Last I checked Photoshop was NOT on every copy of windows. Neither has there been any QBASIC executable. The people who are shifting away into walled gardens so that the proportion of Photoshop / coding users / pc-building geeks become the ONLY users of PCs, I'd be afraid. After all, geeks and niche PC divisions enjoy low prices because the entire mainstream is a force greater than all of us. But there WILL come a time when getting the ever-dwindling non-walled PC will become a niche in itself: just compare to the situation with brick and mortar stores when it comes to driving down looking for 4:3 monitor ratios for your PC and/or living room television.
Well, StackExchange* IS a nice system to make people get serious about seeking high contribution really quickly and you can do way more than slashdotters are used to here, which is just posting --and rarely, mod, and even more rarely, get a submission. That in itself is probably what mistakenly sells it to you, AC.
In my opinion, as you try to rise to the top to "unlock" more rights while learning and helping, I find that there are often despots who routinely use their never-fading power to pretty much edit, downmod and make off-topic criticicism about posts that would otherwise be fine (think of the dreaded Wikipedia edit bureaucracy.) I am annoyed that if your *question* doesn't fit certain guidelines, it gets closed down before you can get any help --sometimes it's moved to another forum where you must register separately to be able to post, which most users don't actually chase down and a newbie responder like me gets no points or feedback if the question is thus abandoned.
SE is very bureaucratic, while slashdot's post-it forever and "vote when the allocator WANTS you to vote," prevents the issues causing a feeling that you're being watched by burriers constantly.
* SE is a *competitive* question site, so dynamics AREN'T like slashdot's more relaxed social news environment.
The real question is, if this system is so broken, why do people keep coming back?
In terms of addiction and "why can't I jump somewhere else," your answer is "ask the same of Facebook junkies"
But to try harder: Because there is no other alternative quite like it with as high a volume of data as what originally made us lurkers and late-1990s old-timers sign up in the first place.
We have a fairly random moderation point system that prevents single-rager abuse, and nerds from all walks of life found in no other SINGLE forum out there. We can all be sure that our nerdish digressions / reminiscing / babbling in any article WILL have various commenters that recognize the topic and contribute to it constructively WITHOUT alienating the rest, since we are all nerds who have little to gain from regularly interfering with the process. As opposed to signal to noise ratios found at mainstream forums. See CNN and Yahoo answers (yuck!)
Who could downmod the parent poster in light of a sig like "Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight." This food motif, revelation and submitter's temp prestige should have some more value, seeing how we all wanted to discuss Ice Cream Sandwiches anyway.
I wonder if this will ALSO drive prices down. But knowing scientists, and most importantly, *marketers*, this will just be used to develop new fancy scans to add to the current pile...
Reminds me of the early workunit system for SETI@home I participated in back in the days of 300Mhz PC's: as the broadband and turn of the century multimedia PC sale movement started exploding with monster speeds (and little to no modern-day spyware to slow the avg PC down), SETI made big changes in the ~2.0 client and started forcing everyone to upgrade (or else...). Workunits that would take you less time to get you ahead of the very competitive stat sharing no longer would do so. And people stuck with old PC's would do even worse. But I digress.
Money is rarely ever "returned" to the consumer when the industry moves on to cheaper alts. Someone might argue RAM prices, but you're buying DIFFERENT RAM with every breakthrough that doesn't work on the older PCs. Sounds to me like these expensive MRI machines would have flash ROMs that can receive new instructions. Like you know, in case some lawsuit out there comes out of the discovery that M procedure in your million dollar machine has been causing cancer with N current parameters.
Or just made them focus on getting stuff done rather than implementing optimisations no one will ever notice.
I see. You're of the "Ignore the problem" school of thought, just like the Firefox crew. If people don't allow you to that, ask them to just throw money at it.
Either way, this will never be resolved because there will never be software accountability.
Academia is just as bad with how it forces math down CS people's unknowing mouths. Your comment sums up exactly what I disliked about Math theory courses starting with Pre-Calculus. Every single class stopped being old material, and was riding on "cute" solutions that had to be learned by watching someone solve a boring proof. It couldn't just be figured out by looking at the book in advance because all advanced math is made through centuries worth of geniouses who worked bits out at the leisure of several years, not a 13 weeks semester.
As time went on, the requirement courses dealing with math get more esoteric and complicated to work on when, and it still is required to learn all the proof solutions and talk the cute abstract math talk to graduate. The real-world needs to clearly know what the CS academia AND the IT career holds before having plunged in. Until someone satisfactorily gives a world-famous solution to CS != Programming that deters or REORIENTS all of us to the right vocational school without finding out the hard way, then people like me will keep falling in the trap. And people making tests will love asking theoretical questions to non-theoretical people thinking everything fits everyone.
I would enjoy Page numbering a-la lynx. After all, some of us WANT to print content out of our screens without guessing how many pages of headers AND footers to "skip" in the manual page printing dialog.
