I see a lot of people here misinterpreting the article and that phrase about the end of the desktop era.
The era of significant growth in desktop OS and applications is coming to a close. Most people already have the OS and applications they need, and most of the stuff that's been written is good enough. There isn't much room left to grow, and there isn't much untapped profit to be made, in the desktop space. After Vista ships and fixes the Windows security architecture and a few other niffty things, there really won't be anything compelling left to add to Windows.
Does that mean companies will stop making or incrementally improving their desktop offerings? Of course not. Does that mean you'll be forced to use a stupid web-based word processor and all of its limitations? Of course not. All it means is that the major software companies are now turning their primary attention and focus to other areas where there's more growth potential.
The interesting thing here is that the study only looked at reviews versus sales.
It said nothing about reviews (written by magazines, etc) versus consumer opinions (or user reviews). It also said nothing about consumer opinions versus sales.
In my experience, reviews written by reviewers generally align pretty well with what consumers think of the game, while sales have little to do with either. In short, sales seem to have little to do with how good a game actually is. Sales seem to correlate more with things like movie and cartoon and brand tie-ins to a game, distribution methods, price point, and other such factors. All of this is really no big surprise, since the game industry has always successfully relied on churning out such drivel and it has obviously worked pretty well for them most of the time.
A more interesting thing to study would be what percentage of sales are purchases made by people who know nothing about games and won't be playing the games themselves... such as parents and grandparents choosing games as gifts for kids, etc. I bet they make up more than 50% of sales.
Remember when the Atari era went bust and the bottom of the video games market completely dropped out? My theory is that it was because the industry stopped creating any good-quality games, having realized from experience that they could just produce well-branded crap and rely on all those gullible non-gamer sales. I think the problem is that when the market floods with crap, the gamers (who ultimately receive those games from the purchasers) completely lose interest in games and stop asking their parents to buy them more. So then the purchasers stop buying completely.
In other words, a sufficient minority of titles must continue to be of good quality for the industry to sustain itself, but once that sufficient minority is met, the rest can be crap and the industry can thrive off the crap. The industry then foolishly thinks all it needs to produce is the crap, which kills demand completely, which kills the whole industry.
Cut the middlemen of the car and energy companies and go right for the villains. I think that they should simply sue everyone with a car.
Your joking suggestion isn't far off, though.
The problem today is that things detrimental to the environment are often not detrimental to the pocketbook. Businesses pollute, drivers pollute, people don't recycle, etc, all because it costs them nothing (financially) to do it.
Al Gore's got it right: we need to shift the taxation system in this country so that earnings aren't taxed, but pollution and other harmful things are taxed instead. Tax the things you want to discourage, and don't tax the things you want to encourage. Pretty sensible. You just have to make sure to apply the tax to businesses and individuals alike.
I agree with what others have already said here (about "people must not be buying tracks off iTunes because they hate DRM" being a flawed conclusion), but I also have an angle of my own to add.
It's human nature to not care about something until you need it. Rights are unfortunately one of those things.
Most people have never even heard the term "DRM". Of those that have, only a minority know what it stands for and understand what rights it takes away. Those of us who hate DRM and everything it stands for are always depressed by how apathetic and uninformed most of the population seems to be.
But DRM is slowly starting to burn people -- ordinary people -- people who previously knew nothing about DRM and didn't care. People are finding out the hard way that when their PC dies, they can't copy the songs back to the PC off their iPod. They are finding out the hard way that they can't take that AAC song they bought on iTunes and convert it to a format that will import freely into other software or work with certain devices. As ordinary people increasingly run into these scenarios, they will learn about DRM the hard way. The good news is that they will also immediately dislike it and be pissed off about it.
Give it another 10-20 years, and I think what you'll see isn't a lack of DRM in the marketplace, but a huge amount of consumer awareness of it and hatred for it. That will set the stage well for things like changing the law, mass-scale piracy, or other methods of fighting back.
