I can see the US government having some interest in where that money was transferred because they don't want it going to support terrorist groups and such but outside of that, why should the US government care what happens to it or what it is used for as long as it is not brought back into the US?
USA is the only country in the world that taxes its citizens' foreign income. This makes IRS very much interested in everything that happens to your money.
For example, you earned $100K by hard work in the USA, and you paid your taxes on that. You took the remaining money and moved to Cayman islands. There you built a small business using these $100K as a startup capital. You do not sell to the USA, ever. Your business grew, and now you are a millionaire. Guess what, IRS wants taxes on your personal income. Your money is their business!
Either you're not exploring the web, or unaware of any infections (or you practice safe cyber-sailing).
I must admit that IRL I also do not explore sewers, and don't go after midnight into a bad part of town, and I don't instigate bar brawls, and I don't bother sleeping dogs. You might classify me as "cautious."
As far as being aware of possible infections... I have MS AV running; it is a low maintenance thing, so I let it be. It's not great, but what is? A skilled, targeted intrusion, such as a stealth keylogger, won't be detected anyway.
With regard to "safe," this LAN is behind a firewall, of course, and each box runs its own software firewall. I guess it would be possible to compromise the router first, then some host behind it, but it would be pretty difficult - it's not something that a script kiddie can do. All those do is portscan my servers - and I'm watching.
I do have a couple browsers that run scripts (IE and Chrome.) But I don't use those for free browsing; they are reserved for specific sites that require scripting. The rest of the browsing is done on the latest FF that has all the privacy and security add-ons loaded (NoScript specifically.) On top of that I do not visit pr0n sites, and I do not get the urge to download a few free MP3s here and there. If I must, there is always lynx or links on one of my Linux boxes; and I can always fire up something in a VM, browse, and then revert to the last snapshot.
Nobody can claim that these measures guarantee safety. But they are a good start. If your AV started ringing the alarm bells, it means that you as a user failed prior to that. For example, I never follow links to URL shorteners. If I do not recognize the domain I don't go there.
There are many sites that I have never visited. Some of them might be good. But you know what, Internet is too large, and I have so little time. I stick to familiar landscapes - news from a handful of known sites, Slashdot and a few similar blogs, and work. That is more than sufficient to fill all available time. I guess that won't work for everyone - after all, some people go to Thailand as sex tourists, which I'd classify as patently crazy. But these rules work for me.
How many viruses your antivirus caught recently? How many CPU cycles the same antivirus burned through as you were opening files on your computer?
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I haven't seen a virus in a decade. The majority of successful attacks are based on social engineering and on 0-day exploits of vulnerable code. An antivirus is not such a great help here. But antivirus companies are sitting pretty because the audience is conditioned that any PC must have an antivirus.
Then the logical question would be, how much physical damage do you see as acceptable for life?
I understand that the damage that kills you is not compatible with life by definition. However many things that don't kill you outright, thanks to modern medical help, may leave you without arms, legs (not to be mentioned after yesterday, but we started this discussion several days ago.) You may become blind, deaf, paralyzed, or in coma. Where lies the threshold between biological life (such as consuming nutrients and generating energy) and between life as humans usually define it - social, creative, enjoyable?
This is a very valid question because the type of crime that I linked to (as well as terrorism) is likely to not kill you on the spot, but just turn your existence (I'm intentionally not using the word "life" here) into pure torture.
As matter of fact, I have it installed onto my laptop. The laptop came with Vista, and Win8 is technically better, without a doubt. By "technically" I mean "under the hood" - there are many good changes made by people who never deal with even a single pixel of UI in their work. The blame is on the GUI people, on the management to be exact.
It is pretty good system that needs a few tweaks.
I know. I tweaked it to resemble WinXP. I'd wish it had Aero, though, because it's nice to the eye. I hate the squarish looking decorations. I understand why they did it - to run the thing on a tablet - but this is NOT a tablet, #%$#%$ !!! I'm running ClassicShell, it killed most of the stupidities, and I don't venture into places where the rest lives.
Other than that it is not that difficult to get used to.
Sure, it's not difficult to live in North Korea, except that there is no food, no electricity, and you have to work as a slave every day in bitter cold. The question is, why would a normal person, not a masochist by any means, choose to live like that if he has choice? It might be tough to escape NK, but nobody can say that you don't have a choice in your OS. This desktop runs Win7, and it will never be downgraded to Win8.
The big deal about start button just surprises me. If people cannot handle simple change like this then are they even able to learn anything new?
The problem is not with "new" or like that. People don't want change in general. A regular man, or even many geeks, don't worship computers. They use them as tools to get some other work done. Imagine that a man got used, after 18 years of training ("Start something!" - 1995) to clicking on the leftmost icon in the toolbar to open a handy launcher where he keeps his usual shortcuts. Imagine that man who enters a Win8 desktop and clicks on that same icon! What will happen? I can tell you, IE starts! I clicked that myself like a hundred times, until I realized that I cannot retrain myself - and I moved a file manager window there to reduce the wasted time. Shortly after I installed ClassicShell, and the problem was gone.
