I don't know where you get your scientific study from, but EVERY single person I personally know who has 8 or 8.1 likes it after the initial hours of adjustment.
I've installed 8.1 on two PCs to give it a thorough going-over, and I don't like it either.
To me, the Start Screen is a reinvented Program Manager. It's a separate specific window or screen that I have to switch to, then navigate through, in order to launch applications. It's theoretically configurable, but not fully (ie, not all icons can be made large or double-width, only special Microsoft-accepted ones) and even it has two or more screens to contend with.
By contrast, the Start Button provided a simple, quick, one-menu approach to reach most of one's common applications, and a couple of nested menus to reach the less commonly used ones. It also provided one-stop-shopping for running something manually, for shutting down the computer, for configuring the OS, and for a few other tasks. It didn't necessarily completely obscure the current application window either.
What Microsoft should have done, in my opinion, was to leave the interface from Windows 7 or something like it intact, and then put this Start Screen business as the default (but changeable) on verified touchscreen devices lacking a physical keyboard only. If one has a keyboard and mouse it's terribly difficult to be quick.
I think that Microsoft jumped the gun, expecting more touchscreen wintel by now than what was actually delivered. In short, they gambled on the death of the PC and actually lost.
Well, if a computer is poorly shielded that might not be all that hard. Handheld 5W ham radios can go much more than that distance on 2m, and lower frequencies can go much further. When the weather allows it, a 5W 2m transmission can go dozens or even a hundred miles, and in especially unusual weather conditions a friend of mine in California managed to talk with someone in Hawaii, once.
So, while inside a case it might not go 20 miles to cover a whole city, I could see being able to reach 8 miles, depending on how intelligently the system was designed in order to reduce the chances of being discovered. The other downside is that strong radio transmissions can interfere with things including speakers, which might make them obvious if not handled correctly.
We were discussing this last night on boingboing, and I shared an equal skepticism.
The basic conclusions were:
A collaborator would be needed to install the device.
An antenna could masquerade in the form of a USB cable.
Municipal distances would be a problem, but eight miles is achievable with consumer-grade ham radio hardware.
There are means to avoid such devices working, if an IT department is security-conscious and takes steps to disable USB ports and plug-n-play services.
I'm still skeptical, mainly because a simple frequency scanner would allow one to detect the presence of transmissions by the device, and because concealing an antenna, even in the form of a USB cable, would be difficult. If the cable is cut-off, then it would be massively obvious with a simple look underneath, and it would be difficult to manufacture a functioning USB cable that contained a radio and antenna.
There was talk of manufacturer collaboration, especially against organizations that develop security (tampering with new-manufacture to replace components on the motherboards essentially) but that seems like it would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve without employees of the manufacturers questioning why they're going through so much effort to do this.
We'll just have to see what comes of it. I'm genuinely curious if we'll ever see any actual evidence or not.
Even more importantly, one doesn't have to necessarily type very fast if there's very little code compared to how well it's conceived of.
Dad was a COBOL and FORTRAN programmer on an MVS machine. His programs were deceivingly simple as he learned his craft in the sixties and seventies when efficiency was very, very important, and he spent a lot more time plotting out how to make the program efficient than he did on typing it in. He's still a two-finger typist, and it served him well.
Ellison is no different than any other Type-A asshole, he just has more money. Arguably his biggest flaw is that he loves to flaunt what he has while being a huge dick while giving interviews to the press, so we can't help but want to punch him in the face.
Yeah, I'd have been a lot more impressed if he'd concentrated on code that was closer to right, on examples that were more realistic.
For examples, in two different films with Matthew Broderick, his modifying school records, assuming that he does indeed have credentials, is not implausible. In The Matrix Reloaded Trinity's hack is more realistic that most other movies.
Sounds to me like this guy is bitter that he can't suspend his disbelief to just enjoy the movie, and he feels a need to drag the rest of us down with him. If the movie isn't specifically about computer hacking or computer security then I'm willing to give a fair amount of silliness a pass.
Add to that "there's no Islamic terrorism because they haven't hit my town... yet!
Sure there's Islamic terrorism! Fox News told me so! And when they tell me about global warming, poverty, and racism I'll believe it then too, but not until then!
It's been well past time for private enterprise to successfully handle low-earth-orbit delivery, there's nothing in those orbits that's difficult or experimental enough to require nation-state backing in order to fund achieving it. Same should hold true for medium-earth-orbit.
