Except that in this case the ATM could spit out an infinite amount of money if you just stood there and kept hitting the same 2 button combination over and over.
In game, buying once and reselling is technically an exploit, but it's also possible it was a legitimate buy, and a legitimate sell.
Standing around for hours buying and selling to produce infinite money is obviously an exploit. Acquisition of money should be either rate limited, or entail risk. This was sort of rate limited by how fast you can click but it's not a real rate limit.
Now exclude MMO's from you data and work from there.
Any MMO developer with a competent legal team looks at the consoles as a seriously bad place to setup shop for a lot of reasons. And those are cash cows on PC.
Also, for the last couple of years at least PC's have been significantly more powerful than consoles for a reasonable price, so that's a viable market. When consoles go back to being sold at a loss and with some fancy new hardware in them that might* change the equation for a couple of years.
*might, because it depends what the console guys try and actually do with the consoles.
When the 360/PS3 came out, we already had GIGS of RAM in our machines, with far more advanced GPUs
Well.. you and I did, and probably most of the people on/.. But we are in the minority, and lots of people were still running core + x600's and 700's and 4000 and 5000 series nVIDIA parts. For them a 500, or 600 dollar console was a huge step up in quality.
The november the PS3 launched I was at a local game development conference (an excuse for the local game developers to drink on publisher money), and at the time a lot of people in the room were still trying to target PC that were no where near PS3 quality, and that was a challenge.
The PC always has the capability to be the superior platform I'll 100% agree with you there - although you can't do an apples to apples on memory or CPU- but that doesn't mean every PC in game market (which is a subset of the total PC market) was actually superior to the consoles.
The PC will always end up ahead in terms of raw power and flexibility but game devs like the stability of consoles and the low barrier to player entry that gives them a bigger target market.
And the MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH easier support and testing.
Not that any testing of parallel computing problems is easy, but compared to the insanely large set of possible PC configurations consoles have a strong appeal. The PC is a great way to test out all of the things you figure will be in the next gen consoles so you know how to implement it there, but it's a difficult market to actually be in.
There seems to be a lot of competing theory on this. 999 is good because it's hard to loopback dial during maintenance, whereas 112 is easy to loopback dial but harder to butt dial by just holding a button. Anything that has a leading 9 conflicts with 'dial 9 for an outside like' services and so on. I don't envy the guys who try and sort these things out.
This is kind of the paradox of it. They've realized people are using windows 7 wrong, but it gets the job done for them. Forcing them to behave properly via windows 8 doesn't seem like a great strategy when no one will have a fucking clue how to make it work.
Along with everything else wrong with it.
I see where they're coming from, I just don't don't think it will work. But I'd be pleased to be wrong on this one.
If you don't think science is real work try and get papers published some time.
We have to figure out what something really is, objectively, measurably, we have to demonstrate how an idea works, demonstrably, measurable etc. Good design is an application of science, it's using what a bunch of people figured out is true to accomplish something. Is this the best colour for the logo? How do you even test that? Bad OS design causes problems that we can, and do study and measure. Quite a lot of work has been done over the years in classifying users into different types within different problem domains to try and figure out how things apply to them. The most basic in games is the well know explorers-achievers-killers-socializers - which is, admittedly, an overly simplistic model. Now games are my area of expertise, and I've done a fair bit of work on a particular sub domain of game UI's but some of the principles apply everywhere. How do you know if a UI is bad for someone who is colourblind?
UI design, especially windows UI design hits a HUGE number of users of all possible types. Bad design causes problems which become support issues - I literally just got off the phone with a 17 year old kid who didn't understand what windows directories are. He somehow managed to install his game 6 times according to him. Well no, he'd copied the icon for it 6 times, but he only had one copy of the game. Windows just spat back an error that said 'try again, if that doesn't work restart' - so to one of my points, that windows users don't like to read, he hadn't read the error, or tried rebooting. Which naturally didn't solve the problem, because the windows error was worse than useless. As it turns out he hadn't actually finished installing the game (insert disk 2? Fuck that I paid for the game it should work from disk one...). I'm going to go with guessing our programmers didn't anticipate someone trying to run the game with the installer running while waiting for disk 2. So that part wasn't actually a windows error really - but a better error message might have alleviated some of it, and certainly UI design on our end could have better resolved the 'no really you have to insert disk 2 or else the game won't work' problem. A weak UI design became an IT problem, which landed on my desk because the kid is a friend of a friend, and wasted my time trying to fix. Now imagine that with 500 million customers rather than 50 000.
