It's pretty bad if you've been taking care of your battery (for example, not letting it fall below 50% of full charge capacity most of the time). My current laptop is down less than 20% after four years. Tesla does this automatically. Their 'empty' capacity is nothing like actually flat, which is why they are able to provide a software update that increases the range at the expense of battery life. I'm not sure what they're doing now, but I seem to recall that the first generation reported that the batteries were empty when they were down to 50% capacity.
You realise that about half of the cabinet in the UK's Conservative government have degrees from Oxford? And that they're regularly invited back to speak, as are other members of their party (in which Oxford graduates, particularly Oxford PPE graduates, are severely overrepresented)? And that the last two Conservative Prime Ministers (along with 25 previous Conservative Prime Ministers) are Oxford graduates, and that all of them have kept ties with the institution after they left?
Oh, and that Oxford is not a campus university, so 'tolerated on campus' is a meaningless idea.
Conservatives are not 'tolerated' in Oxford, they are cultivated, groomed, and sent to join the party.
Here's a thing: he said 'graduated with honors'. In the US, that's a thing people care about. In the UK, it means 'didn't get a thing that was a borderline failure, but we let them scrape through'. Anyone who boasts about graduating with 'honors' (note the US spelling) almost certainly didn't go to a UK university.
Really? You'll find them in a sea food platter in pretty much any coastal French restaurant. I think I'm going to go with the French opinion on food over the American...
Domestic rooftop solar installs are $2.5-3.5/Watt, but that's the most expensive form of solar (installation costs are high per panel, inverters are not shared between many panels, and so on). Large-scale commercial solar is under $1/Watt.
You're attacking a straw man. The point is not that a 100x100mile structure is a good thing to build, it's that it is enough. In reality, it would be insane to build a single power supply for the entire US and so you'd want to build a load of smaller ones, adding up to the same area. His point is that the total are of all of these could be tucked into one of the less populous states that's full of desert without anyone noticing, not that putting them all there is a good idea (though putting large amounts of them in some of the states that have an overabundance of desert isn't a bad idea).
Nuclear power plants need to be big, which means that you're never going to get the same kinds of economies of scale as wind turbines, where a wind 'farm' is a load of identical turbines that can be the same as the identical turbines in the next one.
Nuclear also has a really awkward risk profile. About the worst thing that can happen with a wind turbine is that the blades break and spin off at very high speed. The worst thing that can happen with a nuclear power plant is that it vents nuclear material and makes a large area uninhabitable for a long time. The failure mode for a wind turbine is far more likely, but that actually makes the insurance easier: a fairly likely risk that will probably happen to someone is much easier to deal with than an insanely expensive risk that has a very low chance of happening to anyone. This means that you end up with the government carrying most of the risk, because private insurers aren't willing and able to issue a policy that will almost certainly be a cash cow but will bankrupt them if there's a claim.
This risk profile also means that everything in a nuclear power plant needs to be very tightly regulated. You don't want a contractor cutting corners in a nuclear power plant. If they do in a wind turbine, the risks are fairly low and they're mostly risks to the owner of the plant (i.e. it stops working, it doesn't cause widespread damage). This pushes up the costs a lot, because everything needs to be redundant and independently checked. It's also not something that we're good at: all of the large nuclear accidents to date have been caused by factors that people identified as a problem before they happened, but which were not addressed.
Nuclear also comes with a load of security concerns. Access to things like uranium and plutonium is strictly controlled, for good reason. This adds security to the costs and also has some knock-on effects. For example, the US still doesn't reprocess fuel rods because of proliferation concerns (which, these days, means that they ship the spent fuel to France, where it is reprocessed and shipped back).
Are there more anti-Clinton videos than anti-Trump videos on YouTube? If so, most Bayesian methods will recommend you an anti-Clinton video... unless if you apply a completely partisan bias that enforces equal time for both sides (or even mute out the other side)
Only if it's an entirely trivial algorithm. More likely, it will take other factors such as number of comments, number of views, and so on into account. Given the information that Google collects, it will probably also take into account the amount of time that people spent watching them, the things that other people geographically close to you watched, the things that other people who read the same kinds of new sources as you read (if they've got Google ads, Google knows whether you prefer an R- or D-leaning news site), what news apps you have installed on your Android phone, how many times the word Trump and Hillary appear in emails that you've sent and received with GMail (and with what modifiers, such as whether 'lying' appears near 'Hillary' or 'treason' appears near 'Trump') and so on.
