don't know is that the team behind TOS shifted its emphasis towards specialising in very hard to understand and complicated programmes that were designed to confuse those who read them, like Perl but with longer words. This new coding approach was then adopted by Lawyers everywhere which is why everyone now clearly states they have a "TOS" for their website/software/whatever.
Over beer in 1993 an Atari developer was asked by someone what TOS stood for and jokingly said "Terms of Service". This name stuck, particularly with the lawyers and hence TOS now dominates as the underlying operating system for legal documents.
What most people don't realise is that you can run "Chess Master 2000" on the Supreme Court.
One thing you can always remain impressed by Microsoft is how they manage to spin something that everyone has been doing for 20 years and talk about it as a trend.
SMEs are using Rackspace and the like, people are shifting stuff to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's own strategy is about Azure and the cloud with virtualisation as "normal". In other words what Microsoft are doing here is well behind what they are talking about in the market as being normal.
But they've still managed to spin a press release out of shifting a bunch of servers into a Data Centre in the sort of move that wouldn't have got any press coverage 10 years ago. Brilliantly however they've added a "green" angle to it all thus turning what looks like a move they should have done ages ago into something worthy of comment.
Genius
You have to admire a press release in 2009 that can make shifting to a DC sound like a revolution.
"We don't understand the hardware, we don't understand the software... but we can SEE the flashing lights"
This has led to a whole load of crap IT dedicated to neither hard-core hardware or to hard-core software, its the land of the PHB and its the land of the powerpoint. What surprises me about clouds however is that its often the hard-core folks who are scared of the cloud, they bitch about security and latency but really its because they fear it will make them less important.
It doesn't.
What clouds do is hugely commoditise infrastructure and (in the case of SaaS) those massive package implementations that customise to death a package that would have worked much better without all that consultancy "help".
The people who should fear clouds are the ones who lived off customising packages that didn't need it and who revel in a world of powerpoints and meetings because what SaaS and clouds do is shift the buying of crap boring IT into the hands of the business and then leave the business with the real questions of how to deliver the stuff that actually matters... the hard-core software and genuinely high performing infrastructure.
So don't think of clouds and SaaS as a threat... think of them as kicking the PHB and his expensive package customising consultants in the nuts.
16 sounds like a ridiculously high number for a desktop but is it?
Already we have 4 core processes which have "soft" additional threads (Intel's HT for instance) and some people already have dual CPU desktop machines meaning they are already at the 16 CPU limit.
Roll on 12-18 months and we'll be seeing 8 core CPUs with 8 soft-cores as coming in on top end desktops. Roll forwards 3 years and you'll be seeing 32 core CPUs with 32 soft-cores which is where the scheduler breaks down.
So the problem here is that this is a brilliant optimisation for today and for pieces like the netbook market but won't be good for the desktop market long term.
With Linux looking to be strong in the netbook market however it does say that having a more efficient scheduler for that market would be a better idea than just optimising everything for the server side.
Many moons ago when I was doing coding jobs I had a series of interviews that required me to code stuff to demonstrate what I knew. I was looking to move away from my current job into new areas and didn't know how they worked but they all seemed to ask the same thing
1) Code something 2) Take a coding test
What I learnt very quickly was that lots of people are really looking to hire people not quite as smart as they are. I knew this because I had three interviews where the following happened
Interview 1:
Set an "impossible" task to code (in C) an address book and calendar solution with a GUI (this is the mid-90s) in 6 hours. No internet connection and no reference books.
3 hours later I set off to find the interviewer in the pub.
Interview 2:
Set a series of questions around "write the most effective code to do X".
There were 10 questions and I answered them in 10 different programming languages (Ada, C, Prolog, C++, Eiffel, 68k assembler, LISP, SQL, COBOL, Fortran) and the chap interviewing me didn't have a clue if I was right or wrong.
Interview 3:
They had a major bug in a current release, my job was to find the bug and explain why it happened. I knew free work when I saw it. It was a big C programme and it took me 4 hours to find the bug (pointer referencing problem). I wandered into the office of the person setting the "test" and said...
"How much to tell you the answer"
I didn't go for any of these. What I went for, and what I have done since, is go for the company that set me an abstract test that asked me to design a system which had a number of constraints. They didn't want code, just to see the conceptual model that I would create. When I joined I asked why they did it this way and the answer was enlightening....
