Found a few of the keywords, but none of the associated posts were actually moderated favorably. Perhaps even worse, if I ever had a mode point I didn't think that any of those posts really deserved positive moderation...
Second or third attempt to find an interesting entry point to the potentially meaningful discussion. At this point I can't pretend to remember why I should have such expectations for Slashdot. So let me try to formulate a cohesive response so I'll have better ideas what to search for on the last attempt...
What IBM is actually doing is trying to find and leverage the best solutions so the work of the top employees (which could be defined in terms of the highest productivity and maximum profitability) can be leveraged over entire industries. I do NOT believe that IBM is worried about all the less-than-very-best employees with less-than-very-top skills who become unemployed as a result. IBM just wants to sell the best results, and the REAL business problem (as IBM sees it) is that not enough corporate cancers are buying what IBM is selling.
What employers REALLY want is NOT degrees NOR experience. What the employers want is the cheapest employees who can accomplish the work to produce the maximum profit. Transient employment? Perfect. If IBM can deliver the necessary skills for the 37 minutes it takes to get the job done, then that's great. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
Disclaimer called for? Or should I just AC it? Long story there, but Slashdot isn't worth the time. And why am I even wasting the keystrokes on an AC branch?
No relation to anything I wrote. Par for today's Slashdot, eh?
Any actual reaction of any conceivable relevance? Anything to write worth reading? Perhaps an explanation of who you imagined might conceivably be interested in your mumble? Or just time to regard this as yet another attempted discussion that got aborted before conception?
Not surprised to see the entire discussion on Slashdot is wrongheaded. The REAL victim is the REAL news and the FAKE news is more like the gun that murdered it. The people who propagate the FAKE news are the REAL perps here, but I sure couldn't find any trace of understanding in this discussion.
It's the reputation of the perps that matters. In other words, if no one paid any attention to people who propagate FAKE news, then the problem would be solved. Right now the best approach I can imagine to doing this would involve MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation). If you're a free-speech extremist, you could turn off the filters, but the default would be slightly positive and the trolls would start out invisible to most people and become less visible as they earned negative reputation on the honesty dimension.
Mostly missed this story since they cycle so fast. Usual waste of time to suggest an obvious solution like slowing down the aging of good stories (even though I see little evidence this one was good enough to have gotten slowed down). However I did reply over on Facebook and might as well share it here:
I hope I have an opportunity to read your new book about Facebook, but I will not buy it on Amazon, which is just another flavor of the corporate cancers that are destroying us. I hope the book delves into ekronomics or such solutions as progressive profits taxes based on market share... However from this page it looks like your personal interests have gone from essential time, past investment time, and now all the way into recreational time.
The real problem is insane economic models overriding the legitimate objectives of copyright (and patent law). What we have now is a kind of lottery mentality, looking for YUGE riches. The ACTUAL (and proper) goals were to encourage creativity and innovation.
Having said that, I think many of the solution approaches are obvious, but we can't get there from here. The winners of the crooked lotteries are bribing the cheapest politicians they can find to make the games more crooked. It's all about massive profits for the biggest corporate cancers. Gawdam anyone who tries to improve on Mickey Mouse if it might take a nickel out of Disney's coffers.
Can you imagine cost-recovery plus incentives? Compensation based on actual value received, including such values as pleasure and support for future creativity and innovation? Me neither, even though I think we have the technologies to implement many of those approaches now.
Thought of a second algorithm for a safe search. I think the first algorithm is pretty good and fairly easy to understand, but maybe it has a vulnerability. The new algorithm would require an external resource with high trust. From that resource you would download a secure checksum calculator. Not sure how you could really protect it if your computer has been pwned, but you have more serious problems in that case anyway, but assuming you can run the checksum calculator locally and securely, then you would feed your email address to it and give that result to the website that checks for your email address.
Actually, that doesn't even need to be a particularly good checksum. It would suffice if the final check returns a number of email addresses that might or might not include your email address. The only problem is when there are too many candidates, and the checksum only needs to be good enough to prevent that.
Apparently not without giving it away, which is crazy. Per my earlier comment, there is no reason to implement it that way unless the real objective is to get more email addresses. I included an alternative algorithm in that comment.
Exactly my reaction. The "checking" system should NOT ask for your email address. For example, it could ask for substrings, perhaps four letters at a time, and tell you how many possibilities there are. If there are too many to scan to see if you've been included, then you could enter another four characters and refine the search. At no point should you need to give away the email address you're trying to check.
