in a certain percentage of people who get vaccinated the vaccine doesn't "take". it varies by vaccine. in some the uptake is 95%+ in others 80% or lower. in some it's only a hair above the percentage of the population who need to be immune to maintain herd immunity.
Well by god, why are they allowed to go to school then if their vaccine doesn't take? They're a risk to other students!
Vaccination is very rarely effective anywhere near close to 100% for an individual, and substantially less than 100% for per capita. This is pretty evident by the number of people who "need" regular MMR "boosters", people who have had vaccines as children getting severely ill with supposed childhood diseases in their 20s and 30s, and the fact that people flip out irrationally when they find out a child is unvaccinated.
The irony is that they're probably flipping out because they realize they themselves are still able to get deathly ill from measles, because they were vaccinated and have no natural immunity.
I would say "not unless the unvaccinated child gets measels in isolation from other children," but you seem to be implying that vaccines do not actually work. IF they worked, then no vaccinated baby would be at risk from an unvaccinated child, correct? Therefore, your statement is false.
Truthfully, an unvaccinated child is going to be better prepared after s/he gets said illness because they will have full immunity. They will not have to get a booster; they will not have only partial immunity.
I don't see what the big fuss is about children not being vaccinated. People have been brainwashed, because the responses from pro-vaccination people are vitriolic, demonizing and irrational.
There are many, many unvaccinated adults out there who can be carriers of these viruses, many more than there are unvaccinated children. These children pose no additional 'threat' over the adults in the childrens' lives.
Also, some vaccinations are not 100% effective, so anyone for whom the vaccination was not effective is put at risk.
No, they're not. Ever hear of herd immunity?
If there's no carrier, then naturally it's not something which can be transmitted.
The truth is that the immunity is much lower than the ~95% promised, and that the claims of immunity
MMRs are supposedly a life-long immunity inducing shot. You know, an ubiquitous shot for three very common unpleasant but not life threatening childhood illnesses. My wife has had a half dozen of them and still lacks immunity. I have had two, and failed an immunity test 7 years ago. Our children have all had MMR - that is, measles, mumps, and rubella. Only the eldest has had the vaccine, and the only reason we know the others have had these illnesses is because we had them tested for antibodies.
(Most of) our children will never get MMR again. Due to our parents' trusting nature and the embellishment of the government medical establishment, however, my wife and I could very well get any of them and either become ill, or get a low grade infection and infect others. While none of them, is seriously life threatening for a healthy individual, the same isn't true for today's children who are getting vaccines for pretty much everything, including chicken pox.
In truth, since vaccines require a 'booster', it can be safely said that vaccines are 100% ineffective at providing immunity. All they do is delay possible infection and provide temporary immunity (even if that immunity lasts 10-20 years). It would not be surprising in the least if the vast majority of 40 year olds in the US today do not actually have immunity to the majority of early vaccination illnesses. I feel sorry for the children of today who seem to get vaccines for everything from chicken pox to the flu. I mean, seriously? They'll have no natural immunity (or resistance) to anything by the time they're adults.
He was making a rhetorically sarcastic statement, I believe.
If there were any veracity to the claims of unvaccinated children being dangerous to vaccinated children, it would be because vaccines don't work. But of course that isn't the case - vaccines work. That's why everyone is about ready to get rapey on the people supporting non-vaccination. Because the parents who don't vaccinate their kids are endangering the vaccinated kids.
You're not applying logic evenly and are thinking circularly.
We already know that there are outbreaks of various vaccinated diseases from time to time. Measles and whooping cough, for instance. They occur even within vaccinated populations.
If vaccines are not 100% effective and 100% safe, there can't be a liability associated with not having said shot. For instance, my wife is not immune to rubella. She has had 4 MMR boosters from the age of 16 to 21, and each time prior to the booster she tested negative for immunity. Does this mean that if someone gets ill from rubella and it can be traced to my wife, they could sue the pharmaceutical? Of course not.
