There is no need to run XP in a VM if it works fine on the whole computer. What is to be gained by inserting Win8 and spending on new PCs that can run all that?
Many new PCs don't even have serial or parallel ports to run external equipment. Lots of old software depended on direct control over COM and LPT ports, so it won't work with USB. Some machines are controlled by a custom ISA card - where would you plug one today, in the age of PCI Express?
A one to one replacement of an employee with a computer is not worth it. A computer can only do one thing. An employee can do many things.
It is also not quite correct to assume that an employee sits still and twiddles his thumbs while the software is compiling on an old computer. He may - and should - have other things to do. Doesn't he have an R&D project to work on, timesheets to fill, coffee to drink, reports to write, manager to talk to, trade magazines to read, HR training courses to study? If an old computer can do all the necessary compilations per day, there is no problem. The problem only occurs when someone wants to compile and he cannot because the old computer is too busy with other jobs.
If you can't upgrade your IT infastructure or anything else of a similar nature, then the company in question probably needs to be dissolved into a number of smaller ones.
Businesses, especially public companies, are not paying the shareholders with upgrade reports. They are paying them with money - as dividends or as share value. An expensive upgrade will cost you money, but after it's done you only hope that things keep working as they were working. This is a loss of value, not a gain.
There are only a few cases where an upgrade is a sensible action. Like that PDP-11 that someone mentioned earlier. You can't get a spare one these days. But, thinking of that, it may be easier to build a PDP-11 today in an FPGA and run all the software on it, instead of reworking the whole plant to be controlled by something else, and having to rewrite the control software in the end. A PDP-11 is a much simpler, and a much more testable thing.
Dissolution of a large company is usually detrimental to its revenue due to destruction of its monopoly position. Because of that no sane set of shareholders will give up on such a sweet thing as monopoly. The court can order a company broken up, but the court needs very specific evidence of wrongdoing. One cannot just walk around, point at large companies, and order them broken up. Only a dictator can do that.
The features the common man used the start menu for weren't the primary function of the start menu.
But does it matter what the GUI designer *thought* the menu would be used for? The primary function of an object is what most people use it for.
Well, if you know the exact file name, the limited search i suggested adding back more than have you covered. Otherwise, copy&paste are how normal people do things especially things like "StatusReport-836421-FromBill_Rev3a.docx"
Of course it's just an example; however as you search in Win7 you see more and more matching entries. If you have ten status reports saved on the disk and indexed, you already at that point can select the one that has the right numbers in it - because you can visually compare. You cannot do that if you search from a completely different screen. If you absolutely, unconditionally, must have the search on the start screen and not on the desktop, then at least dim the background and make the start screen partially transparent. But in truth, search for files does not require the whole screen. If it does, start with a small search box, and grow the results window as needed. Even wiser would be for it to follow the cursor - as we do sometimes on our wooden desktops when we search for something. There are many solutions; but the search in Win7 does not come with a culture shock from such an abrupt context switch.
a) its not happening 200 times a day so switching to the start screen for it isn't a big deal
Many accountants and other lowly computer users are simply clicking on "this here yellow thingy" and their proprietary database frontend shows up. Do they want to know that it is called "stock_adn_shortage_report", complete with the typo? Are they even capable of remembering that? If they are, they are holding a wrong job. Some corporate software that I had to use required logins and logouts all the time because there were only so many shared licenses for the backend (some complicated 3D model conversion tools, IIRC.) If you use such software for work - yes, you will be starting and exiting it 200 times per day if necessary.
The correct solution for this problem is in pinning the necessary icons to the desktop or to the Start menu. The desktop option works in Win8, but to use it you need to see the desktop. The "minimize all" right-hand strip in the toolbar is gone on Win8, so you can't use that. Win-M still works, but you have to know about it - and you cannot depend on that in an industrial workflow. The Start menu is always available, and it is the best candidate - if only it were present on Win8.
Pinning application icons to the taskbar is also an option... but it can be confusing because the icon's visual is only minimally different if the software is already running. Using only the Start menu keeps things simple. If you see an icon in the toolbar, it is running. If you don't see it, it is not running. Perhaps not everyone *needs* this particular way of life, but why to kill what was available in Win7? Did MS get paid by someone for disabling the Start menu? What was in it for them to even *contemplate* removing the menu? You don't have to use it, you know...
Manually pinning is better than smart pinning any day of the week. But its also more sophisticated.
True; but power users want this functionality. Low end users will have this pushed onto their desktops through group policy and/or installation images. MS removed this function altogether, for everyone, regardless of who the user is and whether he needs it or not. Everything in Win8 was sacrificed on the altar of Metro and tablets.
We just need a standard taskbar gadget from microsoft to stand in for the old start menu, capture its key features while retiring its legacy purpose, and ease the discoverability of win8 features.
ClassicShell is open source. If someone - or you -
OEMs are probably buying licenses in large blocks, rounded up to the nearest 10 million. This means that most of those 100M Win8 PCs that MS reported are not even built yet.
The thing was that the start menu really was nearly entirely obsolete. None of its features really made sense.
To a uber-geek - perhaps. But not to a common man. Start button replacements are, reportedly, the most popular download for Win8. Otherwise Win8 is not discoverable.
Want to actually search for something? The start screen makes more sense then the smallish non-resizable start menu window.
Unless you are searching for something that you see in another window. Do you want to memorize "StatusReport-836421-FromBill_Rev3a.docx" ? It's a valid runnable object.
Want to get to the control panel, logoff, etc? The charms bar was perfectly fine (if nonobvious).
A nonobvious thing is also nonexistent. It doesn't matter how well it works if non-geeks cannot find it.
