I seem to recall this has been predicted many many times in lots of different movies from the 50's. And they normally started out like this. A few sightings of unexpected animals in areas that are radioactive, then a farmer and his cows go missing followed by a few teenagers having a party late at night at the beach. This is normally followed by the local mayor ignoring the surviving teenagers and insisting on holding the founders day picnic regardless of the fantastic stories of 30 foot tall wild boars. It all ends badly for the idiot mayor but the good looking teenagers manage to survive while the cruel ones and the ones having casual sex get killed in various gruesome ways by the 30 foot tall wild boars.
Windows stops running when it is EOLed? Who would have thunk it!
You will still be able to run Windows after it is EOLed. You just won't have to do any more patches for it. Just make sure you have a good firewall in front of it and use virus protection. Of course one good side effect of it being EOLed is that the virus writers will move on to the new OSes. Come to think of it in 2010 running Windows XP or 2000 may be the safest thing you can do besides switching to Linux, OSX, Solaris, or BSD.
You hit the nail on the head. Microsoft has been showing signs of a company that is past its prime and on the way down. Vista will seal the deal with its slow uptake and possible out right refusal by corporate customers. The past year or two they pushed some special dividends to allow share holders to extract some money. They will continue to do this over the next few years. Note that inertia will continue to carry Microsoft for many years to come. Just like it took a couple of decades for AT&T to dwindle down to the point that it was bought out by SBC. The downward spiral has started, the only real question is how fast will Microsoft plummet?
Re:Vista will dominate, maybe, maybe not
on
How Vista Disappoints
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
From what has been described so far there does not appear to be any major features that will get the corporate world to jump on the upgrade bandwagon for Vista. If anything there are features that will cost a lot to use if you do upgrade. Many many companies will opt to continue to use XP for most of their systems for some time to come. Unless Microsoft can give corporate users a solid business reason to spend millions upgrading there won't be as big an uptake as Microsoft is hoping. The product has been delayed repeatedly, features have been cut, and there are viable alternatives available. As another writer wrote in another thread the reasons for the delay may be due to the software assurance deals they managed to get many many corporate users to sign up for a few years ago. Now that they have delayed the release of Vista long enough for those contracts to expire they can release the new version and charge those companies again. If they fall for it a second time shame on them. They deserve to through away that money on something that is not going to provide any real benefit to the end users. Eye candy is not a valid business reason to upgrade OS and hardware.
Most likely the biggest market for Vista will be cosumers buying new systems from the likes of Dell or HP which will bundle the new Vista OS with the hardware. They won't have a choice. Unless those vendors continue to sell lower priced systems with XP and reserve Vista for the high end systems which are apparently is needed to see all the eye candy.
Do you really think that this would be rolled out with strong end-to-end cryptography?
Not really. I suspect it will be like most other schemes they implement, weak cryptography if any. Just like all the crap they did with cell phones and other things over the years. It costs them to much to do it right so they opt for the quick and cheap solution. And if they do happen to use some reasonably strong encryption to try to prevent people from accessing the data we can start a distributed project to crack the encryption. A few hundred thousand computers cranking on the problem for a few months should do the job. And once cracked it is open for business as usual. If that does not work then we go back to the hardware hacks to get the signal out of an existing box then process it as we wish.
Having worked for a satellite tv provider, I can tell you that this is *very* unlikely to happen. It is the content providers, not the cable companies that are trying to prevent the unbundling of channels. Disney, Viacom and the others use their main channels (ESPN, MTV, etc) to force the broadcasters to also carry ESPN: The Ocho and VH1:More Crap bands with One Hit, etc. The providers know that they could never get many to order 150+ channels when most people are only going to watch maybe 5-10 channels.
So they provide bundles of channels. Either way they end up charging more for what we get today. That extra money gets sent back to the networks to replace revenue lost from decreased ad revenue. Mind you the ads would still be there but they could not charge as much once most of the consumers are using DVRs to skip the commercials. With my current setup I skip over channels I don't watch. Never see them in the line up. I even have zap2it tailored to eliminate the channels I don't watch so they are not even in the guide listings when I check that.
I know I have a better chance at winning the lottery than for the networks to realize that placing horrendous restrictions on their content will eventually drive the consumers away. It may even drive more people to read books.
The digital stream will soon enough be off-limits to hobbyist projects like mythtv etc.
And you think that will stop people? When are they going to outlaw soldering irons? Or compilers? Someone somewhere will figure out how to access the data being transmitted. It has been proven time and again. It may take a little time to figure out but someone always does. Look at the DVD encryption. That did not take very long at all to break.
