However, Windows 8.1 is great on a surface or tablet
And, quite honestly, by the time you disable the Romper Room crap, get a classic shell, and set it up to feel like a more classic Windows desktop... it's absolutely fine on a desktop as well. But 100% of the stuff they have for tablets is pretty much garbage on a desktop if you do actual work on your PC. I utterly loathe the metro interface, and gave basically turned it off. So all the money Microsoft is spending "innovating" seems like garbage to me.
and Windows 10 can do both and run ported Android and IOS apps
Honestly, that remains to be seen. They can make any damned claim they want now, but the proof is in the pudding. Until such time as it exists, and is shipping, it's a marketing bulled point. That's it. They still have plenty of time to say "wow, we can't actually do that".
But, generally I agree with you that there isn't a device which is going to be my smartphone and my desktop.
My personal desktop is a dual monitor setup with a KVM tying in my work laptop, and spec'd to last me the next 5 years or so (8 core CPU, 16 gig RAM, lots of USB ports, and about 8TB of disk space attached). Quite frankly, we're a very far way off from there being a mobile device to compete with that.
If Microsoft forgets that some of us still need a desktop with some muscle behind it, and that we don't use them as toys for recipes, they stand a chance of producing something which is terrible for that use.
A device which wants to be dumbed down to the point it wants to feel like a tablet offers no utility to me on something which isn't a tablet.
Yeah, no kidding. I predict Microsoft is 100% guaranteed to mess up a LOT of machines. I don't trust *any* vendor's patches on day one, and Microsoft even less.
If Microsoft thinks they're not going to be pilloried by saying "fuck it, we're updating your machine and rebooting now" they're idiots.
If Microsoft just goes ahead and does them, they're going to create a support nightmare as they'll fuck up machines left and right.
When will Microsoft learn that there is a reason why we don't trust them?
Sorry guys, but I'll apply patched and reboot my computer when I choose to, not when some idiot in Redmond decides for me. it's my property, not yours.
Maybe. Maybe not. I'll be a wet blanket here and say that until we have the opportunity to test some of the conclusions that are coming out of the theories and scant data behind these announcements, we won't really know if we are getting it right. I think its cool that we are generating testable hypotheses, but we don't yet have a way to test them, do we?
Honestly, I'll take that you could have an actual question if we're interpreting the imaging of the exoplanet correctly as proof of my point.
At this point, I don't care if it's volcanoes, or if the planet is hatching to become a space alligator.
We're comparing data from observations spanning several years of an exoplanet which is 40 light years away... you can wet blanket all you like, it's still freakin' cool.
I'm not qualified to defend the science. I'm here to defend the awesome.:-P
Voice recognition is what comes to mind but some will say it's not private enough and they are right.
Dude, I'll tell you straight up.. if people start having voice controlled wearable devices, someone's gonna get hurt, and have their device stuffed into an orifice which wasn't intended to receive it.
Because it you thought people talking loudly into Bluetooth ear pieces was annoying, wait until some ass in the checkout line is trying to compose an email or bring up his calendar.
Now picture an office full of people trying to use this kind of thing.
More broadly, I have no interest in some dorky gimmick which will have incompetent security, and which mistakenly thinks that my life will be some how improved by an internet enabled soap dish. It's technology for the sake of technology.
Honestly, it's a solution in search of a problem, and something for the marketing wankers to latch onto an say "now with more internet security holes".
Until corporations carry a penalty for being lazy/incompetent with security, you should assume these products are terribly written.
Yeah, no kidding. You'd be using a tiny little stylus to hit a square less than about 0.5mm or so (yes, that number came out of thin air).
If you're trying to cram a keyboard on a display that small.. you're probably doing it wrong.
Of course, if you're involved in the "IoT" you probably need to be smacked about the head with a tuna, as you're an annoying prat dedicated to making pointlessly connected devices with no security.
So, in that regards, I won't ever need to care about your keyboard. Because I think the IoT is a purely marketing term for crappy products.