With so much stuff on the web now, and so many printers at home, I see a problem in that you must either print preview, scroll down 13.5 pages AND count them by hand, and then do math so you can place "13" and "19" on the dialog's start and end page #s. "Print selection" gives no estimate of how much paper you'll waste. You can just abort if you realize that unlike "print selection" a page friendly browser would reveal your idea to encompass too many pages early in the game.
A geek alternative is to paste everything into a good old WYSIWYG editor so you can paginate easily, but that is unknown to non-geeks. Also, page selections are a tricky game with all the invisible stuff that gets dragged. And pasting tends to produce weird TABLE-related artifacts and font problems.
So I'd let opera have their attempt and get my pagination dreams, or at least see that replaced with a world where I can pick WIDTH=100% or at least a SORELY missing customizability option for width in Safari reader and copycat extensions.
Don't forget that LogmeIn and VNC used to require reboots on Windows.
They, and other non-MS remote control software need to run as admin at least once, so they can inject screen-mirroring drivers. The talking to the driver happens from non-admin mode later, but it only takes one admin session to infiltrate your system and work from there, if there's ANY malicious intent.
But back on topic, remote control isn't for the BLIND by any means; it MUST relay your screen by using "screen-mirroring" which requires videocard access at the controll-ee PC, which pretty much requires low-level access for which the PC being assisted needs to yield admin rights. So if your IT department is gone for the weekend and you don't ALREADY have this version of Chrome there, you're out of luck.
Short answer: Higher barriers to entry on malware^W Windows environment programming.
Things get tricky when you're a beginner coder who must do native Windows programming, and need network connectivity. After decades of 'progress' those Windows viruses you're hinting that we create in our sleep are still almost exclusively nasty DOS-using compilations and/or assembly-based. As such, they require some very low level coding since VBS has stopped being the malware tool of choice due to e-mail policies in newer programs.
So, what does Android offer? Because Android isn't windows... Android programs run on Java. Java provides well-understood APIs and has a slew of shared libraries out there. Apparently even virus writers don't want to acquire a masters in the arcaneness of [embedded] C to succeed in rooting your machine^Wproprietary-android-phone via a network.
And to add to the answer above, a Windows creator would try phones because of this next one: "Lack of phone antiviruses." The kind of stuff that you create on Windows would easily get blacklisted and REMOVED by every tool in existence under Windows given enough days. But Android is linux. And linux doesn't "Sell" antiviruses (with capital S.) And Apps won't have root access under your carrier to help you clean the phone properly anyway. And lastly, most phones' Android builds are NEVER auto-updated by the carriers.
Done right, it may be a good thing, however, it will require changes in people's workflows.
I already see problems with finding "Print" in the IE 10 screenshots, and hunting for an unlabeled "gear menu" to find Print, a-la Chrome, just confuses the novice users. One of the three articles mentioned that we have a Welcome / lockscreen, then the choice screen, and finally a Desktop button that WON'T be obvious to most users. Every new version seems to add one extra click to switching from screensaver back to your desktop. *sigh*.
Microsoft provides an IT-friendly setting to avoid the Welcome screen altogether and W8 will not be an exception. It allows for external usernames and alternative domains, and no amount of faked MS fanaticism to "touchscreens" (when multi-finger gestures, iPads, and even the iPod touch predate any interest in MS designing for more than a stylus in mind). And the guys implementing those features haven't come to say that all touchless monitors MUST die, so it's a non-sequitur to see MS doing so.
It's like they're doing the famous trash-good-trash-good pattern on purpose. Rush out the next trash OS to get the next good one out sooner.
In other words, everything since WinME is "like getting Fedora / Enterprise Red Hat in the same alternating, full-price box?" Microsoft can stubbornly AFFORD to run us into a periodic knee-scraping release without any double-digit % customer losses. Because THAT would mean settling for either Linux (alias "arcane-maintenance" computing) or MacOS (aka "needs expensive new hardware.") That gravitational pull is the result of solid enterprise lock-in.
Which leads me to wonder whether there are toilet-puters built into the seat somehow. I do NOT want to google this particular contraption, but if there is, experience shows it will be surerly a Japan-made upgrade to their widespread "smart" bathrooms.
In the end, this trend just raises barriers to entry to smaller producers since their books can't be as "in" without reluctanctly adding the same features to fit in. This is the same inflation forcing any console game and Hollywood movie to require a bigger and bigger budget just to get mediocre sales without providing anything new. And it will shrink the brain: gray matter stops flexing and Alzheimers is more likely to ensue. As an audience we'll all just get used to expecting cues before reacting at all. Think of the death of the mental exercise of memorizing personal phone numbers and how normal it is for people to stop caring about what they could do without assistance a few years back.
Like all early technologies, sound effects in E-books will be implemented as badly as the transition from text to "multi-media" CDs in the early nineties: slow, noisy, forced transitions for. EVERY. click. just to get through your content --frustrating enough even though ads didn't exist back then. Hopefully this thing will not be a forced paradigm upgrade. 3D movies becoming "most popular" today requires the production of the remaining new "un-popular" 2D ones to become an afterthought. And our pocket suffers just like when 4:3 LCD screens became a suddenly-costly niche commodity thanks to the arrival of 16:9 into the mainstream visual presentation world.
