He appeared on a TV show in the UK basically arguing just that. When the time came, he wanted to be able to press a button or whatever and choose himself, and it was long after he started down the road to Alzheimer's that he appeared and argued that.
Actually he barely said a word. He was too far gone down the Alzheimer's route by then, and Tony Robinson (Baldrick) had to say the actual words he'd prepared for him, if I remember correctly.
Well, if copyright extension laws keep... extending... then it's only going to become a bigger and bigger problem as estates of former artists just keep suing and suing forever.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a problem of the industry's making anyway. Which is exactly why, some 70 years after some songs were released, their copyright is STILL not available in the public domain.
How many of those multiple people have done what was requested in one of the very first replies - test under nouveau, where they stand a chance of debugging? None. How many tested not on Fedora, as suggested? None.
An offer to debug is only useful if people have a tiny clue what's going on. In this case, we know exactly what the problem is - there's an unshared pixmap trying to be used as a shared one.
And, as someone points out in the thread, there is NO instance of an unshared pixmap being created in the code and passed to those functions. So either there's a patch being applied somewhere, or the nVidia driver is talking nonsense or breaking itself.
How to debug? Ask nVidia to provide a debugging version of their MASSIVE driver so someone can get a clue about where the original pixmap it has a problem with came from.
More likely, there's an interaction at play here - a distro combination with the XR+R options with a particular version of the nVidia binary and maybe even some memory corruption (where something not a pixmap at all is being passed to the shared pixmap functions!).
But without a line number, a clue, an origin, a pointer, etc. then it's impossible to debug.
Like all things - you need a reproducible, and bisectable, bug in order to be able to get close to a reason in any significant amount of code. You can't break into or debug the nVidia binary AT ALL unless you're nVidia. The XOrg stuff doesn't look like it ever creates an unshared pixmap in or around these functions. Nobody has worked out if it's a Fedora specific, nVidia-driver-specific, or even card-specific bug.
And it affects precisely, what... 2/3 people on that thread.
If you want help in fixing bugs, you have to do most of the legwork, ESPECIALLY in open-source projects. Because likely you're the only one it affects and until a common ground can be found, nobody can reproduce it.
Like my entire day's work every day in IT:
If I can't reproduce it, I CANNOT fix it.
If it always works when I try, even as your user, even on your computer, even doing exactly what you said you did, whether that's a printer not working, or a driver crash, or an obscure bug, I can't do much about it. If I can't make it happen in front of me, I can only stab in the dark as to the cause until I get lucky.
Try it on Nouveau. Try it on Ubuntu, say. Try it on the previous nVidia driver and the latest (if it isn't already).
When you get the bug in TWO places, someone can start drawing conclusions about the cause. If it works on Nouveau, it's probably not a hardware bug. If it works on Ubuntu, it's probably not a Fedora-specific bug. If it works on other nVidia versions, it's ALMOST CERTAINLY an nVidia bug.
Probably not a lot. The hardware surveys don't bother to include Linux for most things because it's such a tiny portion.
But the old arguments of "We can't make games for Linux because of X..." doesn't hold true - it's just as capable as the other two major OS. It still may not be economical to make Linux ports for everything, but that's another question entirely.
And, again, the Steam purpose-built machines may change all of the above dramatically. Or not.
Anecdotally, about 1/3rd of my 900 Steam games are on Linux. More than are on Mac. I could happily get by with just the Linux games, Linux office suites and Linux base OS for my daily and work lives. The only change there is that Steam has made the first viable whereas before it was a lot of faffing and installing Wine and all sorts.
A long-term user of Wine, Crossover Office, Steam (day-one signup), WON before that, and someone who's lived and worked an IT job for many years with ONLY Linux laptops for my own use.
The problem is that the OP of the bug report has only tested on nVidia binary drivers, by the look of it, and has not managed to reproduce on nouveau. Only an nVidia engineer has said that it was an X bug, nobody else, and that's hardly gospel.
Maybe it's just a cock-up in their binary driver? Who knows? And it doesn't look like an awful lot of people have the same problem.
Why? Because you cannot make code run in different sections. Here, the physical hardware is PROVIDING the facility to access a table which is normally privileged, which determines whether a program is allowed to access ANY AND ALL RAM.
