I don't think it's a problem with user trust, given all of the viruses and malware I don't think many are left that have trust in software. I think the problem is that no desktop OS gives you an easy way to properly isolate apps from each other. In Linux I can fudge around with multiple user accounts and such, but it's generally a mess, if there would something as easy as "sandbox ./your_untrustworthy_app" then people might actually use it.

While it would be nicer without DRM, DRM is really only a small piece of what makes the whole service. Take for example Linux versions, on Steam, you automatically get them when they become available for free. When you buy on GOG or physical discs you don't get them, either they aren't provided at all or you have to pay again for them. If you want to play a non-english version of a game you also have a much better chance at getting it on Steam then on any other service.

While that doesn't make the DRM go away, Steam does give me a lot more freedom on where and how I can play my games compared to other services. Would it be nice to have a DRM-free service with the same feature set as Steam? Sure, but as far as I know no one like it exists, closest thing is Humblebundle Store, which gives you both DRM-free versions as well as the Steam version, but they offer a lot less games then Steam at the moment.

The Crystal Cove prototype as well as Valves prototype have solved motion sickness for most part, as they have lower latency then the DevKit and track position, instead of just head rotation. If you play something ultra fast like Quake3 in them, you might still get motion sick, as the motion in that game and many others is far from realistic, but if you have a slower game that is build for VR you shouldn't have much of an issue.

The task is very complex, it's just that the shell offers a very simple way to express it. As said, try to replicate shell behavior in your favorite programming language and you'll see that it is not simple.

Calling cat, uniq and friends starts process, it's not just a function call. Processes unlike functions run in parallel. That's a huge difference.

That to me is an excuse for shitty tools. There is no fundamental reason why a programming language couldn't offer constructs as powerful or even more powerful then what the shell has, yet they don't, as it apparently falls outside of the box in which programming language designers are stuck (aside from those Erlang guys).

Yes and that is far inferior to the shell version. If I have a file that's a few GB or TB in size, the shell version will run just fine (assuming the grep cut's down enough of the data), while your example will crash with out of memory. The "cat" program on the shell never needs to read the whole file at once, as what you are doing on the shell is setting up a filter pipeline, not just handing data from one function to another. Your average programming language doesn't have an easy way to do.

But that aside shell has many more benefits, such as isolated processes for example. If a program crashes on the shell, no big deal, you can just start another. If a function crashes in your favorite programming language, the whole program is toast. Your average programming language doesn't really have much in a way to isolate a function call from the next. Shell can also kill running processes, meanwhile you can't kill a thread safely.

Anyway, the point being here is that your Shell in combination with the OS provides you with tools that you cannot replicate within the realm of your programming language. Having a language graphical or not doesn't make that big of a difference when even such 30 year old fundamental tools aren't available to the programmer in the programming language. Programming language design is extremely stagnate and outside of syntax twiddling little has changed in a long long while.

I don't think that's really the reason. Quite the opposite, with proper graphical tools you could build far more complex things then with flat text. As those tools could allow you everything text can do and a lot more, as you aren't restricted to simple serialized textual representation of the data you deal with.

Anyway, I think the whole graphics vs text debate is getting a bit ahead of itself, lets take a step back to things we already know and use every day. Take some simple shell code like:

cat file | grep "foo" | sort | uniq

Now try to reproduce that simple one liner in your favorite programming language. Can you make it that easy to read? Is your recreation as powerful as the original shell code (i.e. capable of running in parallel, easy to modify, etc.)? The answer to both of those would be "No" for almost any language out there. The code would not only get far more complex, but also far less flexible, slower and just downright miserable. Why is it that most mainstream programming languages don't have pipes or something similar as first class citizen? How can it be that some rusty old language from 30 years ago is far superior when it comes to such basic data flow and filtering?

They have shipped well over 20'000 developer kits so far. That's a device only sold through their website, known to be low-resolution, lacking position tracking and to become obsolete within a year due to release of the much improved consumer version. I have little doubt that they will sell a lot more units once the consumer versions hits the retail shelves. They also have something like $90 million venture capital, so they certainly can do some volume ordering.

Total immersion is a problem and people have wanted to solve for a long long time. At the moment it's still a little niche due to lack of hardware, but there is no shortage on people with tipple monitor setups, TrackIR and other gadgets to get as close to the real thing as possible. Rift can provide a better experience for much cheaper.

