Re:And the zombification of our children continues
on
The Wi-Fi On the Bus
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Right, because before putting wifi on the bus, there were so many opportunities for learning and self-achievement
Actually, you're right. They're missing the mark on the public school mission, and what public schools are best at: socialization.
Really, there's no better argument for mass public schools: get along with those around you and you'll be a good adult, or some such shit. The education is shit, so nothing to remark about as a positive there.
So, truly: the wifi is detracting from the Mission Statement. Someone will probably have to get rid of it.
Hey, don't dis the LaserJet IIP. I had one until a couple years ago, which I got rid of for a number of reasons - namely, I ran out of toner, and was getting intermittent PCB-induced errors
However, the printer went through hell and back, and still survived. It was a public school printer for over a decade, followed by a couple years at a private school and then sitting in someone's basement for a year or so next to their cat litter. The gears were almost toothless from use and would slip slightly once every 10 pages or so, and it smelled dusty/like clean cat litter when you printed a lot at a time, but it still worked - and I got it for free. The thing probably saw hundreds of thousands, if not over a million or more, pages before I got it, and I used it for a couple years before putting it down.
Now I've got a USB Brother 1340 which is a poor impersonation of the LJII and LJIII printers. It requires a blob driver which results in any Windows 7 machine printing to it causing the samba daemon to max out CPU (damn it, can't find a fix). It's infuriating.
I know of engineering multiple companies still using HP LJIIIs and similar vintage. Those things are freaking tanks.
In uni, a friend and I worked on our final CS101 project together - something in C++, I don't recall specifically. I did the better (80%+) part of it, and he ended up going into it. From what I can tell, he's not half bad.
Ironically, he's the programmer now, and I hate programming (preferring the system side of things).
I had cable internet access back then: our town was one of the first 'test sites' for what is now the regional home provider giant.
I barely ever even played Starcraft except for at LAN parties. Why? Because it wasn't half as much fun. It was much more fun to sit next to friends, drink soda (and later, beer) and occasionally hit each other. Yelling at someone at "spit in the eye" range is also much more fun than doing it over Teamspeak or some such thing.
Sure, today, it's possible you could run a LAN party off of a high-speed Internet connection. However, most of the LAN parties I've been to wouldn't work like this, easily: at 15-30kbps up, you're not given much room for a modern, diverse multiplayer game with a handful people on the network. Also, we've usually been kicked out to the garage or basement - locations which (usually) do not have uplink without running lengthy cables (or using wireless). I suppose it would work, but it certainly complicates things.
I have to wonder why IBM is (at least, as of now) limiting these processors in their own hardware.
I can understand the initial economic advantage: they'd gain more profit from server sales, and would be able to sell Linux servers at a fairly non-trivial mark-up (on base hardware cost, to them).
But what is gained there is probably trivial compared to commercial marketing of the chips/boards (OEM sales). I suspect it might also avoid scrutiny from antitrust lawyers more easily. Why wouldn't they do this? I'd certainly love a processor like that; it'd be incredible. 1/4th the power envelope of the Power6, and twice the performance (assuming it means core clock)? That's incredible: the 3.2GHz Power6 is rated at under 100W TDP.
Such a processor might just sway Apple to go back to the Power architecture, I'd think. Linux will run on them, obviously; the only thing you couldn't run on them is Windows (and even that might be possible down the road with only a little work on MS's part).
The only two reasons I can imagine are 'exclusivity' and 'insufficient fab capacity'. That second one would certainly do it on its own.
There were, but not many. Nowhere near the scads of people roaming the planet today. I've read that there have been several times in known history where there were fewer than a couple hundred thousand people; it's plausible that the past 100 years has had more people alive than all of human history, considering the multiple near-extinction events which have supposedly occurred.
A lot of forum software works well, until it gets "behind the curve", and then the site maintainer pulls the site*.
By "behind the curve" I mean any of the following can/does happen: 1) Forum software gets out of date and user fails to upgrade due to modifications or similar, resulting in spam. 2) Forum software gets popular without having a good security model and/or update cycle, resulting in exploits. 3) Gets inundated with comment approvals and the forum (or blog) gets ignored or set to auto-allow out of frustration.
* By "pulls the site" I mean "abandons it but doesn't take it down". That's typically the end result.
It's a lot of work to maintain your own forum and/or blog: managing spam can and will take hours+ from your day if you've not got a good automated and/or textual way to deal with it: web interfaces are clumsy.