And has a hotkey of its own (again non-obvious)
It does? News to me. Which one? How would I know that, outside of reading Slashdot?
The actual hierarchical start menu? Worthless legacy cruft that has been more or less replaced by search anyway.
... said by someone who sees nothing wrong with UNIX commands that pipe data through thirteen programs:-) Most people do not memorize names of the software - especially if they just use it, not write it. I know people who don't even type unless they have to. They use mouse for even cut and paste. Not everyone easily switches between GUI (mouse) and CLI (keyboard.)
Q: What do you type to find uTorrent?
A: You type "torrent."
Q: How would *anyone* know that?
A: By trial and error.
Myself, I use more than one computer, and I do not always know what is or isn't installed on any of them. I cannot search because I don't even remember all the names. Was it "diff", WinDiff, KDiff, or something else? Ah, UltraDiff - but no, it doesn't do what I thought it does! Why don't I make a custom menu where I'd keep all the necessary tools that I need, and call it something like "Start" ?
All that was left was the smart recent applications/recent documents stuff which was almost covered by pinning apps to the taskbar.
I disable all that stuff. It makes no sense to me. I may use one set of applications on one day, and another set on another day. What recent activity has to do with the need for a specific workflow? I disable automatic pinning, and instead pin there what I want pinned, and they stay there. Side effects are bad for usability; a context-dependent ribbon also suffers from that - it is not predictable, it has to be understood all anew whenever it shows up.
And make shutdown a direct option so you don't have to logout first, but that can be on the charms bar...
It's already there. But I can't test because I have ClassicShell disable the charms bar. I haven't needed it so far.
Then make hotcorners entirely optional in desktop mode.
Done that already using ClassicShell (also see above.)
all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact
It is not possible to record a communication that does not pass by the router that you tap. It is hard to record the same if different packets are sent to ten different routers and take different paths to destination. It is not feasible to decrypt a communication that is secured with AES and a new OTP as a key for each block. It is not practical to detect a communication that is done in the zeroth bit of a large photo of a rose bush and posted on Flickr. There are other examples of communication that cannot be recorded or made accessible to anyone but the parties that communicate. Whoever is telling this tale, he is just trying to scare the proles into believing that watchers are omnipresent and omniscient. A new god, by the looks of it. Kneel before me, worms, NOW!
A US company hiring a "consultant" in this way could be charged with bribery for this now.
This has to mean at least one of the following:
The USA is expecting the whole world to suddenly change its ways and to conform to US ways of life (to some of them, but not all - going for all, like getting nuclear tech, is forbidden.)
The USA does not care to win contracts when competition from other countries uses bribes.
On top of that, in a modern politically correct world one could say that it is racist to have such laws because all cultures are equal (no matter what they do.)
Usually the culture of bribery goes pretty deep into the foundation of the society in question because that's how big bosses delegate power and reward lesser bosses. A system of all-powerful bureaucracy cannot be torn down overnight; and if that happens then the society is in serious trouble anyway. Even US government workers take bribes; some are caught, but I suspect many are just more careful.
"Too flimsy"? You're being an idiot. I recently bought a Toyota-built hybrid sedan close to the Tesla Model S in wheelbase and overall length.
Welcome to the club. I own a Prius since 2005. It does not allow towing either. A car that cannot be used for towing is... a car, not a truck. Many cars (as a breed that is separate from SUVs and trucks) cannot tow. In part, that's because their frame is not strong enough to survive the forces that a trailer applies to them. They simply don't have elements that would take that load. It's not necessarily bad - they weigh less this way, and consume less energy.
The car brands people actually cross-shop against a Tesla Model S are Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, and so forth, not Toyota or Chevrolet [...] You can complain about Tesla's pricing relative to the Prius if and when they've grown enough to design a vehicle actually intended to compete directly with the Prius.
Nobody can tell the consumer to not look and to not compare. As a consumer, I do look and I do compare. You are free to be unhappy about it, and I am free to express my opinion on stuff.
Why are you spending so much time Carefully Pointing Out that 2013 Teslas aren't for everyone?
I'm curious to know who Tesla vehicles are for. I know a lot of people, but not even one of my friends is a good candidate. As Tesla is a public company that sells its products to the public, it is the public's right and duty to discuss the company's products. No permission is required for that - neither from Elon Musk, nor from random people on the Internet.
One might almost think you have an axe to grind.
Nevertheless, you decided to write a 1,000 word essay just because of one (1) word in my short comment. If the word "flimsy" offends you, please feel free to replace it with "less sturdy," "lightweight," "mileage-optimized," or whatever makes you happy. I do not want to fight over this choice of a word. Slashdot is not a deposition in court, where one wrong word can put you in prison. Slashdotters kind of *talk* here - freely, and without checking every remark with our lawyers. When we make a poor choice of a word, too bad, too sad. Live with it.
If you really want to make Tesla a better company, and have more EVs around, then perhaps you could explain, with specific numbers in hand, in what use scenarios it is actually *profitable* to buy an EV today. It's not easy; you'd have to account for many factors and many random risks. But it should be doable, and if you can show profit then it will be far more advantageous to your cause than haggling about meaning of the word "is."
By the way, my own calculations show that if you drive very little then you will never realize the profit from an EV because your gas consumption is too low. If you drive a lot then you will never realize the profit from an EV because it will be mostly parked at the charger. I challenge you to find a good middle ground where you can pay $62,400 up front (taking a credit, of course) and still have overall savings after some reasonable number of years (5 to 10.) Don't forget about the insurance costs, the probability of crashing the car (it zeroes your investment and activates the insurance,) the probability of a certain trend in gas prices and electric power prices, the chance of the battery failing out of warranty, and many other little things like that. Note that gas car owners are on the "pay as you go" scheme, while an EV owner has to pay up front. That money is a lost opportunity for investment, and the interest on that difference counts against the EV.
