I agree. I have a BD player act as a Netflix tuner unit for my DVR. Works great. (DVR is a mini, works silently sipping a mere 40w and taking no space) I'm keeping my TV off the net. Same for my BD player except when it's tuning Netflix or Hulu. Love firewalls:)
The only reason the PS3 Blu-Ray wasn't pricey was because Sony was using it as a loss-leading pile-driver to attempt to save Blu-Ray from extinction. Yes, BD has some better features - higher capacity and the scratch resistant finish - but the capacity isn't really needed and the scratch resistant finish could easily have been used on HD-DVDs, DVDs, and CDs, making them all better. Unfortunately for us, Sony "won" the BD war, giving us scratch resistant HD discs with more elaborate (read expensive but still useless) DRM, complete with Region capabilities. The only thing I can say is "Hooray" that their gamble failed. BD has not taken off, the prices are far too high, and Sony's mortgaging of the company has led to steady decline in their fortunes ever since. While it may not be the root cause, the BD "win" they bought didn't help their finances in the least. We can only wish them a rapid journey to their current destination - bankruptcy. It'll be interesting to see who goes first, MS or Sony. I'd bet on Sony for now.
I haven't liked Sony for years but with this move I might give Sony a second chance.
Why give them a second chance? Has the board and entire executive arm been replaced? If not, what makes you think that those DRM hugging, root kit installing, standards breaking overcharging swine have changed their ways? They just found a scapegoat for their shrinking market share. Someone had to take the fall, and considering it's been a 5+ year dive, I guess he ran out of flunkies to blame.
As I understood it, Mr. Sam Walton was quite for America and American family values. There were community efforts, and things that you probably never noticed, like no alcohol sold in any stores. He wanted affordable products available to people who couldn't afford it.... then he died.
Sam at least pushed for "Made in America", then his money grubbing off-spring took over finished killing off thousands of small american businesses by shipping everything to China. Yep, Sam killed off local shop owners, for better or worse, he was responsible for at least as many destroyed livelihoods as his offspring were later. The only difference? Same didn't ship US jobs overseas.
Semantics - "sudden" to a geologist might be 10 million years. Sudden to a typical modern human might be a second....
So I suppose the real answer here is to qualify the relatively ambiguous word "sudden". Let's call the "sudden" evolution of humans a "process that appears to have worked across 'x' years", where 'x' is a number between 1-1,000,000. 1M isn't very "sudden", 1 would be.
In my area - Java is the best solution for a large number of problems. I also code in Javascript occasionally, and C/C++/C#/Obj-C, among others.
So no, I'm not a single language person, having dabbled in a large variety of languages over time, including in no specific order Assembly, Basic, Pascal, Fortran (various flavors), Perl, awk, LISP, Smalltalk, and Ada that I recall, not to mention various shell scripting frameworks. Having experience over time across this broad selection of languages and codebases gives you a different perspective that someone that's an expert in only one. It allows you to see patterns in problems that keep coming to the fore again and again. Scalability in scripting languages, such as Ruby and Perl, maintenance nightmares (Perl, PHP) large code bases (C and C++ still struggle here, but this also applies to Perl, Ruby, PHP, and a host of others) Concurrency - pretty much all of them, although some are easier than others to use.
Finally, while some languages are good for specific purposes, others are not good for anything, despite the best of intentions and even potentials.
Trust me - I've seen some of those that have worked in the environment you described. Many quit, taking no job over working in that environment. You'd be better off delivering pizza or collecting garbage than doing that for long.
Smalltalk is pretty cool, I certainly like what it has to offer. Not sure why it didn't take off as I was never a proponent. Perhaps that was it's core issue - too few proponents?