Car analogy: 95% of cars are rusty old heaps of crap that can't move. Thankfully they're in scrapyards and not on the roads.
Yet, unlike most of those cars, the actual blog content is not necessarily useless. I have seen quite a few abandoned blogs and/or forums which have 3-10 year old information on them which is by no means useless; it's just getting buried.
Digital archeologists of the future will probably have to figure out an automated way to prune back the spam to find the actual Internet, the way things are going.
Consider: if spam accounts for 95% of all user-generated content, and said user-generated content is actually a non-trivial percentage of all actual content online (believable), consider how much bandwidth gets wasted by these spammers. (Thankfully, I suspect most of the 'user generated content spam' doesn't show up on the first couple search page results so it's not going to likely be perused with regularity - unless it's more heavily seeded on topics common folks search.)
We've been saying "flash will die soon" since oh, 1998 or so?
First it was HTML4 and VRML: they were going to allow virtual worlds and completely replace the capabilities of Flash. But then Flash came out with a new version.
Flash festered for years, with a couple other come-lately contenders (currently: Silverlight), but none were as widely adopted as Flash or really all that much better/different. But over the years, Flash has improved it's functionality significantly.
When it comes down to it, Flash itself doesn't suck. The problem with Flash is the player implementations: they're bloated, slow, and generally poorly written. They're not available on all platforms, and make many of the platforms they're written for crash and/or use massive amounts of processor and memory. This has been increasingly the case since Adobe took over from Macromedia.
So, it's still possible for Flash to not suck: they just need to do things like not throw only one developer at the Linux version of the player, and actually implement things properly. For most people, it wouldn't matter if it's not "free/open source" as long as it's free-to-use.
I would instead say "unintentional megacorp hindered by purpose-sprawl more than code-stink or feature-creep". Some large organizations inspire creativity. Granted not many.
Can you name one - just one - top-down organization which inspires creativity and innovation? I'd even give you points for naming one which does not stifle said characteristics.
This document describes a procedure hereby known as "reverse faxing". In this procedure, the paperwork workload is reduced significantly by only acknowledging reverse faxed files and filing all others circularly.
In all seriousness, I suspect they do it due to how they figured out to feed the pre-printed forms into the fax machine. For some reason, nobody realized they could turn them around.
I've yet to see a cable fail, but I've seen the fasteners slip as well as fraying resulting in a slightly mushy feel. It doesn't happen on newer vehicles unless someone fucked up big-time.
Given Toyota's recent record, that's entirely possible.
Who the fuck wants to die for Taiwan (excepting bunch of geezers nostalgic for bar girl poonannie) now that the mainland isn't supporting regimes that endanger the West, and why shouldn't the strong in Asia be its masters?
Apparently you aren't aware of the fact that almost all scenarios involving "China takes Taiwan" also tend to start out with "High altitude nuclear explosion cripples US Pacific fleet". Or how such scenarios would likely end with "Due to a taste of victory, China takes over entire region, exploiting its peoples and resources... for China!"
There has been an increase in laws regulating (or more accurately, punishing the lack of) the moral treatment of others in the West for hundreds of years.
People, however, are still shit, as a populace. To the exception of the few bright lights out there, we're all a bunch of assholes looking out for ourselves.
If there were additional moon rock for sale, it would deflate its relative value. If multiple companies start doing it, funding from such a venture would cease to be possible.
It has nothing to do with globalization, per se, except it's the ultimate result of globalization's culmination. Globalization has run its course and there are no more horses in that barn.
It has happened before and it will happen again, both on the scale of the individual and the nation: as things get difficult, people change the rules as to what is 'acceptable'. It's perfectly fine to be standing on your high moral horse, but it's also terribly easy to do when things are peachy keen.
When you're hungry, your family is hungry, and you don't know how you're going to feed and shelter your family for the winter, "acceptable" is viewed in terms of losses, not morality: can you pull it off and come out ahead, or at least maintain your status quo. Taking the moral high ground and not killing your neighbor in his sleep might be difficult if you know he's got a wood stove and a store of cured foods.
When it's easy to come out ahead, those choices don't need to be made. You can go to your 9 to 5 job, come home, crack open a beer. You're not struggling just for food, and that rent check isn't 2 days late because you had to hawk off some valuables to make it.
As a group, humans are very good at taking care of ourselves in the short term. We'll do what we think will allow us to get by, survive, and thrive. If we don't we either survive and get stronger/learn from our mistakes, or we fall by the wayside.
