Although I wouldn't ever dismiss such things as "never going to happen", the point is that 99% of people who have Office installed (or, worse, go out and buy it separately) have every need they'll ever have for a office suite catered for by LibreOffice.
Personally, it's more than good enough for anything I ever used Office for and when I take into account the cost, I'm more than happy to fiddle a little more with a free product than pay to save a tiny bit of rare inconvenience. To be honest, LibreOffice actually gets more done for me - for a start, any file that MSOffice struggles to open can usually be thrown into LibreOffice and *something* got out of it without having to faff with import filters.
Not everything has to be about making a program that every big business will immediately switch to. That's the "Linux desktop" argument that's been in play for the last decade and is a really bad way to think about things - there are more legitimate privately-held copies of Windows/Office out there than there are business ones.
The point is that LibreOffice is "good enough" for "enough" users that they'll never need to buy or touch MS Office if they don't want to - that alone makes it worth developing for and supporting. I have no interest in them adding big-business-only features that I'll never use, I'd much rather they spent my donations on getting things that everybody will use working. The businesses can bloody look after themselves if they want to and need a critical feature - either by sponsoring the feature or by throwing their own developers on it. The little guys can't do that, and the people at home certainly can't.
I'm an IT Manager for a private school that uses MS software on all its desktops (educational and administrative). I do *not* have MS Office installed on my work laptop (the only machine I personally use apart from servers), I have LibreOffice. Not only have I never received a file that I couldn't open, or one that had broken formulae and couldn't be used, but I use LibreOffice to open ancient/weird/newer formats of office documents from parents etc. in order to convert them to something the teachers/office staff can actually open. And every letter / results spreadsheet that passes through the office ends up as a PDF on our website - a PDF created by LibreOffice's export feature.
Hell, we run our sportsday via complex Excel spreadsheets, not to mention test-result-analysis, everyday office stuff, mailmerge, etc. I'm not saying LibreOffice would do *everything* we could potentially throw at it, but the point is that as someone managing IT for an MS Office environment, I've never needed anything that LibreOffice is missing.
That means, for the vast, vast majority of Office users, there's no reason they couldn't use it too.
This is true of a lot of programs that people use everyday. Most of our software is free or open-source because, for example, VLC does a million times better job of JUST PLAYING THE DAMN DVD than anything that was bundled with the computer ever will (and is consistent, whereas there are half-a-dozen pieces of "bundled" DVD player software that come through my office on new laptops - they all go into the "never install, but keep around" drawer).
That said, I also use a bucketful of Open Source programs to do lots of things that I used to have to buy proprietary applications for (Scribus, InkScape, Openfire - a Jabber server - hell even our VPN is OpenVPN) and have never touched GIMP because it's completely inadequate (though the Gimp-Photoshop-lookalike was infinitely more usable). I'm not suggesting any of them would be useful to someone on the cutting-edge of what the proprietary equivalent can do, but for the vast majority of users, such programs do everything they need and cost infinitely less.
Even "free" (but not open-source) software can make amazing savings on the average desktop (business or personal). Our standard install image here has, at a minimum:
(As most UK people will know, the movie U-571 is entirely bullshit about how the US captured an Enigma machine from a boat that, in real life, was never involved)
Wonder how the Yanks would feel about a British movie depicting the Boston Tea Party as a British success...
Did you miss the point that it was mainly secret in its working days (so it was in a quiet town, in the middle of nowhere, away from German bombs) but is now in a modern-day town where it has zero impact on the local economy, that most of the equipment was destroyed afterwards (and hence what you see is the result of DECADES of restoration work of then-top-secret equipment of which virtually nothing original remains), that the building has been derelict (hence the raising of money) ever since it was *deliberately* cleared and abandoned decades ago? At the moment it is *literally* run by fanatics, not cash, so a few scavenged posters is all they have left after reconstructing all that equipment. Everything else is in planning stages.
You don't preserve the place by turning into The Canterbury Tales with talking characters, etc. especially with ZERO funding that they've had up until now (hence this being a news story that they CAN actually put something there now - and so they should).
Like the Stalag that I went to visit in Germany last year that was nothing more than a bit of grass with some vague building outlines on and a little building with old movies/photos, it was never designed to be a tourist attraction and still isn't except for those who understand what it WAS.
That said, my brother has taken Scout groups to Bletchley several times (he was given a valve-amp, by someone who worked there on the reconstruction, for the kids to study) - so long as you set the scene and explain what's going on there, it's still pretty interesting.
The preservation of it is important but IT HASN'T STARTED. Not properly. For decades it's just been people saying it *should* be preserved but they have literally only just been given the funds to do so - and in ten years time it will be a more interesting place to take your kids.
Personally, I'd rather they built any museum / exhibit close-by and preserved the original buildings as best they could but I doubt it will happen.
Actually, I don't. The problem with complaining about such things is that you look a complete arse (a perfectly-correct English word that is harsher than ass and has no donkey connotations) when you are wrong and only a slightly-smaller arse when you're right.
Anybody who buys a game without trying a demo first, on the hardware they intend to play on, gets everything they deserve. That's been the rule since the 80's.
If a game doesn't offer a demo, OnLive one or rent it. Anyone silly enough to load up a brand-new, full-price game onto a machine and discover problems like this only AFTER the purchase has been made is just asking for trouble - where's the incentive to fix it when someone's already paid for it?
In the same way, anything Microsoft below SP2 just isn't worth running. The same rule works for *so* many things in the PC world that it's unbelievable. And don't even get me started on "pre-orders"...
And if you extrapolate enough, you can take anything to extreme and prove just about anything. That's why statisticians and experts are supposed to come up with what's reasonable, not something that exceeds global GDP because of someone copying a single CD.
There was a British comedy called Only Fools and Horses which contains the following exchange, which I consider no different to these methods:
Rodney: It doesn't matter what they use it for, Trig, it's still knocked off - and it's still illegal.
Del: Yeah, but it's good for the country though Rodney, innit?
Rodney: Come on Del, how can nicking off British Rail be good for Britain?
Del: (To Trig) He amazes me you know Trig, he's got a GCE in Maths, and he still acts like a total wally-brain.
(To Rodney) I'll tell you why this is good for the country, shall I Rodney? 'Cos British Rail have to hire more security guards to protect this paint thus lowering the unemployment figures - plus, their insurance company will need more people to handle British Rail claims that means redundant insurance clerks will be snatched from the dole queues and handed back their dignity. Right?
Now these people may very well celebrate their good fortune by buying a car and taking their wife and kids on a touring holiday round Britain. This will result in a much needed boost to our ailing car industry, higher revenue for North Sea Oil and a vital cash injection into seaside resorts and depressed areas.
On the other hand, they may decide to take a holiday abroad, right, thus forcing foreign hoteliers, restaurateurs and bar owners to buy more British beer, food and goods. This will result in higher export drive which, in turn, will be very good for our balance of payments surplus! Soon this country will be rich and famous again - the starving shall be fed - the homeless will be homed. Right?
When you're taking your court case straight from the mouth of Del Trotter, you *KNOW* you have a serious credibility problem.