"Because we want to hire smarter people than we are. If you talk code then its just about optimising, but if you talk about the abstract then its about thinking. We want people who give us answers we think are wrong and then they explain why we are wrong."
The key point was to give people a limited time (15-30 minutes) to understand the problem and propose the solution. You want people who are agile and quick, not people who can sit on their arses for 6 hours doing a troll job.
If you want to hire people dumber than you, set complex long tests that "only you" know the answers to. If you want to hire smart thinking people set very short tests that challenge their abstract thinking.
This is yet another example as to why the BBC is the finest broadcasting and journalistic organisation on the planet (I've never worked for them, sold to them or have any other financial connection other than the license fee).
They actually investigated something created by an industry group and found it to be bollocks and then reported it. The BBC are arguably the most "socialist" organisation in the democratic world (funded by a tax on everyone for the benefit of everyone) and yet they still question and challenge everything.
The US seriously needs something that questions vested interests and rubbish statistics as much as the BBC. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are just comedians and FoxNews is just comedy.
Given a choice between the first amendment and the BBC, I'll take the BBC; its demonstrated more freedom of speech in a week than the US media has in a decade.
I can see the Today Programme interview with the PRS (UK RIAA) now
John Humphries (you have NOTHING like him in the US): So you want people kicked off the internet for downloading copyrighted material. Why?
PRS: Because copyright theft is simply theft and its illegal and people should be punished accordingly
JH: But the government says that broadband access is becoming an essential tool in modern society, aren't your punishments a bit draconian?
PRS: John, These people are stealing literally billions from artists, its a massive industry in the UK that makes a lot of money for this country and these people are ruining it
JH: So this is about the artists? Not the publishing companies?
PRS: Absolutely John, these downloaders are just stealing from artists and if this continues there will be no more artists
JH: If that is the case why do three of the most successful artists in this country's history oppose your plans?
PRS: Errrr
JH: I mean if it really was about the artists then surely these people would be all for it. Or is it just about publishing companies that can't be bothered to handle a changing world and just want to dig their heels in and get fat from the restrictive contracts and stifling processes that have got them into this mess?
PRS: Errrr
JH: Lets face it you don't care about the artists, you just care about the money and more importantly you care about making money without having to change the way you work. Lots of companies have led the way in legal digital music but the publishing companies have not been amongst them. Isn't this just about old fashioned companies who can't change moaning about new technology and asking the government to bail them out
You must surely recognise that you are on the wrong side of the debate.
The key question here is how will Microsoft Monetise this new games to make more money for XBox Live via the subscriptions that people take out for these games. They don't yet have the sophistication of Apple's App Store for content, subscriptions and upgrades so the choice is either allow more freedom (the Sony choice) or batten it down until you can develop, and enforce, something that ensures the money passes through your pockets.
Any global agenda behind which there is a "political will" is innately corrupt, bullshit, or something that they stand to benefit or gain personally from. Our politicians aren't trying to fix world hunger are they? No? But we care SO MUCH about a prediction that at our current use something which will kill off life on this planet in hundreds of thousands of years?
You sir are an idiot, a class A idiot. In an article that talked about the successful resolution to the Ozone problem as a result of joint political will you claim that anything from politics is always wrong.
Politics is about getting the leaders you vote for, and quite clearly I can guess who you'd vote for out of Bush (an idiot) and Obama (not an idiot).
To all those who decry Cap and Trade (or a Carbon Tax) and shout out either that
a) Climate Scientists don't know what they are talking about, neither does the UN, NASA, EU... FoxNews knows what it is talking about b) Even if true we can't do anything anyway.
Here is a case where a threat to the health of people on the planet as a result of pollutants was identified by Scientists who also identified the causes and then the political will was there to fix this global problem.
So seriously, these guys are batting 1.000 on both their predictions and their causes and have demonstrably been right in both.
But with Global Warming they are just shouting "Fire" in a theatre for their own nefarious ends to destroy the American Way of Life(tm)*?
* - "American Way of Life" is a registered trade mark of the Petroleum industry and cannot be used to describe any other action than the driving very large cars.
