"Is all the software/drivers on Windows considered bleeding edge? Is the hardware not abstracted such that it would cause a complete meltdown with no user interaction possible? Are recovery options insanely complex for the user?"
Absolutely. Microsoft and Linux vendors have released updates in the past that could cause if not a meltdown, then at least some discomfort. When the pending updates show up on my Windows 7 PCs, personally I prefer to install only the security updates immediately, and that is only if I am ready to reboot my PC at that moment. The rest of updates, I'd like to let them simmer and sit there for about a week. Then, if none of the tech news sites reports breaking news about how a recent update has destroyed something, then I also install it eventually on my PC, and again, only at the moment when I am ready to reboot it.
Now, the way Microsoft handles driver updates is doubly bad. First of all, a whole lot of drivers come as a part of a software suite that includes a configuration utility app and the actual driver. But microsoft often just wants to push you an updated driver, without the utility. Now imagine what happens when you combine an out of date driver settings app with the latest driver? I personally don't want to be the first one to find out.
Another, much bigger problem with the Microsoft driver updates is that Microsoft often keeps trying to push you completely old and out of date drivers. How many times I have seen the Windows update offering to install three years old AMD Radeon drivers, even though I already have a more recent AMD Catalyst suite, with drivers.
Nearly every home computer is running Windows 10 Home. So this means that most of non-education non-enterprise users still don't have the ability to turn off the automatic forced updates, and reboots. Jebuz, Microsoft, why can it be so hard to the way it used to be in Windows 8?
Most people don't want them to fail. Most people want to take back the control over their desktop OS. The problems with Windows 10 are well known. A crappy and inconsistent GUI on the desktop, although better than Windows 8, endless stream of bugs related to the updater, high CPU usage, etc, the updater that reboots the OS while the PC is in the middle of task, whole same data collection, etc. If Microsoft wants to improve the OS, that's fine, but people want to have the GUI and the level of control of Windows 7. Windows 8 and 10 were an inconsistent mess that took one step forward from Windows 7, then two back. No wonder people are hanging on dearly onto their Windows 7 licenses and PCs.
If by fine you mean having at best a 20-25Mbit connection to the internet, or 10Mbit connection peer-to-peer within your home network, then I guess wireless-g fine.
I have a 802.11ac router installed in the middle of a home, and I am able to transfer files between two computers in the far corners of the house at something like 150Mbps. Which is twice as fast as what I have seen with Wireless N.
If you're building a mesh wi-fi network, you're probably not doing it in a dense apartment complex. You're doing it in a suburban, possibly two story, home and there is probably some distance to the next home. Moreover, the 5GHz signal dies out pretty fast. I can probably still see the SSID of the neighbors 5GHz wi-fi, but not the one from a house next to your neighbor.
Downgrading to Windows 7 was the best thing I have done to my desktop.
Windows 10, even a year after its original release, had signs of being a beta product at best. One problem I have been struggling with was the machine's CPU eventually constantly at 30-40% use with no obvious causes. I have tried all of the half-baked canned answers from Microsoft, including disabling/enabling/changing AV, disabling Microsoft services, and even wiping out and reinstalling the OS.
The next issue is with the updater. This damned thing simply eventually stops working. It shows there are pending updates, starts the downloads, but then sits at 0%. I have tried every canned answer provided on the Microsoft forums, including resetting the update components and wiping and reinstalling the OS.
And finally, I am not fine at all with an OS that decides to reboot the machine whenever it likes. It's downright dangerous to leave any work open. I have been caught off guard by reboots a few times.
Puhlease. Yes, we know that sometimes an observation or a hypothesis is called a "law". There are also theorems that should have been lemmas, and lemmas that should have been called theorems.
I gotta say that the level of anti-Russian xenophobia is continuing hitting ever higher levels of stupid. NSA alleges that somebody hacked into some journalists account.... 11 years ago. Shocking stuff.
I used OmniROM during the KitKat era, and it felt like an extremely solid and fast ROM. I think they were closer to the stock Android even than Cyanogenmod. The only problem with OmniROM has always been a very poor device support. If you have a Nexus phone, then you're set. But it's pretty spotty/poor outside of Nexus devices.
The problem is not just with the hate for HRC. She lost because of an inept campaign. They basically blew it in Michigan and Wisconsin, where the margin was thin and all they need was to have a more effective campaign operation. But they lost those states because of their own arrogance, the belief that they get to win there by default. And now people like Podesta can't man up and admit it was their own fault. No. They say that Putin and Russian hackers stole the election, it was fake news, and FBI director, or some other external force.