How much wealth inequality do you think is unhealthy for a society? I can easily agree that some people contribute 10 times more than others. I can probably agree that some people contribute 100 times more than others. I might be able to agree that some people contribute 1,000 times more than others. I'd be hard pressed to find people that I think contribute 10,000 times more than others. So what happens if we say 1,000 times the median net worth? In 2013, the median net worth of a US household was $81,400. So what happens if we add a large wealth tax for people with a net worth above $81,400,000, and maybe a smaller one for people above $8,140,00 (and adjust them annually based on the median)?
Someone at the smaller threshold basically never has to work if they don't want to. If they're spending the capital over a 70-years lifetime, it works out at over $100K/year. If they spend $1m on a house and then invest the remainder in something that gives a return of 1% above inflation, then they have no mortgage and an income of the real-terms equivalent of $70k/year in today's money, in perpetuity. That's enough to live very comfortably.
Someone at the larger threshold gets the same numbers multiplied by a factor of 10: they can buy a mansion (or a few large houses in different places) and has a return of $700k/year from investments to live on. Their annual return from investments is more than what someone working a full-time minimum-wage job will make in their lifetime.
Those seem like numbers that are large enough that no one is going to say 'I won't work anymore because I have already made as much money as possible,' but means that you won't have anywhere near the wealth concentration that you have now. Of course, implementing such a system is very difficult, if not impossible (for fun, look at how many US Senators would be hit with high taxes under this model).
The problem with private investors is that you're limited to a fairly small number (about 100, I think), by SEC and similar rules unless you go public. Some companies work around this to an extent: Facebook made Goldman Sachs a single shareholder and GS then created a fund that was backed by their Facebook shares and could be turned into Facebook shares at or after the IPO, so they could effectively sell shares, except without any of the normal legal protections.
In any case, holding Apple up as an example is a bad idea here, given coming attractions
You misunderstand. Apple is a great example, because they showed that DRM gives control to distributors at the expense of content creators, yet the people with the power to insist on DRM or no-DRM are the content creators. The more you point to DRM giving companies like Apple and Netflix a stronger bargaining position relative to companies like EMI and Universal Studios, the more likely these companies are to think 'hang on, we were sold DRM as a thing to protect us, but actually it's giving away control to other people'.
The end point that you want is for the content creators to commoditise content distribution, which will cut the margins in distribution to a very thin sliver and leave the profit with the creators (or, at least, copyright owners), and the only guaranteed way that they have of doing that is to require that distributors ship their product without DRM. At that point, any commodity player can play music and videos from any source, irrespective of the distributor.
Really? My phone is a first-gen Moto G. It was a budget phone at release and I got it because I expected to get updates for a long time from a Google-owned manufacturer. Google sold Motorola a few months later, so that didn't work out - I got updates for about a year and the occasional security fix for another year or two (it took six months for them to push out an update for Stagefright, for example).
The phone is now running LineageOS, and is quite happy with an Android install based on 7.1.2. Improvements to the ART compiler infrastructure mean that a number of the apps that I run are noticeable faster than they were on the older version (not an amazing achievement - they started with a pretty crappy compiler). I expect it to get an update to 8.x as soon as a volunteer-run project gets around to it (a few people have managed to boot it, but not everything works yet).
Are you saying that a handful of volunteers are able to do something that a large company isn't, or is it more accurate to say that companies that sell handsets have no incentive to make your existing handset last longer?
If I walk slightly faster than you, but then when I reach you I walk along with you for a bit before passing you, then I'd say that I met you. The first thing I remember noticing about this rhyme as a child was that he met the man, but he didn't specify that the man was travelling with his wives and their associates, so there might just have been the two of them meeting on the path to St. Ives and walking there. Or there might have been 100 people on the path that didn't get quite close enough to talk, so he only met on man. Basically, it's a stupid riddle and it annoyed me from about the age when I could read.
Depends on what you mean by 'modern Linux'. Since you're talking about kernel versions, I'd expect this to work, just as if you have built your kernel with the correct COMPAT options ancient FreeBSD binaries will run on an old kernel.