The privilege is not normally available, and would normally block almost all such attacks. This is a complete way around all the hardware features that are supposed to stop this kind of access and so, of course, the kernel can do NOTHING about it.
The problem is that most software bugs DO NOT give up escalation at all, except where poor code is run in an escalated context because it HAS to. It's actually quite hard to find a privilege escalation bug that an ordinary user can actually exploit anywhere near reliably, and they are usually patched EXTREMELY quickly. This is actually a hardware bug meaning that all such hardware precautions, restrictions and security are basically bypassed because of a hardware bug.
We just found several CITIES in, was it Honduras? Cities. In plain sight. Where people have been walking around. Where someone who told us they were there got lost over 100 years ago and we've not seen the cities, nor been back there, since because he died before he could tell people where they were. People were LOOKING for them.
People just don't get the scope of the problem at all.
When the flight recorder does get found and it's shown to be a simple terrorist act, or crash, I'm going to find the above posters online and laugh in their face on all our behalves.
But down, the beauty of conspiracy theories is that just after your last was proved to be nonsense, you have infinitely more of them to pluck out of your head and if we can't debunk them all immediately, they are still "true" in your head.
The military won't track every authorised, flight-planned route over every foreign territory. It's just pointless and expensive and outside the scope of the military.
On their own soil and to a certain extent nearby international waters, they rely on air traffic control and their systems to spot UNAUTHORISED aircraft. That's all they care about.
A plane on a detour is a daily occurence. A scheduled plane outside a border and no visible threat, isn't their problem.
And then you get into "which" military? The world's militaries are not co-operative. Likely one countries military did watch the aircraft, but then once it's leaving and not posing a threat it's up to another country to spot it and worry about it. Flying out over international waters into the middle of nowhere, which military is going to care? Even the Malaysian probably doesn't, or they'd be chasing their tails all done long for the slightest things of a company redirecting a plane for maintenance, to cover a late departure, etc.
And then you have to actually choose it as a target, watch it (GPS and GLONASS *do not transmit* from the aircraft, the aircraft uses signals SENT from the satellites to triangulate its OWN position, not the other way around - this is such a common misconception that it drives me mad), percieve it to be a threat worth monitoring and store all the data, including potentially classified capabilities, to hand off for a hunt for a plane where we knew everyone on board was dead the first day it doesn't check in.
It's just nothing to do with the military.
It's certainly nothing to do with any particular military for more than a fleeting moment at all.
And also, they probably have certain capabilities but they aren't active all the time and to this level of detail for everything that ever happens.
Sorry, but really don't buy into this stuff. The UK recently didn't realise that a couple of Soviet bombers were circling around its airspace until they'd already got half-way round and then it took almost forever for them to scramble an aircraft to meet them and see them off. And that's a CREDIBLE threat.
Spotting a commercial airplane going off-flight-plan is for the local air-traffic control. And between countries that link is capable of being "lost" between ATC's. And over international waters there IS not ATC.
Maybe someone did spot them and see them, but they would have paid them no attention as they weren't reported missing, weren't giving out Mayday, were broadcasting their positions as expected, over international waters, and so it never gets recorded and wouldn't be any use if they did (we knew roughly where they were flying, we don't know where they went down).
Even then, the ocean in the area is HUGE, you'd have a task spotting anything that you weren't specifically targeting.
I hear a lot about "Linux needed", the number of jobs asking for it is extraordinarily low. Yes, I can provide work experience of Linux - from small-scale to entire networks. But what you can't do is compete against the thousands of others with similar experience for the handful of jobs going. The ratios are insane.
I'd love to be able to. For many industries these things just don't exist. As I say, in the entire United Kingdom, I know of one school that's Linux-only. There are some educational suppliers that provide Linux-only devices to do their jobs and which are popular in UK schools (Smoothwall is actually one! Various other web filters, firewalls, etc. Espresso. KnowledgeBox. etc.) but even working for them, you have to support (and therefore, test and program against) MS clients in the main.
I have friends that work in datacentres (Rackspace, Google, etc.) and they have Linux knowledge, but are still required to support MS in the main because of the client base.
