Not only is the cure worse than the disease, but the severity of the disease appears to be widely overstated:

http://esciencenews.com/articles/2011/12/14/wayne.state.study.shows.early.research.cellphone.conversations.likely.overestimated.crash.risk?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eScienceNews%2Fpopular+(e!+Science+News+-+Popular)&utm_content=Netvibes

Please support Touch/Motion and tablets in general, but please don't try to unify the Tablet and Desktop UI's. Why not support two completely different presentation modes, a la Metro? (Just do it better and not so much of a bolt on.)

Who can tell if someone like me wrote the "OBVIOUS" retort above, or not? If I HAD written a lovely missive like that to my presumptive friend jd, I also would have posted AC. It's fun to have a Score 0 actually get read enough, be enjoyed, and get modded up. Getting even a Score 1 is a success. Thankfully, there are enough eye-rolling articles such as this on Slashdot that it's possible to actually have an AC success once in awhile.

Aren't there gobs of address blocks reserved for ISP's to talk to one another? Perhaps ISP's could lead the way by converting their back-channel host addresses over to IPv6 and then release those blocks for public site use? Are there really 2 or 3 billion IPv4 internet addresses serving public clients?

Perhaps IPv4 running out of available addresses is the necessity that will push the experts, at least, to convert over to IPv6...

16GB recommended, or else you'll be waiting quite awhile. But, you could build the thing in less RAM than that, right?

I take it that the "route around failures" and other original design features of TCP/IP and the Internet as a whole relied upon trusting others always having good intentions and cooperating. Those designs were necessary at the time and the reason the internet exists today.

Nowadays distrust, firewalls, and coding defensively is the norm (or it should be). In that light, the internet's design seems creaky and vulnerable.

Do you have any thoughts or feelings on how software has changed and seemingly become so treacherous since you first designed TCP/IP? Would you advocate a ground-up redesign of internet transports and protocols starting with TCP/IP?

I have homebrew business ideas that I've been developing and I wanted to own my own servers and learn how to rack and manage them. I could have rented time on a cloud or PHP hosting site or whatever. But I figure that controlling my server infrastructure means controlling my costs. I consider that to be like owning my means of production if you wanna get all marxist about it.

I'm no sysadmin, but I know enough to get around Linux. I'm not doing an awesome job of it, and I have a big meltdown failure once every two years or so. Usually just a harddrive failure that I can recover from, but sometimes it's more serious. My sites haven't earned enough popularity to get sustained intense internet traffic yet; so far, my boxes have done okay with the occasional big burst of traffic for my sites ( https://clubcompy.com/ and http://cardmeeting.com/ ) that I get from Slashdot or some random blog.

I negotiated my costs as a fixed $150/mo for 4U and throttled monthly bandwidth. And I'm not alone, in the colocation facility I rent at, I see a lot of homebrew rigs racked up with google and yahoo-owned servers (obviously not in the same rack and not as well cooled, heh.) I had no idea what I was doing, and the techs at the facility were totally cool and taught me how to rack my boxes and helped hold them up for me while I mounted them to the rails. The server and network hardware that I have probably totals about 4K and I built them up over years. I've still got 2U free for future expansion. I use only mini-ITX form factor mobos because I want to rack them in teensy enclosures so I can max out my rackspace, and those motherboards run cool so they go for years without any failure - heat kills. I buy passively cooled MB's whenever they're available and still meet my requirements. I have found Intel Atom boards to be extremely reliable in 24/7 operation. CPU-wise they stink, and I wish I could go 64-bit with more RAM, but I just need cheep life support for SATA and ethernet at this stage. I've had DIMM's die before motherboards, I don't mind spending extra for the best manufacturing quality there.

If you have a steady, good paying job and you're a developer, you should have a homebrew project that you hope/wish/dream will someday blow up and become your livelihood. No excuses about cost if you have even a couple hundred dollars a month of discretionary funds to burn. If anything, do it for fun and chalk the costs up to hobby expenses and do it to learn new things. Make it a long term project - over years - and you can pay for it yourself. You don't need magical silicon valley angel vc startup capital to do very cool things on the internet or in wireless apps.

