If we only cared about protecting America from attack, our nuclear deterrent alone would be sufficient for most purposes. Just keep the Navy (with its boomer subs) and the National Guard and get rid of the other branches. Of course, we're not going to do that, but let's be honest about the reasons why. It has nothing to do with "national defense".
When you stop getting spam and/. forgets the meaning of "rootkit", let's discuss this again.;-) I, for one, am not holding my breath.:-);-)
It's much easier to harden a dedicated embedded system than it is to make a general-purpose computer immune to attack. This is especially true when you can assume in most cases that the attacker won't have physical access to the device.
Why the hell should something that breaks the lock of a terminally closing incoming anti-air missile, thus saving the unit, be consider "obsolete"? That's like saying that dodging a mugger's knife is obsolete these days. Sure, if you want to end up dead...?
The whole point of drones is that you're not putting your own soldiers at risk, so you don't care if it gets shot down. That only costs money, and the military has as much of that as it wants.
People in the military need to be injured or killed in war, to remind everyone that it is fucking terrible and that no one should *want* to do it.
Automated drones are just the culmination of a decades-long trend in the U.S. towards enabling warfare by insulating the bulk of the population from its costs. During WWI and WWII, a universal draft meant that virtually every able-bodied man had to go to war, and those on the home front shared the sacrifice through work requirements, rationing, and higher taxes. In Vietnam, though, affluent Americans were able to avoid any impact of the war on their own families thanks to the college exemption from the draft. This meant that only the working classes bore the brunt of the war. And on the home front, life was far closer to normal than it was during the World Wars – the war was funded through deficit spending, not increased taxes, and there was no rationing. After Vietnam, the draft was ended, so even those Americans who didn't go to college would not be shipped off to the military unless they signed up. The result was that the first Iraq War met with very little opposition, since no one except volunteer soldiers was at any risk at all, and even then casualties were minimal. The longer campaigns in Afghanistan and in the second Iraq War led to additional backlash against the casualties among volunteer soldiers, hence the move to drones. Basically, the American political elites figured out that if Americans don't have to see American soldiers die in war, then they can do whatever they want overseas and no one will try to stop them.
Because our military should really be basing decisions on fictional movies.
Well-written fiction often speaks to real-world concerns. George Orwell's 1984 was also fictional, but it was and is taken seriously as a cautionary tale, and rightly so.
Sure, it's unlikely that an evil sentient computer will declare nuclear war on humanity, but one reason why the Terminator films are so popular is that they address real-world anxieties about how our lives are increasingly dominated by technology. It's perfectly reasonable to ask whether bad consequences could result from taking humans out of the loop, especially on military decisions.
Most users of Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest had never even heard of Zendesk before this incident. How were they supposed to make an informed choice? For that matter, how is any non-technical user supposed to know what Web providers are doing with their data behind the scenes?
Incidents like these are why we need laws with real teeth to restrict the dissemination of private data. Zendesk should be facing a hefty fine for its negligence in this case. In almost all cases, these hacks are the result of failing to take basic security precautions that have been well-known and understood for years, if not decades. The next time someone loses a list of plaintext passwords from a database (which they should have never stored to begin with), fine them a million bucks or 10% of their gross profit for the year, whichever is greater. They'll cut that crap out if there are real consequences for it.
While this is a great ruling, I've noticed a recent pattern: most of the cases where judges have come down hard on copyright trolls do not involve material from major studios. They involve pornography, often gay pornography. There are quite a few of these cases chronicled on TorrentFreak. I wonder to what extent the judges are letting their disgust of the underlying material come through in their rulings. Would they be making the same rulings if these people were accused of downloading mainstream music or films?
That said, these precedents can probably be used in other cases, even against major studios, since there is no legal distinction between large and small copyright holders and no copyright-relevant distinction between pornographic and non-pornographic content. I'm willing to take victories against the monolith of "IP" wherever they are available.
The Software Mafia's argument is the exact opposite of the truth. Up until now, everyone has generally assumed that APIs could not be copyrighted, and overturning that finding would be incredibly destabilizing and harmful to the industry, as it would redefine as "infringement" practices that have been considered perfectly acceptable for over 30 years.
Google should know better than to gimp the storage!
Google does this on purpose with all their devices, because they want you to live your entire life "in the cloud" (i.e. no data security and no privacy). This is why most newer Nexus devices don't have SD card slots. At least the Chromebook Pixel has one so you can add external storage for your stuff.
