The thing that annoys me about the anti-security theater rant, is that in fact there is a non-zero value even to security theater.
Yes you CAN get past screen checkpoints as we have them. But it does not mean we should give them up totally. Even just a veneer of security can be enough to dissuade a lot of people from trying something, or to make them nervous enough they screw up.
I call B.S. on this.
1) Every time I have to deal with the inane TSA checkpoints, I amuse myself by thinking of the myriad ways in which a malicious person could still blow-up a plane without setting off any alarms. Of course, I'm not such a malicious person, but thinking about it is certainly more amusing than thinking of nothing.
2) If a terrorist really wants to blow up a plane, ineffective security won't stop him unless he's stupid. For example: you're allowed 3 2-ounce containers of liquid. Such containers are typically not checked, so long as they're the right size and number. Therefore: container 1=nitric acid; container 2=glycerin; container 3=nothing important. Bathroom break, anyone? I'm sure an actual terrorist (with whatever training those organizations give) could pull off something like this.
Even if that method wouldn't work, I'm sure there are plenty of other things that would. A determined terrorist could easily bring things aboard to cause problems. (A recent Slashdot article even outlined how to hide weapons from the nude-o-matic scanners...) Security theater might keep honest people honest, but those aren't the people you need to worry about!
My point is not that Iran is necessarily the problem it's claimed to be; rather, my point is that any problem on the other side of the world--Iran or otherwise--will probably not get any serious attention from those who stand to lose money/profits by acting on that problem. If it's financially better to ignore it, then most business owners will do so.
There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
Sorry to rain on your tirade, but I must point out that you have altogether too much faith in the ability of individuals to put global political concerns above personal ones.
The average person has much more pressing matters in life than global politics. Such examples of these are getting enough money to pay rent/mortgage; buying low (i.e. outside the U.S.) and selling high so their businesses get richer/stay afloat; etc. If they can accomplish these goals better by doing business with Iran, then by all means, they usually will--and typically for good (economic) reason. Also, certain high-demand, high-value products are produced almost exclusively in Iran--such as ~90% of the world's saffron--the most valuable spice in the world, and an important ingredient in many of the world's culinary traditions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffron
I would really like it if a "free market" approach to global politics would work as advertised (by you and certain others), but all the businesspeople I know happen to be extremely concerned with their own bottom lines, and not nearly as concerned with what's happening on the other side of the world, unless it's going to cost them something.
I wish I had more faith in the non-greediness (or lack of self-concern) of most people ("when push comes to shove"), but reality tends to contradict such faith violently.
"The telescope is so sensitive that it could even pick up television signals from distant worlds — something that might aid in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence."
I suspect that the intelligence of any society goes briefly upward upon inventing a television...and sharply downward as soon as something is actually broadcast to it.
I also suppose, however, that our own notion of what constitutes a "thinking man" ("sapiens") species prevents us from lowering the requirement of what's called "intelligent," so as to ensure that we qualify to be discovered by any TV-watching extraterrestrials who might care to share their soap operas with us. Hmmmm...that would take satellite TV to a whole new quantum of junk delivery...
I, for one, would relish the opportunity to simply PROVE that I can do the job, rather than trying to schmooze the interviewers into liking me more. In my experience, those who are great at schmoozing interviewers are also the sorts of people that I hate having as co-workers: the ladder-climbing, butt-kissing, co-worker abusing, sorts who are more interested in making those in charge like them (for promotions, raises, etc.) than actually doing a good job. Of course, if they can take credit for other people's work, such people are apt to do so--which, in my mind, makes them the worst employees to have, since they can't make themselves look good based on merit.
If they can make these simulations accurate to the jobs at hand, then the more "human intervention" they take out of the interview process, the better, I say.
I've recently been reading Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin, a world-renowned animal sciences expert, and I came upon one of the several places in this book wherein she lambasts short-sighted, "single-trait" breeding programs. (She lambasts programs that breed for only a handful of traits nearly as much.) These programs have sought such worthy goals as producing animals that eat less, grow faster/larger, breed more rapidly, etc. The problem is that every time these companies/industries have sought to enhance one or a few positive traits, they've ended-up "breaking" several others, unexpectedly.
