One can do oil upsliding without Putin just as well.
You are forgetting the oligarchs. Do you think any money would be spent on social needs or on defense or on reserves or on external debt or on stimulating the economy? Yeltsin's years are a good illustration of that situation: none of the above was done; all the money was taken by oligarchs, and the people were left to fend for themselves as they may.
I won't say that Putin is flawlessly doing all that; however he is doing better than Yeltsin. Oligarchs know their place. Perhaps someone else would do it also pretty good; but the theory of probabilities is against you. If the incumbent is doing something at a good enough level, the newcomer has to explain why he, an untested politician, will do better - and how is he going to guarantee that. Russia is the origin of the game of Russian Roulette, but despite that not every voter is interested in a chance to buy a small incremental improvement if, if things go south, he can equally likely buy himself a large problem. In essence, Putin is "good enough" for most voters; a devil that you know. The only exception is voters who want "their man" in power, or who are simply thinking that people at the top should change every other week. They, poor souls, have no clue what they are asking for. There are people like that in every society. Hell, half of the USA is always against the sitting President, no matter if he is R or D. So what?
Some of us prefer a slightly messy democracy to a slow strangulation of discussion and dissent.
OK. That is fine, and it is actually true. But here is another question. Are those who prefer the other option wrong? Not merely wrong from your point of view, but wrong from some external, absolute reference plane, so that we can declare people A to be undeniably right and people B to be undeniably wrong?
If you say "yes, there is a way to declare them such" then you deny them their own way of development, and that is not democratic. If you say "no, there is no way to objectively judge decisions of another socium" then it has to be accepted that they could be right (or wrong) in their circumstances, and you could be right (or wrong) in your circumstances.
The article states that he's 61 years old, so this is more or less "president for life". If he lasts another 10 years he'll just do it again, or not even bother to hold an election. Russia's slide will continue if this happens.
Slide upward, you mean? Yes, that has to be stopped by any means possible.
In most areas of expertise once we find a capable engineer, a good manager, we tend to keep them employed. But the rules of democracy say that such a manager has to be kicked out after a certain number of years in power. What for? If the people vote for him, they want him in power. It wouldn't make any difference if a clone shows up with a single bit of difference between the two, and the people elect him instead. The revolving door of limited term only forces the current ruler to fatten himself as much as possible while he is on top. Emperors seldom do that - their fate is tied to the fate of the country, and they often arrive to the chopping block first.
It can be said that periodic, forced replacement of leaders reduces the risk of one-sided approach to problems. You can see an example of that in Venezuela. But is the benefit worth the cost?
There is no injustice if (A,B)(C) and (A,C)(B) are temporally or otherwise separated. For example, some law of nature may prevent B and C from ever coming into contact. But each is free to contact A, as long as the other is not around - say, they live in different cities, and A travels.
Will that affect A? Sure; in the same way if A is the husband, B is A's wife, and C is A's mistress:-)
This summer the Arctic sea ice is no where near a record high but has merely moved back to the general declining path it's been on after last year's exceptional melt.
Unfortunately, Earth is on that "general declining path" since the planet formed from frozen gases and other debris a few billion years ago. But I guess if we take our last money away from our children and give it to some salesmen, we can fix this problem in less than a century or two! Where do I sign up?
The villager: Tell me, the learned Haji Nasruddin, is it true that you agreed to teach Emir's donkey to speak in ten years, and took a sack of gold for that?
Haji: Yes, this is true.
The villager: But, Haji, this is surely impossible!
Haji: It is impossible indeed. But I gather that in ten years either the donkey dies, or Emir dies, or, Allah forbid, I die.
Unfortunately, the VM cannot monitor what's happening inside. It is happy to execute NOPs from here and forever. A kernel, however, with even the most primitive MMU, can detect the crash. If there is no crash, the kernel can run another process - in isolation from the main one - that would be monitoring the main process through some IPC.
In other words, there is a reason why Windows 95 is no longer popular.
I think I have a good idea what an RTOS is, having worked with them for about 15 years by now. I understand what you are saying; however it's backward. An RTOS, even on as simple as FreeRTOS, will do just fine to run "an application" in a VM. The fact that an RTOS usually comes equipped with real-time capabilities will not hurt anyone.
So, in other words, you are right - they may have not invented an RTOS - they haven't gotten that good yet:-)
The thing they have "invented" is called RTOS. Typically, an RTOS is a simple kernel that is not using any memory protection features. That's how they started, at least - but over time some RTOS got separation between userspace and kernel space. VxWorks, for example, offered that option back in the year 2000.