Dave

ok, I know it's fashionable to pile on mozilla these days, however, in this case, I hope you'll be pleasantly surprised to find that mozilla is working with the w3c and google to standardize the concept. The eventual api they have just started to work on is currently being called the "gamepad" api.

Speed the death of Flash and speed the adoption of HTML5+JS as the goto client-side software development platform for most things. The Joystick API is amongst the greatest things coming out of this effort:

https://wiki.mozilla.org/JoystickAPI

Mozilla is doing good stuff here, buck up ppl!

Sigh ... I wondered when the Java plugin was finally going to poop out on us design-wise. Darn thing is so creaky and stuck in web 1.0-mode. Maybe it's time to port CardMeeting to HTML5...

This is a great point. Opera doesn't have a public bugtracker. I didn't know my website was having trouble on Opera until I saw it mentioned in the release notes on Opera 11.10.

CORE-35515 (Opera freezes while loading elements on https://clubcompy.com/ )

Maybe there was something I could do to test and workaround my site freezing Opera, had I known there was an issue at all...

Mozilla's running a public bugtracker is commendable, heck you don't even need to sign up for an account to search for bugs!

But, writing great software is REALLY HARD TO DO! The 10-year old unfixed critical bugs and thousands of unconfirmed bugs is common. Mozilla just wears all that egg on it's face rather than hiding the egg under the trenchcoat like the other guys do.

Ultimately, Firefox will need another complete redesign and rewrite because it collapses under its own weight. Technology and ideas will move past it's current architecture. Sad but true. And then the whole cycle of awesomeness and suckiness can start again.

Your trolling is legendary, sir, you've won and now I'm responding.

Java's better than C++. It's more popular. It's better looking. It's more important.

That's not gloating, that's not religion, it's just the market who decided that years ago. You can get angry about it. Fight it if you want. But at the rate you're going with the smug dismissals, you're not gaining any converts.

I'm going to paste all of Lord_Naikon's retort, as what he said is just the tip of the Java iceberg:

Why is it so hard to understand that Java, a language DESIGNED for portabilty, is more suitable for cross platform development than C++? You can throw any number of well designed cross platform C++ libraries at C++, it is still NOT part of the language, not part of the standard development platform and therefore it is harder to do cross platform C++ development than in Java. I can not comprehend why you think otherwise. Yes, the disparity in cross platform developement ease between the two may slowly fade in time, especially in the light of the new C++ release which makes a lot of features that you need from an API standard (threads for instance), but to say they are on par is simply an outrageous claim and definitely not a "simple fact".

Allow me to demonstrate some practical problems with C/C++ cross development between Windows & Unix)
- Non standard build system (make / vc++), different systems used for different libraries.
- Different linking process (.so vs .dll/.lib)
- Wildly differing implementations of the standard C library (stdio in VC++ is severely broken).
- No network API, so we will have to deal with either manual compatibily shims (more work) or 3rd party library (more work)
- No GUI API, same as above

The uniformity in Java is what makes cross platform development such an easy task:
- Everything is .JAR, build tools the same for all platforms (granted, you still need a Make equivalent, say ant, but the result of the build process is portable)
- Linking is just throwing a bunch of JARs together
- There is only one implementation of the standard library that everyone uses.
- Network API is standard
- GUI API is standard.

Now please enlighten me how exactly C++ crossplatform development is just as easy as in Java.

I tried to write a cross-platform C++ open source library once and be one of the good guys in your book. You know what a treacherous, expensive, and painful process that was? All the compilers did templates differently, it was a delicate dance on fiery coals to get my code working for all my users on all platforms.

The best cross-platform build system I could find at the time should give a clue on just how shallow the C++ ecosystem is: java running ant with a C++ compiler exec helper plugin. The C/C++ community couldn't even offer me one decent cross-platform build system that didn't require a master's degree to run. There's nothing there there in the C++ world, no promotion nor adherence to any standards.

Where's C++'s TCK? Where's its JCP? I know you don't care about those things, but I thought I might ask!