It is sobering to know that even outside the USA, our employers, ISPs and cellphone companies can log us to a 6 month to a 2 year period, but we can't pass on the buck to someone else to rightly defend ourselves. There's no real mac address logging* in the consumer routers out there [And we know those macs are easily faked, and a neighbor with a netbook or (rooted?) smartphone just needs to drive-by download from us to make it look like our IP is all that's needed]. Supposing macs were "unhackable" and good enough for lawyers, it's useless that routers DO NOT log robber signal strength. That might let poor victims in a college dorm judge just what search radius is sane to expand into. The real culprit doesn't have to be anchored to a wall near you: gigs worth of mp3s and movies over the course of a few days can be easily stolen by malicious passers-by via the growing market of tablets, netbooks and Wifi cellphones who can root a phone and spoof their mac address.
* I have owned many routers, but they only log an IP address and time. Though my stock firmware DLINK 825 router did have a clear association of a date to an IP address, old lines FIFO'd automatically after about 14 pages of 15 entries. A single day takes care of that little buffer if you test with an open WiFI and enable all log items. This page shows how logs are treated. I have DD-WRT now so I can't check exactly, but IIRC, the problem was that when I returned home and wanted to naively mac-ban neighbors out of my open AP, the log would say "I gave 192.168.1.50 to a computer (an unidentified mac)." I would need to be lucky because the only place to find that neighbor's mac is in the Wireless Clients table menu... which itself OUGHT TO have a permanent log. Since the neighbor would be gone by the time I came to check, I was forced to just close everything up.
You bring up an interesting point. That the general public will also begin to read AND finally two-way insta-translate comments / (maybe live chats?) with friends-of-friends a continent away under another language was not the goal of any website out there, even with Google's pool of world-changing projects.
Guess who benefits from pushing out a post or page that now can be read by the whole world without any google translator and toolbars? Facebook is geared towards the advertisers, and for presidents and celebrities like Queen Elizabeth, who have pages that are easy to find, but hard for Koreans to understand.
Businesses don't need FB to research on added quality of two-way conversations for their audience. Hence, the talk here about how the translations will stumble with "brb", "teh," and " ur " are of no matter because ads are one way, and proper "important people" pages have always been crafted carefully without those stumbling blocks by those who want as may eyeballs to read them as possible.
It's only because Germany very recently started pushing an anti-facebook stance. I doubt they would have implemented this so easily without a government breathing down their necks --they're the largest German web news provider IIRC.
Non-Americans don't even have the same business models that drive traffic to US sites. They don't even have per-story comments a-la CNN, New York Times or Yahoo (too lazy to translate and confirm whether they have a official off-site forum that is obligatory of sites looking for discussion clicks.) So they didn't REALLY need the revenue or hits calculated by keeping the button active. This also shows their users are MORE tech savvy while at once being LESS prone to panic/complain on ideological changes.
The name sounded familiar and some digging shows that these are the same guys that did an IPv6 trial in the past year. So they've already one-upped slashdot with something.
Maybe I'll start learning German to be packed up for the not-so-far day when slashdot implements their Like button: thousands of us per day already acquiesced with Geeknet adding 3 different links to "follow us on $SOCIAL_NETWORK" on the front page. The next logical step to ???? PROFIT! is just to wait for a juicy FB/FBI deal to track non-conformists and further de-anonymize geeks and their slashdot effect when linking to Wikileaks stories, for instance.
Someone needs to post the statistic showing that few linux installs are actually done on USB sticks. This whole "DVD? how quaint!" thing is a slashdot non-sequitor:
Unless you follow Fedora 10+ or Ubuntu 9+, you're stuck with UNOFFICIAL tools and documentation for something you all consider mainstream. ISO CD-burning instructions is the only thing officially documented on the largest distros, let alone the mom-and-pop ones many overseas locales endorse.
These exercises are really only fair if the permitted operations are defined as the first step. (1) Definitions (2) Axioms/Hardware (3) Theorems/Programs
1-3) None of those 3 steps are things a 2nd grader can understand, so we MUST be "unfair" to those principles to be "fair" to the audience. We don't even learn a natural language that way; many noun translations and sentences are lightly explored first. Much later, the grammar rule disection begins. It's the same with absolute beginner and advanced Computer language learners.
Programming like GP suggests is a common teaching aid. It's self-explanatory AND fun once those uninitiated start experiencing how silly program execution WILL BE without literal rules. The whole point is that the more steps you leave out, the more chaos is left for some kind of person to sort through cleanly. We know that person to be a "developer", but the kids will be amused enough with their human "computer" experiment that their interest is already roused.
My school initiation was in 9th grade, with a much harder "Explain how one gets ready for school after waking up this morning." You have people eating breakfast without getting off the bed, dressing or even opening their eyes, and explaining that "walking" might require a whole session of "left foot, n angle, right foot, m angle, check obstacles" in itself gives you a view of how much automation our own brain abstracts away by the time we're out of second grade.
