Pretty much any commitment for 2030-2100 is so far in the future that it is utterly worthless
That is of course the worry, but I think in some ways this represents a real change, if only symbolically. Just think back a few years, when climate change first grabbed headlines, and all industrialized countries went "Oh no, we will not even discuss this, because it might hurt our short term profits". Now, at least, it is a goal of sorts, and you get taken seriously if you suggest ways to move away from fossil fuels; this is not a small thing. It is not ambitious enough, clearly, but I think it will now become a lot easier to move towards a carbon free world, new technologies that enable us to do so will be developed much faster than the pessimists think. What has held us back was not so much technological ability as it was unwillingness on the part of the politicians and their masters.
Not hate, just irritation at somebody who likes to show off a knowledge he hasn't got. A bit like when some manager tries to impress the engineering team with the fact that he once wrote a few lines of Excel BASIC code. It makes you wince.
Serious question: what's with the medium.com hate? I really don't get it.
This is not hate, by engineering standards, only mild scorn. Speaking for myself, I like good factual information backed by references if possible - Wikipedia matches that in many cases, so something like that, or perhaps articles on Science Daily:
The thing about medium.com is that it is targeted for a completely different audience; the people that like modern 'nature programs', with lots of movie-style cutting, funky sound-track, replayed sequences etc - probably very artistic, but tedious and drawn out ad infinitum and with very little factual information. Or, perhaps a bit like BBC's Horizon series, which also tends to be tediously sparse on real information (and I am a great fan of BBC in general, it has to be said).
A tip that can save you a good deal of wasted effort: if the link is to medium.com, they probably havn't got all that much of a clue. Medium.com is a glossy magazine on par with "Heat", "Hello" and the like; I can't imagine anybody with technical or scientific insight wanting to waste time on it.
But it's true that Americans simply don't care, and have no interest in change just for it's own sake.
Not quite - if Americans didn't care, they would say "OK, whatever" and get on with it, simply because it is a more convenient set of units. But instead what you see is that a large proportion of articles for the American public go out of their way to express everything in millions of pounds, inches, barrels or anything ales that demonstrates that you don't use metric. I, on the other really don't care what you guys are using; if I need to, I can do the conversion, or more likely just discard the article, because I can find a better one elsewhere in metric. My impression is that engineers or scientists who are serious about their work and communicate internationally make the small effort to simply get used to metric; it is a non-issue.
Their GDP is twice as big as Japan's, the #3 economy in the world. At what point do they stop getting to play the "we're just a poor developing country, we can't be expected to follow the rules" card?
According to Wikipedia: A developing country "is a nation with an underdeveloped industrial base", whereas a developed country "has a highly developed economy and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less industrialized nations". So, it is a matter of taste whether countries like India or China are still "developing", but the fact is that there is still a large proportion of the population that doesn't enjoy much in the form of mod coms.
I didn't claim that China is a poor developing nation, but they still have quite some way to go before they are as developed everywhere as Europe or the US. Also, I didn't say that is was excusable that any company doesn't follow the rules, only that it isn't surprising, and that the main reason is the lack of proper regulation.
Chinese company caught cheating? NO WAY! Seriously though, raise your hand if you're surprised.
I'm not surprised, but not for the reason I suspect you have in mind: "Because Chinese are just so and so...".
However, it does not really surprise me that we see this from some Chinese companies. China is a developing nation, and they are still relatively new to the way companies play it in the West - not that we are in fact more honest in the West, we have just learned how and when to be dishonest in a way that doesn't make as much noise. I mean, just think of large corporations that avoid paying tax or buy cheaply from sweat-shops employing child-labour. There is no shortage of examples.
But there is another thing in it: lack of regulation. It should not be a surprise to anyone that when there is too little regulation, the most ruthless will feel entitled to bully others - the free, unregulated market can never work to the benefit of everybody, because there will always some, that ruthlessly go for maximising their own short-term advantage, and and that behaviour pushes out the competition and creates monopolies. It is perhaps ironical that this argument is exactly analogous with the argument against Communism: "people are selfish, so if they don't have a reason to work harder, most won't".
We see this in all developing countries, but perhaps most tragilcally in Russia, where they tried to go from tightly regulated Communism to a kind of laissez-faire Capitalism overnight and got horribly burned. And they ended up with the same kind of masters as before, because scum always rises to the top of the pond.
Why don't you just disable automatic updates and do them manually then?