I can go to a dozen recruitment agencies and get nothing but high-end datacenter work for a Linux search, something which not everyone is qualified for, and not everyone will be able to compete against the others to get, no matter their actual non-Windows experience. On most sites, even technical, the ratios are huge - something like 50 Windows to every Linux/UNIX job, and mainstream sites will have almost nothing Linux at all. And the jobs are an entirely different class of work, in the main.
To be honest, I wouldn't touch the first link at all ("earn cash" is not a tag that inspires confidence, especially one expecting you to emigrate to Australia to do so), and most of the jobs you link are far outside the mainstream, and still there aren't an awful lot of them.
Although a lot of knowledge is assumed on here, Go is one of the most well-known and popular board games worldwide. Probably more popular than chess, even.
Othello/Reversi, however is, not only a poor comparison but relatively unheard of. (I'm a massive fan of Othello, it has to be said).
Go is NOT like Othello at all. You have to put coloured stones on a grid-like board, 19x19 for standard Go, in such a way to "enclose" a block of your opponent's pieces. The complexity of Go is RIDICULOUSLY high, so much so that just to hold work out how many board positions there are takes months of computing time. Imagine how good the AI players are in such a circumstance!
When I was at university, 15 years ago, one of my professors (Professor Wilfred Hodges) was working on Go. It was his introductory lecture to describe the complexity of the game. It's astounding. At the time, the most powerful computer player in the world couldn't come close to beating even a seasoned amateur. They're a little closer now but nowhere near the way that Chess can be dominated by a single machine.
Go is one demonstration of how a human's pattern-matching and simultaneous processing can far outweigh anything that a computer can do at the moment. No doubt, with breakthroughs of thought and ever-increasing speed of computers, we'll eventually get there, but a human brain has been able to be there for, well, probably thousands of years already. And on a "puzzle" that's entirely logic-based and effectively ternary (white, black or no stone at all on each space).
Find job in IT tech without Microsoft knowledge / support required.
Good luck! You just increased your chances of unemployment by about ten.
At home, yes, no excuse. I have run entirely MS-free home networks for many years. I have brought Linux into schools and other workplaces.
However, I have equally struggled to find any Linux-related work, whereas Microsoft-based support jobs are ten-a-penny. I work in schools and there is one school in my country that I'm aware of that is entirely Linux. Guess how many job opportunities they have come up?
What will kill MS of its own accord is cloud. If it doesn't matter what OS the browser is on, who cares about buying a Windows tablet compared to, say, an Android? And that's what I see happening. Unfortunately, the Windows PC crowd are just as likely to move to Apple iPads, however (see the reply above yours!).
You can't avoid them entirely, but you can greatly reduce your usage of them. But good luck finding a series of jobs that will last the rest of your life and never involve having to support MS products.
P.S. Love indie games, never heard of any of those in the "showcase" for this engine.
That's, of course, after I waited for MEGABYTES of unresized images to load on each page of that section, that didn't even do so to allow in-page zooming...
However, for some of us, a principle stands out and isn't just empty words.
I do not now, and have not ever, owned an Apple or Sony product. I disagree with the way they do business, I disagree with the attitude to the consumer, and I disagree with the way they sting the prices on their equipment. There's a number of companies on my blacklist that I have said I won't buy from again. And I haven't.
Microsoft, for example, is a problem to avoid. If you work in IT, it's one company that you are very often required to support, no matter what your personal objections. However, even then, there are steps you can take. I endeavour to give Microsoft as little money as possible, and as much proportioned towards the products I agree with as possible. It's cost them many, many tens of thousands of pounds over the years.
I can't completely cut them out, but their attitude costs them all the time. IE and Bing, however, are totally unnecessary in my environments yet encourage a "lazy endorsement" of their products if you just leave them in, so I ACTIVELY do everything I can to move users off them. I often go to a new workplace and my first policy is "We don't support IE, use a real browser" for example.
Some people will bitch and moan and then go on to contradict themselves in the privacy of their own head. Some of us don't.
My current site is entirely Lenovo hardware on the client end. Be sure that Superfish is going to cost them, hard, next time I'm doing some purchasing. Sure, I might end up buying at a much heavier discount than normal (the Superfish issue cannot and have not affected me because of the way I deploy machines on fresh images as a matter of course) rather than outright blacklisting, but that's reflective of the hassle caused to any place using their hardware for business use. Almost none.