Most throttles are a simple cable system (or, at least, they used to be). Such a system doesn't break often and, when it does break, seems to be a gradual thing. I don't personally see much of a need to change things from such a simple mechanism: it works, and rarely breaks. Added complexity introduces many additional failure points. The failure being solely mechanical still likely points to either a drastic re-engineering to account for the electronics, or an electronics-induced mechanical failure. Cable throttles are not exactly "new" science.
A throttle really needs to be designed with safety in mind: IE, under-working not over-working. In other words, the car doesn't "go", never mind not accelerating.
The summary is referring to breaking systems when mentioning hoses and hydraulics. It's already a complex system, but should not be in any way associated with the throttle: breaks should still work when the throttle is broken.
Really, there's little excuse except poor engineering on the part of the Toyota failures. I don't think it speaks one way or the other, for or against, EVs/electronics in vehicles. There are other, bigger issues surrounding EVs/electronics which aren't even really related. The fact that the Toyotas were 'advanced' vehicles is simply coincidence.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the way that the whole 'green technologies' work could see this coming. Simply, nobody has been able to make a viable economic run of electric vehicles yet because the base technologies are not yet viable: significant research, not engineering needs to be done before any significant breakthroughs in the "end product" are made. The base technologies simply aren't available yet.
By breakthroughs, I mean something actually desirable to consumers.
I suspect the goals of Tesla were to pump-and-dump from the beginning: get a pretty concept vehicle with good marketing behind it, get government funding, and ride it to personal wealth. If it results in a viable commercial venture, awesome. If not, they'd still be ahead financially and they had a good time doing it.
My understanding is that one of the major problems with PHP for something like facebook - as opposed to a language like Perl or Python - is that unlike other languages, PHP does not manage SQL database session connections. This results in those professional "oops, we fucked up" messages, timeouts, and other fun stuff like that which wouldn't happen (as regularly) if they'd designed things well.
So if they're fixing that in their PHP rewrite, I'd say they're fixing half the problem they've got. The other half of the problem - slowness - can be gradually fixed by reverting parts of their software to system-level (C) programming, but the database issues need to be fixed ASAP.
The level/degree of proof the UK government seems to be requiring for this is the 'scientific' type. For most things in life, statistical analysis tends to be enough.
What this guy said is akin to saying that North Korea has the strongest army in the world, because there's no proof to the contrary.
Pick any of these:
1) Lackluster/no security features. 2) Lack of improvement over the years. One of the cardinal rules for security is continual improvement. 3) Repeated exploit of said piece of crap. 4) Microsoft itself more-or-less admitting it's insecure and unrepairable - they effectively abandoned it years ago. 5) Anecdotal evidence from tens of thousands of computer repair types; I guarantee you IE is the vector for 9 out of 10 malware infections, and most of those are probably IE.
I'd wager they've been paid off. Anyone with even the slightest amount of intellect can look at the information available and determine that IE6 is rubbish. It's a hell of a lot less proof than most governmental bodies act - often, said bodies act in direct contradiction to the facts for the purpose of special interests money.
I don't think the realization has sunk in that Microsoft may have turned over a new leaf has sunk in for many people yet.
I didn't say they had turned over a new leaf, just that they may have. The vote is still out: will Windows 8 (or whatever) suck, or are they actually going to start to consistently make good hardware?
Windows 3.1 through XP all sucked, horribly. The few improvements they made were long available elsewhere, and there were many problems with each of them which they never bothered to fix. They've got two decades of shit products to live down; I think a healthy dose of skepticism is necessary.
It's not a matter of not having a weapon; it's a matter of not having a significantly better, or at least equal, weapon than the criminals.
A weapon can be anything: your arms, a knife, a baseball bat. Chances are that violent thugs are going to come up-armed: they're going to have one or more of those things and/or a gun, and they're going to come in numbers greater than your own.
By having a gun, you greatly increase your own odds. You keep the enemy at greater-than-arm's-length, and you are reduced from being at their whims to being in control in your own home.
Every now and then you see about an armed robbery going horrifyingly right, with the criminals in question staining the homeowner's carpet. Not so often do you hear about a homeowner shot by criminals with their own gun - at least not that I have seen.
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Right, because before putting wifi on the bus, there were so many opportunities for learning and self-achievement
Actually, you're right. They're missing the mark on the public school mission, and what public schools are best at: socialization.
Really, there's no better argument for mass public schools: get along with those around you and you'll be a good adult, or some such shit. The education is shit, so nothing to remark about as a positive there.