Depends on what exactly you're talking about removing. As I say above, you can't remove the taskbar or the start menu or extra desktops trivially in windows which is good. Being able to kill particular gadgets and live tiles and icons makes sense, as long as you can't axe them from the start menu as well (in windows 7 at least), because those would be a disaster.
My point is also that they shouldn't be easy to remove, too easy to accidentally screw something up. That's fine for a competent user who can recreate something they accidentally fried, but it's bad for a user who can't figure out what happened.
no, IT has monkeys. The people who are students making minimum wage, who answer calls about how to check e-mail, and plugging in cables. Hopefully you don't spend your career at that job level, but it is by far the lowest level of IT employee, and those are basically jobs that could be replaced by monkeys, and would be comparably successful.
Well, ok, ferrets are useful for running cables rather than monkeys, but you get the idea.
And what of that isn't true? IT exists because people don't know how to manage their own machines. Perhaps the correct term is 'ignorant' and not 'stupid' but the effect is the same, the vast majority of users are not capable of managing their own windows machines without help, whether that help is from relatives or IT staff, they still aren't doing it themselves.
Also, I'm a research scientist, it's my job to figure out why things are causing problems for IT. IT guys say to me 'we're getting a lot of questions about....', I try and figure out the root cause of those problems, most of the time it's because users don't want to learn - which then makes it a designer issue, to design in such a way that the user doesn't have to learn to get their shit done - or so that the learning is so soul crushingly simple it's right in front of the user and they can't miss it. Specifically I do video games these days. Why doesn't this game work? Because you didn't update your drivers, didn't check the system requirements, didn't actually install the game, didn't reboot your system after you installed it and it asked you to, you didn't change the settings etc. Those resolve about 90% of the unique questions you get about video games (not MMO's obviously) - everything else are actual bugs, and then you get 1000 questions about 1 bug, which is a software engineering problem. You can have FAQ's everywhere, buttons that tell people what to do, printed instruction in the manual etc. Users still don't do it. And these are gamers, who are, by and large, the relatively tech savvy portion of the market.
Linux is philosophically fundamentally different - because it's trying to come into the business from the outside, you can both assume your readers are inclined to learn what the product is, and how to use it. Windows is there because it has to be there because some previous version of windows was there. Linux is there because someone very deliberately chose to put it there. Completely different sets of people.
Which is fair given that they hadn't really said much about it until this point. It's possible this is actually oracle policy, it's possible the press made them change or break policy. Everyone had understood their policy to be 'no out of cycle patch', and waiting until Oct 26, that's why a bunch of people came up with a hack patch for it, that's why the press was all over this.
Some of this might just be Oracle not being used to dealing with end users, and they really do out of cycle patches for serious exploits etc. and they just did a shitty job of conveying that. It's also possible Larry got exploited while looking at porn and beat up a minion to make him fix it.
Depends on how in depth you think the philosophical discussion goes. 3/4ths or more like 90% of the article is making a point, and then dismissing it as not really relevant, his one point leaves his entire philosophical discussion as:
That’s really part of the design philosophy behind so much great Linux-specific software. “Don’t want it? Just remove it.” And I love that. So very, very much.
Every other point he makes he glosses over as a 'well, open source is nice, but I have closed source too', 'the package management is nice, but not important' 'file copy looks nice, but isn't important'
Distros etc. he literally dismisses them all as not really central to the linux experience (in one paragraph he hits several topics).
None of those points are wrong, but the one point he did make, he didn't actually discuss or flesh out.
The philosophical discussion is there, you're just overlooking it
No, it really isn't. You and I both see that there's a philosophical discussion there - and we have both in comments here expanded far more on the philosophical question than the TFA did. That we can trivially do that in a comment box is why TFA in question isn't suitable for posting on/..
My 33 year old GF has a linux box and regularly mashes some buttons (or her cat mashes some buttons) and I have to go save her from a screen that's way too zoomed in, or something doesn't have a package in a repository she needs or whatever. You mom might be really good at not button mashing, you might have very tightly locked down what she can do - my point is that windows should be in that locked down state completely out of the box for a home installation because most users only want to do browsing, e-mail and Mahjong and by default letting them easily mess up the settings that let them do those 3 things wouldn't be a feature in windows.
