This kind of system, along with things that react to facial expressions, eye movement or brain activity are cool and everything, but what kind of usability gains are we going to get here? Is it really an advantage to have your computer know you're pissed, for example, or sad? Oh yeah, we can get a google-ads type response to your mood; "Looks like you're crying - click here to FedEx Kleenex," or maybe alert security that you've become enraged in your cubicle and are an imminent threat to your coworkers and company property - great. Conversely, if this does do something useful, you'd doubtlessly end up in situations where you're second-guessing the algorithms to accomplish something with twitches and contortions you could otherwise do with a few clicks or not bother with at all.

I'd be much much happier if we got some software out there that can tell that I should have used "first" instead of "firs" in a sentence that currently passes as correct in grammar/spell checking, instead of criticizing me for using passive tense, but that's all less cool.

I bought a Lenovo laptop with WinXP this summer and would also like to say how pleasantly surprised I was by the near-total absence of crapware on it. I got the 30 day MS Office trial and some Lenovo firmware update thing but nothing else, not even Adobe flash and PDF reader (which aren't really crapware in my book, more like necessary evils). I was pretty happy with that...

parent: insightful++

Alas, there never are mod points around when I need them. But yes, surprisingly enough, prices are set by what people are willing to pay,** not by cost of the thing you're selling. The difference between [price x volume] and [fixed + variable costs] merely determines how successful you are as a business. There's no conspiracy, move along.

** Prices are also signals to consumers about other things. If the market charges $60 on average at release and you release for $30, people might be inclined to think that your product is not as good, or something like that.

After 14 years of living with Windows (holy pants, has it been that long?), I'm resigned to installing clean every few years whether there is a new OS or not - it's like a mini-upgrade I give myself, and best of all it's free (for very low values of own time and soul). Basically, in my experience, Windows is sort of like a giant ball of playdough rolling down a city street - it gets dirtier and heavier over time, less appealing and not so colourful, not to mention the used condoms and syringes it occasionally picks up, and so you need to break out a new batch of playdough once in a while. I'm not saying that this is right and that it's a reason to not get angry about these results, but can you imagine the tubs of crap that are being sloshed around in the bowels of your computer when your two-year-old Vista install is being digested for 20h? Are you going to get a pretty result, all clean and good with everything working? Will you be able to uninstall something that didn't quite make it when all is said and done?

Just start clean, it's easier on the conscience...

Video games are now mainstream, just another Hollywood, and what we can learn from movies and apply to our preferred entertainment is that unmitigated mediocrity is no obstacle to making money. How many cookie cutter romantic comedies come out each year? There's no innovation, no surprises, but they keep making them so the money's coming from somewhere. OMG, he travels through time, but he still loves her and she loves him back? Shit bitch, no way! How about generic action movies? Three Transporters, Two Cranked's and Death Race, and I'm sure they're making Death Race 2 right now... in case we forget Jason Statham is awesome. The examples go on. If these movies are making money somehow that means there's enough people out there who are buying, for who those movies offer enough. And yay, look out, the same is true for games. We're measuring different things here, and we even have a study for some reason, but it's no surprise that the average person's demands are for something that's "good enough" in a few basic areas.

...for the space toilet special. An interview with George Lucas will explore the challenges of sci fi pooping, creating believable multi-species lavatories that account for physical as well as cultural differences, whether Jedi excrement has any force abilities, and the problems traditionally associated with merchandising this under-developed aspect of cinema.

This is all wonderful, us rich people can continue to drive GMC Yukons or whatever, except it has the same problems as using other foodstuffs for fuel. Oh, sure, you can use the 20% bad watermelons for it, but once watermelon->fuel processing capacity exists, market prices will dictate whether the 80% of good melons go to the grocery store or to the melon refinery, and when the global economy bounces back and fuel prices go up, it'll be just one more thing putting pressure on the food supply. Before anyone says "oh, but watermelons can't be a large part of the global food supply," what happens with cash crops is they end up more valuable than food crops (hence the name) and displace them in the fields.

And so this whole thing is barking up the wrong tree - the fuel is alternative, but it sure isn't sustainable, just one more squeeze on substance farmers someplace we don't give a damn about.

This seems to follow the typical entertainment industry fallacy of "people who enjoy our product without paying (typically through piracy, though not in this case) would buy it instead if we made free enjoyment harder." The question Blizzard was deciding here was whether the person playing the spawned copy of Starcraft was a potential customer or added value to the actual customers, and they chose to believe that it was a potential customer. Of course everyone should pay. Shareholder value and all that. I'd be surprised if there was "hard data" behind this decision if it were made on that basis.

Conversely, they may have merely decided that they don't need the trouble of including this feature to stand out amongst their competition, having a strong brand and all that.

