No, they don't. Microsoft shut down Live Messenger in April. You're expected to use Skype instead.
My friends aren't exactly happy about that; Skype doesn't exactly have a great user interface. There's a reason why most of them have standardized on Jabber for IMs: You can use third-party clients with a reasonable user interface without running into compatibility issues. Additionally, most people also know someone who doesn't use their IM of choice and don't want to have multiple IM clients open at the same time; thus good compatibility with third-party multi-protocol clients is kind of a big feature.
Of course this doesn't apply if everyone you know uses the same protocol already and they're all happy with their client's UI.
I didn't answer the question becaue it doesn't make any sense. Your question implies that there is no difference between a sex change and breaking one's spine, ie. you see the removal of one's ability to reproduce as equal to crippling oneself. I find that premise to be invalid and thus refuse to answer the question.
You try to steer the discussion away from the topic by using a loaded question that presupposes SRS to be morally wrong. The only reasonable thing to answer to are the semantics of your question, not its content.
Hang on. Does that mean you see being female as a disability? I think most of us have progressed beyond "women are inherently inferior" already but apparently there are still a couple people with a phallocentric world view around even on Slashdot.
Alternatively you are defining the worth of a human being exclusively through their ability to reproduce, which would mean that you see sexual reassignment surgery (or any form of sterilization) as equivalent to throwing one's life away. In this case I must still disagree; not having children is a perfectly valid choice and may indeed be a good one given how overcrowded the planet is getting.
Or, of course, the idea of someone changing their gender just bugs you, in which case I must inform you that "I just don't like the $MINORITY" is not a valid foundation for social policy.
At my workplace we still use Plesk 9.5. This is because we decided to go with a hosted server instead of one where we actually have any control and that's what the server came with. Since we're dependent on the Plesk API working we've been putting off a proposed update to Plesk 11 for a some time now.
Now, technically Plesk 11 should still speak the same API dialect we use but since Plesk's API isn't exactly stable as it is I can't rule out that arbitrary parts of it may stop working. Since we can't afford to have everyone on standby to catch possible business-breaking Plesk bugs right now we're putting it off until after our current development project.
Of course the proper solution would be to switch to a management console with a more reasonable XML-RPC implementation or to just configure the involved programs directy. Unfortunately we can do neither. (And yes, configuring a dozen different software packages by hand would be easier than dealing with Plesk's API. At least in 9.5 that API is so damn unreliable that I have to go clean up after it at least once a week.)
I should also say that this exact question of moving to OpenDocument has come up several times before in Aus gov and got nowhere. The problem is that in the small sample trials they run, the software just fails miserably to deliver on multiple levels. I know this is probably going to upset those of you who are blinded by fanboism, but the fact is that MS office is super super stable and open office hasn't reached that level yet. Hopefully one day it will.
In other words you don't expect the Australian government to use Microsoft Office because it's stable? Remember that the reasoning behind using ODF ist because they want to use it with MS Office and apparently it's better supported by Office than OOXML is. (Well, and as an added bonus everyone but Microsoft seems to have an easier time implementing Office 97's file formats or ODF than OOXML, which seems to favor ODF over OOXML, all other things bein equal.)
That's right. Do you know what's a AAA title? Borderlands 2. You can tell they tried to make it a great experience (and that they actually tried to give it an interesting plot, which is uncommon in shooters). They even went out of their way to make the PC version feel like a first-class release and not a cheap port. That game was expensive to make but the money was spent on quality. I don't regret a single cent I spent on this game.
Then we have things like Call of Duty. Don't get me wrong, CoD sells well but it's not really a AAA title. It's more like a Steven Seagal movie that hasn't slipped into direct-to-DVD land yet. In every CoD the story is predictable and tired (cf. Seagal movies) and the gameplay doesn't differ much from the previous installment. It got to the point where even a friend of mine who generally likes the series has questioned why they released Modern Warfare three times, essentially just incrementing the number at the back. Yet they somehow want sixty bucks for each one when it's new.
And while the big publishers expect people to pay that much for the tenth retread of the same game I paid less than twenty bucks for great games like Jets'n'guns Gold, Kerbal Space Program, FTL, Recettear, Dungeons of Dredmor or the admittedly DLC-tastic Dungeon Defenders. Sure, they don't even try to be AAA titles but they are more fun than most so-called AAA titles while being massively cheaper.
