I live in Minnesota, and I will say that in the spring and summer, especially when I'm outside, my mood is lifted considerably. There's nothing like summer in Minnesota; it's heavenly.
The winters can be brutal, though.
Usually, in cable markets, there's only one choice. Cable never competes, regardless of the provider -- from local to national.
Satellite radio is more similar to HBO, Showtime, et al. People pay extra money and go out of their way to get these premium stations. If there were just HBShowtime (or Shomeboxoffice), would it hurt many people?
Now, if XM+Sirius used their monopoly to crush any new satellite competitors, that would be illegal.
They certainly seem very neat! Thanks for the info!
Yeah, what interests me is that you apparently could turn an algorithm (like decoding/encoding video) into an FPGA device/arrangement, and have it be tons faster. I'm also intrigued by the parallelism -- I'm not sure how much comes built into an FPGA chip.
Hiya twistedsymphony,
I tried finding some way to PM you, but didn't find one, so I'll try here.
After reading this thread, I read a little about FPGAs, and they sounds really really cool. What uses have you heard of for them so far? Do you have any recommended reading?
How much would they be for me to buy? Is there an external peripheral you could get that houses one?
Thanks!
Re:Yay! Yet another use for powered USB ports.
on
USB Batteries
·
· Score: 1
At $24 each I would hate to lose or break them on a regular basis.
Why do anything? Why make art? Because you care. And what you said doesn't come from that place; it comes from a place where people give up and worship the status quo.
We're taking advice from Pitchfork now? In my experience, it is in Pitchfork's nature to think they hold the best opinions, and that nobody can live up to them. As soon as we have the "next Thompson," I bet Pitchfork would be skeptical and call him a sellout copycat. We'd also have a reporter who commits suicide, which I suspect is where the glamour really comes from. This is the answer?
Gonzo journalism inolves blending fiction with non-fiction. Maybe this worked for Hunter Thompson (or maybe it didn't; I never read anything by him), but I don't want other reporters not reporting the facts.
Pitchfork's objective is to hunt down the elusive "cool." Keep your "cool" out of my Journalism. Journalists have important things to report on; it's not all opinion pieces and record reviews for them.
I think it hasn't caught on because it's unnecessary. Mice never travel more than 3 feet from the computer they're bound to. And the idea that you have to replace batteries is unappealing.
I realize Myspace.com is a big website, but how is this news? If MySpace is down due to being bombed, then okay, I want to read about that. But otherwise, I don't really consider this newsworthy.
Until the consequence of lack of innovation in the IT field is millions of deaths I think you trivializing HIV/AIDS to try to make a point.
And you unwittingly trivialized the impact of greed in the free market:-)
Your attitude, intention, and outlook are really what matter. What fields you apply yourself to is just details. So if you have the intention of helping people and making their lives happier and better, that will naturally affect how you create software or how you search for cures.
Your actions come naturally from your understanding of the world and how you consciously want to treat people (including yourself). These actions are a wave: Once you act, the effects of the action are out of your control, and travel endlessly. And as I said, actions flow naturally from your intention, so it is imperative that you decide the kind of effect you want to have on the world and on other people, and you must feel it in your heart, and draw it from your life experience rather than dogma. And since your actions affect how other people feel about the world, and how they act, your actions - every single one - are important. This shouldn't create pressure for you, though, because at its core, life is about love, and expressing love is the most natural thing there is (even if it doesn't feel that way right now). Everything else is the result of confusion and misunderstanding, even though it feels so real. Think of it this way: Your life is important. Yeah, you! For yourself, and for everyone: let's make it a good one. After all, it's the only one we have.
It's arguable that religion, spirituality, and morality have never improved upon the Golden Rule: Treat others as you'd like to be treated. If you had AIDS, how would you feel knowing that laboratories competed against each other, delaying the production of a cure and irresponsibly putting your life in jeopardy?