However, guess who people go to when they want purchasing advice? The IT guy. Guess which laptops they are going to be advised to avoid entirely or at the very least create a fuss when buying?
Things like this aren't zero impact. And when Superfish is just a memory, it should still play a part in people's buying opinions. But do you honestly expect permanent blacklisting for ever and ever even after the problem is fixed?
Because, as many sites especially for this will show you, it's almost impossible to do so.
Tricks like interrogating the CSS colour of links will tell you whether or not they've been visited - potentially revealing browsing history. Playing with certain javascript functions that are REQUIRED will allow you to fingerprint a browser quite easily. Standards are required to let you know if a font isn't available so the website can adjust - and even without them, it's possible to tell they were never loaded from Javascript, etc. to tell whether you had them installed already or are blocking them, even.
Fingerprinting like that is on any subtle difference that's detectable whatsoever and even the time to perform a certain action can fingerprint a browser down to the major version number.
In order for your standards-compliant HTML and CSS to work, unfortunately you're transmitting this information to websites that use it. If you weren't, some standards-compliant features WOULD NOT WORK. You don't even need plugins or Javascript or anything remotely fancy. So the decision was taken at some point to say that there's little point in taking specific steps to hide that kind as it's available elsewhere anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
For those interested, the show I'm talking about, with the man himself:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
He appeared on a TV show in the UK basically arguing just that. When the time came, he wanted to be able to press a button or whatever and choose himself, and it was long after he started down the road to Alzheimer's that he appeared and argued that.
Actually he barely said a word. He was too far gone down the Alzheimer's route by then, and Tony Robinson (Baldrick) had to say the actual words he'd prepared for him, if I remember correctly.
At least Death should be kind to him.
He made Death more human - and humane - than almost any author before him.
Terry, Sir, just make sure you don't end up cleaning Albert's boots.
Well, if copyright extension laws keep... extending... then it's only going to become a bigger and bigger problem as estates of former artists just keep suing and suing forever.
As far as I'm concerned, this is a problem of the industry's making anyway. Which is exactly why, some 70 years after some songs were released, their copyright is STILL not available in the public domain.
"Handed me a vegemite sandwich"
That's all I have to say.
How many of those multiple people have done what was requested in one of the very first replies - test under nouveau, where they stand a chance of debugging? None. How many tested not on Fedora, as suggested? None.
An offer to debug is only useful if people have a tiny clue what's going on. In this case, we know exactly what the problem is - there's an unshared pixmap trying to be used as a shared one.
And, as someone points out in the thread, there is NO instance of an unshared pixmap being created in the code and passed to those functions. So either there's a patch being applied somewhere, or the nVidia driver is talking nonsense or breaking itself.
How to debug? Ask nVidia to provide a debugging version of their MASSIVE driver so someone can get a clue about where the original pixmap it has a problem with came from.
More likely, there's an interaction at play here - a distro combination with the XR+R options with a particular version of the nVidia binary and maybe even some memory corruption (where something not a pixmap at all is being passed to the shared pixmap functions!).
But without a line number, a clue, an origin, a pointer, etc. then it's impossible to debug.
Like all things - you need a reproducible, and bisectable, bug in order to be able to get close to a reason in any significant amount of code. You can't break into or debug the nVidia binary AT ALL unless you're nVidia. The XOrg stuff doesn't look like it ever creates an unshared pixmap in or around these functions. Nobody has worked out if it's a Fedora specific, nVidia-driver-specific, or even card-specific bug.
And it affects precisely, what... 2/3 people on that thread.
If you want help in fixing bugs, you have to do most of the legwork, ESPECIALLY in open-source projects. Because likely you're the only one it affects and until a common ground can be found, nobody can reproduce it.
Like my entire day's work every day in IT:
If I can't reproduce it, I CANNOT fix it.
If it always works when I try, even as your user, even on your computer, even doing exactly what you said you did, whether that's a printer not working, or a driver crash, or an obscure bug, I can't do much about it. If I can't make it happen in front of me, I can only stab in the dark as to the cause until I get lucky.