Tesla management is on record that they're deliberately using a strategy of starting upmarket and moving down as they grow.
Oh, I see now. You are claiming that Tesla makes their EVs not for mere humans. They are making their cars for Hollywood actors. OK, I see now. My bad. Sorry for applying common sense to this debacle. But please go and tell that to Obama, who is promoting EVs left and right. He ought to stop doing that, it misleads the proles.
This thing will be supported as long as there is one old hacker that has one and doesnt like to replace a working part.
First, a USB device is designed to be easily replaceable. Second, imagine that we have open sourced design of Pentium II. How much interest would that generate? In just a year or two it might be hard to find a hacker who'd want to deal with obsolete stuff - and WiFi stuff gets obsolete faster than you can put the credit card back into the wallet.
It is certainly possible that someone, somewhere, buys a COTS consumer-level part, sticks it into the server, and then 10 years later is unwilling to replace the whole module when it fails. But that's what people deal with every single day in the industry and elsewhere - things fail and they need replacement. I would be far more concerned that the hardware of this dongle fails 10 years later - where would you get a replacement then?
This whole approach appeals to too few people. Most are pragmatists. A pragmatic approach means that when the thing fails, there will be money and resources to replace whatever needs replacement. If no money is available, then I guess the project is not that important, after all.
I do not know what business would be attracted by this specific dongle just on the basis that it is documented. This whole concept is way above the pay grade of pretty much everyone who works in IT. It is not even feasible, in most cases, for an IT guy to start a science project to debug a problematic device. This is handled by simple replacement of what doesn't work. This method offers fixed and predictable duration of repair. Hacking a driver, on a live system... well, there are crazier things to do, but not too many.
There is only one useful function that is directly fulfilled by this product - and that is creation of completely free computing systems. Days are coming (perhaps not tomorrow, but who knows?) when RMS's dark prophecy materializes in laws and COTS hardware like WinRT, that denies you, the owner, the right to use the equipment as you see fit. There are F/OSS designs of the CPU and other key blocks already. This is another addition to the collection. Perhaps the hardware will be obsoleted and not available anymore (quite soon, actually, considering that every new IC has about 6 to 9 months on the market before it is obsoleted and replaced with something else.) But the principles of operation may be useful if one wants to build a free computing system.
This function - a free computer - is very important. However, just as nearly all things that are good for the society (and the soul,) there is very little financial reward for doing good deeds. I understand pretty well how much labor went into development of the hardware, MCU software, and the PC software to make the thing work. I do some of that, now and then, for living. This is a good thing to do; but expect no monetary reward. The cost of the device is high, and only a handful of devotees will invest. (There are many devotees, but not too many will support F/OSS by buying the device.) I, for one, simply have no need for such a product - all my computers have built-in WiFi, not that I use it much anyway. Cable is more reliable, and has no interference from neighbors, and nosy Google cannot intercept it easily.
Oh right, you must be from the US, where everyone must travel the 3 blocks to the grocery in his very own private container.
Strawmen are rarely helpful. I, for example, have to travel for 3 miles (using whatever method I want) just to see the nearest bus stop. If I choose to take that bus and go to work, it will take me at least three hours and several transfers, in buses that stop at every corner and wait for everyone and never take freeways. In a car I make the whole trip in 30 minutes. I don't know about others, but I value my time on this Earth.
My friends live on a ranch 7 miles away from a tiny village that sports one grocery store and one gas station; if they want anything else, it may be available within 40-50 miles. The nearest decent hospital is 200 miles away.
Not everyone in the USA (or elsewhere) lives in a city or even wants to live in a city. These people need cars. But if someone chooses to live in an arcology... fine, they don't need anything then.
Tesla doesn't allow towing. Apparently the car is too flimsy for that. Also, this would kill the battery even faster.
Combined with the astronomical price of Tesla, you would be better off today buying a hybrid. A Prius, like the one I have, or a Volt if you have too much money. An EV is only an option for people who *know* that they will never reach the end of the EV range of Tesla. A very wealthy grandmother may buy one to drive to the church, for example... if she'd understand *why*.
And they haven't been a practical solution in the 150 years or so since they were first released.
Not so. The first EVs were used indoors, as factory floor vehicles - like forklifts. They used lead acid batteries, and they were super heavy; but that was OK because the charging outlet was right there, and if the battery does down the operator can always park the machine and plug it in - and take another, that is charged.
Then you got golf carts - small, quiet vehicles for a larger, but still limited area. They are OK too; it's often not life-threatening to be stranded on a golf course. The charging outlets were also conveniently available, and you were not tied to any specific cart (unless you happened to own it.)
Today's pure EVs are just a step up from golf carts. They can transport you not five miles but perhaps fifty. If you live in a city for your entire life, and if your transportation needs are measured in single miles, this is already technically acceptable. (Price-wise it may be a different story.)
There are many people who need to regularly travel farther than the EV range of comfort. This can have many causes. A contractor never knows where his new job will be. A new home owner may find himself having a house a good distance away from work. A spouse may change jobs. A relative may get sick, and hospital visits (some 50 miles away) are required. A relative wants to be picked up at the airport. There are millions of such reasons. Perhaps most of the driving these people do is within the EV range... but it's the outliers that kill the idea. The car must fulfill the need 100% of the time; there is no need for a compromise if dealerships are full of traditional gasoline cars that do all that and more.