The sorting does help, though the spam filtering is increasingly laughable.
What I really want is a variation of future delivery. I want to be able to set up replies for the future with reminders as the deadline approaches. The AI aspect would be learning to recognize my priorities to help with recommended deadlines and more timely reminders: "You drafted this reply to Nancy two days ago. Want to check it again or just let it go out tomorrow." In other words I generally want to slow down and control the tempo with priority to the stuff that actually needs it.
It's ekronomics again, which reminds me that time is up, but I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
What I've been searching for and failing to find is any consideration of whether these expired domains might be subject to re-registration in the form of hijacking. Obviously Putin wouldn't do it in his own name, but he has plenty of cut-outs and sock puppets to work with. (Perhaps some of the same folks who help conceal his vast personal wealth.)
The other thing I'm looking for is any consideration of what happens if a REAL national emergency comes along. America actually has some serious enemies, NOT to be confused with some desperate asylum seekers, and such REAL enemies have a golden opportunity now that #PresidentTweety has broken the government.
Time for a little poem:
Trumpty Dumpty sat on his wall. Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall. And this little Donnie went wee, wee, wee all the way home to Queens.
If Facebook had a proper MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation), then I would look at Zuckerberg's MEPR and adjust my filters so that I would NOT see him anymore. The trolls, too, of course. (Actually, it should be easy to pre-block trolls with a slight adjustment to the default visibility threshold.)
Of course it will never happen. MEPR would require sharing some of the information that Facebook has collected about each of us, and Facebook is going to hoard that information. Only way Facebook would consider sharing the MEPR data would be if there was legislation forcing them to or if there was a credible competitive threat.
I was obviously going for snide. Three levels of snide, actually.
Snark hunting on today's Slashdot? Seems so pointless.
I certainly hope you don't work in a technical field, because your reasoning capabilities are obviously deficient. Most obviously, I did NOT limit my comment to your "good slashdotters" and made no assumptions about the OP. At this point I think most of the "good slashdotters" of yore are RIP. (That is usually a cue for some 3-digit ID to pipe up, eh? "I'm still alive!")
Seems to be another call for the ancient advice: "If you have nothing to say, then perhaps you should say nothing."
Thanks, highly informative response, though I still wonder how they missed the Ars Technica list. Theranos in particular seems like it should have been noticed. As it notes, the rest of them were relatively tiny companies, so maybe that's sufficient explanation.
Sears is probably outside of the scope of Ars Technica. Also it's been a long and pretty visible decline.
Interesting comment, but I can't really decide if it deserved insightful or informative moderation... So I'll focus on the part that most interested me, which was right at the end, the bit about Premium membership. The "premium" search was the only one that came close to my interests.
You [rnturn] complain that "All the Premium membership accomplishes is transferring more of my money to LI." My first question is what is "more" referring to?
However the deeper topic is how the premium memberships relate to the overall economic model of LinkedIn. If LI is deriving a large portion of their revenue from premium subscriptions, then it will have large effects on how they run their business and who they are "loyal" to. In the conventional employer-paid job-matching service, the loyalty is obviously going to be to the employers. That's a really simple business model to understand: The employer pays to get the cheapest employees who can do the work. There might be a few lottery winners who get great jobs, but the bread and butter is going to be a race to the bottom, pitting all the applicants against each other for the available jobs. Most importantly, the incentive system encourages LinkedIn to report the lowest salaries possible to make sure applicants aren't even hoping for too much money.
What I'd be interested in would be a job-search website where the economic model is split between the employees and employers on a win-win basis. Fat chance, right?
In theory, LI could find uniquely best matching jobs for each unique person. I've never seen any evidence that it ever happens. There are a few stellar people, but they do NOT need LinkedIn's help to get stellar jobs. Such people are already known by their visible track records.
Okay, now I have more keywords to search for, but I'm doubtful I should spend the time searching on Slashdot...
It was an interesting and enjoyable story, but the thing that seemed to be missing was missed picks, as in "Who died without getting listed?", "Which major companies went bust without making the list?", or even "What was the largest collapse that should have been picked?" Focusing on the near-death cases seems relatively easy (at least in terms of the mostly obvious candidates they discussed), but I feel like there might be more to learn from a few postmortems of overlooked failures.
Seems like a pointless attempt at a discussion. If you made any sincere attempt to understand what I actually wrote, then I am unable to detect it. In fact, it now looks to me like you don't even understand what YOU wrote.