For example: in the process of breeding chickens for faster/larger growth and lower food consumption, they've managed to produce something that nature would never allow: roosters that rape/murder chickens. Since this happened over the course of years-long breeding programs, the chicken farmers of companies participating in this program began to see roosters that rape and kill chickens (because they don't do the mating rituals necessary for the chickens to co-operate) began to see this behavior as "normal." Likewise, the large, white chickens that we all love for their large production of breast meat just happened to become neurotic--ramming themselves against their cages; pulling out feathers, etc.--and unable to stand or walk--even over to their food to eat. The neurosis, as it turns out, is a result of a lack of melatonin in the brain, which happens because white chickens (for unknown reasons) require less food to grow larger and/or produce more eggs. The legs had become genetically broken because they had grown too large (probably among other reasons).
My point is that the more we attempt to use the "scientific method" in the way of isolating variables, the more we find out--often tragically--that we simply CAN'T account for all the variables, and utterly screw things up by trying. We do, in essence, what nature is far to smart to do: we break evolutionary process, etc., with our hubristic idea that we somehow "know better."
Don't get me wrong; we should, of course, keep trying to "get it right," but we probably never will if we continue thinking that we know so much more than we do. Having been raised by a world-renowned scientist, myself, and having read and heard about the scientific community, as a whole (along with the all the money/politics that so often ruins it), I can't help but notice that many so-called scientists make vastly baseless assumptions about what they know, and then go on to "prove" that they have all the answers about something or other--only to have it shown later that they got it all wrong, but were too proud to admit it.
If we really want to move forward, scientifically, we need to dramatically shift the paradigm of what is considered "science," away from this "controlled environment"/"isolating variables" model, and toward something a little more open-minded, and less hubristic.
For further reading: look up the "behaviorism" research performed in the psychology field, circa 1950-1979. While we've (largely) stopped performing such brutish and unproductive experiments in that field, science has kept the model of controlling all the variables and denying that things would work differently in nature.
I'm pretty tired of American corporations who like to pretend American law applies to the whole world. They have no right to ask a New Zeeland company to delete a Swedish users files, just because the files happen to be illegal for Americans.
A thousand times this. It's about time the rest of the world stands up and tells the Americans to go fuck themselves.
I'm and American, and even I agree with this. A lot of other Americans (though, not the extremely rich ones, typically) feel the same way.
What makes people think that typing commands will somehow be more "user-friendly" for novices/Windows users than clicking on stuff? What happens when somebody types in Acrobat, or PDF Reader and doesn't figure out that it's under "Evince?" Sure, you can rename stuff, tag it, etc., but you're bound to miss something that users will try to type in when they want to access a given program. A well-organized menu system makes this simpler: you want to open a document--XPS, PDF, ODT, whatever--you go to the "Office" menu and click on stuff until you get what you want; then you know. If you have to type stuff--or goodness forbid, deal with a voice recognition program--there's no telling how long it'll take you to realize that you need to type/say "LibreOffice" when you want to type a Word document.
I don't like to be a nay-sayer about software advancements (though I find that this isn't "advancement..."), but in this case, I'll make an exception: it's crap! Who comes up with this stuff?!
I wish Ubuntu (and the rest of the Linux GUI world) would quit trying to re-invent everything with the user interface, and put some long-term polish on something that already works. Gnome 2 had finally become pretty darned usable when--oops!--you can't use Gnome 2 anymore! You have to use Gnome 3 (where half your stuff doesn't work, doesn't appear in a menu, or is generally very counter-intuitive to access and use in any case), or Unity (which is no better about all that, but also has all of about 1 year of code maturity and bug fixes).
Why, oh WHY can't I just go back to the fully-functional Gnome 2, where the System Menu was in the "System" menu, rather than being a bunch of random junk in the "other" category? Why must I now avoid the upper-left corner of the screen when I want to work with windows I already have open? Why the heck must I now spend time typing AND clicking on stuff, rather than spending the 3 seconds it used to take to open applications (or hitting Alt-F2 and just typing--with command completion)? And sure Compiz and such are pretty, but they're certainly not stable enough to be MANDATORY (in Unity, at least)! My desktop environment must crash at least twice every time I log on, now, and much more than that unless the settings are "just so."