Why would I? I already have a better solution: Linux. Still, it pains me when I see colleagues having to deal with this - good, decent people, who deserve better.
You've been able to do that with every single version of Windows that had an update mechanism. Seriously, you Linsux morons will whine and throw tantrums about anything.
Did I "whine and throw tantrums"? I don't think so; you, on the other hand, seem rather unduly affected by my comment.
Heh, yeah, yet another reason why I don't like Windows: the automatic upgrades that always seem to turn up when they are inconvenient and require a reboot. I mean, when I go home, I don't want to leave my PC running, so I have to stay while it does - what, exactly? So, I only start Windows in a VM and I just pull the (virtual) cable.
Apart from that, it is not uncommon to deliberately avoid upgrading, certainly in the UNIX world. Like for example if your business consists in developing software; as vendor you guarantee that your product has been tested on a certain version of the OS and possibly with certain patches. Automatic upgrades are a liability in that situation.
I think one should distinguish between 'Science journalists' and 'Science reporters'. I like to think that 'journalist' means that a serious effort guided by a minimum of insight has taken place, whereas a 'reporter' is more akin to a simple repeating station, transmitting whatever it receives. There are not many real science journalists in the world, but there are plenty of reporters, who don't understand and don't really care either.
Can't we muster a popular appeal against posting vapid articles from medium.com here? Please? Or at least post them with a mandatory icon warning people that this is heavy on glossy pictures and light on worthwhile information?
Who writes this stuff anyway? Clearly somebody with a strong interest in big photos of impressive looking things; whereas I suspect that most of us would be far more interested in good, solid, factual information, without illustrations, unless strictly needed. Is it 'samzenpus'? Does he/she have a glycerine complex?
Why? Since when is it a court's business to protect some business model that doesn't work out?
What you seem to fail to understand is that there is a difference: rich people DESERVE to be rich and therefore DESERVE a better standard of legislation that doesn't interfere unfairly with their right to further enrich themselves. Plebs on the other hand are lazy and probably communists or worse, and should be kept down with any means possible. Surely you can see that?
At the moment I am a bit divided over this issue. I understand their desire to collect revenue to fund a site. But I do need to balance that against the opening up of my system to all sorts of tracking. And at the moment my privacy trumps the websites revenue.
Well, look at it this way: This is Capitalism, right? We're told that under Capitalism, the value of any product or service is whatever you can persuade others to pay. If nobody wants to pay, then it is worthless. If I come across websites that refuse to serve their content unless I allow adverts, I just move on; there are plenty of sites to choose from, usually, and often the ones with the best information are the ones with the least pollution.
And then you get sites like Slashdot, which have this wonderful checkbox that says because I am such a good user, that they will disable advertising for me if I want. Which even if I do, I still get ads served up to me - hence another reason for ad blocking software.
Well, that's the thing - how can one enter into any sort of trust-based relationship, when the other party so clearly can't be trusted?
These things are not necessarily meant for servers or even consumer electronics as we know it; there is a huge number of things that different industries are interested in using computer technology for, where things like price, flexibility and low power consumption are crucial factors. Just imagine if it were possible to print something like thousands of largely autonomous computers on stickers for, say, $.01 each; I think this may very well be possible quite soon. In that situation, you want electronics that are bio-degradable.
Reality is real, whether or not a group of blinkered idiots try to force it not to be so. If these people really had faith, then they wouldn't mind; they would accept that since God had created the world and everything in it, anything you learn about His reality teaches you more about God. The idea that the Bible - a hodgepodge of stories carefully selected to support a religious/political agenda over 1000 years ago - must, aboslutely must, be true to the very comma, is a modern invention, and a particularly pathological one too.
Creationists are liars to themselves, more than anything else. Fundamentalism is equally vile, whether it decorates itself with the name of Christ, Muhammed or any other famous person. The objectves of creationists are of the same evil nature as those of IS or al Qaeda - the methods may vary, but they all want to subdue your freedom to think and choose on you own, by spreading falsehoods. I am not going as far as professor Dawkins and saying that all religion is by nature bad - I have known honest, religious people - but there is line that is very easily crossed.
Aw, how sad - I got modded down for making a Batman joke, it seems. Not a good one, I freely admit, but are there really people who get offended when you joke about a rather pathetic cartoon character? If only I could afford to worry about so small things.
I would suggest that this might be an issue that David Cameron used for the elections and for politics and that it isn't a core issue that he'll defend against such pushback.