Just as there is a marginal likelihood that a vaccine isn't effective (supposedly), there's also a likelihood that the non-vaccinated child has nothing to do with this stuff. There was a local case a couple years back where there was a mumps outbreak at a local private elementary school. Parents got wind of the fact that one of the kids was unvaccinated, so of course a witch hunt was undertaken. The kid was tested for immunity. Turns out he hadn't had it yet himself/he had no immunity or sign of recent infection, and all the kids who got it had been vaccinated. A reasonable person has to wonder who the carrier was, and if the vaccine is effective, why were there enough students who caught it that it was even noticeable as an 'outbreak'?
There is sound reasoning in not getting (at least some) of the vaccines. Kids can be sick for a couple days, it's not a problem. The loss is a couple days of fun and playing in today's healthy, nourished society. The loss, should they get the vaccine, is having to constantly get booster shots and, in some cases, getting the illness later in life to very serious ill effect.
If the state is going to require my children to be sent to their institution, it seems somewhat unreasonable to me that they should also be able to mandate my children to have needless shots (in many cases, eg. MMR) before hand.
Keep in mind that a vaccine does not stop the person from actually getting the illness, and in fact may in some ways make it worse. This is becoming increasingly clear, but it may take a while for the dissonance to clear up before people realize it.
Using your logic, if I sneeze in a public place, you should be entitled in defending yourself from me by hitting me in the face.
Older unvaccinated children can infect younger yet unvaccinated ones. The chance of that is reduced if the older kids are vaccinated.
Why?
Vaccination doesn't result in the body producing its own immunity. You need a booster shot to remain immune, unlike if you were to actually catch a virus.
For most of the benign (in a modern, sanitary, nourished society) illnesses we vaccinate for these days (MMRs come to mind), why does it even make sense to vaccinate?
You've got some vaccinations which make absolutely no sense for this reason, like a flu vaccine. Why would you want your kid to get that, for your 'convenience'? Horribly, horribly selfish. It makes a lot of sense if someone is immunodeficient, such as if the individual is elderly. But outside of that? No, it's just feeding the pharma system and costing you money.
It astounds me how so many people who are so avowedly anti-pharma don't even bat an eye at global application of "vaccines are good"!
If a vaccination is supposed to keep someone from becoming ill with a specific illness, why would someone with that illness impact them at all? I thought that was kind of the whole point of a vaccination, yes?
Why is it people fail to think about this logically and instead resort to knee jerk reactionary insults?
The whole thing is a sham, but you're right: aside from the graphics drivers, Linux hands OS X its ass.
Look through it again (with adblock on, don't let those bastards have another cent of deceptively gained ad revenue), this time mentally excluding all of the synthetic benchmarks (which all seem to be grossly wrong on this review, in favor of OS X). What do you notice? Aside from a couple linear and potentially single core tasks, OS X gets trounced. They were probably paid for these modifications to skew towards OS X - or they had a hidden desire to favor OS X. That, or they wanted more page views and to do that, they needed a controversial article...
The graphics drivers are written in house at NVidia and AMD. Apple doesn't actually write their own drivers. And the GPUs are just bog standard AMD, NVidia, and Intel GPUs (expect for some of the graphics switching.). There is not reason Linux should be at a disadvantage.
What, you mean aside from the fact that Linux drivers for all those respective device manufacturers don't really get a whole lot of attention from the developers compared to Windows and OS X?
But really, that's not important. What people need to pay attention to is that this is something done by Phoronix. This means you need to consider a couple things:
* This benchmark is almost meaningless. Time and time again, I have seen them (falsely) correlate data with an assumption. * The review was done by someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about. * These are synthetics. Without context or understanding of what the benchmarks are doing (there is no explanation) or what may have led to the * The discrepancies are, in most cases, severe enough that you have to assume (at least) one of the following: their benchmark suite was not properly/identically configured for all architectures, or there are drastic implementation discrepancies within the benchmark tool they're using (eg. it wasn't designed but with a specific use case in mind).
