While I'm not sure what the low-level representation of the code has to do with anything -- that's a detail that ideally ought to be hidden by the IDE anyway -- I couldn't agree more. There's nothing wrong with better tools, and there are tasks that are flat-out impossible without better tools. Is there something "very wrong" if a traveler can't get from NY to LA in a single day without using an airplane? Of course not.
I've been programming since the punch card era, and I used to think that the greatest menace to our profession was the new kid who hadn't learned his history. Thirty years and a lot of new ideas later, I still think ignorant newbies are a problem, but I've come to recognize an equal menace in ignorant oldbies who found something they liked and then stopped learning. Machismo and arrogance are just as harmful in software engineering as they are in every other area. Brian Kernighan is still picking up new languages and tools and doing so with an inquisitiveness, humility, and grace that one rarely sees in much less talented developers. Let's hope it catches on.
Using whatever definition of "Free Software" you like, what "Free Software" project is not Open Source? Of course it's a subset. Open Source advocates who say Free Software is a subset of open source doesn't mean it's inferior. They are pointing out that Free Software fulfills all the requirements they care about, and that it has more requirements, and they don't care about those. That last may be infuriating to Free Software fans, but it doesn't make it false.
Okay, this is basic set theory. In order to be a subset of Open Source, all of the properties of Free Software would have to also be properties of Open Source. That is manifestly not the case. It is possible to have an Open Source package that is not also a Free Software package. The reverse -- Free Software that is not also Open Source -- is not possible. If you want to pick nits, Open Source is therefore a subset of the properties of Free Software.
Considered more broadly, the two sets do intersect, but neither is a proper subset of the other.
Stallman and de Icaza have completely different goals, as do the larger Free Software and Open Source movements they are part of. There is unfortunately a tendency on the Open Source side to obscure this difference by claiming that Free Software is a subset of Open Source, often through the use of equivocation with the ambiguous English word "free", but Free Software is not a subset of Open Source.
The Free Software movement's position is essentially ideological, based on the philosophy that closed source is ethically and morally wrong. The Open Source position is essentially pragmatic, based on the theory that closed source (the cathedral) is less efficient than open source (the bazaar). Free Software is an ethical stance; Open Source is a high-level development methodology. The two sides end up shouting over each other's heads more often than not, as they are today, because they are using much of the same terminology to describe completely different things.
As such, de Icaza is wrong when he says that Stallman is missing an opportunity here. From the perspective of Free Software, especially given Microsoft's well-documented past behavior, cooperation with Microsoft is not an opportunity, it's a trap with a flashing neon TRAP sign above it. Conversely, it might well be an opportunity for Open Source, at least insofar as the literal issue of "open source" is concerned, though probably only in the short term.
Closed source software vendors ultimately make their money from artificial scarcity. Yes, it is possible to make money with open source, but the kind of money that Microsoft and most of its peers rake in comes only from closed source. To the extent that they are publicly-owned businesses, and therefore exist to make as much money as possible, they will only expend their assets -- including opening some of their source -- if they believe that it will lead to greater profits. Stallman is entirely correct to be wary of Microsoft here. Microsoft views the Free Software and Open Source movements as competitors, just as they view other conventional closed source companies as competitors. To expect them to behave in a genuinely cooperative fashion with groups that are, in an increasing number of areas, eating into their profits is to live in a utopian fantasy world.
Recently, while shopping for a digital camera to give as a gift, I hunted through a number of online vendors, including Best Buy (mostly because I have credit with them) and NewEgg, both of whom publish negative reviews. What I discovered was that the majority of the reviews were negative on practically everything I looked at. The end result was that I bought another of the same model that I already had and knew was good. This was considerably more expensive than I had planned, but since it was a gift for someone important to me, I sucked it up and did it.
On other occasions, looking for computer equipment, I've noticed the same phenomenon. But in this area, I'm knowledgeable enough to notice that many of the negative reviews are written by people who just don't understand the technology well enough to even operate the devices. And of course, people who have bad experiences with a product are generally more motivated to complain about it than people who have good experiences with a product are motivated to praise it.