I do not know even how to use Windows without the start menu. I use search only rarely. In part because I still have a lot of XP boxes around that don't do search like that at all. But also because it is too wasteful to move my hands from the mouse to the keyboard and type something. Type what??? I do not associate a specific name with a specific program. How do you type uTorrent, for example? Do you look for the greek 'u' (Alt-0181) ??? No. That won't work. You have to search for "torrent" instead. What kind of a common user would know that ahead of time? This is negative discoverability because you cannot use this search even if you *see* the shortcut on the desktop.
Can I learn all these new tricks? Yes, certainly. But WHY SHOULD I? What would you say if you are forced one day to walk only backward in your office? Can you do it? I bet you can, everyone can walk backward. But will you? It is totally unreasonable, short of some massive zombie invasion where you must walk back to back with a partner to watch each other's six. Same here. I can do all these stupid wiggles with mouse, but I don't want to, and I refuse to do it because it does not benefit me in any way. If the change is good and useful, you have a decent chance of convincing me to give it a try. But these changes are anything but good or useful. There is no incentive to learn the new stuff, especially because after you learn it you also learn that it's not helping you. The only person who it does help is Steve Ballmer.
What if their favorite grocery store closes or bread is no longer available? Are they going to starve to death?
We always adapt. However in choosing the best adaptation strategy we look around and evaluate what is available - what alternative products are out there; what happened to the supplies of that bread
I really hate start button. Who really needs it? There is one on the keyboard already.
Millions upon millions of Windows users operate their computers with mouse alone. They discover existence of the keyboard only when they need to type something. There are good reasons for that.
Booting to the desktop seems nice but what is the point? I always want to launch something and go to the start menu anyway.
It's just you. Most people, however, work with more than one application at a time. Business computers are known to launch ten or twenty applications on startup. This box, at home, launches about five automatically (Outlook, OneNote, BPM, Skype, Bria, a sidebar with 6 gadgets, and a few more.) What would I do with just one? Do I have to choose between receiving my calls over Skype vs. over SIP? Booting into the desktop prepares the computer for its intended use. Booting into the start screen requires you to make the same repetitive choices every single time. Desktop makes them all visible and available instantly. Metro doesn't do that. What posessed MS to give up on their own invention of windowed GUI? Is this how large companies go senile?
If I do not want to run any apps in metro mode I do not want to see them in start menu
Good that you mentioned that. Doesn't *everyone* appreciates the disastrous UI that you have to use to control your Start screen? R-Click on each item separately, and then in some bottom row select an option. For each item individually! A typical install of a s/w package dumps ten to twenty new items into the flat Start screen, and you have to fix them all manually! What kind of an idiot came up with that? At least a hierarchy, like in the Start menu, would make sense. I use Start menu all the time - but I customize it to make it into a launcher of applications that *I* want (I disable the automatic pinning of recent stuff.) This is better than the desktop because Start menu is always available with a Windows button or a key, and it only takes one click to launch what I need (not two, like on the desktop, provided that you can get to it without minimizing your work.)
Microsoft have gone too far down this road now, they can't fix things without doing a complete 180. And I don't think I have ever seen Microsoft do that before.
It's nowhere that bad. Here is what they metroified:
- Some control panel applets. This is irrelevant because they can be rewritten for windowed interface in about a day. There is nothing special there, just on/off switches and a couple of text fields.
- Some Metro apps, like a copy of IE. Those should be trashed as they are because they are horrible by design, and cannot be used by anyone (except maybe on a phone, since you don't have that much screen space there.)
That's the complete list. Take the old Start menu code (a part of Windows Explorer) and resurrect it in the version control system. This will finalize the changes.
Now, if you want to support Metro applications, fix the layer that runs them. But make sure to run them windowed by default. If the customer changes them to full screen, remember that choice on per-app basis.
All this work can be done in a week, and it can be pushed to Win8 sufferers as a service pack, if not as a single KB patch. I don't see a technical reason to not do it. Even politically this can be explained away as "serving their customers better." It's wiser to undo a bad decision than to double down and get slaughtered just because the man in charge didn't want to lose face.
Because if Microsoft sees this as an Enterprise-only issue, they may restore the old interface to *only* Enterprise copies of Win8.
Millions of small businesses buy Windows boxes from retail stores. I know because I do just that. Those boxes run Windows Home editions, and they cost 30% to 50% of the cost of "professional" boxes. Most of those businesses don't care; they don't bother joining the domain - and really with few computers around the domain is not a requirement. They don't need same-day service either.
This also will create another divide - between Windows at work and Windows at home. MS was always insisting that both are the same as much as possible, so that the user could seamlessly operate (and learn) at work and at home with no retraining needed. This is what employers are expecting today from new hires. But if Windows Home comes with a tablet interface and Windows Pro (at work) has desktop, there is no transfer of skills between the two. A business would be not any worse if they load Mint onto all work desktops. If the new user is clueless about the Windows Desktop then what's the value in keeping it around?
MS should stop trying to change the nature of people. USSR tried to do that for 70 years and failed. MS has no chance here. They should give the users what they want - and if MS believes that some new interface is better then they should offer it as an option. Best if it is a seamless option, like Metro in a window (or full screen if you maximize.)
Do those users even exist? I heard about one or two, a decade ago. Myself, I think I tried it exactly once... and discontinued. There is a lot of power in being able to tailor your windows to your needs. An overlapping window manager can do tiling, but not the other way around. So why to limit yourself? It's not like one WM costs more than the other.