User Interface design frequently looks to real-world metaphors because people already understand how to interact with common, everyday objects. You use real-world metaphors everyday, even in the interfaces for cutting-edge applications. For example, Firefox has tabs, and so have filing systems and Rolodexes, for years! When you see a tab, you have expectations about what will happen when you click on one, and you understand that when one tab looks different from other tabs, that means it's the active tab.
A classic book on user-interface design is The Design of Everday Things. I recommend that everyone check it out! It's not even targeted at computer application UIs. For example, there is a section of the book that points out the ineffective design of many doors -- especially "artistic" doors that look pretty but make no sense: Imagine a door that has a handle. When you see a handle, you pull. But then you realize that there is a Push sign on the door. Whose fault is this? It's not your fault!! Handles mean "Pull me!" The fact that you have to fall back to searching for a sign is a powerful indication of how completely and spectacularly the interface of the door has failed. And doors have been around for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years!
So, UI issues aren't always easy, and they come into play whenever you design anything that people have to use. And frequently, presenting users with creative representations of things they already understand how to use, results in tremendously powerful and deep interfaces that are easy to use and learn from day one.
Einstein suggests intelligence, and Jim Henson suggests creativity and caring. These are all suggestive images; they aren't to be taken literally. Apple used Gandhi to suggest enlightenment and peace, and along with Caesar Chavez, I certainly get the image of a company that wants to be seen to be "doing the right thing," perhaps regardless of what people think -- which is what is suggested by the slogan "Think different." To what extent Apple wants you to think different is what's at question here.
if the mysql people slack off with security, you can drop them in favour of postgres, with practically no interruption and minimal retooling.
This seems kind of wreckless to say: Can you really just assume that you'll be able to convert (e.g. export and import) your MySQL data into PostgreSQL? Maybe MySQL makes this guarantee (i.e. "MySQL is feature and data-type compliant with PostgreSQL, and data interoperability is guaranteed") - I don't know - but unless they do, I have worked as a programmer long enough to know that it is very hazardous to assume that something will be easy:-)
You know what really bothers me? The notion that some things need to be kept secret -- that, if I, a person not intrinsically different from any of the lying, frightened people in the Bush Administration, knew what they knew, I would simply freak out and ruin the fucking world. I'm fucking sick of our government doing whatever it fucking wants every single day of the god-damned week. Do I live in the United States? I don't even fucking know. I know I live somewhere, and on the news every day I see shit that makes me feel terrible inside. And then someone says that our president - our government, our military aggression - did it. What does it mean to have a country? What does it mean when leadership apparently means that someone wins the vote lottery, and they then get to do everything they've always personally wanted? Being the president shouldn't mean that you get the golden ticket into Willy Wonka's factory, where the walls are made of chocolate, and everyone who isn't like you is turned into an enemy. They should replace the White House with a fucking treehouse. There is no dignity, no service, no honor in that building. It's a bunch of people who fight with every single other god-damned person on the planet. There is no agreement, no consensus, no respect. And that's exactly what I see in this story: zero fucking respect for the ability for people to live their own lives, make their own decisions, and know what is good and right for themselves.
And the ironic thing is, the closer you look - the more introspection you do - the more difficult it is to say what is good for yourself. If you actually feel your upsetness and consider why you're upset about things, rather than immediately fighting any emotion you don't like (which is what most people do most of the time, I believe), you realize that what feels so real to you now is merely something you believe because someone pounded it into your head as a child. And every time you do this - every time you take a piece out of that armor you wear every day - you get a glimpse of what life is like when lived naturally. And that life is a life without fighting, yet without fear. It's a life where, usually, compassion simply means understanding and not interfering. You realize that the desire to control things is simply your childhood fear of abandonment and abuse, and that there is no way you can control anything. And that's infinitely okay, because you also realize that life, lived naturally, is love. Being the President changes none of this. He does bad things because he's screwed up. It's as simple as that. Just like any one of us, when he hurts people, he does it out of fear and misunderstanding. And just like any of us, he's doing the best he believes he can. But I don't want him in office. I want someone who understands what life is about.