That's true in general* but as far as I know A/C is fairly popular in the States even where extreme temperatures aren't regularly encountered. I will moderate my stance to "proper insulation should obviate the need for A/C in temperate climate and might help in the subtropics". That still doesn't change my basic point: Concrete buildings aren't automatically hotter in summer than wooden ones; the opposite is more likely if the building was built properly. Plus, the reasoning behind "you should use reinforced concrete or monolithic domes" is not that it's cooler in summer but that it makes it easier to not lose everything you own when a natural disaster that is known to happen frequently in the area happens.
* We can get that hot but only in extremely hot summers. For instance, in 2003 we had about two weeks' worth of temperatures like that in some areas of Germany - but that was during a very hot summer following a season-long drought that left little water in the ground for evaporative cooling. It was also the hottest summer in the last 500 years.
Same with housing. Building with concrete or steel is expensive, and will turn your house into an E-Z Bake Oven as well. That would increase electricity needs for running AC, which would lead to more pollution, which would cause more deaths.
You mean building with wood turns your home into an E-Z Bake Oven, right? In Europe we like to build our external walls with an autoclaved aerated concrete core because that stuff is great at thermal insulation. Add some proper (ie. double- or triple-pane) windows with insulated frames and appropriate doors and you get a house that is a lot more resistant to outside temperature than one made out of wood. There is a reason why A/C is much less popular in Europe than in the States: It's simply not as useful if the house stays cool on its own if you lower the blinds and only open the windows briefly to let in fresh air.
Of course AAC isn't as strong as regular concrete and it probably can't be reinforced. Even if you go with normal concrete, though, you should be able to acheive superior insulation and thus less need for A/C during summer by using appropriate doors and windows. And even if the concrete has greater thermal leakage you can always add mineral wool. It's not like thermal insulation is a poorly-understood black art.
Or you could go with a hobbit-style house: Take a dome-shaped concrete shell and put earth on top. Sow grass. Use double- or triple-pane windows as appropriate. As far as I have heard the result is very good at thermal insulation. Concrete dome shells (aka monolithic domes) are quite storm-resistant. Even geodesic domes are fairly good at it. You need to make sure that the local building code allows it, though.
Sure, that's all much more expensive than putting up a few wooden beams, nailing boards across them and calling the result a wall. But then again you have to expect increased power consumption due to A/C and decreased building survivability in case of disaster if you decide that what's cheapest in the short term must be the best possible solution.
In short: Concrete walls aren't hot during summer (not if planned and built properly) and if you decide to build a house that can't withstand a severe storm in an area known to be subject to severe storms it's your own fault if your house collapses.
Hang on. Are you asserting that "one foot of snow predicted; three inches of snow in reality" is the worst possible prediction? So if they had predicted two feet of snow or a sunny 90 deg. F those would have both been better predictions? What metric are you using here?
Note that "superior" does not mean "the best possible", it just means "better". Either you know (but didn't bother to mention) that 40 years ago weather prediction was so significantly more precise that your single anecdote is sufficient to illustrate that fact or you believe (as I have asserted in the first paragraph) that the prediction in your anecdote was literally the worst possible weather prediction imaginable, which would make it very likely that predictions were more accurate 40 years ago. Neither position makes a lot of sense.
For the sake of my amusement I shall assume that you indeed consider the prediction to be the worst possible because of your irrational hatred of things that are one foot long.
Note that Dart isn't stable yet (1.0 is expected this summer, though) and the language may still undergo breaking changes on the way to 1.0. If you're interested it's certainly a good idea to start looking into Dart but I wouldn't recommend using it for a production system yet. At the very least be prepared for a rewrite soon.
And even if we somehow made the desktop and mobile OSes completely safe without simultaneously making them useless - there's still the fortress of unassailability called SCADA and other embedded OSes that most likely aren't going to be as perfect. Unless we move to a world where every computing devise and software is EAL7 certified and every spec is guaranteed not to contain any flaws or weaknesses of any kind we'll have malware researchers because malware is lucrative enough to always be there.
And since right now we live in a world where ridiculous flaws actually make it to production, the manufacturers are often too incompetent to release a fix and perfectly normal ad networks unwittingly distributing malware (and perfectly normal websites having vulnerable backends) is not unheard of, we can't assume that restricting your browsing behavior to legit-looking sites is going to keep your system safe.
It's up to each of us to decide whether we need AV on our devices but just assuming that a device is secure just because it doesn't run on the NT kernel is delusional. For crying out loud, everyone who has an Exynos 4-based smartphone has the contents of their RAM world-readable and world-writable!
The question is how often you want to resend the packets. What happens if the connection is genuinely down for, say, five minutes? Do you keep resending packets until eternity? Do you just have the user redo everything up until the purchase screen? Depending on the intended target audience the latter might not be an acceptable answer.