As a personal anecdote, I have now these windows on screen:
* A video camera feed
* A piece of PuTTY window that shows me some changing numbers that I keep an eye on
* A large clock window
* A weather forecast window
* Home automation control window
* Outlook (visible as an icon, no new mail in it)
* An RDP session to another box
* This Firefox window
* A bunch of other stuff that is minimized, but if restored it will be exactly where I left it, and at the proper size
If I use a tiling WM it would be a challenge to arrange all that - and then to rearrange as my needs suddenly change.
It's not like the existing currencies don't take any power to produce
Existing currencies do not take any power to produce new money. It's just simple numbers in computers, and they don't need any computational resource to generate. BTC operations are not atomic initially, but they become such after being recorded by the network using complex crypto and millions of computers. USD operations between two banks are verified by logically singular mainframes at the banks; the transaction doesn't depend on computational power, is atomic and instant.
How many people are going to buy nonexistent "apps" (designed for a tablet) for a minimally popular device that is uncertain what it is, a desktop or a phone? How many car manufacturers would be willing to make a new car without the steering wheel but with three joysticks? How well such a car would be selling?
I tried one free Metro application on a Win8, and it was unusable. I cannot imagine paying for *that*. I couldn't figure out *anything*; the huge screen was entirely devoid of controls, but whenever something managed to trigger some action (a swipe of unknown nature? Who knows.) then all the screens smoothly morphed into something else, equally mysterious and even more useless. But what'd you expect from an ISV if MS themselves are guilty of the same sin in Win8; they didn't even bother to develop a style guide, and their "controls" (if I may call them that) are completely cryptic and not separable from static images.
I don't know what MS's business plan is today, but it's pretty obvious that helping the user to do his work is not part of it. If MS had such an intention they'd simply release Win8 as a faster Win7, with the same UI. Metro would be available as a separate subsystem, and it would launch automatically - in a window or in full screen - whenever you run Metro code. Multiple overlapping Metro windows would be permitted. A separate - and cheaper - release of Win8 for mobile devices could have only Metro; this way Win8 for tablets does not need to carry the desktop support code anymore. WinRT doesn't even allow you to write code for the desktop. But MS had to keep it because their own Office is desktop-based and that is not going to change any time soon.
There were many excellent ways for MS to retain the existing clientele and at the same time advance in the mobile. They selected the worst possible choice, and that was blatantly obvious to any observer that is external to Microsoft.
Acknowledged, thanks for the info! Looks good. I might just do that. I won't be paying for power in this case, but the idea has merit regardless. P4 is just really bad, power-wise. The exhaust air is perceivably warm. I'll stick a kill-a-watt into the cable just to see how bad it is, but it's probably around 150-200W when doing nothing. But I only need to run a backup bind9.
On this subject, I find it funny that so many people, and not too long ago, argued that old computers should be cleaned up and shipped to 3rd world (Africa) because poor Africans can't afford anything better. And now it appears that people of the 1st world cannot afford those same boxes - but somehow it is presumed that people in Africa, who get their power from solar panels and an occasional gasoline generator, can run them just fine.
If you have a decent PC all you need to play almost any game at a really good level is a graphics card upgrade.
A good graphics card will cost as much as a complete console - and you are still stuck with incompatibilities between this game and that video card, or a DLL, or just something else that only happens on your setup, so it's entirely unsupported. Early releases of Thief crashed left and right; first PC releases of Far Cry didn't work with AMD (Diamond) video cards, IIRC.
I gave up gaming on a PC long time ago. I have PS3, and it works just as fast as when I bought it (which means "as fast as the game needs it to work".) If PS4 is a good improvement, I will get it too. There is a lot of value in a console - it runs your games exactly as the developer released them, and all consoles of the same type run the same. Load the disk and the game runs. If it has bugs, everyone has the same bugs - and there is a huge pressure on the developer to fix those and push the patches out.
I can understand why early gaming was on a PC - because the PC was there, and any PC could run any game (of Alley Cat type.) This is no longer true. Building a gaming PC will cost you more than buying a console. Gaming on PC is only practical if you are after games that will never be released on a console of your choice and you can't afford several. Cost of a console is small these days, however, and there is no good excuse why a gamer wouldn't be able to get an Xbox for his Halo and PS3 for his something else.
Windows 8... ummm... I guess I can use the drive it came on as a backup someday.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
I used to buy prebuilt boxes (HP, Dell, Acer) with Win7, and I used them as they are, with Win7 OS. But if I am required to buy Win8 when I need another box I will instead buy parts and build a PC this way - something I haven't done for a long, long time. TigerDirect still sells Win7 OEM packages, but for many of my needs Linux will do just fine. Or I will raise an odd, old P4 box from the dead - as matter of fact, one is on my bench right now, loud and hot as they used to build them in 2007 or so. But it's free. Will install some Linux on it for a simple server duty.
On point 1, Manning never gave anything to the enemy. Manning gave the information to a media agency who is bound by their journalistic duty to ensure the safety of the data released from them.
The very fact that the information got out indicates that whoever received the information was not a suitable handler of secrets. The US government established a simple rule of thumb, so that even a lowly intelligence analyst can figure it out:
(a) you must have clearance high enough to read the document, and (b) you have to have a need to know.