Try it on Nouveau.
Try it on Ubuntu, say.
Try it on the previous nVidia driver and the latest (if it isn't already).
When you get the bug in TWO places, someone can start drawing conclusions about the cause. If it works on Nouveau, it's probably not a hardware bug. If it works on Ubuntu, it's probably not a Fedora-specific bug. If it works on other nVidia versions, it's ALMOST CERTAINLY an nVidia bug.
About 20%. There are about 5000 games on Steam.
Probably not a lot. The hardware surveys don't bother to include Linux for most things because it's such a tiny portion.
But the old arguments of "We can't make games for Linux because of X..." doesn't hold true - it's just as capable as the other two major OS. It still may not be economical to make Linux ports for everything, but that's another question entirely.
And, again, the Steam purpose-built machines may change all of the above dramatically. Or not.
Anecdotally, about 1/3rd of my 900 Steam games are on Linux. More than are on Mac. I could happily get by with just the Linux games, Linux office suites and Linux base OS for my daily and work lives. The only change there is that Steam has made the first viable whereas before it was a lot of faffing and installing Wine and all sorts.
A long-term user of Wine, Crossover Office, Steam (day-one signup), WON before that, and someone who's lived and worked an IT job for many years with ONLY Linux laptops for my own use.
The problem is that the OP of the bug report has only tested on nVidia binary drivers, by the look of it, and has not managed to reproduce on nouveau. Only an nVidia engineer has said that it was an X bug, nobody else, and that's hardly gospel.
Maybe it's just a cock-up in their binary driver? Who knows? And it doesn't look like an awful lot of people have the same problem.
It's a thread synchronisation instruction available on certain processors.
Why? Because you cannot make code run in different sections. Here, the physical hardware is PROVIDING the facility to access a table which is normally privileged, which determines whether a program is allowed to access ANY AND ALL RAM.
The privilege is not normally available, and would normally block almost all such attacks. This is a complete way around all the hardware features that are supposed to stop this kind of access and so, of course, the kernel can do NOTHING about it.
The problem is that most software bugs DO NOT give up escalation at all, except where poor code is run in an escalated context because it HAS to. It's actually quite hard to find a privilege escalation bug that an ordinary user can actually exploit anywhere near reliably, and they are usually patched EXTREMELY quickly. This is actually a hardware bug meaning that all such hardware precautions, restrictions and security are basically bypassed because of a hardware bug.
THEIR exit nodes.
There's nothing stopping such a high flux of new exit nodes in the face of censorship. Especially as ANY client can be an exit node, in theory.
Let's say it's ten a day.
That's still hundreds of days. Maybe still thousands.
And that's if it even shows up on side-scanning sonar at all, in any way, whatsoever now.
Just finding a cable that you KNOW is exactly down THERE to within a good error margin can take weeks.
Several thousand square kilometres. If you are able to search a square kilometre or so a day, I'll be impressed.
Several thousand days. Years. At enormous cost. To find an aircraft we know has been downed.
We just found several CITIES in, was it Honduras? Cities. In plain sight. Where people have been walking around. Where someone who told us they were there got lost over 100 years ago and we've not seen the cities, nor been back there, since because he died before he could tell people where they were. People were LOOKING for them.
People just don't get the scope of the problem at all.
When the flight recorder does get found and it's shown to be a simple terrorist act, or crash, I'm going to find the above posters online and laugh in their face on all our behalves.
But down, the beauty of conspiracy theories is that just after your last was proved to be nonsense, you have infinitely more of them to pluck out of your head and if we can't debunk them all immediately, they are still "true" in your head.
I think it was hours off flight-plan when the engine data stopped being returned to the Boeing systems, wasn't it?
Strange how Boeing were able to supply engine data to help in the original search then...
The military won't track every authorised, flight-planned route over every foreign territory. It's just pointless and expensive and outside the scope of the military.
On their own soil and to a certain extent nearby international waters, they rely on air traffic control and their systems to spot UNAUTHORISED aircraft. That's all they care about.
A plane on a detour is a daily occurence. A scheduled plane outside a border and no visible threat, isn't their problem.