The phrase "spin on it" clearly means different things to different physicists but not having rotational symmetry sounds like more than just a big flaw it sounds like the sort of flaw that you really should try and fix before saying that you've just proved huge numbers of physicists wrong.
Its a mind-bending idea to model the universe in this way and personally I think it will fail because of H2G2
"Some people believe that if man understands the universe then it will be automatically replaced by one even more bizarre and inexplicable, others contend that this has already happened"
No they've just been found guilty for preventing other people's applications working EFFECTIVELY under Windows by not publishing the full APIs and thus giving themselves an unfair competitive advantage.
While the Russian(USSR) Space programme was certainly less sophisticated than the US one its also certainly true that the engineering efficiency of the Russian programme was based around long-life. This is why its a Soyuz capsule that works as the escape pod on the ISS and why the Russians have held the records around how long people stay in space.
Combining the electronic expertise of the US with the engineering expertise of the Russians sounds like an excellent thing to do. It also means that the US can learn from people who have experience of keeping individuals healthy in space for over a year which is what you will need to get to Mars and back.
The Best Space programme to Mars
Designed by Apple Engineered by the Russians Electronics by the Americans Rockets by the Germans Food by the French
The Worst Space programme to Mars
Designed by the US Senate Engineered by Chrysler Electronics by Alfa Romeo Rockets by North Korea Food by McDonalds
Mobile providers are almost all offering bundled broadband deals these days and of course you can get the mobile version is you want to move around more and don't mind coping with only a few GB of bandwidth.
Ha... I've just massively increased my life assurance as the dumb insurance company didn't know about this report so haven't upped the premiums at all.
Man in 500,000,000 years time my kids are going to be RICH!
They aren't saying we've "only" got 500,000 years they are saying that we've only got 500,000,000 years. Given that mankind in its present form have only been around for 100-50,000 years and that we've only had civilisations for around 10,000 years then even 500,000 years is a mind bogglingly staggering amount of time.
Sure we could do propulsion systems, space drives, kill ourselves directly, die from a meteor strike or new virus. What these people are saying is that in 500,000,000 years or more that the earth as it currently stands won't be a great place to live. This doesn't mean panic. It doesn't mean say "who are they to say we aren't going to have technology to fix this problem" its a piece of science that helps us understand more about our planet and solar system and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe.
Half a billion years ago was the Cambrian explosion when life really got going on this planet. So the odds on humans existing in our present form is pretty much zero given the amount of evolution that has happened in the previous 500 million years.
Clever technology is one thing, but half a billion years is another. Evolution works wonders on those sorts of timescales.
Now apart from the obvious point of "errr so we know where this is going" which just means its a directed rather than open-ended game this is really just like using the standard film adaptation approach and applying it to games.
Its not that it is really new, Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did something similar many moons ago. Playing on throw away lines to drive the puzzles (tea and no tea) in some cases but generally following the plot of the book.
Really not a new idea either in concept or application.
I just can't believe that they've blown our cover so soon, I thought that dragging America into end-less wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was a brilliant move (did you seriously think that BUSH came up with the idea?) and the latest shift towards economic desolation via cyber attacks was extremely well thought out.
This isn't 2001 when bandwidth meant dial-up and your local network was running at 10Mbps so the internet connection was an issue. This is 2009 when your internet connection is running at 8Mbps+ and your network is a mixture of hardwired and 802.11n. I've seen people on TRAINS with a 3G connection playing WoW, sure they get the occasional lag, but mainly it appears to be fine for them and that is on a TRAIN.
My backup storage is at Amazon My email is at Google My home network is accessible via VPN where ever I am in the world My printer is on WiFi One laptop is always on a 3G connection One laptop is always on WiFi One desktop is always on WiFi One desktop is always hard-wired
I can flatten the network to include the in-laws if I need to do some tech support for them and they are 400+ miles away and I could do that from a laptop 5000+ miles away if I wanted to.
My point is that who the hell worries about a personal LAN environment for things like Gaming where most people have decent internet connections and really wouldn't have a problem either sharing the bandwidth (if they want to be social) or staying at home and going broad (if they want to be virtually sociable).
