More importantly, I think many of the "killer apps" of the modern day are independent of operating system:
This is important. The slashdot crowd can talk about how you can't run most apps on a tablet, but a lot of these apps you just mentioned are made for tablets. No one doubts that MS will maintain a strong presence in the corporate world for a long time, but increasingly people aren't computing with PCs any more, they're using mobile devices. In any case, even in the corporate world, people are losing interest in MS. I do get e-mails about training for ipad users, I have yet to get one for Win8. In fact, IT has banned win8 from its computers thus far.
If you head over to statcounter and add up the iOS plus OS X versus all the windows flavors, you find that the peak in MS dominance of usage share occurred in May, 2009 at 94.33%. The minimum? February, 2013 at 86.04%. Apple is inversely correlated: max at Feb., 2013, minimum at Dec., 2008. This is not a coincidence. Similarly, if you look at Win8 adoption rates, you find that win8 is being adopted at 0.3% of usage share per month. Win7 was adopted at 1.1% per month. Even Vista was adopted at 0.5% per month, a greater adoption rate than Win8!! Microsoft has failed with its newest OS, and moreover the crest of each new OS they've released has been lower and lower. I'll admit that right now that non-MS stuff is a lot like people without a TV, growing, but still insignificant, but just wait until somebody like Valve releases a gaming OS or console based on linux, you could see the usage share of MS start to drop more rapidly.
Consistency; The noise from a wind far is there usually 24/7 at a fairly constant rate. All the examples you cite are intermittent. There are periods if quiet between when trains and aircraft go by. When building roadways millions are spent on berms and sound fences to mitigate the noise. Even then there are periods of time, usually at night when people are trying to sleep, that roadways are much quieter.
You've obviously never lived in a major city in the U.S. The highway noise is 24/7 and constant, no intermittent about it. No amount of berms and sound fences will stop it, in part because of the Acoustic Shadow effect. Sure a highway doesn't throb, but that's not much of an issue with the newer wind turbines. The older wind turbines (70s era vintage, from the last energy crisis) had prop. speeds that were fast enough to throb, but people realized that having the props spin so fast was inefficient and was reducing the lifetime of the props due to fracturing, so the newer turbines all have automatic transmissions and gear boxes in them to keep the prop rotating at the same speed regardless of wind strength. As far as I know the props spin nice and slow now. Kills less birds, no throbbing.
I’m not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that’s a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States.
Him, you and all the people like you couldn't be more wrong. Science and mathematics has everything to do with the economic growth of the United States. How can the U.S. compete in biotechnology if what we learn in biology courses is that god created the beetle? How can we compete in oil production if all we learn is that fossils are there to fool the unbelievers and the earth is 6000 years old? Time and evolution created both: 4.54 billion years is a LONG time, animal species can change a lot over that amount of time.
Frankly, I think you people are all nuts, and I'd happily let you live in your bubble if not for the fact that you all are ruining my country. I think it's a real shame that our education system has failed so miserably to produce roughly 48% of the voting population who can't even do basic arithmetic (i.e., go read Ryan's or Romney's economic plans: they either don't add up or impossibly vague). This has nothing to with Democrat or Republican, you could have figure out who was the right person to vote for just by looking at which one could do basic arithmetic. This election, my vote went for logic and reason, and that fortunately prevailed, but only by 3.3% or so.
On a different note, I can't help but wonder if Lucas is in poor health
He's pissed off because everyone keeps bitching at him. Nobody liked the Star Wars prequels, nobody liked Indiana Jones 4 (a.k.a. Indiana Jones and the kingdom of just how stupid do they think we are?), and Red Tails. He's declared he's going back to directing art films.
My opinion is that the Star Wars prequels not only showed that Lucas was making it up as he went along for the prequels, but in episodes 4-6 too. All that wondering about why Obi Wan would lie to Luke about Darth Vader killing his father? It's because Lucas pulled it out of his ass because he needed to make another movie after Star Wars was a hit and wanted some sort of continuity and dramatic tension to bring the characters together. Meh, he's still brilliant in terms of special effects, etc., it's just a pity he could never recognize that he should work with someone to get less silly storylines.
Inside Apple, tension has brewed for years over the issue. Apple iOS SVP Scott Forstall is said to push for skeuomorphic design, while industrial designer Jony Ive and other Apple higher-ups are said to oppose the direction. "You could tell who did the product based on how much glitz was in the UI," says one source intimately familiar with Apple’s design process.
After reading that, I realized that this was indeed true and in fact there has been an alternate philosphy besides the skeuomorphic design which is the "war on color" in some aspects of OS X (e.g., the flat gray scroll bars, the gray linen background for the virtual desktop manager, even the world map for changing the time zone). So, now I'm wondering if the skeuomorphic faction led by Forstall has lost the debate, was Ive and the other minimalist design people behind the "war on color" and if that's true, is that what we'll see in future versions of the OS with Ive leading the interface design? I'm not sure how I feel about that, I really don't like using an OS that is drab and boring, it's depressing (I actually liked Aqua for the most part, which was also Forstall's invention I guess). Either way, it's good to know that Apple isn't afraid of rocking the boat still. That skeuomorphic crap might have been good for increasing everyone's vocabulary with regards to interface design, but it was annoying as hell to use.
Now, if only Apple would admit they screwed up the document versioning system beyond repair and give us a proper "Save As..." since the dawn of the computer (or thereabouts) I would consider Apple as having fully realized the error of their ways and moving decidedly in a less terrible direction. But alas, Federhigi is still in charge and they haven't brought Serlet back from retirement unfortunately.
There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.
-- John Rogers.
"An organization dries up if you don't challenge it with growth." -- Mark Shepherd, former President and CEO of Texas Instruments