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It also depends on how the US mil would do it in the USA. A legal sounding secret letter and all cell towers in a region of a state, city stop working except for emergency and select secure calls from a pre set list of allowed users.
All the talk of dark optical, dot com built redundancy is often just talk in many parts of the USA. A lot of physical optical might have been built out at some time but only a few active monopolies, cartels, duopolies really control all networks to keep the backhaul working in some regions with the wider national interconnects.
"First map of US fiber infrastructure reveals potential network redundancy issues" ( September 25, 2015,)
"Using multiple service providers to improve redundancy works only if the providers are not sharing fiber optic conduit space. Researchers suggest caution, as infrastructure sharing is common."
http://www.techrepublic.com/ar...
ie US political or mil request to a actual few owners and the local US telco network becomes a sneaker net.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
All that would be left working would be any non US/NATO advanced handheld and other sat options with pre paid credit ie voice communications and uploading short vids, images. How many 2way sat providers would honour a request to turn off over the USA?
The only way for the US around that up link that would be mil grade jamming or the hunting down each user with working connected hardware once detected..
Consumer grade internet and telco system is easy for any owner to turn off at a national level. Getting images, video out via a sat uplink would then be a risk.

You're trolling, but I'll take the bait. Linux still lacks a proper GUI. Even the big wigs like Gnome and KDE all have parts that make you say, "This was cobbled together by amateurs." And, despite the initial surge of Linux users who flooded Steam when it was opened to them, it's remained stagnant ever since. Fear not, there's still plenty left to mock about Linux with surely more to come. Indeed it is widely deployed, as a no-cost, drop-in replacement for unix. Really, not much has changed.

Windows doesn't have a proper GUI, either. There are inconsistencies all over the place (marvel at Windows 8/8.1/10 having two control panels f'rinstance) .

Probably not much. See benchmarks of a pre-release version of Edge from May last year.

How major is google? and some others...

Most CPUs have been significantly overclockable for at least 15 years.

http://www.techrepublic.com/ar...

Still some work to do: http://www.techrepublic.com/ar...

http://www.techrepublic.com/ar...

But wait - the Office 365 was compared to 6 year old Open office software, and numbers were fudged a lot, as in while the cost of learning the software was considered the same across the entirety of the study, whereas, as with any software product, it falls over time, from when everyone must learn it, to when only new or inexperienced people do. Nor does it take the costs of changing from OO to Microsoft.

So sorry, 6 years ago, the self driving cars were just starting out, so I'm not going to get all spun up about software issues. After all, that's why they have testing.

But yeah, they had that issue back in 2009. Six years ago. Makes a good talking point for ya.

Here's another one. When dissing solar cells, just the type Charles Fritts invented in 1883 as your metric. It used gold and selenium - and had about 1% efficiency. With your logic, thats what they are all like today...right?

Maybe time moves on, and things improve. If you have to go back six years to find this software problem, it probably doesn't exist any more.

If it is one thing MS does well it is backwards capability.

I pretty much laughed at this. I can tell you that the backwards compatibility statement from MS about 4.5 is patently false. Just try doing an elevation of privileges on an unprivileged process (ie, actually elevate the process above its base privilege). Works on .NET4, not on .NET 4.5, or, more accurately, not on .NET 4.5 on 2008SR2. It might work on .NET 4.5 2008... I didn't check. But, more telling is the last clause, which says well, maybe we aren't backwards compatible, but we allow you to run the previous versions of .NET in those cases, except for .NET4, which we completely nerfed. You also get stories like driver complaints or office issues or even with the new xbox.

So, when half your customer base ditches your band after 6 months, then it's time to hawk it to employers, for our 'wellness'?
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/wearables-have-a-dirty-little-secret-most-people-lose-interest

There's a difference between "hybrid sleep" and "hybrid shutdown". Laptops don't do hybrid sleep by default, for obvious reasons. If your laptop does (and it seems like it might), then turn it off. Hybrid shutdown shuts down the user session(s) and then hibernates the kernel session, resulting in a faster startup. No power used.

http://www.techrepublic.com/bl...

Why should I trust that?

