I do it all the time (on the console, of course). It's a symptom of thought process and, as someone else said, "natural refinement. This applies to both at-the-moment command formulation as well as a person's progression and familiarity with the various commands.
Someone starts out and learns cat. OK:
cat foo
Maybe then they learn that grep can be used for matching specifics within the file - but nothing more. So they try:
cat foo | grep *litterbox*
And what do you know - it works! They're elated, and it sticks in their mind.
Now, they might come back to that process and fix it, mentally, as they progress in knowledge and realize that no, cat wasn't necessary. But natural inclination might be to quickly type what they'd originally learned. I sometimes find myself backspacing that nonsense out of my terminal, and I've been using linux for 11 years.
As for the OP and responder... uh, dudes... that's the kind of thing we keep to ourselves.:P
I had to do a WXP Home install recently - for the first time. OH. My. GOD. I knew it was bad, really bad, but not THAT bad. Something like 25 sets of 5 random alphanumeric characters, repeated back -twice- over the phone (because, of course, the built-in didn't work).
I'm going to (hopefully) guess this is an advertising ploy to sell the game when it's actually, finally, released.
Situation 1: "Duke Nuk'em Forever will be on shelves July 4th" -> "Meh, about damn time. Never thought it'd get here, but who gives a fuck now?"
Situation 2: "DNF has been canceled." -> "What the...? DNF at Gamespot? I thought it was canceled! Cool, I wonder if this is a fluke!" *grabs three copies, 1 to play, 3 for ebay*
You realize, don't you, that it probably has something to do with the population density of the country vs. Europe? It costs more, per capita, to install wireless services with universal (or even acceptable) coverage. Cities and large towns are the exception in the US, whereas that's less the case in Europe.
And as another poster said, Canada is even worse. That couldn't have something to do with human population density, could it?
But, I do agree with you, in sentiment if not principle: data plans are too highly priced for most people to justify them - especially when they're used to being dicked around on billing and minutes. Yes, many, if not most people, still have to fight with providers who promise X and give them X-1, and then charge them an arm and a leg for that "1" on the bill.
I think part of it is that data is just gravy for the phone companies. They have extra bandwidth, so they might as well sell it; they can always use QoS to degrade it so voice gets through. But, they don't have so much extra bandwidth that they're able to offer it inexpensively - and doing so wouldn't be nearly as profitable, in terms of I/O (though it might be in total dollars). This works, so they stick with it.
And god knows they don't want to see the revenue from texting and per-megabyte data rates go away. $.10 a text, $1.25 per meg with Verizon, if they're not part of your plan ($5 and $50, respecitvely - thereabout). And it's very, very easy (as in, trivial) to throw an extra $100 onto your account with those overage costs when you don't know you're being charged them (even if you're not really using it but for personal self-communication, like forwarding directions to yourself so you don't have to print it out).
Texting is the best thing most people can -afford-. Your average person is not going to pay $100+ a month for what ultimately boils down to email and limited "I'm bored" web browsing on their =phone=.
When you combine the actual data rates, the price structuring of data plans, the software/hardware support required (and mostly lacking) for common web/email media, the price of the handheld, the advertised vs. realized data rates (and the amount of 'useless' data you get pushed to you while on a data plan, using up your expensive bandwidth).... it's not worth it.
I imagine that such things are more easily justifiable in a larger city. This makes sense, as Japan is, essentially, a larger city.
Personally, I've used foobar for audio and Media Player Classic (not sure if the 2nd is open source or not). VLC is worthless on both Windows and Linux.
- drivers/OS support (WXP still has a horrible wireless implementation/stack which is very unreliable and buggy - most corps won't accept this. Anyone who's had to support laptops knows what I'm talking about.). - roll-out cost (Wireless adapters, particularly for desktops, are expensive. Existing wired infrastructure isn't going away, so use it while it's there.) - interference (There are a lot of things out there using the 2.4GHz frequency. It'd not be cool to have half the users in one section of the building losing connectivity when some idiot in the office next door uses his 2.4GHz wireless phone.)