The real question is whether the Chromebook Pixel has its SSD in standard mSATA format, or if it uses some proprietary crap like the Macbooks do. If it's a standard mSATA drive, it wouldn't be hard to upgrade – you can get a decent 256GB mSATA drive for less than $200, and you're still paying less than you would for a comparable 15" Retina MacBook Pro.
That said, you can fit Windows 7 on the default amount of space – I've run it for a while on a 30GB SSD boot drive on one of my systems. The install comes to 10-15GB before adding any extra software. Of course, you need to keep all your actual data on a different drive.
Hey, it's an x86 PC, even if it runs a crappy OS. I suspect most of these will eventually wind up running Windows, unless there's something about the hardware that prevents this.
For people who liked the Retina hardware on the new MacBooks but couldn't justify the price (and don't care about or don't want OSX), this could be a good alternative. I'll wait a while, though: I don't see this price point lasting very long.
Because the point is to learn the math? The coursework is not designed to teach you how to use a tool, it is to teach you how the underlying pieces work.
Then they should be asking essay questions instead. Ask the student to describe how the underlying principles work.
It's ridiculous to throw a bunch of equations at the student and then say "no, you can't use the easiest and most obvious way of solving these, the method that everyone would use in the real world."
"why bother doing it if someone will steal your work"
The history of the IT field pretty much disproves that. Everyone borrowed from everyone else, and most developers never even bothered to file for patents. Would it really have been better for the IT industry if no one except Dan Bricklin had been able to produce a spreadsheet program until 1999?
Will Bill Gates return then? I like the newer gentler Microsoft even if it is turning incompetent. If Bill was left IE would still have IE 6 crap in their on purpose to make it incompatible with everything else and.docx would be a drmed binary format with no OpenXML so no LibreOffice or GoogleDocs compatibility.
The reason Microsoft isn't doing this crap any more (at least not nearly as much) isn't because Ballmer is less ruthless than Gates was. It's because the European Union found the balls to do what the US antitrust authorities wouldn't, and actually effectively regulated Microsoft's worst anticompetitive excesses. Not only that, but an array of governments and large corporations got bit hard by Microsoft's lock-in as a result of the IE6 fiasco, so they made it clear that they weren't going to put up with any more proprietary nonsense like ActiveX. The whole reason why OOXML was created is that many government agencies insisted on an open and documented file format, and were about to switch to ODF if Microsoft had held the line on their opaque binary blobs.
It's true that the Electoral College somewhat overrepresents small rural states. This is because each state's electoral votes is equal to the size of its Congressional delegation, and all states have 2 Senators regardless of size. (Also, the smallest states still have 1 Representative, no matter how minuscule their population.)
But that problem really doesn't come up too often. It did in 2000, to be sure, but in every other instance in the past century, the Electoral College results had the same winner as the popular vote results. A much more serious issue is that the Electoral College gives rise to the phenomenon of "swing states."
Defenders of the Electoral College often claim that if it was abolished, then Presidential candidates would only bother campaigning in the big states and ignore everyone else. But under the current situation, we have an even worse situation: the campaigns are largely restricted to a handful of states that happen to be almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. That means that if you live in New York or California or Texas, you'll be essentially ignored through the whole Presidential campaign. On the other hand, if you live in Ohio, there is no end to the amount of pandering the parties will do to get your vote. The current situation results in a vast majority of the American people being written off as irrelevant to a Presidential campaign! This is one way we wind up with crappy policy like ethanol subsidies: they play really well in Midwestern swing states, so no one with Presidential aspirations will dare to challenge them.
To the founders, the "Senate problem" was a solution, not a problem. Proportional representation was not the ultimate goal; it was a goal that needed to be tempered. The Senate does that.
"The Founders" weren't one unified body. The bicameral system was a compromise between large-state representatives who wanted proportional representation by population, and small-state representatives who wanted all states to have an equal vote.
The people we usually think of as "Founding Fathers" – most notably James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – wanted proportional representation and weren't too thrilled about the Senate, though they were willing to accept it to avoid scuttling the whole enterprise. According to Wikipedia, "Madison argued that a conspiracy of large states against the small states was unrealistic as the large states were so different from each other. Hamilton argued that the states were artificial entities made up of individuals, and accused small state representatives of wanting power, not liberty." The people who were gung-ho for an equal representation Senate were much more marginal figures, such as Gunning Bedford, Jr.
