You cant blame Microsoft for trying though. Google has had years to collect and analyse search data to tweak their algorithm, for Microsoft that's hard to do if nobody is using their search. I believe part of their strategy is to get people to switch over even if for a short period of time so they can accumulate data and ultimately improve their ranking.

Why would they want to do that? I know from the perspective of an end user since the game is obsolete so is the code and therefore should be open sourced, however, I'm certain they are still making use of the same code base in their newer games and they are not going to just hand it over. I'm a great supporter of open source software, however, in a company such as EA this will never happen.

If anyone is interested, here are the details: http://chrishateswriting.com/

It has nothing to do with intelligent IT workers, majority of times these purchase decisions are made outside the knowledge of IT, the IT department is simply tasked afterwards with the support. Even if IT is involved, a lot of times politics are involved to a point where the OS is not even considered as a topic. Also many of times you have very little choice when it comes to what OS the appliance supports, you may not have a choice.

That is just a merchant site, their site works regardless of what browser you are using, however, it requires Javascript since it is Ajax based. My point is there are many businesses who use products which are running on top of XP and cannot simply be replaced because Microsoft has stopped support for the OS.

XP is used in many commercial products which cannot easily be replaced by the end user. For example: http://rightfast.com/index.php...

But why make not picking up after your dog an arrestable offence anyway? To me it would be reasonable if the penalty was a fine rather than a criminal record!

I keep hearing how prostitution is the oldest profession, but I was under the impression that hunting was the oldest profession!

Personally I'm a little sceptical of this Hour of Code thing or the so called CS crisis, but if the intention of this exercise is to ignite interest in those who may never have considered the field, why is there a need to simplify it down so much? Do we think children today are less capable and intelligent than the generations before them who learned programming or even become pioneers? I hope I'm wrong, but I feel these introductions may attract the wrong type of people to the field by giving them the wrong impression of what computer science is about for simple purpose of flooding the market with cheap labour.

The technology might have been envisioned artistically by others, but the actual mechanics of such system is certainly patent worthy.

Except we still don't have concrete proof that it was the Assad government who gassed it's people, but keep repeating a lie eventually it will become the truth.

I assume the reason why they are not doing this for their previous titles is to avoid having to either anger existing customers who bought the code or have to refund them.

Whats worse is the kid didn't even do anything special. according to Summly's own website, they partnered with SRI International for the AI: "Summly came to SRI International with a core concept to solve the information overload problem, which is especially challenging for mobile devices because of their limited screen size," said David Israel, Ph.D. So SRI wrote the AI piece which does the heavy lifting, and the kid's company made pretty UI to display the summarized articles. $30 million well spent...

I think people are missing the point, regardless of why people are picking a terminal over human interaction, human contact is more and more in decline. It seems the bigger our cities and communities get, the less we wish to interact with one another.

Obviously sometimes you have no choice but to trust someone else's code, but there is a difference between blindly trusting all code versus evaluating the source of the code and deciding whether or not there is enough good faith for the source to be trusted.