If you're talking about a distro, then things get more complex. glibc is pretty good about backwards compatibility and uses symbol versioning extensively to allow binaries to get older behaviour from a newer glibc. The X11 protocol has been extended, but modern X.org supports all of the core protocol that an old app would use and libX.so should work fine with an old binary. Other libraries are less good, and trying to get a Qt3 app running with Qt5 is probably a lot of pain, for example. If you're using OpenSSL, you may find that some of the old and insecure APIs have been removed.
Want to back that up with any evidence? Of all of the pieces of Windows, the kernel is probably one of the better ones. The UIs built on top of it are pretty terrible, but the kernel is one of the better designed ones. I'd recommend Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems for an overview of the NT kernel and its similarities and differences to a *NIX one (though, of course, the book will leave you believing that the way of comparing operating system kernels is by their relative inferiority to MINIX).
Vista sucked because they had to fix all the problems stemming from XP being designed as a single user, non networked OS
XP was a direct descendant of NT, which was always designed as a networked multi-user OS. The problem with XP was that, unlike 2000, it aimed for strong Windows 95 compatibility (NT4 and 2000 could run sensibly written Win32 apps) and that included applications that expected to be able to write their configuration files in C:\Program Files\AppName, rather than in the user's home directory, or write to the Local Machine part of the registry instead of the Current User part. Win32 had APIs for doing this correctly from the start (and a lot of apps used them correctly), but a lot of crap just dumped stuff in the wrong place and didn't bother checking for errors so crashed when it didn't work.
The big change around the time of Vista, from security perspective, was the shift in trust domains. In a classic NT (or UNIX) setting, you have a system administrator who has full access and is responsible for installing and configuring software, and you have other users that have their own home directory to play in. The purpose of the OS's security model is to protect the user from other users and to protect the integrity of the system from other users. In a modern system, this is no longer true.
The change is actually the opposite of the one you suggest: computers have become single-user devices, but that user now embodies multiple trust domains. Users run things like mail clients and web browsers that take untrusted data from the network and they want the OS to prevent a compromise in one of these programs (or, ideally, in one part of one of these programs) from being able to access or damage their other data. UAC, which Vista introduced, was part of this shift. There is no longer a separate administrator user (as a user interface - there still is as a kernel abstraction), the user can do whatever they want to their computer but only intentionally. They don't automatically delegate this power to every program that they run.
The end goal for a modern system is for apps to run with very limited privileges, including no access to the user's home directory except for individual locations that are opened using a powerbox abstraction (i.e. open / save dialogs that are owned by a different process that grants access to the locations to the limited application) and explicit privilege elevation for the few things that require it.
The big flaw with UAC was that it only works well as a UI paradigm if the user is asked to elevate privilege rarely. Basically, [un]installing software or doing system configuration should be the only times a user should explicitly be asked. Unfortunately, the whitelists were very incomplete at launch and so users were just trained to click yes.
I had stopped using Windows at that point, but back when I did around 80% of the blue screens that got crashed in the Soundblaster Live driver. Most of the rest crashed in the GPU driver (I had ATi and nVidia cards then and both came with really buggy drivers).
When it was launched, Creative claimed that the Soundblaster Live was as powerful as a Pentium 166 MMX. This was kind-of true in terms of DSP performance. I eventually have up on it when the machine had a 550MHz Pentium III, which with SSE only loaded the CPU a few percent doing all of the sound calculations in software and using the on-board AC97 CODEC. Windows was a lot more stable after replacing the crappy Creative drivers with Microsoft's generic AC97 ones.
There are a lot of things I don't like about Windows (seriously, how do you set up an ad-hoc WiFi network? Windows 7, 8 and 10 all have completely different UIs for it! Why does Windows 10 randomly split settings between the Settings app and the Control Panel, with some things like mouse configuration requiring you to use both to get all of the options?) but I have a lot of sympathy with Microsoft for wanting third-party drivers to stop crashing their kernel.
I also have zero sympathy for Creative Labs. I had an Aureal card for a long time, which was vastly superior to the stuff from Creative, but was pushed out of business by Creative's anticompetitive behaviour. Anything bad that Microsoft did to Creative was karma.
