I noticed you put IQ in "Air Quotes" which would be my comment. IQ as an intelligence indicator is pretty flawed to begin with.
I would agree that it is likely largely socioeconomic factors however. Not having the guidance, opportunity, or education might have a lot to do with it.
Then again, you might as well outlaw being poor if that is the case.
Perhaps the US should stop the War on Drug and start a War on Poverty. I bet the outcomes would be a lot better.
Provided of course they don't take the meaning of War literally, as that would be bad.
I was about to mention that all of the things you talk about are more memory intensive than anything else, which of course is OS dependent, requiring 64-bit, which in addition to hardly anyone bothering to run multi-threaded software, no one bothers to write software optimized for 64bit systems either.
The main problem being is that relatively speaking single thread 32bit applications are what people are used to making is simple compared to writing a multi-threaded 64bit optimized application. Unless there is a real advantage why do it, if it will take longer, cost more money, etc... I agree it will eventually happen, just not as soon as you may be alluding to.
The next step really needs some method/tool/language to make the process easier for the developers to write the software, allowing them to do it more efficiently, which will in turn start to get management on board to create some of these things.
*Note: I have no experience whatsoever writing multi-threaded 64bit optimized software. I have only heard on the interwebs that its inherent complexity make it more difficult to do.
Also there is the 32bit crutch. Lots of apps out there that are 32bit so it is not going away anytime soon, not like a clean break. While it is still an available option developers will use it. That said, I am not even sure how much difference there is, some benchmarks show very little improvement from one to the other, but that could be a mature technology VS a new one and not a fair comparison.
That said using more available cores, particularly for specific tasks would likely see immediate dividends. From my understanding it is a timing/scheduling and organizational issues that make it more complex.
No I said they made the change prior to Apple doing anything. Apple was the reactionary one, not Google.
Apple was just miffed that new technology wasn't included in their licensing agreement with Google, and wanted it for free,
When Google suggested that they get additional branding for a change in the licensing agreement, Apple balked got its back up and tried to make its own mapping application.
Google was being rational, while Apple was being unrealistic. Or it could be that corporately they got some really really bad information about building their own application. Google has like 10,000 employees, working in their mapping division, has been actively purchasing data, and updating data, for over ten years. If they talked to anyone in the industry they should have told them what they were purposing, to effectively do it overnight is ludicrous. To be honest, I think it was a testament to the poor bastards working on the mapping project at Apple that is wasn't worse that it was!
Anyway that is the whole purpose of licensing agreements, to spell out what you are entitled to, and what you are not. Expecting all new technology into the future forever for free is simply silly.
On top of all that, in what seemed like a fit of pouting, they wouldn't let users at least use the old Google Maps that was still licensed, but forced people (at least initially) to use the silly Apple Maps App. One of the reasons I switched (though not the only one to be fair).
This is presumably for research papers they can wave about to say they are looking into green technology.
16$ Million isn't a lot of money to do anything real with. I used to live close to one of the handful of Tidal (Barrage) generating stations in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was built in the 80's for likely a very exorbitant to build (likely overruns etc... who knows how much it cost), and only generates 20MW.
To put that in perspective, that is like 7 Windmills.
The good: Well unless someone blows up the moon or the oceans disappear (in either case likely electricity is the least of your worries) you have sustainable constant power. The bad: Like most hydro electric ventures, you are pretty much limited to a few places you can put them. Once you run out, you run out. This goes for both stream and Barrage generation.
There is also that freaky generation that uses floats and wave movement, but I don't think this has ever been done in any meaningful way. To my mind, even should it work, it would A) not generate a lot of power, and B) maintenance would be a real bitch. Might be interesting from an engineering standpoint however.
They want to look that way when they are protecting their own interests abroad. The US doesn't go into any situation for the greater good of the world. They do so to protect their own interests, namely #1 Economically, #2 Politically, and #3 Militarily.
The rah rah rah, freedom for all is simply a facade.