Government should be about teamwork. And teamwork is never about figuring out what's "right." When you're in a team, you have to let go of everything you want. Just let it go. When the time comes, you will be able to suggest things to the group, who then will either endorse or question your suggestion. And you'll be able to have true creativity, because your mind will not be tied to any particular outcome. If your mind is tied to an outcome, you are not really a member of a team; you're just fighting. The output of a team is whatever the team can come up with that they think is the best job they could do to benefit everyone the solution is targeted at. The important thing is not the fidelity between the solution and your original fantasy. Anyone who has been in this situation knows the deep, heavy regret and aggression that precipitate from realizing this is what happened. No, what is most important in a team is the team itself. If the team can't be friends, then the team has failed. In this respect, the solution produced by the team doesn't matter -- and in a way, that's true. Because if you're angry in a team, then everything you experien
Well, with each platform you get what that platform offers. With OS X, you get Cocoa, and Interface Builder, and Xcode and whatnot, and for Windows, you get Win32 (which is no fun to program with), and if you want Microsoft's development environment, you have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars. And if you want to do WYSIWYG GUI editing with the official Microsoft product, I believe you have to build a.NET project, though maybe you can do it in MFC, though I get the impression that's not fun to do.
It seems like it would be really hard to re-implement the entire Win32 API. Not only would you have to replicate the sometimes-quirky behavior of each function call, you'd also have to implement all the backwards-compatible hacks that are built into Windows. How could Apple do that without Microsoft's help? It seems very hard. I mean, Apple would essentially be making their own WINE, and WINE isn't perfect. I'll repeat the bit about WINE for clarification's sake: there is no distinction between what WINE is, and what is suggested here. Both would be approaching the same problem in the same manner.
It seems like Apple would be better off doing some sort of "transparent virtualization" which would provide all of the Microsoft code running on a virtual machine. The code should all work, since it thinks it's running on a bare PC, with nothing between it and the hardware. This would actually provide for a stable Windows: Apple could make the hardware look identical, even when it isn't. That'd be a good tool to use to provide stability, when optimizing for performance isn't reliable.
Or, Apple could simply port (or rebuild!) Cocoa and its toolkits, for Windows:-) And who knows how much of it is already ported, now that iTunes runs on Windows? Pull out the BSD kernel, and what is OS X?
When I see stories like this, the first thing that occurs to me is that they're just trying to patch things up. There is overwhelming evidence that this position was created (or newly appointed) because the Bush Administration realizes that people continue to be concerned about this, and they simply want to seem like they care. If they actually cared, they wouldn't need to create this position. If they actually cared, they would get on with the actual work of securing and defending civil liberties and human rights, by doing things like: not torturing people; talk to the press; free information; not spying on people while hiding it and therefore lying about it; pressure China to stop threatening Taiwan and to stop taking over other countries and generally hegemonizing anything they can; have respect for the self-determination of the citizens of the world, and therefore not invade other countries; not putting the desire to control the oil of the Middle East over the rights of the citizens there, and the commitment to honesty with the American people; not thinking they know better what's good for the citizens of America than we can determine for ourselves; and, forcing your religion on the populous, and creating false and hateful issues like "the gay marriage debate" (which isn't a debate as much as it is a proclamation of manifest destiny), which takes advantage of and reinforces the intolerance of everyone involved, in order to divide people into warring factions so you can get votes.
For me to believe that the action of appointing this person to this post meant that the Bush Administration had changed its tune, I would have to believe that the Bush Administration had suddenly changed their whole mission to that of peace, discretion, prosperity, and well-being. And I don't believe that.