Nowhere near 0.1% of the extra power, bandwidth, etc. caused by compromised machines, virus-ridden-spam-hosts, etc. that *can* be caused by visiting sites that you *think* are Google, Wikipedia, Facebook etc. when in fact they're not.
And anybody who worries about the environment impact of an SSL enablement really needs to go see the size and power requirements of the average ISP's datacentre, let alone someone like Google.
The problem with greenies is *not* their intentions, it's the fact that they choose TOTALLY the wrong targets to cut down on. Energy-saving lightbulbs, clockworks radios, EnergyStar monitors etc. mean *SHIT* compared to one household accidentally leaving the aircon / heating on for an extra hour for one night each decade.
Greenies should be targeting those with swimming pools, hot-tubs, aircon in countries that really don't need it, etc. rather than try to make the average householder feel guilty for his 40W bulb and TV-on-standby. You are literally orders-of-magnitude out in the things you worry about. And also you are targeting USEFUL energy (because the SSL has a purpose) and not useless energy (like that lost because someone didn't bother to close the lid on their hot-tub properly).
I have a Mexican friend. She will slap anyone who calls her American unless they go to the extreme length of qualifying it as being only the continent first. Even then, she gets pissed off. She's happy for you to call US people American, but because of vast misunderstanding in the common populace she doesn't want to be associated with the word "America" at all. If you ask her, she'll tell you she's Mexican, never American (or even North American). Even if you ask what continent she's on, she'll be likely to explain at copious length that it's only a technicality that she's in a place called North America.
Because that's almost EXACTLY what happens with UK/Europe ("Oh, you're English? I so *love* Europe") we can sympathise. To us, if you went to Europe and the UK, you went to two separate places. Hell, *we* go to Europe. We actually say that we're going to "the continent" when we go there. Technically, yes, our continental grouping is called Europe. Culturally, colloquially and even in terms of news, politics and general conversation, Europe is an entirely different place to us.
I imagine a lot of Canadians feel the same way and I have heard people say things like "You're Canadian? Cool. When I was over in New York..."
And the IT manager in me is screaming "So you let random, broken, virus-infested machines onto your network and let them connect direct to the Internet with no intervening controls, free to do whatever they like?"
Piracy is the LEAST of your worries. Hell, I'd be worried about people downloading things much more of interest to law enforcement (copyright is only a civil matter) - such as pornography, anarchist cookbooks, etc.
What you're trying to say is that if one of your customers has installed, say, a tool from Anonymous that attacks websites, or has a virus that spams email to everyone, you're going to leave it running for 72 hours on your Internet connection and assume, somehow, that that should be okay with your ISP, law enforcement, etc.
I'm surprised you haven't ALREADY been thrown off your connection by your ISP. It's basically wilful neglect of your contractual duty with them to secure your connection and take responsibility for anything that happen on your connection.
Not to mention what the hell any laptop or machine in your repair environment is doing with access to the network, wired or wireless, or Internet connection. Hell, it sounds like my laptop would leave with more problems than it went in with.
I now require you to remove the assertion in your comment that you are somehow part of a group called "IT professionals".
Damn, not only a grammar nazi, but someone that considers England to be in Europe! I thought that was a shooting offence here in the UK (or has the EU H&S statute outlawed that now?).
I introduce myself as British or, perhaps, English. To then lump me in as a European (ha, yes, you're correct, my natural instinct is to use "a", not "an") is likely to get you a very stern look, even if *technically* correct.
It's like calling a Mexican or Canadian "American". Technically correct (continent-wise), but they *will* slap you.
Actually, about half of the replies to my comment alone haven't heard of it, or literally have JUST google'd it to find out. So it's not really that nerd-relevant, certainly not to have the article summary assume we all know what the hell it is.
Above that, I "know" about a lot of websites. Some of them still run HTML 1. We don't get an announcement about every one. Even for the popular ones - it doesn't mean they make front-page news no matter what they do. "Anydoc-to-PDF website moves their code to use SQL authentication!" is no more a headline than this article, no less technical, and no less relevant. In fact, it's probably more interesting.
And, to be honest, this is smack-bang in the middle of the "recent crap" on Slashdot that has almost nothing to do with technology (website uses HTML! WOOO!), are completely unverified or even obviously false (the article is firstly WRONG in that HTML5 isn't used at all - and not much could read it if it was - and Flash is still used in places, and there are a myriad problems with the site now that there weren't before) and nothing more than putting a company name into an article for the extra clicks. Rather than push traffic to the site, I now will associate that name forever with "cheap publicity hunters, and liars when it comes to anything technical". But that's *not* what I expect to see on Slashdot, and I'm clearly not alone (even most of the people who HAVE heard of it here class it as a slashvertisement).
Where's the interview with the technical guy about what problems they had, how hard it was to do, what sort of compatibility they see, what sort of demographic changes they've observed? Nothing, just a press-release of "we've done X" linked to from their own blog. Do we get a front-page story every time eBay change their web API, for instance? That would also be infinitely more interesting yet still incredibly tedious.
Anyone with the slightest non-technical interest in the actual site would be reading their blog anyway. Anyone with more technical interest than that will actually find zero details at all. Anyone who goes digging of their own accord will find that it's actually a complete lie. And everyone else has *nothing* interesting to read.
If the comments are more interesting, detailed, correct and insightful than the article, its summary or ANY of the links, it's time for the editors to move on. This was kind of my point in making a very facetious comment first of all.
Not even that, how do you expect children to grow without experiencing? That doesn't require personal experience, any more than learning about airplanes requires you to be a pilot. But if you don't read about the wars, you'll never understand what "torture" or "genocide" etc. actually *mean*.
If it's just a word on the page, it's much easier to *commit* that act than if you have it drummed into you exactly WHAT happened (that kind of teaching inevitably comes with a certain "so never do it" moniker, but that's really not necessary if the right facts are put in front of someone). In schools I've worked in, it's been explained to 8-10 year old precisely what it means to not come back from the war. In Germany, you can visit concentration camps that show you uncensored videos of hundreds of bodies being pushed by a bulldozer into a hole in the ground as part of their educational section. This sort of stuff is horrific (in the original sense of the word) but incredibly educational.
Taking it to the other extreme, when a child's pet fish dies you can buy a replacement that looks the same, or have them help you bury it in the garden. It's sad and confusing for them, sure, but it's a very worthwhile thing to do.
The people who *complain* about these things being available understand what they are talking about only in a very removed context, thus it's easy to condemn them. But even they would have *more* knowledge of what's being banned than someone who's been insulated from everything that's banned (which could easily include lists of things that HAVE been banned).
Harry Potter is 100% harmless - it's Tolkien for kids (except in my day, Tolkien WAS for kids). But, hell, in Of Mice and Men, a best friend shoots a mentally-challenged person who's committed murder, after being afraid that other people might his friend has tried to commit rape. That book was taught to me in school, and I'm none the worse for it.
Never, in the best of schools I've been to, have I ever seen such a change as a rough class of inner-city kids come to a grinding, poignant, reflective silence - such as I witnessed in my own English class as a child as we read through the end of that book together. The closest I ever saw was when we were writing our own poems based on a poem describing war-time mustard-gassing of soldiers.