It's not a matter of being smart, it's having a job that isn't to be IT, and wasting IT's time with problems that shouldn't exist is the fault of bad OS designers.
again, what I know, and what the 200 people in my office who call me for support help know are not the same thing.
Confusing them wastes my time, your time if you're an IT guy, and makes the operating system hard to use.
Yes, it *can* be configured to not be draggable - a competent IT guy who's deploying it should know that option should be set by default. But it doesn't help home users, or people who are now panicing because they think they broke it. The vast majority of windows users are stupid, windows needs to be designed for that. Most windows users are smart enough to know they don't know anything, and don't even try and use linux - because linux is, as I say, for people who can read and are inclined to do so.
This is because we've started teaching these things in 1 and 2 year trade school/college programmes where you can get various certs at the end. The quality of the people and training is going up, and the tests can now actually be more than laughably basic stuff.
The windows ecosystem is huge, mind bogglingly so. If you're going to look for a 'windows server' guy you really need to know what you want them to do. Is this a server to support desktops? A web server? Some cloud thing - if so there are a lot of different specializations here. If you want someone with a background in infosec you might be looking at having multiple people.
maybe we were all just a class full of derps.
That used to be the case. If you had (or have) brains you take comp sci, software eng or computer engineering. Everyone else is in the IT guy certifications stream which, lets face it, is one tier of people down on average, usually the top people in the certs stream should really be in comp sci, and the bottom people in comp sci should be in the IT side of things. The problem is that for a long time the IT stream attracted script kiddies out of highschool who played video games on windows and they were basically the only people who knew *anything* about windows so they could get a job. The world has moved on though. If you're going to deploy clients to 200 machines, and then manage all of their licences, sharepoint install, active directory, etc. you really do need a lot more than just 'windows is fun'. At that point windows isn't fun, windows is an expertise you have and that expertise has little to no connection to any 'fun' you might have with windows.
The certifications are supposed to be the minimum level of competence you'd expect out of someone with little to no experience. Believe it or not you do want people with the certifications (or equivalent) so you know they didn't just 'manage' their 200 machines individually and were actually aware of the enterprise product tools. Someone fresh out of a 1 year college course with an MCSE is about what you'd expect for someone one year out of highschool who can prove they paid attention in class. They're way better than someone with no training at all, but there's a lot of experience to had still.
P.S. I think you mean the 70-686 exam, I believe the 60 series was for vista and is long long long gone.
Unless you're a person living near the toxic sludge being overlooked, or you're the kid forced to work 12 hour days below minimum wage in a factory etc.
Sure, a wad of cash can make your problems as business owner go away, but those problems are everyone elses solutions.
Every car is supposed to have standard spacing on pedals so that anyone can put their feet in the right place on the car.
Do we design a WRX for your nanna?
Quite a lot of it actually yes, it is. Airbags, lights, wipers steering wheel position, pedal position etc. Just like every other car, that's sort of the gist of standardization. There are also a lot more cars than there are operating systems, so it's a slightly unfair comparison though.
Windows is the operating system the masses use, it needs to be designed with that in mind, or it's going to cause no end of grief.
Linux is an operating system for people who can read, and are inclined to do so. Windows, not so much.
Lots of people use their desktops to store bookmarks rather than to start programs. those people are going to be screwed by windows 8. It's wrong to use the desktop to link to bookmarks - but they do it anyway.
Because the number of times you would want to drag the taskbar itself is very small compared to the number of times you would accidentally do so, and for many people they wouldn't know how it happened, or how to fix it.
Depends on what you mean by remove. You can't just remove the start menu in windows 7 trivially if you don't like it. That would be a disaster. Being able to remove icons is different than being able to remove UI elements. Windows (pre windows 8) basically has 3 UI elements on the desktop, the start button, the taskbar and the desktop itself. Being able to remove any one of those would be very strange. It's bad enough that you can actually move the task bar and start menu in windows by dragging it if it's configured a particular way.
I guess it can have gadgets too, and you can remove those - but they're glorified icons. With windows 8 you can remove live tiles, but you can't really remove 'metro' or the traditional desktop (even if removing one of those would be a really really good idea).