Sometimes, I think that the biggest flaw in "Linux on the Desktop" is that the community is overly enthusiastic about trying new stuff, rather than refining stuff that already works pretty well (but so far, none of it as well as certain proprietary GUIs). Can't we, for once, "KISS?" (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
Caveat: X needs to be replaced. It was really well-suited for typical use-cases of the 1970s.
*sigh*
I'm done. You're now free to flame me for being heretical.
$98 Million...I could swear I've seen a video of some DIY hacker building one for like $30. Maybe a REALLY BIG one would cost around $2,000. What, on earth, could they be spending this much cash on?!
R&D is great and all, but this seems pretty ridiculous--even if it is the US Govt.'s status quo.
This reminds me very much of the WebTV debacle in the 1990s. Same basic idea, but with fewer bells-and-whistles. I don't see how this will offer much/anything that isn't currently available via the Internet, or via a standard TV with an XBox or similar plugged-in and connected to the network.
Yes, this new iteration seems to favor the integration of tablets, smartphones, etc., but if you have a(n expensive) TV in your living room, why on earth would you watch your shows on a tablet or phone?! I see this as being not "the next tech war," so much as "the next tech war that failed."
Maybe I'm too old-fashioned or something, but this seems really silly to me, until the media companies start taking a more "Internet" (read: commercial-free, choose-your-own-content, etc.) approach to television. Of course, I haven't turned my TV on to watch a show in about 3+ years...because I can get them all online with less garbage interlaced therein.
Notably, MS now puts out a free security suite (Microsoft Security Essentials) that's arguably better than most/all the other free ones out there, at present. Of course, this will not be the case for long, as seems to be the status quo amongst anti-malware vendors.
I agree that it's irresponsible to choose a browser for us, but leave security to the computer-illiterate masses. I also agree that they have legal reasons to shift the liability for their very insecure OS elsewhere.
I've been expecting something like this for years, now, and I'm a bit pleased that somebody is finally calling Symantec on their scare tactics. Pretty-much since Norton was sold to them and became Symantec Anti-Virus (or whatever they call it these days), their products have been crap....Expensive crap....Expensive crap that scares its users into paying more....For products that slow things down and don't generally work.
+1 to all of the above (in the immediate parent comment). I don't think I could have said it all better, myself.
Why bother running on the "upgrade treadmill" when it costs a ton, and in almost every case, does little or nothing to benefit you that the previous version does not? Yes, 7 is slightly more secure than XP. It's also a heck of a lot slower (more resource-intensive). It runs DirectX 11 and has decent 64-bit support--which are the only reasons I use it (albeit an "unofficial" edition...).
Even if I did much more than games on my Windows partition, if I could do everything on XP that I would do on 7--which may be the case, if DX11 is back-ported, and if I didn't need 64-bit support--why would I find it personally profitable to spend over $100 to "upgrade?" (What, exactly, is being upgraded for me, in particular?)
I see these statements quoted in the article summary as semi-blatant attempts to simply get people to give MS their money (i.e. buy their product), and as such are much more concerned with marketing than with usability for the users. (And that 11% probably IS just because people bought new PCs and XP doesn't come with them anymore. That prediction of market share change is something MS has a LOT of control over, so if they CAN'T predict what's going to happen, based on computer sales numbers, they're simply inept.)
Now, if only the Linux desktop environments didn't keep getting re-invented (Gnome 3, KDE 4, Unity, etc.), we'd be making (somewhat) more progress away from Windows, in general...but I digress.
Remember when businesses had to make better products than their competitors in order to compete, instead of continually suing them? Yeah...that was nice.
I've got to wonder why Bill Gates put Balmer in charge, to begin with. Could he have picked a worse candidate? I can't help but think that some office accountant who actually does real work on a computer (rather than just imagining how to change everything, and make it "prettier") would be a much better choice.
I changed the search settings in IE today in Windows 7 clean install, and I can verify that if you want to change your IE search engine from Bing to anything useful, you have to scroll SIDEWAYS (?!) through pages and pages of junk (specialized search engines that help you find stuff you don't care to find in any case) in order to find a real search engine of any kind--and that's even including things like Yahoo. If you want to find Google, you have to be VERY diligent, or use the tiny "Search" box above the list, then NOT select Google News, Google Shopping, etc., but rather the actual google.com search engine that's buried in the middle of them.