Things that are "horrific" can also be "fantastic", "terrific" or even "amazing" but only if you understand what those words actually *mean*. Just because they are horrific, does not mean you shouldn't subject yourself to them voluntarily. Better to get an idea of things by reading them first than by experiencing them.
How do you maintain availability of power for the car owner?
Yes, sure, you might be able to harness some from, say, a haulage company at the end of the day when they shut up shop but in general you can't just steal charge from people's electric cars (because the first new-father in the middle of the night that can't drive his wife to hospital is going to create a ton of bad press for you).
So you're basically looking for places that leave stored-charge cars alone, for a significant period of time (enough that they will have a FULL charge by the next time they are needed even after you've discharged them), will never use them in that time, have electric fleets large enough, have the time, money and effort to implement that sort of infrastructure at all the necessary sites (pumping back to the grid requires yet-another meter and converters, surely?) and are willing to let you do so (i.e. you pay them an incentive).
Seems like a business plan from hell, trying to find the profit in that scenario. Seems to me you'll be spending more money on providing the infrastructure to get them back to "fully charged" in time for the morning start than you'll ever gain by using them even at their scheduled downtimes.
They measured the distance between the stations to within a couple of centimetres. They calibrated multiple, independent time sources to within nanoseconds of each other.
Do you really think they're now going "DUH! What about the rotation of the Earth?!" (Besides the fact that it cancels itself out, virtually, on both ends because your reference points *both* aren't fixed and the only variation is actually due to the curvature of the Earth). They wouldn't have been able to AIM a fecking neutrino if they'd got that wrong, let alone measure it.
Which part of "had NOT been the cause" do you not understand?
They basically came to the conclusion that the fireplace wasn't the source of the fire. Myriad other things could be. He could have been smoking, the ash dropped on his shirt, a fire started (thereby eliminating the cigarette evidence in some cases), but he just happened to fall near the fireplace.
The cause of death, then, is NOT the fireplace at all, in any way. And these people deal in legalities and medical practice - if they don't think the fireplace caused it, they can't just make stuff up or say "Well, it was probably..." Thus the verdict was "spontaneous combustion" (which doesn't mean that his stomach just caught fire, but that they could not determine the cause).
The forensic investigator that says "Oh, it must have been the fire" is the one that lets a murderer get away with it, or mistakes a suicide for murder and puts innocent people behind bars. The investigator that says "I have no clue" does neither and doesn't hinder other investigations that could hinge on his evidence.
Given that all my Italian friends have already started laughing at this before this article even appeared, I'd guess the translation was accurate enough.
Yes, basically, the person in the article did honestly think there was a physical tunnel between the two, and didn't understand what neutrinos are anywhere (because they wouldn't exactly be "herded" in one direction by the walls of a tunnel).
Worse than that - according to the summary/article it's "slavery" and Valve "make" them do it.
Not like these people volunteer and do it on their own time or anything... no, Steam "knows" they are foreign and won't let them play their games until they've translated enough...
It's like saying that Counterstrike "makes" people set up servers for it, or that Minecraft "makes" you create works of art.
I found out all that information for myself separately before you posted that, but it's interesting to see the problem. I had to make the same assumption that the attack described is actually the one that was published all those years ago, which is pretty likely at this stage.
To summarise: Web browsers tend to use the NSS libraries, which have a "bug". The bug is subtle and actually part of the TLS 1.0 standard, but a tiny, standards-compliant, workaround virtually fixes the problem.
It's the same bug that OpenSSL patched 9 YEARS ago, fully knowing what they were patching and based on a publicly available paper on attacking exactly what NSS/OpenSSL were designed for (so the name "Network Security Services" is a bit of a misnomer now). The workaround is pretty basic (throw empty junk into the conversation first) but by all accounts "works".
A lot of browsers use NSS and thus are vulnerable. Some don't and thus aren't (Opera uses OpenSSL which was patched against this 9 years ago!). The "fix" that Google have committed to Chrome is basically identical to the OpenSSL fix from all those years ago.
The bug was pretty much unforeseeable all that time ago, and thus TLS 1.1 etc. were born to supplant it. You can't really blame people for the bug existing in the standard - you CAN blame them for not fixing it 9 years ago when others did exactly that, in "open" code.
Lessons to be learned:
1) SSL library authors needs to READ publicly available exploits aimed at the code they are developing.
2) They need to read other project's bug/commit-logs/security warnings if they are serious about being a competitor to their security.
3) Don't use libraries that don't do the above if you want to be taken seriously, and certainly not in a mainstream millions-of-deployments browser.
4) Update your libraries and recompile your code when they change.
OpenSSL know what they are doing and have a good reputation. NSS are pretty much amateurs. Think of that next time you want to use an SSL library.
But if a stranger phones me up in the middle of the night claiming to be from "Ford Motor Company", telling me that they need me to send them the car keys, or leave the car unlocked so they can come and "fix" it, I will be inherently suspicious and won't part with anything for anything short of a court order.
They could claim to be "recalling" my car - that would be fine. I'd hang up, phone Ford's and check if that's true (as well as checking news stories). It's not difficult if they are REALLY genuine, they will let me do that, on the number that *I* choose (i.e. the actual Ford service department number taken from their website or a phone directory). I bet you Ford would never have heard of them.
If a bank phone me up claiming that I need to pay them £1000, that's fine. You tell me my account number, you give *ME* my details. No? I'll just have to hang up and go through my bank's telephone support lines then to see what the problem is.
(I have seen people answer a ringing phone only to then IMMEDIATELY give out their bank security details on the basis that someone who knew their name said that it was the bank calling about a problem and "could you just give me the 3rd and 4th characters of your password..." Er. No. Because I have *NO* idea who you are. You tell me my secret question / other details first and then we'll talk. Or else you give me your name/department and ***I*** will ring the main bank switchboard and ask to be put through to you.)
Just because you're not literate in a subject does not mean you should be stupid about it. I have absolutely zero qualifications in car repair - but I know if someone is trying to rip me off. This is the equivalent of someone on the street asking for your car and keys for 48 hours in order to clean your tyres.
Even if I had zero knowledge of computers, I would be inherently suspicious that someone "knew" what my machine was doing.
First off, it would be illegal for them to know such things (you KNOW what programs I'm running on my personal computer and decide to contact me about it? Nope), secondly, I would need to know who they are and how they got my phone number (which, again, would be illegal unless I'd given it to THAT named company - which would be highly unlikely), thirdly they have absolutely no business interfering with my personal machine (no matter what they say), fourthly as soon as they start giving me instructions (actually ORDERS on things for me to do) they will be hung up on. Your phone company don't ring you and say "Can you just pop outside and hook your phone line back up for us?". You want it fixed? You come and do it.
Fifth, if they had an INCREDIBLY convincing story about why I needed to buy their service, that's fine. I'll buy it from a vendor that *I* want and won't give you my credit card details over the phone.
At worst, being very gullible, you'd make me unplug my machine (because I might be "breaking the Internet" or something, and that's why you phoned me, I don't know) and either get someone of MY choice in to look at it, or at least ask someone knowledgeable their opinion on the phone call. Why do I know that's what sensible people would do? Because perfectly-sensible, non-computer people ask me about things like this ALL THE TIME.
It's only the idiots that do what they are told, and hand over their computer/credit card to a complete stranger without checking that are the problem. It has NOTHING to do with computer literacy.