Why? Over most of history spying has saved lives more than taken them. I find it so odd that people on Slashdot sing the praises of the "Codebreakers" of WWII but are shocked and freaked out that they are still around today.
In WWI the amount of communications done by ordinary citizens was much smaller.
Now it's a completely indiscriminate thing which says "we're going to spy on everybody just in case".
This is outrageous, and essentially amounts to general warrants and saying "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide".
Sorry, but no, fascist assholes who want to right to spy on everybody without warrant, probable cause, or oversight... these people should be hanged.
You know, if Prenda is going to present complete fiction for their justification for their illegal bullshit... I think it's highly appropriate the court does something similar.
From everything I have seen in the coverage, Prenda is a shady bunch of douchebag lawyers who are sending out false notices for copyrights they don't own or represent, and demanding money.
They can claim all they want to be a legitimate business, but that appears to be a complete lie.
Honestly, unless the judge is somehow failing in his legal duties, his choice of metaphor is largely irrelevant.
Basically Prenda is exactly what the judge says they are... a law firm practicing extortion through misrepresentation and intimidation. I don't care if he makes Sponge Bob references and long as these clowns get shut down.
Yeah, no kidding. I can't tell you how many web pages slavishly stick to their pre-defined widths because some hack of a designer thought it looked pretty.
Which means you horizontally scroll on small screens, and on large screens you see acres of unused space.
So much web design is utter crap... but mobile browsing is utterly pointless. Because it turns into "here, let us forward you to a different link which doesn't have any actual content, won't show you the link you just followed, and has no mechanism to find the link you just followed."
Honestly, I don't know why most places bother with a mobile version of their website if it's just going to be a steaming turd which doesn't show any useful information.
Well, honestly though, how's your Icelandic? And do you know for a fact that their apostrophes and their accents are different?
I have certainly heard about some Icelandic 'delicacies' of some rotted/fermented fish which has a very ammonia flavor which nobody but Icelanders will eat.
You may think it's an absurd product, but I'm betting some guy in Iceland is going "mmmm... smoked whale ball beer".
I think any PR person, CEO, and other mouthpiece who says this stuff is perfectly safe should be forced to drink it. Daily. For a year. Their family included.
If the PR clowns are going to claim it's safe, put their money where there mouth is. If they refuse to drink it, assume they're lying and feed them to bears.
Hold these guys to some standard of truth instead of their accustomed truthiness, and see what they do.
I'm so tired of these "think tanks" who are nothing more than paid shills who spout this crap just to obfuscate the truth -- it's no different than the tobacco lobby did. It's slimy and dishonest, and should carry a huge penalty.
Well, arguably being the fastest at writing code doesn't mean any of it is actually good.
I once worked with a guy who could crank out massive quantities of code. It made for some pretty amazing proof-of-concept and demo stuff -- but it was utterly unusable in the real world because it was, overall, really badly written code.
It didn't have any robustness. It made stupid architectural decisions. It made unfounded and unsupportable assumptions. It had an awful lot of hardcoded magic because he only solved one use case.
It impressed the heck out of the VPs and the customers who said "oooh, gotta get me some of that". But in trying to turn any of it into production level code, by the time you started trying to fix the glaring holes, remove the things which just simply couldn't work in the real world, and take out some of the shortcuts and voodoo -- there was very often nothing workable left.
This was coupled with the fact that he couldn't/wouldn't debug his own code, couldn't/wouldn't go in and make even simple modifications to it without breaking it, and had quite likely moved onto something else new and shiny and couldn't be persuaded to actually fix or maintain previous projects.
He left a wake of crap code and demos, but almost nothing which could be used in the real world. Which means everyone around him started saying "look, if you want to use the super awesome code he wrote, go ahead, but leave me out of it unless you can get him to complete what he started and not leave us with a half-finished demo which can't be made real, we're not supporting the shit he leaves behind him".
Everyone else considered him a nightmare, because while he was prolific and wrote cool looking things... it was all smoke and mirrors, which covered about 2% of the functionality and 75% of the sales demo.