Companies will generally use any legal way possible to maximize profit. Since many laws still permit unethical tactics, there are far more legal tactics than ethical tactics available for a company to use.
If a company limits its tactics to the smaller set (ethical tactics), it will lose when competing against other companies that are only limiting their tactics to the larger set (legal tactics). Therefore no company will ever want to limit itself only to what is ethical. That's the nature of competition -- if you don't use every power at your disposal, you'll lose to someone who did.
And as we've seen before with companies like Enron, some companies don't even limit themselves to tactics that are legal.
Not all fixes pose the same risks or require the same amount of testing.
A patch for a DRM component surely involves much less code churn, risk, and testing than a change to a core OS component (such as network stack or IE) would require.
Furthermore, as the original post indicated, no end-users are going to care about this patch or badmouth it in the press if it doesn't perfectly close the hole. And partner businesses aren't going to abandon their deep investments in Microsoft's platform just b/c of one hole. This scenario actually presents less pressure on Microsoft to have to get the fix right compared to other scenarios, meaning they can afford to do less up-front testing.
* I know someone will want to reply to this post to say: This is Slashdot, and you're looking for fairness?!? HahaaHAhaAHA! I know this is Slashdot, and so I know better than to expect to see fair reporting around here. Still, there's no harm in trying to raise the bar a bit.
At some point someone will come up with a reputation system which will allow everything down to individuals to be rated.
Awesome! I want a system where I can look up a specific person by name and get back a number between 0 and 100 that tells me how good (in a general sense) that person is. And then everyone should be required by law to have their score stamped on their national ID and implanted RFID tag, and we should only let the best people drive or have children or be gainfully employed!
Excited new father at hospital calls his aging parents collect. Old dad picks up, hears, "will you accept a call from Mr. Hayitsbobweehhoddababyeetzaboy?". Old dad says "no". Old mom asks old dad, "Who was it?" Old dad says, "It was Bob. They had the baby. It's a boy!"
Anyways OP's analogy is flawed, when is in a OS project everyone has equal say?
You accidentally stumbled upon the key issue.
Open-source projects are not democracies, but meritocracies. Participants who contribute better results naturally arise as leaders and therefore enjoy playing a larger role in decisions. The things a participant needs to do to move up the chain are perfectly aligned with the results the project needs to deliver to succeed. You don't get leaders who are more interested in their success than in the project's success, because they are one and the same.
Businesses are not meritocracies. People get hired, promoted, and fired based largely on factors that have nothing to do with the results they've contributed. The things an employee needs to do to move up the chain are almost never aligned with the results the business needs to deliver to succeed. You get tons of middle-managers and even CEOs who are more interested in their own success than in the company's success. Not only do those definitions of success not align, but they almost always directly conflict. (See Enron)
This is why so many businesses ultimately fall apart. They increasingly spin their wheels (while increasing numbers of employees jockey competitively for position) while producing lackluster results. (See Microsoft)
This is also why so many open-source projects keep improving despite inner turbulence and leadership changes. Any changes or competition that occur are motivated not by self-interest, but by interest in the success of the project. Therefore, any changes that occur always result in a better (not worse) alignment with the results the project needs to succeed. (See XFree86 -> X.org transition)
The real problem is what you said in your first paragraph: those that are hardcore gamers already have systems as good or better at home. Simply providing a place with PCs doesn't really add value over top of what most gamers can do for free by meeting up at each other's homes.
But there are a lot of things you could do to add compelling features that go beyond what gamers can typically provide for themselves. You just have to put yourself in the mind of a gamer.
Gamers tend to be a picky sort. Each gamer wants his/her configuration (or PC) exactly the way they like it -- having to use a public/shared machine sucks, even if it may have a bit more raw power. Gamers also tend to like "ricing up" their machines to show off to each other, since PC gaming is as much about hardware as the games. And while typically good at maintaining their own individual computers, they tend not to be the greatest at building and securing and maintaining high-performance impromptu networks. In my experience, when gamers meet up to play, there's typically hours wasted trying to get/keep a LAN running so the games can actually be played. Other concerns not typically thought through well by gamers gathering in groups include things like adequate power outlets, comfortable seating, plenty of desk space to put the PCs on, etc.