I think it's somewhat ironic that MS would release their latest, greatest buzz-compliant product for free on the 5th of May (ie Cinco de Mayo or however it's spelled), which is considered a "labor" holiday in many countries as well as a flagship holiday for Marxist/Socialist social agendas.
I wonder if it was intentional. Inside humour, maybe?
First, they get to have people install their OS for a year - call it Vista upgraders. It's a suckerpunch, though, because after that year expires, those people are essentially forced to upgrade to the 'official' W7, or go back to Vista with significant headache. (Oh, the upgrade process from the RC to the final will be easy, rest assured.) Bait, meet hook.
Second, they get to offer their flagship product (and it is their flagship product, at this point) for 'free' - ie, completely without any support, most likely, on account of its RC status. Chances are they will, however, release updates for it, making it more like a traditional product launch.
The fact that they're planning to take money from Intel, under the guise of Intel's supposed predatory behavior, is just that - a guise. The real purpose is to fill the coffers of the EU. Yes, they use a real justification which the majority of people will likely accept, but it's not the real reason they're doing it.
Actually, no, it's not all that perverse that they get most of their income from fines. It's much preferable, as an abstract concept, to (say) placing onerous taxes on everyone, as tends to be the common trend amongst governments. It'd be a much better practice to only 'tax' behavior which is seen anti-competitive and hostile towards the better interests of the society.
What's perverse about it is that the EU isn't an elected body. They're hand-picked goons by each country's respective government, and they govern by fiat. In theory, the EU is a pretty awesome idea; in practice, it's a goon squad on the lookout for themselves alone, with each country's representative looking out first for the EU, and second for their own country - preferably at the detriment of other member countries and companies which operate within those countries.
No, of course it wouldn't - not unless your web browser is poorly written and stuck in an I/O blocking state, consuming all available CPU cycles. But that doesn't happen these days, and hasn't for a decade+. Never mind the bravado in which the article states these things is, and always has been, nonsense.
Thank God! I'm glad someone knows what's going on in this confusing world of ours!
As far as what the OP says, aside from the wild fear mongering and hilariously dumb power distribution "analogies", I do tend to experience connectivity problems during peak hours (Sunday nights specifically). That is, I lose connectivity: upstream and downstream simply cease for periods of time (5s+), and I'm unable to connect to anything (including DNS) on the outside. It's infuriating.
USB/PhotoCD, CD/DVD with just images -> autoplay OK
Don't know about you, but I've seen this feature smack a couple people pretty damn hard when they inserted a CD with "special" images on it, in addition to the ones they want to view. Like, naked pictures. That's pretty not "OK".
An interesting fact about the 1918 pandemic is that India was very heavily hit - moreso than other countries. This might suggest a potential genetic factor playing into the virus's lethality and virility there (likewise, in Mexico now), as well as a possible contradiction to the immune system weakness being a benefit for a virus like this (though I am uncertain how 3rd World India was at the time).
The longer this thing goes on, the more it looks like it might be a biological attack.
I find it interesting that the first case, in Cali, was supposedly a Chinese person, coming from China. Yet China hasn't had any known or reported cases yet (and they had a top general declare about 6 years ago that the US was going to be attacked by a bioweapon).
Mortality rate was -only- 2.5% of those infected during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. A normal flu is something like.1% of those infected.
Even with the 'official' death statistics - 80 out of 1380 - the death toll is about 5.7%. That's fucking huge, yet unofficial reports are claiming as high as 2-3x as many as the official death count (such as in the OP's linked article).
It's like saying (though to a lesser degree) that Hitler was a nice guy: he enjoyed art, architecture, and beauty. He was a bit of a nerd, and looked down on - just your average nerd, not the high-functioning type. And he just wanted to be accepted; truly, he was just misunderstood!