I was glad when I transferred to another group and he was someone else's problem. Though, I did notice the carnage of sales people and clients who bought into the bullshit and thought they were getting something real only to find it had an awful lot of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".
I hope he was a very unusual case, but he was an absolutely prolific coder, who wrote absolutely terrible code.
Right, but then we're back to "among the group of people who are already programmers"... which in no way refutes the oft-cited observation that among people learning to program there's a very distinct double-tassel distribution.
Within the group of people already called programmers, yes, there's going to be variation -- I've certainly known a few who crank out reams of code, which can sometimes make for a good prototype, but which often had to be completely scrapped to turn it into releasable code.
But I've also known a couple who barely seemed to know how to do anything and did everything as if they'd just looked it up in a first year programming book (or from the internet).
I honestly can't tell you how those people turned out in the long run, because we didn't those ones around long enough. They'd bluffed their way past the person interviewing them, but by the time they were on the job, their technical skills just weren't there.
It just seems like he's refuting the idea of a bi-modal distribution by only talking about people who are already programmers, instead of the general population -- which is an entirely different thing.
Now, I don't have stats to back this up... but many moons ago I was told by numerous profs that programming/CS had pretty much always been the bi-modal distribution, and one of them even showed me the graphs of previous years of first year programming courses to back it up.
I have seen an academic paper discussing the bi-modal distribution.
So, is he saying "among people who are programmers there isn't a bi-modal distribution", or is he saying "among people learning to program there isn't a bi-modal distribution"?
Essentially he has no statistics to back his claims, and seems to be saying that "among people who are already programmers there's all kinds" -- which is FAR different from refuting the observation in academia that people learning programming are most definitely showing a bi-modal distribution.
This sounds like he's talking from his 'feels' instead of from his 'facts'.
I've been forced to start removing apps from my phone.
I have an older Android phone, and don't have (or want) a data plan.
A while ago, when I got voicemail and the the notification for it, I'd get a text message from my ISP saying that something on my phone was trying to connect to the internet.
Basically some app I had had decided that it needed to notify someone when I got a phone message, but it failed because I didn't have a data plan.
Then I started removing apps and testing, and eventually got it pared down enough that it didn't happen.
Basically most apps are written by greedy bastards who don't give a crap about your privacy and your security. And if Google won't give me fine grain control to say "I don't care if *you* want to connect to the internet" and disable it, then I'm simply not going to trust the apps.
It has gotten to the point where I have to assume most software is actually hostile to me. If ti can't pass the airplane mode test, it generally gets deleted.
I would definitely install this app, and use it to identify shady apps which need to be deleted.
Sorry, but moronic Christians have every bit as much capacity for violence as moronic Muslims. Stupid and crazy isn't dependent on a specific religion.
So take your own stupid, shove it up your ass, and fuck off. Because there most certainly are examples of violence perpetuated by Christians.
And you can bet your ass that if an atheist set up the "Holy Mary Mother of God Gangbang"... some crazy bastard is going to lose his shit and do something insane.
Slashdot Mirror
And, quite honestly, by the time you disable the Romper Room crap, get a classic shell, and set it up to feel like a more classic Windows desktop ... it's absolutely fine on a desktop as well. But 100% of the stuff they have for tablets is pretty much garbage on a desktop if you do actual work on your PC. I utterly loathe the metro interface, and gave basically turned it off. So all the money Microsoft is spending "innovating" seems like garbage to me.
Honestly, that remains to be seen. They can make any damned claim they want now, but the proof is in the pudding. Until such time as it exists, and is shipping, it's a marketing bulled point. That's it. They still have plenty of time to say "wow, we can't actually do that".
But, generally I agree with you that there isn't a device which is going to be my smartphone and my desktop.
My personal desktop is a dual monitor setup with a KVM tying in my work laptop, and spec'd to last me the next 5 years or so (8 core CPU, 16 gig RAM, lots of USB ports, and about 8TB of disk space attached). Quite frankly, we're a very far way off from there being a mobile device to compete with that.