C# is a cluster of a language, it's C, but not quite, it's Java, but not quite, it's managed, but not completely.... Fair warning, I wrote system admin software when 2008R2 came out and C# was listed as the intended language. Well, truth be told, more than half the codebase is straight C/Win32 code, because C# no longer supports 90% of the calls that were needed, or only supports them half-assed. It may be that the language itself is fine for business programming, but for anything system based it blows. This would be at a time before the.NET 4.0 docs were updated, and a whole slew of samples on MS's MSDN site flat out did not work in 2008R2 due to changes in the framework. And therein lies probably my biggest.NET complaint - the documentation. Who'd ever think that you'd yearn for JavaDocs? The.NET documentation is abysmal, it would require tens of 1000s of man-hours just to approach the usability and correctness of the average open source project. That's the language side of it, the OS is a whole other ball of wax upon which eloquence would be wasted.
Oh, and I'm not a fan of C#'s class and method syntax. Having to explicitly allow the overriding of a method, for instance, means that I need access to anything I want to override. That one design decision makes the language almost useless in large projects where a component may need to override a random method somewhere to add (or decorate) some core functionality. Granted, now you can create a delegate, and do all sorts of other steps to achieve what a simple override would have done. If you say "You would never do this in a production setting" I'd have to disagree, since I'm doing this on a large scale project with a commercial product where I'm extending the capabilities of the product by extending and decorating various internal objects and injecting them back into the system where they are then used seamlessly by both my code and the product's code, as applicable. These types of things would not be possible in C# unless every method were labeled virtual. Of course the product would also have to follow proper OO design guidelines, but that's a different topic and not one C# affects by design.
You are correct -.NET is a platform, the best comparison is the JVM. They then took the concept of compiling to linkable code (from the FORTAN/C/C++ compilers) and created a spec for creating IL code from many languages. Nothing new there. The problem they ran into was that they dealt with both managed and unmanaged code, which meant that even managed code was never guaranteed to be really managed, nor locked down securely. The JVM has a similar "hole" with JNI, but that "hole" can be locked out. I'm not sure that can be done with.NET, and honestly, I don't care.
I'd wager that your Perl code does what it does well, but is probably running in the same state as it was in 2000. (ie, low if any maintenance was done)
I also agree with Perl being flexible, however, there are tradeoffs that are made to make it so, and these sometimes create cons that become obvious only when working on larger systems.
You are 100% correct that crap is not language-dependent. I have seen a huge crap pile of PHP code that was only surpassed by the Java code that was written to replace it (by the same folks that wrote the PHP codebase, gee, are we surprised?) I've also seen a 150K LOC FORTRAN codebase that was "modularized" via 250+ common blocks across multiple modules, with several of those blocks having identically named variables.... For C/C++, I'll only mention that I wound up debugging some model code around the time of the STL, and compilers did just about the worst job imaginable on name munging, so much so that you'd get different results linking the code on different OSes or with different compilers. (It was all ANSI code for processing data, so compiling across multiple systems wasn't a problem) I still recall reading through the object code when the aha moment hit me - the name munging was 2-3 characters longer than allotted for in various linkers, so your pointers, well... you can guess:)
Heck, I'll comment as myself. Here's the real scoop - "programmers" under 30 (Yes, it's quoted, most of them can't program the equivalent of the way out of a wet paper bag) will work dirt cheap, talk the latest lingo, and wow - that sounds really cool! Latest buzzwords, systems, what not.
Experienced programmers (those with more than 10 years experience) have already seen 2 iterations of those latest buzzwords, systems, and what not, and realize that it's much more productive and the chance of success is much higher by using established, known, and relatively debugged systems instead of those latest iterations that reinvent the wheel.
The Wheel, reinvented (and buggy)
.NET (Java wannabe)
Maven (ant, but much worse)
Gradle (maven, but worse)
Grails (nice idea - several libraries already do this)
Ruby (Perl, version x.0, which itself is a crappy solution for enterprise anything)
ADA (have you looked at this?)
...
Things that are truly unique and may have a place:
LISP (yep, even after all these years, LISP may still offer some decent inspiration)
SmallTalk (it'll never be a main language, but it's a good one)
... insert your fave here
Then there's the special list of things that went off the deep end, and in this arena, C++ is the most notable failure. It has failed to produce not because of lack of capabilities, but more because it started out as a promising well constructed language, but when scaling was added for ever larger projects, bad decisions were made which doomed it's ability to be written or maintained. LISP is another, in that it's too flexible, and only under a dictatorship would it be feasible to write long term software systems in LISP.
