Windows 10 S violates the "one code base to rule them all" design decision for which they've been taking so much heat in the recent past. Windows 10's Frankenstein combination of touch-centric and non-touch-centric interfaces was specifically so that they could have a single code base for the entire product line.
So ok, whether to fragment their code base up to them, it's their code. But I strongly suspect that 10 S is really a test balloon for the entire code base to go to a walled-garden-only scheme.
Thing two:
"it does reserve the right to remove software that it deems undesirable" -- yeah, like, competing products.
So, yes, it's been pointed out that a great number, maybe the majority, of the population don't have running water or decent sanitation. But any solution can be abandoned by sufficiently enlarging the scope of the problem. Cities in India have a pollution problem that is significantly worse than in the US. That particular problem is worth solving, even though the problems of water and sanitation also need solving.
The possible win I see in this sort of conversion, besides reducing air pollution, is that it makes having a reliable electrical infrastructure more urgent, so maybe that problem will be solved also. And if they solve it with point source solutions like solar panels, those are naturally adaptable for smaller communities that are currently off the grid, which would be another win.
Or, it could all be a scam to fill the pockets of a few officials. We'll just have to see.
> Also, the generation can occur outside of cities where far fewer people breathe it.
To go off topic slightly, I've often thought that this is the main reason the majority of US manufacturing occurs in China. So the generation of pollution can occur outside our own cities. Like, way outside.
I'm conflicted about this. Although I'd never own one, I felt it was important for Windows Phone to continue as competition (however feeble) against Android and IOS. It's important to have multiple vendors pushing each other to excel.
I'm worried now about Microsoft tablet. Of all the tablet makers, Microsoft seems the only one who at least pays lip service to content *creation* rather than mere content consumption. If Microsoft fails in the tablet market (which could easily happen, considering all the other missteps they've made) the message could easily be that nobody wants to create content on a tablet, which is profoundly untrue. Its that there haven't been good solutions yet.
I'm saying all of this not as a Microsoft fan. I run Winders because it runs the Adobe suite and I can't justify the cost of a mac. (I can build a PC to my specifications for a fraction of the cost.) The OS is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If the Adobe suite ran on Linux, M$ and Apple could both go screw.
IANAL, but having been in a similar situation and after spending some time with a lawyer, I learned that age is indeed a protected class, but lawsuits of this nature typically take a very long time to get through the courts, and the chances of collecting, in the lawyer's words, are about 50/50.
"National origin discrimination"... I haven't heard of that one, but hey, it's California. It might work.
There have been, I think, some recent traction on companies not following rules on outsourcing, they may be able to use that.
I dunno. I think winning is iffy, but I wish them the very best of luck, and maybe now is the time for this kind of suit to go through. Here's hoping they win and it becomes a precedent.
"Since then, Google has seen a 23 percent reduction in the fraction of navigations to HTTP pages with password or credit card forms on Chrome for desktop."
Ok, but is that because the users started using https pages, or because the businesses in question switched to https,
...or because the user switched to Firefox?
I mean, we've been trained for the last 20 years that if you get an error, Switch Browsers.
This doesn't change anything. The people who buy into Apple mindshare will continue to buy Apple, and the rest of us will continue to repurpose old hardware for new roles and pretty much ignore the shiny trendy things. And there will be enough Apple fans for Apple to continue to make boatloads of money. And many of those fans will be all hyped up to save the earth and recycle everything and battle global warming, while not even recognizing the irony of throwing away an $800 phone every 18 months.
But we will, apparently, continue to argue about it.
What he said. Associates who live down town have to put up with 1.5 Mbps DSL because that's all the infrastructure can handle, and running new infrastructure is a big can of worms. It looked for awhile like public high speed wifi might fill in the gaps, but I've read that there were bureaucratic issues with that as well.
Also, from reports, parts of Sacramento, areas around the SF Bay Area, bedroom communities in New York, pretty much everywhere the phones are still using hundred-year-old wiring and it's too costly to run broadband the last mile.
In general, the denser and older the living space, the harder it is to put in a broadband solution.
Just so happens that my company iphone finger print sensor appears to be accurate about 65% of the time with *my* finger. If that's the success they're getting, I'd say they're doing pretty good.
Is this really news? I live in an area where it rains pretty much the year round. Biking to work isn't impossible, merely challenging and unpleasant. I wonder if the uptick in biking to work is not because biking has become more popular but because there exists more circumstances (crowded downtown, difficulty with parking) where it's the only practical option.