Tip: Ask what company they work for. If you haven't heard of them, hang up. If they claim to be acting on behalf of "your" phone company / energy company / ISP, ask them to name it. Ask them for your customer number. In all the scam calls (and even people knocking on my door) that I receive for these things, nobody has yet passed that test. Even if they COULD, I still won't let them do anything without knowing they work for the company (it's easy, after all, to pick up an old bill from the tra
In the same way that you can take ANY movie, song lyric, book etc. and interpret it in terms of drug-taking, you can do the same with sexual references. (Seriously, I've played this game at parties with people who INSIST that song lyrics that sound drug/sex-like must have been written that way - Puff the Magic Dragon, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, etc. - you can make parallels to almost anything and get more drug references out of children's books than you can hardcore rock).
But children don't and won't do this, because they haven't (or SHOULDN'T have been exposed to that yet). They just don't work that way until they are old enough to be considered independent beings (i.e. teenagers, normally) and, by then, them watching Shrek is the least of the things you have to worry about.
Any child old enough to watch Shrek and think "blowjob" (or even understand the word) is going to be a rare thing and probably have had a poor upbringing. And, in that atmosphere, you can claim that Bert & Ernie were a gay couple, etc. just as easily (again, just as easy as drugs/sex references).
When you are a CHILD (i.e. not heard of those things and not old enough to look after yourself), you do not interpret things sexually - that's what puberty is for, and what it brings with it. And then even the garden gnome could look sexy.
When you are a young adult, you might think "heh, heh, it looks like he's licking his balls" but if you sexualise that, it's not because Pixar left it in there for you to do so, it's because of your state of mind.
If you honestly have a bugbear that makes you think Shrek has a "blowjob" scene, then it says more about you. Cats lick themselves. My cat (female) is right next to me now doing it. They do it all day long. It's one of the stereotypical features of a cat or dog, like hairballs, preening, etc. (which are all played up in the movie too). Whether the cat is humanised or not is neither here nor there (animals have sex, too, you know and even some people have had sex with animals).
It's not sexualised until you KNOW what a blowjob is, in the same way that the pretty-woman in the bunny costume is just a bunny until you hit a certain age. Unlike a porn movie which will TEACH you what a blowjob is even if you aren't thinking about it and it would never have occurred to you and you'd never witnessed it or the word before. That's the difference.
Hell, in my country, every other printed newspaper has a nude woman on page 3 at the very least (and some are nothing but nude women, but generally available in newsagents even if you only browse). The top-shelf of every newsagent is filled with clearly-visible porn mags with scantily-clad women poking out at you.
When you're a child you DO NOT notice those things (except in the "mummy, what's that?" kind of way and you rarely investigate further and take no notice that there's 3 rows of smut above your comics). Get to teenage/puberty and you'll think that the women in the home shopping catalogues are sexy and go out of your way to see them, of course you will. The difference is that NONE of that, or Shrek, will teach your child anything. You could safely leave them in a room with Shrek for their entire lives and they won't learn how to perform a blowjob or start asking their girlfriends (or cat) for one.
You have no need to protect your child from Shrek, any more than you stop them going near the garden gnome when they hit puberty. But there are a lot of things out there that, without adequate control, WILL teach your child / young adult things that they shouldn't know. The difference is how you control their exposure, and how you handle it when it DOES happen (because, at some point, it will).
It's a fact of the modern age that, at some point, before they are legally mature enough to perform the act, your son/daughter will be exposed SOMEHOW to the concept of sex and pornography. A kid in the playground with a YouTube clip (used to be a dirty magazine in my day... moder
TBH, it doesn't take a genius to work it out. If you're using the ARM instruction set, your apps aren't going to run on x86, and vice versa (run nicely, or run at all). Although it's theoretically possible (Turing-complete and all that), the performance hit by doing so would be the same as just emulating the other environment (which kinda makes trying to "save battery" - the least of my concerns with a Windows tablet - a waste of time, because you'll be doing extra work to emulate something else).
The way Apple got around it was to make a "dual-binary", where you could have one executable contain two sets of executable code - one for ARM, say, and one for x86 - and with formats like ELF, this is a cinch. You execute whatever one you can and hope the programmers had the foresight to include both.
But, again, without a recompile, that old version of Office will always be x86 or have to be emulated as if it WAS an x86 program. Did you think MS and every software manufacturer were going to go and recompile every Windows program in existence just so you can run it on Windows 8? And have every business in the world moan that Windows isn't compatible with itself even though MS told it it was? Only MS-controlled and newly-written software would be available that way, and most businesses would rather ditch the OS than be forced down the path of which software they MUST run.
No, they'll produce new programs which *COULD* have run on both but they are deliberately deciding not to, but in two different versions. That way, if the ARM one doesn't work / sell, they can blame the platform. There is nothing stopping them doing what Apple did with newer programs except possibly an Apple patent or two (and the two have a lot of patent-sharing between them, not to mention each owning parts of the other). This way, they get two lots of money from you and/or they can make ARM seem like a waste of time because "it can't do Windows" rather than a new market they could swamp overnight.
They were never intending to make it work properly on ARM, the same way that the Windows NT ports supported Intel IA-32, MIPS R3000/R4000, Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium, AMD64 and ARM. It's a niche and they rely on third-party applications to sell their OS - they have to keep *some* backwards compatibility and businesses churning out x86 Win32/64 code or their operating system has nothing to live for any more. A lot of money goes Microsoft's way because of the way you "have" to buy Windows on the machine. If they start selling things on ARM, they would have to try to get that same sort of exclusivity / reputation for necessity that they have on x86, and it wouldn't fly.
I have a feeling it would also show up their programming teams because I very much doubt that most of their code would run on different endianness, etc. processors, different memory architectures, etc. because it's just so focused on x86.
MS never wanted to put "Windows" as most people know it on a tablet - they know it wouldn't work for them and cause them more hassle than it was worth, even if they introduced new terminology. People would still want to know why they can't put their ten-year-old copy of Sage on it, and why the OS was bundled with the machine they bought if they couldn't do that.
In theory, there is NOTHING stopping them porting Windows proper to another architecture, including all their top applications, and nothing preventing a situation similar to Apple's Universal Binary, or even just an emulator from doing this job with relatively little effort beyond what they have (e.g. you have an NT codebase on this platform already!). The problem is that it will destroy their marketing strategies - they won't be able to ensure they're bundled on every ARM machine, and if they were, they would get a million-and-one criticisms about how its not as fast as Windows on x86 and why did they let people waste money on it?
"Think about a giant Ostrich" - one that's about the size of a chicken.
To follow my rules for keeping pets - I'd be quite happy to have it because I *COULD* drop-kick it over the wall if it were to turn against me. (And hence, I don't keep Great Danes or any of a range of other breeds of dog as pets).
Because the second you tell people where they were found, you get a billion people cutting through the rock to try to find their own, to keep or to sell on, destroying everything that is there.
Slashdot Mirror
Although I wouldn't ever dismiss such things as "never going to happen", the point is that 99% of people who have Office installed (or, worse, go out and buy it separately) have every need they'll ever have for a office suite catered for by LibreOffice.