The reason there is "no clear winner" is because it's all rubbish. They're throwing 100 things at two different targets and comparing what misses and saying "no conclusion". Really? You'd have better consistency with an ink blot test of random participants, with ink blots generated by a true random number generator.
Some of the graphics benchmarks don't stand out; the ones that stand out the most are the computational ones involving (very) standard libraries or frameworks which then contradict later results.
For instance, CompileBench and Threaded I/O Tester: OS X falls flat on its face. The threaded I/O tester I believe, because I've seen the same with db and server performance. But earlier, they've got bgbench giving OS X four times the performance for postgresql as Linux. Is that even rational, given that even FileMaker has shyed away from OS X as a preferred platform due to threading and filesystem performance?
Then, they go on to fail to explain these things and why they're fundamentally inconsistent. Not just "this doesn't quite line up, we can write it off due to different library version overhead" but in line with "this car goes faster because its engine is smaller". What?
On a more personal level, I have used their suite of benchmark tools and come away fairly underwhelmed by the results. They're inconsistent and inexplicable, such as those seen in this review.
Here's a hint, benchmarkers:
* when you benchmark something, you must compare things and try to figure out why they are performing as they do. * If there are gross discrepancies which belay a reasonable expectation or contradicts other information, investigate it, because it's probably important * Be sure of what you're comparing. If you've got (more or less) identical binaries on different platforms and the hardware, you're just comparing the kernel. Is that what's happening here? Are their tools linked against native libraries (which would, you know, be an honest benchmark of said platform) or do they use their own stack?
Anyway, I could go on, but you get the idea. This benchmark is stupid on its face. The only benchmarks I'd trust from this roundup here are those that are straight up "measure something real" (frames per second in x, time to complete concrete task y). They make a very different picture than when the synthetics are thrown in to the whole: overall OS X performance is pretty abysmal, but is marginally better at graphical things than Linux. This fits pretty close with my (personal) observation that OS X is about 10-15% slower than linux on general things, markedly slower on threaded things, and a dog at file manipulations while having a firm grasp on display management/graphical stuff - so it might just be my "uneducated Apple-hating bias" speaking.:)
I agree. I'm not a designer, but still. What is a 'Microsoft'?
Personally, their old logo worked for me. We recently designed our company logo and decided "no we're not doing a stupid logo", and by that we meant one with graphics in it. We wanted to make our logo unique and 'styled' but at the same time we needed to have it be self-identifying.
Why? Because everyone does that. Shell, BP, Coke/Coca Cola, Pepsico, Microsoft (before this announcement), Dove, IBM, Veritas, AT&T, T-mobile, and even Apple, to a large degree, use a styled company name or a logo in place of it (less common and primarily if they're better known - eg. Apple).
Their old logo was simple, elegant, and unique. That 'o' with the inverted 'Q' tick/"s" taking a bite out of it? That alone identifies "Microsoft" to many people.
This new logo looks about as generic as possible. Underwhelming is a good word for it. Is it supposed to make me feel comfortable? With software, you're selling image as much as anything. They could have at least made their image not look retarded (though that is in keeping with what they're doing, so it was probably an easy win in 5 minutes for Pentagram).
It just works as I want it out of the box, for all intents and purposes. I believe the default is to use the Windows key as the Mod-4 key, but I prefer Caps_Lock (because that's what I've got available 100% of the time). The keyboard shortcuts are fairly straight forward and shouldn't require much overhead; read the 3 page or so man page and start using it.
You realize there's more to the Metro-UI and the butchering of the general Windows interface than just a start menu, right? They're pushing Metro over everything else for 'native' apps. The desktop is for legacy apps - like "Windows 95 mode", if you remember that. It won't be W8 compatible unless it's Metro.