I believe that this is largely a symptom of our government and culture demanding short-term "results" with regard to anything that we spend money on. This is fine for consumer goods (buying a computer or gadget at a store, for instance), but in science--where is where innovation seems to take place pretty exclusively--these huge, "going-to-the-moon-type" achievements are built on many, many smaller achievements that, themselves came out of many, many failed attempts at making something work.
We didn't develop our space program just because we succeeded once, in a really big way, but because we developed thousands of supportive technologies in the decades and centuries preceding that achievement. (We couldn't have reached the moon without the Greeks keeping track of star movements, which led to telescopes; we needed an industrialized society, which required the assembly line, and the invention of gears, levers, engines, etc. before that. The list of such examples is much long to post here.)
Essentially, without spending a lot of time and money on things that *might* work, but also *might not* work, we couldn't have gotten as far as we are. We could have gotten *much* farther if we'd not adopted this ideal of having every avenue of research pan-out either in the short term, or in the foreseeable long term. Similarly, Thomas Edison tried literally hundreds of different materials to make his "electronic lighting device"--while everybody told him he was wasting time and money--before he invented the light bulb. In our present investment/research culture, funding would have been pulled at around filament attempt number 20, because it was getting too "costly." Of course, the multi-billion-dollar industry of electric lighting would not exist right now if it had been.
This short-sightedness, which seems to be based around a buy-(research)-and-receive-(results/products) business-like culture that will ultimately see us (the USA) left in the dust by other nations that are willing to risk significant loss in return for possible gains down the road. I dearly hope that we end this trip-toward-obsoletion before the USA becomes synonymous with a lesson about short-sighted greed and instant gratification.
Just my 2 cents (that I personally think are worth more...of course).
(I realize this article is referring to stereoscopic 3D, but this is as good as any chance for me to rant about this.)
Does anybody else think, like I do, that they completely ruined Super Mario Brothers by going 3D? I don't think they've come out with a truly good 3D version of a classic platformer...ever. Maybe there's some exception I don't know about, but I think they ruined most console gaming when it went 3D.
Don't get me wrong; I love games like Crysis 2, Doom 3, Half-Life, etc., but we've really lost something by deciding that EVERYTHING has to be 3D.
While I don't honestly think they're in the same category, since they -were- lumped together (which probably says something about a shortage of actual gamers among the judges), I suppose they had to pick one or the other...
Fallout was a much more complex game, with a lot less linearity, and more options for the player. In that sense, I can see how most would find it to be more entertaining, and possibly more artful. On the other hand, Myst was absolutely DRIVEN by the art (watch the original developers' commentary if you don't believe me--I don't think any but a VERY dedicated artist would blow bubbles into the bottom of a toilet bowl through a straw, but for a singular dedication to artistically stunning sound effects), so I think that for those who DID really delve in and enjoy playing it, it was far more artful than Fallout 3. There just weren't as many such people as there were for Fallout 3.
So far, the original Myst has lasted the test of time better than any made-for-3D game ever has (if you recall, 3D was added some years after Myst's sequels started coming out), and seems to have a much stronger cult following, to boot. In 10-15 years, I think that we'll just look at Fallout 3 as a lesser shadow of Fallout 5/6/7 (or whatever they get named). Admittedly, I've played a lot more 3D stuff in recent years than I have of classics like Myst and Deus Ex, but I can't remember half of the newer games I've played, and will probably cease caring about the others before long, when new-and-better/prettier games come out...but since Fallout 3 is a heck-of-a-lot more popular now, I'm sure that had something to do with the judges' reasons for putting it over Myst....Not that they should have been in the same category, anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't put laser weapons on ships! That'll make them easy pickings for sharks who wish to arm themselves!
The thing that annoys me about the anti-security theater rant, is that in fact there is a non-zero value even to security theater.
Yes you CAN get past screen checkpoints as we have them. But it does not mean we should give them up totally. Even just a veneer of security can be enough to dissuade a lot of people from trying something, or to make them nervous enough they screw up.
