The have. It's called emoticon. And you're right, 95% of all forum conversations can be expressed in emoticon with just two words :) and :(

The Chinese artist Shi Guorui has also does this, using not only shipping containers, but also large rooms.

Here's a link for more information: http://www.slowlight.net/blog/?p=79

I don't know what it was like at Parker Borthers, but Atari (we supplied game software and hardware design to them) got marketing people heavily involved. They were typically fresh out of some MBA mill and no understanding of the their target audience (apart from being given 'focus group' results) and little interest in video games beyond concerns about them being hits. I'm sure this helped widen the gap between the artwork and the way the game actually looked. It certainly helped drive Atari into the ground, as the titles got stupider and stupider, leading to the infamous Atari land fill.

As to the box artwork: I remember programmers commenting on the nice box artwork, but there was never any mention about how it didn't match the game. Like someone else said, it was like looking at a cover of a science fiction book, knowing that the contents were probably very different.

To put things into perspective: Back in those days pinball machines were still popular and people expectations of computer games were pretty realistic, e.g. rather low. The IBM AT and XT had just come out, and were targeted at businesses and considered too expensive for the normal household. Graphical user interfaces only existed in research labs and universities. Coin operated video games had much better (and much more expensive) hardware, as compared to the home versions. The home systems had to be less sophisticated, otherwise they would have been too expensive for their target market.

I used to program these things and remember late night sessions pouring over hex dumps trying to recover a byte or two. The initial programming was done in 6502 assembler (to keep the cost down the CPU packed in a 28-pin DIP, which allowed for all sorts of tricks for saving bytes by addressing memory in unconventional ways). The last few weeks of the programming was typically done in hex, looking for opcode sequences that could be used as data. E.g. we spent our time hand optimizing the hex code. Sometimes we found enough space to put in a new feature or two.

Now nearly 30 years later I can still remember some of the hex code a few of the 6502 instructions. 4C is JMP, A9 is LDA, etc.

And by the way, we considered C a high level language back then.

Ray Kurzweil has been making claims for AI for years. For example that we will have an AI singularity event and that
society will be completely replaced my machines. Well, decades later it still hasn't happened and the only things in the
field of computer science that seems to have a life of its own are spam and computer viruses. I'd like call them a
life form.

Will we reverse engineer the brain any time soon? I doubt it. Part of the reason is practical. This would be an
extremely expensive and time consuming undertaking. I'm not sure its even worth it, especially when this is
compared to other branches of science which have made rapid advances. For one example, take a look at
the field neuro-science and its use of fMRI scanning.

Reversing engineering the brain, probably is possible, but it's probably not worth it right now. Well have
to wait another decade.. again.

The news is that it's not new news, but rather a trend that's been apparent for nearly a decade..

  http://www.softxs.ch/alan/essays/googlebomb.html

I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but here's some food for thought concerning evolution in the Catholic and Jewish religions:

Consider what would happen (centuries or millennia ago) if you were a poor but very intelligent male child in Europe:

Depending on the religion of your family, you would probably come to attention of the local priest or rabbi.

If your family was Catholic you might be allowed to enter the priesthood, learn to read and write, and given initiative and some luck, you could rise through the ranks of the church hierarchy. Given you stay in the church it is unlikely that you would produce children.

If your family was Jewish, you might be tutored by the local rabbi, learn to read and write, and given initiative and some luck, you would likely marry someone from an educated and perhaps well to do family. It is likely that your children would get a head start in life, as compared to yourself.

Now consider what this difference means over thousands of years of evolution. The Catholics are removing intelligent people from the gene pool and the Jews are giving them a breeding advantage.

The Catholic religion has existed for over 2000 years, and the Jewish religion for much longer. This is may be enough time to produce measurable results. Think about the studies of the of the Ashkenazi Jewish community, which show a greater than 100 average IQ.

It's definitely safe. This problem was put to bed back in the 80s:

"Radiation, yes indeed! You hear the most outrageous lies about it. Half-baked, goggle-boxed do-gooders telling everybody it's bad for you. Pernicious nonsense! Everybody could stand 100 chest x-rays a year. They ought to have 'em too."
- J. Frank Parnell in "Repo Man"

There, now that that's solved...

So does this mean that WE finally have THEM by the balls?

It would be nice for the OS community to serve back what it's been receiving. I'm thinking
of the patent trolls, copyright oppression, DCMA takedown notices and the like.

Fantastic. An App Store puts democracy back into the hands of the ordinary citizen.

In fact, I think open an account right now, and buy myself a congressman.

From reading both, I tend to gravitate towards the failure side. It's 2009 and only 10% migration? Wasn't this suppose to save money? It's a frigging embarrassment! How are you suppose to point to Munich as an example of free and open-source software working on a city scale when they can't even implement it in a reasonable time-frame?

I think you got got labeled flamebait, not that I agree, because your conclusions appear unreasonable, namely that you are measuring the project on criteria which do not match the project's own stated goals.

First of all: Munich was said that the their goal is not to save money in the short-term, but to gain 'autonomy' from a single supplier. The savings, if any, are to be realized in the long term.

Second: Schedule and cost overruns are (unfortunately) normal for projects this size and complexity. What is your idea of a reasonable time scale anyways? With some searching I can probably identify other similar sized projects which eventually succeeded, in spite of serious schedule overruns. BTW: The sound byte that only 10% of the workstations have been migrated in X years doesn't scale to mean that it will take 9 * X more years to complete to rest of them. I know you didn't state this, but the LimuxWatch blog implies this in many of their schedule slip lists.

Third: There is more at stake than producing Linux-based work stations and a support infrastructure for Munich. This is a first of it's type project, meaning a major public-sector open source deployment on the desktop. If this succeeds, then the lessons learned will form the basis for other similar projects. In other words, don't be surprised if LimuxWatch blog has a hidden agenda.

Over the years I've read a great deal about various efforts to belittle and undermine it. The Munich Limux Watch blog seems like an attempt to systematically discredit the entire project. I'd love to find out who's behind it. I doubt it's directly supported Microsoft, but I'd wouldn't be surprised if there is some business interest, perhaps a disgruntled IT supplier or even a public sector employee who doesn't want their desktop system changed, behind it. Perhaps some clever Slashdot reader can find out more.

Don't be surprised that there are unexpected costs on a project of this size and complexity. Think about similar projects in the (semi-)public sector, some of which had factor 10 cost overruns and were abandoned (for example: Denver airport luggage processing system). In the end, the ability to actually complete the project, even if years late, and the long-term cost savings will determine its real success. [See my signature below]

We shouldn't expect Limux to have an instant pay back. Even though the operating system is free, the installation scripting, customization, roll-out, training and support have real costs, which will take years to amortize. The gain will only be in the long-term when the infrastructure to support Limux is in place and saves from not having license costs associated with forced upgrades are realized.

Further, you must bear in mind that Munich is a pioneer in even attempting to replace a major Microsoft based infrastructure with open source software. They are having to to do everything from scratch, which I'm sure increases the cost.

Munich's Limux project is a battleground for Microsoft. It it succeeds then it will become the model for similar initiatives. This could make non-Microsoft desktop systems a real alternative for large institutions. This is Microsoft's disaster scenario, and could ruin their monopoly hold on the marker. They might even have to, gasp, compete.