I think what will happen is that the networks and others in that business will try very hard to get laws passed to make it illeagal, but in the long run those same laws will be struck down. What will happen is that to implement some of these schemes they would need everyone to turn in their current electronics for new stuff which contains hardware designed to allow the networks to keep control of the content broadcast. That is not going to happen quickly or at all. Can you imagine the backlash to turning off broadcast TV to the masses? Instead of sitting in front of their TVs at home they would be out roaming the streets rioting. Bread and circuses. Welfare for the bread, TV for the circuses. The next decade of two will be very interesting to see what the networks try. In the end we will have DVRs and there will be few restrictions on the content being broadcast.
The problem is irrelevant commercials or poorly made commercials.
Isn't that an oxymoron? All commercials are irrelevant. The last time I saw any commercials (mythtv is great!) they looked more like spam than anything else. More viagra ads and their like than anything else. What could be more irrelevant?
Your post does have one good point, the ads pay for the shows. DVRs are a disruptive technology. It will force the makers of shows to come up with a different revenue model to pay for the shows. Unlike VCRs, DVRs allow the user to skip very quickly, usually 30 second intervals past commercials. With VCRs the user had to fast forward through the commercial such that the product ad would normally get its name on the screen for at least a few seconds. Plus many people did not bother to fast forward the commercials. With DVRs it is easier to jump past such tripe or even better automatically jump past such commercials.
The sad part is that I expect to see more product placement ads embedded in the shows. This will happen over time. I saw a brief blurb how this is already happening on a new series on HBO. This will eventually expand out to other shows on the regular networks.
This problem will take some time for the networks to recognize. DVRs haven not penetrated enough of the market yet to really generate panic for the advertisers. As to what the solution to this change will be? Hard to tell. I suspect that since most people get their signals from cable companies or dish networks that they will eventually go to an ala carte system where you sign up for particular channels. The cable company will then pay the network that provides the channel a percentage which would be based on number of customers that buy that channel. This in turn may (stress MAY) get the networks to produce better shows so more people will buy their channels. Those channels that don't produce content that generates significant sales would slowly die.
Of course the danger in this is that the shows produced would be aimed at the largest common demoninator of the population. Which could be bad if the vast majority does not like the shows you like.
Mythtv does a pretty good job. It records the entire show then runs a commercial flagging process that looks for blank frames, network bugs, and other methods to find the start and stop of a commercial. It stores this information in the database. You can then watch the show with auto skip enabled or you can disable it to watch all the commercials. Additional jobs can be run to strip out the commercials. I have not had a need to do that, the auto skip does well enough.
Have you been to a movie lately? They run about 20 minutes or more of commercials before the movie. Not just the previews they used to run, actual damn commercials. To say nothing of the DON'T USER YOUR CELL PHONE bits.
We should all get behind this and get the networks to start using this system as soon as possible! Has no one else realized that if they embed flags in the broadcast that indicate when a commercial starts and stops that those same flags can be used to AUTOMATICALLY SKIP those same commercials? This will be a major boon to home built DVR systems.
I would acutally welcome such flags in programs. It will make it so much easier to detect and autoskip commercials in mythtv. Right now it is about 80% accurate in skipping commercials using the methods available. With actual flags in the broadcast this will be 100% effective. Very cool!
Just remember Stock only is money when you sell it. Before that it is just the current value of of it. Once you buy stock your money is gone. When you sell it again then you get what it is worth at the time back.
You are correct. Micrsoft sends out people that pitch what not yet available. Saw that back in the 90's when they came around to help solve a Microsoft Mail problem. They said that next year Exchange would fix everything that was wrong with Mail. We ended up putting about 38,000 users on Openmail. Which worked great, until HP made the deal with Microsoft to kill Openmail. Now that company is fighing problems with Exchange. Apparently Microsoft can't debug their own stuff, even with three dumps from the machine. Which BTW takes the system out of service impacting customers each time a dump is taken.
Let's hope Microsoft embraces and extends Linux sometime in the near future.
Please note: I have not used any of the systems listed. I built my own mythtv systems from scratch. Sometime in the future I plan to rebuild the mythtv boxes. I want to put together one big backend system with at least four tuners and then build a number of small diskless frontend systems. Currently I have two combo systems, frontend/backend, that use a single database and storage point. One system has a 1TB file system for storing video. Hoping to use some of the small EPIA systems for frontends.