The thing about open source is that, for all the arguments and chaos, a technically correct solution more often wins out
That's the theory, but it's often not true. Often the person who has commit access to the branch that people use gets to push their code, instead of the person with out-of-tree patches that are technically superior. Or the person who simply keeps arguing after the people who are correct have got bored and moved onto productive things wins out.
This is because it's inherently a meritocracy
The term 'meritocracy' was originally coined to refer to the way that British class system created the veneer of selection on ability but actually selected based on in-group characteristics. If that's what you actually meant, then I'd agree. Particularly for the Linux kernel, but also for a lot of other open source (and proprietary) software projects.
That was an understandable attitude 10 years ago, but it really isn't now. Almost all of the kernels created in the last decade or so have been C++ and most of the rest have been in non-C languages because kernels are complicated things and it turns out that having some higher-level type system parts is useful. The ugly macros that Linux and other C kernels inherited from 4BSD for even simple things like linked lists are evidence of this: sure, they work (though they do a load of casts via void* and char* with no static checking, so a simple typo can give you memory corruption), but now try changing the data type and discover that you have to go and change all of the macros that refer to it. Now change a C++ std::vector to a std::array or a std::map to std::unordered_map and see how much easier it is.
Even buying new, CDs are usually cheaper from online stores, including delivery, than they are from brick and mortar stores. And the online sellers have a much bigger catalogue. Best Buy isn't somewhere that's particularly know for having a huge stock of CDs, so you're likely to only buy one if you're there for something else and happen to see the thing that you want. CDs are just not a great use of shelf space in such a shop.
Not quite. Apple had DRM-free music from EMI, but not from the other big four record labels. Then the rest granted Amazon a license for DRM-free music to try to reduce Apple's bargaining power, because Apple wouldn't license FairPlay and this was the only way for someone else to be able to sell music that would work on iPods.
The lesson from all of this was that DRM let Apple tie their store to the player and so gave them more leverage than the music studios had.
Huh? iTunes and Amazon have been selling DRM-free MP3 and MPEG-4 AAC downloads for about 10 years now. The music industry was fairly quick to realise that DRM gives control to distributors at the expense of producers. The TV and movie industry is a lot slower.
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It's pretty bad if you've been taking care of your battery (for example, not letting it fall below 50% of full charge capacity most of the time). My current laptop is down less than 20% after four years. Tesla does this automatically. Their 'empty' capacity is nothing like actually flat, which is why they are able to provide a software update that increases the range at the expense of battery life. I'm not sure what they're doing now, but I seem to recall that the first generation reported that the batteries were empty when they were down to 50% capacity.
You realise that about half of the cabinet in the UK's Conservative government have degrees from Oxford? And that they're regularly invited back to speak, as are other members of their party (in which Oxford graduates, particularly Oxford PPE graduates, are severely overrepresented)? And that the last two Conservative Prime Ministers (along with 25 previous Conservative Prime Ministers) are Oxford graduates, and that all of them have kept ties with the institution after they left?
Oh, and that Oxford is not a campus university, so 'tolerated on campus' is a meaningless idea.
Conservatives are not 'tolerated' in Oxford, they are cultivated, groomed, and sent to join the party.
Here's a thing: he said 'graduated with honors'. In the US, that's a thing people care about. In the UK, it means 'didn't get a thing that was a borderline failure, but we let them scrape through'. Anyone who boasts about graduating with 'honors' (note the US spelling) almost certainly didn't go to a UK university.
Really? You'll find them in a sea food platter in pretty much any coastal French restaurant. I think I'm going to go with the French opinion on food over the American...
Here's the problem: you have something that has a strong emotional quality, like nuclear power, and you expect it to exist in a purely rational space.
I wonder if she encounters more prejudice as a result of her gender, her ethnicity, or her choice of language. My guess would be choice of language...
Domestic rooftop solar installs are $2.5-3.5/Watt, but that's the most expensive form of solar (installation costs are high per panel, inverters are not shared between many panels, and so on). Large-scale commercial solar is under $1/Watt.
You're attacking a straw man. The point is not that a 100x100mile structure is a good thing to build, it's that it is enough. In reality, it would be insane to build a single power supply for the entire US and so you'd want to build a load of smaller ones, adding up to the same area. His point is that the total are of all of these could be tucked into one of the less populous states that's full of desert without anyone noticing, not that putting them all there is a good idea (though putting large amounts of them in some of the states that have an overabundance of desert isn't a bad idea).