And then you get into "which" military? The world's militaries are not co-operative. Likely one countries military did watch the aircraft, but then once it's leaving and not posing a threat it's up to another country to spot it and worry about it. Flying out over international waters into the middle of nowhere, which military is going to care? Even the Malaysian probably doesn't, or they'd be chasing their tails all done long for the slightest things of a company redirecting a plane for maintenance, to cover a late departure, etc.
And then you have to actually choose it as a target, watch it (GPS and GLONASS *do not transmit* from the aircraft, the aircraft uses signals SENT from the satellites to triangulate its OWN position, not the other way around - this is such a common misconception that it drives me mad), percieve it to be a threat worth monitoring and store all the data, including potentially classified capabilities, to hand off for a hunt for a plane where we knew everyone on board was dead the first day it doesn't check in.
It's just nothing to do with the military.
It's certainly nothing to do with any particular military for more than a fleeting moment at all.
And also, they probably have certain capabilities but they aren't active all the time and to this level of detail for everything that ever happens.
Sorry, but really don't buy into this stuff. The UK recently didn't realise that a couple of Soviet bombers were circling around its airspace until they'd already got half-way round and then it took almost forever for them to scramble an aircraft to meet them and see them off. And that's a CREDIBLE threat.
Spotting a commercial airplane going off-flight-plan is for the local air-traffic control. And between countries that link is capable of being "lost" between ATC's. And over international waters there IS not ATC.
Maybe someone did spot them and see them, but they would have paid them no attention as they weren't reported missing, weren't giving out Mayday, were broadcasting their positions as expected, over international waters, and so it never gets recorded and wouldn't be any use if they did (we knew roughly where they were flying, we don't know where they went down).
Even then, the ocean in the area is HUGE, you'd have a task spotting anything that you weren't specifically targeting.
Compare to number of Microsoft jobs.
I hear a lot about "Linux needed", the number of jobs asking for it is extraordinarily low. Yes, I can provide work experience of Linux - from small-scale to entire networks. But what you can't do is compete against the thousands of others with similar experience for the handful of jobs going. The ratios are insane.
I'd love to be able to. For many industries these things just don't exist. As I say, in the entire United Kingdom, I know of one school that's Linux-only. There are some educational suppliers that provide Linux-only devices to do their jobs and which are popular in UK schools (Smoothwall is actually one! Various other web filters, firewalls, etc. Espresso. KnowledgeBox. etc.) but even working for them, you have to support (and therefore, test and program against) MS clients in the main.
I have friends that work in datacentres (Rackspace, Google, etc.) and they have Linux knowledge, but are still required to support MS in the main because of the client base.
I can go to a dozen recruitment agencies and get nothing but high-end datacenter work for a Linux search, something which not everyone is qualified for, and not everyone will be able to compete against the others to get, no matter their actual non-Windows experience. On most sites, even technical, the ratios are huge - something like 50 Windows to every Linux/UNIX job, and mainstream sites will have almost nothing Linux at all. And the jobs are an entirely different class of work, in the main.
To be honest, I wouldn't touch the first link at all ("earn cash" is not a tag that inspires confidence, especially one expecting you to emigrate to Australia to do so), and most of the jobs you link are far outside the mainstream, and still there aren't an awful lot of them.
Although a lot of knowledge is assumed on here, Go is one of the most well-known and popular board games worldwide. Probably more popular than chess, even.
Othello/Reversi, however is, not only a poor comparison but relatively unheard of. (I'm a massive fan of Othello, it has to be said).
Go is NOT like Othello at all. You have to put coloured stones on a grid-like board, 19x19 for standard Go, in such a way to "enclose" a block of your opponent's pieces. The complexity of Go is RIDICULOUSLY high, so much so that just to hold work out how many board positions there are takes months of computing time. Imagine how good the AI players are in such a circumstance!
When I was at university, 15 years ago, one of my professors (Professor Wilfred Hodges) was working on Go. It was his introductory lecture to describe the complexity of the game. It's astounding. At the time, the most powerful computer player in the world couldn't come close to beating even a seasoned amateur. They're a little closer now but nowhere near the way that Chess can be dominated by a single machine.