So, truly: the wifi is detracting from the Mission Statement. Someone will probably have to get rid of it.
Hey, don't dis the LaserJet IIP. I had one until a couple years ago, which I got rid of for a number of reasons - namely, I ran out of toner, and was getting intermittent PCB-induced errors
However, the printer went through hell and back, and still survived. It was a public school printer for over a decade, followed by a couple years at a private school and then sitting in someone's basement for a year or so next to their cat litter. The gears were almost toothless from use and would slip slightly once every 10 pages or so, and it smelled dusty/like clean cat litter when you printed a lot at a time, but it still worked - and I got it for free. The thing probably saw hundreds of thousands, if not over a million or more, pages before I got it, and I used it for a couple years before putting it down.
Now I've got a USB Brother 1340 which is a poor impersonation of the LJII and LJIII printers. It requires a blob driver which results in any Windows 7 machine printing to it causing the samba daemon to max out CPU (damn it, can't find a fix). It's infuriating.
I know of engineering multiple companies still using HP LJIIIs and similar vintage. Those things are freaking tanks.
In uni, a friend and I worked on our final CS101 project together - something in C++, I don't recall specifically. I did the better (80%+) part of it, and he ended up going into it. From what I can tell, he's not half bad.
Ironically, he's the programmer now, and I hate programming (preferring the system side of things).
Did you actually play back then?
I had cable internet access back then: our town was one of the first 'test sites' for what is now the regional home provider giant.
I barely ever even played Starcraft except for at LAN parties. Why? Because it wasn't half as much fun. It was much more fun to sit next to friends, drink soda (and later, beer) and occasionally hit each other. Yelling at someone at "spit in the eye" range is also much more fun than doing it over Teamspeak or some such thing.
Sure, today, it's possible you could run a LAN party off of a high-speed Internet connection. However, most of the LAN parties I've been to wouldn't work like this, easily: at 15-30kbps up, you're not given much room for a modern, diverse multiplayer game with a handful people on the network. Also, we've usually been kicked out to the garage or basement - locations which (usually) do not have uplink without running lengthy cables (or using wireless). I suppose it would work, but it certainly complicates things.
I have to wonder why IBM is (at least, as of now) limiting these processors in their own hardware.
I can understand the initial economic advantage: they'd gain more profit from server sales, and would be able to sell Linux servers at a fairly non-trivial mark-up (on base hardware cost, to them).
But what is gained there is probably trivial compared to commercial marketing of the chips/boards (OEM sales). I suspect it might also avoid scrutiny from antitrust lawyers more easily. Why wouldn't they do this? I'd certainly love a processor like that; it'd be incredible. 1/4th the power envelope of the Power6, and twice the performance (assuming it means core clock)? That's incredible: the 3.2GHz Power6 is rated at under 100W TDP.
Such a processor might just sway Apple to go back to the Power architecture, I'd think. Linux will run on them, obviously; the only thing you couldn't run on them is Windows (and even that might be possible down the road with only a little work on MS's part).
The only two reasons I can imagine are 'exclusivity' and 'insufficient fab capacity'. That second one would certainly do it on its own.
There were, but not many. Nowhere near the scads of people roaming the planet today. I've read that there have been several times in known history where there were fewer than a couple hundred thousand people; it's plausible that the past 100 years has had more people alive than all of human history, considering the multiple near-extinction events which have supposedly occurred.
A lot of forum software works well, until it gets "behind the curve", and then the site maintainer pulls the site*.
By "behind the curve" I mean any of the following can/does happen:
1) Forum software gets out of date and user fails to upgrade due to modifications or similar, resulting in spam.
2) Forum software gets popular without having a good security model and/or update cycle, resulting in exploits.
3) Gets inundated with comment approvals and the forum (or blog) gets ignored or set to auto-allow out of frustration.
* By "pulls the site" I mean "abandons it but doesn't take it down". That's typically the end result.
It's a lot of work to maintain your own forum and/or blog: managing spam can and will take hours+ from your day if you've not got a good automated and/or textual way to deal with it: web interfaces are clumsy.
Car analogy: 95% of cars are rusty old heaps of crap that can't move. Thankfully they're in scrapyards and not on the roads.
Yet, unlike most of those cars, the actual blog content is not necessarily useless. I have seen quite a few abandoned blogs and/or forums which have 3-10 year old information on them which is by no means useless; it's just getting buried.
Digital archeologists of the future will probably have to figure out an automated way to prune back the spam to find the actual Internet, the way things are going.