Nuclear power plants need to be big, which means that you're never going to get the same kinds of economies of scale as wind turbines, where a wind 'farm' is a load of identical turbines that can be the same as the identical turbines in the next one.
Nuclear also has a really awkward risk profile. About the worst thing that can happen with a wind turbine is that the blades break and spin off at very high speed. The worst thing that can happen with a nuclear power plant is that it vents nuclear material and makes a large area uninhabitable for a long time. The failure mode for a wind turbine is far more likely, but that actually makes the insurance easier: a fairly likely risk that will probably happen to someone is much easier to deal with than an insanely expensive risk that has a very low chance of happening to anyone. This means that you end up with the government carrying most of the risk, because private insurers aren't willing and able to issue a policy that will almost certainly be a cash cow but will bankrupt them if there's a claim.
This risk profile also means that everything in a nuclear power plant needs to be very tightly regulated. You don't want a contractor cutting corners in a nuclear power plant. If they do in a wind turbine, the risks are fairly low and they're mostly risks to the owner of the plant (i.e. it stops working, it doesn't cause widespread damage). This pushes up the costs a lot, because everything needs to be redundant and independently checked. It's also not something that we're good at: all of the large nuclear accidents to date have been caused by factors that people identified as a problem before they happened, but which were not addressed.
Nuclear also comes with a load of security concerns. Access to things like uranium and plutonium is strictly controlled, for good reason. This adds security to the costs and also has some knock-on effects. For example, the US still doesn't reprocess fuel rods because of proliferation concerns (which, these days, means that they ship the spent fuel to France, where it is reprocessed and shipped back).
Are there more anti-Clinton videos than anti-Trump videos on YouTube? If so, most Bayesian methods will recommend you an anti-Clinton video... unless if you apply a completely partisan bias that enforces equal time for both sides (or even mute out the other side)
Only if it's an entirely trivial algorithm. More likely, it will take other factors such as number of comments, number of views, and so on into account. Given the information that Google collects, it will probably also take into account the amount of time that people spent watching them, the things that other people geographically close to you watched, the things that other people who read the same kinds of new sources as you read (if they've got Google ads, Google knows whether you prefer an R- or D-leaning news site), what news apps you have installed on your Android phone, how many times the word Trump and Hillary appear in emails that you've sent and received with GMail (and with what modifiers, such as whether 'lying' appears near 'Hillary' or 'treason' appears near 'Trump') and so on.
How much is "too much"?
How much wealth inequality do you think is unhealthy for a society? I can easily agree that some people contribute 10 times more than others. I can probably agree that some people contribute 100 times more than others. I might be able to agree that some people contribute 1,000 times more than others. I'd be hard pressed to find people that I think contribute 10,000 times more than others. So what happens if we say 1,000 times the median net worth? In 2013, the median net worth of a US household was $81,400. So what happens if we add a large wealth tax for people with a net worth above $81,400,000, and maybe a smaller one for people above $8,140,00 (and adjust them annually based on the median)?
Someone at the smaller threshold basically never has to work if they don't want to. If they're spending the capital over a 70-years lifetime, it works out at over $100K/year. If they spend $1m on a house and then invest the remainder in something that gives a return of 1% above inflation, then they have no mortgage and an income of the real-terms equivalent of $70k/year in today's money, in perpetuity. That's enough to live very comfortably.
Someone at the larger threshold gets the same numbers multiplied by a factor of 10: they can buy a mansion (or a few large houses in different places) and has a return of $700k/year from investments to live on. Their annual return from investments is more than what someone working a full-time minimum-wage job will make in their lifetime.
Those seem like numbers that are large enough that no one is going to say 'I won't work anymore because I have already made as much money as possible,' but means that you won't have anywhere near the wealth concentration that you have now. Of course, implementing such a system is very difficult, if not impossible (for fun, look at how many US Senators would be hit with high taxes under this model).
The problem with private investors is that you're limited to a fairly small number (about 100, I think), by SEC and similar rules unless you go public. Some companies work around this to an extent: Facebook made Goldman Sachs a single shareholder and GS then created a fund that was backed by their Facebook shares and could be turned into Facebook shares at or after the IPO, so they could effectively sell shares, except without any of the normal legal protections.