We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy. The individual citizens of the United States don't get a vote for president. Our states do. We only get a vote to tell our state government who we would prefer they vote for. And, they don't even need to listen to us (and have in the past chosen to vote against the will of the people)!
The antebellum South called, it wants you back.
Seriously, this issue was settled at Appomatox Court House in 1865. There is no such thing as individual state sovereignty in any meaningful sense any more. Nor should there be. State government tends to be the most corrupt and least accountable layer, worse than the feds (who are usually under a magnifying glass of media coverage) and worse than the locals (who at least have to make sure the roads stay paved and the schools open or they'll be thrown out of office.)
The purpose of the electoral college was to avoid having the most important office in the federal gov't be victim to popular fervor. In a direct election, radicals can be too easily elected (see tea party). This system prevents that in theory (along with the voting system of the electors: in seperate areas. This prevented one guy from giving a moving speech and changing the minds of everyone.)
The Electoral College was the result of a political compromise at the 1787 Constitutional Convention because the participants couldn't make up their minds how the President should be selected. Just about every possible method was suggested by one participant or another, and the Electoral College was just the one that happened to pass.
We can respect the work of the Founding Fathers without treating them as infallible gods. In fact, refusing to think for ourselves and instead treating their work as a kind of Holy Scripture is completely against the Enlightenment values that they stood for.
MediaWiki developers are almost ready for Lua scripting to be enabled for all Wikipedia and related sites
Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Allowing anonymous users to do active scripting on one of the Internet's top 10 most populat websites doesn't strike me as the best idea...
The problem was that Lucas was too rich and too capable of doing whatever he wanted regardless of input. It was a hard fast rule of the original trilogy that the better the film, the less Lucas directly had to do with it. The problem with the prequels is that Lucas was deeply involved. He was literally able, especially by the prequels, to do anything he wanted it, and did it all to excess. The prequels had every flaw in Lucas's inabilities with plotting and dialogue that the old films did, but magnified many times over.
The problem isn't that Lucas had input, it's that essentially no one else did. All writers have a blind spot with their own writing. You need an extra set of critical eyes – someone to look over the script and say "This doesn't make any sense" or "This part just isn't entertaining" or "We need more reason for the audience to care about plot point X".
Letting a writer/director have full control over the creative process is usually a disaster. Google "Heaven's Gate" for one particularly egregious example – $40 million (in 1980 dollars!) squandered on a mediocre, 3.5-hour Western that no one really wanted to see.
Sad, isn't it? People are *still* talking about standardizing on browsers instead of enforcing adherence to standardized markup languages.
Maybe it would be different if the W3C hadn't sat around for years with their thumb up their ass. According to the Wikipedia article, CSS 2.1 wasn't finalized by W3C until JUNE 2011! That's utterly insane. CSS 3 is still being kicked around by W3C, which seems to think they have all the time in the world to dot every i and cross every t. Guess what? They don't. The CSS 3 standard is whatever WebKit does, whether W3C likes it or not. Fortunately, WebKit is free, open-source, and contributed to by multiple major stakeholders including Apple, Google, Adobe, and now Opera. It's a better "standards body" than W3C ever was.
Windows 95 on a PC from 2000 runs way faster than XP on a 2010 PC, and both are faster than Windows Vista/7/8 on a modern PC.
Windows 7 is actually faster than XP on most systems. The trend towards ever-increasing bloat peaked around the time of Vista, and ever since then, the increased concern with power efficiency and the rise of mobile devices has led to a rollback.
As for Windows 95, of course it runs faster; it's right on the bare metal and is written mostly in assembly. Remember, Windows 9x has no security. Anyone on the system can do whatever they want. Implementing a proper Unix-style security system inevitably means that the Windows NT line (i.e. all modern versions of Windows) will be slower than Windows 9x. That's not because of bloat, it's because 9x was a quick and dirty hack that was needed due to the limitations of consumer hardware at the time.
Any games on a machine with 4k of RAM are going to be pretty much text only.
Nonsense. The original NES only had 4K of RAM (2K of general purpose memory and 2K of video memory). The code itself, of course, was on cartridge ROMs (as was the tile data).
You can easily get a decent game to run with 4K of RAM if you have a tile-based raster graphics chip and are coding efficiently in 8-bit assembly language. Back in the 1980s it was done all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
If we only cared about protecting America from attack, our nuclear deterrent alone would be sufficient for most purposes. Just keep the Navy (with its boomer subs) and the National Guard and get rid of the other branches. Of course, we're not going to do that, but let's be honest about the reasons why. It has nothing to do with "national defense".