Personally, it's more than good enough for anything I ever used Office for and when I take into account the cost, I'm more than happy to fiddle a little more with a free product than pay to save a tiny bit of rare inconvenience. To be honest, LibreOffice actually gets more done for me - for a start, any file that MSOffice struggles to open can usually be thrown into LibreOffice and *something* got out of it without having to faff with import filters.
Not everything has to be about making a program that every big business will immediately switch to. That's the "Linux desktop" argument that's been in play for the last decade and is a really bad way to think about things - there are more legitimate privately-held copies of Windows/Office out there than there are business ones.
The point is that LibreOffice is "good enough" for "enough" users that they'll never need to buy or touch MS Office if they don't want to - that alone makes it worth developing for and supporting. I have no interest in them adding big-business-only features that I'll never use, I'd much rather they spent my donations on getting things that everybody will use working. The businesses can bloody look after themselves if they want to and need a critical feature - either by sponsoring the feature or by throwing their own developers on it. The little guys can't do that, and the people at home certainly can't.
I'm an IT Manager for a private school that uses MS software on all its desktops (educational and administrative). I do *not* have MS Office installed on my work laptop (the only machine I personally use apart from servers), I have LibreOffice. Not only have I never received a file that I couldn't open, or one that had broken formulae and couldn't be used, but I use LibreOffice to open ancient/weird/newer formats of office documents from parents etc. in order to convert them to something the teachers/office staff can actually open. And every letter / results spreadsheet that passes through the office ends up as a PDF on our website - a PDF created by LibreOffice's export feature.
Hell, we run our sportsday via complex Excel spreadsheets, not to mention test-result-analysis, everyday office stuff, mailmerge, etc. I'm not saying LibreOffice would do *everything* we could potentially throw at it, but the point is that as someone managing IT for an MS Office environment, I've never needed anything that LibreOffice is missing.
That means, for the vast, vast majority of Office users, there's no reason they couldn't use it too.
This is true of a lot of programs that people use everyday. Most of our software is free or open-source because, for example, VLC does a million times better job of JUST PLAYING THE DAMN DVD than anything that was bundled with the computer ever will (and is consistent, whereas there are half-a-dozen pieces of "bundled" DVD player software that come through my office on new laptops - they all go into the "never install, but keep around" drawer).
That said, I also use a bucketful of Open Source programs to do lots of things that I used to have to buy proprietary applications for (Scribus, InkScape, Openfire - a Jabber server - hell even our VPN is OpenVPN) and have never touched GIMP because it's completely inadequate (though the Gimp-Photoshop-lookalike was infinitely more usable). I'm not suggesting any of them would be useful to someone on the cutting-edge of what the proprietary equivalent can do, but for the vast majority of users, such programs do everything they need and cost infinitely less.
Even "free" (but not open-source) software can make amazing savings on the average desktop (business or personal). Our standard install image here has, at a minimum:
Audacity
CDBurner XP Pro
FileZilla
Firefox
Flamebaiting bastard.
(As most UK people will know, the movie U-571 is entirely bullshit about how the US captured an Enigma machine from a boat that, in real life, was never involved)
Wonder how the Yanks would feel about a British movie depicting the Boston Tea Party as a British success...
Did you miss the point that it was mainly secret in its working days (so it was in a quiet town, in the middle of nowhere, away from German bombs) but is now in a modern-day town where it has zero impact on the local economy, that most of the equipment was destroyed afterwards (and hence what you see is the result of DECADES of restoration work of then-top-secret equipment of which virtually nothing original remains), that the building has been derelict (hence the raising of money) ever since it was *deliberately* cleared and abandoned decades ago? At the moment it is *literally* run by fanatics, not cash, so a few scavenged posters is all they have left after reconstructing all that equipment. Everything else is in planning stages.
You don't preserve the place by turning into The Canterbury Tales with talking characters, etc. especially with ZERO funding that they've had up until now (hence this being a news story that they CAN actually put something there now - and so they should).
Like the Stalag that I went to visit in Germany last year that was nothing more than a bit of grass with some vague building outlines on and a little building with old movies/photos, it was never designed to be a tourist attraction and still isn't except for those who understand what it WAS.
That said, my brother has taken Scout groups to Bletchley several times (he was given a valve-amp, by someone who worked there on the reconstruction, for the kids to study) - so long as you set the scene and explain what's going on there, it's still pretty interesting.
The preservation of it is important but IT HASN'T STARTED. Not properly. For decades it's just been people saying it *should* be preserved but they have literally only just been given the funds to do so - and in ten years time it will be a more interesting place to take your kids.
Personally, I'd rather they built any museum / exhibit close-by and preserved the original buildings as best they could but I doubt it will happen.
Actually, I don't. The problem with complaining about such things is that you look a complete arse (a perfectly-correct English word that is harsher than ass and has no donkey connotations) when you are wrong and only a slightly-smaller arse when you're right.
Anybody who buys a game without trying a demo first, on the hardware they intend to play on, gets everything they deserve. That's been the rule since the 80's.
If a game doesn't offer a demo, OnLive one or rent it. Anyone silly enough to load up a brand-new, full-price game onto a machine and discover problems like this only AFTER the purchase has been made is just asking for trouble - where's the incentive to fix it when someone's already paid for it?
In the same way, anything Microsoft below SP2 just isn't worth running. The same rule works for *so* many things in the PC world that it's unbelievable. And don't even get me started on "pre-orders"...
Anybody genuinely shocked by this?
And if you extrapolate enough, you can take anything to extreme and prove just about anything. That's why statisticians and experts are supposed to come up with what's reasonable, not something that exceeds global GDP because of someone copying a single CD.
There was a British comedy called Only Fools and Horses which contains the following exchange, which I consider no different to these methods:
Rodney: It doesn't matter what they use it for, Trig, it's still knocked off - and it's still illegal.
Del: Yeah, but it's good for the country though Rodney, innit?
Rodney: Come on Del, how can nicking off British Rail be good for Britain?
Del: (To Trig) He amazes me you know Trig, he's got a GCE in Maths, and he still acts like a total wally-brain.
(To Rodney) I'll tell you why this is good for the country, shall I Rodney? 'Cos British Rail have to hire more security guards to protect this paint thus lowering the unemployment figures - plus, their insurance company will need more people to handle British Rail claims that means redundant insurance clerks will be snatched from the dole queues and handed back their dignity. Right?
Now these people may very well celebrate their good fortune by buying a car and taking their wife and kids on a touring holiday round Britain. This will result in a much needed boost to our ailing car industry, higher revenue for North Sea Oil and a vital cash injection into seaside resorts and depressed areas.
On the other hand, they may decide to take a holiday abroad, right, thus forcing foreign hoteliers, restaurateurs and bar owners to buy more British beer, food and goods. This will result in higher export drive which, in turn, will be very good for our balance of payments surplus! Soon this country will be rich and famous again - the starving shall be fed - the homeless will be homed. Right?
When you're taking your court case straight from the mouth of Del Trotter, you *KNOW* you have a serious credibility problem.
Nowhere near 0.1% of the extra power, bandwidth, etc. caused by compromised machines, virus-ridden-spam-hosts, etc. that *can* be caused by visiting sites that you *think* are Google, Wikipedia, Facebook etc. when in fact they're not.
