Apps that anyone can write, but no one will use.

or have sex with Roseanne Barr
Ew. Thanks for the visual.

Can I buy some mod points? Insightful.

I just did a risk assessment for a large hospital whose radiology information system is running OpenVMS on unclustered DEC Alpha hardware. The application stack is MUMPS based and no longer supported by the vendor (who no longer exists). They backup to tape and have never in the long, long life of the system test restored a backup set. Needless to say the risk assessment had a lot of red on it.

The first thing GIMP would have to do is to completely dump the current UI.

Aero was designed to improve usability over Luna, the Windows XP UI. The problem with Aero was that it was launched on top of a slow, bloated, bug ridden operating system - Vista. Aero was user focused and was an honest attempt to update / modernize the Windows UI. Aero on Vista was lipstick on a dog, but Aero (with incremental, user focused improvements) on Windows 7 is great.

Metro is not user focused - no user group was demanding a common UI between phones, tablets and desktops. It might have been different if people actually used Windows Phones or Surface tablets. But with basically zero market share in the mobile space, the "converged" UI is a solution to nothing. Steve Ballmer really rolled the dice here and got the math wrong. You have to have a foothold in a market in order to leverage your way in via dominance in another sector. Microsoft has always succeeded by making it easy and transparent for people to use what they are familiar with (Windows) to do things in new markets segments - browse the Internet, access/play multimedia content, author content, etc.

What Ballmer and Co. have done is the opposite, they made it more difficult for people to use Windows in hopes that they might take that crappy experience to their mobile device.

I don't think Coke - New of Classic is the beverage of choice for people concerned about eating healthy.

This is one area that Microsoft could learn from Google. Google has never hesitated to pull the plug on less than successful products - sometimes, possibly even too soon. Bill Gates did this with his Internet Tidal Wave memo - essentially admitting that while Win95 was a success, Microsoft was in danger of missing the boat with the Internet. For those not old enough to remember, Win95 was released without a web browser in the shrink wrap version and with TCP/IP networking not enabled by default - these were only available in the Plus Pack which was marketed mainly as a package of desktop themes.

This is exactly where the MS strategy (if this was really a strategy) broke down. A PC is not a tablet and a tablet is not a PC; unless all you do on a PC is browse the Internet, Facebook and the occasional short email, you should use a tablet (just not that Surface POS). People who perform real work on a computer need a desktop/laptop and use it very differently than they do a tablet. A touch screen is not much use on a PC. For power users who want to work efficiently it taking your hands off the keyboard and mouse just slows you down. It also diminishes one of Windows less appreciated advantages over Macintoshs - a two button mouse and the ability to right click on any UI widget and bring up its extended properties.

Win8/Metro/Surface/Window Phone - are not going to get Microsoft into the tablet market, that ship has sailed. However these horrible products could easily cause them to lose the desktop/laptop market (which has better margins anyways). The tablet market is still not settled, but it's down to Apple and Google. Personally, I prefer Android tablets - I have both an iPad2 and a Samsung Galaxy Tab and I find the Android far more useful for business purposes. The lack of a user accessible file system, the inflexibility in how you organize the UI and Apple's pissing match with Google that cause them to delete applications when you upgrade the iOS makes the iPad frustrating to use for business purposes - but that's a different topic.

The UI is probably the most important part of a desktop operating system. Metro is rubbish, but even if it were fantastic, it doesn't play to Microsoft's strengths, which is leveraging its massive installed base of Windows users who are familiar with the Windows UI. Microsoft has been successful primarily because it has been able to lock in its user base and make switching painful. Users can adapt to evolutionary, incremental changes to the UI, but if you make the pain of upgrading equivalent to the pain of switching (to a competitor), people are either going to defer upgrading or switch. Even those who are former technologists in senior management positions are capable, but don't have the time to learn to be efficient on a new OS/UI. Large leaps "forward" with a UI also have massive associated change management costs for large companies. On top of general roll out costs a new UI vastly increases the cost of training, migration and regression testing of internal apps and tool sets, etc. For this reason alone, most large companies will hold off and/or skip rolling out Windows 8 as they did for Vista.

Windows may be salvagable, but not Metro. Microsoft would be wise to gas it now.