When you stop getting spam and /. forgets the meaning of "rootkit", let's discuss this again. ;-) I, for one, am not holding my breath. :-) ;-)
It's much easier to harden a dedicated embedded system than it is to make a general-purpose computer immune to attack. This is especially true when you can assume in most cases that the attacker won't have physical access to the device.
Why the hell should something that breaks the lock of a terminally closing incoming anti-air missile, thus saving the unit, be consider "obsolete"? That's like saying that dodging a mugger's knife is obsolete these days. Sure, if you want to end up dead...?
The whole point of drones is that you're not putting your own soldiers at risk, so you don't care if it gets shot down. That only costs money, and the military has as much of that as it wants.
Question from a military novice: what purpose does "dogfighting" serve in modern combat?
People in the military need to be injured or killed in war, to remind everyone that it is fucking terrible and that no one should *want* to do it.
Automated drones are just the culmination of a decades-long trend in the U.S. towards enabling warfare by insulating the bulk of the population from its costs. During WWI and WWII, a universal draft meant that virtually every able-bodied man had to go to war, and those on the home front shared the sacrifice through work requirements, rationing, and higher taxes. In Vietnam, though, affluent Americans were able to avoid any impact of the war on their own families thanks to the college exemption from the draft. This meant that only the working classes bore the brunt of the war. And on the home front, life was far closer to normal than it was during the World Wars – the war was funded through deficit spending, not increased taxes, and there was no rationing. After Vietnam, the draft was ended, so even those Americans who didn't go to college would not be shipped off to the military unless they signed up. The result was that the first Iraq War met with very little opposition, since no one except volunteer soldiers was at any risk at all, and even then casualties were minimal. The longer campaigns in Afghanistan and in the second Iraq War led to additional backlash against the casualties among volunteer soldiers, hence the move to drones. Basically, the American political elites figured out that if Americans don't have to see American soldiers die in war, then they can do whatever they want overseas and no one will try to stop them.
Because our military should really be basing decisions on fictional movies.
Well-written fiction often speaks to real-world concerns. George Orwell's 1984 was also fictional, but it was and is taken seriously as a cautionary tale, and rightly so.
Sure, it's unlikely that an evil sentient computer will declare nuclear war on humanity, but one reason why the Terminator films are so popular is that they address real-world anxieties about how our lives are increasingly dominated by technology. It's perfectly reasonable to ask whether bad consequences could result from taking humans out of the loop, especially on military decisions.
Most users of Twitter, Tumblr, and Pinterest had never even heard of Zendesk before this incident. How were they supposed to make an informed choice? For that matter, how is any non-technical user supposed to know what Web providers are doing with their data behind the scenes?
Incidents like these are why we need laws with real teeth to restrict the dissemination of private data. Zendesk should be facing a hefty fine for its negligence in this case. In almost all cases, these hacks are the result of failing to take basic security precautions that have been well-known and understood for years, if not decades. The next time someone loses a list of plaintext passwords from a database (which they should have never stored to begin with), fine them a million bucks or 10% of their gross profit for the year, whichever is greater. They'll cut that crap out if there are real consequences for it.
While this is a great ruling, I've noticed a recent pattern: most of the cases where judges have come down hard on copyright trolls do not involve material from major studios. They involve pornography, often gay pornography. There are quite a few of these cases chronicled on TorrentFreak. I wonder to what extent the judges are letting their disgust of the underlying material come through in their rulings. Would they be making the same rulings if these people were accused of downloading mainstream music or films?
That said, these precedents can probably be used in other cases, even against major studios, since there is no legal distinction between large and small copyright holders and no copyright-relevant distinction between pornographic and non-pornographic content. I'm willing to take victories against the monolith of "IP" wherever they are available.
The Software Mafia's argument is the exact opposite of the truth. Up until now, everyone has generally assumed that APIs could not be copyrighted, and overturning that finding would be incredibly destabilizing and harmful to the industry, as it would redefine as "infringement" practices that have been considered perfectly acceptable for over 30 years.
Google should know better than to gimp the storage!
Google does this on purpose with all their devices, because they want you to live your entire life "in the cloud" (i.e. no data security and no privacy). This is why most newer Nexus devices don't have SD card slots. At least the Chromebook Pixel has one so you can add external storage for your stuff.