Separation of one and the other is not just needed to protect from hackers. It creates a stable, reliable supervisor ring (hello, SVC command from IBM/360!) that can do whatever it wants to the userspace, whereas the userspace can't do anything to the supervisor. This allows the kernel to start, stop and monitor userspace applications, guaranteeing system integrity. If you don't have that, any bug, anywhere, can create unpredictable and undetectable faults within the system - and you will never know until the thing crashes horribly, which will eventually happen.
Well, I'm aware that homeschooling has deficiencies. However for most of human history children did not go to school to socialize... and nevertheless they ended up being normal people. Do you have an explanation for such a weird thing? A human child, raised outside of a special incubator... no, can't be!
Note: I have no desire to "interact socially" with peddlers of drugs, thieves, and street fighters. I would want to associate with people like myself - and them only. Is that something I should be denied, or to be ashamed of? If not, I demand that right.
Students don't need to be able to ban everyone and anyone. Schools do need to kick out the small minority of incorrigible troublemakers who aren't there to learn anyway, and who ruin the learning environment for those who are.
It's far better to let students to vote on who is and who isn't their friend. A person may be nice and sweet while teacher is present, and then turn Mr. Hyde the second the teacher is gone. There is no direct link between being a good student and being a good friend. Huckleberry Finn, for example, was a pretty bad student, and he seldom obeyed orders. As a human, however, he was more decent than average. Children should have freedom of association; they are not idiots in this aspect. Even dogs in a pack are free to stay or to go. The modern society, however, grabs a random collection of dogs and puts them into one cage. No surprise that some of them get hurt - they can't get away.
Do anything against them and you get kicked out of the "in kid" schedule.
This is already true, and it was true forever. You cannot force anyone to invite you to events, or even accept you as a guest outside of school.
Sally enacts the "ban anyone I don't want to talk to" provision and Barbara's class schedule gets moved around so Sally doesn't have to see her... with the added "bonus" of Debbie and Barbara being kept apart.
Where will that "added bonus" come from? S remains all alone, while D & B can be together if they both wish so - just not with S present. Students are vertices of a graph. Each vertice can have an edge to any other vertice. For example, take an IM software where a student opens an independent window to talk to a specific person. D & B may be chatting, and D & S may be chatting, but the edge between S and B is blocked by S's request.
The proposed model is an ideal goal. Existence of only one class is a limiting factor. The school should be able to provide up to N classes to up to N students. (The limit will be used up if all students choose to be alone.) I agree that the current model of school will not work here. At the same time, online education will. As I said, this is not a shovel-ready project. But on the other hand this is the only configuration which allows students to pick and choose who they interact with. Otherwise you will be forcing Sally to see Barbara every single day. Columbine events would have never happened if those two guys could click a button and insulate themselves from those jocks who bullied them.
Seriously, why don't you just fix the fucked up environment that school's create
You can fix that with one and only one change: students must be able to pick and choose who they want - and, most importantly, don't want - to interact with. Someone hurt you, or is scary - banish him from your presence, for a while or forever. This will be self-regulating, unless the student wants to be all alone (and, actually, that is fine as well.) Those bans must work everywhere - in class, and in halls, and in the street. (Too much to ask for, but that's the spec.)
The whole problem is that (a) students have no say in who they are working with, *AND* (b) they have no means to control behavior of others. Adults have both of those options. I don't know why so many ancient writers say that childhood is the best time of anyone's life... in my opinion, it's the worst time (aside from deathbed, perhaps.) Children have no rights; everyone is a superior; noncompliance is punished; complaints are not accepted; crimes can be committed against you with no recourse... Hell, as soon as I was done with school I ran away and never looked back. The adult world is simply heaven, compared to the wolfpack-like society of children where only physical strength and ferocity matter.
Micropayments is a perfectly reasonable model, that has just never taken off.
And why is that? You are answering:
Partially because there's usually so much overhead to managing them. And THAT is partially because of legal constraints.
Overhead? I can't think of much overhead in sending a fraction of a BTC, or in sending over PayPal. There might be a problem if you are an Amazonian native who lives in a rainforest and has no Internet. But then you aren't very likely to be a user either. Everyone else, who has access to the Net, can pay.