Wow, Thanks! You sparked in me a vague memory of round rectangles in a sample demo for Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (de-facto IDE for macs prior to OSX's CodeWarrior took the crown.) I think it was while running sillyballs.c, where between this and flicker-free simple 3D I took my first non-QBASIC GUI programming steps. Google searches of "silliballs +MPW" only returned geocities.jp / random french language introductions to building silliballs or very old macusenet sites that were technically forums, rather than any official documentation or derivative howtos so common today.
So, going off-topic regarding folklore... the above lack of "legacy" info is a warning that COBOL isn't the last language that we'll be having shortages of developers for. Today's hobbyist programmer documents their musings and folklore for free in *perishable* multi-user blogs instead yesteryear's more authentic private-hosted sites.
The japanese geocities, which actually dodged closing down along with the non-kanji geocities the world over once Yahoo found no profits for that kind of free medium. In the pre-bubble '90s most other webpages were hosted by colleges because someone doing research / keeping semi-personal notes cared to split some of their allocated bandwidth with their hobbies and didn't have any other cheap hosting. Now that everything is free and as long-lived as you can hope your average youtube video to last, things are looking bleak for decade-old technology documentation.
As a side note, I was exploring the dark, uncharted world of OpenNIC's alt DNS for sites like http://echoreply.geek/ and discovering that nothing has permanency there either, even if forum links or even the standard DNS site say the alt domain exists. OpenNIC lack and all, I'm starting to value archive.org more and more as the year goes on and google caches stop mirroring really old pages.
Let me give a little history lesson about delayed support of de-facto features: First, we have things like Edit.com and Notepad.exe being unable to open 33K+ files until about XP or Vista, so technicians reading plain text logs or edit large host files had to use Wordpad and Word, which normally offer to screw up the file format after forcing an RTF save or something. We also had Zip support --although welcome, it doesn't allow password protection before or after the zip creation, nor custom compression levels. We also had browser Tabs, which came very late with IE7, and the apparent Up-a-folder-level button seen in the screenshots, decades after Linux had it. But let's turn back to piracy-related features they add reluctactly.
To avoid privacy / non-compete / monopoly issues, MS made Windows XP support only whole-Audio-CD-at-once with only the crappy WMV and WMA saving from WMP. This completely ignores the huge MP3 file following from 10 years ago, and forced you to a silly 72-minutes of music per CD if you didn't just manually drag your collection to the media. They did that despite knowing MP3 was the de-facto napster-fueled format that created the computer-music consumption revolution... remember that MS chose to pass on getting involved and still defaults to crummy formats unless you have installed codec packs today. --See MS Sound Recorder still saving as WMA and nothing else, on today's Windows 7. That's backwards because it had some WAV and MP3 support back in XP.
On another point, we have the complete inability to copy a CD. Two Operating Systems in 10 years after XP's flaunt that it could "copy" CD's, and all we got is a "Copy" and a "Burn to Disk" right-click option. The first does absolutely zippo, and the latter just says that you haven't selected FILES to copy. What's that? "Oh, all newbies MUST get hit with an unexpectedly non-bootable CD's when they try to copy a bootable repair CD at least once... let's just keep quiet about that and they'll learn" They are trying to prevent piracy with that too, since byte-wise cloning ignores copy protection features; and since the OS shows Music CD's as a pseudo device from which you get only handles to the music, so you can't drag and drop the files to your HD nor to another disk without some pre-processor software like WMP.
History has been pretty convincing that MS does not care to add new support and make itself a target. Microsoft said "natively mount" but not "create" nor "modify" ISO and VHD files. Mark my words: MS will NOT support it for more than just read-only purposes, since the home consumer level doesn't create them anyway... The same way as they "don't" create zips.
When people tag photos with my name or pet aliases, there is no auto-linking to any profile because none exist. As an added bonus, FB users searching for my names find nothing, even though my relatives tag me in pictures they snapped of me.
DISCLAIMER: I've never been a member, so this may be an edge case for never-members. Your milage as a victim of "once-enslaved, always enslaved" may vary. You poor souls.;-) I guess the whole chinese "No pictures! That machine will suck out my soul" will become popular again.
To be even fairer, IE8 from 2009 on my up-to-date Windows Seven PC has no problems rendering properly where all four OSS browsers failed.
It's such a simple logical failure too... it's a bizarre case showing that IE has some silent merits... Must be sanity-wrenching to find a bug like this prior to seeing confirmation that it's not YOUR code at fault because the once-leading browser has no issues rendering it.
I wonder how many thousands of devs around the world individually break their head per year once their corporations give the green light to move to OSS browsers, but someone notices THIS exact bug and pulls back. It's little wonder doc files and PDF distributions are so overwhelmingly prefered to HTML.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked Photoshop was NOT on every copy of windows. Neither has there been any QBASIC executable. The people who are shifting away into walled gardens so that the proportion of Photoshop / coding users / pc-building geeks become the ONLY users of PCs, I'd be afraid. After all, geeks and niche PC divisions enjoy low prices because the entire mainstream is a force greater than all of us. But there WILL come a time when getting the ever-dwindling non-walled PC will become a niche in itself: just compare to the situation with brick and mortar stores when it comes to driving down looking for 4:3 monitor ratios for your PC and/or living room television.
