Demand of whom? Autocad makes high-end professional software. When their customers want to set up a system with their software, they go by Autocad's specs. It's a case of getting the OS your applications run on. Autocad probably has very little interest in releasing their software on other systems, since it would be extra work that would get them very few additional customers.
"Just working" doesn't depend on spyware. The walled garden is control over what you can do and what hardware you can use, not spying. I'm not familiar with iCloud, but I think it uses 256-bit encryption. I know my iPhone is encrypted using AES-256.
I'm not saying that Apple isn't spying, but that they have no more incentive to do so than Microsoft.
What you're saying is that Microsoft has a very long way to fall, and could get into other industries on their way down. That doesn't say that Microsoft will stay in the computer industry indefinitely; it does say that Microsoft will be there for a long time.
My mother-in-law had a laptop that she used with trepidation. We gave her a low-end Samsung tablet (didn't know whether she'd like it, figured we could upgrade later), and she loves it. Microsoft's home sales are suffering from Android, I'm sure.
W7 felt faster to start up. It may have been that, in W7, I'd get to the login screen predictably. With W10, I look at this really pretty splash screen, clicking randomly, and wondering when the login popup will appear.
Gates was quite competent and only tried to screw over competitors, without letting little things like legality and morality get in the way. Ballmer is the one behind Windows 8 and RT. I had hopes for Nadella, but right now I see no reason to like him better than Ballmer.
Seriously, how many users upgrade the OS on their device? I'd think that most of MS sales are with new computers. If 8 and 10 had been usable as better 7s, they'd have been very successful.
I'm especially touched by the realization on the part of Microsoft and many application vendors that what I really want to do when I turn my machine on is watch things update. Lesser mortals might have thought I intended to actually use the thing.
Look, everyone who knows me, or checks my posting history, knows who I voted for for President. On the other hand, I could have voted for the Legalize Marijuana Now party (or whatever it's called - it had a full slate of candidates, anyway) and nobody would suspect a thing.
I don't have a problem with voter ID laws per se; I just have problems with the ones I've seen proposed in the US. They seem designed to exclude certain classes of voter. I also don't see that voter IDs would solve any important problems. They wouldn't solve any hypothetical problem of people voting multiple times, since they'd just have to get multiple IDs. Besides, that's a really dumb way to try to cheat, because it adds a few votes at the risk of felony convictions. It's much easier to disrupt the ability of the wrong people to vote, which in my observation seems to be people who will probably vote Democrat currently.
Vote buying may be a bad investment, but vote coercion may not be. If you run a business, and you tell all of your minimum-wage employees to provide selfie videos showing themselves putting ballots voting for Julian Assange if they want to keep their jobs, what are they going to do? You can easily replace the ones who insist on voting for someone who could legally be elected.
Vote totals are normally close enough so that selfies would prove nothing. You'd need reliable selfies from nearly every voter to prove any fraud. Not going to happen.
I can't go through the vote totals after the election and see how my vote was counted, so it doesn't matter if I've got a picture or just remember how I voted (which is not difficult). The only way to correct fraud would be to have everyone take a picture and then get together and count. A small sample is only statistically valid if it's random, and I'd suspect there'd be bias in who took selfies this election.
How it works here: I voted on a paper ballot. It was sealed in an envelope inside another envelope with my name and signature on it. It was deposited in a lockbox with other ballots. Although I didn't identify them, there were presumably observers from both major parties watching for shenanigans. On election day, it'll be much the same except the ballots will go through the tabulating machines and directly into the box. My ballot will have been in a box with a tamper-evident seal, and they'll check my name off and remove the inner envelope and put it with the other inner envelopes. There will be observers from both major parties to make sure all the ballots are tabulated and retained in a box, since any cheating is going to favor one party over another and somebody's going to squawk.
Then, all the ballots are in sealed and identifiable boxes. In some random precincts. there will be hand counts to see if they match the machine totals. If the vote is close, we'll have manual recounts.
The trick is to make sure that ballots are either sealed away or under observation by at least one person whose party would be hurt by any given cheat.
I can tell you who I voted for (early voting). That seems to me to cover freedom of speech. I have the ability to lie or tell the truth, which means my word isn't all that useful for intimidation or coercion.
My experiences with Agile have been much more positive. I think it's a completely valid approach that is really easy to misunderstand and screw up, kinda similar to C++ programming.