For example, at my company we do most of our business with tech-unsavvy businesses. The people who make the buying decisions are usually impatient and capricious and very averse to entering their data more than once. Also, any problem is attributed to us, even if it's a network outage on their end. If their connection to us goes down they expect to continue the ordering process exactly where they left off or they will reconsider the entire deal. Some will take weeks to make room in their apparently ultra-busy schedules to go through our (phone-assisted) ordering process once. If there is a problem that they can't trivially recover from that means waiting for a few weeks more. "Just have them redo the last few steps" comes with an unspoken "and lose a few sales".
The problem is that you're facing (potential) customers. Just like in every customer-facing situation that means that you end up dealing with a number of people who don't want to bother actually having realistic expectations. Depending on your business, these potential customers may be expendable or they may be critical to your success. If the latter applies then you have to bend over backwards to allow behavior that we consider wrong but they consider logical.
You raise a good point. However, I would still silently disable the button for a short amout of time just to catch accidental double-clicks. A second should suffice.
The reason is that they are law enforcement agencies and you can't prove that you aren't a terrorist. Since anti-terror efforts supersede conventional law up to and including the constitution that means they have a perfect argument and you are suspicious for disagreeing.
Then again, the States are slipping. Germany does have a number of restrictions (mostly revolving around Nazis or causing violence) but we're utterly bewildered by the American concept of "free speech zones", which apparently allow for the selective exclusion of arbitrary viewpoints from an event. (That's probably not what the law says they do but that's how they seem to be used.)
Come on, guys! We're supposed to defend human dignity to the point of restricting freedom of speech and you're supposed to defend freedom of speech to the point of restricting human dignity. What's next, America requiring all blood in video games to be green? That's our wart, get your own!
You are assuming that identifying with a word means that one bases an overwhelming part of their personal identity on the things associated with that word. That's not neccessarily true.
I'm a slashdotter. I don't spend that much time on/., usually just browsing the RSS feed and its featured comments. That doesn't change the fact that I consider myself part of the local community.
I'm a web developer. The fact that I write programs in a shitty language for a living and read CSS Tricks doesn't mean I base my entire life around it; it just happens to be my job and I consider myself to be among that group.
Obviously, being part of a fandom to the point of adopting its moniker means that you spend some of your time and/or money on it. But that doesn't mean it has to be more than a regular hobby. I do consider myself a brony but currently the hobby takes up less of my spare time than re-watching ST:DS9 while I commute. (No, I don't consider myself a trekkie. It's just what I happen to watch at the time.)
I do have a literal handful of pony figurines but that's because the show has a clear relationship between merchandise bought and episodes produced: We buy more crap, they make more episodes. As for me, I only buy crap that's on-model. My love for the show doesn't go far enough to want those hideous brushable things on my shelves.
In the grand scheme of things being a brony doesn't consume that large a part of my life; it's just yet another hobby. Still, I am sufficiently involved in the community to understand its memes and customs and I think that does make me a brony. Not an extreme one but still I am a brony, just like I'm a slashdotter, a web developer, a gamer, a pen-and-paper roleplayer, a writer, a unix user and more things that don't dominate my life but influence me as a person in some way or another.
Note that this doesn't change the fact that there are hardcore bronies who fill every nook and cranny of their homes with pony memorabilia, endlessly proselytize and can't function without watching at least one episode per day. I'm just saying that you can self-identify as being a part of the brony community without being like that.
In deference to the my little pony following, I have to be subjected to pornographic pinkie pie pics, so I will retisently withhold judgement.
Obviously there are. Any large enough fanbase will generate porn and the FiM fanbase is large enough that its porn has its own little memes. That's fairly natural; I can remember shows as far back as ST:TOS showing well-understood examples of this. I'd say it doesn't say much about the bronies in particular but something about humans in general.
Step 1: The decker enters the building network and switches all coffee makers to decaf.
Step 2: Everyone in the building falls asleep. The security deckers are the first to go.
Step 3: The team enters unimpeded. No alarms are tripped and the run is going smoothly.
Step 4: The street sam decides that now would be a good time to settle an old score using an unsilenced SMG loaded with EX-explosive ammo. In front of a street-level window facing a busy street.
Step 5: One fight with Lone Star later the GM laments that the C.L.U.E. Foundation has shut its doors.