With everything pre-windows 8 you can remove everything down to a very minimal set of elements, which is the set you start with. You can't remove any of those - and nor should you - was my point. You can remove links to things like the control panel and so on, but you can't actually do that trivially, which again, is good - there's a customization menu that lets you, but I can't find a way to mash some buttons and remove the 'control panel' link from my start menu for example.
The definitive feature of linux is being able to right click and remove a panel... good for it? That wouldn't even be a feature on windows, it would be a disaster, because my 70 year old aunt would accidentally remove something important, not be sure what it was, and call me to find out how to fix it. All the people in my office would remove things, want them back, and not be able to find them. Etc.
You can have an opinion piece that makes some sort of interesting argument about why this feature really changes the computing experience, and how its absence in windows renders the OS unworthy to use, ok, that could actually be interesting. But TFA spends 3/4ths of its length on superficial discussions of things - and the places where a serious and sensible discussion could be made are given no real treatment.
TFA sort of ends on what he should have started with - the different philosophies between linux and windows 8 - that could have made for a very interesting opinion piece that would have been worth posting on/. But it's not there.
It's quite possible Amazon didn't anticipate the back to school demand, and ran out of Kindle Fires and have no more in the pipeline, and the '2' isn't ready in enough volumes for sale yet.
I could certainly see there being a very dramatic demographic shift, where some year suddenly a huge portion of university and college freshmen just don't care about physical books. I have no particular reason to see why it would be this year, but it's certainly a possibility. When you're a computer scientist, and having been hanging around computer scientists who've managed to do some sort of ebook stuff since 2000 you forget just how far ahead of the general public we are on these things.
So wait, you mean a company that has it's own internal phone system and exchange can't expect reliable 911 service, and it's disgusting and deplorable to even give such a problem attention?
Emergency service should be available by whatever means people are going to have to connect to it. It would seem to me that if you can connect to twitter or facebook or the like you have some other connection mechanism, but not every country is the same and technology plods along. If you only have a device with 3g data service and no voice and no texting (who needs texting if you can do it in app) then you should probably have 911 service available through that. If people are going to use twitter to ask for help in an emergency, as stupid as it sounds today, you might want to plan ahead to be able to figure out how to support that.
When I was a kid we didn't have 911 (or 999) service, and were supposed to keep the number for Police, Ambulance and Fire next to the phone, 911 service existed, just not in my area. So why the push to get 911 everywhere when it seemed really straightforward to just print the fire/police/ambulance numbers on a card that sat under the phone handset? Because in an emergency people don't think straight and programming people to be mindless little zombies that can call 911 from the age of 4 is a much better plan than trying to get them to read off a number. Please don't take this statement as belly aching on my part here, but my grandfather died in a retirement home trying to use the phone back in 2008. To dial 911 he needed to dial an extra 9 (9 for an outside line) - and the emergency number for the nurse on the main floor was printed on his phone. No one knows what number he was trying to call (it could have been his estranged wife and not 911 for example), but I'd like to think if he was trying to dial 911 that 911 should have, in all circumstances worked. No extra '9' for an outside line shit - that is far too confusing for someone in an emergency situation, he had trouble with '9 for an outside line' to call US in no stress situations. Every even microscopic thing costs time, confusion and potentially lives.
Especially as we look to the future, emergency service operators have to figure out how they're going to cope with communications being potentially handled by a handful of different companies than the phone and cable companies they're used to. Without voice or texting plans (or devices) we may end up in a world were 'texting' is just some app that uses the phone service like an IM program, voice calls might be handled through any number of services rather than through the phone company directly, and you need to build both a legal and technical framework *before* that becomes a problem. 10 years ago people really needed to think about the problem of 911 service on cell phones so that they could build the technology and rules for cell phones of today, back then there were payphones and landlines everywhere, it seemed silly to even try and get accurate location data for cell phones (they only know what tower they're connected to not where they are right? Oh right...). This might be preparing for nothing. It might be something we all have to deal with, and in the case of Japan they are the forefront of disaster planning because pretty much every type of disaster you can think of afflicts them, so they have the ability to try out a hundred different ideas for the rest of us.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that in this case the ATM could spit out an infinite amount of money if you just stood there and kept hitting the same 2 button combination over and over.