Hey and I am not really criticizing them for it, it is what many nations do (if they can). However they are interfering for an agenda, maybe that lines up with some other groups or another as well, maybe there will be repercussions afterwards, I am sure they have literately a whole army of analysts looking into any decision like that. However I doubt very much that policing the world for the greater good of humanity really enters into it much other than as part of the PR campaign.
I still have an old Abit BP6 system sitting next to my desk gathering dust if you want it. I even have 4 extra celeron processors for it!
Back when men where men, and dual core meant two processors!
Sadly other than specialized software, most are still only designed for single core anyway, making the performance gains negligible for most people, which means other than an expensive marketing ploy to a small enthusiast market, not much of a market advantage for any company to do so...
Seriously, he destroyed their in house OS in favor of Windows... Nokia is the primary producer of Windows phones. Is anyone surprised by this? It all looks rather sketchy and unethical however. Nokia workers being laid off by the tens of thousands must be thrilled. Wonder what they think of the news...
Or reading what you posted in a slightly different perspective makes MS look like an Evil Genius, and Elop a Mastermind.
Step 1) Infiltrate Nokia Step 2) Destroy Nokia stock prices from the inside. Step 3) Buy out Nokia at a fraction of what it would have cost. Step 4) Return to MS a hero, become CEO. Step 5) PROFIT!!!
1) Google released new text to map for Google Maps on Samsung. 2) Apple says "Gimmie!" 3) Google says "Sorry not part of your current licence." 4) Apple says "Gimmie!" 5) Google says "OK, but Google requires increased branding." (aka not asking for money, more more prominent branding of "Google Maps") 6) Apple says "FU!!1111 we will just make our own lamerz! How hard can it be!" 7) Hilarity ensues.
This is why I take all my data off my laptop and put it all on the cloud. That way I can cross the border into the US and not worry about troublesome searches, as all my data is safely on the Cloud. When I want access to it while done in the US, I simply use the internet to bring it up. I even get a really good connection while I am down there, more so than my country of origin even!
Every evil genius knows that you need a bit of flair and drama to be a real Evil Mastermind. Any thug can pop someone in the head. You want to be a thug? Heck we don't even hire out thugs, we get minions like any respectable arch villain.
1) AMD highest end APU is not 150$, it's 330$. With tiers all the way down. 2) If GPU bound, you can get an i5 for 100$ less or an i3 for even less, and put that towards a GPU. 3) Games are also mostly limited to 1 core more or less. Making about 7 of AMD's cores more less useless in this regard.
AMD are not great price vs performance. AMD ARE good at price at the low end. If you are building a basic machine on the cheap, AMD is your chip right now (or a business server). However if you wish to use it for any gaming, don't waste your time.
Actually more relevant to this conversation, are the integrated graphics on each offering for entry level laptops without a dedicated video card. Both have made big (well relatively speaking) improvements to integrated graphics. Since MOST laptops fall within this category, and the popularity to which laptops seem to be happening over desktops, this metric is one that won't be trivial for very much longer.
This explains a lot, like the supposedly letting 90% of their sysadmins go. He is not "Brilliant", heck he may not even be all that smart. What he did have were the required privileges. I mean you can try to encapsulate a lot, but bottom line *someone* will need access to do certain things. Once they have access, they have access. There is a certain amount of trust you have to have with these people. Considering their knee jerk response was, oh well we will just get rid of 90% of the people who have access shows what kind of understanding they have of how things operate. Certain people have access for a purpose. Now it could be that 90% of their staff had access they didn't require, in which place that is a HUGE snafu by the NSA. I mean EVERY corporate entity be it corporate or government tries to limit access and privileges on all systems. Most do audits every few year to "clean up" who has access to what to ensure only those that absolutely need access actually have it. I have to fight tooth and nail, filling out forms, and giving explanations, and examples of work to justify my admin access.