The concern should not be that someone like Bill - a power hungry control freak - become President. For someone like Bill, every step up to the Presidency would be a stepping stone to the Presidency.
And, in all likelihood, the Presidency would be a stepping stone to more power, in and of itself. The office of President wouldn't be important to him; sure, it's more prestige than whatever it was he did before, but it's not the true power he's looking for (not on its own, at least).
Back-room deals with industry types, politicians, and bankers would likely garter him more power, but ultimately, he'd be looking towards a coalition of those people to form a "new" government centered around himself, much in the same way that Bill gamed the computing industry: a single-seated throne of power where all decisions fall from the top, whether they're good for anyone or not - as long as they sound good and maintain his grasp on power.
Re:"at war with my parents over who is in control"
on
Bringing Up Bill
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sorry?
VisualBasic, Windows 95, 98, ME, ActiveDirectory, Bob, Clippy, win32 API, functionally useless APIs, forced backwards compatibility, intrusive and dangerous default system services, Internet Explorer, MSHTML, and on and on goes the list of half-baked, broken, and abusive technologies which we've had to work around for the past two decades. Policy at MS has always been "we're doing what we want, and don't care about you" with regard to their products; they're brazen, like an undisciplined IT worker is in making system changes.
What MS needed to do was to continue to make incremental improvements to XP. Maybe a facelift release (ala ME, but w/o as much cruft), and maybe an incremental security system release. I realize that's essentially what Vista is, but Vista broke entirely too many things to allow for it to be considered "maintaining the status quo".
All the while, they needed to be developing what is their 'next' OS in the background, with the VM plans for Win32 versions of their OS. The new version would be, or should have been, a drastic divorce of the old way of thinking. They'd have to change Visual Studio around a bit, but since they already had.NET, they could just design things on the backend of the "W7" or whatever it would've been, to allow for reasonably simple porting (or, at least, for future versions to be written natively). Maybe, had they done things right, the GUI system wouldn't be so intrinsically shackled to the subsystems, and porting applications might be easier. Who knows...
The problem here is that MS is trying to limit the options of their customers. Building an integral VM into their OS is the logical thing to do at this time in the game, with computers shipping with multicore processors and gigs of RAM. Allow their customers to run their $600 Photoshop or Office 97 from the VM - but with diminished performance due to having half a dozen win32 processes shackled to it to allow it to work. Maintain the new paradigm of security, and make it obvious that they're running "old crap", and people will migrate to the new stuff (eventually).
Maybe give them an interim period where the 'compatibility' option is available. But, by all means, don't just cut-and-run like they have essentially done - whether intentionally or not - with Vista and W7. When you're selling a binary-only operating system, and your architectural changes are large and drastic, after years of developer dependence upon a specific monoculture, you just don't do that. You've got to do your damnedest to make the transition easy.
MS is clinging to the old ways of thinking here. OS X has its virtualization, and via VMWare, most linux machines do, too. Both OS X and Linux users use these tools, and it is not (for the most part) seen as "half assed" anymore. There are a LOT of applications out there now. This isn't 1995, or even 1998 or 2000, when the number of popular or useful applications could reasonably be printed in a single round-up issue of PC Magazine. Virtualization is seen as a necessary evil by many people, but one which has to be done to move forward: when the applications are either not ready or not available for your new and necessary OS, then you shoehorn things for a while.
In reality, MS should have done the -exact- same thing Apple did with OS X. Or more accurately, Vista should've been a house-cleaning upgrade, with no substantial subsystem changes that impact anything relatively recent (except maybe some IE isolation and 'system install defaults' and corporate/IT rollout tool improvements). Rip out the code which allows old, native 16 and 32 bit apps to run natively. Rip out some of the cruft that makes XP glitch like 95 did while shutting down; clean up the boot process and necessary services with some sane default user type security settings (but allow the 'old' ones to still be used for the meantime). Get rid of some of the irritating start bar glitches (ie 'lag when clicked' when explorer is failing somewhere else). Hell, maybe even introduce Vista-style memory management (if appropriate) to better utilize systems with 4Gb of RAM.