So I'm prepared to lose kharma because I'm sure I've offended every mod out there in one way or the other, both by what I've said and what's implied by what I've left out. C'est la vie.
Not so fast - $209B in 2010 $? Really? Where's the original cost statements? NASA's own site says $450M per launch, but that probably doesn't include amortized R&D costs, so I'd imagine it's higher if you include that. Then again, should we also include the X program? It was the precursor research for the shuttle after all. What about the Apollo program itself? It provided LOX engine research. There's also the solid rocket fuel for the boosters. Etc etc etc. An easily inflated number without backing data and vague hand-waving about "adjusted" dollars.
The real numbers we have are what NASA posted for the last missions - $450M per flight. There is no information on what that includes that I found, and this is higher than that posted in wikipedia which bases its numbers on this document which has some more interesting information in it about competing launch systems in the Shuttle class. Note that not all are manned, and yet the shuttle is within a factor of 3 at most on a per Kg cost. It also details information on the shuttle launch costs based on pulling it from the full NASA budget, which indicates the most expensive estimate is $500M per launch. The wikipedia link also details the costs of a Saturn launch and cost per Kg. The Shuttle was only slightly more expensive, and an order of magnitude more capable by this comparison (We'll ignore the piece about Saturn being able to reach the moon, the Shuttle was never designed for that purpose)
Lastly, we have the issue about politics interfering with the Shuttle program. A much cheaper shuttle could have been built with an accompanying heavy launch vehicle for less than the Shuttle. It probably would have been safer too, as it would not have had a Challenger incident, as solid rocket boosters would not have been needed. But that's a tangent into what ifs, it should merely be noted that the Shuttle was not the result of engineering design for a purpose, but of politics adding conflicting requirements and then not funding those requirements.
Nope - because "Normal People" wouldn't be especially interested in the possibility to begin with. Heck, normal people didn't even nick their 3.5 floppies to get double the space, instead buying "approved" 1.44 HD floppies. You think normal people are going to be attempting to crack anything?
Perhaps you are unaware that NSA gave us SHA-1, SHA-256 and DSA. The reason NIST holds public competitions is so that the tin-foil hatters wont get in an uproar about NSA creating a "backdoored' standard. It also helps satisfy foreign entities who wouldn't feel comfortable with America controlling and creating such a standard. The fact that anyone from any nation can submit ciphers helps ease this suspicion.
I would agree that the "backdoored" standard is a real threat. Just look at things like chipsets from China with backdoors built in. Kind of reminds me of the TPM initiative. I'm sure there are plenty more.
I'm surprised you've not been skewered, perhaps it's because there's truth in what you say, but your assumptions are way way off. "Normal people" would behave as you say. Governments and hackers operate on an entirely different level and with different motivations, so making something obscure does not deter them at all. And lastly, wrapping some public function Foo and obscuring it provides you with exactly 0 layers of protection should a flaw with Foo be found. For one example, look at all the vectors associated with the Windows WMF rendering engine, which compromised entire suites of software you weren't even aware of using that "feature", and produced what seemed years of vulnerability reports as more and more products were added to the list as additional vulnerabilities were found.
I personally don't care for ribbons myself. However I found a lot of Non-Technical people love them. So I guess they are not all that bad, Most people don't like to dig deep into menus. If it isn't right there they won't go hunting.
Interesting, my anecdotal evidence indicates that NO ONE likes the ribbon, not a single person I know, and they include the entire gamut of computer literacy from 0 to guru. Not one. Seems people like text over hovering over each icon trying to figure out what they do. Should they spend enough time memorizing what each icon they need does, then those will be the only icons they ever use, so their capabilities with the product drop to LCD features (Save, Cut, Paste, Open...) with the rest unexplored because...quite frankly, who wants to hover over crap?