You don't want to be in the business of maintaining all your own hardware and keeping it all up-to-date. That gets expensive quick, especially with all the technically-skilled hired help you'd need to pay to keep things running.
Given all these factors, I think the best thing you could do would be to provide a space, decked out with plenty of proper furniture, plenty of power strips, super-fast secured reliable network with Internet access, places for spectators to sit and observe comfortably, and some awesome fast-response LCD DVI monitors. But make the entire affair BYOC (bring your own computer). Let the gamers pay for and maintain and bring along their own PCs. Let the "small penis == huge neon glowing overclocked PC" culture work for you rather than against you. Make your spot the place for hot-shot gamers to show off their machines. Offer a cash prize each night to the craziest case mod, etc.
Don't make the place a "you can walk up at random and play" kind of thing. Make it exclusive. Book the place out to groups. Make spectators who randomly drop by feel left out, so next time they'll book the place out with their friends. People typically don't want to just play against strangers randomly -- that wouldn't be much different than playing some random player over the Internet. Instead, focus your efforts on getting groups to rent the whole place out at once. Encourage groups to create team names, and keep a stats system with the team names, etc. Take advantage of the social and competitive aspects of gaming.
Finally, you can take a lesson from movie theaters and actually make most of your money off concessions. When gamers are in the middle of a long gaming session, but get hungry or thirsty, they don't want to have to leave the game entirely to go hunt for food. How great would it be if someone went around to each station offering them snacks and drinks? How much better would it be if those "someones" were attractive Hooters=style waitresses?
I've given you all the ideas you need... good luck.
Actually, you fucking moron, it's NOT your right to call and disturb people who don't wish to be disturbed by you, or to eat up the minutes they paid for in order to do it.
There's a fundamental natural right that trumps anything the Constitution or case law might say you can do, and it's called "the right to be left alone". Leave people the fuck alone!
You can believe and your cause and support your party all you wish, just so long as it doesn't involve infringing upon my natural right to be left the fuck alone.
People like you truly disgust me. Your argument is no better than when the telemarketers bitched about losing their "right to free speech" when the Do Not Call list was enacted. Sorry, but my right to be left alone trumps your right to free speech, so fuck you.
During most major mass-scale emergencies (earthquakes, 9/11, hurricans, etc) in recent years, people on cellular phones have been able to get calls through much better than people on landlines have been able to, due to the landline phone network not having the capacity to handle the sudden rush of calls. In almost any emergency situation you can dream up, you're better off using a cell phone.
Your problem is your carrier. I use Verizon Wireless, and the only time I have connection/audio quality problems is when I'm inside a building that is massively thick and/or armored/shielded in some way (office building, home depot, grocery store, etc). I have many coworkers and friends who use Cingular or Sprint who complain of bad coverage and drop-outs, but I don't seem to have those probles with Verizon.
The poster may be making a sarcastic joke, but they are absolutely right.
The system is too corrupted and too far gone to be fixed within the system. The only solution to all the problems the U.S. faces, and to all the flaws in the U.S. government, is to completely start over with a better (e.g. more fair) government.
I'm amused by the popular (and scientific) notion that DNA is some kind of logical code just waiting to be deciphered.
No one designed the way DNA and genetics work to produce a given biologic result. Evolution naturally selected for certain results without concern for the implementation. In short, DNA/genetics is the ultimate "slop code". It has no clean architecture or consistent rules. Making matters even worse, the code not only defines structures, but it defines how to interpret itself, such that you can't change one without changing the other. The whole mess is ridiculously intertwined and compounded and pointed back in on itself to the point of being beyond human understanding.
Changing one bit of a gene inevitably has compounded, far-reaching, unexpected effects that cannot be completely controlled or predicted. You can't think of any part of DNA as having any specific isolated effect on the result, and you can't really hope to create an accurate or complete blueprint of how it gets interpreted to produce the result.