While it's certainly unethical for a vendor to censor reviews -- without at least prominently announcing that they are censoring them -- I have to question the value of reviews by the general public in the first place.
Don't worry about it. The wingless rocket planes they used to break the sound barrier on land weren't really "cars" in any meaningful sense of the word, either.
It would certainly explain a lot about the quality of the software coming out of Microsoft if their CEO is someone who thinks of "talent" as some liquid commodity you can "pump in" to a project.
There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
The problem here is that 'the way we are used to doing things' is what is "intuitive". The only genuinely intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned behavior.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with hierarchical menus, and there are arguably few if any better ways to present hierarchical data than in a tree form, of which menus are one example. It does require one to learn and understand the hierarchy and for the design of the hierarchy to be well-considered, and of course many users are highly resistant to learning and neither Microsoft nor Mozilla are very good at thinking out menu hierarchies. That said, the situation is not likely to be improved by leaving the most common functions in the hands of a badly designed automated context-awareness routine and making less commonly used functions even harder to find.
Of course, being a bad idea makes it almost certain that the rush towards the least common denominator will continue unabated.
AFAIK we still don't have an AI which can read and understand manuals.
Certainly. But most of the tasks performed by people who can't read and understand manuals can probably be performed by software, excepting menial physical labor that will eventually be performed by robots.
Exactly what I was thinking. The group of people who "find manuals 'difficult to read and understand'" are not a target for software-based training methods -- at least, not outside grade school -- they are a target for replacement with software altogether.
Not as in "time is money" -- though that certainly comes into play at work -- but just in the sense that my time is valuable to me. If I can, for the price of a few hours' wages, buy a piece of software that does what I need with a minimum of fuss, I'll take that over many more hours spent fixing a brittle makefile, compiling, configuring, and figuring out by trial and error how the program works in the absence of decent (or any) documentation. When the free alternative is actually well-designed and polished and works out of the metaphorical box, I always prefer FOSS. But when the free alternative is not only not as good as the commercial program, but also not good enough, I'll pay for the commercial program and get on with my life.
Mind you, I'm a professional software engineer. I can get around technical obstacles that non-technical users can't, and I actually enjoy computers for their own sake. That said, I also enjoy being able to do certain things with computers beyond fiddling with them, and while I'd like to be able to use FOSS for everything, it's either not possible or not worth the grief in every case. Ergo, I use Firefox and OpenOffice over MSIE and MS Office, but I also use Photoshop over GIMP and CorelDraw and Illustrator over Inkscape. (In fairness, I should say that I do look forward to Inkscape's further development; I've given up on GIMP ever being more than a poor copy of Photoshop 4.)
Right. Because right now, all of those nuclear waste spills are in completely sterile groundwater where they won't accelerate the mutation rate of the tens or hundreds of thousands of species of microbes they would encounter in garden-variety unsterilized groundwater. How thoughtful of otherwise careless nuclear waste managers to keep their spills away from the biosphere! Maybe they can help us keep naturally occurring microbes away from the countless tons of radioactive minerals scattered throughout the Earth's crust. That would be, like, so helpful. That'll leave us with only ultraviolet light from the sun, cosmic rays from deep space, and the entire spectrum of natural and artificial mutagenic chemical compounds to deal with. We'll have it done in a snap!
I personally think this is a real pity. So much time is being spent on getting drivers implemented that new features and other kinds enhancements are being pushed back.
It's a mature kernel, what do you expect? Development of actual new features is largely driven by need, so there comes a point when there just isn't much demand for "new features and other [kinds of] enhancements". The lion's share of the kernel's remaining shortcomings is lack of hardware support, and not just for obscure hardware -- there are a great many commonly available and widely used devices for which Linux lacks support. At this point, the bulk of kernel development should be aimed at drivers, and we should be celebrating the fact that the kernel is otherwise mature enough that we can spend lots of time improving hardware support.