Go is one demonstration of how a human's pattern-matching and simultaneous processing can far outweigh anything that a computer can do at the moment. No doubt, with breakthroughs of thought and ever-increasing speed of computers, we'll eventually get there, but a human brain has been able to be there for, well, probably thousands of years already. And on a "puzzle" that's entirely logic-based and effectively ternary (white, black or no stone at all on each space).
Find job in IT tech without Microsoft knowledge / support required.
Good luck! You just increased your chances of unemployment by about ten.
At home, yes, no excuse. I have run entirely MS-free home networks for many years. I have brought Linux into schools and other workplaces.
However, I have equally struggled to find any Linux-related work, whereas Microsoft-based support jobs are ten-a-penny. I work in schools and there is one school in my country that I'm aware of that is entirely Linux. Guess how many job opportunities they have come up?
What will kill MS of its own accord is cloud. If it doesn't matter what OS the browser is on, who cares about buying a Windows tablet compared to, say, an Android? And that's what I see happening. Unfortunately, the Windows PC crowd are just as likely to move to Apple iPads, however (see the reply above yours!).
You can't avoid them entirely, but you can greatly reduce your usage of them. But good luck finding a series of jobs that will last the rest of your life and never involve having to support MS products.
P.S. Love indie games, never heard of any of those in the "showcase" for this engine.
That's, of course, after I waited for MEGABYTES of unresized images to load on each page of that section, that didn't even do so to allow in-page zooming...
Ignoring the poorly-masked slashvertisement:
How many of those AAA engines were written in Java?
I agree with the sentiment of your post.
However, for some of us, a principle stands out and isn't just empty words.
I do not now, and have not ever, owned an Apple or Sony product. I disagree with the way they do business, I disagree with the attitude to the consumer, and I disagree with the way they sting the prices on their equipment. There's a number of companies on my blacklist that I have said I won't buy from again. And I haven't.
Microsoft, for example, is a problem to avoid. If you work in IT, it's one company that you are very often required to support, no matter what your personal objections. However, even then, there are steps you can take. I endeavour to give Microsoft as little money as possible, and as much proportioned towards the products I agree with as possible. It's cost them many, many tens of thousands of pounds over the years.
I can't completely cut them out, but their attitude costs them all the time. IE and Bing, however, are totally unnecessary in my environments yet encourage a "lazy endorsement" of their products if you just leave them in, so I ACTIVELY do everything I can to move users off them. I often go to a new workplace and my first policy is "We don't support IE, use a real browser" for example.
Some people will bitch and moan and then go on to contradict themselves in the privacy of their own head. Some of us don't.
My current site is entirely Lenovo hardware on the client end. Be sure that Superfish is going to cost them, hard, next time I'm doing some purchasing. Sure, I might end up buying at a much heavier discount than normal (the Superfish issue cannot and have not affected me because of the way I deploy machines on fresh images as a matter of course) rather than outright blacklisting, but that's reflective of the hassle caused to any place using their hardware for business use. Almost none.
However, guess who people go to when they want purchasing advice? The IT guy. Guess which laptops they are going to be advised to avoid entirely or at the very least create a fuss when buying?
Things like this aren't zero impact. And when Superfish is just a memory, it should still play a part in people's buying opinions. But do you honestly expect permanent blacklisting for ever and ever even after the problem is fixed?
Because, as many sites especially for this will show you, it's almost impossible to do so.
Tricks like interrogating the CSS colour of links will tell you whether or not they've been visited - potentially revealing browsing history. Playing with certain javascript functions that are REQUIRED will allow you to fingerprint a browser quite easily. Standards are required to let you know if a font isn't available so the website can adjust - and even without them, it's possible to tell they were never loaded from Javascript, etc. to tell whether you had them installed already or are blocking them, even.
Fingerprinting like that is on any subtle difference that's detectable whatsoever and even the time to perform a certain action can fingerprint a browser down to the major version number.
In order for your standards-compliant HTML and CSS to work, unfortunately you're transmitting this information to websites that use it. If you weren't, some standards-compliant features WOULD NOT WORK. You don't even need plugins or Javascript or anything remotely fancy. So the decision was taken at some point to say that there's little point in taking specific steps to hide that kind as it's available elsewhere anyway.
That's why you don't have it.
The summary is almost as long as the article, which is only slightly longer than the original release notes.