Time will tell if I'm right or wrong, but if yesterday's news of the resignation of the White House Press Secretary is part of this same plan to show America and the world that the Bush Administration is serious about being caring, then I'm inclined to be insulted -- because the job of Press Secretary is meaningless. All the Press Secretary has to do is tell the press what the rest of the Administration wants him or her to say. You could put anyone in that job. They aren't required to ab lib or create strategy, and I assume that if they did, they'd be fired.
The fluorescent light bulb is very old, with history reaching back to the late 19th century (along with the incandescent lamp / light bulb). And General Electric, Thomas Edison's company, bought the patent for the fluorescent light bulb in 1938.
If a company can say to its customers, "with our lights, you will pay [xx]% less in power and cooling costs, and by the way, our lights last longer and look more natural," do you think that knowledge will go away? I think it's in everyone's interest to continue to innovate, especially when that innovation reduces the need for power and natural resources -- hot topics today. And if the lights do look more natural than fluorescent, then people will be much happier in buildings. I know I hate the flickering oppressive light that comes from fluorescent bulbs.
Look at America Online: they make more money when people use their dial-up service, but do you think that they, even though they were the biggest name in internet access at one time, could have stopped broadband? In a free market economy, perhaps the lowest common denominator is greed, and in this case, it would work perfectly to bring us the technology regardless of who owns it. Companies buy up patents and technologies in order to sell them, all the time. And hopefully our laws against taking advantage of a monopoly would prevent a company from buying patents and sitting on them.
I think there is virtue in establishing a milestone and saying, "this is when we will release this program as a major revision." I don't think people are inclined to update a program daily just for minor changes. Major bugfixes, yes, perhaps, but I don't think people will feel inclined to update their copy of the program unless there are new features available, or their copy has become corrupted or contains bugs that bother them a lot.
They might not have changed engines simply to have the newest/prettiest/whatever engine; those changes might have just been patches to "catch up" the game since it was delayed so long due to other reasons. I doubt the game's development has taken so long simply because of an unreasonable desire to be using the latest game engine technology.
And let's not forget: though it seems to me to be a dirty little secret, I have to mention that Microsoft gave us XMLHttpRequest. Though I have to admit, I doubt I would use it if it required ActiveX.
Slashdot Mirror
MR FUSION!! http://bttf.wikia.com/wiki/Mr._Fusion
I live in Minnesota, and I will say that in the spring and summer, especially when I'm outside, my mood is lifted considerably. There's nothing like summer in Minnesota; it's heavenly. The winters can be brutal, though.
Cable TV is different than satellite radio.
Usually, in cable markets, there's only one choice. Cable never competes, regardless of the provider -- from local to national.
Satellite radio is more similar to HBO, Showtime, et al. People pay extra money and go out of their way to get these premium stations. If there were just HBShowtime (or Shomeboxoffice), would it hurt many people?
Now, if XM+Sirius used their monopoly to crush any new satellite competitors, that would be illegal.
They certainly seem very neat! Thanks for the info!
Yeah, what interests me is that you apparently could turn an algorithm (like decoding/encoding video) into an FPGA device/arrangement, and have it be tons faster. I'm also intrigued by the parallelism -- I'm not sure how much comes built into an FPGA chip.
Hiya twistedsymphony, I tried finding some way to PM you, but didn't find one, so I'll try here. After reading this thread, I read a little about FPGAs, and they sounds really really cool. What uses have you heard of for them so far? Do you have any recommended reading? How much would they be for me to buy? Is there an external peripheral you could get that houses one? Thanks!
Why do anything? Why make art? Because you care. And what you said doesn't come from that place; it comes from a place where people give up and worship the status quo.
Actually, olive oil is better than lube. It doesn't dry out at all. Don't use it with a condom, though: it eats latex!
We're taking advice from Pitchfork now? In my experience, it is in Pitchfork's nature to think they hold the best opinions, and that nobody can live up to them. As soon as we have the "next Thompson," I bet Pitchfork would be skeptical and call him a sellout copycat. We'd also have a reporter who commits suicide, which I suspect is where the glamour really comes from. This is the answer?