Linux would be shit, as he's clearly doing exactly what he's supposed to do to keep it working and growing. Linus Torvalds is not a CEO or a department manager, he's indirectly responsible for managing the efforts of tens of thousands of people over an Internet-distributed platform with no regular face-to-face contact between any of them, and almost all of his communication is made public in the process. It is a very unique position. To pull in the "professional environment" bullshit of modern corporate offices and judge him by those standards is willfully ignorant and short-sighted at best.

Linus is only a douche where someone should know better or someone ignores what he's said multiple times. He is always gentle to the children of the flock (until they try to post the same busted patch eight times and he's told them why it can't be accepted seven times.) When he's mad, he's mad because someone is doing something that will damage Linux. Hell, if Linus was actually a douche, the whole "Sarah Sharp beating him with a feminism wiffle ball bat" incident wouldn't have gone well at all. Sarah Sharp is still pounding away at the USB code in the kernel and Linus is still just fine working with her. The press sensationalized a couple of posts in the thread but chose to ignore all of the respectful discussion thereafter; this is the only reason a lot of people think Linus is a real douchenozzle that needs to "be fired" or "quit."

Honestly, he's probably the best "boss" in a technical field that any of us have had the pleasure of observing. I have no doubt that 99.999% of Slashdot readers would have done a worse job than him. Not because they're incompetent or incapable of managing a project, but because it'd be very hard to do what he's done managerially any better than he has done it.

Interesting point, so I read up a bit. This only applies to Office365 customers. What about Linux, (etc.) users that can't fully utilize Office365? This really seems almost like a consumer option, and there are certainly business use-cases where this just ain't gonna fly. There's a 20,000 file limit, *period*, and the maximum file size is 10Gb, which is limiting for some, (especially those folks who roll their own encryption and compression).

For those reasons, Microsoft Office365/OneDrive doesn't seem like a serious competitor to Google Nearline, Amazon Glacier, or Microsoft Azure services.

http://www.techrepublic.com/ar...

Linux cannot into touchscreens, which is amusing considering Android handles it easily.

Nonsense, check out how KDE 5 handles it

Hopefully you had checked for shadow copies of your files before you paid. http://www.techrepublic.com/bl...

Would you really want to send your son or daughter to die in North Korea because crackers broke into a company's servers?

The cast of "Duck Dynasty" did North Korea's hacking for them? I didn't know this...

Cracker is also a term for a malicious hacker. The media has corrupted the term hacker from its original meaning: someone who is obsessed with the internal details of a system and is able to manipulate it in unconventional ways.

I think of the difference between a cracker and a hacker as similar to the difference between a burglar and a locksmith.

My understanding is that ARM-based microservers are attractive for low-compute workloads. For example, a half-rack with 1600 microservers in it would do a great job of coping with the Slashdot effect (it could spin up a whole bunch of web servers).

You are right that if you are scaling out major number crunching jobs, fast Xeon boxes will work out to be more efficient. But those Xeon boxes would be wasted just serving up web pages.

HP has released figures claiming that 1,600 of its Project Moonshot Calxeda EnergyCore microservers, built around ARM-based SoCs, packed into just half a server rack were able to carry out a light scale-out application workload that took 10 racks of 1U servers -- reducing cabling, switching, and peripheral device complexity. The result, according to HP, was that carrying out the workload used 89 percent less energy and cost 63 percent less.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/10-things/10-things-you-should-know-about-microservers/

I think Docker and microservers will turn out to be a great combination. Lightweight Docker containers should run great on the microservers.
IMHO the ARM competitors to Xeon are principally interesting to show that you won't be "painting yourself into a corner" if you adopt the ARM platform: it still has plenty of room to improve.

Apple proudly announced that their Excel competitor now supports table transposing.

What do you mean Excel has been doing this for over a decade and a half, at least?

> How often does a new genre of gaming get created?

Pretty often in the 80's since the established genres were still being created! Today, not so much. Everything is cross genre these days.

id invented the First Person Shooter with Wolfenstein 3D (though purists might argue it was earlier
Doom settled the deal though: Doom Clone vs FPS

Colossal Cave Adventure was the first text adventure, but Infocom (with Zork) refined it.