So here's the punchline. My REAL project just now is polishing up the final exam I am about to administer to some of the top computer science students in the country. At least they think so, and the university where I'm pinch-hitting has a pretty fancy reputation. I've supposedly spent an entire semester helping them learn how to write comprehensible and unambiguous technical papers and dissertations. In English, which is not the native language of any of the students. When I reviewed their personal linguistic histories, English was 3rd or 4th for some of the Chinese students... From the samples I've seen so far, I'm rather doubtful you could pass the course, even though I'm a pretty easy grader.
The students have also told me quite a bit about their research. That's coming on top of my 15 years supporting researchers in a high reputation lab for one of the big TLCs in the industry. I was mostly surprised by how many of the same old problems remain mostly unsolved and only occasionally surprised by the progress that's been made on a few of them. Even worse, it's clear that most of these students are smarter than I ever was (in spite of graduating from two top-ranked universities) and a few of them are quite probably geniuses.
Just for grins, I actually considered including the abstract of the arXiv article they have to deal with. I'd have wagered you couldn't make hide nor hair of it. One of the authors is an old friend and heavy mathematician with an Erdos number of 2. He spent about an hour explaining it to me a couple of months ago...
Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I think there was a time when visiting Slashdot didn't feel like slumming.
If I am so wrong, then why are you citing evidence to support my "opinion"? Perhaps you could clarify which part of your apparent self-contradiction is your actual opinion? Let me clarify that I am NOT criticizing you for your continued use of XP, but Microsoft is quite unhappy with bad (or "naughty"?) customers like you.
Anyway, if you don't understand my "considered opinions" (and want to), then you should feel free to ask for clarification. I would actually thank you for your support, but find that difficult until you clarify what you are trying to say. Alternatively, you could try to clarify where you think they are insufficiently considered, but that usually calls for some persuasive evidence against them.
I think it would be interesting to do a historical analysis of the discussions on Slashdot to see when they tilted away from productive and constructive. Perhaps such discussions were never in the majority and my memory is merely playing tricks on me. So many trolls, so little time.
So how much money do you want to spend to partake of a new standard? Or would you settle for a minor software upgrade at a much lower cost if Microsoft felt like offering it?
I actually hoped that Linux would follow that path, but now I feel like all my hopes and expectations for Linux were childish delusions. Corporate cancers rule and make the rules.
My wife was actually quite satisfied with Windows 8, but about equally satisfied with Windows 10. There were even some people who thought Windows ME was okay. The important aspect is why Microsoft allows the quality of OSes to fluctuate so widely. My longer comment above focuses on the economics of creating demand under false pretenses and why we are now in trouble since the last good version (Windows 7) has been eclipsed by a new version (Windows 10), which I suspect (but I haven't seen the source code) is really just Windows 7 with "improvements" to make it more easily breakable with future upgrades.
Do I need to qualify my response? I've never purchased a Windows 10 computer (though I've advised on the purchase of some). All 2-1/2 of my Windows 10 machines were upgraded from Windows 7. Most of my Ubuntu machines were upgraded from Windows XP. My newest machine is actually a Mac, but I dislike Apple for other reasons... Not sure what I'm going to do the next time I am forced to buy a new machine. None of the above is not a viable option (and hoping I die first is even worse, though it solves the problem of viability).
I really think this is sad news. Now Microsoft can start wrecking Windows 10 to create demand for a new and "improved" OS. I think the only reason they gave free upgrades to Windows 10 was because of the fiasco of Windows XP. At least that's how it looked to Microsoft's accountants when people were basically satisfied with the OS and had no desire to upgrade.
In reality the OSes and the hardware have already surpassed our normal human needs. Yeah, in theory it's always nicer to do things a bit faster, but the computers have run away from our human perceptions. Opening a program in 20 ms makes no significant difference against 40 ms or even 1 ms.
Humans just don't care anymore. We have a good enough OS (and a fast enough computer and a powerful enough smartphone).
How do you create demand when the customers' real needs have been satisfied? By polishing things up and making good enough better? Or by using upgrades to break things?
One of my older machines has been having increasing troubles with Windows 10 over the last few months. The machine's hardware is still in pretty good shape (except for the DVD drive), but I predict things are going downhill from here, starting with the very next unneeded upgrade.
Slashdot Mirror
Found a few of the keywords, but none of the associated posts were actually moderated favorably. Perhaps even worse, if I ever had a mode point I didn't think that any of those posts really deserved positive moderation...