Regardless of what the official explanations that exist in the Federalist papers and other writings of the founders, a whole lot of historians agree that the primary reason the USA has indirect elections of the president is because the founders feared the rule of the populist mob, their ability to elect someone who did not represent the interests of the establishment oligarchy. Basically, the electoral college existed then to be able to override the majority vote in order to prevent the likes of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump from winning. Hence, it is actually ironic that we see a non-system presidential candidate benefiting from the same system that was meant to do the opposite.
There is major difference between what Russia thinks of Ukraine, and the rest of its neighbors. There are cultural and historical ties that are extremely strong. Both Russia and Ukraine trace their origins to the medieval state of the Kievan Rus. That's right! The first "Rus" had its capital in Kiev, what is today the capital of Ukraine.
I still prefer it to Apple's walled garden, and actually enjoy using my Android devices. Having said that, it's a pretty dangerous situation right now that there is no true independent and open source alternative. It's like the world of Mac OS and Windows from 10 years ago, except without Linux of BSD alternatives.
Paranoia with Trump is completely warranted because he is a completely loose cannon beholden to no one and continues to prove it so with insane statements like Hillary getting million of illegal votes simply because he lost the majority.
I beg to differ. Trump did not make an insane statement regarding the illegal votes. What he really did on Monday was very skillfully troll the media using a tiny twitter post in revenge for the likes of Stein campaign questioning the integrity of the vote in three crucial Midwestern states that Trump won. Most people don't understand that Trump is a master of trolling. He feeds on it. He took five minutes to post that twitt, and then CNN spent the WHOLE DAY talking about it. It's a win-win for Trump. That's exactly the strategy that won him the republican nomination and got him elected a president.
So in 1990s Russia held almost no exercises, and then they hold an exercise where an old sub sinks. But do you realize how much Russian navy is spending on exercises.
It's really funny to hear that EXISTING state of art Yasen-class submarine, Su-35 fighter jets, brand new Sineva and Bulava class ballistic missiles, Kalibr cruise missiles, Brahmos anti-ship missiles are all "fantasy" weapons.
If you want to talk about broken fantasy weapons, let's talk about F-35, which are even US allies want to drop like a hot potato. Let's talk about A400M, which is so unreliable and below its originally stated specs that Germany, France, and UK have quietly ordered batches of C-130 and C-17 in case if they need a real battle ready aircraft. Let's talk about massively over budget and massively oversold and ineffective LCS ships and the Zumwalt destroyer. These are the real "fantasy" weapons that are completely inadequate for the real world.
These are brand new weapons systems already deployed and produced. Russia is so damn broke that they now produce 4++ generation fighter jets at the rate of 200 pieces a year. So damn broke. Russians gotta envy the British Navy which is so well-funded that it will apparently be left soon without anti-ship missiles.
Then again, Royal Navy will soon have no missiles. Just LOL at all the idiots who decided to come out and measure their dick sizes. Guess what. This navy is soon left without any dicks.
For those who are really worried about the fate of the Russian aircraft carrier, it's actually alive and well, and it's already striking targets in Syria. Here is a collection of recent pics and videos.
From the point of view of a first world navy, those are nice floating targets that will be disabled with one cruise missile. Yes, it can be used to attack third world countries.
You have conveniently forgotten that Kursk was an older-generation Soviet sub. Russia is currently producing Yasen-class multipurpose nuclear attack submarine which is basically state of art. Moreover, the fact that subs sink every once in a while simply highlights the fact that they're very complex devices, like the say the aircraft, which also regularly crash all over the world.
The Russian Northern Fleet has more subs than probably the rest of Europe combined. If one sub sinks for whatever reason, Russians will just view it as an acceptable collateral cost to owning a sub fleet with a massive strike capability.
It's an open question really. So far they have been only attacking third world countries that can't strike back. But is it a good weapon against.. say China. The Chinese have guided ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads specially targeting aircraft carrier groups for example.
Russia is working on developing tugboats for its submarines
You gotta be joking right? The Russian aircraft carrier may need a tugboat because it's a thirty year old ship with turbine engines that were build outside of Russia proper. Russian nuclear submarine fleet has always been a top priority for Russia and they have series production of ballistic missile submarines, multipurpose nuclear submarines and also diesel subs.
The Europeans should really get to work together in terms of weapons standardization. Right now the situation with all those small Navies, like Spain, Germany, Poland, etc is that they are all amounting to very little. They should all have ONE standard destroyer ship that's produced by the dozens, one type of frigate, ONE type of Aircraft carrier, one type of each diesel and nuclear subs, one type of anti-ship missile, and so on. The situation where each navy is trying to procure a little bit of everything with its own domestic resources is very expensive and inefficient.
Slashdot Mirror
All 12 of them!
"Is all the software/drivers on Windows considered bleeding edge? Is the hardware not abstracted such that it would cause a complete meltdown with no user interaction possible? Are recovery options insanely complex for the user?"