> I often hear Blizzard criticized for not being original enough

That is definitely one criticism -- they just copy other people's gameplay and polish the art. They _used_ to have fun execution. Diablo 3 was a complete clusterfuck of bland and boring itemization

The other is the disrespect for player's time, and the constantly dumbing down and half-baked game play mechanics in all their latest games.

A Google search shows many versions of this news with some actually saying that the decision to switch has already been made. Not so, according to another report at TechRepublic: "Ditching Linux for Windows? The truth isn't that simple, says Munich" http://www.techrepublic.com/ar... What is certain for the moment is that a study will be made internally by the Munich city council, the new mayor and deputy mayor are in favour of Windows (and even MS fans) and reportedly instrumental in bringing the Microsoft German head office to Munich. The final decision will be made by the elected members of the council. From the many comments on this piece of news at different sites, we can gather that Munich likely mishandled the process e.g. Limux (their version) is still at 10.04 which is really old and should have already been upgraded to 12.04 (used, for example, by Google and the French Police). Munich migrated some 14,000 workstations to Linux while in complete contrast the French police have 37,000 workstations running their version called Gendbuntu (Gendarmerie + Ubuntu) and their plans are that by the end of this summer to have it running on 72,000 workstations. http://ostatic.com/blog/french... The French police also claim they have saved 40% on the total cost of operation using Linux. https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/co...

Take for example, in Kenya the M-Pesa, the leading form of mobile payment system is widely adopted and mobile phones are used to pay for things such as public transport, school fees, rent, money transfers, to get loans etc. It is so successful that it was launched in other countries like Tanzania, Afghanistan and India.

And M-Pesa is private owned, not a government project.

Oh, and M-Pesa is apparently now going into the digital currency market proper by integrating with bitcoin.

There is no reason why Ecuador cannot do the same.

The question is that exactly because of that culture, they seem able to complicate the most simple of the problems looking through the eyes of our culture. It also does no help that they say they know everything, their CV looks like far better than a Linus Torvalds, lots of IT certifications, but when your start asking them the simplest of the questions, they fall apart.

Given that there's only about a billion of them, I would say it is safe to assume that they all fall apart and that there isn't a single Indian how actually knows anything.

It's almost a miracle that they've managed to come this far.

That's a bit disingenuous. We're talking specifically about the people hired by companies in the business of outsourcing IT. That has to be a pretty small subset of a billion.

And as I said in another article, it's not that way because some entire race of people are stupid, but because of the way the business model is set up. In order to offer IT labor at an attractive price while including overhead and profit margin, it becomes necessary to buy the cheapest labor possible. This tends to present to the customer workers that are, shall we say, less than capable. And inflated resumes seems to be a real thing.

10% of the Google Play store wouldn't be malware.

It's not. That claim was typical hyperbole by an AV vendor desperately trying to find a market to sell their snake oil in now that Windows is in decline. The report they used even showed the Google Play Movies application as malware... They've since backed off the claim, but of course the mud (as intended) still sticks.

http://www.techrepublic.com/ar...

Riiight, that is why the kernel.org repo was infected by malware. Oh and just FYI it was either the Debian or ubuntu repo that was serving a rootkitted Quake 3 install for THREE YEARS, don't have time to look it up ATM, feel free to google it.

Roses are red,
Violets are blue.
You're not at all clever,
And we're all onto you.

BURMA SHAVE

Gee, it looks like people who've actually tried UltraDefrag don't seem too thrilled with it:

I'm trying UltraDefrag on a well-fragmented hard disk (36% fragmented), and the UltraDefrag GUI leaves me unsure if it is doing anything or not. It has been up for an hour and a half, and the display hasn't changed a pixel since it displayed the original analysis. The progress bar on the bottom still shows 100%, so that is obviously meaningless. The process explorer shows that it is taking up CPU and an increasing amount of memory, but I still can't tell if it is actually doing anything. I think it is time to uninstall it and move on.

Installed on a relatively fast Vista business machine with a 650 gig HD of which 8 gigs were used. Analyze showed 12% fragmentation. I ran the program. Next day (7 1/2 hrs later), it showed being only 30% done. Trash can!

All applications, especially security software, must be closed/shutdown otherwise it is slow and does not do as well.