I, personally, cannot buy an EV because I live in hilly terrain, and some of my errands require about 80-90 miles of driving per day (with no opportunity for recharge.) A mere lossless lifting of 1 ton of car by 2,000 feet requires 5.5 MJ of energy. This is about 3-4% of the usable battery capacity in a standard Tesla S. Add inevitable losses, and you are easily looking at 10% of the capacity to just cover the last 3 miles to my home. That is not even counting the road trips - those, to a certain destination that I visit once or twice per year, are about 450 miles away (one day of very pleasant driving.) And what if I have to leave the car for a week at an airport's long term parking? What SoC will I find it in when I return? Will it even boot up, if I had to use 30% of the range just to get to the airport? What if the temperature drops overnight, as it happened on that infamous trip? To summarize, why do I need this much headache?
Some say: rent a gas car when you need one. This flies not any better than a lead balloon. It is a hassle to rent a car, and it is very expensive. A sinlge week-long rent of a gas car will eat all your yearly savings on an EV (if you had those savings, but you won't because EVs cost too much in the first place.)
Perhaps households with two or three or four cars can buy an EV as one of them. But I have only one car, and it better do everything I need. There are many people in the same position. Even if a family has two cars, do they want to be concerned that they both need to go for a long drive at the same time? Why would they want to schedule their life around limitations of their super-expensive EV, when Joneses across the road don't have any such problem?
A horse will not mow your lawn; it will eat all the grass, down to the soil. You will be left with bare earth, with a few deposits of processed grass on it. I'm not sure I'd want my lawn to be like that.
Any other excuse for not hiring them is a smokescreen
There are other valid reasons, before you jump to assumption of evil intentions. For example, an old worker is very likely to have an attitude of "my way or highway," no matter what is the reason for the requirements that he is given. I have seen it myself how an older developer, who is given a minor authority over the project, successfully shields it from all new and good things that came into existence in last three or four decades. I have seen it how such a developer refuses to follow good and proper instructions from his manager. Such people are called "loose cannons." Sometimes it's safer to play Russian roulette with a semi-auto than to talk to such a person.
Older developers have plenty of time to look at new technologies and decide if they want to have anything to do with them. They also have enough weight in the company to pick and choose jobs that they take. Many young developers, raised on Python and Perl, are not even capable of doing those jobs - such as writing the assembly code for a small 8-bit MCU. The rift between that code, and code that implements some Web 3.0 JS thingy (that is all the rage, of course!) is huge. I do not do web programming, and I do not expect to ever do it - simply because it doesn't interest me, and I don't like how it works anyway.
If an old developer is unwilling to change, there is still plenty of work for him left. I work with hardware and low level software; these methods haven't changed for a long time (since 8080 stepped into the game.) But I'm using WPF for all my GUI needs these days, instead of (historically) OWL, MFC, Qt, and such. I gladly went with that change because I liked the result.
What is the chance that an international committee of 100 professional bureaucrats will voluntarily cede their self-assigned right to name planets to some sort of intrepid Captain Lone Starr and his mawg?
Anyone I have had a face to face discussion with on the topic of "police state tyranny" has always been in favor of moderation
It is not relevant, unless you can show that your acquaintances are a representative sample of the entire US population. (This is just a math point - it is all but impossible for a single person to have the same number of friends among politicians and lumpens, citizens and illegals, men and women and uncertain, rich and poor, smart and stupid, young and old, city slickers and farmers.)
The nearest approximation to such a nation-wide poll would be actually Presidential elections. How did *that* work out?
Is there any place with other people around where it'll be acceptable to say that to your glasses?
There is no reason why Glass cannot be operated over Bluetooth - either from your phone, that it is already paired with, or from an accessory. Once the camel's nose is under the tent, it's too late.
Your other concerns - that Glass will be used to spy on the user, by tracking everything you purchase and consume - have you any idea how much bandwidth that would require?
Those are just simple technical issues, they can be overcame even today. I have a video recorder in the car; it records 1920 x 1080P, 30fps HD video for 8 hours on a single, replaceable 32 GB SD card. The actual silicon in that SD card is small enough to be placed into Glass. If you do that, you have 8 hours of continuous recording between hotspots; and once you are at any WiFi hotspot, the Glass will dump the buffered video. If not, you are probably on a hike somewhere in wilderness, and Google has no interest in all these grizzly bears around you.
The problem of "petabytes" is just as severe as a concern that a banker may hurt himself carrying all those gold bars into his vault. It's a process with a positive feedback; a tiny percentage of profits from this information will buy you a lot of computers - and this is a perfectly parallelizable work. Mark my word, "they" will even make you pay for the storage and processing. In part that would be done with government money (that is your taxes,) and in other part it will be done with business income that ultimately comes from you and other consumers of goods and services. Once Google makes you want Glass, they can demand payment from you, in one way or another.
I remember when "walkmen/boomboxes will destroy society since people will use them during movies and in public restrooms"
Boomboxes did help to destroy society, in a small way, but not because of movies and restrooms. Boomboxes allowed young people to take a part of their home (the entertainment) with them wherever they are - in a car, in an abandoned house, in a forest. A gang has music now. Today the same gang has mobile communication and mobile computing, making gang members more mobile and less attached to their homes. Only 50 years ago a home was the center of living, where everything happened. Today a home is just a place to stop by occasionally to sleep or to see parents. All this is enabled not just by boomboxes, but by technology in general. It empowers people with good intentions and people with bad intentions, and the society changes.
Per Wikipedia, "In 2010, tourism constituted 6.4% of Israel's GDP."
Now, think about it for a moment. How many wealthy business owners and managers come to Israel who have at least one email account that is beyond access by Israel's border guards? What's even the point of asking them about free hosted accounts? Do you think Bill Gates has registered and is actively using a Google account?