Bottom line, is if you have access to this stuff at a sysadmin level it would be fairly trivial I would think to do whatever it is you want with the data. This is why there are all those stories of employees of this nature on slashdot where they get let go or fired, no one tells them, they get their two weeks paid or whatever, but there is a security officer at your desk when you come in in the morning as a surprise, to escort you from the building. Its like that sysadmin for what I believe was the city or state in California where upon being let go, changed all the passwords to the system as a bon voyage farewell and they took him to court to try to gain access. Anyway once you have the privileges, it doesn't take a genius to copy data to a USB drive. Sure you could do some serious logging, monitoring, automated alerts, but first all this is going to restrict what you can do in day to day operations, overhead and complexity, but if you have full DB access, you have access to that as well anyway. Not to mention unless a actually person is really on the ball, all this will tell you is who did it when after the fact, which they found out about anyway from the leaks (or perhaps they did just interrogate the logs). Bottom line is you will always need people like this and you have to be able to trust them, though I guess that goes without saying that perhaps in the paranoia of the NSA that might be hard to come by.
This idea has been around for a very long time to the point that it is basically common sense.
People tend to be more attuned to the "here and now" than to some nebulous "future state".
There was a similar study not all that long ago, that offered people on the street 20$ right now, or like 100$ in a month. Almost all subjects took the 20$.
This is probably hardwired to our lizard brain regarding survival instincts. Grab what you can, while you can, etc...
I agree, it was on execution not design that Vista sucked, and as time went on things improved.
Windows 8 was a misguided attempt by Microsoft at convergence between mobile devices like tablets and PC's. I think their thinking being that most people buy laptops now rather than desktops. However not only does that not make any logical sense, but also touch screen LCD monitors are largely unavailable for desktops, and only a handful of higher end laptops usually support it right now. So not only did they take a bad design, but executed it badly as well. Then MS corporate gets involved trying to push Windows 8 and makes the situation worse by basically making it impossible to get any computer without Windows 8 regardless of type unless you built it yourself (which I do, but not the primary market). Getting a desktop or a laptop without a touch screen essentially makes the Metro interface useless, which comprises pretty much half the OS (insofar as the consumer is concerned). Even with a touch screen what sort of user even wants or would use that on a desktop? Perhaps in some cases laptop users might, particularly if they have the reversible screen into tablet kind, but that is a pretty small market of users when you are forcing it on the population as a whole. I can only speculate that the MS PR folks got a hold of the reins and thought, "Gee, none of those users are going to get Windows 8, and are going to go with Windows 7, making our new OS look like a dud, thus they try to force sales. When really it would look like a dud, because it is actually a very niche market. So design fail, execution fail, then corporate direction fail, ultimately leading to: Epic fail.
Two additions however: 1) While Diversifying mix of generation, it is usually referred to in its ability to handle a variable load. In that Natural Gas is one of the best alternatives. You can bring on (or off) generation very quickly, and it is constant power, both good things. 2) As you allude to at the end, diversifying also has the longer term implication of fuel source and cost of power. As your one fuel source becomes scarce, it obviously becomes more expensive. What you didn't mention (or perhaps assumed) is the fact that both nuclear (because it is complex and huge) and green energy (because of low energy volume) require a long time to actually build and bring online as replacements. Green is sort of good because you can gradually add as you build due to small size, but due to its low energy efficiency is wildly expensive (i.e. natural gas would have to get REALLY expensive). Governments tend to give big subsidies in terms of long term contracts, but you pay one way or another through taxation What that means, is that when gas prices do spike, you have no alternatives, and you won't for many many years, because it will take that long to build the installations to start generating by other means.
Meh, Windows 7 has UAC as well, and it really isn't that inconvenient really, particularly if you have admin control (and I would wager most businesses didn't go for Vista anyway over XP at the time).
As to the slow copy I haven't seen the issue, and I have a 2TB media drive full of stuff I regularly update and move around without much problem (30-60MB/s speeds if I recall correctly). Then again maybe I am just used to those speeds now, however I use Windows 7 at work at it doesn't seem any faster really (for copy operations).