Can't learn how to use it; UD does not even install on Windows 7. So, it is worthless for me.

Since XP, Windows has offered disk optimization as a background process. I thought that using this was supposed to eliminate the need for periodic defragmentation with a separate tool.

Won't install properly on Win7 64bit (no icons to executables). Puts all it's stuff in the windows system32 folder and the executables won't run manually either. Also caused a one-time boot failure. Maybe installed a virus (I'm hunting)? POS and/or dangerous?

I tried out this tool recently on 2 laptops I was servicing. When using the consolidate space option the defrag driver caused a system crash/reboot on both laptops. If it had just been 1 laptop I would have put it down to the machine, but 2 out of 2 makes me somewhat wary of this app.

I find the user interface limiting and lacks feedback. Almost childlike in it's design.

Speed, huh? It took UltraDefrag almost 45 minutes just to ANALYZE a 150GB partition that had 35% free space. (Running Vista Business) Actually, I STOPPED it when it reached 70%. Yeah, it only got to 70% complete in 45 minutes. I'm not talking about the freakin' defrag time... no no no... just to A-N-A-L-Y-Z-E the drive. There was no way in hell I was going to actually run a defrag after waiting 45 minutes... and even at that point it was only reporting 3 fragmented files. WTF?!?!? If I didn't know any better (and if it wasn't September) I'd say this was some kind of sick April Fool's joke.

And so on, and so on... Saw no favourable comments whatsoever.

Facebook is written in php...Keep that in mind. Facebook is not a company of technological excellence

If you look below the annoying surface of the Facebook page, you'll find a very different story. Facebook actually HAS been a company of technical excellence.

On PHP in particular, most technical people look down on PHP... but instead of doing that, Facebook figured out how to fix some of what was broken about PHP so they could still use the good aspects of it.

That's not a company that does not have some technical chops.

Windows 8 is using a hybrid shutdown which isn't actually available in Windows 7. The kernel is hibernated, but userland is actually shut down, as is the hardware session. http://www.techrepublic.com/bl....

So no actual websites then? You do know that FF and IE also have moz- and ms- CSS tags for their specific implementations so this isn't just a Webkit (which BTW is not just Chrome) thing.

Are you intentionally being dense? That post is from Opera, a browser company that was forced to support webkit tags because developers are not putting in the normal prefix-less prefixes or Opera prefixes, but only adding webkit tags even if the standards or Opera support the feature. They finally got fed up and switched to webkit, reducing the variety in mainstream browser engines from 4 to 3.

I do know FF and IE support their own prefixes,but IIRC even FF was also forced to support some webkit tags. This is about vendors forced into support *other* tags. I can't explain it simpler than this.

http://www.techrepublic.com/bl...
http://tiffanybbrown.com/2012/...
http://www.change.org/petition...

"some of those would have adware, some would have malware. At least the ones in the FLOSS repositories wouldn't."

repositories are a layer of security. yet malware repos are widely promoted on some websites of so called help doing things like playing back movies configuring firewalls etc, also trusted repos are in fact compromized sometimes like http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/linux-repository-hit-by-malware-attack/2989/
i remember one site no link as i forgot where i found it, was a guide to set up a 'transparent' firewall and it was basically a guide to let all traffic go in both directions and no rules to block anything. as a human i almost spit my soda out my nose at the so called guide. there are people who are not smart enough to realize how bad that info was.

as noted on http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/windows-and-office/how-windows-8-hybrid-shutdown-fast-boot-feature-works/

the olde trick of shutdown /s /t 0 works still and you can wire that to an icon if you want

[RED BLINKING] THIS CAUSES AN IMMEDIATE FULL SHUTDOWN NO QUESTIONS NO ABORTS [/RED BLINKING]

if you want to be able to do an abort replace 0 with the number of seconds and use shutdown /a to abort

I have been using Google Keep. https://www.google.com/keep While not great it is adequate. Integrates with google account, although better integration with calendar would be cool. Works with google drive. Posting because some organizations are more open to letting you use google apps. Google keep is relatively new and seems not a lot of people have found it. Here is a pretty good review of Google Keep. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/google-in-the-enterprise/five-things-worth-noting-about-google-keep/

Even so I doubt it'll be such a big problem. The percentage of exploited Windows 2000 machines out of total Windows 2000 machines isn't that high. And there are still Windows 2000 machines out there.