It makes a lot more sense for public projects to handle launches out past geosynchronous orbit, where the technology isn't nearly as reliable and there's less opportunity for profit. Private companies are less likely to develop for technology for high earth orbit as there's just nothing out there to make a profit for them. Governments can drive profitability there by concentrating on science there, which in turn helps drive a market for private companies to service.
The shame of it all is that the Space Shuttle arguably set us back far more in space development than it helped. The Russians eventually even figured it out, though not before they also spent a lot of money not really achieving anything that their Soyuz program and their space station programs couldn't already deliver. Had the shuttle been capable of taking us to the Moon or to at least Lunar orbit, then there might have been some real benefit, but we just sat around in low earth orbit, doing some science but doing too much community relations.
Even more to the point, Google provided a backend that allowed startups to build on, but given the history of Google cutting things, once the proof-of-concept was created by the startups, it would have been in their interest to either license the backend from Google or to write their own. Google hasn't exactly been shy about this kind of behavior.
If commercial, paid-for products are allowed to write the floor out from under one, then I don't really see why a no-fee service should have stronger rules or expectations.
One reason car companies collect this data is to steal the car back from you (repossess it) in the event of non-payment. The GPS tracking is often turned over to the Repo operators when they need to go steal your car back.
Bullshit. The financing companies, even those owned by the auto manufacturers, aren't savvy enough to get that kind of information from the manufacturer, and the repo companies generally aren't savvy enough to use that information even if it were passed on to them. They'd have to be able to do this in real-time for it to be any good over current methods.
Towing companies get the home and work addresses of the defaulted borrower, and possibly the addresses of family members, and go look for the car at those locations. They don't concern themselves with getting every single car, and they don't go after vehicles that are stored under lock and key unless there's a compelling reason to bring law enforcement with them.
Old? That meme only happened in the early 2000s and the version of the game that it came from was released in 1991. If you think that makes you old, then you're probably still just a kid.
Washington is a bunch of Type-A, borderline personality disorder sociopaths, as that's what it generally takes in order to claw one's way up to that level. Arguably that pressure-cooker is present in any group of political elite, from the Politburo to the King's Court.
This whining reminds me a bit of a civilian telecom contractor that went to Iraq to serve military needs, that complained that when some soldiers offered to give him some rudimentary weapons training on the range if he could get the ammo, complained about how hard it was to get ammo. In one of the most heavily armed bases in the world. Sure, he'd probably have to scrounge or scavenge or "borrow" ammo, but as a civilian it was not their job to supply it to him, and they were being nice by offering to give him some training at all.
This guy should have known what internal battles he'd face up there, that's part why Presidents visibly age so dramatically while in office. It's rough on top.
No, but the department can be sued like a corporation can.
Like I said, I think it is a good thing but that doesn't mean it won't fall to the lawyers.
Even more importantly, depending on how a given state has written their rules on employment and privacy, this kind of thing might be quite illegal in some places, and given specifically that this is the police and an arm of the state, an actual prosecution and conviction might be required for them to assert that anything at all publicly-disclosable has happened.
Slander and libel laws might also apply, especially if there are disputes in the events that led to the dismissals, and moreso if the fired staff member is later vindicated and can demonstrate that the statements made by the employer prevented them from finding work elsewhere. Lots of employers, when called to confirm that someone had worked there, will give little more than a factual statement that the person worked there and the range of time in which they did.
I'm certainly not going to dispute that it's important for employers to stop retaining employees that are actively bad, and doubly so for law enforcement employees, but should something like this backfire on the department then it could not only mean trouble with the employee in question, but trouble disciplining future employees.
The barrier to legally have notified the community is very, very small. In my area there's a privately-owned weekly newspaper that serves the small local Orthodox Jewish community that is very frequently used for when organizations have to formally notify the public of corporation paperwork filings and other official changes, and the vast majority of those paid announcements are not made by members of that local Orthodox Jewish community. It happens that the circulation is considered high enough to meet the minimum criteria for a public notice, the prices for the notices are low, and the paper makes it easy to buy the public notice space.
Unfortunately there's way too much neglect in the industry right now. I drive around the city that I live in and more than half of the pedestals are cracked open, with plastic bags wrapped over the distribution blocks to keep water off of them. The cable and phone companies are neglecting their infrastructure and given the number of years that this has been a problem, they don't seem interested in hiring the staff or paying for the materials to fix these problems correctly.
As far as data centers, network management, and the like, the industry has headed toward ever smaller and more powerful machines, virtualization, and equipment that needs less knowledge to support it. Autoprogramming switches, that sort of thing. It's also becoming more prevalent to outsource instead of having staff on-hand, so that's not exactly helping to push us toward full employment either.