You can't reverse-engineer something that wasn't engineered in the first place. The design follows from the function, nlike engineering where the function follows from the design. The best way to work with DNA/genetics is to create an environment that selects the desired result, let it run for as long as it needs to generate that result, and then create a "patch" from the diff of the before-and-after DNA.
Matteran Energy uses 'thermal-collection technology to heat a synthetic fluid with a very low boiling point
And just how much petroleum-based energy does it take to produce this special synthetic fluid? Hrmm? My guess is a lot -- more than this generator produces over its lifetime.
If getting browsers to pass the ACID2 test is such a huge high-priority item for all you web developers out there, why aren't you pressing harder on the Firefox development team or the IE7 development team to get them to make it a high priority item?
Instead of bitching about it on Slashdot, why aren't you entering (or adding votes for) bugs against Firefox, or sending e-mails to the IE7 development team members (many of whom have public-facing blogs, etc, where you can contact them)?
It won't get fixed by the development teams until they decide it's high priority, and they won't decide that until large percentages of users start bitching extremely frequently and loudly.
My suspicion is that most users of sites like Slashdot are attracted to the site not because of original news content but because it offers a competitive forum and an opportunity for basking in the public spotlight. Young males eat that shit up. Give them a chance to post comments to hopefully accumulate good reviews and karma, thus establishing on online reputation, and they'll go for it. Not really that different than MMORPGs, if you think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
I see a lot of people here misinterpreting the article and that phrase about the end of the desktop era.
The era of significant growth in desktop OS and applications is coming to a close. Most people already have the OS and applications they need, and most of the stuff that's been written is good enough. There isn't much room left to grow, and there isn't much untapped profit to be made, in the desktop space. After Vista ships and fixes the Windows security architecture and a few other niffty things, there really won't be anything compelling left to add to Windows.
Does that mean companies will stop making or incrementally improving their desktop offerings? Of course not. Does that mean you'll be forced to use a stupid web-based word processor and all of its limitations? Of course not. All it means is that the major software companies are now turning their primary attention and focus to other areas where there's more growth potential.
on every significant new format
I guess we're going to have to find out what he thinks "significant" means, then. Let the fanboyism commence!
The interesting thing here is that the study only looked at reviews versus sales.
It said nothing about reviews (written by magazines, etc) versus consumer opinions (or user reviews). It also said nothing about consumer opinions versus sales.
In my experience, reviews written by reviewers generally align pretty well with what consumers think of the game, while sales have little to do with either. In short, sales seem to have little to do with how good a game actually is. Sales seem to correlate more with things like movie and cartoon and brand tie-ins to a game, distribution methods, price point, and other such factors. All of this is really no big surprise, since the game industry has always successfully relied on churning out such drivel and it has obviously worked pretty well for them most of the time.
A more interesting thing to study would be what percentage of sales are purchases made by people who know nothing about games and won't be playing the games themselves... such as parents and grandparents choosing games as gifts for kids, etc. I bet they make up more than 50% of sales.
Remember when the Atari era went bust and the bottom of the video games market completely dropped out? My theory is that it was because the industry stopped creating any good-quality games, having realized from experience that they could just produce well-branded crap and rely on all those gullible non-gamer sales. I think the problem is that when the market floods with crap, the gamers (who ultimately receive those games from the purchasers) completely lose interest in games and stop asking their parents to buy them more. So then the purchasers stop buying completely.
In other words, a sufficient minority of titles must continue to be of good quality for the industry to sustain itself, but once that sufficient minority is met, the rest can be crap and the industry can thrive off the crap. The industry then foolishly thinks all it needs to produce is the crap, which kills demand completely, which kills the whole industry.
Cut the middlemen of the car and energy companies and go right for the villains. I think that they should simply sue everyone with a car.
Your joking suggestion isn't far off, though.