If Microsoft stops fixing XP maybe the Chinese Gov will fix XP: http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/asian-technology/beijing-pressures-microsoft-to-extend-support-for-windows-xp/
http://slashdot.org/story/13/08/08/027211/china-has-a-massive-windows-xp-problem
http://slashdot.org/story/13/12/05/032202/china-prefers-sticking-with-dying-windows-xp-to-upgrading

Would be a great way for the Chinese Gov to monitor and control their online population.

If it's a small office, you can use Ethernet over power lines. I have not used it before, but it seems to be what you are looking for.

That being said, it's difficult to give up the 1000 Mb connections from modern ethernet cables, along with POE for phones, etc. The designer by not putting ethernet cables in place did your business a disservice. A secure business requires secure ethernet.

Ethernet over power lines? Yikes, that's about as bad as WiFi for security and it will be SLOW, SLOW, SLOW if you use a lot of devices in a small space...

The ONLY solution that is workable here is to plan to wire up everything that doesn't move. Everyplace you put a power plug, plan for a network drop next to it with one or more ports.

If it's a small office, you can use Ethernet over power lines. I have not used it before, but it seems to be what you are looking for.

That being said, it's difficult to give up the 1000 Mb connections from modern ethernet cables, along with POE for phones, etc. The designer by not putting ethernet cables in place did your business a disservice. A secure business requires secure ethernet.

To put simply, Windows runs a bunch of services and people have done the homework. Just look at windows services you can disable. These are all for Windows 7, but there aren't that much different than Vista or XP. The latter 2 have a Win 7 equivalent, but my 15 seconds of searching are up.

To put simply, Windows runs a bunch of services and people have done the homework. Just look at windows services you can disable. These are all for Windows 7, but there aren't that much different than Vista or XP. The latter 2 have a Win 7 equivalent, but my 15 seconds of searching are up.

To put simply, Windows runs a bunch of services and people have done the homework. Just look at windows services you can disable. These are all for Windows 7, but there aren't that much different than Vista or XP. The latter 2 have a Win 7 equivalent, but my 15 seconds of searching are up.

As a 12+ year Linux users, I have to give Shuttleworth some rope to hang or prove himself. For example, back in Gnome 2x-3x transition days, Gnome panel was broken for widescreen devices like LCD monitors and netbooks.[1] Unity turned out a bloated for my taste, but I fully understand his frustration with Gnome. In the end, for heavy weight desktops, I prefer Unity over Gnome 3.

PulseAudiois fine for playing music, but a real PITA for many hardcore gamers[2][3] including myself. I found latency was terrible with Wine + PA and later saw the developers had an issue with PA too.[4] After countless hours lost trying to debug some PA issues, I lost all respect for Poettering. The only worse sound server that I’ve encountered is AudioFlinger, and at least that has the excuse of being optimized for battery life over latency. So like Shuttleworth, I'm skeptical about any of Poettering's work.

Now to the meat of the debate, Mir. It's clear X11 is fundamentally broken for modern desktop/GPUs. [5] It needs to die and I don't care if it is replaced by Mir or Wayland. I have been hearing about Wayland for years now, and only after Mir was announced did I start to hear about it actually reaching a usable state. I wish they'd work together but maybe a little competition will help us all to finally rid Linux of X11.

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382

[2] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/pulse...

[3] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=960195

[4] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyODM

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

Samsung does allow "windowed" apps. You can watch video in a window while reading email or whatever. Not terribly useful, I agree.

But much more common. you can have many widgets running all the time, you can have a boat load of tasks running in any smartphone.
Mostly these affect battery life by keeping your radios up and running, but lots of these run even when you are doing something on the phone, such as surfing or email, or (horrors!) talking.

Reminds me of this story.

In that case Netflix has been working just fine for months ;) http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/how-to-get-netflix-streaming-on-ubuntu-1210/ I have a Mint box in the living room, and the only reason I currently have a Netflix sub is the Ubuntu workaround. The new method sounds like a step up, though.