In any case, as many other posters have noted, most of the people working on drivers would not necessarily be working on some other part of the kernel.
I'd be surprised if that bit of potential case law survived a challenge in a higher court. Of course, IANAL, but I don't see how a contract can be binding on any entity that is not an actual party to the contract.
That said, the reality is that going up against a company as large as Google requires incredibly deep pockets, and a proper challenge might well be out of the reach of all but a few large corporations, the CEOs of which could all fit comfortably in my living room. Having Microsoft involved might actually result in a ruling benefiting the common good. Granted, that'd be an accidental byproduct, but such things do happen -- Bridgeman v. Corel springs to mind.
It's hard to get excited about this deal one way or the other without feeling like it's getting annoyed at the bloodsucking tick you found on the sofa -- without noticing that the tick is on the back of a snarling rottweiler. The underlying problem is our broken intellectual property system -- or even the very idea of intellectual property -- and not the specifics of how one company or another takes advantage of it.
Thank you. I remember the era of the diskless workstation. Of course, we called them "dumb terminals" back then. There was a lot to recommend them if you were responsible for managing the system. If you were an end-user, not so much. Naturally, the people who proclaim a renaissance of the old mainframe timesharing system -- under whatever name they're calling it this week -- are people responsible for managing systems. The people selling systems love it too, mainly because it combines the benefits of artificial scarcity and being able to charge users at regular intervals for access alone.
Of course, the reason the personal computer became popular is because centralized control is expensive, unreliable, and inflexible from the user's point of view. Don't expect a whole bunch of users to suddenly flock back to a model that holds no real advantage for them.
That's just the consumer class, though. I see a bright future for cloud computing in the corporate world, where the twin engines of management fads and development fads have a proven track record of turning superficial changes into significant wastes of money.
Although I don't particularly care for the idea, I'd much rather take a skills test than what I get at most places, which is a drug test and a credit check. A test of job skills is actually relevant, and I don't think it's unreasonable for a potential employer to ask an applicant to demonstrate that they can do the job. The only thing I find genuinely objectionable is when a company isn't up front about the hoops they expect applicants to jump through. If you expect your applicants to be honest with you, the least you can do is to return the favor.
..the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms...
Oh, horseshit. I've worked in American companies with European offices for years and have seen no such thing. Europeans are just as happy to take American dollars as anyone else. The EC countries do, however, have rather more stringent antitrust laws than the United States (and more consumer protections, more privacy laws, and so on). If you do business in a country, you have to respect their laws, just as European countries doing business in the US have to respect our laws (or our lawlessness in many matters). That Microsoft and Oracle -- two companies that are hardly well-loved here -- have had trouble in Europe hardly constitutes a pattern of "abusing American firms".
It may be that the real issue here is that Oracle, like Microsoft, gets off on anti-competitive practices, and as a result often finds itself up against laws against the same, in Europe as well as the US.
Leaving aside the gross inaccuracies about the history of the personal computer in TFA, there's one giant shrieking difference between the "Fire in the Valley" days and the current commercial space rush: startup costs. Any number of early personal computer companies really were started by a couple of guys in a garage with a few thousand dollars. There may very well be some space industry parts vendors who still start this way. But no one starts a private launch company without a ton of money up front.
It's still exciting, but not in the way the early personal computer days were. Back then, you could look at, let's say, Wozniak and Jobs and think, "That could be me!" No one at my pay grade is having that thought about SpaceX.
They follow trends, soak up advertisements, and generally do what marketers tell them to do.
This isn't that different from Slashdot and tech people in general. How many people do you think formed their opinions on the best operating system, Linux distro, programming language, or text editor on the basis of a careful comparison of their strengths and weaknesses?
Doubtful. As with a lot of problems that, like depression, are at least partly rooted in genetics, natural selection only works if the trait leads to the death of the organism before it can reproduce. A good example is our species' tendency toward war. One might naively expect that people inclined to be soldiers would have eliminated themselves from the gene pool, but battlefield losses are more than compensated for by the tendency of soldiers to impregnate their mates right before deployment.