And anybody who worries about the environment impact of an SSL enablement really needs to go see the size and power requirements of the average ISP's datacentre, let alone someone like Google.
The problem with greenies is *not* their intentions, it's the fact that they choose TOTALLY the wrong targets to cut down on. Energy-saving lightbulbs, clockworks radios, EnergyStar monitors etc. mean *SHIT* compared to one household accidentally leaving the aircon / heating on for an extra hour for one night each decade.
Greenies should be targeting those with swimming pools, hot-tubs, aircon in countries that really don't need it, etc. rather than try to make the average householder feel guilty for his 40W bulb and TV-on-standby. You are literally orders-of-magnitude out in the things you worry about. And also you are targeting USEFUL energy (because the SSL has a purpose) and not useless energy (like that lost because someone didn't bother to close the lid on their hot-tub properly).
I have a Mexican friend. She will slap anyone who calls her American unless they go to the extreme length of qualifying it as being only the continent first. Even then, she gets pissed off. She's happy for you to call US people American, but because of vast misunderstanding in the common populace she doesn't want to be associated with the word "America" at all. If you ask her, she'll tell you she's Mexican, never American (or even North American). Even if you ask what continent she's on, she'll be likely to explain at copious length that it's only a technicality that she's in a place called North America.
Because that's almost EXACTLY what happens with UK/Europe ("Oh, you're English? I so *love* Europe") we can sympathise. To us, if you went to Europe and the UK, you went to two separate places. Hell, *we* go to Europe. We actually say that we're going to "the continent" when we go there. Technically, yes, our continental grouping is called Europe. Culturally, colloquially and even in terms of news, politics and general conversation, Europe is an entirely different place to us.
I imagine a lot of Canadians feel the same way and I have heard people say things like "You're Canadian? Cool. When I was over in New York..."
This is hardly a compelling argument.
And the IT manager in me is screaming "So you let random, broken, virus-infested machines onto your network and let them connect direct to the Internet with no intervening controls, free to do whatever they like?"
Piracy is the LEAST of your worries. Hell, I'd be worried about people downloading things much more of interest to law enforcement (copyright is only a civil matter) - such as pornography, anarchist cookbooks, etc.
What you're trying to say is that if one of your customers has installed, say, a tool from Anonymous that attacks websites, or has a virus that spams email to everyone, you're going to leave it running for 72 hours on your Internet connection and assume, somehow, that that should be okay with your ISP, law enforcement, etc.
I'm surprised you haven't ALREADY been thrown off your connection by your ISP. It's basically wilful neglect of your contractual duty with them to secure your connection and take responsibility for anything that happen on your connection.
Not to mention what the hell any laptop or machine in your repair environment is doing with access to the network, wired or wireless, or Internet connection. Hell, it sounds like my laptop would leave with more problems than it went in with.
I now require you to remove the assertion in your comment that you are somehow part of a group called "IT professionals".
Damn, not only a grammar nazi, but someone that considers England to be in Europe! I thought that was a shooting offence here in the UK (or has the EU H&S statute outlawed that now?).
I introduce myself as British or, perhaps, English. To then lump me in as a European (ha, yes, you're correct, my natural instinct is to use "a", not "an") is likely to get you a very stern look, even if *technically* correct.
It's like calling a Mexican or Canadian "American". Technically correct (continent-wise), but they *will* slap you.
Actually, about half of the replies to my comment alone haven't heard of it, or literally have JUST google'd it to find out. So it's not really that nerd-relevant, certainly not to have the article summary assume we all know what the hell it is.
Above that, I "know" about a lot of websites. Some of them still run HTML 1. We don't get an announcement about every one. Even for the popular ones - it doesn't mean they make front-page news no matter what they do. "Anydoc-to-PDF website moves their code to use SQL authentication!" is no more a headline than this article, no less technical, and no less relevant. In fact, it's probably more interesting.
And, to be honest, this is smack-bang in the middle of the "recent crap" on Slashdot that has almost nothing to do with technology (website uses HTML! WOOO!), are completely unverified or even obviously false (the article is firstly WRONG in that HTML5 isn't used at all - and not much could read it if it was - and Flash is still used in places, and there are a myriad problems with the site now that there weren't before) and nothing more than putting a company name into an article for the extra clicks. Rather than push traffic to the site, I now will associate that name forever with "cheap publicity hunters, and liars when it comes to anything technical". But that's *not* what I expect to see on Slashdot, and I'm clearly not alone (even most of the people who HAVE heard of it here class it as a slashvertisement).
Where's the interview with the technical guy about what problems they had, how hard it was to do, what sort of compatibility they see, what sort of demographic changes they've observed? Nothing, just a press-release of "we've done X" linked to from their own blog. Do we get a front-page story every time eBay change their web API, for instance? That would also be infinitely more interesting yet still incredibly tedious.
Anyone with the slightest non-technical interest in the actual site would be reading their blog anyway. Anyone with more technical interest than that will actually find zero details at all. Anyone who goes digging of their own accord will find that it's actually a complete lie. And everyone else has *nothing* interesting to read.
If the comments are more interesting, detailed, correct and insightful than the article, its summary or ANY of the links, it's time for the editors to move on. This was kind of my point in making a very facetious comment first of all.
5) What kind of nerd thinks those were any more than rhetorical questions to make a point?
Not even that, how do you expect children to grow without experiencing? That doesn't require personal experience, any more than learning about airplanes requires you to be a pilot. But if you don't read about the wars, you'll never understand what "torture" or "genocide" etc. actually *mean*.
If it's just a word on the page, it's much easier to *commit* that act than if you have it drummed into you exactly WHAT happened (that kind of teaching inevitably comes with a certain "so never do it" moniker, but that's really not necessary if the right facts are put in front of someone). In schools I've worked in, it's been explained to 8-10 year old precisely what it means to not come back from the war. In Germany, you can visit concentration camps that show you uncensored videos of hundreds of bodies being pushed by a bulldozer into a hole in the ground as part of their educational section. This sort of stuff is horrific (in the original sense of the word) but incredibly educational.
Taking it to the other extreme, when a child's pet fish dies you can buy a replacement that looks the same, or have them help you bury it in the garden. It's sad and confusing for them, sure, but it's a very worthwhile thing to do.
The people who *complain* about these things being available understand what they are talking about only in a very removed context, thus it's easy to condemn them. But even they would have *more* knowledge of what's being banned than someone who's been insulated from everything that's banned (which could easily include lists of things that HAVE been banned).
Harry Potter is 100% harmless - it's Tolkien for kids (except in my day, Tolkien WAS for kids). But, hell, in Of Mice and Men, a best friend shoots a mentally-challenged person who's committed murder, after being afraid that other people might his friend has tried to commit rape. That book was taught to me in school, and I'm none the worse for it.
Never, in the best of schools I've been to, have I ever seen such a change as a rough class of inner-city kids come to a grinding, poignant, reflective silence - such as I witnessed in my own English class as a child as we read through the end of that book together. The closest I ever saw was when we were writing our own poems based on a poem describing war-time mustard-gassing of soldiers.