Gonzo journalism inolves blending fiction with non-fiction. Maybe this worked for Hunter Thompson (or maybe it didn't; I never read anything by him), but I don't want other reporters not reporting the facts.
Pitchfork's objective is to hunt down the elusive "cool." Keep your "cool" out of my Journalism. Journalists have important things to report on; it's not all opinion pieces and record reviews for them.
I think it hasn't caught on because it's unnecessary. Mice never travel more than 3 feet from the computer they're bound to. And the idea that you have to replace batteries is unappealing.
At least, that's how I feel about it.
I realize Myspace.com is a big website, but how is this news? If MySpace is down due to being bombed, then okay, I want to read about that. But otherwise, I don't really consider this newsworthy.
Your attitude, intention, and outlook are really what matter. What fields you apply yourself to is just details. So if you have the intention of helping people and making their lives happier and better, that will naturally affect how you create software or how you search for cures.
Your actions come naturally from your understanding of the world and how you consciously want to treat people (including yourself). These actions are a wave: Once you act, the effects of the action are out of your control, and travel endlessly. And as I said, actions flow naturally from your intention, so it is imperative that you decide the kind of effect you want to have on the world and on other people, and you must feel it in your heart, and draw it from your life experience rather than dogma. And since your actions affect how other people feel about the world, and how they act, your actions - every single one - are important. This shouldn't create pressure for you, though, because at its core, life is about love, and expressing love is the most natural thing there is (even if it doesn't feel that way right now). Everything else is the result of confusion and misunderstanding, even though it feels so real. Think of it this way: Your life is important. Yeah, you! For yourself, and for everyone: let's make it a good one. After all, it's the only one we have.
It's arguable that religion, spirituality, and morality have never improved upon the Golden Rule: Treat others as you'd like to be treated. If you had AIDS, how would you feel knowing that laboratories competed against each other, delaying the production of a cure and irresponsibly putting your life in jeopardy?
User Interface design frequently looks to real-world metaphors because people already understand how to interact with common, everyday objects. You use real-world metaphors everyday, even in the interfaces for cutting-edge applications. For example, Firefox has tabs, and so have filing systems and Rolodexes, for years! When you see a tab, you have expectations about what will happen when you click on one, and you understand that when one tab looks different from other tabs, that means it's the active tab.
A classic book on user-interface design is The Design of Everday Things. I recommend that everyone check it out! It's not even targeted at computer application UIs. For example, there is a section of the book that points out the ineffective design of many doors -- especially "artistic" doors that look pretty but make no sense: Imagine a door that has a handle. When you see a handle, you pull. But then you realize that there is a Push sign on the door. Whose fault is this? It's not your fault!! Handles mean "Pull me!" The fact that you have to fall back to searching for a sign is a powerful indication of how completely and spectacularly the interface of the door has failed. And doors have been around for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years!
So, UI issues aren't always easy, and they come into play whenever you design anything that people have to use. And frequently, presenting users with creative representations of things they already understand how to use, results in tremendously powerful and deep interfaces that are easy to use and learn from day one.
Einstein suggests intelligence, and Jim Henson suggests creativity and caring. These are all suggestive images; they aren't to be taken literally. Apple used Gandhi to suggest enlightenment and peace, and along with Caesar Chavez, I certainly get the image of a company that wants to be seen to be "doing the right thing," perhaps regardless of what people think -- which is what is suggested by the slogan "Think different." To what extent Apple wants you to think different is what's at question here.
Hey, I've worked at some crappity jobs where I only did about two hours of "actual" work per day. So this threshold is variable.