Well, Windows Me had some good ideas but the 9x line was completely outdated at that point. People might have actually sucked it up but the contemporary Windows 2000 was so utterly superior that people noticed how horrible 9x was. In fact, 2k came out half a year earlier so poeple had already tried and liked the NT kernel before the Me brob was dropped. I switched to 2k (with a pure gaming PC) in mid-2000 and never looked back as 2k was just that good. In fact the incredibly long-lived XP started out as 2k in worse, only really hitting its stride with SP1.
Vista brought a lot of new things that didn't quite work right initally (and some, like UAC, still don't work right in Win 7). And it had compatibility issues that in this day and age just shouldn't happen anymore. And it was horribly late, which made the compatibility issues even more unforgivable. It probably worked better with enough patches but, well, by that time Windows 7 was out and nobody bothered with Vista anymore.
As for Office: People use Office 2007? To this date I know nobody who actually uses the Office XML formats; if you exchange documents with someone they always come in Office 97.doc/.xls files. Either OOXML isn't Office 2007/2010's default format or people are dutifully selecting the older format whenever they save or people simply aren't using Office versions that default to OOXML. Either way it's safe to assume that Office 2007/2010 isn't dominating the market.
As for Windows 8: They decided not to differentiate between tablet users and desktop users. This has lead to amusing/sad things like marketing the fact that you can have two applications on the screen at the same time as a killer feature. Desktop users had multiple windows since Windows 1.0 and as a desktop feature that's so bad that I felt compelled to use the term "comically unimpressive" for the first time in my life. In addition to the unwanted new user interface comes the fact that Windows 7 is turning out like Windows XP - it's "good enough" for now and most people are seeing Windows 8 like they saw HD-DVD/BluRay at launch: An unneccessarily expensive minor upgrade without any compelling features*.
* Yes, I know that a lot of people will disagree with me but hey, many people only bought HDTVs because you don't get any other TV sets these days. DVDs are still going well. In fact I still buy them despite the fact that I appreciate high-resolution shows and movies. For most people HD video is less impressive than it's expensive even these days.
Then, through Voyager's Janeway, I learned that all women over thirty-five are nagging bitches who enjoy being difficult to their families.
That was not the central message of Voyager. The central message of Voyager was that a cup of coffee is worth approximately 150 human lives. At least if your name is Kathryn Janeway.
The main issue is the price. If you tinker enough that shelling out a thousand bucks or more just for the ability to build custom parts then you're a) fairly well-off and b) using a lot of custom parts. Most casual tinkerers can't justify that kind of budget so at most they might pool their money and get one communal 3D printer. But even then they might not need custom 3D parts often enough to make the investment worthwhile - often enough off-the-shelf parts also work, just not quite as well. And they'd probably still be cehaper even if you factor out the cost of the printer.
If high-resolution 3D printers with a reasonable printing area came down to 100-200 bucks you might see a lot of casual tinkerers use them. But at the current princes it simply doesn't make sense to buy one as opposed to just doing without custom parts or getting the parts done as a one-off in a machine shop if you really do need them.
I think Metro falls into the same category as Ion or Ratpoison: Some people are extremely efficient using it but others are completely baffled by how it's supposed to work... and the latter are in the majority. Microsoft added some rather unusual gestures to the whole thing (plus gesture-centric UIs are uncommon in desktop-land), which doesn't help. It's certainly a usable and intuitive UI - on a tablet. On the desktop it's so different that most people have to relearn everything, yet Microsoft didn't make it easy enough for them to do so. It's no wonder that Metro flopped.
A more Unity-like approach might have worked better - or even a Metro that seamlessly coexists with the desktop and retains a menu-structured launcher, with a permanently-open desktop tile as the centerpiece with the ability to open additional tiles as needed. A bit like running a traditional desktop environment inside a tiling one. You could add multiple pages (accessible through, say, Windows-1 through Windows-0), each of which can contain an arbitrary constellation of tiles. Need another desktop? Open another desktop tile. Need a desktop and a stock ticker app? Open two tiles and do it. Want to go back to your mail client? You have it open in a desktop tile on page 4. Basically (to use OS X parlance) it's as if Spaces and Dashboard had had offspring. Allow users to tell certain programs to always open on a certain page and you've got a reasonably familiar, reasonably discoverable yet immensely customizable user interface that (sans desktop tiles and using gestures to switch between pages) translates well to tablets.
Or, you know, just take a capable tablet interface that will confuse most desktop users and a capable desktop interface that will frustrate most tablet users and bundle them together.
Slashdot Mirror
Might be that they kept the protocol alive for now. I can't really tell either given the fact that nobody I know uses the official client.
Guess why people stick to Live Messenger[...]?