If Microsoft forgets that some of us still need a desktop with some muscle behind it, and that we don't use them as toys for recipes, they stand a chance of producing something which is terrible for that use.
A device which wants to be dumbed down to the point it wants to feel like a tablet offers no utility to me on something which isn't a tablet.
Yeah, no kidding. I predict Microsoft is 100% guaranteed to mess up a LOT of machines. I don't trust *any* vendor's patches on day one, and Microsoft even less.
If Microsoft thinks they're not going to be pilloried by saying "fuck it, we're updating your machine and rebooting now" they're idiots.
If Microsoft just goes ahead and does them, they're going to create a support nightmare as they'll fuck up machines left and right.
When will Microsoft learn that there is a reason why we don't trust them?
Sorry guys, but I'll apply patched and reboot my computer when I choose to, not when some idiot in Redmond decides for me. it's my property, not yours.
I hereby nominate the Mars Rovers for any and all honors which can be shoehorned into being something we can assign to them.
And kudos to the people who built it and kept it going.
Fourty-five times planned mission length is pretty damned awesome!!
Honestly, I'll take that you could have an actual question if we're interpreting the imaging of the exoplanet correctly as proof of my point.
At this point, I don't care if it's volcanoes, or if the planet is hatching to become a space alligator.
We're comparing data from observations spanning several years of an exoplanet which is 40 light years away ... you can wet blanket all you like, it's still freakin' cool.
I'm not qualified to defend the science. I'm here to defend the awesome. :-P
You should totally go and watch some exotic dancri to celebrate.
Dude, are you seriously surprised by a crazed AC in a discussion about an Apple product on Slashdot? Really?
Simple, the idiots who produce IoT products will simply suggest you have an open wifi so they don't have to solve the problem.
Mark my words.
Exactly like how web sites give you instructions to enable javascript, cookies, and turn off your Windows firewall.
They don't give a crap about security, so they'll just write it such that you can't have any if you want your IoT buttplug to be able to send tweets.
Yeah, it's literally stuff which was theoretical science (if not science fiction) 25 years ago.
Some days I look back at Pong and think "holy shit we've come a long way".
Detecting possible volcanoes on a planet 40 light years away? That boggles my mind.
Yay science!!
Dude, I'll tell you straight up .. if people start having voice controlled wearable devices, someone's gonna get hurt, and have their device stuffed into an orifice which wasn't intended to receive it.
Because it you thought people talking loudly into Bluetooth ear pieces was annoying, wait until some ass in the checkout line is trying to compose an email or bring up his calendar.
Now picture an office full of people trying to use this kind of thing.
No. Just no.
More broadly, I have no interest in some dorky gimmick which will have incompetent security, and which mistakenly thinks that my life will be some how improved by an internet enabled soap dish. It's technology for the sake of technology.
Honestly, it's a solution in search of a problem, and something for the marketing wankers to latch onto an say "now with more internet security holes".
Until corporations carry a penalty for being lazy/incompetent with security, you should assume these products are terribly written.
Because they probably are.
Yeah, no kidding. You'd be using a tiny little stylus to hit a square less than about 0.5mm or so (yes, that number came out of thin air).
If you're trying to cram a keyboard on a display that small .. you're probably doing it wrong.
Of course, if you're involved in the "IoT" you probably need to be smacked about the head with a tuna, as you're an annoying prat dedicated to making pointlessly connected devices with no security.
So, in that regards, I won't ever need to care about your keyboard. Because I think the IoT is a purely marketing term for crappy products.
Ooooh ... poke me in the elbow again!!
Yeah, sorry about that, it was an attempt to use google translate for:
"LOL, no, it wasn't obvious that 'here' meant Iceland and that you were Icelandic.
But thanks to Google Translate, I can look like an idiot in two languages. Assuming of course Slash dot doesn't wreck the unicode. ;-)"
How the hell do you get the accents to work? As your signature points out, Slashdot's support for unicode is pathetic.