Metro is fundamentally unable to be used in any sort of useful, contextually deep way. There you go - there's my concerns.
* ~A year after W7 was released, netbooks started using W7. * This would not have been possible with Vista due to (lack of) software performance on said hardware. * At this point in time, XP was a non-starter; nobody wanted it. So it would not have sold as well.
While Vista was out, Microsoft -was- pushing XP on netbooks, what they could. But nobody wanted it because it added another $50+ to the cost of the netbook and was hideous XP.
I'm pretty sure Vista not running well on the "bottom 80%" systems is understating things a bit. You needed fast storage to make Vista useable beyond very basic word processing and browsing (single processing). There's no two ways about that.
It's not "flashy vs. not flashy" it's "make yourself look like the least appealing target".
The common thief won't think anything of a 386 sitting in the corner, it's old junk. They'll grab the $500 40" TV instead. What if it's not a 386 and is, in fact, a valuables safe containing tens of thousands in whatever?
They'll hit your neighbor who has the BMW sitting out on his drive and a nicely manicured lawn long before they hit the grandmother in the unmaintained yard across the street - who just happens to have tens of thousands in gold coins on display (but not visible from the street) over the mantle.
The best trick I've seen was when someone living on my family's culdesac at the end got broken into several times one summer. He bought an old Crown Vic at auction, screwed a fake spot light onto the side, and put a random number generator-controlled green LED and resistor setup. He had a servo which would pull a string randomly on a black-clad dummy sitting in the driver's seat and make it move. He parked the car behind some trees on the edge of his property. From even a couple feet away, it looked fairly authentic. No other problems after that. I've also seen people intentionally obscure their house from the street so they can't be easily cased.
Having someone home all the time, having a fairly random schedule, and/or generally making it difficult for thieves to tell when you are up and/or awake certainly helps as a deterrent for the professional thief.
I've got an older (1980s) Chevy. Driving in Berkeley, CA every day is a sure way to put your vehicle under scrutiny for theft. I locked my doors every day. Unfortunately, due to the vehicle's vintage, it's fairly easy to jimmy a lock (easier and safer than breaking the window), and that was done twice with small things stolen - glow plugs for the engine I hadn't put in yet, and misc. electronics crap I had in there as parts.
So I decided to just leave the vehicle unlocked with the windows down, and nothing obvious in plain sight. I had several hundred dollars+ in tools under the passenger seat almost every single day, but I never had a problem again unless I left a pack of smokes on the dash (which would almost always be stolen).
Security theater isn't theater, it's like a simple, cheap lock.
A simple lock keeps weak people with little intelligence or creativity out. It can also be used as a trigger for a more effective security system. Security theater keeps dullards out due to a show of presence, and can possibly hide or otherwise obscure the actual security mechanisms in place.
That said I really can't see paying $200 for the thing when I was able to get my dad a nice 4 camera system for his shop with 500Gb DVR for just $230 shipped from Tiger.
Well, which of those is more likely to reduce the likelihood that your house is broken into?
A DVR security system with cameras is going to fetch a decent price at a pawn shop. Those lasers probably have no resale value, but unlike the cameras (which they plan to take) are going to have an increased likelihood of actually inhibiting actual burglary. They don't have to be actively monitored to work.
There's no reason you couldn't do both.:)
For an extra couple hundred dollars, you could put bars on the windows, too. It's not an all or nothing proposition: like all security, it's a sliding scale.
Slashdot Mirror
in a certain percentage of people who get vaccinated the vaccine doesn't "take".
it varies by vaccine. in some the uptake is 95%+ in others 80% or lower. in some it's only a hair above the percentage of the population who need to be immune to maintain herd immunity.
Well by god, why are they allowed to go to school then if their vaccine doesn't take? They're a risk to other students!