Basically, they should've done things to prepare Xp to be virtualized under their next, new, and great OS in a seamless, bloat-free manner. UAC shouldn't have come until it could be put on top of proper ACL-priviledged accounts (vs. the current 'administrator is everyone' thing still going on). You know, something designed and not kludged.
And no, I'm not a MS fanboy in the least. But, given MS's resources, they really smashed this opportunity on the rocks.
MacOS came about when there was no such thing as a GUI. Microsoft's first OS came about when there was no really usable, readily available operating system for the hobbyist. For a decade or more, on into the 1990s, people paid hundreds of dollars to get a handful of moderately functional text editors, word processors, printer drivers, and various other software tidbits to create a 'computing environment'.
Linux came along, as did the Internet, and changed all that: a movement of popular culture took place in the late 1990s and over the past decade, and today it is expected for a computer "operating system" to at least have the bare basics: tools to effectively manage files, play media, read and write documents, chat, and browse the web.
Anything short of those requirements these days is an appliance. Hell, Android lacks a lot of functionality found in other phones, for that matter (look at the Blackberry phones, those are incredible for what they are - free, on some providers, now).
Android is a long, long way from being anywhere significant, and frankly, I think Google shot themselves in the foot on two fronts:
1) They picked Java as their platform core. What were they thinking? Runs slower than native code (and slower than other runtime code, for that matter), has high hardware requirements, and is generally despised for these (and many other) reasons by developers. 2) They butchered Java, alienating whatever support they may have gotten from existing hardcore Java supporters, as well as turning Sun against them. Also, butchering a 'standard' and creating more, different things on which IT people have to deal with = not cool. 2) Java is not cool. It was a novel, interesting, and even useful idea when Sun pushed it around a decade ago, but it is not in any shape or form looked on as desirable by most people. It is boring. It gets the job done in many cases, but it's boring, and a bit of a headache just the same.
With a weaponized biological agent, or really any virus or anything which kills its host and infects through proximity, there are several things to consider with regard to its effectiveness:
* Its ability to spread quickly is reversely proportional to how severe the initial onset is. If a carrier can be an infected host, passing it on to others, before exhibiting symptoms, it spreads faster and wider. * It's ability to not kill its hosts too quickly. if they die too quickly, the host can't pass it on. * Its ability to keep the host infective long enough throughout its infestation to keep people getting infected. See the first point, as its related.
The thing about the 1918 flu is that it was able to spread quickly enough, without the initial symptoms being bad enough, to spread quickly. It also had a fairly long period where the hosts remained infective, IIRC.
As far as it being a weaponized strain... it's a virus. Would you, as a country, want to have a virus on the loose which is highly infective, spreads quickly, and has a high mortality rate? I don't think so: vaccines would be very, very expensive, and being the only country to possess them would be a big "we did it" sign to everyone else. This is, IMO, even more likely to be the case when the 'attacking' country is populous and concentrated (such as China and/or Russia, the most likely culprits, IMO, if it were such the case).
Which brings up a third possibility... it's an incompetently weaponized virus strain, done by a terrorist organization. Not a theory I'll hold to, but it's a possibility. It could also be something put forward by a government or two to try and evoke the whole "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" thing in the populace, which they could then leverage to the desired result. The coming weeks and months will tell whether any of these are true, or if it's just like SARS.
Part of me has to wonder whether, if this becomes a pandemic in the US, if it could've been mitigated by the things which politicians have been promising us for a decade: immigration reform, border control, and sending illegal residents home.
Slashdot Mirror
I do it all the time (on the console, of course). It's a symptom of thought process and, as someone else said, "natural refinement. This applies to both at-the-moment command formulation as well as a person's progression and familiarity with the various commands.