The menu depth was only 2 layers for more than 80% of the functionality, and it was pretty easy to figure out which menu silo held what you were looking for, as those silos are given some lip service to by the Ribbon. I especially loved the example given by a pro-Ribbon person: "I found Mail Merge in less than 3 min". Me - not using Office but extremely sporadically for the last 5 years open my new Office 2011 copy (yes, macs have Office 2011, it sucks, but it has menus!) and found said mail merge functionality and successfully used it in less than 8s. They didn't respond. In short - the Ribbon is a travesty of GUI design, and it will be remembered as such far into the future as something "you should not do".
After about twenty minutes of looking for how to save my work, I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye the screen on my netbook after I clicked on that button. To my surprise, there was a popup menu on the netbook display -- but it didn't appear via VNC.
A button with no information about what it does, that opens a special window that won't display on a remote display, is just nonsense.
No surprise there - there's about 5 different window components you can use in Win7, IIRC (number might be 4 or 6, I would't be on the exact number) which have varying features and capabilities. Is it stupid? Yes. Klunky? Yes. Fixable? Of course. Will it be? No.
Given that - is it surprising that there are things that VNC and the like fail to display? How many edge cases can you run against and test? Especially when those test cases may use entirely different paths through the OS to render items, some ages old, other new and in an entirely different subsystem.
So, given the number of liars, crazy people, and otherwise sane people who can have hallucinations or experiences they can't otherwise explain, it seems likely that the majority of UFO sightings (of alien origin anyway) and religious experiences are explainable that way. Even if there are real ones, they would be drowned out from the noise from all the fake ones.
You left out gullible children who will believe pretty much anything told them, from hiccups shorten your life to stepping on a crack will break your morther's back and more. Ever watch even "adults" avoid cracks in sidewalks as they walk? It's pretty darn amusing when you think about it.
yet are just as certain that God doesn't exist, despite witnesses to the contrary.
Certainty is hard to come by but we can probably agree at least that many gods don't exist, despite witnesses to the contrary. I'm pretty convinced that Caligula did, but not any more.
"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours" - Stephen Roberts
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Forgot to add an addendum - don't need the BD player either anymore - it's amazing what you can do with 2 minis.... :)
I agree. I have a BD player act as a Netflix tuner unit for my DVR. Works great. (DVR is a mini, works silently sipping a mere 40w and taking no space) I'm keeping my TV off the net. Same for my BD player except when it's tuning Netflix or Hulu. Love firewalls :)
The only reason the PS3 Blu-Ray wasn't pricey was because Sony was using it as a loss-leading pile-driver to attempt to save Blu-Ray from extinction. Yes, BD has some better features - higher capacity and the scratch resistant finish - but the capacity isn't really needed and the scratch resistant finish could easily have been used on HD-DVDs, DVDs, and CDs, making them all better. Unfortunately for us, Sony "won" the BD war, giving us scratch resistant HD discs with more elaborate (read expensive but still useless) DRM, complete with Region capabilities. The only thing I can say is "Hooray" that their gamble failed. BD has not taken off, the prices are far too high, and Sony's mortgaging of the company has led to steady decline in their fortunes ever since. While it may not be the root cause, the BD "win" they bought didn't help their finances in the least. We can only wish them a rapid journey to their current destination - bankruptcy. It'll be interesting to see who goes first, MS or Sony. I'd bet on Sony for now.
I haven't liked Sony for years but with this move I might give Sony a second chance.
Why give them a second chance? Has the board and entire executive arm been replaced? If not, what makes you think that those DRM hugging, root kit installing, standards breaking overcharging swine have changed their ways? They just found a scapegoat for their shrinking market share. Someone had to take the fall, and considering it's been a 5+ year dive, I guess he ran out of flunkies to blame.
As I understood it, Mr. Sam Walton was quite for America and American family values. There were community efforts, and things that you probably never noticed, like no alcohol sold in any stores. He wanted affordable products available to people who couldn't afford it. ... then he died.
Sam at least pushed for "Made in America", then his money grubbing off-spring took over finished killing off thousands of small american businesses by shipping everything to China. Yep, Sam killed off local shop owners, for better or worse, he was responsible for at least as many destroyed livelihoods as his offspring were later. The only difference? Same didn't ship US jobs overseas.