I think it is quite important - as a diversion tactic. He doesn't want people to catch on to the fact that the Conservatives are selling off public assets as part of a larger, ideologically motivated strategy. I won't deny that they and the Liberal Democrats have done a reasonable job of handling the crisis, in as much as they have done at least part of what had to be done, but they have moved on from the pragmatic running of the country, to a targeted implementation of ideology, and that will inevitably hurt society. This is not because Conservative ideology is worse than the others, but because ideology tends to ignore reality.
The Conservatives have this romantic notion of 'Big Society', which in their minds means that charities, voluntary work etc should cover for more and more things, and the state should not - something I find rather disturbing; presumably if you fall through the 'Big Society' safety net, you are free to go and sell your body to scientific experiments? Another one that sounds a bit hollow is their being the party for 'Working People' - not 'The Working Class', note - which one suspects may mean they are in favour exclusively of people being in work, so you are not on benefits. Thus, changing the benefit system so people are forced to take shitty jobs far below their abilities, because there simply isn't anything else, will be 'For Working People', right?
Every time you get the urge to say "it's natural so it is OK" - REMEMBER CYANIDE. Or Ebola. Or AIDS. Cancer too...
You seem to focus exclusively on the inconvenience caused by things clogging pipes, but that really is the least of the problem. I'm not suffering from the 'natural is good' delusion; all I'm saying is, natural substances have been around for a long time, so nature has had time to adjust to them. Plastics, on the other hand have exploded onto the scene in the last century; no doubt, if given enough time, something will evolve to take advantage of the abundant, new energy source, but it is likely to take something like millions of years - or certainly a lot longer than our lifetimes. Whatever harm plastic may cause, we are not liekly to have a good defence against it; we should have thought about that before we just let it out in the world around us, but we didn't.
I can't imagine it is really a big water treatment issue since they have a different density than water and you could separate them with settling tanks and skimmers.
Separating really small objects of almost the same density as water (0.91â"0.96 g/cm3 - they are made from polyethylene) is not easy, and the fact is that they pass through all existing water treatment works. Plastics are in fact a serious environmental issue, 1) since they often leak hormone-like chemicals, and 2) because plastic objects are mostly not broken down into their chemical constituents, but instead break up to form very small plastic splinters and fibres. These are now found everywhere in our food chain; certainly in anything that starts life at sea: fish etc. We still don't quite know what harm they cause - the great worry is that thei will turn out to be as harmful as asbestos. Is it a good idea to allow the industry to pump these largely unnecessary products out, when it seems likely that it will cause massive problems for society down the line? Health problems cost society money, not just in form of hospitals, doctors etc, but also in lost productivity - prevention is better than cure, and it is also better for business in the long run.
And I don't see it matters for industry really because they'll just go back to using what they were using before which is mostly - sand.
You use this stuff as an abrasive and maybe the microbeads are mildly less abrasive? I don't know... anyway, they'll just replace this with very fine sand.
Sand is a natural material, and the environment already knows how to deal with it. I don't know exactly why they prefer to use plastic, but I'll bet it has to do with thei short term profit. Maybe it is a selling point, or was - I remember when it was first introduced and you suddenly heard a lot about how harsh the old kind of toothpaste was to your teeth. In reality it is probably no more than a selling point, like the current craze for putting triclosan in everything - which doesn't actually kill bacteria, but is likely to harm our health in the long run (both directly and by breeding resistent bacteria; when will we bother to learn?)
25 years, you say? It feels longer, somehow. Don't worry, I can see everybody's eyes glaze over, so I won't go too far down memory lane, except to say that there was actually a time when when Windows was cool and fun to work with. By gods, it was a load of crap, back then, but fun to code for, for that very reason. I used to spend 90% of my time commenting out code sections until the latest, spectacular error went away; that was how I learned to program properly in C. There is nothing like having to debug Windows running in real mode to bring home the idea that you must always initialise variable and check returned pointers. I sometimes miss the "hardship" in a perverse sort of way.
Slashdot Mirror
Pretty much any commitment for 2030-2100 is so far in the future that it is utterly worthless
That is of course the worry, but I think in some ways this represents a real change, if only symbolically. Just think back a few years, when climate change first grabbed headlines, and all industrialized countries went "Oh no, we will not even discuss this, because it might hurt our short term profits". Now, at least, it is a goal of sorts, and you get taken seriously if you suggest ways to move away from fossil fuels; this is not a small thing. It is not ambitious enough, clearly, but I think it will now become a lot easier to move towards a carbon free world, new technologies that enable us to do so will be developed much faster than the pessimists think. What has held us back was not so much technological ability as it was unwillingness on the part of the politicians and their masters.