We don't have passengers in the cockpit flying our commercial airline planes. We have expert pilots flying our planes who have thousands of hours logged training. It's too important to have just anyone flying planes, lives are at stake.

When it comes to software, it's nonstop amateur hour. There is hardly any urgency about the lives at stake when it comes to software.

In my estimation, there is very little robust native code, written large, in the world. QNX, the JVM, maybe Apache HTTP (although that seems creaky to me and the config system is a hot mess.)

The linux kernel seems robust to me based on how it's maintained, but I am not an expert. All of the browsers have some varying degree of swiss cheese holes to them, with giant attack surfaces, and poorly written plugins (including Java's.) I pity the security teams on those products.

I don't trust your native code. I hear people tout their soup du jour language/vm as robust, sane, battle hardened. The more shared libraries and DLL's your code relies on, the less I believe you. If your favorite system easily/readily/commonly links in more native code as it rolls along, then I hope you understand that your battle hardened tank has cheese cloth armor that should never go to war.

I don't trust Microsoft code, especially their new products - a permanent bullseye is tattooed on their hineys. Yes, they've made security advances in recent years, they're still horribly vulnerable due to the legacy baggage which is core to their business. Microsoft code is bubbly poison at its deep, dark, dank core. IE is terrifying to me.

When it comes to me, I consider the code I write to have my name attached to it. Why wouldn't I give myself every opportunity to look good? A crash bug in native code to me is the most serious form of professional failure.

Maybe a lot of you just tinker and love your micro-optimizations in C and Assembly. Good for you, go spin that propeller on the beanie on your head, very neat. If you write for games or embedded systems and need the speed of native code, fair enough, but I'm dubious C# or Java isn't fast enough for most of that. Otherwise, please, PLEASE stay out of the native code cockpit when it comes to commercial/professional work unless you've got your thousands of hours of flight training. Lives are at stake.

Of course that isn't true, and screaming "But you have to think of the chil^H^H^H^H troops!!!" wasn't the point I was making. I pointed out one particular reason that I personally have been without access to an individual Internet connection for extended periods. There are many other reasons why people don't always have access to a permanent connection.

I suspect, but don't know, that part of the justification for this requirement is anti-piracy, although Blizzard appears not be making that claim publicly. What Blizzard actually thinks is likely either that the small loss of revenue will be worth the benefits provided by the requirements, or that the loss from users not buying the game due to the requirement will be equaled or exceeded by additional sales driven by the anti-piracy measures. If the requirement is indeed solely about protecting the online experience, I pointed out a simple solution to that issue. If it's about anti-piracy, then obviously that solution is irrelevant.

Because of the things blizzard is doing this move is needed to help stave of some serious issue that can arise with RMT. I think they are bold for doing this and it makes sense why they would. In this iteration of the series SP has taken a backseat, especially given the popularity of MP in D2.

No, it doesn't make sense. I can respect the desire to avoid cheating and to emphasize solid MP gameplay. But from a technical perspective, how hard would it be to give you a choice of local or server storage for your character at the beginning of a single player game? If you choose server storage, you need an Internet connection and you can use that character in online games. If you choose local storage, no connection required but that character can only be used for single-player games.

If you don't like it, don't buy it. It is not aimed at those who have trouble with the internet. Your troubles with the internet does not supersede the design and direction of the game.

Of course I have the option of not buying it. I also have the option of bitching about a stupid requirement to play a game. My bitching is not aimed at players who see no problem with the requirement. It's aimed at Blizzard, to let them know why I won't be a customer for this game. Your irritation with my bitching doesn't supersede my right to bitch or to let Blizzard know that they have potential customers who are not actual customers because of this decision. If you don't like my bitching, don't read/listen to it.

For what it's worth, my perspective is influenced by serving twenty years in the US Navy. When you're stuck for six months on a ship at sea with no personal Internet connection possible, games become a great way to pass the time. As more and more games make an Internet connection a requirement for playing even single player games, it'll soon get to the point where you aren't choosing to not purchase a particular game but are being forced to give up gaming entirely.