...Is almost certainly the correct answer.

We've managed to take principled stands against things like paying ransoms to hostage takers for years, recognising that even though the consequences in an individual case may be horrible it is important not to lend any credibility to the strategy of taking hostages.

Today we are seeing a few very small groups of people, who want to instil fear to promote some sort of ideological position, who actually do relatively little damage but do it in ostentatious ways to seek attention. How is it that our political leaders and media reporters think the correct response to this strategy is to give these people exactly the attention they crave, with wall-to-wall graphic media coverage and inflammatory political statements full of phoned-it-in remorse and concern? If we want to disrupt people who support terrorism, perhaps we should start with all the influential people who are making terrorism a viable strategy in the first place.

I'm pretty sure the correct reaction to these kinds of incidents is to allow the police to investigate, to put the perpetrators on trial, and in this case probably to send them to prison for life like any other murderer. Meanwhile, the politicians and media could spend their time promoting (both politically and with funding) things like medical research or safer driving, either of which has the potential to save many more lives in a single year than preventing every terrorist attack that has occurred in the same places in my entire lifetime.

Fear motivates the world (or at least the US) these days.

The media peddles it, the two political parties (I was tempted to say major, but they have a lock on it) *both* peddle it to great effect. They each have their own brand, but they're both villainous in their exploitation of it.

The public has bought in to it, and individuals and groups lacking in scruples have noticed that it can be used to rally support.

My point is not so much that I think OSS must involve spending money but rather that to make a good product for users a lot of relatively dull and tedious jobs are necessary. The incentives that motivate many/most OSS contributors don't tend to align with getting those things done, while commercial/proprietary organisations solve that problem by paying their developers as an incentive.

Well, Windows RT has IE with Flash (and that's not even x86, but is very locked down by default). IE is already present in Box 360s, and was mentioned several times for the Xbox One, so that will definitely be present (Flash is unknown). Arbitrary third-party plugins are almost guaranteed to be not present, though.

There is an NT kernel in there, as well as a whatever-they-call-the-Xbox-kernel for the gaming portions; you'll be able to switch back and forth between a gaming mode and a "runs stuff that runs on NT" mode very quickly... but I suspect that the "stuff that runs on NT" part is going to be extremely limited. Music, videos, web browsing, and probably not much more.

Linux is right out until the root of the system is cracked, I suspect. Too bad; it's a powerful x86 box.

Annoyingly, Indies these days are showing a trend toward only publishing on Steam. If I can't buy the game straight from the developer, or through a quality (DRM-free, among other characteristics) retailer like Good Old Games, I won't support it (it's OK if they *also* want to publish on Steam so long as the other copies don't languish unmaintained). Unfortunately, sometimes they don't bother announcing "oh by the way, this will only be available on Steam" until after the Kickstarter (or other such thing) period ends....

... except that you can, have been able to for years, and tons of people *have* made Xbox 360 games and published them online. They're even distributed on Xbox Live, under the completely sneaky and unexpected name of Xbox Live Indie Games. http://xbox.create.msdn.com/en-US

There are catches, of course: the online publication requires a $100/year account, and the games can only be developed using XNA (which is a quite nice framework but produces CIL assemblies, not native code). The tradeoffs are at least a modicum of curation of the store content and an architecture independence that should (don't know if this has been announced) allow running XBLIG, unmodified, on the Xbox One even though it runs on a different architecture than the 360.

Eh... I've seen a lot of misinformation on this subject. Not saying that the core message (no back-compat for XB360 games) is wrong, but there's a lot of details out there which are.

For example, the usual reason given - the switch from PPC to x86 - is invalid on the face of it; the 360 runs original Xbox games, which were written for x86 (it uses emulation to do this). Relatedly, the XB1 should be able (by that logic) to run OXB games (same architecture). There's also no legitimacy to the claim that indie arcade games won't run because of the architecture; those games are written using XNA (a variant of the .NET framework aimed at gaming) and compile to CIL, which will run on any architecture with the requisite JIT compiler (r interpreter, if you didn't mind it being very slow). For example, WP7 and ZuneHD games are also XNA games, but both devices run on the ARM architecture (although the WP7 "emulator" is actually an x86 VM and can load the same package files as the phone, so you can be damn sure that the code produced by the XNA compiler is architecture-agnostic). Ignore any idiots who claim that the ORX used the same architecture as the 360; that is flat-out wrong, and the difficulties in getting the emulator just right are why many OXB games didn't initially work quite right on the 360.

Of course, the 360's CPU is not nearly as much less powerful than the XB1's CPU than the OXB's CPU is than the 360's. There may just not be room for emulation overhead in the difference between the 360 and the ONE. XNA and OSB games should still work, though...

How is the Surface *Pro* a disaster? Microsoft appears to be selling them about as fast as they can manufacture them. The Surface RT (uses ARM chips and runs the crippled-desktop Windows RT) has had disappointing sales, not the Pro.

It does appear that the goal is not to reduce crime, though that is used as a statistic. I do agree that the banning of guns appears to be an end on its own for these people. It makes little sense. There is an irrational fear, probably instilled at an early age. It is similar to the irrational fear that other people have towards people instead of objects. I think it is the same base motivation, and the separate groups each see their cause as just. It doesn't mean they both aren't delusional though.

I don't usually say this, but mod this AC up! I don't know what the hell Larry is smoking, but it's like he's trapped inside a reversed RDF that completely hides the real world from him. Well, either that or he's the most two-faced liar I've seen outside of a career politician in years...

There's certainly plenty of bad proprietary software out there too, no argument there. But if there's one really unfortunate thing that applies almost across the board in the FOSS world, it's the lack of that user focus.

Most FOSS is developed either by people interested in scratching their own itch (which I'm not at all saying is a problem, but those itches might not be the same as most people's) or by companies that make their money from consulting on it (which can create an unfortunate conflict of interest as far as quality and usability are concerned). Most proprietary software is developed by people or companies whose interest is in scratching as many people's itches as possible so they get paid as often as possible. Those different motivations naturally lead to different kinds of development process and ultimately to different emphases in the resulting software.

Right. In fact, everyone who starts a small business was rich before, and even if their business collapses while they're pumping their own savings back into it so they can keep paying their employees in a down period, they'll still have plenty of money left over to pay for health insurance and a good school for their kids.

If you really feel that starting a business is an easy choice and carries no real risk, go ahead and do it yourself. There's nothing magic about it, and nothing is stopping you but your own prejudice. Then you can make sure that when you do hire guys to do potentially dangerous manual work, they've got the best safety gear and working conditions and site supervision possible.

I'm guessing you're just trolling, but here are some obvious examples:

• http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/
• http://www.apple.com/ipad/
• http://www.adobe.com/uk/products/photoshop.html

My mod points just ran out or you'd have had a (+1, Insightful) for that.

As you say, the major difference between most successful FOSS projects and most successful CCSS ones probably isn't the programming, it's everything else. It's the vision and creativity and market research. It's the willingness and ability to commit entire teams for weeks in a row to completely rewrite an area of the UI that wasn't working quite as well as it could. It's spending time and money to implement tedious file conversion code and license relevant technologies, because people in the real world need to use the de facto standard proprietary formats, even if they are patent-encumbered. It's hiring a team of technical writers and illustrators to produce a user-friendly help system that actually does help. It's spending a small fortune running observation tests with actual users to find the most important problems, and then fixing those first. In short, it's having leadership/management who are user-focussed and able to direct their resources objectively to where they will make the most difference to those users.