Why the hate?
Not hate, just irritation at somebody who likes to show off a knowledge he hasn't got. A bit like when some manager tries to impress the engineering team with the fact that he once wrote a few lines of Excel BASIC code. It makes you wince.
Serious question: what's with the medium.com hate? I really don't get it.
This is not hate, by engineering standards, only mild scorn. Speaking for myself, I like good factual information backed by references if possible - Wikipedia matches that in many cases, so something like that, or perhaps articles on Science Daily:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/in...
The thing about medium.com is that it is targeted for a completely different audience; the people that like modern 'nature programs', with lots of movie-style cutting, funky sound-track, replayed sequences etc - probably very artistic, but tedious and drawn out ad infinitum and with very little factual information. Or, perhaps a bit like BBC's Horizon series, which also tends to be tediously sparse on real information (and I am a great fan of BBC in general, it has to be said).
A tip that can save you a good deal of wasted effort: if the link is to medium.com, they probably havn't got all that much of a clue. Medium.com is a glossy magazine on par with "Heat", "Hello" and the like; I can't imagine anybody with technical or scientific insight wanting to waste time on it.
Yeah - and I thought that the "Turn off adverts" option would block medium.com SPAM.
But it's true that Americans simply don't care, and have no interest in change just for it's own sake.
Not quite - if Americans didn't care, they would say "OK, whatever" and get on with it, simply because it is a more convenient set of units. But instead what you see is that a large proportion of articles for the American public go out of their way to express everything in millions of pounds, inches, barrels or anything ales that demonstrates that you don't use metric. I, on the other really don't care what you guys are using; if I need to, I can do the conversion, or more likely just discard the article, because I can find a better one elsewhere in metric. My impression is that engineers or scientists who are serious about their work and communicate internationally make the small effort to simply get used to metric; it is a non-issue.
Their GDP is twice as big as Japan's, the #3 economy in the world. At what point do they stop getting to play the "we're just a poor developing country, we can't be expected to follow the rules" card?
According to Wikipedia: A developing country "is a nation with an underdeveloped industrial base", whereas a developed country "has a highly developed economy and advanced technological infrastructure relative to other less industrialized nations". So, it is a matter of taste whether countries like India or China are still "developing", but the fact is that there is still a large proportion of the population that doesn't enjoy much in the form of mod coms.
I didn't claim that China is a poor developing nation, but they still have quite some way to go before they are as developed everywhere as Europe or the US. Also, I didn't say that is was excusable that any company doesn't follow the rules, only that it isn't surprising, and that the main reason is the lack of proper regulation.
Chinese company caught cheating? NO WAY!
Seriously though, raise your hand if you're surprised.
I'm not surprised, but not for the reason I suspect you have in mind: "Because Chinese are just so and so...".
However, it does not really surprise me that we see this from some Chinese companies. China is a developing nation, and they are still relatively new to the way companies play it in the West - not that we are in fact more honest in the West, we have just learned how and when to be dishonest in a way that doesn't make as much noise. I mean, just think of large corporations that avoid paying tax or buy cheaply from sweat-shops employing child-labour. There is no shortage of examples.
But there is another thing in it: lack of regulation. It should not be a surprise to anyone that when there is too little regulation, the most ruthless will feel entitled to bully others - the free, unregulated market can never work to the benefit of everybody, because there will always some, that ruthlessly go for maximising their own short-term advantage, and and that behaviour pushes out the competition and creates monopolies. It is perhaps ironical that this argument is exactly analogous with the argument against Communism: "people are selfish, so if they don't have a reason to work harder, most won't".
We see this in all developing countries, but perhaps most tragilcally in Russia, where they tried to go from tightly regulated Communism to a kind of laissez-faire Capitalism overnight and got horribly burned. And they ended up with the same kind of masters as before, because scum always rises to the top of the pond.
Why don't you just disable automatic updates and do them manually then?
Why would I? I already have a better solution: Linux. Still, it pains me when I see colleagues having to deal with this - good, decent people, who deserve better.
You've been able to do that with every single version of Windows that had an update mechanism. Seriously, you Linsux morons will whine and throw tantrums about anything.