Well, StackExchange* IS a nice system to make people get serious about seeking high contribution really quickly and you can do way more than slashdotters are used to here, which is just posting --and rarely, mod, and even more rarely, get a submission. That in itself is probably what mistakenly sells it to you, AC.
In my opinion, as you try to rise to the top to "unlock" more rights while learning and helping, I find that there are often despots who routinely use their never-fading power to pretty much edit, downmod and make off-topic criticicism about posts that would otherwise be fine (think of the dreaded Wikipedia edit bureaucracy.) I am annoyed that if your *question* doesn't fit certain guidelines, it gets closed down before you can get any help --sometimes it's moved to another forum where you must register separately to be able to post, which most users don't actually chase down and a newbie responder like me gets no points or feedback if the question is thus abandoned.
SE is very bureaucratic, while slashdot's post-it forever and "vote when the allocator WANTS you to vote," prevents the issues causing a feeling that you're being watched by burriers constantly.
* SE is a *competitive* question site, so dynamics AREN'T like slashdot's more relaxed social news environment.
The real question is, if this system is so broken, why do people keep coming back?
In terms of addiction and "why can't I jump somewhere else," your answer is "ask the same of Facebook junkies"
But to try harder: Because there is no other alternative quite like it with as high a volume of data as what originally made us lurkers and late-1990s old-timers sign up in the first place.
We have a fairly random moderation point system that prevents single-rager abuse, and nerds from all walks of life found in no other SINGLE forum out there. We can all be sure that our nerdish digressions / reminiscing / babbling in any article WILL have various commenters that recognize the topic and contribute to it constructively WITHOUT alienating the rest, since we are all nerds who have little to gain from regularly interfering with the process. As opposed to signal to noise ratios found at mainstream forums. See CNN and Yahoo answers (yuck!)
Ouch. Tough crowd of moderators tonight.
Who could downmod the parent poster in light of a sig like "Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight." This food motif, revelation and submitter's temp prestige should have some more value, seeing how we all wanted to discuss Ice Cream Sandwiches anyway.
I wonder if this will ALSO drive prices down. But knowing scientists, and most importantly, *marketers*, this will just be used to develop new fancy scans to add to the current pile...
Reminds me of the early workunit system for SETI@home I participated in back in the days of 300Mhz PC's: as the broadband and turn of the century multimedia PC sale movement started exploding with monster speeds (and little to no modern-day spyware to slow the avg PC down), SETI made big changes in the ~2.0 client and started forcing everyone to upgrade (or else...). Workunits that would take you less time to get you ahead of the very competitive stat sharing no longer would do so. And people stuck with old PC's would do even worse. But I digress.
Money is rarely ever "returned" to the consumer when the industry moves on to cheaper alts. Someone might argue RAM prices, but you're buying DIFFERENT RAM with every breakthrough that doesn't work on the older PCs. Sounds to me like these expensive MRI machines would have flash ROMs that can receive new instructions. Like you know, in case some lawsuit out there comes out of the discovery that M procedure in your million dollar machine has been causing cancer with N current parameters.
Or just made them focus on getting stuff done rather than implementing optimisations no one will ever notice.
I see. You're of the "Ignore the problem" school of thought, just like the Firefox crew. If people don't allow you to that, ask them to just throw money at it.
Either way, this will never be resolved because there will never be software accountability.
Academia is just as bad with how it forces math down CS people's unknowing mouths. Your comment sums up exactly what I disliked about Math theory courses starting with Pre-Calculus. Every single class stopped being old material, and was riding on "cute" solutions that had to be learned by watching someone solve a boring proof. It couldn't just be figured out by looking at the book in advance because all advanced math is made through centuries worth of geniouses who worked bits out at the leisure of several years, not a 13 weeks semester.
As time went on, the requirement courses dealing with math get more esoteric and complicated to work on when, and it still is required to learn all the proof solutions and talk the cute abstract math talk to graduate. The real-world needs to clearly know what the CS academia AND the IT career holds before having plunged in. Until someone satisfactorily gives a world-famous solution to CS != Programming that deters or REORIENTS all of us to the right vocational school without finding out the hard way, then people like me will keep falling in the trap. And people making tests will love asking theoretical questions to non-theoretical people thinking everything fits everyone.
I would enjoy Page numbering a-la lynx. After all, some of us WANT to print content out of our screens without guessing how many pages of headers AND footers to "skip" in the manual page printing dialog.
With so much stuff on the web now, and so many printers at home, I see a problem in that you must either print preview, scroll down 13.5 pages AND count them by hand, and then do math so you can place "13" and "19" on the dialog's start and end page #s. "Print selection" gives no estimate of how much paper you'll waste. You can just abort if you realize that unlike "print selection" a page friendly browser would reveal your idea to encompass too many pages early in the game.