You know what really bothers me? The notion that some things need to be kept secret -- that, if I, a person not intrinsically different from any of the lying, frightened people in the Bush Administration, knew what they knew, I would simply freak out and ruin the fucking world. I'm fucking sick of our government doing whatever it fucking wants every single day of the god-damned week. Do I live in the United States? I don't even fucking know. I know I live somewhere, and on the news every day I see shit that makes me feel terrible inside. And then someone says that our president - our government, our military aggression - did it. What does it mean to have a country? What does it mean when leadership apparently means that someone wins the vote lottery, and they then get to do everything they've always personally wanted? Being the president shouldn't mean that you get the golden ticket into Willy Wonka's factory, where the walls are made of chocolate, and everyone who isn't like you is turned into an enemy. They should replace the White House with a fucking treehouse. There is no dignity, no service, no honor in that building. It's a bunch of people who fight with every single other god-damned person on the planet . There is no agreement, no consensus, no respect. And that's exactly what I see in this story: zero fucking respect for the ability for people to live their own lives, make their own decisions, and know what is good and right for themselves.
And the ironic thing is, the closer you look - the more introspection you do - the more difficult it is to say what is good for yourself. If you actually feel your upsetness and consider why you're upset about things, rather than immediately fighting any emotion you don't like (which is what most people do most of the time, I believe), you realize that what feels so real to you now is merely something you believe because someone pounded it into your head as a child. And every time you do this - every time you take a piece out of that armor you wear every day - you get a glimpse of what life is like when lived naturally. And that life is a life without fighting, yet without fear. It's a life where, usually, compassion simply means understanding and not interfering. You realize that the desire to control things is simply your childhood fear of abandonment and abuse, and that there is no way you can control anything. And that's infinitely okay, because you also realize that life, lived naturally, is love. Being the President changes none of this. He does bad things because he's screwed up. It's as simple as that. Just like any one of us, when he hurts people, he does it out of fear and misunderstanding. And just like any of us, he's doing the best he believes he can. But I don't want him in office. I want someone who understands what life is about.
Government should be about teamwork. And teamwork is never about figuring out what's "right." When you're in a team, you have to let go of everything you want. Just let it go. When the time comes, you will be able to suggest things to the group, who then will either endorse or question your suggestion. And you'll be able to have true creativity, because your mind will not be tied to any particular outcome. If your mind is tied to an outcome, you are not really a member of a team; you're just fighting. The output of a team is whatever the team can come up with that they think is the best job they could do to benefit everyone the solution is targeted at. The important thing is not the fidelity between the solution and your original fantasy. Anyone who has been in this situation knows the deep, heavy regret and aggression that precipitate from realizing this is what happened. No, what is most important in a team is the team itself. If the team can't be friends, then the team has failed. In this respect, the solution produced by the team doesn't matter -- and in a way, that's true. Because if you're angry in a team, then everything you experien
Well, with each platform you get what that platform offers. With OS X, you get Cocoa, and Interface Builder, and Xcode and whatnot, and for Windows, you get Win32 (which is no fun to program with), and if you want Microsoft's development environment, you have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars. And if you want to do WYSIWYG GUI editing with the official Microsoft product, I believe you have to build a .NET project, though maybe you can do it in MFC, though I get the impression that's not fun to do.
:-) And who knows how much of it is already ported, now that iTunes runs on Windows? Pull out the BSD kernel, and what is OS X?
It seems like it would be really hard to re-implement the entire Win32 API. Not only would you have to replicate the sometimes-quirky behavior of each function call, you'd also have to implement all the backwards-compatible hacks that are built into Windows. How could Apple do that without Microsoft's help? It seems very hard. I mean, Apple would essentially be making their own WINE, and WINE isn't perfect. I'll repeat the bit about WINE for clarification's sake: there is no distinction between what WINE is, and what is suggested here. Both would be approaching the same problem in the same manner.
It seems like Apple would be better off doing some sort of "transparent virtualization" which would provide all of the Microsoft code running on a virtual machine. The code should all work, since it thinks it's running on a bare PC, with nothing between it and the hardware. This would actually provide for a stable Windows: Apple could make the hardware look identical, even when it isn't. That'd be a good tool to use to provide stability, when optimizing for performance isn't reliable.