Personally, having suffered from clinical depression my entire adult life -- ameliorated, thankfully, by medication -- I find the entire premise of the article flawed. Unmedicated, I certainly can concentrate like heck on one thing, but I don't get to choose the subject of that concentration. It'd be great if I could be totally focused on some useful engineering problem. But the reality is that I end up obsessionally focused on some negative emotion or other, which never leads to solving any actual problem, personal or otherwise -- hence chronic depression.
Is there some advantage to depression? Maybe, but whatever it is, I'd gladly give it up for a cure and not have to spend a couple of hundred bucks a month on pills to keep it at bay.
I am considering that. Excepting the blimp itself and whatever aerodynamic controls are involved, everything else can -- or could be -- sourced from off-the-shelf parts. And since the device is tethered, the power source could be on the ground.
Whether it's a good idea to build a platform so vulnerable to such a wide variety of low-tech, improvised attack vectors is another question altogether.
$1.4 billion dollars? We are talking about what is basically a balloon with an instrument package slung beneath it, aren't we? I don't know about you, but I'd be willing to bet that if the purchaser was anyone but the Pentagon, the price would be at least an order of magnitude lower.
It could be that the market for smartphones is just saturated right now. Google is coming late to a market where nearly everyone who wanted something like this already has either an iPhone or a Blackberry. Everyone else -- and that would be the vast majority of the population -- just wants a phone to make and receive phone calls and, below a certain age, send text messages, so the extra cost for a smartphone is a non-starter. The situation isn't likely to change until someone comes up with something much, much better than an iPhone. Merely being as good as an iPhone is not enough.
It's also worth considering that there is some element of a fad or fashion craze in this situation, too. What was the next big thing after the hula hoop? It sure wasn't a better hula hoop.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm not sure what the low-level representation of the code has to do with anything -- that's a detail that ideally ought to be hidden by the IDE anyway -- I couldn't agree more. There's nothing wrong with better tools, and there are tasks that are flat-out impossible without better tools. Is there something "very wrong" if a traveler can't get from NY to LA in a single day without using an airplane? Of course not.
I've been programming since the punch card era, and I used to think that the greatest menace to our profession was the new kid who hadn't learned his history. Thirty years and a lot of new ideas later, I still think ignorant newbies are a problem, but I've come to recognize an equal menace in ignorant oldbies who found something they liked and then stopped learning. Machismo and arrogance are just as harmful in software engineering as they are in every other area. Brian Kernighan is still picking up new languages and tools and doing so with an inquisitiveness, humility, and grace that one rarely sees in much less talented developers. Let's hope it catches on.
Using whatever definition of "Free Software" you like, what "Free Software" project is not Open Source? Of course it's a subset. Open Source advocates who say Free Software is a subset of open source doesn't mean it's inferior. They are pointing out that Free Software fulfills all the requirements they care about, and that it has more requirements, and they don't care about those. That last may be infuriating to Free Software fans, but it doesn't make it false.
Okay, this is basic set theory. In order to be a subset of Open Source, all of the properties of Free Software would have to also be properties of Open Source. That is manifestly not the case. It is possible to have an Open Source package that is not also a Free Software package. The reverse -- Free Software that is not also Open Source -- is not possible. If you want to pick nits, Open Source is therefore a subset of the properties of Free Software.
Considered more broadly, the two sets do intersect, but neither is a proper subset of the other.
Stallman and de Icaza have completely different goals, as do the larger Free Software and Open Source movements they are part of. There is unfortunately a tendency on the Open Source side to obscure this difference by claiming that Free Software is a subset of Open Source, often through the use of equivocation with the ambiguous English word "free", but Free Software is not a subset of Open Source.
The Free Software movement's position is essentially ideological, based on the philosophy that closed source is ethically and morally wrong. The Open Source position is essentially pragmatic, based on the theory that closed source (the cathedral) is less efficient than open source (the bazaar). Free Software is an ethical stance; Open Source is a high-level development methodology. The two sides end up shouting over each other's heads more often than not, as they are today, because they are using much of the same terminology to describe completely different things.