OTOH, please note that I did say "partially". There are other reasons that it hasn't taken off, and the "free rider" problem is one of them.
Somewhat yes, I agree. Very often optional payments are optimized away. Also, a small payment is seen as not influential, and therefore not necessary. People are conditioned to not spend their money left and right because they have needs in the real world, and those needs are not optional. For micropayments to work you need a new man. Good luck with that. People are, generally, opportunistic gatherers and freeloaders. They do contribute sometimes, but not too much and not too often. A modern society requires too much labor from an individual to just stay alive, pay for the house, and for the children, and for healthcare... very few people come home from a 12-hour hacking at work and immediately sit down for another 8 hours of hacking at home. Not everyone works as hard, but good coders usually do - and you want only those.
Breakage of a random application that dared to use a deprecated API call that suddenly suffered a regression (and wasn't tested, since it's deprecated) does occur. But it's unintentional, and MS may eventually fix the problem. They have no particular reason to protect a problem.
However Metro was a problem that was intentionally created and maintained and protected. Working around that problem is "unwelcome." I don't know how open is the API that the software is using, but as I suspect it is neither very open nor very much designed for 3rd parties. If it's undocumented, here be dragons.
In essence, software like Start8 is actively fighting Microsoft. And Microsoft fights back. What business would want to stand on that battlefield and risk being obliterated by one side or the other?
No, its becoming a tiling window manager, something several linux users run on their own systems by choice and swear by it.
Tiling window managers fit the workflow of precious few users. I don't use it myself (actively hate!) and I don't know anyone who would use one or want one. Many years ago I knew one geek; he was only using console I/O and vi. Perhaps it would work for him. But it's sheer insanity to throw a highly specialized piece of software at unsuspecting people who - for their whole life of computing - have never even seen a tiling WM. The nature of "general computing" suggests that we run different applications, and they have different needs. Tiling WM is OK if you and your software are very logical and very systematic. Most people are nothing of the sort. They just drag their windows around until they get what they want. They do not "program" their WM, they wing it.
And I think most of microsofts defaults for the start screen are stupid on a desktop... but that's all stuff that easily fixable with group policy.
Indeed, plenty of SO/HO users are ready to whip up a few GPOs and deploy them through their AD. That's what those poor souls live for - to fix Windows. Not to repair cars, and not to sell products, and not to bake pizza - but to code GPOs. Sure, this is not a problem at a large company. But it is a huge problem at a smaller company. Now you have to buy a new computer and call the support contractor right away because the computer is not usable "out of the box."
The 3rd party add-ons do that well enough today. If you haven't "discovered" them yet, you haven't been looking.
Those 3rd party add-ons are not a good option for a business. Microsoft can break the functionality at any time - and they did it once already, with 8.1.
If they do it again, what will you do when on some fine Wednesday 100 workers come to their computers, wiggle the mouse, and they see... what will they see? They never saw it before. Would be probably a thousand tiles. They will call the IT. The telephones at IT melt down, and the IT director commits seppuku with a dull byte. There is no option to "wait a couple weeks until the Start8 people figure out what is broken *this time*." The option to roll back the updates is also not very easy (if you need it, you aren't set up for approved deployment of patches.)
2-3 years from now, I figure the new start screen will have largely been adopted as mainstream
It won't be because it is not an improvement, it's a regress to Windows 3.0. Full-screen, single window Program Manager.
having been divorced for ten years I'm happier than any time in my life
A whole bunch of people, those who are able to learn from other people's misfortune, decide to skip the whole business and go straight to the joys of being single without all the preceding marriage rigamarole. It may be fun to meet someone, but it's far less likely to be fun to deal with their family, and their ways of life, and with all the legal implications of marriage. Divorce is often ruinous, no matter what gender you belong to.
Where I live, the main highway has been under construction for the last 3 years, and the entrances, exits, and lanes aren't in the same place two weeks in a row. And it rains a lot. And it snows in the winter. How's your robot car gonna handle that?
Much better than a human. Often the driver cannot figure out ahead of time what lanes are closed or open because the visibility is poor. But a robot would simply receive a RF signal from the work site, and that signal would contain all the relevant information.
"excuse me gentle madam, but there seems to be a patch of ice 20 meters ahead, can you take the wheel for a moment?"
A robot would drive on ice far better than a human. 20 meters is plenty of time to drop the speed. A human would simply stare at the danger all this time.