...I saw this on ABC News a few hours ago. Their headline, "Sharks send tweets..." was just as inaccurate as this one.
The sharks do nothing buy go about their routine. The system monitoring them sends tweets. The system monitoring them doesn't monitor all sharks, it monitors tagged sharks, so the system cannot be relied upon to notify of all sharks, it can only notify for known sharks whose tags still function.
It's not a bad system, but it's not a sure-fire system either.
Seriously, the post office in my wife's old hometown is only open until something like 4pm. We usually need to use it when we're mailing something back from her parents that they've given to us on a trip, something like books that aren't particularly fragile and are very heavy, so shlepping them on to the plane is less than ideal. It's awkward when they're open such a short amount of time, and yes, there usually is quite the line at closing time so they're effectively open until 4:30 or 5:00 anyway.
This quick point-of-sale wireless stuff could be a real boon admittedly, for when customers don't need the parcels weighed in order to pay for them, and might help make getting through line faster. That could mean that they'd need less clerks at the same time, so they could lengthen the operating day by staggering clerks' shifts a little more, allowing them to remain open later without having to hire more workers.
The Mythbusters shouldn't be embarrassed, their hacks are just what they need for both a practical, quick-and-dirty approach to a car that won't ever be driven again, and the hack-n-whack approach is good for their ratings.
The people behind this new implementation should be embarrassed.
Yes, it's kind of neat to implement remote control with consumer grade stuff, cheaply.
We're lampooning it, in part, because it's so Mythbusters to control the car with belts and pulleys and by pushing the pedals when many modern cars could be electronically told to do that.
They should be. Their hack-implementations pushed the pedals and turned the steering with pulleys and belts.
In a modern car with electronic stability control, antilock brakes, and drive-by-wire throttle cable it's silly to make something that pushes the pedals. It's even sillier to have a pulley and a belt turn the steering wheel when many new cars have park-assist, where the steering can be controlled by the vehicle.
With many modern cars such a system could be implemented without making it obvious to anyone that it's there. No extra components or modifications within the passenger compartment. And that is the point, automakers are continuing to build systems to alpha-test the systems that would need to be present in a car capable of driving itself. It's not much of a stretch to take one of these modern cars with all of these self-control features and to add the sensors needed to allow it to drive itself. We may even see grey-market retrofit kits fifteen years from now, if original-equipment self-driving cars hit the market in the next decade.
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I've installed 8.1 on two PCs to give it a thorough going-over, and I don't like it either.
To me, the Start Screen is a reinvented Program Manager. It's a separate specific window or screen that I have to switch to, then navigate through, in order to launch applications. It's theoretically configurable, but not fully (ie, not all icons can be made large or double-width, only special Microsoft-accepted ones) and even it has two or more screens to contend with.
By contrast, the Start Button provided a simple, quick, one-menu approach to reach most of one's common applications, and a couple of nested menus to reach the less commonly used ones. It also provided one-stop-shopping for running something manually, for shutting down the computer, for configuring the OS, and for a few other tasks. It didn't necessarily completely obscure the current application window either.
What Microsoft should have done, in my opinion, was to leave the interface from Windows 7 or something like it intact, and then put this Start Screen business as the default (but changeable) on verified touchscreen devices lacking a physical keyboard only. If one has a keyboard and mouse it's terribly difficult to be quick.
I think that Microsoft jumped the gun, expecting more touchscreen wintel by now than what was actually delivered. In short, they gambled on the death of the PC and actually lost.
I don't like Metro!
Well, if a computer is poorly shielded that might not be all that hard. Handheld 5W ham radios can go much more than that distance on 2m, and lower frequencies can go much further. When the weather allows it, a 5W 2m transmission can go dozens or even a hundred miles, and in especially unusual weather conditions a friend of mine in California managed to talk with someone in Hawaii, once.
So, while inside a case it might not go 20 miles to cover a whole city, I could see being able to reach 8 miles, depending on how intelligently the system was designed in order to reduce the chances of being discovered. The other downside is that strong radio transmissions can interfere with things including speakers, which might make them obvious if not handled correctly.
The basic conclusions were:
I'm still skeptical, mainly because a simple frequency scanner would allow one to detect the presence of transmissions by the device, and because concealing an antenna, even in the form of a USB cable, would be difficult. If the cable is cut-off, then it would be massively obvious with a simple look underneath, and it would be difficult to manufacture a functioning USB cable that contained a radio and antenna.