The problem today is that things detrimental to the environment are often not detrimental to the pocketbook. Businesses pollute, drivers pollute, people don't recycle, etc, all because it costs them nothing (financially) to do it.
Al Gore's got it right: we need to shift the taxation system in this country so that earnings aren't taxed, but pollution and other harmful things are taxed instead. Tax the things you want to discourage, and don't tax the things you want to encourage. Pretty sensible. You just have to make sure to apply the tax to businesses and individuals alike.
Passionate music lovers do enjoy having a physical object that represents a link between them and the band they love.
Oh, you mean like a giant dildo that says "White Stripes" on it?
I hate it when the media misuse the word "pirate". You'd think Slashdot could at least get it right.
Illegal copies sold at retail are counterfit copies, not "pirated copies".
Piracy is when you copy content yourself for free. With piracy, no one profits off someone else's hard work.
Counterfitting is when someone runs illegal copies and then sells the copies for their own profit.
It's a subtle difference, but an important one.
My other car is a cdr.
I agree with what others have already said here (about "people must not be buying tracks off iTunes because they hate DRM" being a flawed conclusion), but I also have an angle of my own to add.
It's human nature to not care about something until you need it. Rights are unfortunately one of those things.
Most people have never even heard the term "DRM". Of those that have, only a minority know what it stands for and understand what rights it takes away. Those of us who hate DRM and everything it stands for are always depressed by how apathetic and uninformed most of the population seems to be.
But DRM is slowly starting to burn people -- ordinary people -- people who previously knew nothing about DRM and didn't care. People are finding out the hard way that when their PC dies, they can't copy the songs back to the PC off their iPod. They are finding out the hard way that they can't take that AAC song they bought on iTunes and convert it to a format that will import freely into other software or work with certain devices. As ordinary people increasingly run into these scenarios, they will learn about DRM the hard way. The good news is that they will also immediately dislike it and be pissed off about it.
Give it another 10-20 years, and I think what you'll see isn't a lack of DRM in the marketplace, but a huge amount of consumer awareness of it and hatred for it. That will set the stage well for things like changing the law, mass-scale piracy, or other methods of fighting back.
Companies will generally use any legal way possible to maximize profit. Since many laws still permit unethical tactics, there are far more legal tactics than ethical tactics available for a company to use.
If a company limits its tactics to the smaller set (ethical tactics), it will lose when competing against other companies that are only limiting their tactics to the larger set (legal tactics). Therefore no company will ever want to limit itself only to what is ethical. That's the nature of competition -- if you don't use every power at your disposal, you'll lose to someone who did.
And as we've seen before with companies like Enron, some companies don't even limit themselves to tactics that are legal.
Not all fixes pose the same risks or require the same amount of testing.
A patch for a DRM component surely involves much less code churn, risk, and testing than a change to a core OS component (such as network stack or IE) would require.
Furthermore, as the original post indicated, no end-users are going to care about this patch or badmouth it in the press if it doesn't perfectly close the hole. And partner businesses aren't going to abandon their deep investments in Microsoft's platform just b/c of one hole. This scenario actually presents less pressure on Microsoft to have to get the fix right compared to other scenarios, meaning they can afford to do less up-front testing.
* I know someone will want to reply to this post to say: This is Slashdot, and you're looking for fairness?!? HahaaHAhaAHA! I know this is Slashdot, and so I know better than to expect to see fair reporting around here. Still, there's no harm in trying to raise the bar a bit.
At some point someone will come up with a reputation system which will allow everything down to individuals to be rated.
Awesome! I want a system where I can look up a specific person by name and get back a number between 0 and 100 that tells me how good (in a general sense) that person is. And then everyone should be required by law to have their score stamped on their national ID and implanted RFID tag, and we should only let the best people drive or have children or be gainfully employed!
Yes, it would be just peachy.
Sounds like that TV commercial a while back...
Excited new father at hospital calls his aging parents collect. Old dad picks up, hears, "will you accept a call from Mr. Hayitsbobweehhoddababyeetzaboy?". Old dad says "no". Old mom asks old dad, "Who was it?" Old dad says, "It was Bob. They had the baby. It's a boy!"