Second or third attempt to find an interesting entry point to the potentially meaningful discussion. At this point I can't pretend to remember why I should have such expectations for Slashdot. So let me try to formulate a cohesive response so I'll have better ideas what to search for on the last attempt...
What IBM is actually doing is trying to find and leverage the best solutions so the work of the top employees (which could be defined in terms of the highest productivity and maximum profitability) can be leveraged over entire industries. I do NOT believe that IBM is worried about all the less-than-very-best employees with less-than-very-top skills who become unemployed as a result. IBM just wants to sell the best results, and the REAL business problem (as IBM sees it) is that not enough corporate cancers are buying what IBM is selling.
What employers REALLY want is NOT degrees NOR experience. What the employers want is the cheapest employees who can accomplish the work to produce the maximum profit. Transient employment? Perfect. If IBM can deliver the necessary skills for the 37 minutes it takes to get the job done, then that's great. Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
Disclaimer called for? Or should I just AC it? Long story there, but Slashdot isn't worth the time. And why am I even wasting the keystrokes on an AC branch?
No relation to anything I wrote. Par for today's Slashdot, eh?
Any actual reaction of any conceivable relevance? Anything to write worth reading? Perhaps an explanation of who you imagined might conceivably be interested in your mumble? Or just time to regard this as yet another attempted discussion that got aborted before conception?
Not surprised to see the entire discussion on Slashdot is wrongheaded. The REAL victim is the REAL news and the FAKE news is more like the gun that murdered it. The people who propagate the FAKE news are the REAL perps here, but I sure couldn't find any trace of understanding in this discussion.
It's the reputation of the perps that matters. In other words, if no one paid any attention to people who propagate FAKE news, then the problem would be solved. Right now the best approach I can imagine to doing this would involve MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation). If you're a free-speech extremist, you could turn off the filters, but the default would be slightly positive and the trolls would start out invisible to most people and become less visible as they earned negative reputation on the honesty dimension.
Times up, so I bid you ADAuPR, atAJG.
Mostly missed this story since they cycle so fast. Usual waste of time to suggest an obvious solution like slowing down the aging of good stories (even though I see little evidence this one was good enough to have gotten slowed down). However I did reply over on Facebook and might as well share it here:
I hope I have an opportunity to read your new book about Facebook, but I will not buy it on Amazon, which is just another flavor of the corporate cancers that are destroying us. I hope the book delves into ekronomics or such solutions as progressive profits taxes based on market share... However from this page it looks like your personal interests have gone from essential time, past investment time, and now all the way into recreational time.
Well, the AC did con me into looking, but...
The real problem is insane economic models overriding the legitimate objectives of copyright (and patent law). What we have now is a kind of lottery mentality, looking for YUGE riches. The ACTUAL (and proper) goals were to encourage creativity and innovation.
Having said that, I think many of the solution approaches are obvious, but we can't get there from here. The winners of the crooked lotteries are bribing the cheapest politicians they can find to make the games more crooked. It's all about massive profits for the biggest corporate cancers. Gawdam anyone who tries to improve on Mickey Mouse if it might take a nickel out of Disney's coffers.
Can you imagine cost-recovery plus incentives? Compensation based on actual value received, including such values as pleasure and support for future creativity and innovation? Me neither, even though I think we have the technologies to implement many of those approaches now.
Thought of a second algorithm for a safe search. I think the first algorithm is pretty good and fairly easy to understand, but maybe it has a vulnerability. The new algorithm would require an external resource with high trust. From that resource you would download a secure checksum calculator. Not sure how you could really protect it if your computer has been pwned, but you have more serious problems in that case anyway, but assuming you can run the checksum calculator locally and securely, then you would feed your email address to it and give that result to the website that checks for your email address.
Actually, that doesn't even need to be a particularly good checksum. It would suffice if the final check returns a number of email addresses that might or might not include your email address. The only problem is when there are too many candidates, and the checksum only needs to be good enough to prevent that.
Apparently not without giving it away, which is crazy. Per my earlier comment, there is no reason to implement it that way unless the real objective is to get more email addresses. I included an alternative algorithm in that comment.
Exactly my reaction. The "checking" system should NOT ask for your email address. For example, it could ask for substrings, perhaps four letters at a time, and tell you how many possibilities there are. If there are too many to scan to see if you've been included, then you could enter another four characters and refine the search. At no point should you need to give away the email address you're trying to check.
The sorting does help, though the spam filtering is increasingly laughable.