Consider: if spam accounts for 95% of all user-generated content, and said user-generated content is actually a non-trivial percentage of all actual content online (believable), consider how much bandwidth gets wasted by these spammers. (Thankfully, I suspect most of the 'user generated content spam' doesn't show up on the first couple search page results so it's not going to likely be perused with regularity - unless it's more heavily seeded on topics common folks search.)
We've been saying "flash will die soon" since oh, 1998 or so?
First it was HTML4 and VRML: they were going to allow virtual worlds and completely replace the capabilities of Flash. But then Flash came out with a new version.
Flash festered for years, with a couple other come-lately contenders (currently: Silverlight), but none were as widely adopted as Flash or really all that much better/different. But over the years, Flash has improved it's functionality significantly.
When it comes down to it, Flash itself doesn't suck. The problem with Flash is the player implementations: they're bloated, slow, and generally poorly written. They're not available on all platforms, and make many of the platforms they're written for crash and/or use massive amounts of processor and memory. This has been increasingly the case since Adobe took over from Macromedia.
So, it's still possible for Flash to not suck: they just need to do things like not throw only one developer at the Linux version of the player, and actually implement things properly. For most people, it wouldn't matter if it's not "free/open source" as long as it's free-to-use.
I would instead say "unintentional megacorp hindered by purpose-sprawl more than code-stink or feature-creep". Some large organizations inspire creativity. Granted not many.
Can you name one - just one - top-down organization which inspires creativity and innovation? I'd even give you points for naming one which does not stifle said characteristics.
If only my van got that kind of mileage.
Patent Application 1994934772299
Abstract
This document describes a procedure hereby known as "reverse faxing". In this procedure, the paperwork workload is reduced significantly by only acknowledging reverse faxed files and filing all others circularly.
In all seriousness, I suspect they do it due to how they figured out to feed the pre-printed forms into the fax machine. For some reason, nobody realized they could turn them around.
Meh. Your friend had a P100?
I remember playing it on a friend's parents' 386 DX, which we had covertly over-clocked to something like 44MHz.
Kids these days, they get everything...
I've yet to see a cable fail, but I've seen the fasteners slip as well as fraying resulting in a slightly mushy feel. It doesn't happen on newer vehicles unless someone fucked up big-time.
Given Toyota's recent record, that's entirely possible.
Add to that list: half of Eastern Europe, most of the northern *stans (including Afghanistan), and so on.
Not to mention the travesties committed in Tibet and throughout western China to quell "dissent".
And Georgia was just recently. Like, under a year and a half ago. (But I'm sure Georgia deserved it, that bitch. How dare she leave Mother Russia.)
Who the fuck wants to die for Taiwan (excepting bunch of geezers nostalgic for bar girl poonannie) now that the mainland isn't supporting regimes that endanger the West, and why shouldn't the strong in Asia be its masters?
Apparently you aren't aware of the fact that almost all scenarios involving "China takes Taiwan" also tend to start out with "High altitude nuclear explosion cripples US Pacific fleet". Or how such scenarios would likely end with "Due to a taste of victory, China takes over entire region, exploiting its peoples and resources... for China!"
Don't be the fool who doesn't look at history.
There has been an increase in laws regulating (or more accurately, punishing the lack of) the moral treatment of others in the West for hundreds of years.
People, however, are still shit, as a populace. To the exception of the few bright lights out there, we're all a bunch of assholes looking out for ourselves.
If there were additional moon rock for sale, it would deflate its relative value. If multiple companies start doing it, funding from such a venture would cease to be possible.
It has nothing to do with globalization, per se, except it's the ultimate result of globalization's culmination. Globalization has run its course and there are no more horses in that barn.
It has happened before and it will happen again, both on the scale of the individual and the nation: as things get difficult, people change the rules as to what is 'acceptable'. It's perfectly fine to be standing on your high moral horse, but it's also terribly easy to do when things are peachy keen.
When you're hungry, your family is hungry, and you don't know how you're going to feed and shelter your family for the winter, "acceptable" is viewed in terms of losses, not morality: can you pull it off and come out ahead, or at least maintain your status quo. Taking the moral high ground and not killing your neighbor in his sleep might be difficult if you know he's got a wood stove and a store of cured foods.
When it's easy to come out ahead, those choices don't need to be made. You can go to your 9 to 5 job, come home, crack open a beer. You're not struggling just for food, and that rent check isn't 2 days late because you had to hawk off some valuables to make it.