Not just margins. Development time is short. A model of the drive has to be produced and sold in less than a year, and replaced with a new model after that. Who can afford an endurance test, even if accelerated?
God help you if you use the older win 7 rtm or worse XP without a single patch. I have financial data and hundreds of gigs of data and vms so a reimage due to a virus is unconscionable.
If you are so concerned about your data, your best option is to keep it on a server that is not connected to the Internet. What are you doing, trusting "hundreds of GB" to a few platters of spinning rust? As a minimum you need a RAID 1 or higher NAS, and ideally you need an offsite mirror.
Assuming that you are a typical careful user, your chances of getting a virus are far lower than your chances of seeing your HDD crashed. Even Linus is not protected from that!
I don't say that the government cares to spy upon me.
Slashdot is a place where geeks discuss vulnerabilities. A TV is one such vulnerability. Maybe it is rarely used, or never. A mild paranoia is a job requirement for a sysadmin, or for anyone who is tasked with providing security. If you want to laugh at true paranoids, those who do not see the difference between possibility and reality, you can find plenty of them on other forums.
My big screen does not spy on me, it simply does not have an input capability
If it has speakers, they can be used as a microphone.
Even if the box is not connected... how much does a cell phone interface cost, as in hardware? I think it's dirt cheap. These can be installed in all new telescreens, and activated when needed. The NSA will gladly pay the phone bill, especially because it will be heavily discounted.
For some reason it's unconventional for random people to judge others and immediately carry out the sencence. It is not illegal to work for the government. If you want to set up a parallel legal system that is only controlled by you, and judges people by your laws... it's not exactly democratic. It's called "mob rule," with torches and pitchforks.
After all, what makes you think that your opinion is shared by the majority of voters? If it were, you wouldn't need any of those measures - the majority would just vote to fix what is broken. Since they don't... do you suppose you are entitled to force them into happiness? Those ideas are not new.
Interestingly enough, the proposal of punishing government workers reminds me of campaigns of terror that were so popular among assorted European revolutionaries between 1880 and 1920. One of them even managed to ignite a World War.
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One can do oil upsliding without Putin just as well.
You are forgetting the oligarchs. Do you think any money would be spent on social needs or on defense or on reserves or on external debt or on stimulating the economy? Yeltsin's years are a good illustration of that situation: none of the above was done; all the money was taken by oligarchs, and the people were left to fend for themselves as they may.
I won't say that Putin is flawlessly doing all that; however he is doing better than Yeltsin. Oligarchs know their place. Perhaps someone else would do it also pretty good; but the theory of probabilities is against you. If the incumbent is doing something at a good enough level, the newcomer has to explain why he, an untested politician, will do better - and how is he going to guarantee that. Russia is the origin of the game of Russian Roulette, but despite that not every voter is interested in a chance to buy a small incremental improvement if, if things go south, he can equally likely buy himself a large problem. In essence, Putin is "good enough" for most voters; a devil that you know. The only exception is voters who want "their man" in power, or who are simply thinking that people at the top should change every other week. They, poor souls, have no clue what they are asking for. There are people like that in every society. Hell, half of the USA is always against the sitting President, no matter if he is R or D. So what?
Some of us prefer a slightly messy democracy to a slow strangulation of discussion and dissent.
OK. That is fine, and it is actually true. But here is another question. Are those who prefer the other option wrong? Not merely wrong from your point of view, but wrong from some external, absolute reference plane, so that we can declare people A to be undeniably right and people B to be undeniably wrong?
If you say "yes, there is a way to declare them such" then you deny them their own way of development, and that is not democratic. If you say "no, there is no way to objectively judge decisions of another socium" then it has to be accepted that they could be right (or wrong) in their circumstances, and you could be right (or wrong) in your circumstances.
The article states that he's 61 years old, so this is more or less "president for life". If he lasts another 10 years he'll just do it again, or not even bother to hold an election. Russia's slide will continue if this happens.
Slide upward, you mean? Yes, that has to be stopped by any means possible.
In most areas of expertise once we find a capable engineer, a good manager, we tend to keep them employed. But the rules of democracy say that such a manager has to be kicked out after a certain number of years in power. What for? If the people vote for him, they want him in power. It wouldn't make any difference if a clone shows up with a single bit of difference between the two, and the people elect him instead. The revolving door of limited term only forces the current ruler to fatten himself as much as possible while he is on top. Emperors seldom do that - their fate is tied to the fate of the country, and they often arrive to the chopping block first.