A geek alternative is to paste everything into a good old WYSIWYG editor so you can paginate easily, but that is unknown to non-geeks. Also, page selections are a tricky game with all the invisible stuff that gets dragged. And pasting tends to produce weird TABLE-related artifacts and font problems.
So I'd let opera have their attempt and get my pagination dreams, or at least see that replaced with a world where I can pick WIDTH=100% or at least a SORELY missing customizability option for width in Safari reader and copycat extensions.
Don't forget that LogmeIn and VNC used to require reboots on Windows.
They, and other non-MS remote control software need to run as admin at least once, so they can inject screen-mirroring drivers. The talking to the driver happens from non-admin mode later, but it only takes one admin session to infiltrate your system and work from there, if there's ANY malicious intent.
But back on topic, remote control isn't for the BLIND by any means; it MUST relay your screen by using "screen-mirroring" which requires videocard access at the controll-ee PC, which pretty much requires low-level access for which the PC being assisted needs to yield admin rights. So if your IT department is gone for the weekend and you don't ALREADY have this version of Chrome there, you're out of luck.
Why aren't all malware creators doing this?
Short answer: Higher barriers to entry on malware^W Windows environment programming.
Things get tricky when you're a beginner coder who must do native Windows programming, and need network connectivity. After decades of 'progress' those Windows viruses you're hinting that we create in our sleep are still almost exclusively nasty DOS-using compilations and/or assembly-based. As such, they require some very low level coding since VBS has stopped being the malware tool of choice due to e-mail policies in newer programs.
So, what does Android offer? Because Android isn't windows... Android programs run on Java. Java provides well-understood APIs and has a slew of shared libraries out there. Apparently even virus writers don't want to acquire a masters in the arcaneness of [embedded] C to succeed in rooting your machine^Wproprietary-android-phone via a network.
And to add to the answer above, a Windows creator would try phones because of this next one: "Lack of phone antiviruses." The kind of stuff that you create on Windows would easily get blacklisted and REMOVED by every tool in existence under Windows given enough days. But Android is linux. And linux doesn't "Sell" antiviruses (with capital S.) And Apps won't have root access under your carrier to help you clean the phone properly anyway. And lastly, most phones' Android builds are NEVER auto-updated by the carriers.
Done right, it may be a good thing, however, it will require changes in people's workflows.
I already see problems with finding "Print" in the IE 10 screenshots, and hunting for an unlabeled "gear menu" to find Print, a-la Chrome, just confuses the novice users. One of the three articles mentioned that we have a Welcome / lockscreen, then the choice screen, and finally a Desktop button that WON'T be obvious to most users. Every new version seems to add one extra click to switching from screensaver back to your desktop. *sigh*.
Microsoft provides an IT-friendly setting to avoid the Welcome screen altogether and W8 will not be an exception. It allows for external usernames and alternative domains, and no amount of faked MS fanaticism to "touchscreens" (when multi-finger gestures, iPads, and even the iPod touch predate any interest in MS designing for more than a stylus in mind). And the guys implementing those features haven't come to say that all touchless monitors MUST die, so it's a non-sequitur to see MS doing so.
If only that could fit into 120 characters...
"Tell a man there's a billion stars in the galaxy & he'll trust you; say the paint is wet & he'll touch it to find out."
There, in 119.
It's like they're doing the famous trash-good-trash-good pattern on purpose. Rush out the next trash OS to get the next good one out sooner.
In other words, everything since WinME is "like getting Fedora / Enterprise Red Hat in the same alternating, full-price box?"
Microsoft can stubbornly AFFORD to run us into a periodic knee-scraping release without any double-digit % customer losses. Because THAT would mean settling for either Linux (alias "arcane-maintenance" computing) or MacOS (aka "needs expensive new hardware.") That gravitational pull is the result of solid enterprise lock-in.
Which leads me to wonder whether there are toilet-puters built into the seat somehow. I do NOT want to google this particular contraption, but if there is, experience shows it will be surerly a Japan-made upgrade to their widespread "smart" bathrooms.
In the end, this trend just raises barriers to entry to smaller producers since their books can't be as "in" without reluctanctly adding the same features to fit in. This is the same inflation forcing any console game and Hollywood movie to require a bigger and bigger budget just to get mediocre sales without providing anything new. And it will shrink the brain: gray matter stops flexing and Alzheimers is more likely to ensue. As an audience we'll all just get used to expecting cues before reacting at all. Think of the death of the mental exercise of memorizing personal phone numbers and how normal it is for people to stop caring about what they could do without assistance a few years back.
Like all early technologies, sound effects in E-books will be implemented as badly as the transition from text to "multi-media" CDs in the early nineties: slow, noisy, forced transitions for. EVERY. click. just to get through your content --frustrating enough even though ads didn't exist back then. Hopefully this thing will not be a forced paradigm upgrade. 3D movies becoming "most popular" today requires the production of the remaining new "un-popular" 2D ones to become an afterthought. And our pocket suffers just like when 4:3 LCD screens became a suddenly-costly niche commodity thanks to the arrival of 16:9 into the mainstream visual presentation world.