As someone else already pointed out, if you filter visitors by this criteria then the only people who you let into the country are those without jobs; or terrorists, who have enough money to last them to the end of their lives.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no need to run XP in a VM if it works fine on the whole computer. What is to be gained by inserting Win8 and spending on new PCs that can run all that?
Many new PCs don't even have serial or parallel ports to run external equipment. Lots of old software depended on direct control over COM and LPT ports, so it won't work with USB. Some machines are controlled by a custom ISA card - where would you plug one today, in the age of PCI Express?
A one to one replacement of an employee with a computer is not worth it. A computer can only do one thing. An employee can do many things.
It is also not quite correct to assume that an employee sits still and twiddles his thumbs while the software is compiling on an old computer. He may - and should - have other things to do. Doesn't he have an R&D project to work on, timesheets to fill, coffee to drink, reports to write, manager to talk to, trade magazines to read, HR training courses to study? If an old computer can do all the necessary compilations per day, there is no problem. The problem only occurs when someone wants to compile and he cannot because the old computer is too busy with other jobs.
If you can't upgrade your IT infastructure or anything else of a similar nature, then the company in question probably needs to be dissolved into a number of smaller ones.
Businesses, especially public companies, are not paying the shareholders with upgrade reports. They are paying them with money - as dividends or as share value. An expensive upgrade will cost you money, but after it's done you only hope that things keep working as they were working. This is a loss of value, not a gain.
There are only a few cases where an upgrade is a sensible action. Like that PDP-11 that someone mentioned earlier. You can't get a spare one these days. But, thinking of that, it may be easier to build a PDP-11 today in an FPGA and run all the software on it, instead of reworking the whole plant to be controlled by something else, and having to rewrite the control software in the end. A PDP-11 is a much simpler, and a much more testable thing.
Dissolution of a large company is usually detrimental to its revenue due to destruction of its monopoly position. Because of that no sane set of shareholders will give up on such a sweet thing as monopoly. The court can order a company broken up, but the court needs very specific evidence of wrongdoing. One cannot just walk around, point at large companies, and order them broken up. Only a dictator can do that.
The features the common man used the start menu for weren't the primary function of the start menu.
But does it matter what the GUI designer *thought* the menu would be used for? The primary function of an object is what most people use it for.
Well, if you know the exact file name, the limited search i suggested adding back more than have you covered. Otherwise, copy&paste are how normal people do things especially things like "StatusReport-836421-FromBill_Rev3a.docx"
Of course it's just an example; however as you search in Win7 you see more and more matching entries. If you have ten status reports saved on the disk and indexed, you already at that point can select the one that has the right numbers in it - because you can visually compare. You cannot do that if you search from a completely different screen. If you absolutely, unconditionally, must have the search on the start screen and not on the desktop, then at least dim the background and make the start screen partially transparent. But in truth, search for files does not require the whole screen. If it does, start with a small search box, and grow the results window as needed. Even wiser would be for it to follow the cursor - as we do sometimes on our wooden desktops when we search for something. There are many solutions; but the search in Win7 does not come with a culture shock from such an abrupt context switch.
a) its not happening 200 times a day so switching to the start screen for it isn't a big deal
Many accountants and other lowly computer users are simply clicking on "this here yellow thingy" and their proprietary database frontend shows up. Do they want to know that it is called "stock_adn_shortage_report", complete with the typo? Are they even capable of remembering that? If they are, they are holding a wrong job. Some corporate software that I had to use required logins and logouts all the time because there were only so many shared licenses for the backend (some complicated 3D model conversion tools, IIRC.) If you use such software for work - yes, you will be starting and exiting it 200 times per day if necessary.
The correct solution for this problem is in pinning the necessary icons to the desktop or to the Start menu. The desktop option works in Win8, but to use it you need to see the desktop. The "minimize all" right-hand strip in the toolbar is gone on Win8, so you can't use that. Win-M still works, but you have to know about it - and you cannot depend on that in an industrial workflow. The Start menu is always available, and it is the best candidate - if only it were present on Win8.
Pinning application icons to the taskbar is also an option... but it can be confusing because the icon's visual is only minimally different if the software is already running. Using only the Start menu keeps things simple. If you see an icon in the toolbar, it is running. If you don't see it, it is not running. Perhaps not everyone *needs* this particular way of life, but why to kill what was available in Win7? Did MS get paid by someone for disabling the Start menu? What was in it for them to even *contemplate* removing the menu? You don't have to use it, you know...
Manually pinning is better than smart pinning any day of the week. But its also more sophisticated.
True; but power users want this functionality. Low end users will have this pushed onto their desktops through group policy and/or installation images. MS removed this function altogether, for everyone, regardless of who the user is and whether he needs it or not. Everything in Win8 was sacrificed on the altar of Metro and tablets.
We just need a standard taskbar gadget from microsoft to stand in for the old start menu, capture its key features while retiring its legacy purpose, and ease the discoverability of win8 features.
ClassicShell is open source. If someone - or you -
OEMs are probably buying licenses in large blocks, rounded up to the nearest 10 million. This means that most of those 100M Win8 PCs that MS reported are not even built yet.
The thing was that the start menu really was nearly entirely obsolete. None of its features really made sense.
To a uber-geek - perhaps. But not to a common man. Start button replacements are, reportedly, the most popular download for Win8. Otherwise Win8 is not discoverable.
Want to actually search for something? The start screen makes more sense then the smallish non-resizable start menu window.
Unless you are searching for something that you see in another window. Do you want to memorize "StatusReport-836421-FromBill_Rev3a.docx" ? It's a valid runnable object.
Want to get to the control panel, logoff, etc? The charms bar was perfectly fine (if nonobvious).
A nonobvious thing is also nonexistent. It doesn't matter how well it works if non-geeks cannot find it.