Someone starts out and learns cat. OK:
cat foo
Maybe then they learn that grep can be used for matching specifics within the file - but nothing more. So they try:
cat foo | grep *litterbox*
And what do you know - it works! They're elated, and it sticks in their mind.
Now, they might come back to that process and fix it, mentally, as they progress in knowledge and realize that no, cat wasn't necessary. But natural inclination might be to quickly type what they'd originally learned. I sometimes find myself backspacing that nonsense out of my terminal, and I've been using linux for 11 years.
As for the OP and responder... uh, dudes... that's the kind of thing we keep to ourselves. :P
Yep.
I had to do a WXP Home install recently - for the first time. OH. My. GOD. I knew it was bad, really bad, but not THAT bad. Something like 25 sets of 5 random alphanumeric characters, repeated back -twice- over the phone (because, of course, the built-in didn't work).
I'm going to (hopefully) guess this is an advertising ploy to sell the game when it's actually, finally, released.
Situation 1: "Duke Nuk'em Forever will be on shelves July 4th" -> "Meh, about damn time. Never thought it'd get here, but who gives a fuck now?"
Situation 2: "DNF has been canceled." -> "What the...? DNF at Gamespot? I thought it was canceled! Cool, I wonder if this is a fluke!" *grabs three copies, 1 to play, 3 for ebay*
You realize, don't you, that it probably has something to do with the population density of the country vs. Europe? It costs more, per capita, to install wireless services with universal (or even acceptable) coverage. Cities and large towns are the exception in the US, whereas that's less the case in Europe.
And as another poster said, Canada is even worse. That couldn't have something to do with human population density, could it?
But, I do agree with you, in sentiment if not principle: data plans are too highly priced for most people to justify them - especially when they're used to being dicked around on billing and minutes. Yes, many, if not most people, still have to fight with providers who promise X and give them X-1, and then charge them an arm and a leg for that "1" on the bill.
I think part of it is that data is just gravy for the phone companies. They have extra bandwidth, so they might as well sell it; they can always use QoS to degrade it so voice gets through. But, they don't have so much extra bandwidth that they're able to offer it inexpensively - and doing so wouldn't be nearly as profitable, in terms of I/O (though it might be in total dollars). This works, so they stick with it.
And god knows they don't want to see the revenue from texting and per-megabyte data rates go away. $.10 a text, $1.25 per meg with Verizon, if they're not part of your plan ($5 and $50, respecitvely - thereabout). And it's very, very easy (as in, trivial) to throw an extra $100 onto your account with those overage costs when you don't know you're being charged them (even if you're not really using it but for personal self-communication, like forwarding directions to yourself so you don't have to print it out).
Texting is the best thing most people can -afford-. Your average person is not going to pay $100+ a month for what ultimately boils down to email and limited "I'm bored" web browsing on their =phone=.
When you combine the actual data rates, the price structuring of data plans, the software/hardware support required (and mostly lacking) for common web/email media, the price of the handheld, the advertised vs. realized data rates (and the amount of 'useless' data you get pushed to you while on a data plan, using up your expensive bandwidth).... it's not worth it.
I imagine that such things are more easily justifiable in a larger city. This makes sense, as Japan is, essentially, a larger city.
Personally, I've used foobar for audio and Media Player Classic (not sure if the 2nd is open source or not). VLC is worthless on both Windows and Linux.
- drivers/OS support (WXP still has a horrible wireless implementation/stack which is very unreliable and buggy - most corps won't accept this. Anyone who's had to support laptops knows what I'm talking about.).
- roll-out cost (Wireless adapters, particularly for desktops, are expensive. Existing wired infrastructure isn't going away, so use it while it's there.)
- interference (There are a lot of things out there using the 2.4GHz frequency. It'd not be cool to have half the users in one section of the building losing connectivity when some idiot in the office next door uses his 2.4GHz wireless phone.)