In any case, holding Apple up as an example is a bad idea here, given coming attractions
You misunderstand. Apple is a great example, because they showed that DRM gives control to distributors at the expense of content creators, yet the people with the power to insist on DRM or no-DRM are the content creators. The more you point to DRM giving companies like Apple and Netflix a stronger bargaining position relative to companies like EMI and Universal Studios, the more likely these companies are to think 'hang on, we were sold DRM as a thing to protect us, but actually it's giving away control to other people'.
The end point that you want is for the content creators to commoditise content distribution, which will cut the margins in distribution to a very thin sliver and leave the profit with the creators (or, at least, copyright owners), and the only guaranteed way that they have of doing that is to require that distributors ship their product without DRM. At that point, any commodity player can play music and videos from any source, irrespective of the distributor.
Really? My phone is a first-gen Moto G. It was a budget phone at release and I got it because I expected to get updates for a long time from a Google-owned manufacturer. Google sold Motorola a few months later, so that didn't work out - I got updates for about a year and the occasional security fix for another year or two (it took six months for them to push out an update for Stagefright, for example).
The phone is now running LineageOS, and is quite happy with an Android install based on 7.1.2. Improvements to the ART compiler infrastructure mean that a number of the apps that I run are noticeable faster than they were on the older version (not an amazing achievement - they started with a pretty crappy compiler). I expect it to get an update to 8.x as soon as a volunteer-run project gets around to it (a few people have managed to boot it, but not everything works yet).
Are you saying that a handful of volunteers are able to do something that a large company isn't, or is it more accurate to say that companies that sell handsets have no incentive to make your existing handset last longer?
If I walk slightly faster than you, but then when I reach you I walk along with you for a bit before passing you, then I'd say that I met you. The first thing I remember noticing about this rhyme as a child was that he met the man, but he didn't specify that the man was travelling with his wives and their associates, so there might just have been the two of them meeting on the path to St. Ives and walking there. Or there might have been 100 people on the path that didn't get quite close enough to talk, so he only met on man. Basically, it's a stupid riddle and it annoyed me from about the age when I could read.
So someone thought that the correct place to change a configuration UI was a minor update, rather than a major new version? That's impressively bad.
If you're talking about a distro, then things get more complex. glibc is pretty good about backwards compatibility and uses symbol versioning extensively to allow binaries to get older behaviour from a newer glibc. The X11 protocol has been extended, but modern X.org supports all of the core protocol that an old app would use and libX.so should work fine with an old binary. Other libraries are less good, and trying to get a Qt3 app running with Qt5 is probably a lot of pain, for example. If you're using OpenSSL, you may find that some of the old and insecure APIs have been removed.
Want to back that up with any evidence? Of all of the pieces of Windows, the kernel is probably one of the better ones. The UIs built on top of it are pretty terrible, but the kernel is one of the better designed ones. I'd recommend Tanenbaum's Modern Operating Systems for an overview of the NT kernel and its similarities and differences to a *NIX one (though, of course, the book will leave you believing that the way of comparing operating system kernels is by their relative inferiority to MINIX).
Vista sucked because they had to fix all the problems stemming from XP being designed as a single user, non networked OS
XP was a direct descendant of NT, which was always designed as a networked multi-user OS. The problem with XP was that, unlike 2000, it aimed for strong Windows 95 compatibility (NT4 and 2000 could run sensibly written Win32 apps) and that included applications that expected to be able to write their configuration files in C:\Program Files\AppName, rather than in the user's home directory, or write to the Local Machine part of the registry instead of the Current User part. Win32 had APIs for doing this correctly from the start (and a lot of apps used them correctly), but a lot of crap just dumped stuff in the wrong place and didn't bother checking for errors so crashed when it didn't work.
The big change around the time of Vista, from security perspective, was the shift in trust domains. In a classic NT (or UNIX) setting, you have a system administrator who has full access and is responsible for installing and configuring software, and you have other users that have their own home directory to play in. The purpose of the OS's security model is to protect the user from other users and to protect the integrity of the system from other users. In a modern system, this is no longer true.
The change is actually the opposite of the one you suggest: computers have become single-user devices, but that user now embodies multiple trust domains. Users run things like mail clients and web browsers that take untrusted data from the network and they want the OS to prevent a compromise in one of these programs (or, ideally, in one part of one of these programs) from being able to access or damage their other data. UAC, which Vista introduced, was part of this shift. There is no longer a separate administrator user (as a user interface - there still is as a kernel abstraction), the user can do whatever they want to their computer but only intentionally. They don't automatically delegate this power to every program that they run.