Don't get me wrong, Windows 7 is a superior beast, but I don't think Vista is as bad as everyone seems to make it out to be. Likely because all the reviews that were done on first launch (when it was terrible) and simply stuck. I had a computer come pre-installed with Windows ME years ago, now if you want to talk about a truly horrible OS, THAT was the worst. I don't think I made it more than a week or two before I ditched it.
Or they could have a smidgen of sensitivity and break out a thesaurus.
Besides, these are individuals, not firms or companies, or groups acting together, nor are they price fixing or anything like that. They are simply improperly citing each other to boost their profile and readership. I have no doubt "Cartel" was used not for its definition but for is "sexiness" in a headline, which is what prompted my remark.
This is what killed Vista. It wasn't so much that Vista was a bad OS (I have been running a Vista machine for 6 years now). It is the fact that when it FIRST released it was terrible, because NONE of the hardware drivers were available/worked. This was because Microsoft rushed it out, and didn't give companies enough time to come up with proper software (particularly for hardware). So initially it had tonnes of problems. Even after most of those had been figured out just to do a clean install would take forever as you needed to download about a metric fsck tonne of updated, patches, drivers, etc... to get it in working form. Once there it is fine.
People already hate Windows 8. Not just over elitist slashdotters like ourselves. I got a ultrabook for my folks this summer, and they hate it, and that is their core consumers. Alienate your core consumers and they will look for alternatives, Apple for example as it is easier (Metro is confusing as hell, and no start menu as well), or might as well try Linux (Chrome etc...) as it is no more daunting to use than Win8.
Slashdot Mirror
I noticed you put IQ in "Air Quotes" which would be my comment. IQ as an intelligence indicator is pretty flawed to begin with.
I would agree that it is likely largely socioeconomic factors however. Not having the guidance, opportunity, or education might have a lot to do with it.
Then again, you might as well outlaw being poor if that is the case.
Perhaps the US should stop the War on Drug and start a War on Poverty. I bet the outcomes would be a lot better.
Provided of course they don't take the meaning of War literally, as that would be bad.
I was about to mention that all of the things you talk about are more memory intensive than anything else, which of course is OS dependent, requiring 64-bit, which in addition to hardly anyone bothering to run multi-threaded software, no one bothers to write software optimized for 64bit systems either.
The main problem being is that relatively speaking single thread 32bit applications are what people are used to making is simple compared to writing a multi-threaded 64bit optimized application. Unless there is a real advantage why do it, if it will take longer, cost more money, etc... I agree it will eventually happen, just not as soon as you may be alluding to.
The next step really needs some method/tool/language to make the process easier for the developers to write the software, allowing them to do it more efficiently, which will in turn start to get management on board to create some of these things.
*Note: I have no experience whatsoever writing multi-threaded 64bit optimized software. I have only heard on the interwebs that its inherent complexity make it more difficult to do.
Also there is the 32bit crutch. Lots of apps out there that are 32bit so it is not going away anytime soon, not like a clean break. While it is still an available option developers will use it. That said, I am not even sure how much difference there is, some benchmarks show very little improvement from one to the other, but that could be a mature technology VS a new one and not a fair comparison.
That said using more available cores, particularly for specific tasks would likely see immediate dividends. From my understanding it is a timing/scheduling and organizational issues that make it more complex.
OK I may have rambled a bit.
No I said they made the change prior to Apple doing anything. Apple was the reactionary one, not Google.
Apple was just miffed that new technology wasn't included in their licensing agreement with Google, and wanted it for free,
When Google suggested that they get additional branding for a change in the licensing agreement, Apple balked got its back up and tried to make its own mapping application.
Google was being rational, while Apple was being unrealistic. Or it could be that corporately they got some really really bad information about building their own application. Google has like 10,000 employees, working in their mapping division, has been actively purchasing data, and updating data, for over ten years. If they talked to anyone in the industry they should have told them what they were purposing, to effectively do it overnight is ludicrous. To be honest, I think it was a testament to the poor bastards working on the mapping project at Apple that is wasn't worse that it was!