There was talk of manufacturer collaboration, especially against organizations that develop security (tampering with new-manufacture to replace components on the motherboards essentially) but that seems like it would be extraordinarily difficult to achieve without employees of the manufacturers questioning why they're going through so much effort to do this.
We'll just have to see what comes of it. I'm genuinely curious if we'll ever see any actual evidence or not.
Even more importantly, one doesn't have to necessarily type very fast if there's very little code compared to how well it's conceived of.
Dad was a COBOL and FORTRAN programmer on an MVS machine. His programs were deceivingly simple as he learned his craft in the sixties and seventies when efficiency was very, very important, and he spent a lot more time plotting out how to make the program efficient than he did on typing it in. He's still a two-finger typist, and it served him well.
Yeah, Larry Ellison has been a dick for as long as I've been aware of his existence, and probably a lot longer than that.
I'm reminded of an exchange between F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway.
Ellison is no different than any other Type-A asshole, he just has more money. Arguably his biggest flaw is that he loves to flaunt what he has while being a huge dick while giving interviews to the press, so we can't help but want to punch him in the face.
Yeah, I'd have been a lot more impressed if he'd concentrated on code that was closer to right, on examples that were more realistic.
For examples, in two different films with Matthew Broderick, his modifying school records, assuming that he does indeed have credentials, is not implausible. In The Matrix Reloaded Trinity's hack is more realistic that most other movies.
Sounds to me like this guy is bitter that he can't suspend his disbelief to just enjoy the movie, and he feels a need to drag the rest of us down with him. If the movie isn't specifically about computer hacking or computer security then I'm willing to give a fair amount of silliness a pass.
Sure there's Islamic terrorism! Fox News told me so! And when they tell me about global warming, poverty, and racism I'll believe it then too, but not until then!
It's been well past time for private enterprise to successfully handle low-earth-orbit delivery, there's nothing in those orbits that's difficult or experimental enough to require nation-state backing in order to fund achieving it. Same should hold true for medium-earth-orbit.
It makes a lot more sense for public projects to handle launches out past geosynchronous orbit, where the technology isn't nearly as reliable and there's less opportunity for profit. Private companies are less likely to develop for technology for high earth orbit as there's just nothing out there to make a profit for them. Governments can drive profitability there by concentrating on science there, which in turn helps drive a market for private companies to service.
The shame of it all is that the Space Shuttle arguably set us back far more in space development than it helped. The Russians eventually even figured it out, though not before they also spent a lot of money not really achieving anything that their Soyuz program and their space station programs couldn't already deliver. Had the shuttle been capable of taking us to the Moon or to at least Lunar orbit, then there might have been some real benefit, but we just sat around in low earth orbit, doing some science but doing too much community relations.
Oh crap, what am I going to do when I can't replace that Courier V.42bis so that people can dial in to my BBS?
Even more to the point, Google provided a backend that allowed startups to build on, but given the history of Google cutting things, once the proof-of-concept was created by the startups, it would have been in their interest to either license the backend from Google or to write their own. Google hasn't exactly been shy about this kind of behavior.
If commercial, paid-for products are allowed to write the floor out from under one, then I don't really see why a no-fee service should have stronger rules or expectations.
Yes, that's what I meant. If it's in a locked garage, or behind a locked gate, the towing company can't touch it.
Bullshit. The financing companies, even those owned by the auto manufacturers, aren't savvy enough to get that kind of information from the manufacturer, and the repo companies generally aren't savvy enough to use that information even if it were passed on to them. They'd have to be able to do this in real-time for it to be any good over current methods.
Towing companies get the home and work addresses of the defaulted borrower, and possibly the addresses of family members, and go look for the car at those locations. They don't concern themselves with getting every single car, and they don't go after vehicles that are stored under lock and key unless there's a compelling reason to bring law enforcement with them.
Oh yeah? Well, a grue eats your face!
I mean, didn't they see all those Godzilla movies?
Washington is a bunch of Type-A, borderline personality disorder sociopaths, as that's what it generally takes in order to claw one's way up to that level. Arguably that pressure-cooker is present in any group of political elite, from the Politburo to the King's Court.
This whining reminds me a bit of a civilian telecom contractor that went to Iraq to serve military needs, that complained that when some soldiers offered to give him some rudimentary weapons training on the range if he could get the ammo, complained about how hard it was to get ammo. In one of the most heavily armed bases in the world. Sure, he'd probably have to scrounge or scavenge or "borrow" ammo, but as a civilian it was not their job to supply it to him, and they were being nice by offering to give him some training at all.