I call B.S. on this.
1) Every time I have to deal with the inane TSA checkpoints, I amuse myself by thinking of the myriad ways in which a malicious person could still blow-up a plane without setting off any alarms. Of course, I'm not such a malicious person, but thinking about it is certainly more amusing than thinking of nothing.
2) If a terrorist really wants to blow up a plane, ineffective security won't stop him unless he's stupid. For example: you're allowed 3 2-ounce containers of liquid. Such containers are typically not checked, so long as they're the right size and number. Therefore: container 1=nitric acid; container 2=glycerin; container 3=nothing important. Bathroom break, anyone? I'm sure an actual terrorist (with whatever training those organizations give) could pull off something like this.
Even if that method wouldn't work, I'm sure there are plenty of other things that would. A determined terrorist could easily bring things aboard to cause problems. (A recent Slashdot article even outlined how to hide weapons from the nude-o-matic scanners...) Security theater might keep honest people honest, but those aren't the people you need to worry about!
My point is not that Iran is necessarily the problem it's claimed to be; rather, my point is that any problem on the other side of the world--Iran or otherwise--will probably not get any serious attention from those who stand to lose money/profits by acting on that problem. If it's financially better to ignore it, then most business owners will do so.
There's a very democratic way to handle the decision of whether to apply sanctions on Iran or not - allow individual citizens and companies to decide whether they'll trade with Iran or not. If there is genuine moral outrage at the "evil" things Iran is doing, individuals will refuse to trade and will boycott or publically pressure firms who do.
Sorry to rain on your tirade, but I must point out that you have altogether too much faith in the ability of individuals to put global political concerns above personal ones.
The average person has much more pressing matters in life than global politics. Such examples of these are getting enough money to pay rent/mortgage; buying low (i.e. outside the U.S.) and selling high so their businesses get richer/stay afloat; etc. If they can accomplish these goals better by doing business with Iran, then by all means, they usually will--and typically for good (economic) reason. Also, certain high-demand, high-value products are produced almost exclusively in Iran--such as ~90% of the world's saffron--the most valuable spice in the world, and an important ingredient in many of the world's culinary traditions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffron
I would really like it if a "free market" approach to global politics would work as advertised (by you and certain others), but all the businesspeople I know happen to be extremely concerned with their own bottom lines, and not nearly as concerned with what's happening on the other side of the world, unless it's going to cost them something.
I wish I had more faith in the non-greediness (or lack of self-concern) of most people ("when push comes to shove"), but reality tends to contradict such faith violently.
Can I get a cell phone that works indoors, now?
I dare say, you took my comment entirely too seriously! ;-)
"The telescope is so sensitive that it could even pick up television signals from distant worlds — something that might aid in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence."
I suspect that the intelligence of any society goes briefly upward upon inventing a television...and sharply downward as soon as something is actually broadcast to it.
I also suppose, however, that our own notion of what constitutes a "thinking man" ("sapiens") species prevents us from lowering the requirement of what's called "intelligent," so as to ensure that we qualify to be discovered by any TV-watching extraterrestrials who might care to share their soap operas with us. Hmmmm...that would take satellite TV to a whole new quantum of junk delivery...
I, for one, would relish the opportunity to simply PROVE that I can do the job, rather than trying to schmooze the interviewers into liking me more. In my experience, those who are great at schmoozing interviewers are also the sorts of people that I hate having as co-workers: the ladder-climbing, butt-kissing, co-worker abusing, sorts who are more interested in making those in charge like them (for promotions, raises, etc.) than actually doing a good job. Of course, if they can take credit for other people's work, such people are apt to do so--which, in my mind, makes them the worst employees to have, since they can't make themselves look good based on merit.
If they can make these simulations accurate to the jobs at hand, then the more "human intervention" they take out of the interview process, the better, I say.
I've recently been reading Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin, a world-renowned animal sciences expert, and I came upon one of the several places in this book wherein she lambasts short-sighted, "single-trait" breeding programs. (She lambasts programs that breed for only a handful of traits nearly as much.) These programs have sought such worthy goals as producing animals that eat less, grow faster/larger, breed more rapidly, etc. The problem is that every time these companies/industries have sought to enhance one or a few positive traits, they've ended-up "breaking" several others, unexpectedly.