Anyways OP's analogy is flawed, when is in a OS project everyone has equal say?
You accidentally stumbled upon the key issue.
Open-source projects are not democracies, but meritocracies. Participants who contribute better results naturally arise as leaders and therefore enjoy playing a larger role in decisions. The things a participant needs to do to move up the chain are perfectly aligned with the results the project needs to deliver to succeed. You don't get leaders who are more interested in their success than in the project's success, because they are one and the same.
Businesses are not meritocracies. People get hired, promoted, and fired based largely on factors that have nothing to do with the results they've contributed. The things an employee needs to do to move up the chain are almost never aligned with the results the business needs to deliver to succeed. You get tons of middle-managers and even CEOs who are more interested in their own success than in the company's success. Not only do those definitions of success not align, but they almost always directly conflict. (See Enron)
This is why so many businesses ultimately fall apart. They increasingly spin their wheels (while increasing numbers of employees jockey competitively for position) while producing lackluster results. (See Microsoft)
This is also why so many open-source projects keep improving despite inner turbulence and leadership changes. Any changes or competition that occur are motivated not by self-interest, but by interest in the success of the project. Therefore, any changes that occur always result in a better (not worse) alignment with the results the project needs to succeed. (See XFree86 -> X.org transition)
The real problem is what you said in your first paragraph: those that are hardcore gamers already have systems as good or better at home. Simply providing a place with PCs doesn't really add value over top of what most gamers can do for free by meeting up at each other's homes.
But there are a lot of things you could do to add compelling features that go beyond what gamers can typically provide for themselves. You just have to put yourself in the mind of a gamer.
Gamers tend to be a picky sort. Each gamer wants his/her configuration (or PC) exactly the way they like it -- having to use a public/shared machine sucks, even if it may have a bit more raw power. Gamers also tend to like "ricing up" their machines to show off to each other, since PC gaming is as much about hardware as the games. And while typically good at maintaining their own individual computers, they tend not to be the greatest at building and securing and maintaining high-performance impromptu networks. In my experience, when gamers meet up to play, there's typically hours wasted trying to get/keep a LAN running so the games can actually be played. Other concerns not typically thought through well by gamers gathering in groups include things like adequate power outlets, comfortable seating, plenty of desk space to put the PCs on, etc.
You don't want to be in the business of maintaining all your own hardware and keeping it all up-to-date. That gets expensive quick, especially with all the technically-skilled hired help you'd need to pay to keep things running.
Given all these factors, I think the best thing you could do would be to provide a space, decked out with plenty of proper furniture, plenty of power strips, super-fast secured reliable network with Internet access, places for spectators to sit and observe comfortably, and some awesome fast-response LCD DVI monitors. But make the entire affair BYOC (bring your own computer). Let the gamers pay for and maintain and bring along their own PCs. Let the "small penis == huge neon glowing overclocked PC" culture work for you rather than against you. Make your spot the place for hot-shot gamers to show off their machines. Offer a cash prize each night to the craziest case mod, etc.
Don't make the place a "you can walk up at random and play" kind of thing. Make it exclusive. Book the place out to groups. Make spectators who randomly drop by feel left out, so next time they'll book the place out with their friends. People typically don't want to just play against strangers randomly -- that wouldn't be much different than playing some random player over the Internet. Instead, focus your efforts on getting groups to rent the whole place out at once. Encourage groups to create team names, and keep a stats system with the team names, etc. Take advantage of the social and competitive aspects of gaming.
Finally, you can take a lesson from movie theaters and actually make most of your money off concessions. When gamers are in the middle of a long gaming session, but get hungry or thirsty, they don't want to have to leave the game entirely to go hunt for food. How great would it be if someone went around to each station offering them snacks and drinks? How much better would it be if those "someones" were attractive Hooters=style waitresses?
I've given you all the ideas you need... good luck.