Vaccination is very rarely effective anywhere near close to 100% for an individual, and substantially less than 100% for per capita. This is pretty evident by the number of people who "need" regular MMR "boosters", people who have had vaccines as children getting severely ill with supposed childhood diseases in their 20s and 30s, and the fact that people flip out irrationally when they find out a child is unvaccinated.
The irony is that they're probably flipping out because they realize they themselves are still able to get deathly ill from measles, because they were vaccinated and have no natural immunity.
I would say "not unless the unvaccinated child gets measels in isolation from other children," but you seem to be implying that vaccines do not actually work. IF they worked, then no vaccinated baby would be at risk from an unvaccinated child, correct? Therefore, your statement is false.
Truthfully, an unvaccinated child is going to be better prepared after s/he gets said illness because they will have full immunity. They will not have to get a booster; they will not have only partial immunity.
I don't see what the big fuss is about children not being vaccinated. People have been brainwashed, because the responses from pro-vaccination people are vitriolic, demonizing and irrational.
There are many, many unvaccinated adults out there who can be carriers of these viruses, many more than there are unvaccinated children. These children pose no additional 'threat' over the adults in the childrens' lives.
Also, some vaccinations are not 100% effective, so anyone for whom the vaccination was not effective is put at risk.
No, they're not. Ever hear of herd immunity?
If there's no carrier, then naturally it's not something which can be transmitted.
The truth is that the immunity is much lower than the ~95% promised, and that the claims of immunity
MMRs are supposedly a life-long immunity inducing shot. You know, an ubiquitous shot for three very common unpleasant but not life threatening childhood illnesses. My wife has had a half dozen of them and still lacks immunity. I have had two, and failed an immunity test 7 years ago. Our children have all had MMR - that is, measles, mumps, and rubella. Only the eldest has had the vaccine, and the only reason we know the others have had these illnesses is because we had them tested for antibodies.
(Most of) our children will never get MMR again. Due to our parents' trusting nature and the embellishment of the government medical establishment, however, my wife and I could very well get any of them and either become ill, or get a low grade infection and infect others. While none of them, is seriously life threatening for a healthy individual, the same isn't true for today's children who are getting vaccines for pretty much everything, including chicken pox.
In truth, since vaccines require a 'booster', it can be safely said that vaccines are 100% ineffective at providing immunity. All they do is delay possible infection and provide temporary immunity (even if that immunity lasts 10-20 years). It would not be surprising in the least if the vast majority of 40 year olds in the US today do not actually have immunity to the majority of early vaccination illnesses. I feel sorry for the children of today who seem to get vaccines for everything from chicken pox to the flu. I mean, seriously? They'll have no natural immunity (or resistance) to anything by the time they're adults.
He was making a rhetorically sarcastic statement, I believe.
If there were any veracity to the claims of unvaccinated children being dangerous to vaccinated children, it would be because vaccines don't work. But of course that isn't the case - vaccines work. That's why everyone is about ready to get rapey on the people supporting non-vaccination. Because the parents who don't vaccinate their kids are endangering the vaccinated kids.
The logic fail here is astounding. ASTOUNDING.
Ah, so we're resorting to No True Medical Doctor or Knowledgeable Pundit arguments now, are we?
You would, of course, be incorrect. You wouldn't know it, of course, because you're only listening to what you hear on nationally broadcast news.
You're not applying logic evenly and are thinking circularly.
We already know that there are outbreaks of various vaccinated diseases from time to time. Measles and whooping cough, for instance. They occur even within vaccinated populations.
If vaccines are not 100% effective and 100% safe, there can't be a liability associated with not having said shot. For instance, my wife is not immune to rubella. She has had 4 MMR boosters from the age of 16 to 21, and each time prior to the booster she tested negative for immunity. Does this mean that if someone gets ill from rubella and it can be traced to my wife, they could sue the pharmaceutical? Of course not.