As such, de Icaza is wrong when he says that Stallman is missing an opportunity here. From the perspective of Free Software, especially given Microsoft's well-documented past behavior, cooperation with Microsoft is not an opportunity, it's a trap with a flashing neon TRAP sign above it. Conversely, it might well be an opportunity for Open Source, at least insofar as the literal issue of "open source" is concerned, though probably only in the short term.
Closed source software vendors ultimately make their money from artificial scarcity. Yes, it is possible to make money with open source, but the kind of money that Microsoft and most of its peers rake in comes only from closed source. To the extent that they are publicly-owned businesses, and therefore exist to make as much money as possible, they will only expend their assets -- including opening some of their source -- if they believe that it will lead to greater profits. Stallman is entirely correct to be wary of Microsoft here. Microsoft views the Free Software and Open Source movements as competitors, just as they view other conventional closed source companies as competitors. To expect them to behave in a genuinely cooperative fashion with groups that are, in an increasing number of areas, eating into their profits is to live in a utopian fantasy world.
Recently, while shopping for a digital camera to give as a gift, I hunted through a number of online vendors, including Best Buy (mostly because I have credit with them) and NewEgg, both of whom publish negative reviews. What I discovered was that the majority of the reviews were negative on practically everything I looked at. The end result was that I bought another of the same model that I already had and knew was good. This was considerably more expensive than I had planned, but since it was a gift for someone important to me, I sucked it up and did it.
On other occasions, looking for computer equipment, I've noticed the same phenomenon. But in this area, I'm knowledgeable enough to notice that many of the negative reviews are written by people who just don't understand the technology well enough to even operate the devices. And of course, people who have bad experiences with a product are generally more motivated to complain about it than people who have good experiences with a product are motivated to praise it.
While it's certainly unethical for a vendor to censor reviews -- without at least prominently announcing that they are censoring them -- I have to question the value of reviews by the general public in the first place.
Don't worry about it. The wingless rocket planes they used to break the sound barrier on land weren't really "cars" in any meaningful sense of the word, either.
It would certainly explain a lot about the quality of the software coming out of Microsoft if their CEO is someone who thinks of "talent" as some liquid commodity you can "pump in" to a project.
There is resistance to the change because of 'menus are the way we are used to doing things' not necessarily the way things should be done.
The problem here is that 'the way we are used to doing things' is what is "intuitive". The only genuinely intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned behavior.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with hierarchical menus, and there are arguably few if any better ways to present hierarchical data than in a tree form, of which menus are one example. It does require one to learn and understand the hierarchy and for the design of the hierarchy to be well-considered, and of course many users are highly resistant to learning and neither Microsoft nor Mozilla are very good at thinking out menu hierarchies. That said, the situation is not likely to be improved by leaving the most common functions in the hands of a badly designed automated context-awareness routine and making less commonly used functions even harder to find.
Of course, being a bad idea makes it almost certain that the rush towards the least common denominator will continue unabated.
AFAIK we still don't have an AI which can read and understand manuals.
Certainly. But most of the tasks performed by people who can't read and understand manuals can probably be performed by software, excepting menial physical labor that will eventually be performed by robots.
Exactly what I was thinking. The group of people who "find manuals 'difficult to read and understand'" are not a target for software-based training methods -- at least, not outside grade school -- they are a target for replacement with software altogether.
Not as in "time is money" -- though that certainly comes into play at work -- but just in the sense that my time is valuable to me. If I can, for the price of a few hours' wages, buy a piece of software that does what I need with a minimum of fuss, I'll take that over many more hours spent fixing a brittle makefile, compiling, configuring, and figuring out by trial and error how the program works in the absence of decent (or any) documentation. When the free alternative is actually well-designed and polished and works out of the metaphorical box, I always prefer FOSS. But when the free alternative is not only not as good as the commercial program, but also not good enough, I'll pay for the commercial program and get on with my life.