I really don't get why people in IT keep wanting things to be the same as they were at a specific point in time. I don't want to lug servers around for LAN parties, I don't want to have a dial-up connection to the internet and I really don't give a shit if games developers assume I have an internet connection for a multi-player game.
People will probably bleat about "piracy" and that this just "sucks" so here is and answer... if you want to do LAN parties and want to pirate software
Don't play games that require you to authenticate via a central server
See easy isn't it? Now stop bleating that people aren't making your piracy easy.
Okay so they've done some cool stuff with their 200 PS3s.... but does anyone else get the feeling that they are mainly just having massive LAN parties and they just doing some research whenever the Dean asks where the money has gone.
Oh hang on, they are pure mathematicians... this sort of stuff is their equivalent of a LAN party.
You get 25GB of storage with the corporate GMail account... I'm at the rather high level of email by volume (PPTs, Visio, random people sending me pointless Mega-Zips) but 2.5GB a year doesn't sound too high.
The reason you have, and I had, all of those PST files is that one PST file can't be over 2GB and the search engines seem to prefer multiple small files anyway. Switching it all into a 25GB GMail account stops that problem and stops the "oh look time to create a new PST file".
For those of us who actually search back through time in emails its a mega boon, especially as you don't get the occasional "Oh sorry, we've just realised that your PST file is trashed for no apparent reason.... and we trashed it about 2 years ago but this is the first time you've accessed it since then so all the backups are also trash."
Slashdot Mirror
You used a rake? What a lightweight.
Rakes are hard and pointy. Real Men(tm) use the leaf blower with a pack of bendy balloons and aim to beat the game using an inflatable giraffe.
Are you kidding? TOS is still used through-out the computing industry. In fact its normally pretty big news when people make TOS modifications as they are behind some of the biggest pieces of software out there in the world.
What people don't know is that the team behind TOS shifted its emphasis towards specialising in very hard to understand and complicated programmes that were designed to confuse those who read them, like Perl but with longer words. This new coding approach was then adopted by Lawyers everywhere which is why everyone now clearly states they have a "TOS" for their website/software/whatever.
Over beer in 1993 an Atari developer was asked by someone what TOS stood for and jokingly said "Terms of Service". This name stuck, particularly with the lawyers and hence TOS now dominates as the underlying operating system for legal documents.
What most people don't realise is that you can run "Chess Master 2000" on the Supreme Court.
One thing you can always remain impressed by Microsoft is how they manage to spin something that everyone has been doing for 20 years and talk about it as a trend.
SMEs are using Rackspace and the like, people are shifting stuff to Amazon Web Services and Microsoft's own strategy is about Azure and the cloud with virtualisation as "normal". In other words what Microsoft are doing here is well behind what they are talking about in the market as being normal.
But they've still managed to spin a press release out of shifting a bunch of servers into a Data Centre in the sort of move that wouldn't have got any press coverage 10 years ago. Brilliantly however they've added a "green" angle to it all thus turning what looks like a move they should have done ages ago into something worthy of comment.
Genius
You have to admire a press release in 2009 that can make shifting to a DC sound like a revolution.
There is a phrase about IT
"We don't understand the hardware, we don't understand the software... but we can SEE the flashing lights"
This has led to a whole load of crap IT dedicated to neither hard-core hardware or to hard-core software, its the land of the PHB and its the land of the powerpoint. What surprises me about clouds however is that its often the hard-core folks who are scared of the cloud, they bitch about security and latency but really its because they fear it will make them less important.
It doesn't.
What clouds do is hugely commoditise infrastructure and (in the case of SaaS) those massive package implementations that customise to death a package that would have worked much better without all that consultancy "help".
The people who should fear clouds are the ones who lived off customising packages that didn't need it and who revel in a world of powerpoints and meetings because what SaaS and clouds do is shift the buying of crap boring IT into the hands of the business and then leave the business with the real questions of how to deliver the stuff that actually matters... the hard-core software and genuinely high performing infrastructure.
So don't think of clouds and SaaS as a threat... think of them as kicking the PHB and his expensive package customising consultants in the nuts.
16 sounds like a ridiculously high number for a desktop but is it?
Already we have 4 core processes which have "soft" additional threads (Intel's HT for instance) and some people already have dual CPU desktop machines meaning they are already at the 16 CPU limit.