I don't think the adoption of the new HDTV/HDDVDs will happen very quickly. The costs have to drop tremendously and there has to be a lot more content. And then there is the fact that a large part of the population gets "good enough" resolution from the existing equipment. Over time HD will eventually take over. But it will be a couple of decades at least. The DVD makers will continue to provide standard DVDs since the market will continue to sell many millions more of those than HDDVDs for some time to come.
Face it, most people get their video over cable lines now. While cable does offer some HD content, at additional cost, most of the content is standard definition. An expensive HD system would not provide much difference. As such there is nothing that compels the average user to upgrade, besides braging rights that they can watch a handful of shows at a higher resolution than their neighbors.
If you want to discuss the next disruptive technology then discuss DVR systems. They are available in both standard definition and HD. DVRs will eventually change the whole financial model of the networks. Commercials as we know them will eventually have to be replaced by a new revenue stream for the networks since DVRs will allow you to skip past commercials either manually, 30 seconds at a jump, or automatically the way mythtv does.
Mythtv has a distributed architecture. You can have multiple frontends viewing shows from the backend system and you can have multiple backend systems (additional tuner cards) that can record shows using the same database to store the information on the shows.
Been using a mythtv system for over a year now and it has worked great. As others have stated it changes the way you watch TV. And the auto-commercial skip features are pretty good.
I think you have it the wrong way around. If Linux does not have drivers for main stream hardware such as video cards and such, then linux will become irrelevant. If proprietary drivers for such cards were blocked from loading on the next kernel release you would be left with the crappy hardware you mentioned or you would switch to Windows which would have the drivers to support the hardware you want/need to run.
This whole argument of allowing/disallowing proprietary drivers is more of a religious war than anything else. You have the FSF on one side frothing at the mouth over it trying to push their political agenda and on the other side you have users that just want to use their machines. The companies providing the proprietary drivers are meeting a need for a very small part of the market. I am surprised they spend as much time on such drivers as they do. The return on investment has to be razor thin if it exists at all.
Ideology should not over rule technical decisions. Unfortunatly most companies make decisions on technology based on costs, politics, or which vendor gave them a coffe mug or t-shirt last.
There are going to be a number of benefits to global warming. We should embrace the change. Think about all the opportunities. Construction companies specializing in flood control walls and pumps. And with the melting of major ice sheets and glaciers there is the possibility of discovery of lost cities and other archaeological artifacts and fossils. And don't forget all the additional water front property and the new resorts that will be available.
The scariest part of your post is that there appear to be 23 people for every tax payer. That is crazy, but probably true in the US.
You forgot the 22 million illegal aliens in the country. They typically don't pay taxes. So they account for a large part of the number of people that don't pay.
Actually the future of war will be rooms full of teenagers remotely controlling thousands of semi autonomous vehicles, ground, sea, and air, to achieve victory on the battle field. Ender's Game http://www.ender.com/ender/ describes such a future.
Of course the real reason for developing such robots will initially be to reduce the number of troops needed to support the front line troops. Typically it requires a large number of support troops for each combat troop on the front line. By reducing the number of support troops needed you free up people that can be put on the front line. This will become a bigger issue as fewer people are opting to volunteer for duty. After that we start pushing AI enabled vehicles directly into combat. The big issue with doing that is how do you clearly identify an enemy target? With the kind of wars being fought today you can not specify a particular uniform as a target. And you don't want one of these vehicles to go off on your own troops in the field. The simple solution is to use these as area denial weapons, kind of like smart mines. Instead of lying inert in the ground like a typical mine these actively patrol and seach out targets in a defin ed area. Anything in the box is a target. Reminds of the movie Screamers http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/.
Ultimately though real boots will have to be put on the ground to take and hold an area.
Regardless of how many robots are deployed it will still require boots on the ground to take an area and hold. At least until we perfect AI as good as those used in BOLOs. http://users.stargate.net/~whkeith/htm/bolo.htm
And let's hope that the AI's we develop for such war machines are like those in the BOLO stories and not like Berserkers or those in the Terminator movies.
The point is that mucking around with the inner workings of the OS is BAD
Stated like you control and/or own the OS running on your machine. This is just another example showing how Microsoft feels they should be the ones to control your system. There are many examples of this. Patches for applications that change things in the core operating system are common. Why a patch for office should change things in the OS never made any sense. But then Micrsoft knows best.