Journalists can be argued to meet (b), however they are clearly not meeting the requirement (a). Their "journalistic duty" is not to ensure safety of the data; it's to publish the data as fast as they can.
You are wrong to claim Manning gave anything to the enemy
He intentionally gave the information to people who, as he knew, had no obligations to keep it secret - and who had their own motives to publish it. Once published, any reasonable person will conclude that the enemy will want to have a look.
Imagine that you climb onto a roof of a building, take a brick, and fling it over the edge. You do not see where it falls; you even avoid thinking about it. If the brick kills someone you are clearly guilty. But will you be guilty of something if the brick just scares some people, but doesn't do any obvious damage this time around? If yes, then Manning is also guilty of the same crime.
In addition, Manning, when the clearance was issued to him, gave his word that he will keep the secret. He broke that word.
The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society
True, but what has it to do with any of the societies on Earth? They are neither free nor open. The last free society on Earth was probably formed by Neanderthals.
But why now suddenly? After all, it's been ~25 years.
a) MS inflicted too much pain onto consumers. It's one thing to move buttons around. It's a complely different thing to tell the user that there are no buttons anymore and you should swipe your greasy finger across your 25" monitor two feet away from you if you want to launch something - and it *will* be full screen, and you *will* be looking through the fingerprints, and you *will* like it.
b) The customers have examples of good UI design, and they do not understand why they should be suffering this one just because a gaggle of self-centered elitists at MS made that decision for them.
Who would shell out money for W8 if it was perceived as W7 with some problems fixed?
A lot of people would do that, especially because upgrades of MS OS on the same hardware are nonexistent outside of geeks' basements. If you buy a Wintel box you will buy Win7, Win8, Win9 or whatever MS is selling today. Only geeks know how to get what they need.
But very few people want to shell out the money for Win8 as it is perceived as Win7 with many problems added and with many good solutions arbitrarily removed.
XP64 was poorly supported by driver developers. For Vista and 7 MS mandated that both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers must be available at the same time, or MS will not sign any of them. This helped. Another factor is that in XP days 2 GB or RAM was all that most people had, and 64-bit bought you nothing. Today there is probably no new PC out there that has less than 4 GB of RAM, and 64-bit OS is a necessity. RAM-hungry applications also come now as 64-bit builds; a build for XP64 was unheard of.
If the law says you can't wash your horse in your driveway on sundays, it may be a stupid law, but if the police find a wet horse in your driveway, you still broke it.
Not necessarily. For this evidence to be proof of breaking the law all the elements of the law must be in place. For example:
It must be you washing the horse, not someone else (not your neighbor, and not a diplomat from North Korea)
It must be your horse that you are washing, not someone else's horse
You must wash the horse, as opposed to cooling it with water or letting it walk into a stream of water from a garden sprinkler
It must be exactly a horse, and not a unicorn. Ponies may or may not fall under that legislation; zebras are right out
It must be your driveway, not your neighbor's driveway
It must be exactly a driveway, not a walkway and not a front yard - and not a public street either
The washing activity must happen over the driveway. It is not sufficient if you wash the horse on your lawn but horse's tail is casting a shadow onto the driveway.
It needs to be proven that the washing did not finish by 00:00am on Sunday. The horse can remain wet for hours after that (especially if it is or was raining, as another comment says.)
What options will you have 10 years from now when you need to do a critical desktop computing oriented task - tasks such as spread sheets and word processing that were what brought about the revolution in personal computing in the first place - but there are no more desktops because Microsoft killed them all?
First, you can use pirated copies. They exist for all Windows versions. If a version is not sold anymore, and the current version doesn't do what you need to do, then at least you have an ethical excuse for running a pirated copy. It's not a lost sale to MS because you will not buy their tablet OS for serious work.
There is no "second," actually. If the software doesn't work on Win2012 for one reason or another then you have no option at all. Either the ISV is gone out of business; or they decided to discontinue the product; or their roadmap does not include what you need (Hi, Xilinx!) or, the simplest of them all, the upgrade just costs too much and you cannot afford it.
A Dual-Core Pentium, heck, even a Hyper-threading P4 makes an acceptable Win7 desktop, provided it has 2 Gigs of RAM...
I have a P4 3.2 GHz, with 1 GB of RAM, on the bench right now. Currently it runs XP pretty well. Should I spend $150 on Win7 that won't even work well on this box? (If the min. usable RAM is 2 GB as you say.)
This box has a few more years of life in it. Cost of replacement would be about $500-600 if you buy a low end PC today. It will come with Win8, by the way. There is zero sense in feeding the landfill and spending money on a new box. Nobody wins - at least nobody on this side of Pacific ocean.
we choose to keep most of our GX270s on WinXP rather than go through the process of upgrading them
It's always easier to do nothing than to do something. If your IT department is not overpaid and underworked, there is no reason for you to look for more work for yourself. The work will find you on its own.
Having a watch that will not tell you exact time an instead tell you 'fuzzy' time in 5 minute increments (in words, not numbers) and doing it at 5atm pressure under water?