Roll on 12-18 months and we'll be seeing 8 core CPUs with 8 soft-cores as coming in on top end desktops. Roll forwards 3 years and you'll be seeing 32 core CPUs with 32 soft-cores which is where the scheduler breaks down.
So the problem here is that this is a brilliant optimisation for today and for pieces like the netbook market but won't be good for the desktop market long term.
With Linux looking to be strong in the netbook market however it does say that having a more efficient scheduler for that market would be a better idea than just optimising everything for the server side.
Many moons ago when I was doing coding jobs I had a series of interviews that required me to code stuff to demonstrate what I knew. I was looking to move away from my current job into new areas and didn't know how they worked but they all seemed to ask the same thing
1) Code something
2) Take a coding test
What I learnt very quickly was that lots of people are really looking to hire people not quite as smart as they are. I knew this because I had three interviews where the following happened
Interview 1:
Set an "impossible" task to code (in C) an address book and calendar solution with a GUI (this is the mid-90s) in 6 hours. No internet connection and no reference books.
3 hours later I set off to find the interviewer in the pub.
Interview 2:
Set a series of questions around "write the most effective code to do X".
There were 10 questions and I answered them in 10 different programming languages (Ada, C, Prolog, C++, Eiffel, 68k assembler, LISP, SQL, COBOL, Fortran) and the chap interviewing me didn't have a clue if I was right or wrong.
Interview 3:
They had a major bug in a current release, my job was to find the bug and explain why it happened. I knew free work when I saw it. It was a big C programme and it took me 4 hours to find the bug (pointer referencing problem). I wandered into the office of the person setting the "test" and said...
"How much to tell you the answer"
I didn't go for any of these. What I went for, and what I have done since, is go for the company that set me an abstract test that asked me to design a system which had a number of constraints. They didn't want code, just to see the conceptual model that I would create. When I joined I asked why they did it this way and the answer was enlightening....
"Because we want to hire smarter people than we are. If you talk code then its just about optimising, but if you talk about the abstract then its about thinking. We want people who give us answers we think are wrong and then they explain why we are wrong."
The key point was to give people a limited time (15-30 minutes) to understand the problem and propose the solution. You want people who are agile and quick, not people who can sit on their arses for 6 hours doing a troll job.
If you want to hire people dumber than you, set complex long tests that "only you" know the answers to. If you want to hire smart thinking people set very short tests that challenge their abstract thinking.
This is yet another example as to why the BBC is the finest broadcasting and journalistic organisation on the planet (I've never worked for them, sold to them or have any other financial connection other than the license fee).
They actually investigated something created by an industry group and found it to be bollocks and then reported it. The BBC are arguably the most "socialist" organisation in the democratic world (funded by a tax on everyone for the benefit of everyone) and yet they still question and challenge everything.
The US seriously needs something that questions vested interests and rubbish statistics as much as the BBC. Jon Stewart and Bill Maher are just comedians and FoxNews is just comedy.
Given a choice between the first amendment and the BBC, I'll take the BBC; its demonstrated more freedom of speech in a week than the US media has in a decade.
I can see the Today Programme interview with the PRS (UK RIAA) now
John Humphries (you have NOTHING like him in the US): So you want people kicked off the internet for downloading copyrighted material. Why?
PRS: Because copyright theft is simply theft and its illegal and people should be punished accordingly
JH: But the government says that broadband access is becoming an essential tool in modern society, aren't your punishments a bit draconian?
PRS: John, These people are stealing literally billions from artists, its a massive industry in the UK that makes a lot of money for this country and these people are ruining it
JH: So this is about the artists? Not the publishing companies?
PRS: Absolutely John, these downloaders are just stealing from artists and if this continues there will be no more artists
JH: If that is the case why do three of the most successful artists in this country's history oppose your plans?
PRS: Errrr
JH: I mean if it really was about the artists then surely these people would be all for it. Or is it just about publishing companies that can't be bothered to handle a changing world and just want to dig their heels in and get fat from the restrictive contracts and stifling processes that have got them into this mess?
PRS: Errrr
JH: Lets face it you don't care about the artists, you just care about the money and more importantly you care about making money without having to change the way you work. Lots of companies have led the way in legal digital music but the publishing companies have not been amongst them. Isn't this just about old fashioned companies who can't change moaning about new technology and asking the government to bail them out
PRS: Errrr
JH: And now for the weather
You must surely recognise that you are on the wrong side of the debate.