In game, buying once and reselling is technically an exploit, but it's also possible it was a legitimate buy, and a legitimate sell.
Standing around for hours buying and selling to produce infinite money is obviously an exploit. Acquisition of money should be either rate limited, or entail risk. This was sort of rate limited by how fast you can click but it's not a real rate limit.
Now exclude MMO's from you data and work from there.
Any MMO developer with a competent legal team looks at the consoles as a seriously bad place to setup shop for a lot of reasons. And those are cash cows on PC.
Also, for the last couple of years at least PC's have been significantly more powerful than consoles for a reasonable price, so that's a viable market. When consoles go back to being sold at a loss and with some fancy new hardware in them that might* change the equation for a couple of years.
*might, because it depends what the console guys try and actually do with the consoles.
You made a bit of a logical fallacy.
When the 360/PS3 came out, we already had GIGS of RAM in our machines, with far more advanced GPUs
Well.. you and I did, and probably most of the people on /.. But we are in the minority, and lots of people were still running core + x600's and 700's and 4000 and 5000 series nVIDIA parts. For them a 500, or 600 dollar console was a huge step up in quality.
The november the PS3 launched I was at a local game development conference (an excuse for the local game developers to drink on publisher money), and at the time a lot of people in the room were still trying to target PC that were no where near PS3 quality, and that was a challenge.
The PC always has the capability to be the superior platform I'll 100% agree with you there - although you can't do an apples to apples on memory or CPU- but that doesn't mean every PC in game market (which is a subset of the total PC market) was actually superior to the consoles.
The PC will always end up ahead in terms of raw power and flexibility but game devs like the stability of consoles and the low barrier to player entry that gives them a bigger target market.
And the MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH MUCH easier support and testing.
Not that any testing of parallel computing problems is easy, but compared to the insanely large set of possible PC configurations consoles have a strong appeal. The PC is a great way to test out all of the things you figure will be in the next gen consoles so you know how to implement it there, but it's a difficult market to actually be in.
There seems to be a lot of competing theory on this. 999 is good because it's hard to loopback dial during maintenance, whereas 112 is easy to loopback dial but harder to butt dial by just holding a button. Anything that has a leading 9 conflicts with 'dial 9 for an outside like' services and so on. I don't envy the guys who try and sort these things out.
This is kind of the paradox of it. They've realized people are using windows 7 wrong, but it gets the job done for them. Forcing them to behave properly via windows 8 doesn't seem like a great strategy when no one will have a fucking clue how to make it work.
Along with everything else wrong with it.
I see where they're coming from, I just don't don't think it will work. But I'd be pleased to be wrong on this one.
If you don't think science is real work try and get papers published some time.
We have to figure out what something really is, objectively, measurably, we have to demonstrate how an idea works, demonstrably, measurable etc. Good design is an application of science, it's using what a bunch of people figured out is true to accomplish something. Is this the best colour for the logo? How do you even test that? Bad OS design causes problems that we can, and do study and measure. Quite a lot of work has been done over the years in classifying users into different types within different problem domains to try and figure out how things apply to them. The most basic in games is the well know explorers-achievers-killers-socializers - which is, admittedly, an overly simplistic model. Now games are my area of expertise, and I've done a fair bit of work on a particular sub domain of game UI's but some of the principles apply everywhere. How do you know if a UI is bad for someone who is colourblind?
UI design, especially windows UI design hits a HUGE number of users of all possible types. Bad design causes problems which become support issues - I literally just got off the phone with a 17 year old kid who didn't understand what windows directories are. He somehow managed to install his game 6 times according to him. Well no, he'd copied the icon for it 6 times, but he only had one copy of the game. Windows just spat back an error that said 'try again, if that doesn't work restart' - so to one of my points, that windows users don't like to read, he hadn't read the error, or tried rebooting. Which naturally didn't solve the problem, because the windows error was worse than useless. As it turns out he hadn't actually finished installing the game (insert disk 2? Fuck that I paid for the game it should work from disk one...). I'm going to go with guessing our programmers didn't anticipate someone trying to run the game with the installer running while waiting for disk 2. So that part wasn't actually a windows error really - but a better error message might have alleviated some of it, and certainly UI design on our end could have better resolved the 'no really you have to insert disk 2 or else the game won't work' problem. A weak UI design became an IT problem, which landed on my desk because the kid is a friend of a friend, and wasted my time trying to fix. Now imagine that with 500 million customers rather than 50 000.