I think it's somewhat ironic that MS would release their latest, greatest buzz-compliant product for free on the 5th of May (ie Cinco de Mayo or however it's spelled), which is considered a "labor" holiday in many countries as well as a flagship holiday for Marxist/Socialist social agendas.
I wonder if it was intentional. Inside humour, maybe?
This is a win/win situation for Microsoft.
First, they get to have people install their OS for a year - call it Vista upgraders. It's a suckerpunch, though, because after that year expires, those people are essentially forced to upgrade to the 'official' W7, or go back to Vista with significant headache. (Oh, the upgrade process from the RC to the final will be easy, rest assured.) Bait, meet hook.
Second, they get to offer their flagship product (and it is their flagship product, at this point) for 'free' - ie, completely without any support, most likely, on account of its RC status. Chances are they will, however, release updates for it, making it more like a traditional product launch.
Truly, this is being intellectually dishonest.
The fact that they're planning to take money from Intel, under the guise of Intel's supposed predatory behavior, is just that - a guise. The real purpose is to fill the coffers of the EU. Yes, they use a real justification which the majority of people will likely accept, but it's not the real reason they're doing it.
Actually, no, it's not all that perverse that they get most of their income from fines. It's much preferable, as an abstract concept, to (say) placing onerous taxes on everyone, as tends to be the common trend amongst governments. It'd be a much better practice to only 'tax' behavior which is seen anti-competitive and hostile towards the better interests of the society.
What's perverse about it is that the EU isn't an elected body. They're hand-picked goons by each country's respective government, and they govern by fiat. In theory, the EU is a pretty awesome idea; in practice, it's a goon squad on the lookout for themselves alone, with each country's representative looking out first for the EU, and second for their own country - preferably at the detriment of other member countries and companies which operate within those countries.
No, of course it wouldn't - not unless your web browser is poorly written and stuck in an I/O blocking state, consuming all available CPU cycles. But that doesn't happen these days, and hasn't for a decade+. Never mind the bravado in which the article states these things is, and always has been, nonsense.
Thank God! I'm glad someone knows what's going on in this confusing world of ours!
As far as what the OP says, aside from the wild fear mongering and hilariously dumb power distribution "analogies", I do tend to experience connectivity problems during peak hours (Sunday nights specifically). That is, I lose connectivity: upstream and downstream simply cease for periods of time (5s+), and I'm unable to connect to anything (including DNS) on the outside. It's infuriating.
USB/PhotoCD, CD/DVD with just images -> autoplay OK
Don't know about you, but I've seen this feature smack a couple people pretty damn hard when they inserted a CD with "special" images on it, in addition to the ones they want to view. Like, naked pictures. That's pretty not "OK".
An interesting fact about the 1918 pandemic is that India was very heavily hit - moreso than other countries. This might suggest a potential genetic factor playing into the virus's lethality and virility there (likewise, in Mexico now), as well as a possible contradiction to the immune system weakness being a benefit for a virus like this (though I am uncertain how 3rd World India was at the time).
Would hate to die of Swine Flu, just because of what it's called... and all that it would imply if I caught it..
Uh am I missing something here? What's implied by catching "swine influenza"?
I might possibly see a problem if you're a fearful Muslim or or Jew with prohibitions against pigs, but uh, only if you're stupid.
The longer this thing goes on, the more it looks like it might be a biological attack.
I find it interesting that the first case, in Cali, was supposedly a Chinese person, coming from China. Yet China hasn't had any known or reported cases yet (and they had a top general declare about 6 years ago that the US was going to be attacked by a bioweapon).
Mortality rate was -only- 2.5% of those infected during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. A normal flu is something like .1% of those infected.
Even with the 'official' death statistics - 80 out of 1380 - the death toll is about 5.7%. That's fucking huge, yet unofficial reports are claiming as high as 2-3x as many as the official death count (such as in the OP's linked article).
This is almost beyond scary.
Yep.