It can be said that periodic, forced replacement of leaders reduces the risk of one-sided approach to problems. You can see an example of that in Venezuela. But is the benefit worth the cost?
There is no injustice if (A,B)(C) and (A,C)(B) are temporally or otherwise separated. For example, some law of nature may prevent B and C from ever coming into contact. But each is free to contact A, as long as the other is not around - say, they live in different cities, and A travels.
Will that affect A? Sure; in the same way if A is the husband, B is A's wife, and C is A's mistress :-)
This summer the Arctic sea ice is no where near a record high but has merely moved back to the general declining path it's been on after last year's exceptional melt.
Unfortunately, Earth is on that "general declining path" since the planet formed from frozen gases and other debris a few billion years ago. But I guess if we take our last money away from our children and give it to some salesmen, we can fix this problem in less than a century or two! Where do I sign up?
The villager: Tell me, the learned Haji Nasruddin, is it true that you agreed to teach Emir's donkey to speak in ten years, and took a sack of gold for that?
Haji: Yes, this is true.
The villager: But, Haji, this is surely impossible!
Haji: It is impossible indeed. But I gather that in ten years either the donkey dies, or Emir dies, or, Allah forbid, I die.
Unfortunately, the VM cannot monitor what's happening inside. It is happy to execute NOPs from here and forever. A kernel, however, with even the most primitive MMU, can detect the crash. If there is no crash, the kernel can run another process - in isolation from the main one - that would be monitoring the main process through some IPC.
In other words, there is a reason why Windows 95 is no longer popular.
I think I have a good idea what an RTOS is, having worked with them for about 15 years by now. I understand what you are saying; however it's backward. An RTOS, even on as simple as FreeRTOS, will do just fine to run "an application" in a VM. The fact that an RTOS usually comes equipped with real-time capabilities will not hurt anyone.
So, in other words, you are right - they may have not invented an RTOS - they haven't gotten that good yet :-)
The thing they have "invented" is called RTOS. Typically, an RTOS is a simple kernel that is not using any memory protection features. That's how they started, at least - but over time some RTOS got separation between userspace and kernel space. VxWorks, for example, offered that option back in the year 2000.
Separation of one and the other is not just needed to protect from hackers. It creates a stable, reliable supervisor ring (hello, SVC command from IBM/360!) that can do whatever it wants to the userspace, whereas the userspace can't do anything to the supervisor. This allows the kernel to start, stop and monitor userspace applications, guaranteeing system integrity. If you don't have that, any bug, anywhere, can create unpredictable and undetectable faults within the system - and you will never know until the thing crashes horribly, which will eventually happen.
Well, I'm aware that homeschooling has deficiencies. However for most of human history children did not go to school to socialize... and nevertheless they ended up being normal people. Do you have an explanation for such a weird thing? A human child, raised outside of a special incubator... no, can't be!
Note: I have no desire to "interact socially" with peddlers of drugs, thieves, and street fighters. I would want to associate with people like myself - and them only. Is that something I should be denied, or to be ashamed of? If not, I demand that right.
Students don't need to be able to ban everyone and anyone. Schools do need to kick out the small minority of incorrigible troublemakers who aren't there to learn anyway, and who ruin the learning environment for those who are.
It's far better to let students to vote on who is and who isn't their friend. A person may be nice and sweet while teacher is present, and then turn Mr. Hyde the second the teacher is gone. There is no direct link between being a good student and being a good friend. Huckleberry Finn, for example, was a pretty bad student, and he seldom obeyed orders. As a human, however, he was more decent than average. Children should have freedom of association; they are not idiots in this aspect. Even dogs in a pack are free to stay or to go. The modern society, however, grabs a random collection of dogs and puts them into one cage. No surprise that some of them get hurt - they can't get away.
Do anything against them and you get kicked out of the "in kid" schedule.
This is already true, and it was true forever. You cannot force anyone to invite you to events, or even accept you as a guest outside of school.
Sally enacts the "ban anyone I don't want to talk to" provision and Barbara's class schedule gets moved around so Sally doesn't have to see her... with the added "bonus" of Debbie and Barbara being kept apart.
Where will that "added bonus" come from? S remains all alone, while D & B can be together if they both wish so - just not with S present. Students are vertices of a graph. Each vertice can have an edge to any other vertice. For example, take an IM software where a student opens an independent window to talk to a specific person. D & B may be chatting, and D & S may be chatting, but the edge between S and B is blocked by S's request.