On the other hand, the only factors keeping us from a huge uptick in working from home are (a) old school company policies, and (b) lack of broadband. And perversely, access to broadband is reportedly *less* likely downtown, (I believe there was a slashdot article on that last year) due to legacy wiring, (low speed dsl only) giving the edge for work-from-homers to the suburbs which are more likely to have cable or fiber. Suburb professionals also being the same class that are looking at a possible hellish auto commute and impractical logistics to bike into downtown, increasing the attraction of WFH.
I'd be interested in seeing the statistics broken out by distance from work, and perhaps split between jobs downtown and jobs in the suburbs. (For instance, the Intel plants -- major tech employer -- in this area are *not* downtown, but quite a bit out west of the city. So biking to work is more practical, but driving to work is more appealing also.)
I dunno, the more I think about it the more complicated the picture gets. I don't think percentage increases in commuting categories for all of America would necessarily lead to valid conclusions.
And incidentally, regarding the old school policies ("If you work from home, you work for someone else, not us") it's amusing how a company with strict rules *against* work from home will happily employ offshore programmers who (for all they know) are balancing an old laptop across their knees in a tin shack. But dammit, the locals they employ had better the hell have butts in cubicle seats first thing every morning.
"This could also happen if they forgot to renew the software."
Absolutely. The biggest time bomb of all might be simply to decline to share the file of license renewals. The company starts to feel the results of *that* after the admin is long gone. And all the warning messages go to the admin's closed account, or to a service account that nobody checks since he left.
The problem is, the results are indistinguishable from the case where the admin passed the information to "transition management" prior to being outsourced, only to have them lose it, so he gives them his spare copy, and they lose that also, and then a few months down the road when appliances and software suddenly stop working, offshore management blames the former admins for the debacle(s).
An administrator leaves a company. A few weeks or months later, things start to fall apart. This tends to happen even if there's no malicious code involved.
Slashdot Mirror
Excellent use of irony.
We're all just one automatic upgrade away from infection. ...which now that I think of it, is true for any AV product.
"It sounds like you're having digestive trouble. Can I help?"
To which the natural response is, "Help with WHAT?"
The fart part. Air freshener is a good answer. Also enzyme supplements, Beano, fiber supplements, the possibilities are endless!
Thing one:
Windows 10 S violates the "one code base to rule them all" design decision for which they've been taking so much heat in the recent past. Windows 10's Frankenstein combination of touch-centric and non-touch-centric interfaces was specifically so that they could have a single code base for the entire product line.
So ok, whether to fragment their code base up to them, it's their code. But I strongly suspect that 10 S is really a test balloon for the entire code base to go to a walled-garden-only scheme.
Thing two:
"it does reserve the right to remove software that it deems undesirable" -- yeah, like, competing products.
I wonder what it would order online under those circumstances.
"It just worked" is an Apple trademark. Expect a visit from their lawyers.
(It used to be "It just works" before they lost Jobs. Now it's past-tense.)
I just moved my office to a different room. I think I'll decline to plug the microphone back in.
I wouldn't say flawed, I'd say incomplete. You're right about prototyping. But that's nowhere near the bulk of manufacturing.
So, yes, it's been pointed out that a great number, maybe the majority, of the population don't have running water or decent sanitation. But any solution can be abandoned by sufficiently enlarging the scope of the problem. Cities in India have a pollution problem that is significantly worse than in the US. That particular problem is worth solving, even though the problems of water and sanitation also need solving.
The possible win I see in this sort of conversion, besides reducing air pollution, is that it makes having a reliable electrical infrastructure more urgent, so maybe that problem will be solved also. And if they solve it with point source solutions like solar panels, those are naturally adaptable for smaller communities that are currently off the grid, which would be another win.
Or, it could all be a scam to fill the pockets of a few officials. We'll just have to see.
> Also, the generation can occur outside of cities where far fewer people breathe it.
To go off topic slightly, I've often thought that this is the main reason the majority of US manufacturing occurs in China. So the generation of pollution can occur outside our own cities. Like, way outside.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. Perhaps the availability of electric cars will drive the need for a reliable electric infrastructure.
Or it could be a technological dead end. But even then, valuable information will be had from having done the experiment.
I'm conflicted about this. Although I'd never own one, I felt it was important for Windows Phone to continue as competition (however feeble) against Android and IOS. It's important to have multiple vendors pushing each other to excel.
I'm worried now about Microsoft tablet. Of all the tablet makers, Microsoft seems the only one who at least pays lip service to content *creation* rather than mere content consumption. If Microsoft fails in the tablet market (which could easily happen, considering all the other missteps they've made) the message could easily be that nobody wants to create content on a tablet, which is profoundly untrue. Its that there haven't been good solutions yet.