It's like saying (though to a lesser degree) that Hitler was a nice guy: he enjoyed art, architecture, and beauty. He was a bit of a nerd, and looked down on - just your average nerd, not the high-functioning type. And he just wanted to be accepted; truly, he was just misunderstood!
(Duly note the sarcasm.)
The concern should not be that someone like Bill - a power hungry control freak - become President. For someone like Bill, every step up to the Presidency would be a stepping stone to the Presidency.
And, in all likelihood, the Presidency would be a stepping stone to more power, in and of itself. The office of President wouldn't be important to him; sure, it's more prestige than whatever it was he did before, but it's not the true power he's looking for (not on its own, at least).
Back-room deals with industry types, politicians, and bankers would likely garter him more power, but ultimately, he'd be looking towards a coalition of those people to form a "new" government centered around himself, much in the same way that Bill gamed the computing industry: a single-seated throne of power where all decisions fall from the top, whether they're good for anyone or not - as long as they sound good and maintain his grasp on power.
Sorry?
VisualBasic, Windows 95, 98, ME, ActiveDirectory, Bob, Clippy, win32 API, functionally useless APIs, forced backwards compatibility, intrusive and dangerous default system services, Internet Explorer, MSHTML, and on and on goes the list of half-baked, broken, and abusive technologies which we've had to work around for the past two decades. Policy at MS has always been "we're doing what we want, and don't care about you" with regard to their products; they're brazen, like an undisciplined IT worker is in making system changes.
You're right, of course.
What MS needed to do was to continue to make incremental improvements to XP. Maybe a facelift release (ala ME, but w/o as much cruft), and maybe an incremental security system release. I realize that's essentially what Vista is, but Vista broke entirely too many things to allow for it to be considered "maintaining the status quo".
All the while, they needed to be developing what is their 'next' OS in the background, with the VM plans for Win32 versions of their OS. The new version would be, or should have been, a drastic divorce of the old way of thinking. They'd have to change Visual Studio around a bit, but since they already had .NET, they could just design things on the backend of the "W7" or whatever it would've been, to allow for reasonably simple porting (or, at least, for future versions to be written natively). Maybe, had they done things right, the GUI system wouldn't be so intrinsically shackled to the subsystems, and porting applications might be easier. Who knows...
The problem here is that MS is trying to limit the options of their customers. Building an integral VM into their OS is the logical thing to do at this time in the game, with computers shipping with multicore processors and gigs of RAM. Allow their customers to run their $600 Photoshop or Office 97 from the VM - but with diminished performance due to having half a dozen win32 processes shackled to it to allow it to work. Maintain the new paradigm of security, and make it obvious that they're running "old crap", and people will migrate to the new stuff (eventually).
Maybe give them an interim period where the 'compatibility' option is available. But, by all means, don't just cut-and-run like they have essentially done - whether intentionally or not - with Vista and W7. When you're selling a binary-only operating system, and your architectural changes are large and drastic, after years of developer dependence upon a specific monoculture, you just don't do that. You've got to do your damnedest to make the transition easy.
MS is clinging to the old ways of thinking here. OS X has its virtualization, and via VMWare, most linux machines do, too. Both OS X and Linux users use these tools, and it is not (for the most part) seen as "half assed" anymore. There are a LOT of applications out there now. This isn't 1995, or even 1998 or 2000, when the number of popular or useful applications could reasonably be printed in a single round-up issue of PC Magazine. Virtualization is seen as a necessary evil by many people, but one which has to be done to move forward: when the applications are either not ready or not available for your new and necessary OS, then you shoehorn things for a while.