Did I "whine and throw tantrums"? I don't think so; you, on the other hand, seem rather unduly affected by my comment.
Heh, yeah, yet another reason why I don't like Windows: the automatic upgrades that always seem to turn up when they are inconvenient and require a reboot. I mean, when I go home, I don't want to leave my PC running, so I have to stay while it does - what, exactly? So, I only start Windows in a VM and I just pull the (virtual) cable.
Apart from that, it is not uncommon to deliberately avoid upgrading, certainly in the UNIX world. Like for example if your business consists in developing software; as vendor you guarantee that your product has been tested on a certain version of the OS and possibly with certain patches. Automatic upgrades are a liability in that situation.
... nukular engineer ...
"Nukular" indeed; *sigh*.
I think one should distinguish between 'Science journalists' and 'Science reporters'. I like to think that 'journalist' means that a serious effort guided by a minimum of insight has taken place, whereas a 'reporter' is more akin to a simple repeating station, transmitting whatever it receives. There are not many real science journalists in the world, but there are plenty of reporters, who don't understand and don't really care either.
Can't we muster a popular appeal against posting vapid articles from medium.com here? Please? Or at least post them with a mandatory icon warning people that this is heavy on glossy pictures and light on worthwhile information?
Who writes this stuff anyway? Clearly somebody with a strong interest in big photos of impressive looking things; whereas I suspect that most of us would be far more interested in good, solid, factual information, without illustrations, unless strictly needed. Is it 'samzenpus'? Does he/she have a glycerine complex?
Why? Since when is it a court's business to protect some business model that doesn't work out?
What you seem to fail to understand is that there is a difference: rich people DESERVE to be rich and therefore DESERVE a better standard of legislation that doesn't interfere unfairly with their right to further enrich themselves. Plebs on the other hand are lazy and probably communists or worse, and should be kept down with any means possible. Surely you can see that?
At the moment I am a bit divided over this issue. I understand their desire to collect revenue to fund a site. But I do need to balance that against the opening up of my system to all sorts of tracking. And at the moment my privacy trumps the websites revenue.
Well, look at it this way: This is Capitalism, right? We're told that under Capitalism, the value of any product or service is whatever you can persuade others to pay. If nobody wants to pay, then it is worthless. If I come across websites that refuse to serve their content unless I allow adverts, I just move on; there are plenty of sites to choose from, usually, and often the ones with the best information are the ones with the least pollution.
And then you get sites like Slashdot, which have this wonderful checkbox that says because I am such a good user, that they will disable advertising for me if I want. Which even if I do, I still get ads served up to me - hence another reason for ad blocking software.
Well, that's the thing - how can one enter into any sort of trust-based relationship, when the other party so clearly can't be trusted?
Except that this substrate is not being used for Si based semiconductors, but for GaAs instead
Apart from that, there is the whole, emerging, organic and printable semiconductor industry:
http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/r...
http://www.fastcompany.com/114...
These things are not necessarily meant for servers or even consumer electronics as we know it; there is a huge number of things that different industries are interested in using computer technology for, where things like price, flexibility and low power consumption are crucial factors. Just imagine if it were possible to print something like thousands of largely autonomous computers on stickers for, say, $.01 each; I think this may very well be possible quite soon. In that situation, you want electronics that are bio-degradable.
Reality is real, whether or not a group of blinkered idiots try to force it not to be so. If these people really had faith, then they wouldn't mind; they would accept that since God had created the world and everything in it, anything you learn about His reality teaches you more about God. The idea that the Bible - a hodgepodge of stories carefully selected to support a religious/political agenda over 1000 years ago - must, aboslutely must, be true to the very comma, is a modern invention, and a particularly pathological one too.
Creationists are liars to themselves, more than anything else. Fundamentalism is equally vile, whether it decorates itself with the name of Christ, Muhammed or any other famous person. The objectves of creationists are of the same evil nature as those of IS or al Qaeda - the methods may vary, but they all want to subdue your freedom to think and choose on you own, by spreading falsehoods. I am not going as far as professor Dawkins and saying that all religion is by nature bad - I have known honest, religious people - but there is line that is very easily crossed.
Aw, how sad - I got modded down for making a Batman joke, it seems. Not a good one, I freely admit, but are there really people who get offended when you joke about a rather pathetic cartoon character? If only I could afford to worry about so small things.
I would suggest that this might be an issue that David Cameron used for the elections and for politics and that it isn't a core issue that he'll defend against such pushback.