The key question here is how will Microsoft Monetise this new games to make more money for XBox Live via the subscriptions that people take out for these games. They don't yet have the sophistication of Apple's App Store for content, subscriptions and upgrades so the choice is either allow more freedom (the Sony choice) or batten it down until you can develop, and enforce, something that ensures the money passes through your pockets.
Lets wait and see when he actually does something that we wouldn't expect from Bush.
A Coherent Sentence ? Check
Opposition to Torture ? Check
An Educated and Reasoned Debate over "if you aren't with us you are against us"? Check
Oh and most of all....
Not completely screwing up relationships with China in an act of stupid bravado Check
If you don't remember the last one, its the spy plane incident from before Sept 11th when Bush clearly staked his colours of idiocracy.
Any global agenda behind which there is a "political will" is innately corrupt, bullshit, or something that they stand to benefit or gain personally from. Our politicians aren't trying to fix world hunger are they? No? But we care SO MUCH about a prediction that at our current use something which will kill off life on this planet in hundreds of thousands of years?
You sir are an idiot, a class A idiot. In an article that talked about the successful resolution to the Ozone problem as a result of joint political will you claim that anything from politics is always wrong.
Politics is about getting the leaders you vote for, and quite clearly I can guess who you'd vote for out of Bush (an idiot) and Obama (not an idiot).
To all those who decry Cap and Trade (or a Carbon Tax) and shout out either that
a) Climate Scientists don't know what they are talking about, neither does the UN, NASA, EU... FoxNews knows what it is talking about
b) Even if true we can't do anything anyway.
Here is a case where a threat to the health of people on the planet as a result of pollutants was identified by Scientists who also identified the causes and then the political will was there to fix this global problem.
So seriously, these guys are batting 1.000 on both their predictions and their causes and have demonstrably been right in both.
But with Global Warming they are just shouting "Fire" in a theatre for their own nefarious ends to destroy the American Way of Life(tm)*?
* - "American Way of Life" is a registered trade mark of the Petroleum industry and cannot be used to describe any other action than the driving very large cars.
The phrase "spin on it" clearly means different things to different physicists but not having rotational symmetry sounds like more than just a big flaw it sounds like the sort of flaw that you really should try and fix before saying that you've just proved huge numbers of physicists wrong.
Its a mind-bending idea to model the universe in this way and personally I think it will fail because of H2G2
"Some people believe that if man understands the universe then it will be automatically replaced by one even more bizarre and inexplicable, others contend that this has already happened"
No they've just been found guilty for preventing other people's applications working EFFECTIVELY under Windows by not publishing the full APIs and thus giving themselves an unfair competitive advantage.
Different approach with the same intent.
While the Russian(USSR) Space programme was certainly less sophisticated than the US one its also certainly true that the engineering efficiency of the Russian programme was based around long-life. This is why its a Soyuz capsule that works as the escape pod on the ISS and why the Russians have held the records around how long people stay in space.
Combining the electronic expertise of the US with the engineering expertise of the Russians sounds like an excellent thing to do. It also means that the US can learn from people who have experience of keeping individuals healthy in space for over a year which is what you will need to get to Mars and back.
The Best Space programme to Mars
Designed by Apple
Engineered by the Russians
Electronics by the Americans
Rockets by the Germans
Food by the French
The Worst Space programme to Mars
Designed by the US Senate
Engineered by Chrysler
Electronics by Alfa Romeo
Rockets by North Korea
Food by McDonalds
You have some mobile providers listed there - they're not broadband
Taking just Vodafone out of the list they do a full set of both mobile and home broadband in Ireland.
Mobile providers are almost all offering bundled broadband deals these days and of course you can get the mobile version is you want to move around more and don't mind coping with only a few GB of bandwidth.
Ha... I've just massively increased my life assurance as the dumb insurance company didn't know about this report so haven't upped the premiums at all.
Man in 500,000,000 years time my kids are going to be RICH!