Because the right to be left alone by other people is the highest-ranking of all natural rights, as defined by me.
Wrong! They do, in nearly all cases.
Actually, you fucking moron, it's NOT your right to call and disturb people who don't wish to be disturbed by you, or to eat up the minutes they paid for in order to do it.
There's a fundamental natural right that trumps anything the Constitution or case law might say you can do, and it's called "the right to be left alone". Leave people the fuck alone!
You can believe and your cause and support your party all you wish, just so long as it doesn't involve infringing upon my natural right to be left the fuck alone.
People like you truly disgust me. Your argument is no better than when the telemarketers bitched about losing their "right to free speech" when the Do Not Call list was enacted. Sorry, but my right to be left alone trumps your right to free speech, so fuck you.
During most major mass-scale emergencies (earthquakes, 9/11, hurricans, etc) in recent years, people on cellular phones have been able to get calls through much better than people on landlines have been able to, due to the landline phone network not having the capacity to handle the sudden rush of calls. In almost any emergency situation you can dream up, you're better off using a cell phone.
Your problem is your carrier. I use Verizon Wireless, and the only time I have connection/audio quality problems is when I'm inside a building that is massively thick and/or armored/shielded in some way (office building, home depot, grocery store, etc). I have many coworkers and friends who use Cingular or Sprint who complain of bad coverage and drop-outs, but I don't seem to have those probles with Verizon.
What the hell are you doing still using a land line, anyway?
Cancel your land line and get a cell phone (and remember to put a text-messaging block on it). You won't receive ANY telemarketing calls.
The poster may be making a sarcastic joke, but they are absolutely right.
The system is too corrupted and too far gone to be fixed within the system. The only solution to all the problems the U.S. faces, and to all the flaws in the U.S. government, is to completely start over with a better (e.g. more fair) government.
I'm amused by the popular (and scientific) notion that DNA is some kind of logical code just waiting to be deciphered.
No one designed the way DNA and genetics work to produce a given biologic result. Evolution naturally selected for certain results without concern for the implementation. In short, DNA/genetics is the ultimate "slop code". It has no clean architecture or consistent rules. Making matters even worse, the code not only defines structures, but it defines how to interpret itself, such that you can't change one without changing the other. The whole mess is ridiculously intertwined and compounded and pointed back in on itself to the point of being beyond human understanding.
Changing one bit of a gene inevitably has compounded, far-reaching, unexpected effects that cannot be completely controlled or predicted. You can't think of any part of DNA as having any specific isolated effect on the result, and you can't really hope to create an accurate or complete blueprint of how it gets interpreted to produce the result.
You can't reverse-engineer something that wasn't engineered in the first place. The design follows from the function, nlike engineering where the function follows from the design. The best way to work with DNA/genetics is to create an environment that selects the desired result, let it run for as long as it needs to generate that result, and then create a "patch" from the diff of the before-and-after DNA.
Matteran Energy uses 'thermal-collection technology to heat a synthetic fluid with a very low boiling point
And just how much petroleum-based energy does it take to produce this special synthetic fluid? Hrmm? My guess is a lot -- more than this generator produces over its lifetime.
If getting browsers to pass the ACID2 test is such a huge high-priority item for all you web developers out there, why aren't you pressing harder on the Firefox development team or the IE7 development team to get them to make it a high priority item?
Instead of bitching about it on Slashdot, why aren't you entering (or adding votes for) bugs against Firefox, or sending e-mails to the IE7 development team members (many of whom have public-facing blogs, etc, where you can contact them)?
It won't get fixed by the development teams until they decide it's high priority, and they won't decide that until large percentages of users start bitching extremely frequently and loudly.
My suspicion is that most users of sites like Slashdot are attracted to the site not because of original news content but because it offers a competitive forum and an opportunity for basking in the public spotlight. Young males eat that shit up. Give them a chance to post comments to hopefully accumulate good reviews and karma, thus establishing on online reputation, and they'll go for it. Not really that different than MMORPGs, if you think about it.