I think it is quite important - as a diversion tactic. He doesn't want people to catch on to the fact that the Conservatives are selling off public assets as part of a larger, ideologically motivated strategy. I won't deny that they and the Liberal Democrats have done a reasonable job of handling the crisis, in as much as they have done at least part of what had to be done, but they have moved on from the pragmatic running of the country, to a targeted implementation of ideology, and that will inevitably hurt society. This is not because Conservative ideology is worse than the others, but because ideology tends to ignore reality.
The Conservatives have this romantic notion of 'Big Society', which in their minds means that charities, voluntary work etc should cover for more and more things, and the state should not - something I find rather disturbing; presumably if you fall through the 'Big Society' safety net, you are free to go and sell your body to scientific experiments? Another one that sounds a bit hollow is their being the party for 'Working People' - not 'The Working Class', note - which one suspects may mean they are in favour exclusively of people being in work, so you are not on benefits. Thus, changing the benefit system so people are forced to take shitty jobs far below their abilities, because there simply isn't anything else, will be 'For Working People', right?
Thank God, Gotham City is safe!
Most POS systems that I have encountered run WinXP
From the article:
One of the latest attacks on PoS software comes in the form of malicious Word macros downloaded from spam emails.
It looks like you might be right.
There ought to be competent CTOs out there.
Two questions for you:
1: What have you been smoking?
2: Can I have some?
I think 'competent' and 'CTO' in the same sentence probably constitutes a contradiction in terms.
Every time you get the urge to say "it's natural so it is OK" - REMEMBER CYANIDE.
Or Ebola. Or AIDS. Cancer too...
You seem to focus exclusively on the inconvenience caused by things clogging pipes, but that really is the least of the problem. I'm not suffering from the 'natural is good' delusion; all I'm saying is, natural substances have been around for a long time, so nature has had time to adjust to them. Plastics, on the other hand have exploded onto the scene in the last century; no doubt, if given enough time, something will evolve to take advantage of the abundant, new energy source, but it is likely to take something like millions of years - or certainly a lot longer than our lifetimes. Whatever harm plastic may cause, we are not liekly to have a good defence against it; we should have thought about that before we just let it out in the world around us, but we didn't.
I can't imagine it is really a big water treatment issue since they have a different density than water and you could separate them with settling tanks and skimmers.
Separating really small objects of almost the same density as water (0.91â"0.96 g/cm3 - they are made from polyethylene) is not easy, and the fact is that they pass through all existing water treatment works. Plastics are in fact a serious environmental issue, 1) since they often leak hormone-like chemicals, and 2) because plastic objects are mostly not broken down into their chemical constituents, but instead break up to form very small plastic splinters and fibres. These are now found everywhere in our food chain; certainly in anything that starts life at sea: fish etc. We still don't quite know what harm they cause - the great worry is that thei will turn out to be as harmful as asbestos. Is it a good idea to allow the industry to pump these largely unnecessary products out, when it seems likely that it will cause massive problems for society down the line? Health problems cost society money, not just in form of hospitals, doctors etc, but also in lost productivity - prevention is better than cure, and it is also better for business in the long run.
And I don't see it matters for industry really because they'll just go back to using what they were using before which is mostly - sand.
You use this stuff as an abrasive and maybe the microbeads are mildly less abrasive? I don't know... anyway, they'll just replace this with very fine sand.
Sand is a natural material, and the environment already knows how to deal with it. I don't know exactly why they prefer to use plastic, but I'll bet it has to do with thei short term profit. Maybe it is a selling point, or was - I remember when it was first introduced and you suddenly heard a lot about how harsh the old kind of toothpaste was to your teeth. In reality it is probably no more than a selling point, like the current craze for putting triclosan in everything - which doesn't actually kill bacteria, but is likely to harm our health in the long run (both directly and by breeding resistent bacteria; when will we bother to learn?)
25 years, you say? It feels longer, somehow. Don't worry, I can see everybody's eyes glaze over, so I won't go too far down memory lane, except to say that there was actually a time when when Windows was cool and fun to work with. By gods, it was a load of crap, back then, but fun to code for, for that very reason. I used to spend 90% of my time commenting out code sections until the latest, spectacular error went away; that was how I learned to program properly in C. There is nothing like having to debug Windows running in real mode to bring home the idea that you must always initialise variable and check returned pointers. I sometimes miss the "hardship" in a perverse sort of way.