Look at some reaction videos on Youtube, everybody from 6 year old kids to 90 year old grandmas seems to enjoy the experience, a lot. Disney also did some research back in the 90's with they Aladdin Virtual Reality Carpet Ride and concluded that it's basically fun for all ages, no need to be some hardcore sci-fi geek to enjoy a bit of virtual reality. All the gaming aside, who would say no to an IMAX cinema in his living room? Virtual reality can provide that.

The Segway cost as much as a small car, so it's not that surprising that it didn't take of. If the Segway would have cost as much as a bike it would have had a much better time with mass market adoption. The Rift by contrast is pretty cheap, well within the realm of other gaming peripherals, cheaper then a big TV.

The Rift is already extremely cheap, devkits sell for just $300 which is about as much as a good monitor will cost you and given that the thing is little more then a mobile phone screen and motion tracking that price can easily go down to $200, $100 or even less in the coming years when they ramp up the volume.

The reason why VR failed in the past is that it was to expensive and just not good enough. Tracking was slow, resolution was low, the things were heavy, FOV was tiny and game support was extremely limited. All that meant you would go back to a monitor sooner or later. The Rift however fixes basically all of that thanks to use of cheap components from mobile phones and in terms of performance it beats every previous consumer headset by a mile. The FOV goes from the usual 50 degree to 110 degree and the tracking is fast enough to have basically no perceivable lag. Weight is also pretty low and cost is as mentioned is a third of the inferior competition (aka Sony HMZ). Game support also seems to be much better this time around, thanks to a lot of developers either already offering native support or third party driver injection into exiting games (which was impossible in the first round of consumer VR, as games back then still run under DOS without a standard 3D API and most people didn't have the Internet yet).

The Rift still has a bit of an uphill battle, as mainstream game development focuses mainly on consoles not PC, but given the never ending hype that this device has gotten over the last one and a half year I have little doubt that virtual reality will stick around this time.

Copy-protection ain't exactly a new invention, games in the days of the original Prince of Persia where full of them, be it checks that made you look up something in the games manual or checks for faulty sectors on the floppy that you couldn't copy easily. But just as with modern copy protection almost all of that stuff has been cracked.

What you have to worry about isn't really DRM, but just plain old archival. I tried to toy around with some Grand Prix Legends old mods a few weeks ago and a huge amounts of that stuff is already lost due to plain old link-rot, dead servers or Megaupload going down. Steam and Origin are actually a good thing in that aspect, as they (hopefully) keep around a well maintained archive of all their games and mods, something that can't be said about random Indie studio that likely won't exist any more in five years time or a random modder.

The problem is that an erasable Internet can only ever work with locked down hardware, incompetent users or a government censored Internet. And even with locked down hardware stuff like Snapchat would quickly lose it's point once Google Glass becomes more popular and you can just snap photos of your phone with your Glass. If anything, I see the future heading in the complete opposite direction. Record everything, all the time. A $100 3TB drive will already record a year or two of non-stop video in 360p@30. Right now it's impractical as head mounted cameras are clunky and battery life is short (two hours for most models), but that's slowly changing.

Come on, he installed four alarm system and didn't bother with a single surveillance camera? I am not saying that there wasn't somebody in his apartment, but it's hard not to think this might have just been a case of a malfunctioning alarm system and a whole bunch of paranoia on top. If the government is after you, at least make sure you get some pretty pictures of them, cams are cheap these days.

Both the technology and price is already there. The devkit cost just $300, which is already extremely low for a highend non-mass-market tech gadget. The mass-market version is targeting the same price while getting some additional features. Given how the price for small displays is developing there is no reason to assume that the thing won't be $150 or less in a few years.

It won't give you a headache like the 3DS, as the 3D is done via a display strapped to your head instead of lenticular lenses, shutter glasses, so the image that hits your eyes is always the proper one and there is no cross talk. The current devkit will however give you motion sickness as there is both latency between your head movement and the display updates as well as a lack of positional tracking, meaning there will be a small offset between where the image is and where it should be.

However people who have tried the latest prototype of what Oculus is currently developing behind closed doors have commented that they have basically solved those issues and can generate a motion sickness free experience even for people for which motion sickness was a big problem with the released devkits.

This seems like a great underhanded way to make it illegal to run Tor exit nodes, free VPNs, proxies or similar services that give anonymous people ways to interact with the net.

That assumes that there was a point where he said "screw this". I have plenty of projects that I just stopped working on, but with none of them I had a clear point were I knew I would stop working on them, it was mostly just getting busy with other stuff and then just never finding the time or motivation to come back to them. The projects just fizzled out, there was never a point were I gave up on them and in theory I might pick them up again one day.