Just as there is a marginal likelihood that a vaccine isn't effective (supposedly), there's also a likelihood that the non-vaccinated child has nothing to do with this stuff. There was a local case a couple years back where there was a mumps outbreak at a local private elementary school. Parents got wind of the fact that one of the kids was unvaccinated, so of course a witch hunt was undertaken. The kid was tested for immunity. Turns out he hadn't had it yet himself/he had no immunity or sign of recent infection, and all the kids who got it had been vaccinated. A reasonable person has to wonder who the carrier was, and if the vaccine is effective, why were there enough students who caught it that it was even noticeable as an 'outbreak'?
There is sound reasoning in not getting (at least some) of the vaccines. Kids can be sick for a couple days, it's not a problem. The loss is a couple days of fun and playing in today's healthy, nourished society. The loss, should they get the vaccine, is having to constantly get booster shots and, in some cases, getting the illness later in life to very serious ill effect.
... but the parents of many of the whooping cough victims did vaccinate their children.
People aren't thinking this shit through - or, apparently, paying much attention at all.
If the state is going to require my children to be sent to their institution, it seems somewhat unreasonable to me that they should also be able to mandate my children to have needless shots (in many cases, eg. MMR) before hand.
Keep in mind that a vaccine does not stop the person from actually getting the illness, and in fact may in some ways make it worse. This is becoming increasingly clear, but it may take a while for the dissonance to clear up before people realize it.
Using your logic, if I sneeze in a public place, you should be entitled in defending yourself from me by hitting me in the face.
Older unvaccinated children can infect younger yet unvaccinated ones. The chance of that is reduced if the older kids are vaccinated.
Why?
Vaccination doesn't result in the body producing its own immunity. You need a booster shot to remain immune, unlike if you were to actually catch a virus.
For most of the benign (in a modern, sanitary, nourished society) illnesses we vaccinate for these days (MMRs come to mind), why does it even make sense to vaccinate?
You've got some vaccinations which make absolutely no sense for this reason, like a flu vaccine. Why would you want your kid to get that, for your 'convenience'? Horribly, horribly selfish. It makes a lot of sense if someone is immunodeficient, such as if the individual is elderly. But outside of that? No, it's just feeding the pharma system and costing you money.
It astounds me how so many people who are so avowedly anti-pharma don't even bat an eye at global application of "vaccines are good"!
Who, the vaccinated kids?
If a vaccination is supposed to keep someone from becoming ill with a specific illness, why would someone with that illness impact them at all? I thought that was kind of the whole point of a vaccination, yes?
Why is it people fail to think about this logically and instead resort to knee jerk reactionary insults?
The whole thing is a sham, but you're right: aside from the graphics drivers, Linux hands OS X its ass.
Look through it again (with adblock on, don't let those bastards have another cent of deceptively gained ad revenue), this time mentally excluding all of the synthetic benchmarks (which all seem to be grossly wrong on this review, in favor of OS X). What do you notice? Aside from a couple linear and potentially single core tasks, OS X gets trounced. They were probably paid for these modifications to skew towards OS X - or they had a hidden desire to favor OS X. That, or they wanted more page views and to do that, they needed a controversial article...
The graphics drivers are written in house at NVidia and AMD. Apple doesn't actually write their own drivers. And the GPUs are just bog standard AMD, NVidia, and Intel GPUs (expect for some of the graphics switching.). There is not reason Linux should be at a disadvantage.
What, you mean aside from the fact that Linux drivers for all those respective device manufacturers don't really get a whole lot of attention from the developers compared to Windows and OS X?
But really, that's not important. What people need to pay attention to is that this is something done by Phoronix. This means you need to consider a couple things:
* This benchmark is almost meaningless. Time and time again, I have seen them (falsely) correlate data with an assumption.
* The review was done by someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about.
* These are synthetics. Without context or understanding of what the benchmarks are doing (there is no explanation) or what may have led to the
* The discrepancies are, in most cases, severe enough that you have to assume (at least) one of the following: their benchmark suite was not properly/identically configured for all architectures, or there are drastic implementation discrepancies within the benchmark tool they're using (eg. it wasn't designed but with a specific use case in mind).