No, they don't. Microsoft shut down Live Messenger in April. You're expected to use Skype instead.
My friends aren't exactly happy about that; Skype doesn't exactly have a great user interface. There's a reason why most of them have standardized on Jabber for IMs: You can use third-party clients with a reasonable user interface without running into compatibility issues. Additionally, most people also know someone who doesn't use their IM of choice and don't want to have multiple IM clients open at the same time; thus good compatibility with third-party multi-protocol clients is kind of a big feature.
Of course this doesn't apply if everyone you know uses the same protocol already and they're all happy with their client's UI.
I didn't answer the question becaue it doesn't make any sense. Your question implies that there is no difference between a sex change and breaking one's spine, ie. you see the removal of one's ability to reproduce as equal to crippling oneself. I find that premise to be invalid and thus refuse to answer the question.
You try to steer the discussion away from the topic by using a loaded question that presupposes SRS to be morally wrong. The only reasonable thing to answer to are the semantics of your question, not its content.
Hang on. Does that mean you see being female as a disability? I think most of us have progressed beyond "women are inherently inferior" already but apparently there are still a couple people with a phallocentric world view around even on Slashdot.
Alternatively you are defining the worth of a human being exclusively through their ability to reproduce, which would mean that you see sexual reassignment surgery (or any form of sterilization) as equivalent to throwing one's life away. In this case I must still disagree; not having children is a perfectly valid choice and may indeed be a good one given how overcrowded the planet is getting.
Or, of course, the idea of someone changing their gender just bugs you, in which case I must inform you that "I just don't like the $MINORITY" is not a valid foundation for social policy.
At my workplace we still use Plesk 9.5. This is because we decided to go with a hosted server instead of one where we actually have any control and that's what the server came with. Since we're dependent on the Plesk API working we've been putting off a proposed update to Plesk 11 for a some time now.
Now, technically Plesk 11 should still speak the same API dialect we use but since Plesk's API isn't exactly stable as it is I can't rule out that arbitrary parts of it may stop working. Since we can't afford to have everyone on standby to catch possible business-breaking Plesk bugs right now we're putting it off until after our current development project.
Of course the proper solution would be to switch to a management console with a more reasonable XML-RPC implementation or to just configure the involved programs directy. Unfortunately we can do neither. (And yes, configuring a dozen different software packages by hand would be easier than dealing with Plesk's API. At least in 9.5 that API is so damn unreliable that I have to go clean up after it at least once a week.)
I should also say that this exact question of moving to OpenDocument has come up several times before in Aus gov and got nowhere. The problem is that in the small sample trials they run, the software just fails miserably to deliver on multiple levels. I know this is probably going to upset those of you who are blinded by fanboism, but the fact is that MS office is super super stable and open office hasn't reached that level yet. Hopefully one day it will.
In other words you don't expect the Australian government to use Microsoft Office because it's stable? Remember that the reasoning behind using ODF ist because they want to use it with MS Office and apparently it's better supported by Office than OOXML is. (Well, and as an added bonus everyone but Microsoft seems to have an easier time implementing Office 97's file formats or ODF than OOXML, which seems to favor ODF over OOXML, all other things bein equal.)
That's right. Do you know what's a AAA title? Borderlands 2. You can tell they tried to make it a great experience (and that they actually tried to give it an interesting plot, which is uncommon in shooters). They even went out of their way to make the PC version feel like a first-class release and not a cheap port. That game was expensive to make but the money was spent on quality. I don't regret a single cent I spent on this game.
Then we have things like Call of Duty. Don't get me wrong, CoD sells well but it's not really a AAA title. It's more like a Steven Seagal movie that hasn't slipped into direct-to-DVD land yet. In every CoD the story is predictable and tired (cf. Seagal movies) and the gameplay doesn't differ much from the previous installment. It got to the point where even a friend of mine who generally likes the series has questioned why they released Modern Warfare three times, essentially just incrementing the number at the back. Yet they somehow want sixty bucks for each one when it's new.
And while the big publishers expect people to pay that much for the tenth retread of the same game I paid less than twenty bucks for great games like Jets'n'guns Gold, Kerbal Space Program, FTL, Recettear, Dungeons of Dredmor or the admittedly DLC-tastic Dungeon Defenders. Sure, they don't even try to be AAA titles but they are more fun than most so-called AAA titles while being massively cheaper.