I'm saying all of this not as a Microsoft fan. I run Winders because it runs the Adobe suite and I can't justify the cost of a mac. (I can build a PC to my specifications for a fraction of the cost.) The OS is a means to an end, not an end in itself. If the Adobe suite ran on Linux, M$ and Apple could both go screw.
IANAL, but having been in a similar situation and after spending some time with a lawyer, I learned that age is indeed a protected class, but lawsuits of this nature typically take a very long time to get through the courts, and the chances of collecting, in the lawyer's words, are about 50/50.
"National origin discrimination"... I haven't heard of that one, but hey, it's California. It might work.
There have been, I think, some recent traction on companies not following rules on outsourcing, they may be able to use that.
I dunno. I think winning is iffy, but I wish them the very best of luck, and maybe now is the time for this kind of suit to go through. Here's hoping they win and it becomes a precedent.
"Since then, Google has seen a 23 percent reduction in the fraction of navigations to HTTP pages with password or credit card forms on Chrome for desktop."
Ok, but is that because the users started using https pages, or because the businesses in question switched to https,
I mean, we've been trained for the last 20 years that if you get an error, Switch Browsers.
This doesn't change anything. The people who buy into Apple mindshare will continue to buy Apple, and the rest of us will continue to repurpose old hardware for new roles and pretty much ignore the shiny trendy things. And there will be enough Apple fans for Apple to continue to make boatloads of money. And many of those fans will be all hyped up to save the earth and recycle everything and battle global warming, while not even recognizing the irony of throwing away an $800 phone every 18 months.
But we will, apparently, continue to argue about it.
My 2000 PC running Windows 10 disagrees with your 2010 Macbook Pro. As does my late '90's laptop running Mint.
What he said. Associates who live down town have to put up with 1.5 Mbps DSL because that's all the infrastructure can handle, and running new infrastructure is a big can of worms. It looked for awhile like public high speed wifi might fill in the gaps, but I've read that there were bureaucratic issues with that as well.
Also, from reports, parts of Sacramento, areas around the SF Bay Area, bedroom communities in New York, pretty much everywhere the phones are still using hundred-year-old wiring and it's too costly to run broadband the last mile.
In general, the denser and older the living space, the harder it is to put in a broadband solution.
Just so happens that my company iphone finger print sensor appears to be accurate about 65% of the time with *my* finger. If that's the success they're getting, I'd say they're doing pretty good.
Is this really news? I live in an area where it rains pretty much the year round. Biking to work isn't impossible, merely challenging and unpleasant. I wonder if the uptick in biking to work is not because biking has become more popular but because there exists more circumstances (crowded downtown, difficulty with parking) where it's the only practical option.
On the other hand, the only factors keeping us from a huge uptick in working from home are (a) old school company policies, and (b) lack of broadband. And perversely, access to broadband is reportedly *less* likely downtown, (I believe there was a slashdot article on that last year) due to legacy wiring, (low speed dsl only) giving the edge for work-from-homers to the suburbs which are more likely to have cable or fiber. Suburb professionals also being the same class that are looking at a possible hellish auto commute and impractical logistics to bike into downtown, increasing the attraction of WFH.
I'd be interested in seeing the statistics broken out by distance from work, and perhaps split between jobs downtown and jobs in the suburbs. (For instance, the Intel plants -- major tech employer -- in this area are *not* downtown, but quite a bit out west of the city. So biking to work is more practical, but driving to work is more appealing also.)
I dunno, the more I think about it the more complicated the picture gets. I don't think percentage increases in commuting categories for all of America would necessarily lead to valid conclusions.
And incidentally, regarding the old school policies ("If you work from home, you work for someone else, not us") it's amusing how a company with strict rules *against* work from home will happily employ offshore programmers who (for all they know) are balancing an old laptop across their knees in a tin shack. But dammit, the locals they employ had better the hell have butts in cubicle seats first thing every morning.
"This could also happen if they forgot to renew the software."
Absolutely. The biggest time bomb of all might be simply to decline to share the file of license renewals. The company starts to feel the results of *that* after the admin is long gone. And all the warning messages go to the admin's closed account, or to a service account that nobody checks since he left.
The problem is, the results are indistinguishable from the case where the admin passed the information to "transition management" prior to being outsourced, only to have them lose it, so he gives them his spare copy, and they lose that also, and then a few months down the road when appliances and software suddenly stop working, offshore management blames the former admins for the debacle(s).
Don't ask me how I know this.
An administrator leaves a company. A few weeks or months later, things start to fall apart. This tends to happen even if there's no malicious code involved.
Or at least, have the code delete itself.