I'm sure when you are 165 feet below you don't want to know the exact duration of your dive. Plus or minus ten minutes is just fine:-)
(Well, otherwise you'd use a proper dive computer, and you'd be alive back on the surface.)
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I can see the US government having some interest in where that money was transferred because they don't want it going to support terrorist groups and such but outside of that, why should the US government care what happens to it or what it is used for as long as it is not brought back into the US?
USA is the only country in the world that taxes its citizens' foreign income. This makes IRS very much interested in everything that happens to your money.
For example, you earned $100K by hard work in the USA, and you paid your taxes on that. You took the remaining money and moved to Cayman islands. There you built a small business using these $100K as a startup capital. You do not sell to the USA, ever. Your business grew, and now you are a millionaire. Guess what, IRS wants taxes on your personal income. Your money is their business!
Either you're not exploring the web, or unaware of any infections (or you practice safe cyber-sailing).
I must admit that IRL I also do not explore sewers, and don't go after midnight into a bad part of town, and I don't instigate bar brawls, and I don't bother sleeping dogs. You might classify me as "cautious."
As far as being aware of possible infections... I have MS AV running; it is a low maintenance thing, so I let it be. It's not great, but what is? A skilled, targeted intrusion, such as a stealth keylogger, won't be detected anyway.
With regard to "safe," this LAN is behind a firewall, of course, and each box runs its own software firewall. I guess it would be possible to compromise the router first, then some host behind it, but it would be pretty difficult - it's not something that a script kiddie can do. All those do is portscan my servers - and I'm watching.
I do have a couple browsers that run scripts (IE and Chrome.) But I don't use those for free browsing; they are reserved for specific sites that require scripting. The rest of the browsing is done on the latest FF that has all the privacy and security add-ons loaded (NoScript specifically.) On top of that I do not visit pr0n sites, and I do not get the urge to download a few free MP3s here and there. If I must, there is always lynx or links on one of my Linux boxes; and I can always fire up something in a VM, browse, and then revert to the last snapshot.
Nobody can claim that these measures guarantee safety. But they are a good start. If your AV started ringing the alarm bells, it means that you as a user failed prior to that. For example, I never follow links to URL shorteners. If I do not recognize the domain I don't go there.
There are many sites that I have never visited. Some of them might be good. But you know what, Internet is too large, and I have so little time. I stick to familiar landscapes - news from a handful of known sites, Slashdot and a few similar blogs, and work. That is more than sufficient to fill all available time. I guess that won't work for everyone - after all, some people go to Thailand as sex tourists, which I'd classify as patently crazy. But these rules work for me.
How many viruses your antivirus caught recently? How many CPU cycles the same antivirus burned through as you were opening files on your computer?
Maybe I'm doing something wrong, but I haven't seen a virus in a decade. The majority of successful attacks are based on social engineering and on 0-day exploits of vulnerable code. An antivirus is not such a great help here. But antivirus companies are sitting pretty because the audience is conditioned that any PC must have an antivirus.
Then the logical question would be, how much physical damage do you see as acceptable for life?
I understand that the damage that kills you is not compatible with life by definition. However many things that don't kill you outright, thanks to modern medical help, may leave you without arms, legs (not to be mentioned after yesterday, but we started this discussion several days ago.) You may become blind, deaf, paralyzed, or in coma. Where lies the threshold between biological life (such as consuming nutrients and generating energy) and between life as humans usually define it - social, creative, enjoyable?
This is a very valid question because the type of crime that I linked to (as well as terrorism) is likely to not kill you on the spot, but just turn your existence (I'm intentionally not using the word "life" here) into pure torture.
I do not think you have used windows 8 much.
As matter of fact, I have it installed onto my laptop. The laptop came with Vista, and Win8 is technically better, without a doubt. By "technically" I mean "under the hood" - there are many good changes made by people who never deal with even a single pixel of UI in their work. The blame is on the GUI people, on the management to be exact.
It is pretty good system that needs a few tweaks.
I know. I tweaked it to resemble WinXP. I'd wish it had Aero, though, because it's nice to the eye. I hate the squarish looking decorations. I understand why they did it - to run the thing on a tablet - but this is NOT a tablet, #%$#%$ !!! I'm running ClassicShell, it killed most of the stupidities, and I don't venture into places where the rest lives.
Other than that it is not that difficult to get used to.
Sure, it's not difficult to live in North Korea, except that there is no food, no electricity, and you have to work as a slave every day in bitter cold. The question is, why would a normal person, not a masochist by any means, choose to live like that if he has choice? It might be tough to escape NK, but nobody can say that you don't have a choice in your OS. This desktop runs Win7, and it will never be downgraded to Win8.
The big deal about start button just surprises me. If people cannot handle simple change like this then are they even able to learn anything new?
The problem is not with "new" or like that. People don't want change in general. A regular man, or even many geeks, don't worship computers. They use them as tools to get some other work done. Imagine that a man got used, after 18 years of training ("Start something!" - 1995) to clicking on the leftmost icon in the toolbar to open a handy launcher where he keeps his usual shortcuts. Imagine that man who enters a Win8 desktop and clicks on that same icon! What will happen? I can tell you, IE starts! I clicked that myself like a hundred times, until I realized that I cannot retrain myself - and I moved a file manager window there to reduce the wasted time. Shortly after I installed ClassicShell, and the problem was gone.
