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Comment Re:The Ancient Battle (Score 1) 780

Another critical difference is a tradeoff between cost of learning and the flexibility of the interface. A CLI is hard/expensive to master, but once you do, you can do a great deal of work as the tools are able to interoperate in unforeseen ways. A GUI is the opposite situation: easier to learn, but overall, a shallower toolset that can only be used in ways that are deliberately designed into the interface.

The only way a GUI can even come close to the flexibility of a CLI, would be to require a radical re-think of the whole thing. For instance: allowing the user to attach objects from any piece of software in the system, to any control, in any interface, at any time. That would be a start, as it still doesn't address things like arbitrary logic, data flow, or automation between tools. From there it becomes obvious why Microsoft is toying with the idea of pushing software vendors to invest in CLI tools: as you say, it's easier to engineer.

Comment Re:When i see things like this... (Score 1) 203

That's probably the next step. Powering it would be a bitch, but I'm sure some kind of inductive power via a headband would do the job.

I think an 8x8 sensor is just enough to make this work for an optical prosthetic. The saccading motion of the eye would build up a higher resolution image inside the patient's mind. It would still be low resolution overall, but it would be a huge step over the current prototype.

Comment Re:How to make games scary? (Score 1) 129

Fatal Frame followed that advice exceptionally well. Your "weapon" in that game is a camera that eats souls. So not only are you continually faced with the doubt that the silly thing will actually do the job, but you have to get really close and take photographs of malign spirits over and over again. It's very effective at creating fear in the player, beyond what the environment can do.

Comment Re:The music industry (Score 1) 140

"they're pissed they're not producing and making the games themselves."

This is too true. And they should be pissed because they failed to see this coming and capitalize on it. But it's not too late.

XBOL completely nailed the distribution details down for content updates, and RockBand and GuitarHero can now use the same controllers. The standards have been set, and the kinks worked out. If there was ever a time for any one of the big five to roll out their own game with regular updates, this would be it.

But no, instead they stammer and stomp their feet. Dumb, dumb, dumb.

Comment Re:Huh? (Score 1) 175

Mostly over 500 Telnic employees grabbing henry.tel and david.tel. Yawn.

I'm actually looking forward to the more creative uses of .tel like "william.tel", "canyou.tel" "icant.tel", "whocan.tel", etc.

It's funny.  Laugh.

Google News Has Russian Army Invading Savannah, GA 413

theodp writes "If you checked out Google-wannabe Cuil, you learned that mapping search results to relevant images isn't a trivial task. But even Big Dog Google isn't immune to embarrassing graphics gaffes. Readers of Google News were shown that Russian troops are thrusting into the outskirts of Savannah, Georgia, thanks to the Google Maps graphic accompanying a story about Russian incursions into Georgia — the nation-state in the Caucasus, not the Caucasian-pride-ridden state in the southern US. Yahoo! Answers also had some fun with the GA-Georgia mix-up — 'I live in georegia but i dont see rusia no where not even sound but they says theres tanks should i be worrie' (Google cache) — before a spoilsport deleted the question."
Windows

Windows Is Dead – Long Live Midori? 695

parvenu74 writes "A story from Infoworld is suggesting that the days of Windows are numbered and that Microsoft is preparing a web-based operating system code-named Midori as a successor. Midori is reported to be an offshoot of Microsoft Research's Singularity OS, an all-managed code microkernel OS which leverages a technology called software isolated processes (SIPs) to overcome the traditional inter-thread communications issues of microkernel OSes."

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