Depends on what exactly you're talking about removing. As I say above, you can't remove the taskbar or the start menu or extra desktops trivially in windows which is good. Being able to kill particular gadgets and live tiles and icons makes sense, as long as you can't axe them from the start menu as well (in windows 7 at least), because those would be a disaster.
My point is also that they shouldn't be easy to remove, too easy to accidentally screw something up. That's fine for a competent user who can recreate something they accidentally fried, but it's bad for a user who can't figure out what happened.
IT makes you a monkey.
no, IT has monkeys. The people who are students making minimum wage, who answer calls about how to check e-mail, and plugging in cables. Hopefully you don't spend your career at that job level, but it is by far the lowest level of IT employee, and those are basically jobs that could be replaced by monkeys, and would be comparably successful.
Well, ok, ferrets are useful for running cables rather than monkeys, but you get the idea.
And what of that isn't true? IT exists because people don't know how to manage their own machines. Perhaps the correct term is 'ignorant' and not 'stupid' but the effect is the same, the vast majority of users are not capable of managing their own windows machines without help, whether that help is from relatives or IT staff, they still aren't doing it themselves.
Also, I'm a research scientist, it's my job to figure out why things are causing problems for IT. IT guys say to me 'we're getting a lot of questions about ....', I try and figure out the root cause of those problems, most of the time it's because users don't want to learn - which then makes it a designer issue, to design in such a way that the user doesn't have to learn to get their shit done - or so that the learning is so soul crushingly simple it's right in front of the user and they can't miss it. Specifically I do video games these days. Why doesn't this game work? Because you didn't update your drivers, didn't check the system requirements, didn't actually install the game, didn't reboot your system after you installed it and it asked you to, you didn't change the settings etc. Those resolve about 90% of the unique questions you get about video games (not MMO's obviously) - everything else are actual bugs, and then you get 1000 questions about 1 bug, which is a software engineering problem. You can have FAQ's everywhere, buttons that tell people what to do, printed instruction in the manual etc. Users still don't do it. And these are gamers, who are, by and large, the relatively tech savvy portion of the market.
Linux is philosophically fundamentally different - because it's trying to come into the business from the outside, you can both assume your readers are inclined to learn what the product is, and how to use it. Windows is there because it has to be there because some previous version of windows was there. Linux is there because someone very deliberately chose to put it there. Completely different sets of people.
Which is fair given that they hadn't really said much about it until this point. It's possible this is actually oracle policy, it's possible the press made them change or break policy. Everyone had understood their policy to be 'no out of cycle patch', and waiting until Oct 26, that's why a bunch of people came up with a hack patch for it, that's why the press was all over this.
Some of this might just be Oracle not being used to dealing with end users, and they really do out of cycle patches for serious exploits etc. and they just did a shitty job of conveying that. It's also possible Larry got exploited while looking at porn and beat up a minion to make him fix it.
Depends on how in depth you think the philosophical discussion goes. 3/4ths or more like 90% of the article is making a point, and then dismissing it as not really relevant, his one point leaves his entire philosophical discussion as:
That’s really part of the design philosophy behind so much great Linux-specific software. “Don’t want it? Just remove it.” And I love that. So very, very much.
Every other point he makes he glosses over as a 'well, open source is nice, but I have closed source too', 'the package management is nice, but not important' 'file copy looks nice, but isn't important'
Distros etc. he literally dismisses them all as not really central to the linux experience (in one paragraph he hits several topics).
None of those points are wrong, but the one point he did make, he didn't actually discuss or flesh out.
The philosophical discussion is there, you're just overlooking it
No, it really isn't. You and I both see that there's a philosophical discussion there - and we have both in comments here expanded far more on the philosophical question than the TFA did. That we can trivially do that in a comment box is why TFA in question isn't suitable for posting on /..
My 33 year old GF has a linux box and regularly mashes some buttons (or her cat mashes some buttons) and I have to go save her from a screen that's way too zoomed in, or something doesn't have a package in a repository she needs or whatever. You mom might be really good at not button mashing, you might have very tightly locked down what she can do - my point is that windows should be in that locked down state completely out of the box for a home installation because most users only want to do browsing, e-mail and Mahjong and by default letting them easily mess up the settings that let them do those 3 things wouldn't be a feature in windows.