It is sobering to know that even outside the USA, our employers, ISPs and cellphone companies can log us to a 6 month to a 2 year period, but we can't pass on the buck to someone else to rightly defend ourselves. There's no real mac address logging* in the consumer routers out there [And we know those macs are easily faked, and a neighbor with a netbook or (rooted?) smartphone just needs to drive-by download from us to make it look like our IP is all that's needed]. Supposing macs were "unhackable" and good enough for lawyers, it's useless that routers DO NOT log robber signal strength. That might let poor victims in a college dorm judge just what search radius is sane to expand into. The real culprit doesn't have to be anchored to a wall near you: gigs worth of mp3s and movies over the course of a few days can be easily stolen by malicious passers-by via the growing market of tablets, netbooks and Wifi cellphones who can root a phone and spoof their mac address.
* I have owned many routers, but they only log an IP address and time. Though my stock firmware DLINK 825 router did have a clear association of a date to an IP address, old lines FIFO'd automatically after about 14 pages of 15 entries. A single day takes care of that little buffer if you test with an open WiFI and enable all log items.
This page shows how logs are treated. I have DD-WRT now so I can't check exactly, but IIRC, the problem was that when I returned home and wanted to naively mac-ban neighbors out of my open AP, the log would say "I gave 192.168.1.50 to a computer (an unidentified mac)." I would need to be lucky because the only place to find that neighbor's mac is in the Wireless Clients table menu... which itself OUGHT TO have a permanent log. Since the neighbor would be gone by the time I came to check, I was forced to just close everything up.
You bring up an interesting point. That the general public will also begin to read AND finally two-way insta-translate comments / (maybe live chats?) with friends-of-friends a continent away under another language was not the goal of any website out there, even with Google's pool of world-changing projects.
Guess who benefits from pushing out a post or page that now can be read by the whole world without any google translator and toolbars? Facebook is geared towards the advertisers, and for presidents and celebrities like Queen Elizabeth, who have pages that are easy to find, but hard for Koreans to understand.
Businesses don't need FB to research on added quality of two-way conversations for their audience. Hence, the talk here about how the translations will stumble with "brb", "teh," and " ur " are of no matter because ads are one way, and proper "important people" pages have always been crafted carefully without those stumbling blocks by those who want as may eyeballs to read them as possible.
It's only because Germany very recently started pushing an anti-facebook stance. I doubt they would have implemented this so easily without a government breathing down their necks --they're the largest German web news provider IIRC.
Non-Americans don't even have the same business models that drive traffic to US sites. They don't even have per-story comments a-la CNN, New York Times or Yahoo (too lazy to translate and confirm whether they have a official off-site forum that is obligatory of sites looking for discussion clicks.) So they didn't REALLY need the revenue or hits calculated by keeping the button active. This also shows their users are MORE tech savvy while at once being LESS prone to panic/complain on ideological changes.
The name sounded familiar and some digging shows that these are the same guys that did an IPv6 trial in the past year. So they've already one-upped slashdot with something.
Maybe I'll start learning German to be packed up for the not-so-far day when slashdot implements their Like button: thousands of us per day already acquiesced with Geeknet adding 3 different links to "follow us on $SOCIAL_NETWORK" on the front page. The next logical step to ???? PROFIT! is just to wait for a juicy FB/FBI deal to track non-conformists and further de-anonymize geeks and their slashdot effect when linking to Wikileaks stories, for instance.
Someone needs to post the statistic showing that few linux installs are actually done on USB sticks. This whole "DVD? how quaint!" thing is a slashdot non-sequitor:
Unless you follow Fedora 10+ or Ubuntu 9+, you're stuck with UNOFFICIAL tools and documentation for something you all consider mainstream. ISO CD-burning instructions is the only thing officially documented on the largest distros, let alone the mom-and-pop ones many overseas locales endorse.
These exercises are really only fair if the permitted operations are defined as the first step.
(1) Definitions (2) Axioms/Hardware (3) Theorems/Programs
1-3) None of those 3 steps are things a 2nd grader can understand, so we MUST be "unfair" to those principles to be "fair" to the audience. We don't even learn a natural language that way; many noun translations and sentences are lightly explored first. Much later, the grammar rule disection begins. It's the same with absolute beginner and advanced Computer language learners.
Programming like GP suggests is a common teaching aid. It's self-explanatory AND fun once those uninitiated start experiencing how silly program execution WILL BE without literal rules. The whole point is that the more steps you leave out, the more chaos is left for some kind of person to sort through cleanly. We know that person to be a "developer", but the kids will be amused enough with their human "computer" experiment that their interest is already roused.
My school initiation was in 9th grade, with a much harder "Explain how one gets ready for school after waking up this morning." You have people eating breakfast without getting off the bed, dressing or even opening their eyes, and explaining that "walking" might require a whole session of "left foot, n angle, right foot, m angle, check obstacles" in itself gives you a view of how much automation our own brain abstracts away by the time we're out of second grade.