And has a hotkey of its own (again non-obvious)
It does? News to me. Which one? How would I know that, outside of reading Slashdot?
The actual hierarchical start menu? Worthless legacy cruft that has been more or less replaced by search anyway.
Q: What do you type to find uTorrent?
A: You type "torrent."
Q: How would *anyone* know that?
A: By trial and error.
Myself, I use more than one computer, and I do not always know what is or isn't installed on any of them. I cannot search because I don't even remember all the names. Was it "diff", WinDiff, KDiff, or something else? Ah, UltraDiff - but no, it doesn't do what I thought it does! Why don't I make a custom menu where I'd keep all the necessary tools that I need, and call it something like "Start" ?
All that was left was the smart recent applications/recent documents stuff which was almost covered by pinning apps to the taskbar.
I disable all that stuff. It makes no sense to me. I may use one set of applications on one day, and another set on another day. What recent activity has to do with the need for a specific workflow? I disable automatic pinning, and instead pin there what I want pinned, and they stay there. Side effects are bad for usability; a context-dependent ribbon also suffers from that - it is not predictable, it has to be understood all anew whenever it shows up.
And make shutdown a direct option so you don't have to logout first, but that can be on the charms bar...
It's already there. But I can't test because I have ClassicShell disable the charms bar. I haven't needed it so far.
Then make hotcorners entirely optional in desktop mode.
Done that already using ClassicShell (also see above.)
all digital communications - meaning telephone calls, emails, online chats and the like - are automatically recorded and stored and accessible to the government after the fact
It is not possible to record a communication that does not pass by the router that you tap. It is hard to record the same if different packets are sent to ten different routers and take different paths to destination. It is not feasible to decrypt a communication that is secured with AES and a new OTP as a key for each block. It is not practical to detect a communication that is done in the zeroth bit of a large photo of a rose bush and posted on Flickr. There are other examples of communication that cannot be recorded or made accessible to anyone but the parties that communicate. Whoever is telling this tale, he is just trying to scare the proles into believing that watchers are omnipresent and omniscient. A new god, by the looks of it. Kneel before me, worms, NOW!
A US company hiring a "consultant" in this way could be charged with bribery for this now.
This has to mean at least one of the following:
On top of that, in a modern politically correct world one could say that it is racist to have such laws because all cultures are equal (no matter what they do.)
Usually the culture of bribery goes pretty deep into the foundation of the society in question because that's how big bosses delegate power and reward lesser bosses. A system of all-powerful bureaucracy cannot be torn down overnight; and if that happens then the society is in serious trouble anyway. Even US government workers take bribes; some are caught, but I suspect many are just more careful.
I like to think sometimes that I am smarter than an average horse :-) Horses are pretty stupid.
"Too flimsy"? You're being an idiot. I recently bought a Toyota-built hybrid sedan close to the Tesla Model S in wheelbase and overall length.
Welcome to the club. I own a Prius since 2005. It does not allow towing either. A car that cannot be used for towing is ... a car, not a truck. Many cars (as a breed that is separate from SUVs and trucks) cannot tow. In part, that's because their frame is not strong enough to survive the forces that a trailer applies to them. They simply don't have elements that would take that load. It's not necessarily bad - they weigh less this way, and consume less energy.
The car brands people actually cross-shop against a Tesla Model S are Mercedes, BMW, Lexus, and so forth, not Toyota or Chevrolet [...] You can complain about Tesla's pricing relative to the Prius if and when they've grown enough to design a vehicle actually intended to compete directly with the Prius.
Nobody can tell the consumer to not look and to not compare. As a consumer, I do look and I do compare. You are free to be unhappy about it, and I am free to express my opinion on stuff.
Why are you spending so much time Carefully Pointing Out that 2013 Teslas aren't for everyone?
I'm curious to know who Tesla vehicles are for. I know a lot of people, but not even one of my friends is a good candidate. As Tesla is a public company that sells its products to the public, it is the public's right and duty to discuss the company's products. No permission is required for that - neither from Elon Musk, nor from random people on the Internet.
One might almost think you have an axe to grind.
Nevertheless, you decided to write a 1,000 word essay just because of one (1) word in my short comment. If the word "flimsy" offends you, please feel free to replace it with "less sturdy," "lightweight," "mileage-optimized," or whatever makes you happy. I do not want to fight over this choice of a word. Slashdot is not a deposition in court, where one wrong word can put you in prison. Slashdotters kind of *talk* here - freely, and without checking every remark with our lawyers. When we make a poor choice of a word, too bad, too sad. Live with it.
If you really want to make Tesla a better company, and have more EVs around, then perhaps you could explain, with specific numbers in hand, in what use scenarios it is actually *profitable* to buy an EV today. It's not easy; you'd have to account for many factors and many random risks. But it should be doable, and if you can show profit then it will be far more advantageous to your cause than haggling about meaning of the word "is."
By the way, my own calculations show that if you drive very little then you will never realize the profit from an EV because your gas consumption is too low. If you drive a lot then you will never realize the profit from an EV because it will be mostly parked at the charger. I challenge you to find a good middle ground where you can pay $62,400 up front (taking a credit, of course) and still have overall savings after some reasonable number of years (5 to 10.) Don't forget about the insurance costs, the probability of crashing the car (it zeroes your investment and activates the insurance,) the probability of a certain trend in gas prices and electric power prices, the chance of the battery failing out of warranty, and many other little things like that. Note that gas car owners are on the "pay as you go" scheme, while an EV owner has to pay up front. That money is a lost opportunity for investment, and the interest on that difference counts against the EV.
Tesla management is on record that they're deliberately using a strategy of starting upmarket and moving down as they grow.