For example: in the process of breeding chickens for faster/larger growth and lower food consumption, they've managed to produce something that nature would never allow: roosters that rape/murder chickens. Since this happened over the course of years-long breeding programs, the chicken farmers of companies participating in this program began to see roosters that rape and kill chickens (because they don't do the mating rituals necessary for the chickens to co-operate) began to see this behavior as "normal." Likewise, the large, white chickens that we all love for their large production of breast meat just happened to become neurotic--ramming themselves against their cages; pulling out feathers, etc.--and unable to stand or walk--even over to their food to eat. The neurosis, as it turns out, is a result of a lack of melatonin in the brain, which happens because white chickens (for unknown reasons) require less food to grow larger and/or produce more eggs. The legs had become genetically broken because they had grown too large (probably among other reasons).
My point is that the more we attempt to use the "scientific method" in the way of isolating variables, the more we find out--often tragically--that we simply CAN'T account for all the variables, and utterly screw things up by trying. We do, in essence, what nature is far to smart to do: we break evolutionary process, etc., with our hubristic idea that we somehow "know better."
Don't get me wrong; we should, of course, keep trying to "get it right," but we probably never will if we continue thinking that we know so much more than we do. Having been raised by a world-renowned scientist, myself, and having read and heard about the scientific community, as a whole (along with the all the money/politics that so often ruins it), I can't help but notice that many so-called scientists make vastly baseless assumptions about what they know, and then go on to "prove" that they have all the answers about something or other--only to have it shown later that they got it all wrong, but were too proud to admit it.
If we really want to move forward, scientifically, we need to dramatically shift the paradigm of what is considered "science," away from this "controlled environment"/"isolating variables" model, and toward something a little more open-minded, and less hubristic.
For further reading: look up the "behaviorism" research performed in the psychology field, circa 1950-1979. While we've (largely) stopped performing such brutish and unproductive experiments in that field, science has kept the model of controlling all the variables and denying that things would work differently in nature.
I'm pretty tired of American corporations who like to pretend American law applies to the whole world. They have no right to ask a New Zeeland company to delete a Swedish users files, just because the files happen to be illegal for Americans.
A thousand times this. It's about time the rest of the world stands up and tells the Americans to go fuck themselves.
I'm and American, and even I agree with this. A lot of other Americans (though, not the extremely rich ones, typically) feel the same way.
...and another thing:
What makes people think that typing commands will somehow be more "user-friendly" for novices/Windows users than clicking on stuff? What happens when somebody types in Acrobat, or PDF Reader and doesn't figure out that it's under "Evince?" Sure, you can rename stuff, tag it, etc., but you're bound to miss something that users will try to type in when they want to access a given program. A well-organized menu system makes this simpler: you want to open a document--XPS, PDF, ODT, whatever--you go to the "Office" menu and click on stuff until you get what you want; then you know. If you have to type stuff--or goodness forbid, deal with a voice recognition program--there's no telling how long it'll take you to realize that you need to type/say "LibreOffice" when you want to type a Word document.
I don't like to be a nay-sayer about software advancements (though I find that this isn't "advancement..."), but in this case, I'll make an exception: it's crap! Who comes up with this stuff?!
I wish Ubuntu (and the rest of the Linux GUI world) would quit trying to re-invent everything with the user interface, and put some long-term polish on something that already works. Gnome 2 had finally become pretty darned usable when--oops!--you can't use Gnome 2 anymore! You have to use Gnome 3 (where half your stuff doesn't work, doesn't appear in a menu, or is generally very counter-intuitive to access and use in any case), or Unity (which is no better about all that, but also has all of about 1 year of code maturity and bug fixes).
Why, oh WHY can't I just go back to the fully-functional Gnome 2, where the System Menu was in the "System" menu, rather than being a bunch of random junk in the "other" category? Why must I now avoid the upper-left corner of the screen when I want to work with windows I already have open? Why the heck must I now spend time typing AND clicking on stuff, rather than spending the 3 seconds it used to take to open applications (or hitting Alt-F2 and just typing--with command completion)? And sure Compiz and such are pretty, but they're certainly not stable enough to be MANDATORY (in Unity, at least)! My desktop environment must crash at least twice every time I log on, now, and much more than that unless the settings are "just so."