It also makes funding retirement accounts a whole let less expensive.
If true all that is true, you need to find a new job.
Semantics - "sudden" to a geologist might be 10 million years. Sudden to a typical modern human might be a second....
So I suppose the real answer here is to qualify the relatively ambiguous word "sudden". Let's call the "sudden" evolution of humans a "process that appears to have worked across 'x' years", where 'x' is a number between 1-1,000,000. 1M isn't very "sudden", 1 would be.
In my area - Java is the best solution for a large number of problems. I also code in Javascript occasionally, and C/C++/C#/Obj-C, among others.
So no, I'm not a single language person, having dabbled in a large variety of languages over time, including in no specific order Assembly, Basic, Pascal, Fortran (various flavors), Perl, awk, LISP, Smalltalk, and Ada that I recall, not to mention various shell scripting frameworks. Having experience over time across this broad selection of languages and codebases gives you a different perspective that someone that's an expert in only one. It allows you to see patterns in problems that keep coming to the fore again and again. Scalability in scripting languages, such as Ruby and Perl, maintenance nightmares (Perl, PHP) large code bases (C and C++ still struggle here, but this also applies to Perl, Ruby, PHP, and a host of others) Concurrency - pretty much all of them, although some are easier than others to use.
Finally, while some languages are good for specific purposes, others are not good for anything, despite the best of intentions and even potentials.
Trust me - I've seen some of those that have worked in the environment you described. Many quit, taking no job over working in that environment. You'd be better off delivering pizza or collecting garbage than doing that for long.
Smalltalk is pretty cool, I certainly like what it has to offer. Not sure why it didn't take off as I was never a proponent. Perhaps that was it's core issue - too few proponents?
C# is a cluster of a language, it's C, but not quite, it's Java, but not quite, it's managed, but not completely.... Fair warning, I wrote system admin software when 2008R2 came out and C# was listed as the intended language. Well, truth be told, more than half the codebase is straight C/Win32 code, because C# no longer supports 90% of the calls that were needed, or only supports them half-assed. It may be that the language itself is fine for business programming, but for anything system based it blows. This would be at a time before the .NET 4.0 docs were updated, and a whole slew of samples on MS's MSDN site flat out did not work in 2008R2 due to changes in the framework. And therein lies probably my biggest .NET complaint - the documentation. Who'd ever think that you'd yearn for JavaDocs? The .NET documentation is abysmal, it would require tens of 1000s of man-hours just to approach the usability and correctness of the average open source project. That's the language side of it, the OS is a whole other ball of wax upon which eloquence would be wasted.
Oh, and I'm not a fan of C#'s class and method syntax. Having to explicitly allow the overriding of a method, for instance, means that I need access to anything I want to override. That one design decision makes the language almost useless in large projects where a component may need to override a random method somewhere to add (or decorate) some core functionality. Granted, now you can create a delegate, and do all sorts of other steps to achieve what a simple override would have done. If you say "You would never do this in a production setting" I'd have to disagree, since I'm doing this on a large scale project with a commercial product where I'm extending the capabilities of the product by extending and decorating various internal objects and injecting them back into the system where they are then used seamlessly by both my code and the product's code, as applicable. These types of things would not be possible in C# unless every method were labeled virtual. Of course the product would also have to follow proper OO design guidelines, but that's a different topic and not one C# affects by design.
You are correct - .NET is a platform, the best comparison is the JVM. They then took the concept of compiling to linkable code (from the FORTAN/C/C++ compilers) and created a spec for creating IL code from many languages. Nothing new there. The problem they ran into was that they dealt with both managed and unmanaged code, which meant that even managed code was never guaranteed to be really managed, nor locked down securely. The JVM has a similar "hole" with JNI, but that "hole" can be locked out. I'm not sure that can be done with .NET, and honestly, I don't care.