As a group, humans are very good at taking care of ourselves in the short term. We'll do what we think will allow us to get by, survive, and thrive. If we don't we either survive and get stronger/learn from our mistakes, or we fall by the wayside.
Most throttles are a simple cable system (or, at least, they used to be). Such a system doesn't break often and, when it does break, seems to be a gradual thing. I don't personally see much of a need to change things from such a simple mechanism: it works, and rarely breaks. Added complexity introduces many additional failure points. The failure being solely mechanical still likely points to either a drastic re-engineering to account for the electronics, or an electronics-induced mechanical failure. Cable throttles are not exactly "new" science.
A throttle really needs to be designed with safety in mind: IE, under-working not over-working. In other words, the car doesn't "go", never mind not accelerating.
The summary is referring to breaking systems when mentioning hoses and hydraulics. It's already a complex system, but should not be in any way associated with the throttle: breaks should still work when the throttle is broken.
Really, there's little excuse except poor engineering on the part of the Toyota failures. I don't think it speaks one way or the other, for or against, EVs/electronics in vehicles. There are other, bigger issues surrounding EVs/electronics which aren't even really related. The fact that the Toyotas were 'advanced' vehicles is simply coincidence.
Anyone who has been paying attention to the way that the whole 'green technologies' work could see this coming. Simply, nobody has been able to make a viable economic run of electric vehicles yet because the base technologies are not yet viable: significant research, not engineering needs to be done before any significant breakthroughs in the "end product" are made. The base technologies simply aren't available yet.
By breakthroughs, I mean something actually desirable to consumers.
I suspect the goals of Tesla were to pump-and-dump from the beginning: get a pretty concept vehicle with good marketing behind it, get government funding, and ride it to personal wealth. If it results in a viable commercial venture, awesome. If not, they'd still be ahead financially and they had a good time doing it.
My understanding is that one of the major problems with PHP for something like facebook - as opposed to a language like Perl or Python - is that unlike other languages, PHP does not manage SQL database session connections. This results in those professional "oops, we fucked up" messages, timeouts, and other fun stuff like that which wouldn't happen (as regularly) if they'd designed things well.
So if they're fixing that in their PHP rewrite, I'd say they're fixing half the problem they've got. The other half of the problem - slowness - can be gradually fixed by reverting parts of their software to system-level (C) programming, but the database issues need to be fixed ASAP.
The level/degree of proof the UK government seems to be requiring for this is the 'scientific' type. For most things in life, statistical analysis tends to be enough.
What this guy said is akin to saying that North Korea has the strongest army in the world, because there's no proof to the contrary.
Pick any of these:
1) Lackluster/no security features.
2) Lack of improvement over the years. One of the cardinal rules for security is continual improvement.
3) Repeated exploit of said piece of crap.
4) Microsoft itself more-or-less admitting it's insecure and unrepairable - they effectively abandoned it years ago.
5) Anecdotal evidence from tens of thousands of computer repair types; I guarantee you IE is the vector for 9 out of 10 malware infections, and most of those are probably IE.
I'd wager they've been paid off. Anyone with even the slightest amount of intellect can look at the information available and determine that IE6 is rubbish. It's a hell of a lot less proof than most governmental bodies act - often, said bodies act in direct contradiction to the facts for the purpose of special interests money.
I don't think the realization has sunk in that Microsoft may have turned over a new leaf has sunk in for many people yet.
I didn't say they had turned over a new leaf, just that they may have. The vote is still out: will Windows 8 (or whatever) suck, or are they actually going to start to consistently make good hardware?
Windows 3.1 through XP all sucked, horribly. The few improvements they made were long available elsewhere, and there were many problems with each of them which they never bothered to fix. They've got two decades of shit products to live down; I think a healthy dose of skepticism is necessary.
It's not a matter of not having a weapon; it's a matter of not having a significantly better, or at least equal, weapon than the criminals.
A weapon can be anything: your arms, a knife, a baseball bat. Chances are that violent thugs are going to come up-armed: they're going to have one or more of those things and/or a gun, and they're going to come in numbers greater than your own.
By having a gun, you greatly increase your own odds. You keep the enemy at greater-than-arm's-length, and you are reduced from being at their whims to being in control in your own home.
Every now and then you see about an armed robbery going horrifyingly right, with the criminals in question staining the homeowner's carpet. Not so often do you hear about a homeowner shot by criminals with their own gun - at least not that I have seen.
It'd really suck if you have to switch hands. Yeah, that's terribly useful...