Sometimes, I think that the biggest flaw in "Linux on the Desktop" is that the community is overly enthusiastic about trying new stuff, rather than refining stuff that already works pretty well (but so far, none of it as well as certain proprietary GUIs). Can't we, for once, "KISS?" (Keep It Simple, Stupid)
Caveat: X needs to be replaced. It was really well-suited for typical use-cases of the 1970s.
*sigh*
I'm done. You're now free to flame me for being heretical.
$98 Million...I could swear I've seen a video of some DIY hacker building one for like $30. Maybe a REALLY BIG one would cost around $2,000. What, on earth, could they be spending this much cash on?!
R&D is great and all, but this seems pretty ridiculous--even if it is the US Govt.'s status quo.
I wonder if it's bad form to link to my own comment on another thread.
Let's find out!
Who remembers WebTV...and how it failed?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2618008&cid=38674006
This reminds me very much of the WebTV debacle in the 1990s. Same basic idea, but with fewer bells-and-whistles. I don't see how this will offer much/anything that isn't currently available via the Internet, or via a standard TV with an XBox or similar plugged-in and connected to the network.
Yes, this new iteration seems to favor the integration of tablets, smartphones, etc., but if you have a(n expensive) TV in your living room, why on earth would you watch your shows on a tablet or phone?! I see this as being not "the next tech war," so much as "the next tech war that failed."
Maybe I'm too old-fashioned or something, but this seems really silly to me, until the media companies start taking a more "Internet" (read: commercial-free, choose-your-own-content, etc.) approach to television. Of course, I haven't turned my TV on to watch a show in about 3+ years...because I can get them all online with less garbage interlaced therein.
Notably, MS now puts out a free security suite (Microsoft Security Essentials) that's arguably better than most/all the other free ones out there, at present. Of course, this will not be the case for long, as seems to be the status quo amongst anti-malware vendors.
I agree that it's irresponsible to choose a browser for us, but leave security to the computer-illiterate masses. I also agree that they have legal reasons to shift the liability for their very insecure OS elsewhere.
I've been expecting something like this for years, now, and I'm a bit pleased that somebody is finally calling Symantec on their scare tactics. Pretty-much since Norton was sold to them and became Symantec Anti-Virus (or whatever they call it these days), their products have been crap. ...Expensive crap. ...Expensive crap that scares its users into paying more. ...For products that slow things down and don't generally work.
So there.
+1 to all of the above (in the immediate parent comment). I don't think I could have said it all better, myself.
Why bother running on the "upgrade treadmill" when it costs a ton, and in almost every case, does little or nothing to benefit you that the previous version does not? Yes, 7 is slightly more secure than XP. It's also a heck of a lot slower (more resource-intensive). It runs DirectX 11 and has decent 64-bit support--which are the only reasons I use it (albeit an "unofficial" edition...).
Even if I did much more than games on my Windows partition, if I could do everything on XP that I would do on 7--which may be the case, if DX11 is back-ported, and if I didn't need 64-bit support--why would I find it personally profitable to spend over $100 to "upgrade?" (What, exactly, is being upgraded for me, in particular?)
I see these statements quoted in the article summary as semi-blatant attempts to simply get people to give MS their money (i.e. buy their product), and as such are much more concerned with marketing than with usability for the users. (And that 11% probably IS just because people bought new PCs and XP doesn't come with them anymore. That prediction of market share change is something MS has a LOT of control over, so if they CAN'T predict what's going to happen, based on computer sales numbers, they're simply inept.)
Now, if only the Linux desktop environments didn't keep getting re-invented (Gnome 3, KDE 4, Unity, etc.), we'd be making (somewhat) more progress away from Windows, in general...but I digress.
Remember when businesses had to make better products than their competitors in order to compete, instead of continually suing them? Yeah...that was nice.
I've got to wonder why Bill Gates put Balmer in charge, to begin with. Could he have picked a worse candidate? I can't help but think that some office accountant who actually does real work on a computer (rather than just imagining how to change everything, and make it "prettier") would be a much better choice.