That's true in general* but as far as I know A/C is fairly popular in the States even where extreme temperatures aren't regularly encountered. I will moderate my stance to "proper insulation should obviate the need for A/C in temperate climate and might help in the subtropics". That still doesn't change my basic point: Concrete buildings aren't automatically hotter in summer than wooden ones; the opposite is more likely if the building was built properly. Plus, the reasoning behind "you should use reinforced concrete or monolithic domes" is not that it's cooler in summer but that it makes it easier to not lose everything you own when a natural disaster that is known to happen frequently in the area happens.
* We can get that hot but only in extremely hot summers. For instance, in 2003 we had about two weeks' worth of temperatures like that in some areas of Germany - but that was during a very hot summer following a season-long drought that left little water in the ground for evaporative cooling. It was also the hottest summer in the last 500 years.
Same with housing. Building with concrete or steel is expensive, and will turn your house into an E-Z Bake Oven as well. That would increase electricity needs for running AC, which would lead to more pollution, which would cause more deaths.
You mean building with wood turns your home into an E-Z Bake Oven, right? In Europe we like to build our external walls with an autoclaved aerated concrete core because that stuff is great at thermal insulation. Add some proper (ie. double- or triple-pane) windows with insulated frames and appropriate doors and you get a house that is a lot more resistant to outside temperature than one made out of wood. There is a reason why A/C is much less popular in Europe than in the States: It's simply not as useful if the house stays cool on its own if you lower the blinds and only open the windows briefly to let in fresh air.
Of course AAC isn't as strong as regular concrete and it probably can't be reinforced. Even if you go with normal concrete, though, you should be able to acheive superior insulation and thus less need for A/C during summer by using appropriate doors and windows. And even if the concrete has greater thermal leakage you can always add mineral wool. It's not like thermal insulation is a poorly-understood black art.
Or you could go with a hobbit-style house: Take a dome-shaped concrete shell and put earth on top. Sow grass. Use double- or triple-pane windows as appropriate. As far as I have heard the result is very good at thermal insulation. Concrete dome shells (aka monolithic domes) are quite storm-resistant. Even geodesic domes are fairly good at it. You need to make sure that the local building code allows it, though.
Sure, that's all much more expensive than putting up a few wooden beams, nailing boards across them and calling the result a wall. But then again you have to expect increased power consumption due to A/C and decreased building survivability in case of disaster if you decide that what's cheapest in the short term must be the best possible solution.
In short: Concrete walls aren't hot during summer (not if planned and built properly) and if you decide to build a house that can't withstand a severe storm in an area known to be subject to severe storms it's your own fault if your house collapses.
Hang on. Are you asserting that "one foot of snow predicted; three inches of snow in reality" is the worst possible prediction? So if they had predicted two feet of snow or a sunny 90 deg. F those would have both been better predictions? What metric are you using here?
Note that "superior" does not mean "the best possible", it just means "better". Either you know (but didn't bother to mention) that 40 years ago weather prediction was so significantly more precise that your single anecdote is sufficient to illustrate that fact or you believe (as I have asserted in the first paragraph) that the prediction in your anecdote was literally the worst possible weather prediction imaginable, which would make it very likely that predictions were more accurate 40 years ago. Neither position makes a lot of sense.
For the sake of my amusement I shall assume that you indeed consider the prediction to be the worst possible because of your irrational hatred of things that are one foot long.
Note that Dart isn't stable yet (1.0 is expected this summer, though) and the language may still undergo breaking changes on the way to 1.0. If you're interested it's certainly a good idea to start looking into Dart but I wouldn't recommend using it for a production system yet. At the very least be prepared for a rewrite soon.
You are right. I shouldn't have lumped profitability and political aims together.
And even if we somehow made the desktop and mobile OSes completely safe without simultaneously making them useless - there's still the fortress of unassailability called SCADA and other embedded OSes that most likely aren't going to be as perfect. Unless we move to a world where every computing devise and software is EAL7 certified and every spec is guaranteed not to contain any flaws or weaknesses of any kind we'll have malware researchers because malware is lucrative enough to always be there.
And since right now we live in a world where ridiculous flaws actually make it to production, the manufacturers are often too incompetent to release a fix and perfectly normal ad networks unwittingly distributing malware (and perfectly normal websites having vulnerable backends) is not unheard of, we can't assume that restricting your browsing behavior to legit-looking sites is going to keep your system safe.
It's up to each of us to decide whether we need AV on our devices but just assuming that a device is secure just because it doesn't run on the NT kernel is delusional. For crying out loud, everyone who has an Exynos 4-based smartphone has the contents of their RAM world-readable and world-writable!