The real question is whether the Chromebook Pixel has its SSD in standard mSATA format, or if it uses some proprietary crap like the Macbooks do. If it's a standard mSATA drive, it wouldn't be hard to upgrade – you can get a decent 256GB mSATA drive for less than $200, and you're still paying less than you would for a comparable 15" Retina MacBook Pro.
That said, you can fit Windows 7 on the default amount of space – I've run it for a while on a 30GB SSD boot drive on one of my systems. The install comes to 10-15GB before adding any extra software. Of course, you need to keep all your actual data on a different drive.
Hey, it's an x86 PC, even if it runs a crappy OS. I suspect most of these will eventually wind up running Windows, unless there's something about the hardware that prevents this.
For people who liked the Retina hardware on the new MacBooks but couldn't justify the price (and don't care about or don't want OSX), this could be a good alternative. I'll wait a while, though: I don't see this price point lasting very long.
TL;DR: Jeff Cogswell doesn't understand how relational databases work. Or "the cloud", for that matter.
Because the point is to learn the math? The coursework is not designed to teach you how to use a tool, it is to teach you how the underlying pieces work.
Then they should be asking essay questions instead. Ask the student to describe how the underlying principles work.
It's ridiculous to throw a bunch of equations at the student and then say "no, you can't use the easiest and most obvious way of solving these, the method that everyone would use in the real world."
"why bother doing it if someone will steal your work"
The history of the IT field pretty much disproves that. Everyone borrowed from everyone else, and most developers never even bothered to file for patents. Would it really have been better for the IT industry if no one except Dan Bricklin had been able to produce a spreadsheet program until 1999?
Will Bill Gates return then? I like the newer gentler Microsoft even if it is turning incompetent. If Bill was left IE would still have IE 6 crap in their on purpose to make it incompatible with everything else and .docx would be a drmed binary format with no OpenXML so no LibreOffice or GoogleDocs compatibility.
The reason Microsoft isn't doing this crap any more (at least not nearly as much) isn't because Ballmer is less ruthless than Gates was. It's because the European Union found the balls to do what the US antitrust authorities wouldn't, and actually effectively regulated Microsoft's worst anticompetitive excesses. Not only that, but an array of governments and large corporations got bit hard by Microsoft's lock-in as a result of the IE6 fiasco, so they made it clear that they weren't going to put up with any more proprietary nonsense like ActiveX. The whole reason why OOXML was created is that many government agencies insisted on an open and documented file format, and were about to switch to ODF if Microsoft had held the line on their opaque binary blobs.
Let me get this straight. These guys ported and anachronistic piece of software from one dead language to a slightly less dead language
C is by no means a dead language.
It's true that the Electoral College somewhat overrepresents small rural states. This is because each state's electoral votes is equal to the size of its Congressional delegation, and all states have 2 Senators regardless of size. (Also, the smallest states still have 1 Representative, no matter how minuscule their population.)
But that problem really doesn't come up too often. It did in 2000, to be sure, but in every other instance in the past century, the Electoral College results had the same winner as the popular vote results. A much more serious issue is that the Electoral College gives rise to the phenomenon of "swing states."
Defenders of the Electoral College often claim that if it was abolished, then Presidential candidates would only bother campaigning in the big states and ignore everyone else. But under the current situation, we have an even worse situation: the campaigns are largely restricted to a handful of states that happen to be almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. That means that if you live in New York or California or Texas, you'll be essentially ignored through the whole Presidential campaign. On the other hand, if you live in Ohio, there is no end to the amount of pandering the parties will do to get your vote. The current situation results in a vast majority of the American people being written off as irrelevant to a Presidential campaign! This is one way we wind up with crappy policy like ethanol subsidies: they play really well in Midwestern swing states, so no one with Presidential aspirations will dare to challenge them.
To the founders, the "Senate problem" was a solution, not a problem. Proportional representation was not the ultimate goal; it was a goal that needed to be tempered. The Senate does that.
"The Founders" weren't one unified body. The bicameral system was a compromise between large-state representatives who wanted proportional representation by population, and small-state representatives who wanted all states to have an equal vote.
The people we usually think of as "Founding Fathers" – most notably James Madison and Alexander Hamilton – wanted proportional representation and weren't too thrilled about the Senate, though they were willing to accept it to avoid scuttling the whole enterprise. According to Wikipedia, "Madison argued that a conspiracy of large states against the small states was unrealistic as the large states were so different from each other. Hamilton argued that the states were artificial entities made up of individuals, and accused small state representatives of wanting power, not liberty." The people who were gung-ho for an equal representation Senate were much more marginal figures, such as Gunning Bedford, Jr.