The reason there is "no clear winner" is because it's all rubbish. They're throwing 100 things at two different targets and comparing what misses and saying "no conclusion". Really? You'd have better consistency with an ink blot test of random participants, with ink blots generated by a true random number generator.
Some of the graphics benchmarks don't stand out; the ones that stand out the most are the computational ones involving (very) standard libraries or frameworks which then contradict later results.
For instance, CompileBench and Threaded I/O Tester: OS X falls flat on its face. The threaded I/O tester I believe, because I've seen the same with db and server performance. But earlier, they've got bgbench giving OS X four times the performance for postgresql as Linux. Is that even rational, given that even FileMaker has shyed away from OS X as a preferred platform due to threading and filesystem performance?
Then, they go on to fail to explain these things and why they're fundamentally inconsistent. Not just "this doesn't quite line up, we can write it off due to different library version overhead" but in line with "this car goes faster because its engine is smaller". What?
On a more personal level, I have used their suite of benchmark tools and come away fairly underwhelmed by the results. They're inconsistent and inexplicable, such as those seen in this review.
Here's a hint, benchmarkers:
* when you benchmark something, you must compare things and try to figure out why they are performing as they do.
* If there are gross discrepancies which belay a reasonable expectation or contradicts other information, investigate it, because it's probably important
* Be sure of what you're comparing. If you've got (more or less) identical binaries on different platforms and the hardware, you're just comparing the kernel. Is that what's happening here? Are their tools linked against native libraries (which would, you know, be an honest benchmark of said platform) or do they use their own stack?
Anyway, I could go on, but you get the idea. This benchmark is stupid on its face. The only benchmarks I'd trust from this roundup here are those that are straight up "measure something real" (frames per second in x, time to complete concrete task y). They make a very different picture than when the synthetics are thrown in to the whole: overall OS X performance is pretty abysmal, but is marginally better at graphical things than Linux. This fits pretty close with my (personal) observation that OS X is about 10-15% slower than linux on general things, markedly slower on threaded things, and a dog at file manipulations while having a firm grasp on display management/graphical stuff - so it might just be my "uneducated Apple-hating bias" speaking. :)
I agree. I'm not a designer, but still. What is a 'Microsoft'?
Personally, their old logo worked for me. We recently designed our company logo and decided "no we're not doing a stupid logo", and by that we meant one with graphics in it. We wanted to make our logo unique and 'styled' but at the same time we needed to have it be self-identifying.
Why? Because everyone does that. Shell, BP, Coke/Coca Cola, Pepsico, Microsoft (before this announcement), Dove, IBM, Veritas, AT&T, T-mobile, and even Apple, to a large degree, use a styled company name or a logo in place of it (less common and primarily if they're better known - eg. Apple).
Their old logo was simple, elegant, and unique. That 'o' with the inverted 'Q' tick/"s" taking a bite out of it? That alone identifies "Microsoft" to many people.
This new logo looks about as generic as possible. Underwhelming is a good word for it. Is it supposed to make me feel comfortable? With software, you're selling image as much as anything. They could have at least made their image not look retarded (though that is in keeping with what they're doing, so it was probably an easy win in 5 minutes for Pentagram).
Cum on your monitor, maybe?
That's nothing. I'm sure they spent much more than that on Windows 8, and look what that looks like. It's not much more complex than the logo.
What configuration?
It just works as I want it out of the box, for all intents and purposes. I believe the default is to use the Windows key as the Mod-4 key, but I prefer Caps_Lock (because that's what I've got available 100% of the time). The keyboard shortcuts are fairly straight forward and shouldn't require much overhead; read the 3 page or so man page and start using it.