Absolutely. Microsoft and Linux vendors have released updates in the past that could cause if not a meltdown, then at least some discomfort. When the pending updates show up on my Windows 7 PCs, personally I prefer to install only the security updates immediately, and that is only if I am ready to reboot my PC at that moment. The rest of updates, I'd like to let them simmer and sit there for about a week. Then, if none of the tech news sites reports breaking news about how a recent update has destroyed something, then I also install it eventually on my PC, and again, only at the moment when I am ready to reboot it.
Now, the way Microsoft handles driver updates is doubly bad. First of all, a whole lot of drivers come as a part of a software suite that includes a configuration utility app and the actual driver. But microsoft often just wants to push you an updated driver, without the utility. Now imagine what happens when you combine an out of date driver settings app with the latest driver? I personally don't want to be the first one to find out.
Another, much bigger problem with the Microsoft driver updates is that Microsoft often keeps trying to push you completely old and out of date drivers. How many times I have seen the Windows update offering to install three years old AMD Radeon drivers, even though I already have a more recent AMD Catalyst suite, with drivers.
Nearly every home computer is running Windows 10 Home. So this means that most of non-education non-enterprise users still don't have the ability to turn off the automatic forced updates, and reboots. Jebuz, Microsoft, why can it be so hard to the way it used to be in Windows 8?
Some people? Please.
Most people don't want them to fail. Most people want to take back the control over their desktop OS. The problems with Windows 10 are well known. A crappy and inconsistent GUI on the desktop, although better than Windows 8, endless stream of bugs related to the updater, high CPU usage, etc, the updater that reboots the OS while the PC is in the middle of task, whole same data collection, etc. If Microsoft wants to improve the OS, that's fine, but people want to have the GUI and the level of control of Windows 7. Windows 8 and 10 were an inconsistent mess that took one step forward from Windows 7, then two back. No wonder people are hanging on dearly onto their Windows 7 licenses and PCs.
If by fine you mean having at best a 20-25Mbit connection to the internet, or 10Mbit connection peer-to-peer within your home network, then I guess wireless-g fine.
I have a 802.11ac router installed in the middle of a home, and I am able to transfer files between two computers in the far corners of the house at something like 150Mbps. Which is twice as fast as what I have seen with Wireless N.
If you're building a mesh wi-fi network, you're probably not doing it in a dense apartment complex. You're doing it in a suburban, possibly two story, home and there is probably some distance to the next home. Moreover, the 5GHz signal dies out pretty fast. I can probably still see the SSID of the neighbors 5GHz wi-fi, but not the one from a house next to your neighbor.
Downgrading to Windows 7 was the best thing I have done to my desktop.
Windows 10, even a year after its original release, had signs of being a beta product at best. One problem I have been struggling with was the machine's CPU eventually constantly at 30-40% use with no obvious causes. I have tried all of the half-baked canned answers from Microsoft, including disabling/enabling/changing AV, disabling Microsoft services, and even wiping out and reinstalling the OS.
The next issue is with the updater. This damned thing simply eventually stops working. It shows there are pending updates, starts the downloads, but then sits at 0%. I have tried every canned answer provided on the Microsoft forums, including resetting the update components and wiping and reinstalling the OS.
And finally, I am not fine at all with an OS that decides to reboot the machine whenever it likes. It's downright dangerous to leave any work open. I have been caught off guard by reboots a few times.
Dictionary nazi detected.
Puhlease. Yes, we know that sometimes an observation or a hypothesis is called a "law". There are also theorems that should have been lemmas, and lemmas that should have been called theorems.
Buying AMD chips in order to support its mediocrity? Puhlease. You do that for me.
I gotta say that the level of anti-Russian xenophobia is continuing hitting ever higher levels of stupid. NSA alleges that somebody hacked into some journalists account.... 11 years ago. Shocking stuff.
I used OmniROM during the KitKat era, and it felt like an extremely solid and fast ROM. I think they were closer to the stock Android even than Cyanogenmod. The only problem with OmniROM has always been a very poor device support. If you have a Nexus phone, then you're set. But it's pretty spotty/poor outside of Nexus devices.
The problem is not just with the hate for HRC. She lost because of an inept campaign. They basically blew it in Michigan and Wisconsin, where the margin was thin and all they need was to have a more effective campaign operation. But they lost those states because of their own arrogance, the belief that they get to win there by default. And now people like Podesta can't man up and admit it was their own fault. No. They say that Putin and Russian hackers stole the election, it was fake news, and FBI director, or some other external force.
The Clinton Campaign Was Undone By Its Own Neglect And A Touch Of Arrogance, Staffers Say
Regardless of what the official explanations that exist in the Federalist papers and other writings of the founders, a whole lot of historians agree that the primary reason the USA has indirect elections of the president is because the founders feared the rule of the populist mob, their ability to elect someone who did not represent the interests of the establishment oligarchy. Basically, the electoral college existed then to be able to override the majority vote in order to prevent the likes of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump from winning. Hence, it is actually ironic that we see a non-system presidential candidate benefiting from the same system that was meant to do the opposite.