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I seem to recall this has been predicted many many times in lots of different movies from the 50's. And they normally started out like this. A few sightings of unexpected animals in areas that are radioactive, then a farmer and his cows go missing followed by a few teenagers having a party late at night at the beach. This is normally followed by the local mayor ignoring the surviving teenagers and insisting on holding the founders day picnic regardless of the fantastic stories of 30 foot tall wild boars. It all ends badly for the idiot mayor but the good looking teenagers manage to survive while the cruel ones and the ones having casual sex get killed in various gruesome ways by the 30 foot tall wild boars.
You don't mean it? Do you really?
Windows stops running when it is EOLed? Who would have thunk it!
You will still be able to run Windows after it is EOLed. You just won't have to do any more patches for it. Just make sure you have a good firewall in front of it and use virus protection. Of course one good side effect of it being EOLed is that the virus writers will move on to the new OSes. Come to think of it in 2010 running Windows XP or 2000 may be the safest thing you can do besides switching to Linux, OSX, Solaris, or BSD.
You hit the nail on the head. Microsoft has been showing signs of a company that is past its prime and on the way down. Vista will seal the deal with its slow uptake and possible out right refusal by corporate customers. The past year or two they pushed some special dividends to allow share holders to extract some money. They will continue to do this over the next few years. Note that inertia will continue to carry Microsoft for many years to come. Just like it took a couple of decades for AT&T to dwindle down to the point that it was bought out by SBC. The downward spiral has started, the only real question is how fast will Microsoft plummet?
From what has been described so far there does not appear to be any major features that will get the corporate world to jump on the upgrade bandwagon for Vista. If anything there are features that will cost a lot to use if you do upgrade. Many many companies will opt to continue to use XP for most of their systems for some time to come. Unless Microsoft can give corporate users a solid business reason to spend millions upgrading there won't be as big an uptake as Microsoft is hoping. The product has been delayed repeatedly, features have been cut, and there are viable alternatives available. As another writer wrote in another thread the reasons for the delay may be due to the software assurance deals they managed to get many many corporate users to sign up for a few years ago. Now that they have delayed the release of Vista long enough for those contracts to expire they can release the new version and charge those companies again. If they fall for it a second time shame on them. They deserve to through away that money on something that is not going to provide any real benefit to the end users. Eye candy is not a valid business reason to upgrade OS and hardware.
Most likely the biggest market for Vista will be cosumers buying new systems from the likes of Dell or HP which will bundle the new Vista OS with the hardware. They won't have a choice. Unless those vendors continue to sell lower priced systems with XP and reserve Vista for the high end systems which are apparently is needed to see all the eye candy.
Do you really think that this would be rolled out with strong end-to-end cryptography?
Not really. I suspect it will be like most other schemes they implement, weak cryptography if any. Just like all the crap they did with cell phones and other things over the years. It costs them to much to do it right so they opt for the quick and cheap solution. And if they do happen to use some reasonably strong encryption to try to prevent people from accessing the data we can start a distributed project to crack the encryption. A few hundred thousand computers cranking on the problem for a few months should do the job. And once cracked it is open for business as usual. If that does not work then we go back to the hardware hacks to get the signal out of an existing box then process it as we wish.
Having worked for a satellite tv provider, I can tell you that this is *very* unlikely to happen. It is the content providers, not the cable companies that are trying to prevent the unbundling of channels. Disney, Viacom and the others use their main channels (ESPN, MTV, etc) to force the broadcasters to also carry ESPN: The Ocho and VH1:More Crap bands with One Hit, etc. The providers know that they could never get many to order 150+ channels when most people are only going to watch maybe 5-10 channels.
So they provide bundles of channels. Either way they end up charging more for what we get today. That extra money gets sent back to the networks to replace revenue lost from decreased ad revenue. Mind you the ads would still be there but they could not charge as much once most of the consumers are using DVRs to skip the commercials. With my current setup I skip over channels I don't watch. Never see them in the line up. I even have zap2it tailored to eliminate the channels I don't watch so they are not even in the guide listings when I check that.
I know I have a better chance at winning the lottery than for the networks to realize that placing horrendous restrictions on their content will eventually drive the consumers away. It may even drive more people to read books.
The digital stream will soon enough be off-limits to hobbyist projects like mythtv etc.
And you think that will stop people? When are they going to outlaw soldering irons? Or compilers? Someone somewhere will figure out how to access the data being transmitted. It has been proven time and again. It may take a little time to figure out but someone always does. Look at the DVD encryption. That did not take very long at all to break.