LOL, nei, þaà var ekki augljÃst aà "hér" þýddi Ãsland og aà þà værir Ãslensk.
En þÃkk sé Google Translate, get ég lÃta Ãt eins og hÃlfviti à tveimur tungumÃlum. Ef gert er rÃà auÃvitaà Slash dot er ekki flak Unicode. ;-)
In which case I'll look even more the moron. :-P
In WWI the amount of communications done by ordinary citizens was much smaller.
Now it's a completely indiscriminate thing which says "we're going to spy on everybody just in case".
This is outrageous, and essentially amounts to general warrants and saying "you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide".
Sorry, but no, fascist assholes who want to right to spy on everybody without warrant, probable cause, or oversight ... these people should be hanged.
Fuck them all if that's what they want to do.
You know, if Prenda is going to present complete fiction for their justification for their illegal bullshit ... I think it's highly appropriate the court does something similar.
From everything I have seen in the coverage, Prenda is a shady bunch of douchebag lawyers who are sending out false notices for copyrights they don't own or represent, and demanding money.
They can claim all they want to be a legitimate business, but that appears to be a complete lie.
Honestly, unless the judge is somehow failing in his legal duties, his choice of metaphor is largely irrelevant.
Basically Prenda is exactly what the judge says they are ... a law firm practicing extortion through misrepresentation and intimidation. I don't care if he makes Sponge Bob references and long as these clowns get shut down.
Yeah, no kidding. I can't tell you how many web pages slavishly stick to their pre-defined widths because some hack of a designer thought it looked pretty.
Which means you horizontally scroll on small screens, and on large screens you see acres of unused space.
So much web design is utter crap ... but mobile browsing is utterly pointless. Because it turns into "here, let us forward you to a different link which doesn't have any actual content, won't show you the link you just followed, and has no mechanism to find the link you just followed."
Honestly, I don't know why most places bother with a mobile version of their website if it's just going to be a steaming turd which doesn't show any useful information.
Well, honestly though, how's your Icelandic? And do you know for a fact that their apostrophes and their accents are different?
I have certainly heard about some Icelandic 'delicacies' of some rotted/fermented fish which has a very ammonia flavor which nobody but Icelanders will eat.
You may think it's an absurd product, but I'm betting some guy in Iceland is going "mmmm ... smoked whale ball beer".
I think any PR person, CEO, and other mouthpiece who says this stuff is perfectly safe should be forced to drink it. Daily. For a year. Their family included.
If the PR clowns are going to claim it's safe, put their money where there mouth is. If they refuse to drink it, assume they're lying and feed them to bears.
Hold these guys to some standard of truth instead of their accustomed truthiness, and see what they do.
I'm so tired of these "think tanks" who are nothing more than paid shills who spout this crap just to obfuscate the truth -- it's no different than the tobacco lobby did. It's slimy and dishonest, and should carry a huge penalty.
Well, arguably being the fastest at writing code doesn't mean any of it is actually good.
I once worked with a guy who could crank out massive quantities of code. It made for some pretty amazing proof-of-concept and demo stuff -- but it was utterly unusable in the real world because it was, overall, really badly written code.
It didn't have any robustness. It made stupid architectural decisions. It made unfounded and unsupportable assumptions. It had an awful lot of hardcoded magic because he only solved one use case.
It impressed the heck out of the VPs and the customers who said "oooh, gotta get me some of that". But in trying to turn any of it into production level code, by the time you started trying to fix the glaring holes, remove the things which just simply couldn't work in the real world, and take out some of the shortcuts and voodoo -- there was very often nothing workable left.
This was coupled with the fact that he couldn't/wouldn't debug his own code, couldn't/wouldn't go in and make even simple modifications to it without breaking it, and had quite likely moved onto something else new and shiny and couldn't be persuaded to actually fix or maintain previous projects.