That may actually work well for a small shop. We've become a lot more risk-averse as we've grown. It takes a little fun out of things, but I'd rather my checkins were good.
Given data entry with hundreds of variables that all interrelate to each other, is it possible to do unit tests? If you have ten boolean values that interact with each other, you need a thousand unit tests. It gets worse from there.
Virtual environments for the expensive machines? Partly because they're not perfect, but largely because the behavior of the machines tends to depend on the real world. They're nice when we can get them.
Most devs have no clue about project management from a business perspective; your more seasoned devs will (or at least should). "No" will rarely mean "No, that can't be done"; they have to learn how to speak your lingo as much as you need to learn how to speak theirs, and a good PM will help both sides do that.
That's the wrong way around. If you're the project manager, you got hired partly for your people skills. Developers get hired primarily for their technical skills. It would be easier for a good project manager to learn to speak geek than for developers to speak business. Besides, developers tend to be worse negotiators, and if they're talking a foreign language they'll be even more at a disadvantage. One defense a bad negotiator has is to take a position and stick to it.
Experienced developers are sometimes gun-shy. If you're trying to do a job, and say "We can do it if we get X and Y", and find that you're expected to do it just fine without X and Y, and your complaints get stonewalled, it's going to be much easier for you to say "No, can't do it" next time.
It's possible to wind up in a situation where developers and managers are on the same side, but that usually requires management to understand developers and keep promises.
I've found that to be one of the most frustrating things in dealing with users. If I know what the actual problem is, I can help come up with a good solution.
I've spent time on Stack Overflow reading questions like "How do I do this incredibly stupid thing?" that don't give a clue as to the problem they're trying to solve. It's frustrating, and somebody complains when I comment "That's not the solution, no matter what. What's your problem? It's got to have a much better solution than this."
I don't know how it was designed. I can tell what it actually does. If it's making politically significant tweets near Election Day, it needs to be shut down until it can avoid doing that.
People don't magically shed responsibility by having a machine carry out their decisions.
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Demand of whom? Autocad makes high-end professional software. When their customers want to set up a system with their software, they go by Autocad's specs. It's a case of getting the OS your applications run on. Autocad probably has very little interest in releasing their software on other systems, since it would be extra work that would get them very few additional customers.
Unfortunately, the "shady stuff" seems to be everywhere. My wife's work computer got infected from the New York Times website.
"Just working" doesn't depend on spyware. The walled garden is control over what you can do and what hardware you can use, not spying. I'm not familiar with iCloud, but I think it uses 256-bit encryption. I know my iPhone is encrypted using AES-256.
I'm not saying that Apple isn't spying, but that they have no more incentive to do so than Microsoft.
What you're saying is that Microsoft has a very long way to fall, and could get into other industries on their way down. That doesn't say that Microsoft will stay in the computer industry indefinitely; it does say that Microsoft will be there for a long time.
My mother-in-law had a laptop that she used with trepidation. We gave her a low-end Samsung tablet (didn't know whether she'd like it, figured we could upgrade later), and she loves it. Microsoft's home sales are suffering from Android, I'm sure.
W7 felt faster to start up. It may have been that, in W7, I'd get to the login screen predictably. With W10, I look at this really pretty splash screen, clicking randomly, and wondering when the login popup will appear.
Gates was quite competent and only tried to screw over competitors, without letting little things like legality and morality get in the way. Ballmer is the one behind Windows 8 and RT. I had hopes for Nadella, but right now I see no reason to like him better than Ballmer.
Seriously, how many users upgrade the OS on their device? I'd think that most of MS sales are with new computers. If 8 and 10 had been usable as better 7s, they'd have been very successful.
I didn't use Me. I liked Vista a lot better than I like 10.
I'm especially touched by the realization on the part of Microsoft and many application vendors that what I really want to do when I turn my machine on is watch things update. Lesser mortals might have thought I intended to actually use the thing.
Look, everyone who knows me, or checks my posting history, knows who I voted for for President. On the other hand, I could have voted for the Legalize Marijuana Now party (or whatever it's called - it had a full slate of candidates, anyway) and nobody would suspect a thing.