I'd wager that your Perl code does what it does well, but is probably running in the same state as it was in 2000. (ie, low if any maintenance was done)
I also agree with Perl being flexible, however, there are tradeoffs that are made to make it so, and these sometimes create cons that become obvious only when working on larger systems.
You are 100% correct that crap is not language-dependent. I have seen a huge crap pile of PHP code that was only surpassed by the Java code that was written to replace it (by the same folks that wrote the PHP codebase, gee, are we surprised?) I've also seen a 150K LOC FORTRAN codebase that was "modularized" via 250+ common blocks across multiple modules, with several of those blocks having identically named variables.... For C/C++, I'll only mention that I wound up debugging some model code around the time of the STL, and compilers did just about the worst job imaginable on name munging, so much so that you'd get different results linking the code on different OSes or with different compilers. (It was all ANSI code for processing data, so compiling across multiple systems wasn't a problem) I still recall reading through the object code when the aha moment hit me - the name munging was 2-3 characters longer than allotted for in various linkers, so your pointers, well... you can guess :)
Heck, I'll comment as myself. Here's the real scoop - "programmers" under 30 (Yes, it's quoted, most of them can't program the equivalent of the way out of a wet paper bag) will work dirt cheap, talk the latest lingo, and wow - that sounds really cool! Latest buzzwords, systems, what not.
Experienced programmers (those with more than 10 years experience) have already seen 2 iterations of those latest buzzwords, systems, and what not, and realize that it's much more productive and the chance of success is much higher by using established, known, and relatively debugged systems instead of those latest iterations that reinvent the wheel.
The Wheel, reinvented (and buggy)
Things that are truly unique and may have a place:
Then there's the special list of things that went off the deep end, and in this arena, C++ is the most notable failure. It has failed to produce not because of lack of capabilities, but more because it started out as a promising well constructed language, but when scaling was added for ever larger projects, bad decisions were made which doomed it's ability to be written or maintained. LISP is another, in that it's too flexible, and only under a dictatorship would it be feasible to write long term software systems in LISP.
So I'm prepared to lose kharma because I'm sure I've offended every mod out there in one way or the other, both by what I've said and what's implied by what I've left out. C'est la vie.
Who wants a sweat shop job anyways? Not me.
Not so fast - $209B in 2010 $? Really? Where's the original cost statements? NASA's own site says $450M per launch, but that probably doesn't include amortized R&D costs, so I'd imagine it's higher if you include that. Then again, should we also include the X program? It was the precursor research for the shuttle after all. What about the Apollo program itself? It provided LOX engine research. There's also the solid rocket fuel for the boosters. Etc etc etc. An easily inflated number without backing data and vague hand-waving about "adjusted" dollars.
The real numbers we have are what NASA posted for the last missions - $450M per flight. There is no information on what that includes that I found, and this is higher than that posted in wikipedia which bases its numbers on this document which has some more interesting information in it about competing launch systems in the Shuttle class. Note that not all are manned, and yet the shuttle is within a factor of 3 at most on a per Kg cost. It also details information on the shuttle launch costs based on pulling it from the full NASA budget, which indicates the most expensive estimate is $500M per launch. The wikipedia link also details the costs of a Saturn launch and cost per Kg. The Shuttle was only slightly more expensive, and an order of magnitude more capable by this comparison (We'll ignore the piece about Saturn being able to reach the moon, the Shuttle was never designed for that purpose)
Lastly, we have the issue about politics interfering with the Shuttle program. A much cheaper shuttle could have been built with an accompanying heavy launch vehicle for less than the Shuttle. It probably would have been safer too, as it would not have had a Challenger incident, as solid rocket boosters would not have been needed. But that's a tangent into what ifs, it should merely be noted that the Shuttle was not the result of engineering design for a purpose, but of politics adding conflicting requirements and then not funding those requirements.
Nope - because "Normal People" wouldn't be especially interested in the possibility to begin with. Heck, normal people didn't even nick their 3.5 floppies to get double the space, instead buying "approved" 1.44 HD floppies. You think normal people are going to be attempting to crack anything?
