Its an enima that once consumed attaches itself to your spinal cord allowing you to "see" a HUD over every part of your life, download books and browse the web as a small glowing apple pulsates on your back. There is a rumored problem with overheating but otherwise....

Ha Ha, All jokes aside I think its going to be a game changer!!

"The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function."

This sentence is quite telling and ultimately the main reason behind the flash of (or lack of flash) in comupter UI's in motion pictures. They are used to drive the plot. Everyone here has surely noticed the cool looking way people "hack" computers in the movies. How about the slowing ticking progress bar and flashing data presented when people are illegally downloading files to a usb drive. In some movies the UI is so 3d and gesture advance as to make the user "dance" to interact with it. This is to present the virtuosity of the user at his craft. In other movies retro monochrome looking console UI's are used to give things an analog grittiness. I find the whole thing quite fascinating. Its a dream job if there ever was one.

The coolness of fictional media UI's does make it hard to design regular UI's for real products. The user expectation is pretty high. I always chuckle a little when I start up my PS3. The main nav is just a menu tree. The eye candy floating in the back has no function use whatsoever but most of the processing during the navigation phase is consumed by presenting the cool liquid effect in the background.

I've been watching "The 1st 48" (US reality show about solving murder cases) for a while. I love how all of the UIs are basically just MS Windows and maybe a web based perp search application because is what cops actually use. I compare this show to CSI all the time and "CSI fan" friends hate me for it.

With CES there must be a worst. I don't fault any of these companies and there "bad" products too much though. They are doing what it takes to get recognition in an industry where sometimes the best products go unseen and unmentioned. Hype/buzz has become the rule of the day, the more you can generate the more successful your product launch will be, whether it is good or bad. I would also venture to say that some products are rushed out of development prematurely specifically for this trade show.

If you are making your platform choice based solely on the primary development language of the platform then you might not be ready for game development. The knowledge and understanding necessary for making something as complicated as a video game transcends programming language.

There seem to be a high percentage of historically "Wet" satellites in our solar system. Earth,Venus, Mars possibly Europa, Titan....... Are our assumptions about solar system formation and the likely hood of liquid water covered satellites off?

I agree with you on the source, but there was a time that the only place you could get to relevant data was to either wait for it to come to a library or go to a university.

Not to spread doom and gloom but academia has been like this for a very long time.

Colleges and universities are struggling internally. On the one hand schools have to generate revenue which requires advertisement, marketing and "looking" better than other competing schools. On the other hand the primary roles of universities and colleges in society are to increase societies overall intellect and be a lightening rod for research, learning, and understanding.

The internet offers free access to knowledge and is stealing thunder from individual academic institutions. For example, I can communicate almost instantaneously with authors, researchers and professors and get an answer in most cases. I can view lectures and get materials on most subjects. Most educators/professors have blogs and some have tweets. We are not as dependent on academia to facilitate intellectual communication as we once were.

I have compared academia in the US, especially the Ivy League schools, to the luxury car industry. The information rumored in the original post enforces the legitimacy of my comparison. I recently read an small article on luxury vs performance that kinda applies to this topic.

Luxury is about appearing better. Performance is about being better.

We (mankind) are currently lacking in the capability to accurately quantify many natural phenomena. We may not ever, given our nature and the nature of the universe, be able to see somethings as they actually are.

If it weren't for those meddling kids!!!!

But I don't mind LGPL.

I remember thinking the same thing when Adobe bought out Macromedia. I think there is hope for some of the larger more useful pet projects but Oracles primary is making there a new acquisition profitable. Anything not strong enough to adequately monetize will probably be Open Sourced or shelf-ed.

So what observations can be made from other companies in our industry that have acquired companies with a strong library of technologies? What has lasted and what has fallen by the wayside historically speaking?

I'm saying the the environment for business should be properly constrained, those constraints should be difficult to circumvent and the "entities" competing in the environment be monitored by some governing body not vested in the success of anyone entity working from within the environment.

Given the opportunity it is very hard for any person or company to pass up a chance to change the rules of a game in a way that disadvantages its competition in that game. This is especially true when survival is at stake. We do not and should never condone this type of behavior but we must realize it is natural and (without regard to morality) should be expected. This type behavior is bad for our industry as we have all seen so we must always be aware that some company out there will always try this as a means to advantage and stop it to allow strength to be generated via fierce competition.