Smart-quotes are a blight on online publishing. Either convert them on upload, or turn them off on your word processor. http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/msoffice/turn-off-words-smart-quotes/

30% - 70% Windows patches might be NSA directed? Well, Heaven knows Windows has no legitimate bugs to fix . But that does help me understand something. I've been puzzled by your sig for some time since I can't say I know anyone that actually lives in fear. Now it is clearer. You probably bitch when Microsoft doesn't fix something, but are too terrified to use it when they do. That explains a lot. Especially if you aren't applying patches and get pwned.

Your views are simple: It's all a plot. Windows is complex. Complex software has bugs: The danger of complexity: More code, more bugs

I'm reasonably certain that NSA isn't behind all the bugs and all the fixes.

Windows 2000 was released with 20,000 bugs

PS - I hope you do read the response I made to your post, and watch at least the first video. You will be better informed.

MSE is highly praised by Slashdotters.

Only by those who don't pay attention to current reviews

Yes, because reviews are so trustworthy! It appears that rather than reading reviews, some of us read slashdot and see how reliable reviews are. Since I pay no attention to reviews, how does Malwarebytes fare? Hmm... Google to the rescue:
"Malwarebytes Anti-Malware is a surprisingly effective anti-malware tool given that it hasn't received any major updates in the past few years. Sure, the scans are a bit faster and the installation is definitely smoother, but overall the product remains unaltered." -- C|Net

"Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 1.70 is probably the best-known free removal-only antivirus tool. Even tech support agents for other companies use it. In my own testing it beat out all free and commercial competition, quickly and without any fuss." -- PC Magazine

"Compared to the competition, Malwarebytes offers effective protection against malware that not only complements your current anti-virus, but is also lightweight on resources and snappy in performance." -- TechRepublic

Those are Googles' first three results. Yeah, you keep readinig those glowing reviews for products that brick Windows. I'll stick to reading slashdot.

People seem to think personal microcomputing started wtih Jobs, Wozniak and Apple and want to adorn history with misinformation. Yeah, the old Apples were pretty revolutaionary however The Home Brew Computer Club[1] was where it all started. With the Altair 88[0] and many other people besides Jobs and Wozniak.

[0] - http://www.techrepublic.com/photos/inside-the-altair-8800-vintage-computer/1453?seq=15
[1] - http://www.silicon-valley-story.de/sv/pc_homebrew.html

The Altair was a kit, not a complete PC; they mostly selected components that hobbyists could already buy and assemble...and sold them to hobbyists to assemble.

The Apple II (the Apple I was also a kit) was a finished product that regular people could buy. Of course, it beat the Commodore and other early PCs to market by a matter of months, essentially no time at all.

A better counterexample would be the IBM 5100 (complicated by the fact that it cost more than the average house at the time, so it wasn't really personal.) Or possibly the HP 9100A, which would have been the first personal computer except for the fact that they called it a "calculator" for marketing reasons.

People seem to think personal microcomputing started wtih Jobs, Wozniak and Apple and want to adorn history with misinformation. Yeah, the old Apples were pretty revolutaionary however The Home Brew Computer Club[1] was where it all started. With the Altair 88[0] and many other people besides Jobs and Wozniak.

[0] - http://www.techrepublic.com/photos/inside-the-altair-8800-vintage-computer/1453?seq=15
[1] - http://www.silicon-valley-story.de/sv/pc_homebrew.html

Even worse, look at the editor bitching about Netflix not working on Linux when it's a solved problem.

The ads pay for the "free" email, and also help pay for Google's research into autonomous vehicles, improved search technology, etc.

In an ideal world, perhaps. The truth is, most ad-servers end up compromised and serving up malware or iframe redirectors which serve up malware.

Furthermore, I fail to see how maturity equates to putting blind faith into a Corporation to do no evil. Especially when you consider it's Microsoft - the same people who brought us UEFI as well as funded most of the SCO legal debacle.

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/datacenter/disable-removable-media-through-windows-server-2008s-group-policy-configuration/452

Really easy and simple. No need to script anything or to remove files from local systems.

How would you do that in Linux (which has had *many* vulnerabilities in USB drivers in *kernel* space)