He left a wake of crap code and demos, but almost nothing which could be used in the real world. Which means everyone around him started saying "look, if you want to use the super awesome code he wrote, go ahead, but leave me out of it unless you can get him to complete what he started and not leave us with a half-finished demo which can't be made real, we're not supporting the shit he leaves behind him".
Everyone else considered him a nightmare, because while he was prolific and wrote cool looking things ... it was all smoke and mirrors, which covered about 2% of the functionality and 75% of the sales demo.
I was glad when I transferred to another group and he was someone else's problem. Though, I did notice the carnage of sales people and clients who bought into the bullshit and thought they were getting something real only to find it had an awful lot of "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain".
I hope he was a very unusual case, but he was an absolutely prolific coder, who wrote absolutely terrible code.
Right, but then we're back to "among the group of people who are already programmers" ... which in no way refutes the oft-cited observation that among people learning to program there's a very distinct double-tassel distribution.
Within the group of people already called programmers, yes, there's going to be variation -- I've certainly known a few who crank out reams of code, which can sometimes make for a good prototype, but which often had to be completely scrapped to turn it into releasable code.
But I've also known a couple who barely seemed to know how to do anything and did everything as if they'd just looked it up in a first year programming book (or from the internet).
I honestly can't tell you how those people turned out in the long run, because we didn't those ones around long enough. They'd bluffed their way past the person interviewing them, but by the time they were on the job, their technical skills just weren't there.
It just seems like he's refuting the idea of a bi-modal distribution by only talking about people who are already programmers, instead of the general population -- which is an entirely different thing.
Now, I don't have stats to back this up ... but many moons ago I was told by numerous profs that programming/CS had pretty much always been the bi-modal distribution, and one of them even showed me the graphs of previous years of first year programming courses to back it up.
I have seen an academic paper discussing the bi-modal distribution.
So, is he saying "among people who are programmers there isn't a bi-modal distribution", or is he saying "among people learning to program there isn't a bi-modal distribution"?
Essentially he has no statistics to back his claims, and seems to be saying that "among people who are already programmers there's all kinds" -- which is FAR different from refuting the observation in academia that people learning programming are most definitely showing a bi-modal distribution.
This sounds like he's talking from his 'feels' instead of from his 'facts'.
I've been forced to start removing apps from my phone.
I have an older Android phone, and don't have (or want) a data plan.
A while ago, when I got voicemail and the the notification for it, I'd get a text message from my ISP saying that something on my phone was trying to connect to the internet.
Basically some app I had had decided that it needed to notify someone when I got a phone message, but it failed because I didn't have a data plan.
Then I started removing apps and testing, and eventually got it pared down enough that it didn't happen.
Basically most apps are written by greedy bastards who don't give a crap about your privacy and your security. And if Google won't give me fine grain control to say "I don't care if *you* want to connect to the internet" and disable it, then I'm simply not going to trust the apps.
It has gotten to the point where I have to assume most software is actually hostile to me. If ti can't pass the airplane mode test, it generally gets deleted.
I would definitely install this app, and use it to identify shady apps which need to be deleted.
Fine, you have given a statistic on the Linux Kernel.
Now, show me a stat for "most OSS developers" across not just the Linux kernel. And then we're probably back to what I said in the first place.
Because, you'll notice, I never said Linux. I said OSS. My view isn't dated, yours is incomplete.
And there's a crapton more OSS code on the interwebs than just the Linux kernel. It may not be as influential, but it is far more plentiful.
And it's definitely not "product", it's "hobby".
What, you mean like the crazy Christians who have been attacking abortion clinics like the Army of God?
Sorry, but moronic Christians have every bit as much capacity for violence as moronic Muslims. Stupid and crazy isn't dependent on a specific religion.
So take your own stupid, shove it up your ass, and fuck off. Because there most certainly are examples of violence perpetuated by Christians.
And you can bet your ass that if an atheist set up the "Holy Mary Mother of God Gangbang" ... some crazy bastard is going to lose his shit and do something insane.