Things that are "horrific" can also be "fantastic", "terrific" or even "amazing" but only if you understand what those words actually *mean*. Just because they are horrific, does not mean you shouldn't subject yourself to them voluntarily. Better to get an idea of things by reading them first than by experiencing them.
1) Who the hell are SlideShare?
2) Why would I care?
3) What makes it frontpage material for nerds?
How do you maintain availability of power for the car owner?
Yes, sure, you might be able to harness some from, say, a haulage company at the end of the day when they shut up shop but in general you can't just steal charge from people's electric cars (because the first new-father in the middle of the night that can't drive his wife to hospital is going to create a ton of bad press for you).
So you're basically looking for places that leave stored-charge cars alone, for a significant period of time (enough that they will have a FULL charge by the next time they are needed even after you've discharged them), will never use them in that time, have electric fleets large enough, have the time, money and effort to implement that sort of infrastructure at all the necessary sites (pumping back to the grid requires yet-another meter and converters, surely?) and are willing to let you do so (i.e. you pay them an incentive).
Seems like a business plan from hell, trying to find the profit in that scenario. Seems to me you'll be spending more money on providing the infrastructure to get them back to "fully charged" in time for the morning start than you'll ever gain by using them even at their scheduled downtimes.
They measured the distance between the stations to within a couple of centimetres. They calibrated multiple, independent time sources to within nanoseconds of each other.
Do you really think they're now going "DUH! What about the rotation of the Earth?!" (Besides the fact that it cancels itself out, virtually, on both ends because your reference points *both* aren't fixed and the only variation is actually due to the curvature of the Earth). They wouldn't have been able to AIM a fecking neutrino if they'd got that wrong, let alone measure it.
Which part of "had NOT been the cause" do you not understand?
They basically came to the conclusion that the fireplace wasn't the source of the fire. Myriad other things could be. He could have been smoking, the ash dropped on his shirt, a fire started (thereby eliminating the cigarette evidence in some cases), but he just happened to fall near the fireplace.
The cause of death, then, is NOT the fireplace at all, in any way. And these people deal in legalities and medical practice - if they don't think the fireplace caused it, they can't just make stuff up or say "Well, it was probably..." Thus the verdict was "spontaneous combustion" (which doesn't mean that his stomach just caught fire, but that they could not determine the cause).
The forensic investigator that says "Oh, it must have been the fire" is the one that lets a murderer get away with it, or mistakes a suicide for murder and puts innocent people behind bars. The investigator that says "I have no clue" does neither and doesn't hinder other investigations that could hinge on his evidence.
Given that all my Italian friends have already started laughing at this before this article even appeared, I'd guess the translation was accurate enough.
Yes, basically, the person in the article did honestly think there was a physical tunnel between the two, and didn't understand what neutrinos are anywhere (because they wouldn't exactly be "herded" in one direction by the walls of a tunnel).
Worse than that - according to the summary/article it's "slavery" and Valve "make" them do it.
Not like these people volunteer and do it on their own time or anything... no, Steam "knows" they are foreign and won't let them play their games until they've translated enough...
It's like saying that Counterstrike "makes" people set up servers for it, or that Minecraft "makes" you create works of art.
I found out all that information for myself separately before you posted that, but it's interesting to see the problem. I had to make the same assumption that the attack described is actually the one that was published all those years ago, which is pretty likely at this stage.
To summarise: Web browsers tend to use the NSS libraries, which have a "bug". The bug is subtle and actually part of the TLS 1.0 standard, but a tiny, standards-compliant, workaround virtually fixes the problem.
It's the same bug that OpenSSL patched 9 YEARS ago, fully knowing what they were patching and based on a publicly available paper on attacking exactly what NSS/OpenSSL were designed for (so the name "Network Security Services" is a bit of a misnomer now). The workaround is pretty basic (throw empty junk into the conversation first) but by all accounts "works".
A lot of browsers use NSS and thus are vulnerable. Some don't and thus aren't (Opera uses OpenSSL which was patched against this 9 years ago!). The "fix" that Google have committed to Chrome is basically identical to the OpenSSL fix from all those years ago.
The bug was pretty much unforeseeable all that time ago, and thus TLS 1.1 etc. were born to supplant it. You can't really blame people for the bug existing in the standard - you CAN blame them for not fixing it 9 years ago when others did exactly that, in "open" code.
Lessons to be learned:
1) SSL library authors needs to READ publicly available exploits aimed at the code they are developing.
2) They need to read other project's bug/commit-logs/security warnings if they are serious about being a competitor to their security.
3) Don't use libraries that don't do the above if you want to be taken seriously, and certainly not in a mainstream millions-of-deployments browser.
4) Update your libraries and recompile your code when they change.
OpenSSL know what they are doing and have a good reputation. NSS are pretty much amateurs. Think of that next time you want to use an SSL library.
I know NOTHING about cars.
But if a stranger phones me up in the middle of the night claiming to be from "Ford Motor Company", telling me that they need me to send them the car keys, or leave the car unlocked so they can come and "fix" it, I will be inherently suspicious and won't part with anything for anything short of a court order.
They could claim to be "recalling" my car - that would be fine. I'd hang up, phone Ford's and check if that's true (as well as checking news stories). It's not difficult if they are REALLY genuine, they will let me do that, on the number that *I* choose (i.e. the actual Ford service department number taken from their website or a phone directory). I bet you Ford would never have heard of them.
If a bank phone me up claiming that I need to pay them £1000, that's fine. You tell me my account number, you give *ME* my details. No? I'll just have to hang up and go through my bank's telephone support lines then to see what the problem is.
(I have seen people answer a ringing phone only to then IMMEDIATELY give out their bank security details on the basis that someone who knew their name said that it was the bank calling about a problem and "could you just give me the 3rd and 4th characters of your password..." Er. No. Because I have *NO* idea who you are. You tell me my secret question / other details first and then we'll talk. Or else you give me your name/department and ***I*** will ring the main bank switchboard and ask to be put through to you.)
Just because you're not literate in a subject does not mean you should be stupid about it. I have absolutely zero qualifications in car repair - but I know if someone is trying to rip me off. This is the equivalent of someone on the street asking for your car and keys for 48 hours in order to clean your tyres.
Even if I had zero knowledge of computers, I would be inherently suspicious that someone "knew" what my machine was doing.
First off, it would be illegal for them to know such things (you KNOW what programs I'm running on my personal computer and decide to contact me about it? Nope), secondly, I would need to know who they are and how they got my phone number (which, again, would be illegal unless I'd given it to THAT named company - which would be highly unlikely), thirdly they have absolutely no business interfering with my personal machine (no matter what they say), fourthly as soon as they start giving me instructions (actually ORDERS on things for me to do) they will be hung up on. Your phone company don't ring you and say "Can you just pop outside and hook your phone line back up for us?". You want it fixed? You come and do it.
Fifth, if they had an INCREDIBLY convincing story about why I needed to buy their service, that's fine. I'll buy it from a vendor that *I* want and won't give you my credit card details over the phone.
At worst, being very gullible, you'd make me unplug my machine (because I might be "breaking the Internet" or something, and that's why you phoned me, I don't know) and either get someone of MY choice in to look at it, or at least ask someone knowledgeable their opinion on the phone call. Why do I know that's what sensible people would do? Because perfectly-sensible, non-computer people ask me about things like this ALL THE TIME.