Anyway that is the whole purpose of licensing agreements, to spell out what you are entitled to, and what you are not. Expecting all new technology into the future forever for free is simply silly.
On top of all that, in what seemed like a fit of pouting, they wouldn't let users at least use the old Google Maps that was still licensed, but forced people (at least initially) to use the silly Apple Maps App. One of the reasons I switched (though not the only one to be fair).
This is presumably for research papers they can wave about to say they are looking into green technology.
16$ Million isn't a lot of money to do anything real with. I used to live close to one of the handful of Tidal (Barrage) generating stations in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was built in the 80's for likely a very exorbitant to build (likely overruns etc... who knows how much it cost), and only generates 20MW.
To put that in perspective, that is like 7 Windmills.
The good: Well unless someone blows up the moon or the oceans disappear (in either case likely electricity is the least of your worries) you have sustainable constant power.
The bad: Like most hydro electric ventures, you are pretty much limited to a few places you can put them. Once you run out, you run out. This goes for both stream and Barrage generation.
There is also that freaky generation that uses floats and wave movement, but I don't think this has ever been done in any meaningful way. To my mind, even should it work, it would A) not generate a lot of power, and B) maintenance would be a real bitch. Might be interesting from an engineering standpoint however.
Hardly.
They want to look that way when they are protecting their own interests abroad. The US doesn't go into any situation for the greater good of the world. They do so to protect their own interests, namely #1 Economically, #2 Politically, and #3 Militarily.
The rah rah rah, freedom for all is simply a facade.
Hey and I am not really criticizing them for it, it is what many nations do (if they can). However they are interfering for an agenda, maybe that lines up with some other groups or another as well, maybe there will be repercussions afterwards, I am sure they have literately a whole army of analysts looking into any decision like that. However I doubt very much that policing the world for the greater good of humanity really enters into it much other than as part of the PR campaign.
I still have an old Abit BP6 system sitting next to my desk gathering dust if you want it. I even have 4 extra celeron processors for it!
Back when men where men, and dual core meant two processors!
Sadly other than specialized software, most are still only designed for single core anyway, making the performance gains negligible for most people, which means other than an expensive marketing ploy to a small enthusiast market, not much of a market advantage for any company to do so...
Seriously, he destroyed their in house OS in favor of Windows... Nokia is the primary producer of Windows phones. Is anyone surprised by this? It all looks rather sketchy and unethical however. Nokia workers being laid off by the tens of thousands must be thrilled. Wonder what they think of the news...
Or reading what you posted in a slightly different perspective makes MS look like an Evil Genius, and Elop a Mastermind.
Step 1) Infiltrate Nokia
Step 2) Destroy Nokia stock prices from the inside.
Step 3) Buy out Nokia at a fraction of what it would have cost.
Step 4) Return to MS a hero, become CEO.
Step 5) PROFIT!!!
Step 6) The World?
Muhahaha!
lol
1) Google released new text to map for Google Maps on Samsung.
2) Apple says "Gimmie!"
3) Google says "Sorry not part of your current licence."
4) Apple says "Gimmie!"
5) Google says "OK, but Google requires increased branding." (aka not asking for money, more more prominent branding of "Google Maps")
6) Apple says "FU!!1111 we will just make our own lamerz! How hard can it be!"
7) Hilarity ensues.
lol
I was going to comment jokingly about the irony of a Chinese company being more American than an American company.
Well played Sir, well played.
This is why I take all my data off my laptop and put it all on the cloud. That way I can cross the border into the US and not worry about troublesome searches, as all my data is safely on the Cloud. When I want access to it while done in the US, I simply use the internet to bring it up. I even get a really good connection while I am down there, more so than my country of origin even!