What I really want is a variation of future delivery. I want to be able to set up replies for the future with reminders as the deadline approaches. The AI aspect would be learning to recognize my priorities to help with recommended deadlines and more timely reminders: "You drafted this reply to Nancy two days ago. Want to check it again or just let it go out tomorrow." In other words I generally want to slow down and control the tempo with priority to the stuff that actually needs it.
It's ekronomics again, which reminds me that time is up, but I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
What I've been searching for and failing to find is any consideration of whether these expired domains might be subject to re-registration in the form of hijacking. Obviously Putin wouldn't do it in his own name, but he has plenty of cut-outs and sock puppets to work with. (Perhaps some of the same folks who help conceal his vast personal wealth.)
The other thing I'm looking for is any consideration of what happens if a REAL national emergency comes along. America actually has some serious enemies, NOT to be confused with some desperate asylum seekers, and such REAL enemies have a golden opportunity now that #PresidentTweety has broken the government.
Time for a little poem:
Trumpty Dumpty sat on his wall.
Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall.
And this little Donnie went wee, wee, wee all the way home to Queens.
If Facebook had a proper MEPR (Multidimensional Earned Public Reputation), then I would look at Zuckerberg's MEPR and adjust my filters so that I would NOT see him anymore. The trolls, too, of course. (Actually, it should be easy to pre-block trolls with a slight adjustment to the default visibility threshold.)
Of course it will never happen. MEPR would require sharing some of the information that Facebook has collected about each of us, and Facebook is going to hoard that information. Only way Facebook would consider sharing the MEPR data would be if there was legislation forcing them to or if there was a credible competitive threat.
Time's up, but I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I was obviously going for snide. Three levels of snide, actually.
Snark hunting on today's Slashdot? Seems so pointless.
I certainly hope you don't work in a technical field, because your reasoning capabilities are obviously deficient. Most obviously, I did NOT limit my comment to your "good slashdotters" and made no assumptions about the OP. At this point I think most of the "good slashdotters" of yore are RIP. (That is usually a cue for some 3-digit ID to pipe up, eh? "I'm still alive!")
Seems to be another call for the ancient advice: "If you have nothing to say, then perhaps you should say nothing."
Thanks, highly informative response, though I still wonder how they missed the Ars Technica list. Theranos in particular seems like it should have been noticed. As it notes, the rest of them were relatively tiny companies, so maybe that's sufficient explanation.
Sears is probably outside of the scope of Ars Technica. Also it's been a long and pretty visible decline.
Interesting comment, but I can't really decide if it deserved insightful or informative moderation... So I'll focus on the part that most interested me, which was right at the end, the bit about Premium membership. The "premium" search was the only one that came close to my interests.
You [rnturn] complain that "All the Premium membership accomplishes is transferring more of my money to LI." My first question is what is "more" referring to?
However the deeper topic is how the premium memberships relate to the overall economic model of LinkedIn. If LI is deriving a large portion of their revenue from premium subscriptions, then it will have large effects on how they run their business and who they are "loyal" to. In the conventional employer-paid job-matching service, the loyalty is obviously going to be to the employers. That's a really simple business model to understand: The employer pays to get the cheapest employees who can do the work. There might be a few lottery winners who get great jobs, but the bread and butter is going to be a race to the bottom, pitting all the applicants against each other for the available jobs. Most importantly, the incentive system encourages LinkedIn to report the lowest salaries possible to make sure applicants aren't even hoping for too much money.
What I'd be interested in would be a job-search website where the economic model is split between the employees and employers on a win-win basis. Fat chance, right?
In theory, LI could find uniquely best matching jobs for each unique person. I've never seen any evidence that it ever happens. There are a few stellar people, but they do NOT need LinkedIn's help to get stellar jobs. Such people are already known by their visible track records.
Okay, now I have more keywords to search for, but I'm doubtful I should spend the time searching on Slashdot...
First link.
Not to be confused with first post.
However I think you [chrism238] can probably claim to be first to not read the article before commenting.
It was an interesting and enjoyable story, but the thing that seemed to be missing was missed picks, as in "Who died without getting listed?", "Which major companies went bust without making the list?", or even "What was the largest collapse that should have been picked?" Focusing on the near-death cases seems relatively easy (at least in terms of the mostly obvious candidates they discussed), but I feel like there might be more to learn from a few postmortems of overlooked failures.
Z^-1
Seems like a pointless attempt at a discussion. If you made any sincere attempt to understand what I actually wrote, then I am unable to detect it. In fact, it now looks to me like you don't even understand what YOU wrote.