It's only the idiots that do what they are told, and hand over their computer/credit card to a complete stranger without checking that are the problem. It has NOTHING to do with computer literacy.
Tip: Ask what company they work for. If you haven't heard of them, hang up. If they claim to be acting on behalf of "your" phone company / energy company / ISP, ask them to name it. Ask them for your customer number. In all the scam calls (and even people knocking on my door) that I receive for these things, nobody has yet passed that test. Even if they COULD, I still won't let them do anything without knowing they work for the company (it's easy, after all, to pick up an old bill from the tra
I don't agree.
In the same way that you can take ANY movie, song lyric, book etc. and interpret it in terms of drug-taking, you can do the same with sexual references. (Seriously, I've played this game at parties with people who INSIST that song lyrics that sound drug/sex-like must have been written that way - Puff the Magic Dragon, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, etc. - you can make parallels to almost anything and get more drug references out of children's books than you can hardcore rock).
But children don't and won't do this, because they haven't (or SHOULDN'T have been exposed to that yet). They just don't work that way until they are old enough to be considered independent beings (i.e. teenagers, normally) and, by then, them watching Shrek is the least of the things you have to worry about.
Any child old enough to watch Shrek and think "blowjob" (or even understand the word) is going to be a rare thing and probably have had a poor upbringing. And, in that atmosphere, you can claim that Bert & Ernie were a gay couple, etc. just as easily (again, just as easy as drugs/sex references).
When you are a CHILD (i.e. not heard of those things and not old enough to look after yourself), you do not interpret things sexually - that's what puberty is for, and what it brings with it. And then even the garden gnome could look sexy.
When you are a young adult, you might think "heh, heh, it looks like he's licking his balls" but if you sexualise that, it's not because Pixar left it in there for you to do so, it's because of your state of mind.
If you honestly have a bugbear that makes you think Shrek has a "blowjob" scene, then it says more about you. Cats lick themselves. My cat (female) is right next to me now doing it. They do it all day long. It's one of the stereotypical features of a cat or dog, like hairballs, preening, etc. (which are all played up in the movie too). Whether the cat is humanised or not is neither here nor there (animals have sex, too, you know and even some people have had sex with animals).
It's not sexualised until you KNOW what a blowjob is, in the same way that the pretty-woman in the bunny costume is just a bunny until you hit a certain age. Unlike a porn movie which will TEACH you what a blowjob is even if you aren't thinking about it and it would never have occurred to you and you'd never witnessed it or the word before. That's the difference.
Hell, in my country, every other printed newspaper has a nude woman on page 3 at the very least (and some are nothing but nude women, but generally available in newsagents even if you only browse). The top-shelf of every newsagent is filled with clearly-visible porn mags with scantily-clad women poking out at you.
When you're a child you DO NOT notice those things (except in the "mummy, what's that?" kind of way and you rarely investigate further and take no notice that there's 3 rows of smut above your comics). Get to teenage/puberty and you'll think that the women in the home shopping catalogues are sexy and go out of your way to see them, of course you will. The difference is that NONE of that, or Shrek, will teach your child anything. You could safely leave them in a room with Shrek for their entire lives and they won't learn how to perform a blowjob or start asking their girlfriends (or cat) for one.
You have no need to protect your child from Shrek, any more than you stop them going near the garden gnome when they hit puberty. But there are a lot of things out there that, without adequate control, WILL teach your child / young adult things that they shouldn't know. The difference is how you control their exposure, and how you handle it when it DOES happen (because, at some point, it will).
It's a fact of the modern age that, at some point, before they are legally mature enough to perform the act, your son/daughter will be exposed SOMEHOW to the concept of sex and pornography. A kid in the playground with a YouTube clip (used to be a dirty magazine in my day... moder
TBH, it doesn't take a genius to work it out. If you're using the ARM instruction set, your apps aren't going to run on x86, and vice versa (run nicely, or run at all). Although it's theoretically possible (Turing-complete and all that), the performance hit by doing so would be the same as just emulating the other environment (which kinda makes trying to "save battery" - the least of my concerns with a Windows tablet - a waste of time, because you'll be doing extra work to emulate something else).
The way Apple got around it was to make a "dual-binary", where you could have one executable contain two sets of executable code - one for ARM, say, and one for x86 - and with formats like ELF, this is a cinch. You execute whatever one you can and hope the programmers had the foresight to include both.
But, again, without a recompile, that old version of Office will always be x86 or have to be emulated as if it WAS an x86 program. Did you think MS and every software manufacturer were going to go and recompile every Windows program in existence just so you can run it on Windows 8? And have every business in the world moan that Windows isn't compatible with itself even though MS told it it was? Only MS-controlled and newly-written software would be available that way, and most businesses would rather ditch the OS than be forced down the path of which software they MUST run.
No, they'll produce new programs which *COULD* have run on both but they are deliberately deciding not to, but in two different versions. That way, if the ARM one doesn't work / sell, they can blame the platform. There is nothing stopping them doing what Apple did with newer programs except possibly an Apple patent or two (and the two have a lot of patent-sharing between them, not to mention each owning parts of the other). This way, they get two lots of money from you and/or they can make ARM seem like a waste of time because "it can't do Windows" rather than a new market they could swamp overnight.
They were never intending to make it work properly on ARM, the same way that the Windows NT ports supported Intel IA-32, MIPS R3000/R4000, Alpha, PowerPC, Itanium, AMD64 and ARM. It's a niche and they rely on third-party applications to sell their OS - they have to keep *some* backwards compatibility and businesses churning out x86 Win32/64 code or their operating system has nothing to live for any more. A lot of money goes Microsoft's way because of the way you "have" to buy Windows on the machine. If they start selling things on ARM, they would have to try to get that same sort of exclusivity / reputation for necessity that they have on x86, and it wouldn't fly.
I have a feeling it would also show up their programming teams because I very much doubt that most of their code would run on different endianness, etc. processors, different memory architectures, etc. because it's just so focused on x86.
MS never wanted to put "Windows" as most people know it on a tablet - they know it wouldn't work for them and cause them more hassle than it was worth, even if they introduced new terminology. People would still want to know why they can't put their ten-year-old copy of Sage on it, and why the OS was bundled with the machine they bought if they couldn't do that.
In theory, there is NOTHING stopping them porting Windows proper to another architecture, including all their top applications, and nothing preventing a situation similar to Apple's Universal Binary, or even just an emulator from doing this job with relatively little effort beyond what they have (e.g. you have an NT codebase on this platform already!). The problem is that it will destroy their marketing strategies - they won't be able to ensure they're bundled on every ARM machine, and if they were, they would get a million-and-one criticisms about how its not as fast as Windows on x86 and why did they let people waste money on it?
"Think about a giant Ostrich" - one that's about the size of a chicken.
To follow my rules for keeping pets - I'd be quite happy to have it because I *COULD* drop-kick it over the wall if it were to turn against me. (And hence, I don't keep Great Danes or any of a range of other breeds of dog as pets).
Because the second you tell people where they were found, you get a billion people cutting through the rock to try to find their own, to keep or to sell on, destroying everything that is there.