Oh, I see now. You are claiming that Tesla makes their EVs not for mere humans. They are making their cars for Hollywood actors. OK, I see now. My bad. Sorry for applying common sense to this debacle. But please go and tell that to Obama, who is promoting EVs left and right. He ought to stop doing that, it misleads the proles.
This thing will be supported as long as there is one old hacker that has one and doesnt like to replace a working part.
First, a USB device is designed to be easily replaceable. Second, imagine that we have open sourced design of Pentium II. How much interest would that generate? In just a year or two it might be hard to find a hacker who'd want to deal with obsolete stuff - and WiFi stuff gets obsolete faster than you can put the credit card back into the wallet.
It is certainly possible that someone, somewhere, buys a COTS consumer-level part, sticks it into the server, and then 10 years later is unwilling to replace the whole module when it fails. But that's what people deal with every single day in the industry and elsewhere - things fail and they need replacement. I would be far more concerned that the hardware of this dongle fails 10 years later - where would you get a replacement then?
This whole approach appeals to too few people. Most are pragmatists. A pragmatic approach means that when the thing fails, there will be money and resources to replace whatever needs replacement. If no money is available, then I guess the project is not that important, after all.
I do not know what business would be attracted by this specific dongle just on the basis that it is documented. This whole concept is way above the pay grade of pretty much everyone who works in IT. It is not even feasible, in most cases, for an IT guy to start a science project to debug a problematic device. This is handled by simple replacement of what doesn't work. This method offers fixed and predictable duration of repair. Hacking a driver, on a live system ... well, there are crazier things to do, but not too many.
There is only one useful function that is directly fulfilled by this product - and that is creation of completely free computing systems. Days are coming (perhaps not tomorrow, but who knows?) when RMS's dark prophecy materializes in laws and COTS hardware like WinRT, that denies you, the owner, the right to use the equipment as you see fit. There are F/OSS designs of the CPU and other key blocks already. This is another addition to the collection. Perhaps the hardware will be obsoleted and not available anymore (quite soon, actually, considering that every new IC has about 6 to 9 months on the market before it is obsoleted and replaced with something else.) But the principles of operation may be useful if one wants to build a free computing system.
This function - a free computer - is very important. However, just as nearly all things that are good for the society (and the soul,) there is very little financial reward for doing good deeds. I understand pretty well how much labor went into development of the hardware, MCU software, and the PC software to make the thing work. I do some of that, now and then, for living. This is a good thing to do; but expect no monetary reward. The cost of the device is high, and only a handful of devotees will invest. (There are many devotees, but not too many will support F/OSS by buying the device.) I, for one, simply have no need for such a product - all my computers have built-in WiFi, not that I use it much anyway. Cable is more reliable, and has no interference from neighbors, and nosy Google cannot intercept it easily.
Oh right, you must be from the US, where everyone must travel the 3 blocks to the grocery in his very own private container.
Strawmen are rarely helpful. I, for example, have to travel for 3 miles (using whatever method I want) just to see the nearest bus stop. If I choose to take that bus and go to work, it will take me at least three hours and several transfers, in buses that stop at every corner and wait for everyone and never take freeways. In a car I make the whole trip in 30 minutes. I don't know about others, but I value my time on this Earth.
My friends live on a ranch 7 miles away from a tiny village that sports one grocery store and one gas station; if they want anything else, it may be available within 40-50 miles. The nearest decent hospital is 200 miles away.
Not everyone in the USA (or elsewhere) lives in a city or even wants to live in a city. These people need cars. But if someone chooses to live in an arcology... fine, they don't need anything then.
On the double-plus side, your wife will run away.
Tesla doesn't allow towing. Apparently the car is too flimsy for that. Also, this would kill the battery even faster.
Combined with the astronomical price of Tesla, you would be better off today buying a hybrid. A Prius, like the one I have, or a Volt if you have too much money. An EV is only an option for people who *know* that they will never reach the end of the EV range of Tesla. A very wealthy grandmother may buy one to drive to the church, for example... if she'd understand *why*.
And they haven't been a practical solution in the 150 years or so since they were first released.
Not so. The first EVs were used indoors, as factory floor vehicles - like forklifts. They used lead acid batteries, and they were super heavy; but that was OK because the charging outlet was right there, and if the battery does down the operator can always park the machine and plug it in - and take another, that is charged.
Then you got golf carts - small, quiet vehicles for a larger, but still limited area. They are OK too; it's often not life-threatening to be stranded on a golf course. The charging outlets were also conveniently available, and you were not tied to any specific cart (unless you happened to own it.)
Today's pure EVs are just a step up from golf carts. They can transport you not five miles but perhaps fifty. If you live in a city for your entire life, and if your transportation needs are measured in single miles, this is already technically acceptable. (Price-wise it may be a different story.)
There are many people who need to regularly travel farther than the EV range of comfort. This can have many causes. A contractor never knows where his new job will be. A new home owner may find himself having a house a good distance away from work. A spouse may change jobs. A relative may get sick, and hospital visits (some 50 miles away) are required. A relative wants to be picked up at the airport. There are millions of such reasons. Perhaps most of the driving these people do is within the EV range... but it's the outliers that kill the idea. The car must fulfill the need 100% of the time; there is no need for a compromise if dealerships are full of traditional gasoline cars that do all that and more.