ID it not a theory, it is a religious/political ideology being presented as a theory that aims to explain the perceived weaknesses of science in order to advance the interests of certain groups and individuals.

- This beautiful, complex interaction could not have possibly arisen spontaneously, therefore God's will.
- This makes no apparent sense/has no apparent purpose, therefore descent from God's will.
- You cannot explain something neatly, therefore God's will or the descent from it.

That's not a theory. The aim of a theory is to predict something that you can then test for. ID doesn't predict anything, there is no empirical test for God and deciding arbitrarily whether things are as God intended or not does not increase our understanding of them - it's merely a reactionary attitude advanced by old men who are afraid of change and what it means for their status.

Besides, even if you believe in God the creator, the ID advocacy of ignorance still seems bogus; God gave you all these wonderful cognitive capabilities, so why not use them to try to fully appreciate his grand work? You would be wasting God's gifts if you didn't. :p

This bit of fud suggests that this "bing" thing actually has, well, new parts? Something's changed? Improved, even slightly? It was my initial impression that it was some new makeup and rebranding of ye olde Windows Live Search, or whatever it was officially called last. You know, to be cool for the kids these days. No one wants to be all "let's windows live search some pr0n!" - it's much sexier if they bing Kim Kardashian, and then bing some homework. See, that works so well I never even imagined that there was more to it.

It seems to me that we're still experiencing special effects giddiness as many of the industry people that started in the 70s and 80s when things were hard and you had to build intricate models and crazy sets and sometimes colour things in with crayons are now the old coots in charge and leading some of these works of wonder out there, and literally can't control the power they have. It's not even that you couldn't do some things without CG but it was just too expensive and no one in their right mind would do it.

Just look at the Gungan/droid battle at the end of SW Episode 1; it adds virtually nothing to the story but does show a total lack of imagination by those in charge. They took great pains to construct an encounter that, for all its lasers, aliens, droids and tanks, is essentially a medieval skirmish where large formations clash at close quarters. 20 years ago you'd have to dress up a few hundred guys, build faux tanks and giant beasts, and many of those things in miniature as well, and then use a lot of clever editing to pull all of it together. It would have likely never happened because of the sheer physical effort involved, or they'd do a different style of battle instead because it'd be easier to show a few people on the screen at one time. George is not the only one succumbing to this, though he certainly is our favourite example.

The current state of CG in movies is almost what would happen if new Lamborghinis were suddenly being sold for $20k - many of the people who wanted one as a kid would probably get one, and then your roads would be packed with impractical but cool-looking two-seaters, and it would take some time before people came to their senses.

You sound like someone who has never spent the better part of a night in an ER, waiting for someone to do something to help you or a person you care about. You might be dying, you don't know (well, this guy did), and you're probably in serious pain or discomfort, and no one there is really in a hurry - of course it's going to be emotional. But the story here is that, though his ER experience was the typical hospital horror story, he followed up later and was able to identify defects with the hospital's software as contributing, potentially significantly, to what he went through, and draw some conclusions.

As for how this relates to Obama's health care plan, well, why do you assume that any grant-driven country-wide modernization is going to produce better results than this hospital's presumably self-driven modernization did? There's perhaps nothing inherently wrong with electronic records systems, but it's going to be a short-term gold rush for IT companies and a time-limited opportunity for the hospitals (if for no other reason that the grant budget, though large, is finite, so those who wait too long may not get anything), an environment that doesn't lend itself to patience, thoroughness and careful consideration, things that typical IT projects aren't exactly brimming with to begin with. It's not that it's a bad idea to try to lift hospitals out of the paper & pencil days, but throwing money at the problem and saying "go forth and digitize" doesn't inevitably (or even likely) translate into heroic results that will make everything all better.

I just type sequences of Dwarf Fortress commands in random text boxes periodically to maintain my uber micro. bwz bTl dbd mvt

I didn't really do the Vista thing, but it was my impression that everyone was really fucking confused about all the different versions and which one did what, possibly including Microsoft guys themselves? So the way this reads, Windows 7 will be pretty much the same in this regard, except they'll ignore most of the versions for the purposes of simplifying advertising, pushing the "fancy/expensive" versions while the lesser versions probably are what comes pre-installed on your pre-assembled computers. Or so it seems.

I think the (sarcastically) better idea would be if they let you buy something that boots into a browser-capable environment for $30 and then nickle-and-dimed you on everything else. Looks like you're trying to write a letter. To use the letter assistant, please have your credit card ready... Or something.

Google seems to have fixed itself around 1025 EST, which is unfortunate in a way - I would have preferred a more prime-time meltdown. This is not because I wish particularly ill on them, but because too many people drink the kool-aid and it's good to have a reminder of Google's mortal fallibility once in a while. ;)