In reality, MS should have done the -exact- same thing Apple did with OS X. Or more accurately, Vista should've been a house-cleaning upgrade, with no substantial subsystem changes that impact anything relatively recent (except maybe some IE isolation and 'system install defaults' and corporate/IT rollout tool improvements). Rip out the code which allows old, native 16 and 32 bit apps to run natively. Rip out some of the cruft that makes XP glitch like 95 did while shutting down; clean up the boot process and necessary services with some sane default user type security settings (but allow the 'old' ones to still be used for the meantime). Get rid of some of the irritating start bar glitches (ie 'lag when clicked' when explorer is failing somewhere else). Hell, maybe even introduce Vista-style memory management (if appropriate) to better utilize systems with 4Gb of RAM.
Basically, they should've done things to prepare Xp to be virtualized under their next, new, and great OS in a seamless, bloat-free manner. UAC shouldn't have come until it could be put on top of proper ACL-priviledged accounts (vs. the current 'administrator is everyone' thing still going on). You know, something designed and not kludged.
And no, I'm not a MS fanboy in the least. But, given MS's resources, they really smashed this opportunity on the rocks.
MacOS came about when there was no such thing as a GUI. Microsoft's first OS came about when there was no really usable, readily available operating system for the hobbyist. For a decade or more, on into the 1990s, people paid hundreds of dollars to get a handful of moderately functional text editors, word processors, printer drivers, and various other software tidbits to create a 'computing environment'.
Linux came along, as did the Internet, and changed all that: a movement of popular culture took place in the late 1990s and over the past decade, and today it is expected for a computer "operating system" to at least have the bare basics: tools to effectively manage files, play media, read and write documents, chat, and browse the web.
Anything short of those requirements these days is an appliance. Hell, Android lacks a lot of functionality found in other phones, for that matter (look at the Blackberry phones, those are incredible for what they are - free, on some providers, now).
Android is a long, long way from being anywhere significant, and frankly, I think Google shot themselves in the foot on two fronts:
1) They picked Java as their platform core. What were they thinking? Runs slower than native code (and slower than other runtime code, for that matter), has high hardware requirements, and is generally despised for these (and many other) reasons by developers.
2) They butchered Java, alienating whatever support they may have gotten from existing hardcore Java supporters, as well as turning Sun against them. Also, butchering a 'standard' and creating more, different things on which IT people have to deal with = not cool.
2) Java is not cool. It was a novel, interesting, and even useful idea when Sun pushed it around a decade ago, but it is not in any shape or form looked on as desirable by most people. It is boring. It gets the job done in many cases, but it's boring, and a bit of a headache just the same.
With a weaponized biological agent, or really any virus or anything which kills its host and infects through proximity, there are several things to consider with regard to its effectiveness:
* Its ability to spread quickly is reversely proportional to how severe the initial onset is. If a carrier can be an infected host, passing it on to others, before exhibiting symptoms, it spreads faster and wider.
* It's ability to not kill its hosts too quickly. if they die too quickly, the host can't pass it on.
* Its ability to keep the host infective long enough throughout its infestation to keep people getting infected. See the first point, as its related.
The thing about the 1918 flu is that it was able to spread quickly enough, without the initial symptoms being bad enough, to spread quickly. It also had a fairly long period where the hosts remained infective, IIRC.
As far as it being a weaponized strain... it's a virus. Would you, as a country, want to have a virus on the loose which is highly infective, spreads quickly, and has a high mortality rate? I don't think so: vaccines would be very, very expensive, and being the only country to possess them would be a big "we did it" sign to everyone else. This is, IMO, even more likely to be the case when the 'attacking' country is populous and concentrated (such as China and/or Russia, the most likely culprits, IMO, if it were such the case).
Which brings up a third possibility... it's an incompetently weaponized virus strain, done by a terrorist organization. Not a theory I'll hold to, but it's a possibility. It could also be something put forward by a government or two to try and evoke the whole "fear, uncertainty, and doubt" thing in the populace, which they could then leverage to the desired result. The coming weeks and months will tell whether any of these are true, or if it's just like SARS.
Part of me has to wonder whether, if this becomes a pandemic in the US, if it could've been mitigated by the things which politicians have been promising us for a decade: immigration reform, border control, and sending illegal residents home.