User education. It won't go away, you always need to do it, and for most users, you have to do it multiple times. Proximity systems may help, but...

For the record, on a winders machine, window-L. Two keystrokes, you're done. Well, mostly, but that'll keep most people out.

Well, yeah. But it's still got to take a lot of infrastructure that really sounds beyond their capabilities. Let's say:
16 tb drives, 1 eb= 62,500 drives.
Let's say 2 weeks of storage; 875,000.
Let's say 200 per. Let's say $100 extra per for the racks, cases, controllers.
$262,000,000 just for the storage.

I dunno, 1.5billion euros, with first usage in 2013 and full capabilities and usage in 2022; maybe they'll make it with that budget if they speak to somebody who already does lots of computation and storage, say: the Big G.

Okay, if I do some rough math, just on the hard drives to dump that to
assuming 2tb drives, and ignoring the binary/decimal nonsense to be quick
assuming that the 1eb per day is correct and not the .25eb/day of wiki
assuming that 2tb costs $100 (volume discount, you know)
assuming no costs for things to hold these drives, and electricity, etc.

180 million drives. 18 billion dollars. Per year.

Let's assume by 2013 we've gone eightfold, to 16tb drives. Good, now we're at 2million ish drives and 2billionish dollars. Good

I realize they're planning for it all, but I just can't see how they're really going to store, let alone process, all that data. Whew.

I mean, they'd max out a btrfs/zfs system in 16 daysish at 1eb per. Perhaps this is just simply too much data...

Fascinating. Of the universities and colleges in Georgia that I know of, at least a dozen, most of the tech staff uses and likes linux.
I think some quarters on a campus may gravitate one way or another, of course. The business dept. staff here is more strongly linux; the faculty is more Microsoft. Getting a monolithic 'yes' to anything at any large university is surprising...

Now just sign up James Cameron to do the movie after *that* and we'll be good.

Not drunk, yet.

Once again, I apologize for not explaining stuff fully. I just figured the fact that we were discussing businesses upgrading would sort of mean that we were talking about Microsoft-based businesses. (That's the ecosystem.)
Unfortunately, due to the way things work, for good and ill, if you're a Microsoft shop, you have more pressure to upgrade products than if you're running, say, Gnu/Linux.

And, as I said above, since these are business apps they're running, that are critical, wouldn't it be nice if the front-end was just a browser, and the back-end was a plain jane web app that could run on any browser.

I'm not talking about moving everything into the cloud, I'm just talking about moving some of these business apps to modern platforms.

First paying computer gig was in 1981, so I'm with you on the whole centralized-vs-decentralized thing. (I'm probably of the generation before you.) Really. I was a little bit concise in my post; sorry. I was just excited because for the first time in YEARS I might actually be that dreaded person, the primary poster, I think. (Didn't happen.)

I should clarify: I see a lot of businesses that switched over from dumb terminals to winxp running frontend apps. The business obviously has some process where they want a central server, hosting a db. If they went to a well-designed webapp, they could deploy WHATEVER on the desk. This excites me for a great many reasons.

Obviously, webapps will not replace everything. I don't want them for *my* docs. But I'm an individual, not a corporation. And there's quite a few business processes that are, unfortunately, just record keeping.

I want *my* data locally, sure. But if I'm a business, I'd prefer my data locally, too, on a server serving a webapp.

However, I'm atypical, since I have a mac and 3 linux boxes at home.

It's got to be tough. You can't kill off XP like you want to, because people really really might leave. But it looks foolish to support that morass of code in spite of the NEW morass you've spent all that money on.

In the long run, they'll switch. Until everything becomes a webapp, the ecosystem almost demands it. Here's hoping people realize webapps are where it's at, for most things.

I admit I haven't read the article yet, and perhaps it's got a very nuanced discussion on this subject that will persuade me otherwise...

but I doubt it.

Look, it's a new thing, really. I don't know why we haven't had 'art' in VG yet, but the simple fact is that it isn't because we don't have explicit sex. (Explicit violence has been censored from VG? Uh...)

I just drew a simple classic off the top of my head. Citizen Kane has nothing approaching violence and sex, and yet it's well regarded. And although Shakespeare had violence (and bawdy puns) it's nothing that you couldn't do without being a MA game.

I could probably list a 100 movies that affected me greatly, that are well regarded, and at least half of them I'd put forth as art, and of those, at least half again would be lacking in violence and sex. Sometimes, lacking colors in your palette can ENHANCE the experience.

We're getting there. Things like Braid are a step forward. Quite honestly, though, the real problem is the lack of a broad audience. When the 40 year old gamers of today hit 60, they'll have different tastes and requirements.