They aren't saying we've "only" got 500,000 years they are saying that we've only got 500,000,000 years. Given that mankind in its present form have only been around for 100-50,000 years and that we've only had civilisations for around 10,000 years then even 500,000 years is a mind bogglingly staggering amount of time.
Sure we could do propulsion systems, space drives, kill ourselves directly, die from a meteor strike or new virus. What these people are saying is that in 500,000,000 years or more that the earth as it currently stands won't be a great place to live. This doesn't mean panic. It doesn't mean say "who are they to say we aren't going to have technology to fix this problem" its a piece of science that helps us understand more about our planet and solar system and the potential for life elsewhere in the universe.
Half a billion years ago was the Cambrian explosion when life really got going on this planet. So the odds on humans existing in our present form is pretty much zero given the amount of evolution that has happened in the previous 500 million years.
Clever technology is one thing, but half a billion years is another. Evolution works wonders on those sorts of timescales.
OK, where is the Great Atlantic Garbage patch?
New Jersey
Now becomes a positive phrase aimed at solving your problems
"Had a really tough problem today but I vented my spleen and just worked it out"
Now apart from the obvious point of "errr so we know where this is going" which just means its a directed rather than open-ended game this is really just like using the standard film adaptation approach and applying it to games.
Its not that it is really new, Infocom's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy did something similar many moons ago. Playing on throw away lines to drive the puzzles (tea and no tea) in some cases but generally following the plot of the book.
Really not a new idea either in concept or application.
And now we want our Empire back...
I just can't believe that they've blown our cover so soon, I thought that dragging America into end-less wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was a brilliant move (did you seriously think that BUSH came up with the idea?) and the latest shift towards economic desolation via cyber attacks was extremely well thought out.
And why can we do this.... Because WE HAVE A FLAG!
Okay back to plan B of being crap at sports we invent but quite polite about losing.
This isn't 2001 when bandwidth meant dial-up and your local network was running at 10Mbps so the internet connection was an issue. This is 2009 when your internet connection is running at 8Mbps+ and your network is a mixture of hardwired and 802.11n. I've seen people on TRAINS with a 3G connection playing WoW, sure they get the occasional lag, but mainly it appears to be fine for them and that is on a TRAIN.
My backup storage is at Amazon
My email is at Google
My home network is accessible via VPN where ever I am in the world
My printer is on WiFi
One laptop is always on a 3G connection
One laptop is always on WiFi
One desktop is always on WiFi
One desktop is always hard-wired
I can flatten the network to include the in-laws if I need to do some tech support for them and they are 400+ miles away and I could do that from a laptop 5000+ miles away if I wanted to.
My point is that who the hell worries about a personal LAN environment for things like Gaming where most people have decent internet connections and really wouldn't have a problem either sharing the bandwidth (if they want to be social) or staying at home and going broad (if they want to be virtually sociable).
I really don't get why people in IT keep wanting things to be the same as they were at a specific point in time. I don't want to lug servers around for LAN parties, I don't want to have a dial-up connection to the internet and I really don't give a shit if games developers assume I have an internet connection for a multi-player game.
People will probably bleat about "piracy" and that this just "sucks" so here is and answer... if you want to do LAN parties and want to pirate software
Don't play games that require you to authenticate via a central server
See easy isn't it? Now stop bleating that people aren't making your piracy easy.
Okay so they've done some cool stuff with their 200 PS3s.... but does anyone else get the feeling that they are mainly just having massive LAN parties and they just doing some research whenever the Dean asks where the money has gone.
Oh hang on, they are pure mathematicians... this sort of stuff is their equivalent of a LAN party.
You get 25GB of storage with the corporate GMail account... I'm at the rather high level of email by volume (PPTs, Visio, random people sending me pointless Mega-Zips) but 2.5GB a year doesn't sound too high.
The reason you have, and I had, all of those PST files is that one PST file can't be over 2GB and the search engines seem to prefer multiple small files anyway. Switching it all into a 25GB GMail account stops that problem and stops the "oh look time to create a new PST file".
For those of us who actually search back through time in emails its a mega boon, especially as you don't get the occasional "Oh sorry, we've just realised that your PST file is trashed for no apparent reason.... and we trashed it about 2 years ago but this is the first time you've accessed it since then so all the backups are also trash."
25GB of Email storage, its a wonderful thing.