I do not know even how to use Windows without the start menu. I use search only rarely. In part because I still have a lot of XP boxes around that don't do search like that at all. But also because it is too wasteful to move my hands from the mouse to the keyboard and type something. Type what??? I do not associate a specific name with a specific program. How do you type uTorrent, for example? Do you look for the greek 'u' (Alt-0181) ??? No. That won't work. You have to search for "torrent" instead. What kind of a common user would know that ahead of time? This is negative discoverability because you cannot use this search even if you *see* the shortcut on the desktop.
Can I learn all these new tricks? Yes, certainly. But WHY SHOULD I? What would you say if you are forced one day to walk only backward in your office? Can you do it? I bet you can, everyone can walk backward. But will you? It is totally unreasonable, short of some massive zombie invasion where you must walk back to back with a partner to watch each other's six. Same here. I can do all these stupid wiggles with mouse, but I don't want to, and I refuse to do it because it does not benefit me in any way. If the change is good and useful, you have a decent chance of convincing me to give it a try. But these changes are anything but good or useful. There is no incentive to learn the new stuff, especially because after you learn it you also learn that it's not helping you. The only person who it does help is Steve Ballmer.
What if their favorite grocery store closes or bread is no longer available? Are they going to starve to death?
We always adapt. However in choosing the best adaptation strategy we look around and evaluate what is available - what alternative products are out there; what happened to the supplies of that bread
I really hate start button. Who really needs it? There is one on the keyboard already.
Millions upon millions of Windows users operate their computers with mouse alone. They discover existence of the keyboard only when they need to type something. There are good reasons for that.
Booting to the desktop seems nice but what is the point? I always want to launch something and go to the start menu anyway.
It's just you. Most people, however, work with more than one application at a time. Business computers are known to launch ten or twenty applications on startup. This box, at home, launches about five automatically (Outlook, OneNote, BPM, Skype, Bria, a sidebar with 6 gadgets, and a few more.) What would I do with just one? Do I have to choose between receiving my calls over Skype vs. over SIP? Booting into the desktop prepares the computer for its intended use. Booting into the start screen requires you to make the same repetitive choices every single time. Desktop makes them all visible and available instantly. Metro doesn't do that. What posessed MS to give up on their own invention of windowed GUI? Is this how large companies go senile?
If I do not want to run any apps in metro mode I do not want to see them in start menu
Good that you mentioned that. Doesn't *everyone* appreciates the disastrous UI that you have to use to control your Start screen? R-Click on each item separately, and then in some bottom row select an option. For each item individually! A typical install of a s/w package dumps ten to twenty new items into the flat Start screen, and you have to fix them all manually! What kind of an idiot came up with that? At least a hierarchy, like in the Start menu, would make sense. I use Start menu all the time - but I customize it to make it into a launcher of applications that *I* want (I disable the automatic pinning of recent stuff.) This is better than the desktop because Start menu is always available with a Windows button or a key, and it only takes one click to launch what I need (not two, like on the desktop, provided that you can get to it without minimizing your work.)
Microsoft have gone too far down this road now, they can't fix things without doing a complete 180. And I don't think I have ever seen Microsoft do that before.
It's nowhere that bad. Here is what they metroified:
- Some control panel applets. This is irrelevant because they can be rewritten for windowed interface in about a day. There is nothing special there, just on/off switches and a couple of text fields.
- Some Metro apps, like a copy of IE. Those should be trashed as they are because they are horrible by design, and cannot be used by anyone (except maybe on a phone, since you don't have that much screen space there.)
That's the complete list. Take the old Start menu code (a part of Windows Explorer) and resurrect it in the version control system. This will finalize the changes.
Now, if you want to support Metro applications, fix the layer that runs them. But make sure to run them windowed by default. If the customer changes them to full screen, remember that choice on per-app basis.
All this work can be done in a week, and it can be pushed to Win8 sufferers as a service pack, if not as a single KB patch. I don't see a technical reason to not do it. Even politically this can be explained away as "serving their customers better." It's wiser to undo a bad decision than to double down and get slaughtered just because the man in charge didn't want to lose face.
Because if Microsoft sees this as an Enterprise-only issue, they may restore the old interface to *only* Enterprise copies of Win8.
Millions of small businesses buy Windows boxes from retail stores. I know because I do just that. Those boxes run Windows Home editions, and they cost 30% to 50% of the cost of "professional" boxes. Most of those businesses don't care; they don't bother joining the domain - and really with few computers around the domain is not a requirement. They don't need same-day service either.
This also will create another divide - between Windows at work and Windows at home. MS was always insisting that both are the same as much as possible, so that the user could seamlessly operate (and learn) at work and at home with no retraining needed. This is what employers are expecting today from new hires. But if Windows Home comes with a tablet interface and Windows Pro (at work) has desktop, there is no transfer of skills between the two. A business would be not any worse if they load Mint onto all work desktops. If the new user is clueless about the Windows Desktop then what's the value in keeping it around?
MS should stop trying to change the nature of people. USSR tried to do that for 70 years and failed. MS has no chance here. They should give the users what they want - and if MS believes that some new interface is better then they should offer it as an option. Best if it is a seamless option, like Metro in a window (or full screen if you maximize.)