Or, Apple could simply port (or rebuild!) Cocoa and its toolkits, for Windows
When I see stories like this, the first thing that occurs to me is that they're just trying to patch things up. There is overwhelming evidence that this position was created (or newly appointed) because the Bush Administration realizes that people continue to be concerned about this, and they simply want to seem like they care. If they actually cared, they wouldn't need to create this position. If they actually cared, they would get on with the actual work of securing and defending civil liberties and human rights, by doing things like: not torturing people; talk to the press; free information; not spying on people while hiding it and therefore lying about it; pressure China to stop threatening Taiwan and to stop taking over other countries and generally hegemonizing anything they can; have respect for the self-determination of the citizens of the world, and therefore not invade other countries; not putting the desire to control the oil of the Middle East over the rights of the citizens there, and the commitment to honesty with the American people; not thinking they know better what's good for the citizens of America than we can determine for ourselves; and, forcing your religion on the populous, and creating false and hateful issues like "the gay marriage debate" (which isn't a debate as much as it is a proclamation of manifest destiny), which takes advantage of and reinforces the intolerance of everyone involved, in order to divide people into warring factions so you can get votes.
For me to believe that the action of appointing this person to this post meant that the Bush Administration had changed its tune, I would have to believe that the Bush Administration had suddenly changed their whole mission to that of peace, discretion, prosperity, and well-being. And I don't believe that.
Time will tell if I'm right or wrong, but if yesterday's news of the resignation of the White House Press Secretary is part of this same plan to show America and the world that the Bush Administration is serious about being caring, then I'm inclined to be insulted -- because the job of Press Secretary is meaningless. All the Press Secretary has to do is tell the press what the rest of the Administration wants him or her to say. You could put anyone in that job. They aren't required to ab lib or create strategy, and I assume that if they did, they'd be fired.
You'll notice he said "customer's fault", not "customers' fault". Singular, not plural :-) Though suspiciously, the customer's name is Marl DcDribe.
The fluorescent light bulb is very old, with history reaching back to the late 19th century (along with the incandescent lamp / light bulb). And General Electric, Thomas Edison's company, bought the patent for the fluorescent light bulb in 1938.
If a company can say to its customers, "with our lights, you will pay [xx]% less in power and cooling costs, and by the way, our lights last longer and look more natural," do you think that knowledge will go away? I think it's in everyone's interest to continue to innovate, especially when that innovation reduces the need for power and natural resources -- hot topics today. And if the lights do look more natural than fluorescent, then people will be much happier in buildings. I know I hate the flickering oppressive light that comes from fluorescent bulbs.
Look at America Online: they make more money when people use their dial-up service, but do you think that they, even though they were the biggest name in internet access at one time, could have stopped broadband? In a free market economy, perhaps the lowest common denominator is greed, and in this case, it would work perfectly to bring us the technology regardless of who owns it. Companies buy up patents and technologies in order to sell them, all the time. And hopefully our laws against taking advantage of a monopoly would prevent a company from buying patents and sitting on them.
I think there is virtue in establishing a milestone and saying, "this is when we will release this program as a major revision." I don't think people are inclined to update a program daily just for minor changes. Major bugfixes, yes, perhaps, but I don't think people will feel inclined to update their copy of the program unless there are new features available, or their copy has become corrupted or contains bugs that bother them a lot.
They might not have changed engines simply to have the newest/prettiest/whatever engine; those changes might have just been patches to "catch up" the game since it was delayed so long due to other reasons. I doubt the game's development has taken so long simply because of an unreasonable desire to be using the latest game engine technology.
This is insightful? It's a completely negative opinion. We have another modifier for that.
And let's not forget: though it seems to me to be a dirty little secret, I have to mention that Microsoft gave us XMLHttpRequest. Though I have to admit, I doubt I would use it if it required ActiveX.