Perhaps you are unaware that NSA gave us SHA-1, SHA-256 and DSA. The reason NIST holds public competitions is so that the tin-foil hatters wont get in an uproar about NSA creating a "backdoored' standard. It also helps satisfy foreign entities who wouldn't feel comfortable with America controlling and creating such a standard. The fact that anyone from any nation can submit ciphers helps ease this suspicion.
I would agree that the "backdoored" standard is a real threat. Just look at things like chipsets from China with backdoors built in. Kind of reminds me of the TPM initiative. I'm sure there are plenty more.
I'm surprised you've not been skewered, perhaps it's because there's truth in what you say, but your assumptions are way way off. "Normal people" would behave as you say. Governments and hackers operate on an entirely different level and with different motivations, so making something obscure does not deter them at all. And lastly, wrapping some public function Foo and obscuring it provides you with exactly 0 layers of protection should a flaw with Foo be found. For one example, look at all the vectors associated with the Windows WMF rendering engine, which compromised entire suites of software you weren't even aware of using that "feature", and produced what seemed years of vulnerability reports as more and more products were added to the list as additional vulnerabilities were found.
I personally don't care for ribbons myself. However I found a lot of Non-Technical people love them. So I guess they are not all that bad, Most people don't like to dig deep into menus. If it isn't right there they won't go hunting.
Interesting, my anecdotal evidence indicates that NO ONE likes the ribbon, not a single person I know, and they include the entire gamut of computer literacy from 0 to guru. Not one. Seems people like text over hovering over each icon trying to figure out what they do. Should they spend enough time memorizing what each icon they need does, then those will be the only icons they ever use, so their capabilities with the product drop to LCD features (Save, Cut, Paste, Open...) with the rest unexplored because...quite frankly, who wants to hover over crap?
The menu depth was only 2 layers for more than 80% of the functionality, and it was pretty easy to figure out which menu silo held what you were looking for, as those silos are given some lip service to by the Ribbon. I especially loved the example given by a pro-Ribbon person: "I found Mail Merge in less than 3 min". Me - not using Office but extremely sporadically for the last 5 years open my new Office 2011 copy (yes, macs have Office 2011, it sucks, but it has menus!) and found said mail merge functionality and successfully used it in less than 8s. They didn't respond. In short - the Ribbon is a travesty of GUI design, and it will be remembered as such far into the future as something "you should not do".
After about twenty minutes of looking for how to save my work, I happened to notice out of the corner of my eye the screen on my netbook after I clicked on that button. To my surprise, there was a popup menu on the netbook display -- but it didn't appear via VNC.
A button with no information about what it does, that opens a special window that won't display on a remote display, is just nonsense.
No surprise there - there's about 5 different window components you can use in Win7, IIRC (number might be 4 or 6, I would't be on the exact number) which have varying features and capabilities. Is it stupid? Yes. Klunky? Yes. Fixable? Of course. Will it be? No.
Given that - is it surprising that there are things that VNC and the like fail to display? How many edge cases can you run against and test? Especially when those test cases may use entirely different paths through the OS to render items, some ages old, other new and in an entirely different subsystem.
So, given the number of liars, crazy people, and otherwise sane people who can have hallucinations or experiences they can't otherwise explain, it seems likely that the majority of UFO sightings (of alien origin anyway) and religious experiences are explainable that way. Even if there are real ones, they would be drowned out from the noise from all the fake ones.
You left out gullible children who will believe pretty much anything told them, from hiccups shorten your life to stepping on a crack will break your morther's back and more. Ever watch even "adults" avoid cracks in sidewalks as they walk? It's pretty darn amusing when you think about it.
Look where?
If you think a long dead pre-human is a bona fide god, you have an incredibly low threshold for divinity, so low as to be meaningless and worthless...
Perhaps that was the point?
yet are just as certain that God doesn't exist, despite witnesses to the contrary.
Certainty is hard to come by but we can probably agree at least that many gods don't exist, despite witnesses to the contrary. I'm pretty convinced that Caligula did, but not any more.
"When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours" - Stephen Roberts