It's not a matter of being smart, it's having a job that isn't to be IT, and wasting IT's time with problems that shouldn't exist is the fault of bad OS designers.
again, what I know, and what the 200 people in my office who call me for support help know are not the same thing.
Confusing them wastes my time, your time if you're an IT guy, and makes the operating system hard to use.
Yes, it *can* be configured to not be draggable - a competent IT guy who's deploying it should know that option should be set by default. But it doesn't help home users, or people who are now panicing because they think they broke it. The vast majority of windows users are stupid, windows needs to be designed for that. Most windows users are smart enough to know they don't know anything, and don't even try and use linux - because linux is, as I say, for people who can read and are inclined to do so.
This is because we've started teaching these things in 1 and 2 year trade school /college programmes where you can get various certs at the end. The quality of the people and training is going up, and the tests can now actually be more than laughably basic stuff.
The windows ecosystem is huge, mind bogglingly so. If you're going to look for a 'windows server' guy you really need to know what you want them to do. Is this a server to support desktops? A web server? Some cloud thing - if so there are a lot of different specializations here. If you want someone with a background in infosec you might be looking at having multiple people.
maybe we were all just a class full of derps.
That used to be the case. If you had (or have) brains you take comp sci, software eng or computer engineering. Everyone else is in the IT guy certifications stream which, lets face it, is one tier of people down on average, usually the top people in the certs stream should really be in comp sci, and the bottom people in comp sci should be in the IT side of things. The problem is that for a long time the IT stream attracted script kiddies out of highschool who played video games on windows and they were basically the only people who knew *anything* about windows so they could get a job. The world has moved on though. If you're going to deploy clients to 200 machines, and then manage all of their licences, sharepoint install, active directory, etc. you really do need a lot more than just 'windows is fun'. At that point windows isn't fun, windows is an expertise you have and that expertise has little to no connection to any 'fun' you might have with windows.
The certifications are supposed to be the minimum level of competence you'd expect out of someone with little to no experience. Believe it or not you do want people with the certifications (or equivalent) so you know they didn't just 'manage' their 200 machines individually and were actually aware of the enterprise product tools. Someone fresh out of a 1 year college course with an MCSE is about what you'd expect for someone one year out of highschool who can prove they paid attention in class. They're way better than someone with no training at all, but there's a lot of experience to had still.
P.S. I think you mean the 70-686 exam, I believe the 60 series was for vista and is long long long gone.
Unless you're a person living near the toxic sludge being overlooked, or you're the kid forced to work 12 hour days below minimum wage in a factory etc.
Sure, a wad of cash can make your problems as business owner go away, but those problems are everyone elses solutions.
You're assuming I set up her machine. If I did that for every person who calls me for help I'd have a job being an IT monkey, not being a scientist.
Every car is supposed to have standard spacing on pedals so that anyone can put their feet in the right place on the car.
Do we design a WRX for your nanna?
Quite a lot of it actually yes, it is. Airbags, lights, wipers steering wheel position, pedal position etc. Just like every other car, that's sort of the gist of standardization. There are also a lot more cars than there are operating systems, so it's a slightly unfair comparison though.
Windows is the operating system the masses use, it needs to be designed with that in mind, or it's going to cause no end of grief.
Linux is an operating system for people who can read, and are inclined to do so. Windows, not so much.
Oh god.... don't remind me.
Lots of people use their desktops to store bookmarks rather than to start programs. those people are going to be screwed by windows 8. It's wrong to use the desktop to link to bookmarks - but they do it anyway.
Because the number of times you would want to drag the taskbar itself is very small compared to the number of times you would accidentally do so, and for many people they wouldn't know how it happened, or how to fix it.
Depends on what you mean by remove. You can't just remove the start menu in windows 7 trivially if you don't like it. That would be a disaster. Being able to remove icons is different than being able to remove UI elements. Windows (pre windows 8) basically has 3 UI elements on the desktop, the start button, the taskbar and the desktop itself. Being able to remove any one of those would be very strange. It's bad enough that you can actually move the task bar and start menu in windows by dragging it if it's configured a particular way.
I guess it can have gadgets too, and you can remove those - but they're glorified icons. With windows 8 you can remove live tiles, but you can't really remove 'metro' or the traditional desktop (even if removing one of those would be a really really good idea).