I think what will happen is that the networks and others in that business will try very hard to get laws passed to make it illeagal, but in the long run those same laws will be struck down. What will happen is that to implement some of these schemes they would need everyone to turn in their current electronics for new stuff which contains hardware designed to allow the networks to keep control of the content broadcast. That is not going to happen quickly or at all. Can you imagine the backlash to turning off broadcast TV to the masses? Instead of sitting in front of their TVs at home they would be out roaming the streets rioting. Bread and circuses. Welfare for the bread, TV for the circuses. The next decade of two will be very interesting to see what the networks try. In the end we will have DVRs and there will be few restrictions on the content being broadcast.
The problem is irrelevant commercials or poorly made commercials.
Isn't that an oxymoron? All commercials are irrelevant. The last time I saw any commercials (mythtv is great!) they looked more like spam than anything else. More viagra ads and their like than anything else. What could be more irrelevant?
Your post does have one good point, the ads pay for the shows. DVRs are a disruptive technology. It will force the makers of shows to come up with a different revenue model to pay for the shows. Unlike VCRs, DVRs allow the user to skip very quickly, usually 30 second intervals past commercials. With VCRs the user had to fast forward through the commercial such that the product ad would normally get its name on the screen for at least a few seconds. Plus many people did not bother to fast forward the commercials. With DVRs it is easier to jump past such tripe or even better automatically jump past such commercials.
The sad part is that I expect to see more product placement ads embedded in the shows. This will happen over time. I saw a brief blurb how this is already happening on a new series on HBO. This will eventually expand out to other shows on the regular networks.
This problem will take some time for the networks to recognize. DVRs haven not penetrated enough of the market yet to really generate panic for the advertisers. As to what the solution to this change will be? Hard to tell. I suspect that since most people get their signals from cable companies or dish networks that they will eventually go to an ala carte system where you sign up for particular channels. The cable company will then pay the network that provides the channel a percentage which would be based on number of customers that buy that channel. This in turn may (stress MAY) get the networks to produce better shows so more people will buy their channels. Those channels that don't produce content that generates significant sales would slowly die.
Of course the danger in this is that the shows produced would be aimed at the largest common demoninator of the population. Which could be bad if the vast majority does not like the shows you like.
Mythtv does a pretty good job. It records the entire show then runs a commercial flagging process that looks for blank frames, network bugs, and other methods to find the start and stop of a commercial. It stores this information in the database. You can then watch the show with auto skip enabled or you can disable it to watch all the commercials. Additional jobs can be run to strip out the commercials. I have not had a need to do that, the auto skip does well enough.
Have you been to a movie lately? They run about 20 minutes or more of commercials before the movie. Not just the previews they used to run, actual damn commercials. To say nothing of the DON'T USER YOUR CELL PHONE bits.
the flags are in the live broadcast
We should all get behind this and get the networks to start using this system as soon as possible! Has no one else realized that if they embed flags in the broadcast that indicate when a commercial starts and stops that those same flags can be used to AUTOMATICALLY SKIP those same commercials? This will be a major boon to home built DVR systems.
So get out there and support this technology!
I would acutally welcome such flags in programs. It will make it so much easier to detect and autoskip commercials in mythtv. Right now it is about 80% accurate in skipping commercials using the methods available. With actual flags in the broadcast this will be 100% effective. Very cool!
Just remember Stock only is money when you sell it. Before that it is just the current value of of it. Once you buy stock your money is gone. When you sell it again then you get what it is worth at the time back.
Just like a lottery ticket.
You are correct. Micrsoft sends out people that pitch what not yet available. Saw that back in the 90's when they came around to help solve a Microsoft Mail problem. They said that next year Exchange would fix everything that was wrong with Mail. We ended up putting about 38,000 users on Openmail. Which worked great, until HP made the deal with Microsoft to kill Openmail. Now that company is fighing problems with Exchange. Apparently Microsoft can't debug their own stuff, even with three dumps from the machine. Which BTW takes the system out of service impacting customers each time a dump is taken.
Let's hope Microsoft embraces and extends Linux sometime in the near future.
Please note: I have not used any of the systems listed. I built my own mythtv systems from scratch. Sometime in the future I plan to rebuild the mythtv boxes. I want to put together one big backend system with at least four tuners and then build a number of small diskless frontend systems. Currently I have two combo systems, frontend/backend, that use a single database and storage point. One system has a 1TB file system for storing video. Hoping to use some of the small EPIA systems for frontends.
Prebuilt mythtv systems are available from several sources:
G god2CimAA
http://www.monolithmc.com/?gclid=CMLM0b3atoQCFQZL
http://store.interact-tv.com/store/
http://www.hackmyth.com/
And building your own is not that difficult or expensive.