Wow, Thanks! You sparked in me a vague memory of round rectangles in a sample demo for Macintosh Programmer's Workshop (de-facto IDE for macs prior to OSX's CodeWarrior took the crown.) I think it was while running sillyballs.c, where between this and flicker-free simple 3D I took my first non-QBASIC GUI programming steps. Google searches of "silliballs +MPW" only returned geocities.jp / random french language introductions to building silliballs or very old macusenet sites that were technically forums, rather than any official documentation or derivative howtos so common today.
So, going off-topic regarding folklore... the above lack of "legacy" info is a warning that COBOL isn't the last language that we'll be having shortages of developers for. Today's hobbyist programmer documents their musings and folklore for free in *perishable* multi-user blogs instead yesteryear's more authentic private-hosted sites.
The japanese geocities, which actually dodged closing down along with the non-kanji geocities the world over once Yahoo found no profits for that kind of free medium. In the pre-bubble '90s most other webpages were hosted by colleges because someone doing research / keeping semi-personal notes cared to split some of their allocated bandwidth with their hobbies and didn't have any other cheap hosting. Now that everything is free and as long-lived as you can hope your average youtube video to last, things are looking bleak for decade-old technology documentation.
As a side note, I was exploring the dark, uncharted world of OpenNIC's alt DNS for sites like http://echoreply.geek/ and discovering that nothing has permanency there either, even if forum links or even the standard DNS site say the alt domain exists. OpenNIC lack and all, I'm starting to value archive.org more and more as the year goes on and google caches stop mirroring really old pages.
Let me give a little history lesson about delayed support of de-facto features:
First, we have things like Edit.com and Notepad.exe being unable to open 33K+ files until about XP or Vista, so technicians reading plain text logs or edit large host files had to use Wordpad and Word, which normally offer to screw up the file format after forcing an RTF save or something. We also had Zip support --although welcome, it doesn't allow password protection before or after the zip creation, nor custom compression levels. We also had browser Tabs, which came very late with IE7, and the apparent Up-a-folder-level button seen in the screenshots, decades after Linux had it. But let's turn back to piracy-related features they add reluctactly.
To avoid privacy / non-compete / monopoly issues, MS made Windows XP support only whole-Audio-CD-at-once with only the crappy WMV and WMA saving from WMP. This completely ignores the huge MP3 file following from 10 years ago, and forced you to a silly 72-minutes of music per CD if you didn't just manually drag your collection to the media. They did that despite knowing MP3 was the de-facto napster-fueled format that created the computer-music consumption revolution... remember that MS chose to pass on getting involved and still defaults to crummy formats unless you have installed codec packs today. --See MS Sound Recorder still saving as WMA and nothing else, on today's Windows 7. That's backwards because it had some WAV and MP3 support back in XP.
On another point, we have the complete inability to copy a CD. Two Operating Systems in 10 years after XP's flaunt that it could "copy" CD's, and all we got is a "Copy" and a "Burn to Disk" right-click option. The first does absolutely zippo, and the latter just says that you haven't selected FILES to copy. What's that? "Oh, all newbies MUST get hit with an unexpectedly non-bootable CD's when they try to copy a bootable repair CD at least once... let's just keep quiet about that and they'll learn" They are trying to prevent piracy with that too, since byte-wise cloning ignores copy protection features; and since the OS shows Music CD's as a pseudo device from which you get only handles to the music, so you can't drag and drop the files to your HD nor to another disk without some pre-processor software like WMP.
History has been pretty convincing that MS does not care to add new support and make itself a target. Microsoft said "natively mount" but not "create" nor "modify" ISO and VHD files. Mark my words: MS will NOT support it for more than just read-only purposes, since the home consumer level doesn't create them anyway... The same way as they "don't" create zips.
When people tag photos with my name or pet aliases, there is no auto-linking to any profile because none exist. As an added bonus, FB users searching for my names find nothing, even though my relatives tag me in pictures they snapped of me.
DISCLAIMER: I've never been a member, so this may be an edge case for never-members. Your milage as a victim of "once-enslaved, always enslaved" may vary. You poor souls. ;-)
I guess the whole chinese "No pictures! That machine will suck out my soul" will become popular again.
Ouch. To be fair, someone on the Chrome page pointed out that
No single opensource browser can render properly this tag properties:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=915 (12 year old!)
https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=50688
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3241
[let's inline Chrome's bug for slashdot's benefit: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=12094 ]
To be even fairer, IE8 from 2009 on my up-to-date Windows Seven PC has no problems rendering properly where all four OSS browsers failed.
It's such a simple logical failure too... it's a bizarre case showing that IE has some silent merits... Must be sanity-wrenching to find a bug like this prior to seeing confirmation that it's not YOUR code at fault because the once-leading browser has no issues rendering it.
I wonder how many thousands of devs around the world individually break their head per year once their corporations give the green light to move to OSS browsers, but someone notices THIS exact bug and pulls back. It's little wonder doc files and PDF distributions are so overwhelmingly prefered to HTML.