The question is how often you want to resend the packets. What happens if the connection is genuinely down for, say, five minutes? Do you keep resending packets until eternity? Do you just have the user redo everything up until the purchase screen? Depending on the intended target audience the latter might not be an acceptable answer.
For example, at my company we do most of our business with tech-unsavvy businesses. The people who make the buying decisions are usually impatient and capricious and very averse to entering their data more than once. Also, any problem is attributed to us, even if it's a network outage on their end. If their connection to us goes down they expect to continue the ordering process exactly where they left off or they will reconsider the entire deal. Some will take weeks to make room in their apparently ultra-busy schedules to go through our (phone-assisted) ordering process once. If there is a problem that they can't trivially recover from that means waiting for a few weeks more. "Just have them redo the last few steps" comes with an unspoken "and lose a few sales".
The problem is that you're facing (potential) customers. Just like in every customer-facing situation that means that you end up dealing with a number of people who don't want to bother actually having realistic expectations. Depending on your business, these potential customers may be expendable or they may be critical to your success. If the latter applies then you have to bend over backwards to allow behavior that we consider wrong but they consider logical.
You raise a good point. However, I would still silently disable the button for a short amout of time just to catch accidental double-clicks. A second should suffice.
The reason is that they are law enforcement agencies and you can't prove that you aren't a terrorist. Since anti-terror efforts supersede conventional law up to and including the constitution that means they have a perfect argument and you are suspicious for disagreeing.
Then again, the States are slipping. Germany does have a number of restrictions (mostly revolving around Nazis or causing violence) but we're utterly bewildered by the American concept of "free speech zones", which apparently allow for the selective exclusion of arbitrary viewpoints from an event. (That's probably not what the law says they do but that's how they seem to be used.)
Come on, guys! We're supposed to defend human dignity to the point of restricting freedom of speech and you're supposed to defend freedom of speech to the point of restricting human dignity. What's next, America requiring all blood in video games to be green? That's our wart, get your own!
You are assuming that identifying with a word means that one bases an overwhelming part of their personal identity on the things associated with that word. That's not neccessarily true.
/., usually just browsing the RSS feed and its featured comments. That doesn't change the fact that I consider myself part of the local community.
I'm a slashdotter. I don't spend that much time on
I'm a web developer. The fact that I write programs in a shitty language for a living and read CSS Tricks doesn't mean I base my entire life around it; it just happens to be my job and I consider myself to be among that group.
Obviously, being part of a fandom to the point of adopting its moniker means that you spend some of your time and/or money on it. But that doesn't mean it has to be more than a regular hobby. I do consider myself a brony but currently the hobby takes up less of my spare time than re-watching ST:DS9 while I commute. (No, I don't consider myself a trekkie. It's just what I happen to watch at the time.)
I do have a literal handful of pony figurines but that's because the show has a clear relationship between merchandise bought and episodes produced: We buy more crap, they make more episodes. As for me, I only buy crap that's on-model. My love for the show doesn't go far enough to want those hideous brushable things on my shelves.
In the grand scheme of things being a brony doesn't consume that large a part of my life; it's just yet another hobby. Still, I am sufficiently involved in the community to understand its memes and customs and I think that does make me a brony. Not an extreme one but still I am a brony, just like I'm a slashdotter, a web developer, a gamer, a pen-and-paper roleplayer, a writer, a unix user and more things that don't dominate my life but influence me as a person in some way or another.
Note that this doesn't change the fact that there are hardcore bronies who fill every nook and cranny of their homes with pony memorabilia, endlessly proselytize and can't function without watching at least one episode per day. I'm just saying that you can self-identify as being a part of the brony community without being like that.
In deference to the my little pony following, I have to be subjected to pornographic pinkie pie pics, so I will retisently withhold judgement.
Obviously there are. Any large enough fanbase will generate porn and the FiM fanbase is large enough that its porn has its own little memes. That's fairly natural; I can remember shows as far back as ST:TOS showing well-understood examples of this. I'd say it doesn't say much about the bronies in particular but something about humans in general.
So, what have we learned?
To always use 64-bit numbers, duh.
Sounds like a typical Shadowrun plot.
Step 1: The decker enters the building network and switches all coffee makers to decaf.
Step 2: Everyone in the building falls asleep. The security deckers are the first to go.
Step 3: The team enters unimpeded. No alarms are tripped and the run is going smoothly.
Step 4: The street sam decides that now would be a good time to settle an old score using an unsilenced SMG loaded with EX-explosive ammo. In front of a street-level window facing a busy street.
Step 5: One fight with Lone Star later the GM laments that the C.L.U.E. Foundation has shut its doors.