Don't worry. Russia's invasion force will be defeated by the Finnish Olympic cross-country skiing team, just like it happened in the winter war.
There is major difference between what Russia thinks of Ukraine, and the rest of its neighbors. There are cultural and historical ties that are extremely strong. Both Russia and Ukraine trace their origins to the medieval state of the Kievan Rus. That's right! The first "Rus" had its capital in Kiev, what is today the capital of Ukraine.
Android is shit. Complete and total garbage.
I still prefer it to Apple's walled garden, and actually enjoy using my Android devices. Having said that, it's a pretty dangerous situation right now that there is no true independent and open source alternative. It's like the world of Mac OS and Windows from 10 years ago, except without Linux of BSD alternatives.
Paranoia with Trump is completely warranted because he is a completely loose cannon beholden to no one and continues to prove it so with insane statements like Hillary getting million of illegal votes simply because he lost the majority.
I beg to differ. Trump did not make an insane statement regarding the illegal votes. What he really did on Monday was very skillfully troll the media using a tiny twitter post in revenge for the likes of Stein campaign questioning the integrity of the vote in three crucial Midwestern states that Trump won. Most people don't understand that Trump is a master of trolling. He feeds on it. He took five minutes to post that twitt, and then CNN spent the WHOLE DAY talking about it. It's a win-win for Trump. That's exactly the strategy that won him the republican nomination and got him elected a president.
So in 1990s Russia held almost no exercises, and then they hold an exercise where an old sub sinks. But do you realize how much Russian navy is spending on exercises.
It's really funny to hear that EXISTING state of art Yasen-class submarine, Su-35 fighter jets, brand new Sineva and Bulava class ballistic missiles, Kalibr cruise missiles, Brahmos anti-ship missiles are all "fantasy" weapons.
If you want to talk about broken fantasy weapons, let's talk about F-35, which are even US allies want to drop like a hot potato. Let's talk about A400M, which is so unreliable and below its originally stated specs that Germany, France, and UK have quietly ordered batches of C-130 and C-17 in case if they need a real battle ready aircraft. Let's talk about massively over budget and massively oversold and ineffective LCS ships and the Zumwalt destroyer. These are the real "fantasy" weapons that are completely inadequate for the real world.
These are brand new weapons systems already deployed and produced. Russia is so damn broke that they now produce 4++ generation fighter jets at the rate of 200 pieces a year. So damn broke. Russians gotta envy the British Navy which is so well-funded that it will apparently be left soon without anti-ship missiles.
Then again, Royal Navy will soon have no missiles. Just LOL at all the idiots who decided to come out and measure their dick sizes. Guess what. This navy is soon left without any dicks.
For those who are really worried about the fate of the Russian aircraft carrier, it's actually alive and well, and it's already striking targets in Syria. Here is a collection of recent pics and videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
http://bmpd.livejournal.com/22...
http://bmpd.livejournal.com/22...
From the point of view of a first world navy, those are nice floating targets that will be disabled with one cruise missile. Yes, it can be used to attack third world countries.
You have conveniently forgotten that Kursk was an older-generation Soviet sub. Russia is currently producing Yasen-class multipurpose nuclear attack submarine which is basically state of art. Moreover, the fact that subs sink every once in a while simply highlights the fact that they're very complex devices, like the say the aircraft, which also regularly crash all over the world.
The Russian Northern Fleet has more subs than probably the rest of Europe combined. If one sub sinks for whatever reason, Russians will just view it as an acceptable collateral cost to owning a sub fleet with a massive strike capability.
It's an open question really. So far they have been only attacking third world countries that can't strike back. But is it a good weapon against.. say China. The Chinese have guided ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads specially targeting aircraft carrier groups for example.
Russia is working on developing tugboats for its submarines
You gotta be joking right? The Russian aircraft carrier may need a tugboat because it's a thirty year old ship with turbine engines that were build outside of Russia proper. Russian nuclear submarine fleet has always been a top priority for Russia and they have series production of ballistic missile submarines, multipurpose nuclear submarines and also diesel subs.
The Europeans should really get to work together in terms of weapons standardization. Right now the situation with all those small Navies, like Spain, Germany, Poland, etc is that they are all amounting to very little. They should all have ONE standard destroyer ship that's produced by the dozens, one type of frigate, ONE type of Aircraft carrier, one type of each diesel and nuclear subs, one type of anti-ship missile, and so on. The situation where each navy is trying to procure a little bit of everything with its own domestic resources is very expensive and inefficient.