This guy should have known what internal battles he'd face up there, that's part why Presidents visibly age so dramatically while in office. It's rough on top.
Even more importantly, depending on how a given state has written their rules on employment and privacy, this kind of thing might be quite illegal in some places, and given specifically that this is the police and an arm of the state, an actual prosecution and conviction might be required for them to assert that anything at all publicly-disclosable has happened.
Slander and libel laws might also apply, especially if there are disputes in the events that led to the dismissals, and moreso if the fired staff member is later vindicated and can demonstrate that the statements made by the employer prevented them from finding work elsewhere. Lots of employers, when called to confirm that someone had worked there, will give little more than a factual statement that the person worked there and the range of time in which they did.
I'm certainly not going to dispute that it's important for employers to stop retaining employees that are actively bad, and doubly so for law enforcement employees, but should something like this backfire on the department then it could not only mean trouble with the employee in question, but trouble disciplining future employees.
The barrier to legally have notified the community is very, very small. In my area there's a privately-owned weekly newspaper that serves the small local Orthodox Jewish community that is very frequently used for when organizations have to formally notify the public of corporation paperwork filings and other official changes, and the vast majority of those paid announcements are not made by members of that local Orthodox Jewish community. It happens that the circulation is considered high enough to meet the minimum criteria for a public notice, the prices for the notices are low, and the paper makes it easy to buy the public notice space.
Unfortunately there's way too much neglect in the industry right now. I drive around the city that I live in and more than half of the pedestals are cracked open, with plastic bags wrapped over the distribution blocks to keep water off of them. The cable and phone companies are neglecting their infrastructure and given the number of years that this has been a problem, they don't seem interested in hiring the staff or paying for the materials to fix these problems correctly.
As far as data centers, network management, and the like, the industry has headed toward ever smaller and more powerful machines, virtualization, and equipment that needs less knowledge to support it. Autoprogramming switches, that sort of thing. It's also becoming more prevalent to outsource instead of having staff on-hand, so that's not exactly helping to push us toward full employment either.
In short, it's all screwed up.
Simple. Get drunk and crash your car into a telephone pole.
...I saw this on ABC News a few hours ago. Their headline, "Sharks send tweets..." was just as inaccurate as this one.
The sharks do nothing buy go about their routine. The system monitoring them sends tweets. The system monitoring them doesn't monitor all sharks, it monitors tagged sharks, so the system cannot be relied upon to notify of all sharks, it can only notify for known sharks whose tags still function.
It's not a bad system, but it's not a sure-fire system either.
...could do something about those hours...
Seriously, the post office in my wife's old hometown is only open until something like 4pm. We usually need to use it when we're mailing something back from her parents that they've given to us on a trip, something like books that aren't particularly fragile and are very heavy, so shlepping them on to the plane is less than ideal. It's awkward when they're open such a short amount of time, and yes, there usually is quite the line at closing time so they're effectively open until 4:30 or 5:00 anyway.
This quick point-of-sale wireless stuff could be a real boon admittedly, for when customers don't need the parcels weighed in order to pay for them, and might help make getting through line faster. That could mean that they'd need less clerks at the same time, so they could lengthen the operating day by staggering clerks' shifts a little more, allowing them to remain open later without having to hire more workers.
The Mythbusters shouldn't be embarrassed, their hacks are just what they need for both a practical, quick-and-dirty approach to a car that won't ever be driven again, and the hack-n-whack approach is good for their ratings.
The people behind this new implementation should be embarrassed.
Yes, it's kind of neat to implement remote control with consumer grade stuff, cheaply.
We're lampooning it, in part, because it's so Mythbusters to control the car with belts and pulleys and by pushing the pedals when many modern cars could be electronically told to do that.
They should be. Their hack-implementations pushed the pedals and turned the steering with pulleys and belts.
In a modern car with electronic stability control, antilock brakes, and drive-by-wire throttle cable it's silly to make something that pushes the pedals. It's even sillier to have a pulley and a belt turn the steering wheel when many new cars have park-assist, where the steering can be controlled by the vehicle.
With many modern cars such a system could be implemented without making it obvious to anyone that it's there. No extra components or modifications within the passenger compartment. And that is the point, automakers are continuing to build systems to alpha-test the systems that would need to be present in a car capable of driving itself. It's not much of a stretch to take one of these modern cars with all of these self-control features and to add the sensors needed to allow it to drive itself. We may even see grey-market retrofit kits fifteen years from now, if original-equipment self-driving cars hit the market in the next decade.