With everything pre-windows 8 you can remove everything down to a very minimal set of elements, which is the set you start with. You can't remove any of those - and nor should you - was my point. You can remove links to things like the control panel and so on, but you can't actually do that trivially, which again, is good - there's a customization menu that lets you, but I can't find a way to mash some buttons and remove the 'control panel' link from my start menu for example.
Especially not one as bizarre as this.
The definitive feature of linux is being able to right click and remove a panel... good for it? That wouldn't even be a feature on windows, it would be a disaster, because my 70 year old aunt would accidentally remove something important, not be sure what it was, and call me to find out how to fix it. All the people in my office would remove things, want them back, and not be able to find them. Etc.
You can have an opinion piece that makes some sort of interesting argument about why this feature really changes the computing experience, and how its absence in windows renders the OS unworthy to use, ok, that could actually be interesting. But TFA spends 3/4ths of its length on superficial discussions of things - and the places where a serious and sensible discussion could be made are given no real treatment.
TFA sort of ends on what he should have started with - the different philosophies between linux and windows 8 - that could have made for a very interesting opinion piece that would have been worth posting on /. But it's not there.
You mean like china, where all of those problems can disappear for a big enough wad of cash.
It's quite possible Amazon didn't anticipate the back to school demand, and ran out of Kindle Fires and have no more in the pipeline, and the '2' isn't ready in enough volumes for sale yet.
I could certainly see there being a very dramatic demographic shift, where some year suddenly a huge portion of university and college freshmen just don't care about physical books. I have no particular reason to see why it would be this year, but it's certainly a possibility. When you're a computer scientist, and having been hanging around computer scientists who've managed to do some sort of ebook stuff since 2000 you forget just how far ahead of the general public we are on these things.
So wait, you mean a company that has it's own internal phone system and exchange can't expect reliable 911 service, and it's disgusting and deplorable to even give such a problem attention?
Emergency service should be available by whatever means people are going to have to connect to it. It would seem to me that if you can connect to twitter or facebook or the like you have some other connection mechanism, but not every country is the same and technology plods along. If you only have a device with 3g data service and no voice and no texting (who needs texting if you can do it in app) then you should probably have 911 service available through that. If people are going to use twitter to ask for help in an emergency, as stupid as it sounds today, you might want to plan ahead to be able to figure out how to support that.
When I was a kid we didn't have 911 (or 999) service, and were supposed to keep the number for Police, Ambulance and Fire next to the phone, 911 service existed, just not in my area. So why the push to get 911 everywhere when it seemed really straightforward to just print the fire/police/ambulance numbers on a card that sat under the phone handset? Because in an emergency people don't think straight and programming people to be mindless little zombies that can call 911 from the age of 4 is a much better plan than trying to get them to read off a number. Please don't take this statement as belly aching on my part here, but my grandfather died in a retirement home trying to use the phone back in 2008. To dial 911 he needed to dial an extra 9 (9 for an outside line) - and the emergency number for the nurse on the main floor was printed on his phone. No one knows what number he was trying to call (it could have been his estranged wife and not 911 for example), but I'd like to think if he was trying to dial 911 that 911 should have, in all circumstances worked. No extra '9' for an outside line shit - that is far too confusing for someone in an emergency situation, he had trouble with '9 for an outside line' to call US in no stress situations. Every even microscopic thing costs time, confusion and potentially lives.
Especially as we look to the future, emergency service operators have to figure out how they're going to cope with communications being potentially handled by a handful of different companies than the phone and cable companies they're used to. Without voice or texting plans (or devices) we may end up in a world were 'texting' is just some app that uses the phone service like an IM program, voice calls might be handled through any number of services rather than through the phone company directly, and you need to build both a legal and technical framework *before* that becomes a problem. 10 years ago people really needed to think about the problem of 911 service on cell phones so that they could build the technology and rules for cell phones of today, back then there were payphones and landlines everywhere, it seemed silly to even try and get accurate location data for cell phones (they only know what tower they're connected to not where they are right? Oh right...). This might be preparing for nothing. It might be something we all have to deal with, and in the case of Japan they are the forefront of disaster planning because pretty much every type of disaster you can think of afflicts them, so they have the ability to try out a hundred different ideas for the rest of us.