Well, Windows Me had some good ideas but the 9x line was completely outdated at that point. People might have actually sucked it up but the contemporary Windows 2000 was so utterly superior that people noticed how horrible 9x was. In fact, 2k came out half a year earlier so poeple had already tried and liked the NT kernel before the Me brob was dropped. I switched to 2k (with a pure gaming PC) in mid-2000 and never looked back as 2k was just that good. In fact the incredibly long-lived XP started out as 2k in worse, only really hitting its stride with SP1.
.doc/.xls files. Either OOXML isn't Office 2007/2010's default format or people are dutifully selecting the older format whenever they save or people simply aren't using Office versions that default to OOXML. Either way it's safe to assume that Office 2007/2010 isn't dominating the market.
Vista brought a lot of new things that didn't quite work right initally (and some, like UAC, still don't work right in Win 7). And it had compatibility issues that in this day and age just shouldn't happen anymore. And it was horribly late, which made the compatibility issues even more unforgivable. It probably worked better with enough patches but, well, by that time Windows 7 was out and nobody bothered with Vista anymore.
As for Office: People use Office 2007? To this date I know nobody who actually uses the Office XML formats; if you exchange documents with someone they always come in Office 97
As for Windows 8: They decided not to differentiate between tablet users and desktop users. This has lead to amusing/sad things like marketing the fact that you can have two applications on the screen at the same time as a killer feature. Desktop users had multiple windows since Windows 1.0 and as a desktop feature that's so bad that I felt compelled to use the term "comically unimpressive" for the first time in my life. In addition to the unwanted new user interface comes the fact that Windows 7 is turning out like Windows XP - it's "good enough" for now and most people are seeing Windows 8 like they saw HD-DVD/BluRay at launch: An unneccessarily expensive minor upgrade without any compelling features*.
* Yes, I know that a lot of people will disagree with me but hey, many people only bought HDTVs because you don't get any other TV sets these days. DVDs are still going well. In fact I still buy them despite the fact that I appreciate high-resolution shows and movies. For most people HD video is less impressive than it's expensive even these days.
Then, through Voyager's Janeway, I learned that all women over thirty-five are nagging bitches who enjoy being difficult to their families.
That was not the central message of Voyager. The central message of Voyager was that a cup of coffee is worth approximately 150 human lives. At least if your name is Kathryn Janeway.
The main issue is the price. If you tinker enough that shelling out a thousand bucks or more just for the ability to build custom parts then you're a) fairly well-off and b) using a lot of custom parts. Most casual tinkerers can't justify that kind of budget so at most they might pool their money and get one communal 3D printer. But even then they might not need custom 3D parts often enough to make the investment worthwhile - often enough off-the-shelf parts also work, just not quite as well. And they'd probably still be cehaper even if you factor out the cost of the printer.
If high-resolution 3D printers with a reasonable printing area came down to 100-200 bucks you might see a lot of casual tinkerers use them. But at the current princes it simply doesn't make sense to buy one as opposed to just doing without custom parts or getting the parts done as a one-off in a machine shop if you really do need them.
I think Metro falls into the same category as Ion or Ratpoison: Some people are extremely efficient using it but others are completely baffled by how it's supposed to work... and the latter are in the majority. Microsoft added some rather unusual gestures to the whole thing (plus gesture-centric UIs are uncommon in desktop-land), which doesn't help. It's certainly a usable and intuitive UI - on a tablet. On the desktop it's so different that most people have to relearn everything, yet Microsoft didn't make it easy enough for them to do so. It's no wonder that Metro flopped.
A more Unity-like approach might have worked better - or even a Metro that seamlessly coexists with the desktop and retains a menu-structured launcher, with a permanently-open desktop tile as the centerpiece with the ability to open additional tiles as needed. A bit like running a traditional desktop environment inside a tiling one. You could add multiple pages (accessible through, say, Windows-1 through Windows-0), each of which can contain an arbitrary constellation of tiles. Need another desktop? Open another desktop tile. Need a desktop and a stock ticker app? Open two tiles and do it. Want to go back to your mail client? You have it open in a desktop tile on page 4. Basically (to use OS X parlance) it's as if Spaces and Dashboard had had offspring. Allow users to tell certain programs to always open on a certain page and you've got a reasonably familiar, reasonably discoverable yet immensely customizable user interface that (sans desktop tiles and using gestures to switch between pages) translates well to tablets.
Or, you know, just take a capable tablet interface that will confuse most desktop users and a capable desktop interface that will frustrate most tablet users and bundle them together.