Mind you, I'm a professional software engineer. I can get around technical obstacles that non-technical users can't, and I actually enjoy computers for their own sake. That said, I also enjoy being able to do certain things with computers beyond fiddling with them, and while I'd like to be able to use FOSS for everything, it's either not possible or not worth the grief in every case. Ergo, I use Firefox and OpenOffice over MSIE and MS Office, but I also use Photoshop over GIMP and CorelDraw and Illustrator over Inkscape. (In fairness, I should say that I do look forward to Inkscape's further development; I've given up on GIMP ever being more than a poor copy of Photoshop 4.)
Right. Because right now, all of those nuclear waste spills are in completely sterile groundwater where they won't accelerate the mutation rate of the tens or hundreds of thousands of species of microbes they would encounter in garden-variety unsterilized groundwater. How thoughtful of otherwise careless nuclear waste managers to keep their spills away from the biosphere! Maybe they can help us keep naturally occurring microbes away from the countless tons of radioactive minerals scattered throughout the Earth's crust. That would be, like, so helpful. That'll leave us with only ultraviolet light from the sun, cosmic rays from deep space, and the entire spectrum of natural and artificial mutagenic chemical compounds to deal with. We'll have it done in a snap!
I personally think this is a real pity. So much time is being spent on getting drivers implemented that new features and other kinds enhancements are being pushed back.
It's a mature kernel, what do you expect? Development of actual new features is largely driven by need, so there comes a point when there just isn't much demand for "new features and other [kinds of] enhancements". The lion's share of the kernel's remaining shortcomings is lack of hardware support, and not just for obscure hardware -- there are a great many commonly available and widely used devices for which Linux lacks support. At this point, the bulk of kernel development should be aimed at drivers, and we should be celebrating the fact that the kernel is otherwise mature enough that we can spend lots of time improving hardware support.
In any case, as many other posters have noted, most of the people working on drivers would not necessarily be working on some other part of the kernel.
I'd be surprised if that bit of potential case law survived a challenge in a higher court. Of course, IANAL, but I don't see how a contract can be binding on any entity that is not an actual party to the contract.
That said, the reality is that going up against a company as large as Google requires incredibly deep pockets, and a proper challenge might well be out of the reach of all but a few large corporations, the CEOs of which could all fit comfortably in my living room. Having Microsoft involved might actually result in a ruling benefiting the common good. Granted, that'd be an accidental byproduct, but such things do happen -- Bridgeman v. Corel springs to mind.
It's hard to get excited about this deal one way or the other without feeling like it's getting annoyed at the bloodsucking tick you found on the sofa -- without noticing that the tick is on the back of a snarling rottweiler. The underlying problem is our broken intellectual property system -- or even the very idea of intellectual property -- and not the specifics of how one company or another takes advantage of it.
That's usually the point at which conditions are ripe for some outsider to come up with something new and different.
Thank you. I remember the era of the diskless workstation. Of course, we called them "dumb terminals" back then. There was a lot to recommend them if you were responsible for managing the system. If you were an end-user, not so much. Naturally, the people who proclaim a renaissance of the old mainframe timesharing system -- under whatever name they're calling it this week -- are people responsible for managing systems. The people selling systems love it too, mainly because it combines the benefits of artificial scarcity and being able to charge users at regular intervals for access alone.
Of course, the reason the personal computer became popular is because centralized control is expensive, unreliable, and inflexible from the user's point of view. Don't expect a whole bunch of users to suddenly flock back to a model that holds no real advantage for them.
That's just the consumer class, though. I see a bright future for cloud computing in the corporate world, where the twin engines of management fads and development fads have a proven track record of turning superficial changes into significant wastes of money.
I think I'm a frustrated crook or security consultant.
Or a potential new hire at Goldman Sachs.