I don't have a problem with voter ID laws per se; I just have problems with the ones I've seen proposed in the US. They seem designed to exclude certain classes of voter. I also don't see that voter IDs would solve any important problems. They wouldn't solve any hypothetical problem of people voting multiple times, since they'd just have to get multiple IDs. Besides, that's a really dumb way to try to cheat, because it adds a few votes at the risk of felony convictions. It's much easier to disrupt the ability of the wrong people to vote, which in my observation seems to be people who will probably vote Democrat currently.
Vote buying may be a bad investment, but vote coercion may not be. If you run a business, and you tell all of your minimum-wage employees to provide selfie videos showing themselves putting ballots voting for Julian Assange if they want to keep their jobs, what are they going to do? You can easily replace the ones who insist on voting for someone who could legally be elected.
Vote totals are normally close enough so that selfies would prove nothing. You'd need reliable selfies from nearly every voter to prove any fraud. Not going to happen.
Nope. That doesn't work.
I can't go through the vote totals after the election and see how my vote was counted, so it doesn't matter if I've got a picture or just remember how I voted (which is not difficult). The only way to correct fraud would be to have everyone take a picture and then get together and count. A small sample is only statistically valid if it's random, and I'd suspect there'd be bias in who took selfies this election.
How it works here: I voted on a paper ballot. It was sealed in an envelope inside another envelope with my name and signature on it. It was deposited in a lockbox with other ballots. Although I didn't identify them, there were presumably observers from both major parties watching for shenanigans. On election day, it'll be much the same except the ballots will go through the tabulating machines and directly into the box. My ballot will have been in a box with a tamper-evident seal, and they'll check my name off and remove the inner envelope and put it with the other inner envelopes. There will be observers from both major parties to make sure all the ballots are tabulated and retained in a box, since any cheating is going to favor one party over another and somebody's going to squawk.
Then, all the ballots are in sealed and identifiable boxes. In some random precincts. there will be hand counts to see if they match the machine totals. If the vote is close, we'll have manual recounts.
The trick is to make sure that ballots are either sealed away or under observation by at least one person whose party would be hurt by any given cheat.
I'd like to see them restricted to people who really need them. There are people who realistically aren't going to make it to a voting booth.
The early voting facilities in my city provide private voting, so that's no problem.
I can tell you who I voted for (early voting). That seems to me to cover freedom of speech. I have the ability to lie or tell the truth, which means my word isn't all that useful for intimidation or coercion.
My experiences with Agile have been much more positive. I think it's a completely valid approach that is really easy to misunderstand and screw up, kinda similar to C++ programming.
That may actually work well for a small shop. We've become a lot more risk-averse as we've grown. It takes a little fun out of things, but I'd rather my checkins were good.
Given data entry with hundreds of variables that all interrelate to each other, is it possible to do unit tests? If you have ten boolean values that interact with each other, you need a thousand unit tests. It gets worse from there.
Virtual environments for the expensive machines? Partly because they're not perfect, but largely because the behavior of the machines tends to depend on the real world. They're nice when we can get them.
That's the wrong way around. If you're the project manager, you got hired partly for your people skills. Developers get hired primarily for their technical skills. It would be easier for a good project manager to learn to speak geek than for developers to speak business. Besides, developers tend to be worse negotiators, and if they're talking a foreign language they'll be even more at a disadvantage. One defense a bad negotiator has is to take a position and stick to it.
Experienced developers are sometimes gun-shy. If you're trying to do a job, and say "We can do it if we get X and Y", and find that you're expected to do it just fine without X and Y, and your complaints get stonewalled, it's going to be much easier for you to say "No, can't do it" next time.
It's possible to wind up in a situation where developers and managers are on the same side, but that usually requires management to understand developers and keep promises.
I've found that to be one of the most frustrating things in dealing with users. If I know what the actual problem is, I can help come up with a good solution.
I've spent time on Stack Overflow reading questions like "How do I do this incredibly stupid thing?" that don't give a clue as to the problem they're trying to solve. It's frustrating, and somebody complains when I comment "That's not the solution, no matter what. What's your problem? It's got to have a much better solution than this."
It's been a frightening amount of time since I could go to snopes.com and tell the "news" from the "fact checks" without looking.
I don't know how it was designed. I can tell what it actually does. If it's making politically significant tweets near Election Day, it needs to be shut down until it can avoid doing that.
People don't magically shed responsibility by having a machine carry out their decisions.
How many Unix and Linux OSes run the mainstream products that a Mac will (like Photoshop)? I believe Mac OSX is unique there.