The end goal for a modern system is for apps to run with very limited privileges, including no access to the user's home directory except for individual locations that are opened using a powerbox abstraction (i.e. open / save dialogs that are owned by a different process that grants access to the locations to the limited application) and explicit privilege elevation for the few things that require it.
The big flaw with UAC was that it only works well as a UI paradigm if the user is asked to elevate privilege rarely. Basically, [un]installing software or doing system configuration should be the only times a user should explicitly be asked. Unfortunately, the whitelists were very incomplete at launch and so users were just trained to click yes.
I had stopped using Windows at that point, but back when I did around 80% of the blue screens that got crashed in the Soundblaster Live driver. Most of the rest crashed in the GPU driver (I had ATi and nVidia cards then and both came with really buggy drivers).
When it was launched, Creative claimed that the Soundblaster Live was as powerful as a Pentium 166 MMX. This was kind-of true in terms of DSP performance. I eventually have up on it when the machine had a 550MHz Pentium III, which with SSE only loaded the CPU a few percent doing all of the sound calculations in software and using the on-board AC97 CODEC. Windows was a lot more stable after replacing the crappy Creative drivers with Microsoft's generic AC97 ones.
There are a lot of things I don't like about Windows (seriously, how do you set up an ad-hoc WiFi network? Windows 7, 8 and 10 all have completely different UIs for it! Why does Windows 10 randomly split settings between the Settings app and the Control Panel, with some things like mouse configuration requiring you to use both to get all of the options?) but I have a lot of sympathy with Microsoft for wanting third-party drivers to stop crashing their kernel.
I also have zero sympathy for Creative Labs. I had an Aureal card for a long time, which was vastly superior to the stuff from Creative, but was pushed out of business by Creative's anticompetitive behaviour. Anything bad that Microsoft did to Creative was karma.
The thing about open source is that, for all the arguments and chaos, a technically correct solution more often wins out
That's the theory, but it's often not true. Often the person who has commit access to the branch that people use gets to push their code, instead of the person with out-of-tree patches that are technically superior. Or the person who simply keeps arguing after the people who are correct have got bored and moved onto productive things wins out.
This is because it's inherently a meritocracy
The term 'meritocracy' was originally coined to refer to the way that British class system created the veneer of selection on ability but actually selected based on in-group characteristics. If that's what you actually meant, then I'd agree. Particularly for the Linux kernel, but also for a lot of other open source (and proprietary) software projects.
Keep that C++ shittery out of the kernel
That was an understandable attitude 10 years ago, but it really isn't now. Almost all of the kernels created in the last decade or so have been C++ and most of the rest have been in non-C languages because kernels are complicated things and it turns out that having some higher-level type system parts is useful. The ugly macros that Linux and other C kernels inherited from 4BSD for even simple things like linked lists are evidence of this: sure, they work (though they do a load of casts via void* and char* with no static checking, so a simple typo can give you memory corruption), but now try changing the data type and discover that you have to go and change all of the macros that refer to it. Now change a C++ std::vector to a std::array or a std::map to std::unordered_map and see how much easier it is.
Even buying new, CDs are usually cheaper from online stores, including delivery, than they are from brick and mortar stores. And the online sellers have a much bigger catalogue. Best Buy isn't somewhere that's particularly know for having a huge stock of CDs, so you're likely to only buy one if you're there for something else and happen to see the thing that you want. CDs are just not a great use of shelf space in such a shop.
Not quite. Apple had DRM-free music from EMI, but not from the other big four record labels. Then the rest granted Amazon a license for DRM-free music to try to reduce Apple's bargaining power, because Apple wouldn't license FairPlay and this was the only way for someone else to be able to sell music that would work on iPods.
The lesson from all of this was that DRM let Apple tie their store to the player and so gave them more leverage than the music studios had.
Huh? iTunes and Amazon have been selling DRM-free MP3 and MPEG-4 AAC downloads for about 10 years now. The music industry was fairly quick to realise that DRM gives control to distributors at the expense of producers. The TV and movie industry is a lot slower.