The proposed model is an ideal goal. Existence of only one class is a limiting factor. The school should be able to provide up to N classes to up to N students. (The limit will be used up if all students choose to be alone.) I agree that the current model of school will not work here. At the same time, online education will. As I said, this is not a shovel-ready project. But on the other hand this is the only configuration which allows students to pick and choose who they interact with. Otherwise you will be forcing Sally to see Barbara every single day. Columbine events would have never happened if those two guys could click a button and insulate themselves from those jocks who bullied them.
Seriously, why don't you just fix the fucked up environment that school's create
You can fix that with one and only one change: students must be able to pick and choose who they want - and, most importantly, don't want - to interact with. Someone hurt you, or is scary - banish him from your presence, for a while or forever. This will be self-regulating, unless the student wants to be all alone (and, actually, that is fine as well.) Those bans must work everywhere - in class, and in halls, and in the street. (Too much to ask for, but that's the spec.)
The whole problem is that (a) students have no say in who they are working with, *AND* (b) they have no means to control behavior of others. Adults have both of those options. I don't know why so many ancient writers say that childhood is the best time of anyone's life ... in my opinion, it's the worst time (aside from deathbed, perhaps.) Children have no rights; everyone is a superior; noncompliance is punished; complaints are not accepted; crimes can be committed against you with no recourse... Hell, as soon as I was done with school I ran away and never looked back. The adult world is simply heaven, compared to the wolfpack-like society of children where only physical strength and ferocity matter.
The end result will be more frightening. Do you want to use a WM that had been written by students? A WM crash may easily ruin your day.
Micropayments is a perfectly reasonable model, that has just never taken off.
And why is that? You are answering:
Partially because there's usually so much overhead to managing them. And THAT is partially because of legal constraints.
Overhead? I can't think of much overhead in sending a fraction of a BTC, or in sending over PayPal. There might be a problem if you are an Amazonian native who lives in a rainforest and has no Internet. But then you aren't very likely to be a user either. Everyone else, who has access to the Net, can pay.
OTOH, please note that I did say "partially". There are other reasons that it hasn't taken off, and the "free rider" problem is one of them.
Somewhat yes, I agree. Very often optional payments are optimized away. Also, a small payment is seen as not influential, and therefore not necessary. People are conditioned to not spend their money left and right because they have needs in the real world, and those needs are not optional. For micropayments to work you need a new man. Good luck with that. People are, generally, opportunistic gatherers and freeloaders. They do contribute sometimes, but not too much and not too often. A modern society requires too much labor from an individual to just stay alive, pay for the house, and for the children, and for healthcare... very few people come home from a 12-hour hacking at work and immediately sit down for another 8 hours of hacking at home. Not everyone works as hard, but good coders usually do - and you want only those.
True of all 3rd party software. All the time.
Breakage of a random application that dared to use a deprecated API call that suddenly suffered a regression (and wasn't tested, since it's deprecated) does occur. But it's unintentional, and MS may eventually fix the problem. They have no particular reason to protect a problem.
However Metro was a problem that was intentionally created and maintained and protected. Working around that problem is "unwelcome." I don't know how open is the API that the software is using, but as I suspect it is neither very open nor very much designed for 3rd parties. If it's undocumented, here be dragons.
In essence, software like Start8 is actively fighting Microsoft. And Microsoft fights back. What business would want to stand on that battlefield and risk being obliterated by one side or the other?
No, its becoming a tiling window manager, something several linux users run on their own systems by choice and swear by it.
Tiling window managers fit the workflow of precious few users. I don't use it myself (actively hate!) and I don't know anyone who would use one or want one. Many years ago I knew one geek; he was only using console I/O and vi. Perhaps it would work for him. But it's sheer insanity to throw a highly specialized piece of software at unsuspecting people who - for their whole life of computing - have never even seen a tiling WM. The nature of "general computing" suggests that we run different applications, and they have different needs. Tiling WM is OK if you and your software are very logical and very systematic. Most people are nothing of the sort. They just drag their windows around until they get what they want. They do not "program" their WM, they wing it.
And I think most of microsofts defaults for the start screen are stupid on a desktop... but that's all stuff that easily fixable with group policy.