We have the electoral college because we live in a federated representational republic, not a democracy. The individual citizens of the United States don't get a vote for president. Our states do. We only get a vote to tell our state government who we would prefer they vote for. And, they don't even need to listen to us (and have in the past chosen to vote against the will of the people)!
The antebellum South called, it wants you back.
Seriously, this issue was settled at Appomatox Court House in 1865. There is no such thing as individual state sovereignty in any meaningful sense any more. Nor should there be. State government tends to be the most corrupt and least accountable layer, worse than the feds (who are usually under a magnifying glass of media coverage) and worse than the locals (who at least have to make sure the roads stay paved and the schools open or they'll be thrown out of office.)
The purpose of the electoral college was to avoid having the most important office in the federal gov't be victim to popular fervor. In a direct election, radicals can be too easily elected (see tea party). This system prevents that in theory (along with the voting system of the electors: in seperate areas. This prevented one guy from giving a moving speech and changing the minds of everyone.)
The Electoral College was the result of a political compromise at the 1787 Constitutional Convention because the participants couldn't make up their minds how the President should be selected. Just about every possible method was suggested by one participant or another, and the Electoral College was just the one that happened to pass.
We can respect the work of the Founding Fathers without treating them as infallible gods. In fact, refusing to think for ourselves and instead treating their work as a kind of Holy Scripture is completely against the Enlightenment values that they stood for.
MediaWiki developers are almost ready for Lua scripting to be enabled for all Wikipedia and related sites
Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Allowing anonymous users to do active scripting on one of the Internet's top 10 most populat websites doesn't strike me as the best idea...
The problem was that Lucas was too rich and too capable of doing whatever he wanted regardless of input. It was a hard fast rule of the original trilogy that the better the film, the less Lucas directly had to do with it. The problem with the prequels is that Lucas was deeply involved. He was literally able, especially by the prequels, to do anything he wanted it, and did it all to excess. The prequels had every flaw in Lucas's inabilities with plotting and dialogue that the old films did, but magnified many times over.
The problem isn't that Lucas had input, it's that essentially no one else did. All writers have a blind spot with their own writing. You need an extra set of critical eyes – someone to look over the script and say "This doesn't make any sense" or "This part just isn't entertaining" or "We need more reason for the audience to care about plot point X".
Letting a writer/director have full control over the creative process is usually a disaster. Google "Heaven's Gate" for one particularly egregious example – $40 million (in 1980 dollars!) squandered on a mediocre, 3.5-hour Western that no one really wanted to see.
Sad, isn't it? People are *still* talking about standardizing on browsers instead of enforcing adherence to standardized markup languages.
Maybe it would be different if the W3C hadn't sat around for years with their thumb up their ass. According to the Wikipedia article, CSS 2.1 wasn't finalized by W3C until JUNE 2011! That's utterly insane. CSS 3 is still being kicked around by W3C, which seems to think they have all the time in the world to dot every i and cross every t. Guess what? They don't. The CSS 3 standard is whatever WebKit does, whether W3C likes it or not. Fortunately, WebKit is free, open-source, and contributed to by multiple major stakeholders including Apple, Google, Adobe, and now Opera. It's a better "standards body" than W3C ever was.
Windows 95 on a PC from 2000 runs way faster than XP on a 2010 PC, and both are faster than Windows Vista/7/8 on a modern PC.
Windows 7 is actually faster than XP on most systems. The trend towards ever-increasing bloat peaked around the time of Vista, and ever since then, the increased concern with power efficiency and the rise of mobile devices has led to a rollback.
As for Windows 95, of course it runs faster; it's right on the bare metal and is written mostly in assembly. Remember, Windows 9x has no security. Anyone on the system can do whatever they want. Implementing a proper Unix-style security system inevitably means that the Windows NT line (i.e. all modern versions of Windows) will be slower than Windows 9x. That's not because of bloat, it's because 9x was a quick and dirty hack that was needed due to the limitations of consumer hardware at the time.
Any games on a machine with 4k of RAM are going to be pretty much text only.
Nonsense. The original NES only had 4K of RAM (2K of general purpose memory and 2K of video memory). The code itself, of course, was on cartridge ROMs (as was the tile data).
You can easily get a decent game to run with 4K of RAM if you have a tile-based raster graphics chip and are coding efficiently in 8-bit assembly language. Back in the 1980s it was done all the time.