I changed the search settings in IE today in Windows 7 clean install, and I can verify that if you want to change your IE search engine from Bing to anything useful, you have to scroll SIDEWAYS (?!) through pages and pages of junk (specialized search engines that help you find stuff you don't care to find in any case) in order to find a real search engine of any kind--and that's even including things like Yahoo. If you want to find Google, you have to be VERY diligent, or use the tiny "Search" box above the list, then NOT select Google News, Google Shopping, etc., but rather the actual google.com search engine that's buried in the middle of them.
Oh, and alphabetical order? Not so lucky.
...especially the bit about the services.
I believe that this is largely a symptom of our government and culture demanding short-term "results" with regard to anything that we spend money on. This is fine for consumer goods (buying a computer or gadget at a store, for instance), but in science--where is where innovation seems to take place pretty exclusively--these huge, "going-to-the-moon-type" achievements are built on many, many smaller achievements that, themselves came out of many, many failed attempts at making something work.
We didn't develop our space program just because we succeeded once, in a really big way, but because we developed thousands of supportive technologies in the decades and centuries preceding that achievement. (We couldn't have reached the moon without the Greeks keeping track of star movements, which led to telescopes; we needed an industrialized society, which required the assembly line, and the invention of gears, levers, engines, etc. before that. The list of such examples is much long to post here.)
Essentially, without spending a lot of time and money on things that *might* work, but also *might not* work, we couldn't have gotten as far as we are. We could have gotten *much* farther if we'd not adopted this ideal of having every avenue of research pan-out either in the short term, or in the foreseeable long term. Similarly, Thomas Edison tried literally hundreds of different materials to make his "electronic lighting device"--while everybody told him he was wasting time and money--before he invented the light bulb. In our present investment/research culture, funding would have been pulled at around filament attempt number 20, because it was getting too "costly." Of course, the multi-billion-dollar industry of electric lighting would not exist right now if it had been.
This short-sightedness, which seems to be based around a buy-(research)-and-receive-(results/products) business-like culture that will ultimately see us (the USA) left in the dust by other nations that are willing to risk significant loss in return for possible gains down the road. I dearly hope that we end this trip-toward-obsoletion before the USA becomes synonymous with a lesson about short-sighted greed and instant gratification.
Just my 2 cents (that I personally think are worth more...of course).
(I realize this article is referring to stereoscopic 3D, but this is as good as any chance for me to rant about this.)
Does anybody else think, like I do, that they completely ruined Super Mario Brothers by going 3D? I don't think they've come out with a truly good 3D version of a classic platformer...ever. Maybe there's some exception I don't know about, but I think they ruined most console gaming when it went 3D.
Don't get me wrong; I love games like Crysis 2, Doom 3, Half-Life, etc., but we've really lost something by deciding that EVERYTHING has to be 3D.
[end of rant...for now]
While I don't honestly think they're in the same category, since they -were- lumped together (which probably says something about a shortage of actual gamers among the judges), I suppose they had to pick one or the other...
Fallout was a much more complex game, with a lot less linearity, and more options for the player. In that sense, I can see how most would find it to be more entertaining, and possibly more artful. On the other hand, Myst was absolutely DRIVEN by the art (watch the original developers' commentary if you don't believe me--I don't think any but a VERY dedicated artist would blow bubbles into the bottom of a toilet bowl through a straw, but for a singular dedication to artistically stunning sound effects), so I think that for those who DID really delve in and enjoy playing it, it was far more artful than Fallout 3. There just weren't as many such people as there were for Fallout 3.
So far, the original Myst has lasted the test of time better than any made-for-3D game ever has (if you recall, 3D was added some years after Myst's sequels started coming out), and seems to have a much stronger cult following, to boot. In 10-15 years, I think that we'll just look at Fallout 3 as a lesser shadow of Fallout 5/6/7 (or whatever they get named). Admittedly, I've played a lot more 3D stuff in recent years than I have of classics like Myst and Deus Ex, but I can't remember half of the newer games I've played, and will probably cease caring about the others before long, when new-and-better/prettier games come out...but since Fallout 3 is a heck-of-a-lot more popular now, I'm sure that had something to do with the judges' reasons for putting it over Myst. ...Not that they should have been in the same category, anyway.