Indeed, plenty of SO/HO users are ready to whip up a few GPOs and deploy them through their AD. That's what those poor souls live for - to fix Windows. Not to repair cars, and not to sell products, and not to bake pizza - but to code GPOs. Sure, this is not a problem at a large company. But it is a huge problem at a smaller company. Now you have to buy a new computer and call the support contractor right away because the computer is not usable "out of the box."
The 3rd party add-ons do that well enough today. If you haven't "discovered" them yet, you haven't been looking.
Those 3rd party add-ons are not a good option for a business. Microsoft can break the functionality at any time - and they did it once already, with 8.1.
If they do it again, what will you do when on some fine Wednesday 100 workers come to their computers, wiggle the mouse, and they see ... what will they see? They never saw it before. Would be probably a thousand tiles. They will call the IT. The telephones at IT melt down, and the IT director commits seppuku with a dull byte. There is no option to "wait a couple weeks until the Start8 people figure out what is broken *this time*." The option to roll back the updates is also not very easy (if you need it, you aren't set up for approved deployment of patches.)
2-3 years from now, I figure the new start screen will have largely been adopted as mainstream
It won't be because it is not an improvement, it's a regress to Windows 3.0. Full-screen, single window Program Manager.
having been divorced for ten years I'm happier than any time in my life
A whole bunch of people, those who are able to learn from other people's misfortune, decide to skip the whole business and go straight to the joys of being single without all the preceding marriage rigamarole. It may be fun to meet someone, but it's far less likely to be fun to deal with their family, and their ways of life, and with all the legal implications of marriage. Divorce is often ruinous, no matter what gender you belong to.
Where I live, the main highway has been under construction for the last 3 years, and the entrances, exits, and lanes aren't in the same place two weeks in a row. And it rains a lot. And it snows in the winter. How's your robot car gonna handle that?
Much better than a human. Often the driver cannot figure out ahead of time what lanes are closed or open because the visibility is poor. But a robot would simply receive a RF signal from the work site, and that signal would contain all the relevant information.
"excuse me gentle madam, but there seems to be a patch of ice 20 meters ahead, can you take the wheel for a moment?"
A robot would drive on ice far better than a human. 20 meters is plenty of time to drop the speed. A human would simply stare at the danger all this time.
margins are paper thin. no time to do QA.
Not just margins. Development time is short. A model of the drive has to be produced and sold in less than a year, and replaced with a new model after that. Who can afford an endurance test, even if accelerated?
God help you if you use the older win 7 rtm or worse XP without a single patch. I have financial data and hundreds of gigs of data and vms so a reimage due to a virus is unconscionable.
If you are so concerned about your data, your best option is to keep it on a server that is not connected to the Internet. What are you doing, trusting "hundreds of GB" to a few platters of spinning rust? As a minimum you need a RAID 1 or higher NAS, and ideally you need an offsite mirror.
Assuming that you are a typical careful user, your chances of getting a virus are far lower than your chances of seeing your HDD crashed. Even Linus is not protected from that!
I, personally, have even better install policy: off. The disruption from MS patches exceeds the pain from defects in the OS.
Is Windows-loving legal?
These days, and in enlightened countries, every perversion is legal - even this one :-)
I don't say that the government cares to spy upon me.
Slashdot is a place where geeks discuss vulnerabilities. A TV is one such vulnerability. Maybe it is rarely used, or never. A mild paranoia is a job requirement for a sysadmin, or for anyone who is tasked with providing security. If you want to laugh at true paranoids, those who do not see the difference between possibility and reality, you can find plenty of them on other forums.
My big screen does not spy on me, it simply does not have an input capability
If it has speakers, they can be used as a microphone.
Even if the box is not connected... how much does a cell phone interface cost, as in hardware? I think it's dirt cheap. These can be installed in all new telescreens, and activated when needed. The NSA will gladly pay the phone bill, especially because it will be heavily discounted.
For some reason it's unconventional for random people to judge others and immediately carry out the sencence. It is not illegal to work for the government. If you want to set up a parallel legal system that is only controlled by you, and judges people by your laws ... it's not exactly democratic. It's called "mob rule," with torches and pitchforks.
After all, what makes you think that your opinion is shared by the majority of voters? If it were, you wouldn't need any of those measures - the majority would just vote to fix what is broken. Since they don't ... do you suppose you are entitled to force them into happiness? Those ideas are not new.
Interestingly enough, the proposal of punishing government workers reminds me of campaigns of terror that were so popular among assorted European revolutionaries between 1880 and 1920. One of them even managed to ignite a World War.