I don't think the adoption of the new HDTV/HDDVDs will happen very quickly. The costs have to drop tremendously and there has to be a lot more content. And then there is the fact that a large part of the population gets "good enough" resolution from the existing equipment. Over time HD will eventually take over. But it will be a couple of decades at least. The DVD makers will continue to provide standard DVDs since the market will continue to sell many millions more of those than HDDVDs for some time to come.
Face it, most people get their video over cable lines now. While cable does offer some HD content, at additional cost, most of the content is standard definition. An expensive HD system would not provide much difference. As such there is nothing that compels the average user to upgrade, besides braging rights that they can watch a handful of shows at a higher resolution than their neighbors.
If you want to discuss the next disruptive technology then discuss DVR systems. They are available in both standard definition and HD. DVRs will eventually change the whole financial model of the networks. Commercials as we know them will eventually have to be replaced by a new revenue stream for the networks since DVRs will allow you to skip past commercials either manually, 30 seconds at a jump, or automatically the way mythtv does.
Mythtv has a distributed architecture. You can have multiple frontends viewing shows from the backend system and you can have multiple backend systems (additional tuner cards) that can record shows using the same database to store the information on the shows.
Been using a mythtv system for over a year now and it has worked great. As others have stated it changes the way you watch TV. And the auto-commercial skip features are pretty good.
I think you have it the wrong way around. If Linux does not have drivers for main stream hardware such as video cards and such, then linux will become irrelevant. If proprietary drivers for such cards were blocked from loading on the next kernel release you would be left with the crappy hardware you mentioned or you would switch to Windows which would have the drivers to support the hardware you want/need to run.
This whole argument of allowing/disallowing proprietary drivers is more of a religious war than anything else. You have the FSF on one side frothing at the mouth over it trying to push their political agenda and on the other side you have users that just want to use their machines. The companies providing the proprietary drivers are meeting a need for a very small part of the market. I am surprised they spend as much time on such drivers as they do. The return on investment has to be razor thin if it exists at all.
Ideology should not over rule technical decisions. Unfortunatly most companies make decisions on technology based on costs, politics, or which vendor gave them a coffe mug or t-shirt last.
There are going to be a number of benefits to global warming. We should embrace the change. Think about all the opportunities. Construction companies specializing in flood control walls and pumps. And with the melting of major ice sheets and glaciers there is the possibility of discovery of lost cities and other archaeological artifacts and fossils. And don't forget all the additional water front property and the new resorts that will be available.
The scariest part of your post is that there appear to be 23 people for every tax payer. That is crazy, but probably true in the US.
You forgot the 22 million illegal aliens in the country. They typically don't pay taxes. So they account for a large part of the number of people that don't pay.
Actually the future of war will be rooms full of teenagers remotely controlling thousands of semi autonomous vehicles, ground, sea, and air, to achieve victory on the battle field. Ender's Game http://www.ender.com/ender/ describes such a future.
Of course the real reason for developing such robots will initially be to reduce the number of troops needed to support the front line troops. Typically it requires a large number of support troops for each combat troop on the front line. By reducing the number of support troops needed you free up people that can be put on the front line. This will become a bigger issue as fewer people are opting to volunteer for duty. After that we start pushing AI enabled vehicles directly into combat. The big issue with doing that is how do you clearly identify an enemy target? With the kind of wars being fought today you can not specify a particular uniform as a target. And you don't want one of these vehicles to go off on your own troops in the field. The simple solution is to use these as area denial weapons, kind of like smart mines. Instead of lying inert in the ground like a typical mine these actively patrol and seach out targets in a defin ed area. Anything in the box is a target. Reminds of the movie Screamers http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114367/.
Ultimately though real boots will have to be put on the ground to take and hold an area.
Regardless of how many robots are deployed it will still require boots on the ground to take an area and hold. At least until we perfect AI as good as those used in BOLOs. http://users.stargate.net/~whkeith/htm/bolo.htm
And let's hope that the AI's we develop for such war machines are like those in the BOLO stories and not like Berserkers or those in the Terminator movies.
The point is that mucking around with the inner workings of the OS is BAD
Stated like you control and/or own the OS running on your machine. This is just another example showing how Microsoft feels they should be the ones to control your system. There are many examples of this. Patches for applications that change things in the core operating system are common. Why a patch for office should change things in the OS never made any sense. But then Micrsoft knows best.
Why?
Why?
and the ever so popular, Why?