Do those users even exist? I heard about one or two, a decade ago. Myself, I think I tried it exactly once... and discontinued. There is a lot of power in being able to tailor your windows to your needs. An overlapping window manager can do tiling, but not the other way around. So why to limit yourself? It's not like one WM costs more than the other.
As a personal anecdote, I have now these windows on screen:
If I use a tiling WM it would be a challenge to arrange all that - and then to rearrange as my needs suddenly change.
Anyone who thinks it is as easy to kill people with a "flammable substance" as with a gun is an idiot?
No.
Besides, some burns are worse than death. Try to live without skin.
It's not like the existing currencies don't take any power to produce
Existing currencies do not take any power to produce new money. It's just simple numbers in computers, and they don't need any computational resource to generate. BTC operations are not atomic initially, but they become such after being recorded by the network using complex crypto and millions of computers. USD operations between two banks are verified by logically singular mainframes at the banks; the transaction doesn't depend on computational power, is atomic and instant.
any imbecile can [...] kill anyone they like.
FTFY. Here is the proof. No guns needed; though if it comes down to choosing, you'd beg to be shot instead of being burned alive.
Now, if you would only propose how to identify imbeciles, and what to do with their future crimes...
How many people are going to buy nonexistent "apps" (designed for a tablet) for a minimally popular device that is uncertain what it is, a desktop or a phone? How many car manufacturers would be willing to make a new car without the steering wheel but with three joysticks? How well such a car would be selling?
I tried one free Metro application on a Win8, and it was unusable. I cannot imagine paying for *that*. I couldn't figure out *anything*; the huge screen was entirely devoid of controls, but whenever something managed to trigger some action (a swipe of unknown nature? Who knows.) then all the screens smoothly morphed into something else, equally mysterious and even more useless. But what'd you expect from an ISV if MS themselves are guilty of the same sin in Win8; they didn't even bother to develop a style guide, and their "controls" (if I may call them that) are completely cryptic and not separable from static images.
I don't know what MS's business plan is today, but it's pretty obvious that helping the user to do his work is not part of it. If MS had such an intention they'd simply release Win8 as a faster Win7, with the same UI. Metro would be available as a separate subsystem, and it would launch automatically - in a window or in full screen - whenever you run Metro code. Multiple overlapping Metro windows would be permitted. A separate - and cheaper - release of Win8 for mobile devices could have only Metro; this way Win8 for tablets does not need to carry the desktop support code anymore. WinRT doesn't even allow you to write code for the desktop. But MS had to keep it because their own Office is desktop-based and that is not going to change any time soon.
There were many excellent ways for MS to retain the existing clientele and at the same time advance in the mobile. They selected the worst possible choice, and that was blatantly obvious to any observer that is external to Microsoft.
Acknowledged, thanks for the info! Looks good. I might just do that. I won't be paying for power in this case, but the idea has merit regardless. P4 is just really bad, power-wise. The exhaust air is perceivably warm. I'll stick a kill-a-watt into the cable just to see how bad it is, but it's probably around 150-200W when doing nothing. But I only need to run a backup bind9.
On this subject, I find it funny that so many people, and not too long ago, argued that old computers should be cleaned up and shipped to 3rd world (Africa) because poor Africans can't afford anything better. And now it appears that people of the 1st world cannot afford those same boxes - but somehow it is presumed that people in Africa, who get their power from solar panels and an occasional gasoline generator, can run them just fine.
If you have a decent PC all you need to play almost any game at a really good level is a graphics card upgrade.
A good graphics card will cost as much as a complete console - and you are still stuck with incompatibilities between this game and that video card, or a DLL, or just something else that only happens on your setup, so it's entirely unsupported. Early releases of Thief crashed left and right; first PC releases of Far Cry didn't work with AMD (Diamond) video cards, IIRC.
I gave up gaming on a PC long time ago. I have PS3, and it works just as fast as when I bought it (which means "as fast as the game needs it to work".) If PS4 is a good improvement, I will get it too. There is a lot of value in a console - it runs your games exactly as the developer released them, and all consoles of the same type run the same. Load the disk and the game runs. If it has bugs, everyone has the same bugs - and there is a huge pressure on the developer to fix those and push the patches out.
I can understand why early gaming was on a PC - because the PC was there, and any PC could run any game (of Alley Cat type.) This is no longer true. Building a gaming PC will cost you more than buying a console. Gaming on PC is only practical if you are after games that will never be released on a console of your choice and you can't afford several. Cost of a console is small these days, however, and there is no good excuse why a gamer wouldn't be able to get an Xbox for his Halo and PS3 for his something else.
Windows 8 ... ummm... I guess I can use the drive it came on as a backup someday.
Microsoft loves you as a customer. You bought their product and trashed it, thus making it not necessary for them to support you. (Not that they would ever do such a thing.) Microsoft only cares about the number of units sold, and you contributed to that.
I used to buy prebuilt boxes (HP, Dell, Acer) with Win7, and I used them as they are, with Win7 OS. But if I am required to buy Win8 when I need another box I will instead buy parts and build a PC this way - something I haven't done for a long, long time. TigerDirect still sells Win7 OEM packages, but for many of my needs Linux will do just fine. Or I will raise an odd, old P4 box from the dead - as matter of fact, one is on my bench right now, loud and hot as they used to build them in 2007 or so. But it's free. Will install some Linux on it for a simple server duty.