Although I don't particularly care for the idea, I'd much rather take a skills test than what I get at most places, which is a drug test and a credit check. A test of job skills is actually relevant, and I don't think it's unreasonable for a potential employer to ask an applicant to demonstrate that they can do the job. The only thing I find genuinely objectionable is when a company isn't up front about the hoops they expect applicants to jump through. If you expect your applicants to be honest with you, the least you can do is to return the favor.
..the European Commission, which seems to get off on abusing American firms...
Oh, horseshit. I've worked in American companies with European offices for years and have seen no such thing. Europeans are just as happy to take American dollars as anyone else. The EC countries do, however, have rather more stringent antitrust laws than the United States (and more consumer protections, more privacy laws, and so on). If you do business in a country, you have to respect their laws, just as European countries doing business in the US have to respect our laws (or our lawlessness in many matters). That Microsoft and Oracle -- two companies that are hardly well-loved here -- have had trouble in Europe hardly constitutes a pattern of "abusing American firms".
It may be that the real issue here is that Oracle, like Microsoft, gets off on anti-competitive practices, and as a result often finds itself up against laws against the same, in Europe as well as the US.
Leaving aside the gross inaccuracies about the history of the personal computer in TFA, there's one giant shrieking difference between the "Fire in the Valley" days and the current commercial space rush: startup costs. Any number of early personal computer companies really were started by a couple of guys in a garage with a few thousand dollars. There may very well be some space industry parts vendors who still start this way. But no one starts a private launch company without a ton of money up front.
It's still exciting, but not in the way the early personal computer days were. Back then, you could look at, let's say, Wozniak and Jobs and think, "That could be me!" No one at my pay grade is having that thought about SpaceX.
They follow trends, soak up advertisements, and generally do what marketers tell them to do.
This isn't that different from Slashdot and tech people in general. How many people do you think formed their opinions on the best operating system, Linux distro, programming language, or text editor on the basis of a careful comparison of their strengths and weaknesses?
Doubtful. As with a lot of problems that, like depression, are at least partly rooted in genetics, natural selection only works if the trait leads to the death of the organism before it can reproduce. A good example is our species' tendency toward war. One might naively expect that people inclined to be soldiers would have eliminated themselves from the gene pool, but battlefield losses are more than compensated for by the tendency of soldiers to impregnate their mates right before deployment.
Personally, having suffered from clinical depression my entire adult life -- ameliorated, thankfully, by medication -- I find the entire premise of the article flawed. Unmedicated, I certainly can concentrate like heck on one thing, but I don't get to choose the subject of that concentration. It'd be great if I could be totally focused on some useful engineering problem. But the reality is that I end up obsessionally focused on some negative emotion or other, which never leads to solving any actual problem, personal or otherwise -- hence chronic depression.
Is there some advantage to depression? Maybe, but whatever it is, I'd gladly give it up for a cure and not have to spend a couple of hundred bucks a month on pills to keep it at bay.
I am considering that. Excepting the blimp itself and whatever aerodynamic controls are involved, everything else can -- or could be -- sourced from off-the-shelf parts. And since the device is tethered, the power source could be on the ground.
Whether it's a good idea to build a platform so vulnerable to such a wide variety of low-tech, improvised attack vectors is another question altogether.
$1.4 billion dollars? We are talking about what is basically a balloon with an instrument package slung beneath it, aren't we? I don't know about you, but I'd be willing to bet that if the purchaser was anyone but the Pentagon, the price would be at least an order of magnitude lower.
It could be that the market for smartphones is just saturated right now. Google is coming late to a market where nearly everyone who wanted something like this already has either an iPhone or a Blackberry. Everyone else -- and that would be the vast majority of the population -- just wants a phone to make and receive phone calls and, below a certain age, send text messages, so the extra cost for a smartphone is a non-starter. The situation isn't likely to change until someone comes up with something much, much better than an iPhone. Merely being as good as an iPhone is not enough.
It's also worth considering that there is some element of a fad or fashion craze in this situation, too. What was the next big thing after the hula hoop? It sure wasn't a better hula hoop.