I, personally, cannot buy an EV because I live in hilly terrain, and some of my errands require about 80-90 miles of driving per day (with no opportunity for recharge.) A mere lossless lifting of 1 ton of car by 2,000 feet requires 5.5 MJ of energy. This is about 3-4% of the usable battery capacity in a standard Tesla S. Add inevitable losses, and you are easily looking at 10% of the capacity to just cover the last 3 miles to my home. That is not even counting the road trips - those, to a certain destination that I visit once or twice per year, are about 450 miles away (one day of very pleasant driving.) And what if I have to leave the car for a week at an airport's long term parking? What SoC will I find it in when I return? Will it even boot up, if I had to use 30% of the range just to get to the airport? What if the temperature drops overnight, as it happened on that infamous trip? To summarize, why do I need this much headache?
Some say: rent a gas car when you need one. This flies not any better than a lead balloon. It is a hassle to rent a car, and it is very expensive. A sinlge week-long rent of a gas car will eat all your yearly savings on an EV (if you had those savings, but you won't because EVs cost too much in the first place.)
Perhaps households with two or three or four cars can buy an EV as one of them. But I have only one car, and it better do everything I need. There are many people in the same position. Even if a family has two cars, do they want to be concerned that they both need to go for a long drive at the same time? Why would they want to schedule their life around limitations of their super-expensive EV, when Joneses across the road don't have any such problem?
A horse will not mow your lawn; it will eat all the grass, down to the soil. You will be left with bare earth, with a few deposits of processed grass on it. I'm not sure I'd want my lawn to be like that.
Any other excuse for not hiring them is a smokescreen
There are other valid reasons, before you jump to assumption of evil intentions. For example, an old worker is very likely to have an attitude of "my way or highway," no matter what is the reason for the requirements that he is given. I have seen it myself how an older developer, who is given a minor authority over the project, successfully shields it from all new and good things that came into existence in last three or four decades. I have seen it how such a developer refuses to follow good and proper instructions from his manager. Such people are called "loose cannons." Sometimes it's safer to play Russian roulette with a semi-auto than to talk to such a person.
Older developers have plenty of time to look at new technologies and decide if they want to have anything to do with them. They also have enough weight in the company to pick and choose jobs that they take. Many young developers, raised on Python and Perl, are not even capable of doing those jobs - such as writing the assembly code for a small 8-bit MCU. The rift between that code, and code that implements some Web 3.0 JS thingy (that is all the rage, of course!) is huge. I do not do web programming, and I do not expect to ever do it - simply because it doesn't interest me, and I don't like how it works anyway.
If an old developer is unwilling to change, there is still plenty of work for him left. I work with hardware and low level software; these methods haven't changed for a long time (since 8080 stepped into the game.) But I'm using WPF for all my GUI needs these days, instead of (historically) OWL, MFC, Qt, and such. I gladly went with that change because I liked the result.
First person on the planet gets to name it
What is the chance that an international committee of 100 professional bureaucrats will voluntarily cede their self-assigned right to name planets to some sort of intrepid Captain Lone Starr and his mawg?
Anyone I have had a face to face discussion with on the topic of "police state tyranny" has always been in favor of moderation
It is not relevant, unless you can show that your acquaintances are a representative sample of the entire US population. (This is just a math point - it is all but impossible for a single person to have the same number of friends among politicians and lumpens, citizens and illegals, men and women and uncertain, rich and poor, smart and stupid, young and old, city slickers and farmers.)
The nearest approximation to such a nation-wide poll would be actually Presidential elections. How did *that* work out?
Is there any place with other people around where it'll be acceptable to say that to your glasses?
There is no reason why Glass cannot be operated over Bluetooth - either from your phone, that it is already paired with, or from an accessory. Once the camel's nose is under the tent, it's too late.
Your other concerns - that Glass will be used to spy on the user, by tracking everything you purchase and consume - have you any idea how much bandwidth that would require?
Those are just simple technical issues, they can be overcame even today. I have a video recorder in the car; it records 1920 x 1080P, 30fps HD video for 8 hours on a single, replaceable 32 GB SD card. The actual silicon in that SD card is small enough to be placed into Glass. If you do that, you have 8 hours of continuous recording between hotspots; and once you are at any WiFi hotspot, the Glass will dump the buffered video. If not, you are probably on a hike somewhere in wilderness, and Google has no interest in all these grizzly bears around you.
The problem of "petabytes" is just as severe as a concern that a banker may hurt himself carrying all those gold bars into his vault. It's a process with a positive feedback; a tiny percentage of profits from this information will buy you a lot of computers - and this is a perfectly parallelizable work. Mark my word, "they" will even make you pay for the storage and processing. In part that would be done with government money (that is your taxes,) and in other part it will be done with business income that ultimately comes from you and other consumers of goods and services. Once Google makes you want Glass, they can demand payment from you, in one way or another.
I remember when "walkmen/boomboxes will destroy society since people will use them during movies and in public restrooms"
Boomboxes did help to destroy society, in a small way, but not because of movies and restrooms. Boomboxes allowed young people to take a part of their home (the entertainment) with them wherever they are - in a car, in an abandoned house, in a forest. A gang has music now. Today the same gang has mobile communication and mobile computing, making gang members more mobile and less attached to their homes. Only 50 years ago a home was the center of living, where everything happened. Today a home is just a place to stop by occasionally to sleep or to see parents. All this is enabled not just by boomboxes, but by technology in general. It empowers people with good intentions and people with bad intentions, and the society changes.
And people bitch about XP users hanging onto an old and obsolete system.
XP may be old, but it is in no way obsolete.
Per Wikipedia, "In 2010, tourism constituted 6.4% of Israel's GDP."
Now, think about it for a moment. How many wealthy business owners and managers come to Israel who have at least one email account that is beyond access by Israel's border guards? What's even the point of asking them about free hosted accounts? Do you think Bill Gates has registered and is actively using a Google account?
As someone else already pointed out, if you filter visitors by this criteria then the only people who you let into the country are those without jobs; or terrorists, who have enough money to last them to the end of their lives.