You realize there's more to the Metro-UI and the butchering of the general Windows interface than just a start menu, right? They're pushing Metro over everything else for 'native' apps. The desktop is for legacy apps - like "Windows 95 mode", if you remember that. It won't be W8 compatible unless it's Metro.
Metro is fundamentally unable to be used in any sort of useful, contextually deep way. There you go - there's my concerns.
No, you misunderstood.
* ~A year after W7 was released, netbooks started using W7.
* This would not have been possible with Vista due to (lack of) software performance on said hardware.
* At this point in time, XP was a non-starter; nobody wanted it. So it would not have sold as well.
While Vista was out, Microsoft -was- pushing XP on netbooks, what they could. But nobody wanted it because it added another $50+ to the cost of the netbook and was hideous XP.
I'm pretty sure Vista not running well on the "bottom 80%" systems is understating things a bit. You needed fast storage to make Vista useable beyond very basic word processing and browsing (single processing). There's no two ways about that.
Yep, there was no reason for it other than the fact that it asked for key verification in order to actually authenticate. :)
2k3 virtualizations are usually oem to something else to get them to work on non-native hardware. WTF was MS thinking?
It's not "flashy vs. not flashy" it's "make yourself look like the least appealing target".
The common thief won't think anything of a 386 sitting in the corner, it's old junk. They'll grab the $500 40" TV instead. What if it's not a 386 and is, in fact, a valuables safe containing tens of thousands in whatever?
They'll hit your neighbor who has the BMW sitting out on his drive and a nicely manicured lawn long before they hit the grandmother in the unmaintained yard across the street - who just happens to have tens of thousands in gold coins on display (but not visible from the street) over the mantle.
The best trick I've seen was when someone living on my family's culdesac at the end got broken into several times one summer. He bought an old Crown Vic at auction, screwed a fake spot light onto the side, and put a random number generator-controlled green LED and resistor setup. He had a servo which would pull a string randomly on a black-clad dummy sitting in the driver's seat and make it move. He parked the car behind some trees on the edge of his property. From even a couple feet away, it looked fairly authentic. No other problems after that. I've also seen people intentionally obscure their house from the street so they can't be easily cased.
Having someone home all the time, having a fairly random schedule, and/or generally making it difficult for thieves to tell when you are up and/or awake certainly helps as a deterrent for the professional thief.
That's why I hide a pungee stick pit under my front door mat. It's more effective than using keys.
Also, on anecdotes:
I've got an older (1980s) Chevy. Driving in Berkeley, CA every day is a sure way to put your vehicle under scrutiny for theft. I locked my doors every day. Unfortunately, due to the vehicle's vintage, it's fairly easy to jimmy a lock (easier and safer than breaking the window), and that was done twice with small things stolen - glow plugs for the engine I hadn't put in yet, and misc. electronics crap I had in there as parts.
So I decided to just leave the vehicle unlocked with the windows down, and nothing obvious in plain sight. I had several hundred dollars+ in tools under the passenger seat almost every single day, but I never had a problem again unless I left a pack of smokes on the dash (which would almost always be stolen).
Security theater isn't theater, it's like a simple, cheap lock.
A simple lock keeps weak people with little intelligence or creativity out. It can also be used as a trigger for a more effective security system. Security theater keeps dullards out due to a show of presence, and can possibly hide or otherwise obscure the actual security mechanisms in place.
That said I really can't see paying $200 for the thing when I was able to get my dad a nice 4 camera system for his shop with 500Gb DVR for just $230 shipped from Tiger.
Well, which of those is more likely to reduce the likelihood that your house is broken into?
A DVR security system with cameras is going to fetch a decent price at a pawn shop. Those lasers probably have no resale value, but unlike the cameras (which they plan to take) are going to have an increased likelihood of actually inhibiting actual burglary. They don't have to be actively monitored to work.
There's no reason you couldn't do both. :)
For an extra couple hundred dollars, you could put bars on the windows, too. It's not an all or nothing proposition: like all security, it's a sliding scale.