So here's the punchline. My REAL project just now is polishing up the final exam I am about to administer to some of the top computer science students in the country. At least they think so, and the university where I'm pinch-hitting has a pretty fancy reputation. I've supposedly spent an entire semester helping them learn how to write comprehensible and unambiguous technical papers and dissertations. In English, which is not the native language of any of the students. When I reviewed their personal linguistic histories, English was 3rd or 4th for some of the Chinese students... From the samples I've seen so far, I'm rather doubtful you could pass the course, even though I'm a pretty easy grader.
The students have also told me quite a bit about their research. That's coming on top of my 15 years supporting researchers in a high reputation lab for one of the big TLCs in the industry. I was mostly surprised by how many of the same old problems remain mostly unsolved and only occasionally surprised by the progress that's been made on a few of them. Even worse, it's clear that most of these students are smarter than I ever was (in spite of graduating from two top-ranked universities) and a few of them are quite probably geniuses.
Just for grins, I actually considered including the abstract of the arXiv article they have to deal with. I'd have wagered you couldn't make hide nor hair of it. One of the authors is an old friend and heavy mathematician with an Erdos number of 2. He spent about an hour explaining it to me a couple of months ago...
Perhaps my memory is failing me, but I think there was a time when visiting Slashdot didn't feel like slumming.
If I am so wrong, then why are you citing evidence to support my "opinion"? Perhaps you could clarify which part of your apparent self-contradiction is your actual opinion? Let me clarify that I am NOT criticizing you for your continued use of XP, but Microsoft is quite unhappy with bad (or "naughty"?) customers like you.
Anyway, if you don't understand my "considered opinions" (and want to), then you should feel free to ask for clarification. I would actually thank you for your support, but find that difficult until you clarify what you are trying to say. Alternatively, you could try to clarify where you think they are insufficiently considered, but that usually calls for some persuasive evidence against them.
I think it would be interesting to do a historical analysis of the discussions on Slashdot to see when they tilted away from productive and constructive. Perhaps such discussions were never in the majority and my memory is merely playing tricks on me. So many trolls, so little time.
So how much money do you want to spend to partake of a new standard? Or would you settle for a minor software upgrade at a much lower cost if Microsoft felt like offering it?
I actually hoped that Linux would follow that path, but now I feel like all my hopes and expectations for Linux were childish delusions. Corporate cancers rule and make the rules.
My wife was actually quite satisfied with Windows 8, but about equally satisfied with Windows 10. There were even some people who thought Windows ME was okay. The important aspect is why Microsoft allows the quality of OSes to fluctuate so widely. My longer comment above focuses on the economics of creating demand under false pretenses and why we are now in trouble since the last good version (Windows 7) has been eclipsed by a new version (Windows 10), which I suspect (but I haven't seen the source code) is really just Windows 7 with "improvements" to make it more easily breakable with future upgrades.
Do I need to qualify my response? I've never purchased a Windows 10 computer (though I've advised on the purchase of some). All 2-1/2 of my Windows 10 machines were upgraded from Windows 7. Most of my Ubuntu machines were upgraded from Windows XP. My newest machine is actually a Mac, but I dislike Apple for other reasons... Not sure what I'm going to do the next time I am forced to buy a new machine. None of the above is not a viable option (and hoping I die first is even worse, though it solves the problem of viability).
Times up, so I bid you ADSAuPR, atAJG.
I really think this is sad news. Now Microsoft can start wrecking Windows 10 to create demand for a new and "improved" OS. I think the only reason they gave free upgrades to Windows 10 was because of the fiasco of Windows XP. At least that's how it looked to Microsoft's accountants when people were basically satisfied with the OS and had no desire to upgrade.
In reality the OSes and the hardware have already surpassed our normal human needs. Yeah, in theory it's always nicer to do things a bit faster, but the computers have run away from our human perceptions. Opening a program in 20 ms makes no significant difference against 40 ms or even 1 ms.
Humans just don't care anymore. We have a good enough OS (and a fast enough computer and a powerful enough smartphone).
How do you create demand when the customers' real needs have been satisfied? By polishing things up and making good enough better? Or by using upgrades to break things?
One of my older machines has been having increasing troubles with Windows 10 over the last few months. The machine's hardware is still in pretty good shape (except for the DVD drive), but I predict things are going downhill from here, starting with the very next unneeded upgrade.
Z^-2
Z^-1