On point 1, Manning never gave anything to the enemy. Manning gave the information to a media agency who is bound by their journalistic duty to ensure the safety of the data released from them.
The very fact that the information got out indicates that whoever received the information was not a suitable handler of secrets. The US government established a simple rule of thumb, so that even a lowly intelligence analyst can figure it out:
(a) you must have clearance high enough to read the document, and (b) you have to have a need to know.
Journalists can be argued to meet (b), however they are clearly not meeting the requirement (a). Their "journalistic duty" is not to ensure safety of the data; it's to publish the data as fast as they can.
You are wrong to claim Manning gave anything to the enemy
He intentionally gave the information to people who, as he knew, had no obligations to keep it secret - and who had their own motives to publish it. Once published, any reasonable person will conclude that the enemy will want to have a look.
Imagine that you climb onto a roof of a building, take a brick, and fling it over the edge. You do not see where it falls; you even avoid thinking about it. If the brick kills someone you are clearly guilty. But will you be guilty of something if the brick just scares some people, but doesn't do any obvious damage this time around? If yes, then Manning is also guilty of the same crime.
In addition, Manning, when the clearance was issued to him, gave his word that he will keep the secret. He broke that word.
The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society
True, but what has it to do with any of the societies on Earth? They are neither free nor open. The last free society on Earth was probably formed by Neanderthals.
But why now suddenly? After all, it's been ~25 years.
a) MS inflicted too much pain onto consumers. It's one thing to move buttons around. It's a complely different thing to tell the user that there are no buttons anymore and you should swipe your greasy finger across your 25" monitor two feet away from you if you want to launch something - and it *will* be full screen, and you *will* be looking through the fingerprints, and you *will* like it.
b) The customers have examples of good UI design, and they do not understand why they should be suffering this one just because a gaggle of self-centered elitists at MS made that decision for them.
Who would shell out money for W8 if it was perceived as W7 with some problems fixed?
A lot of people would do that, especially because upgrades of MS OS on the same hardware are nonexistent outside of geeks' basements. If you buy a Wintel box you will buy Win7, Win8, Win9 or whatever MS is selling today. Only geeks know how to get what they need.
But very few people want to shell out the money for Win8 as it is perceived as Win7 with many problems added and with many good solutions arbitrarily removed.
Sooner or later they will run out and you will have little vhoivr, unless you want to test your luck with eBay.
Just don't insist on 'e' in your selection of bays.
XP64 was poorly supported by driver developers. For Vista and 7 MS mandated that both 32-bit and 64-bit drivers must be available at the same time, or MS will not sign any of them. This helped. Another factor is that in XP days 2 GB or RAM was all that most people had, and 64-bit bought you nothing. Today there is probably no new PC out there that has less than 4 GB of RAM, and 64-bit OS is a necessity. RAM-hungry applications also come now as 64-bit builds; a build for XP64 was unheard of.
If the law says you can't wash your horse in your driveway on sundays, it may be a stupid law, but if the police find a wet horse in your driveway, you still broke it.
Not necessarily. For this evidence to be proof of breaking the law all the elements of the law must be in place. For example:
What options will you have 10 years from now when you need to do a critical desktop computing oriented task - tasks such as spread sheets and word processing that were what brought about the revolution in personal computing in the first place - but there are no more desktops because Microsoft killed them all?
First, you can use pirated copies. They exist for all Windows versions. If a version is not sold anymore, and the current version doesn't do what you need to do, then at least you have an ethical excuse for running a pirated copy. It's not a lost sale to MS because you will not buy their tablet OS for serious work.
There is no "second," actually. If the software doesn't work on Win2012 for one reason or another then you have no option at all. Either the ISV is gone out of business; or they decided to discontinue the product; or their roadmap does not include what you need (Hi, Xilinx!) or, the simplest of them all, the upgrade just costs too much and you cannot afford it.
A Dual-Core Pentium, heck, even a Hyper-threading P4 makes an acceptable Win7 desktop, provided it has 2 Gigs of RAM...
I have a P4 3.2 GHz, with 1 GB of RAM, on the bench right now. Currently it runs XP pretty well. Should I spend $150 on Win7 that won't even work well on this box? (If the min. usable RAM is 2 GB as you say.)
This box has a few more years of life in it. Cost of replacement would be about $500-600 if you buy a low end PC today. It will come with Win8, by the way. There is zero sense in feeding the landfill and spending money on a new box. Nobody wins - at least nobody on this side of Pacific ocean.
we choose to keep most of our GX270s on WinXP rather than go through the process of upgrading them
It's always easier to do nothing than to do something. If your IT department is not overpaid and underworked, there is no reason for you to look for more work for yourself. The work will find you on its own.
Having a watch that will not tell you exact time an instead tell you 'fuzzy' time in 5 minute increments (in words, not numbers) and doing it at 5atm pressure under water?
I'm sure when you are 165 feet below you don't want to know the exact duration of your dive. Plus or minus ten minutes is just fine :-)
(Well, otherwise you'd use a proper dive computer, and you'd be alive back on the surface.)