The existence of a rocky planet in the habitable zone of a star is insufficient on its own for the establishment of life as we know it. It must be large enough to retain its atmosphere, particularly early on as it accretes from multiple violent planetismal collisions. It must be formed in a region of the galaxy that is rich in heavier minerals - iron, carbon, uranium, thorium, potassium, etc. to allow for an dense iron core and radioactively driven plate tectonics. The star system probably requires large gas giants such as Jupiter to protect the inner planet from continuous bombardment from comets and asteroids, but allow sufficient comet bombardment early in its life to seed the planet with water and organic compounds. These conditions and probably more, limit the number of potential life sustaining exoplanets.

And rejecting a logical hypothesis because it doesn't fit with our preconceived views of the cosmos has never led us astray either.

Earlier (modern) thinking on the existence of intelligent life in the universe tended towards fairly high estimates of the potential number of advanced civilizations in the universe. The Drake equation has been used to estimate the probability of civilizations in our galaxy that could be detected using a radio telescope. The Drake equation starts with the number of new stars forming in the galaxy every year over the life of the galaxy and then applies a series of probabilities that these stars have planets capable of sustaining life, that the planets develop life, that life evolves to complex, intelligent life, that intelligent life develops detectable (by radio telescope) evidence and that detectable signals are produced for long enough and in the right time window to be detected by us. Original estimates optimistic and arrived at a range of detectable planets in our galaxy between 1000 and 100,000,000.

However the Drake group initially assumed that 100% of habitable planets developed life and 100% of these developed intelligent life. This was based on a fairly linear view of evolution and the bias that evolution has a particular goal - to develop advanced, communicating, detectable, intelligent life. Religious folks are criticized for intelligent design, which in its most progressive form, is an evolution that is intelligently guided or directed towards a specific goal. It seems the astronomers have/had the same fallacy. When you consider that the earth is roughly 4.5B years old and that 1) to the best of our knowledge, abiogenesis (life evolving from simple organic compounds) only happened ONCE in all this time; 2) complex life (multi-cellular) has only existed for the last 1B years; 3) there have been numerous mass extinctions, any of which could have (and yet still may) wiped out all complex life on the planet; 4) intelligent life has only existed in the last 200,000 - 500,000 years; and 5) only ONE intelligent species has evolved and survived to develop a detectable civilization, it becomes clear that the evolution of life is NOT linear or directed towards a specific goal.

Different assumptions applied to the same equation yield vastly different results. If we assume that the evolution of intelligent life requires a rocky planet with a solid iron core, a molten mantel and thin tectonic crust, with just enough vulcanism to create a CO2 rich (but not too rich) atmosphere, with liquid water, orbiting a fairly young star within a habitable zone, with a magnetosphere to protect life from radiation, with several large gas giants in the outer solar system to protect the planet from bombardment by meteorites and comets, but allow just enough, early bombardment to seed the planet with water and organic compounds, with a large, near planet sized moon to allow tidal action (it is thought that life originally formed in inter-tidal zones), etc, etc, it seems very, very, very unlikely that a large proportion of habitable planets developed life at all.

I think it is quite possible, even probable, that there is life "out there", but intelligent life seems less and less probable.

is another person's prudent planning. Unless there is a law being broken, an accounting principle being misinterpreted or other such wrong doing, I don't see the problem here. Google is just doing what every company (and individual) does, or should be doing - structuring their business to be tax efficient. Google sell ads on the Internet - which in inherently borderless. Tax codes in most jurisdictions are ill suited for eCommerce and revenue hungry tax agencies are constantly looking for ways to get a piece of this business. If Google were actually doing something illegal, this would be an HMRC investigation rather than Parliamentary grandstanding.

Let me spell it out for the learning impaired. Scorched earth means to destroy the environment to win a battle by denying an opponent the environment needed to sustain his army. It's a strategy that has been used notably by Russia vs Napoleon and by the Soviets vs.Germany. You could also categorize the US Agent Orange tactics in Vietnam / Cambodia as scorched earth.

By attempting to exert patents and copyright protections to not only Sun/Oracle's Java implementation but to the language itself (interface specifications) Oracle was more than willing to destroy the community that made Java successful in order to win a battle with Google. In the end they lost the battle and, at the very least, made the Java community even more wary.