You are right. For an article on the user experience, it really doesn't do much to help the user. Using terminology like UX was a bit silly, but even more so was the massive wall of text that actually told us nothing. For example, on the entire screenful of text about the Philips Hue Light Bulb, the only relevant text about the user interface (sorry, UX) was:

I came away from that article without much insight as to why these things are good or bad "user experiences". They say that a picture tells a thousand words, but in this case the graphic at the top of the article summarizing the product names was just as informative as the 5,000 words that followed.

That is a pretty unsupportable statement considering that the scientists are well aware of how much certainty their models have, and so give a large error range such that it was nearly impossible to get it wrong. Your claim that they all have been falsified by observations is a complete lie.

That is exactly how the models work; when new facts are found they plug that into their models and calibrate it against past data. They also compare the predictions against new measurements, and if there is a discrepancy then they try to figure out why - as was the case here. This is why the models are getting more accurate as the years go by.

Except Man doesn't think that he has everything figured out. This is even mentioned in the summary:

Researchers knew that the models did not match what was happening and didn't know why. In fact, you can tell that they don't think that they know it all by seeing how they state their margins of error (which takes into account that there might be things that they don't know). Hell, even when they try to sound certain they can't quite bring themselves to stating things in terms of absolutes (hence the IPCC report saying that it was 95% certain that climate change was man made).

And think about it, if scientists came out and said that they had discovered everything that there was to know then they would be putting themselves out of a job.

...or typesetters & typists, accountants, video editors, music composers, engineers & architects, etc. In fact, anyone who produces, rather than consumes will tend to use computers as their main system. SSDs work nicely for all of them, if only to store the OS and program files.

That you only know gamers and developers says more about the company you keep rather than what technology is used out there. It is true that tablets and smart phone sales are on the rise and PC sales are declining, but that doesn't mean that people have stopped using their old computers.

Me too!

You obviously haven't been in a museum in the last couple of decades. They have had interactive displays, personal spoken tours using portable audio devices (using an MP3 player, Discman or Minidisc player), and the better museums had tour guides. That is the new technology where a person takes a group of people around and tells them about the art. It's amazing what they can do these days!

But maybe if you are the kind of person who cannot read a small sign, then perhaps even a museum couldn't be much help for you. I wonder how you go with some of those lengthy dissertations on Twitter.

I had a look at the link that you gave, but couldn't see any mention about "Putting this in for the Office team" that was apparently one of the big discussions. I did manage to find this, but it doesn't really show a smoking gun for widespread collusion between the Windows and Office development teams, especially because they also mention of specific code for Borland, IBM, and Symantec in that article.

I think that the use of a few vague comments in the Windows source code leak as proof of secret API calls in Office is about as undamning as the focussing on a few instances of terminology in the CRU email leaks when trying to prove climate change is all one big conspiracy. If all the allegations were true, I would have expected to see more specific evidence.

I think you are dramatically underestimating how many Steam games there are. I just started counting my Steam keys, and by the time I counted my fifth bundle (four Android bundles and the Deep Silver bundle) I had already counted 31 unique games. I am not going to bother counting the other twenty-odd bundles, because I have no doubt that they will easily get past the 100 mark.

Here is what I found so far:

1. Fieldrunners
2. BIT.TRIP BEAT
3. SpaceChem
4. Uplink
5. Crayon Physics Deluxe
6. Eufloria
7. Splice
8. Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP
9. Waking Mars
10. Cogs
11. Zen Bound 2
12. Avadon: The Black Fortress
13. Dynamite Jack
14. Beat Hazard Ultra
15. Nightsky
16. Solar 2
17. Aquaria
18. Fractal
19. Stealth Bastard Deluxe
20. Organ Trail: Director's Cut
21. Frozen Synapse
22. Broken Sword: Director's Cut
23. McPixel
24. Risen 2
25. Sacred 2 Gold
26. Saints Row 2
27. Saints Row: The Third
28. Dead Island GOTY
29. Metro 2033
30. Risen
31. Sacred Citadel

Just to confirm it, I just click two other bundles at random and got 20 unique Steam games to make over 50 in just seven bundles. And that is not even going near the "Humble Weekly Sale" section where virtually everything was delivered by Steam.

I just had a look, and of the nine games listed on the front page, five of them had a DRM-free sign. Just because they have Steam keys available doesn't preclude a direct download version too. Not all of the games were on GOG either, and those that are there are currently at full price (though GOG has had some pretty aggressive sales lately so it may be worth waiting).

Same here, but with a radio from the 30s or 40s. I guess the difference is that those devices didn't require a code listing for the firmware. A simple circuit diagram wouldn't be that useful these days.

Also, in the past if a device broke then you would have it repaired. They were made to last. These days you just throw it away and get a new one.

Actually, you can thank the Microsoft's own Platform SDK for all this free value. This included a free C++ compiler, and was released at the start of this century. It was originally for MSDN subscribers, but it was released to the public for anyone to download. If you want to thank anyone for this inital free release, I think it would be Watcom C++ which was released as open source in 2000 after commercial development stopped. At the time that was a much bigger competitor to Microsoft's dev kits than any GNU software.

If you put some ice in water and let it melt, the water level will remain the same. Even if you see ice sticking up out of the water when it floats along, the weight of it still displaces the same amount of water that the ice is made from.

This means that melting sea ice will not make the oceans rise.

As is often the case this common knowledge is actually a common misconception. While the sea ice is increasing, the land ice is shedding mass at an accelerating rate. Since the sea ice is already in the sea, it does not affect sea levels at all. Thawing land ice does increase sea levels, since it introduces water to the sea that used to sit on land.

It is possible that their software was written using .NET, which could run on both full Windows and the ARM-based Windows RT.