Every evil genius knows that you need a bit of flair and drama to be a real Evil Mastermind. Any thug can pop someone in the head. You want to be a thug? Heck we don't even hire out thugs, we get minions like any respectable arch villain.
Germany already had a speed limiter on cars made in Germany. 155MPH. Top Gear hates it. Just imagine what they think of a 70MPH limit!?
I foresee this being a Top Gear topic for sure! (Which I will be able to watch a year later because I live in Canada...)
1) AMD highest end APU is not 150$, it's 330$. With tiers all the way down.
2) If GPU bound, you can get an i5 for 100$ less or an i3 for even less, and put that towards a GPU.
3) Games are also mostly limited to 1 core more or less. Making about 7 of AMD's cores more less useless in this regard.
AMD are not great price vs performance. AMD ARE good at price at the low end. If you are building a basic machine on the cheap, AMD is your chip right now (or a business server). However if you wish to use it for any gaming, don't waste your time.
Actually more relevant to this conversation, are the integrated graphics on each offering for entry level laptops without a dedicated video card. Both have made big (well relatively speaking) improvements to integrated graphics. Since MOST laptops fall within this category, and the popularity to which laptops seem to be happening over desktops, this metric is one that won't be trivial for very much longer.
This explains a lot, like the supposedly letting 90% of their sysadmins go. He is not "Brilliant", heck he may not even be all that smart. What he did have were the required privileges. I mean you can try to encapsulate a lot, but bottom line *someone* will need access to do certain things. Once they have access, they have access. There is a certain amount of trust you have to have with these people. Considering their knee jerk response was, oh well we will just get rid of 90% of the people who have access shows what kind of understanding they have of how things operate. Certain people have access for a purpose. Now it could be that 90% of their staff had access they didn't require, in which place that is a HUGE snafu by the NSA. I mean EVERY corporate entity be it corporate or government tries to limit access and privileges on all systems. Most do audits every few year to "clean up" who has access to what to ensure only those that absolutely need access actually have it. I have to fight tooth and nail, filling out forms, and giving explanations, and examples of work to justify my admin access.
Bottom line, is if you have access to this stuff at a sysadmin level it would be fairly trivial I would think to do whatever it is you want with the data. This is why there are all those stories of employees of this nature on slashdot where they get let go or fired, no one tells them, they get their two weeks paid or whatever, but there is a security officer at your desk when you come in in the morning as a surprise, to escort you from the building. Its like that sysadmin for what I believe was the city or state in California where upon being let go, changed all the passwords to the system as a bon voyage farewell and they took him to court to try to gain access. Anyway once you have the privileges, it doesn't take a genius to copy data to a USB drive. Sure you could do some serious logging, monitoring, automated alerts, but first all this is going to restrict what you can do in day to day operations, overhead and complexity, but if you have full DB access, you have access to that as well anyway. Not to mention unless a actually person is really on the ball, all this will tell you is who did it when after the fact, which they found out about anyway from the leaks (or perhaps they did just interrogate the logs). Bottom line is you will always need people like this and you have to be able to trust them, though I guess that goes without saying that perhaps in the paranoia of the NSA that might be hard to come by.
Why should anyone really care about a philosophy professors views on environmental issues, never mind those of space exploration.
I mean if he were some time of expert this might perhaps be news, if the idea presented were new. This is just so random nonsense.
This idea has been around for a very long time to the point that it is basically common sense.
People tend to be more attuned to the "here and now" than to some nebulous "future state".
There was a similar study not all that long ago, that offered people on the street 20$ right now, or like 100$ in a month. Almost all subjects took the 20$.
This is probably hardwired to our lizard brain regarding survival instincts. Grab what you can, while you can, etc...
I agree, it was on execution not design that Vista sucked, and as time went on things improved.
Windows 8 was a misguided attempt by Microsoft at convergence between mobile devices like tablets and PC's. I think their thinking being that most people buy laptops now rather than desktops. However not only does that not make any logical sense, but also touch screen LCD monitors are largely unavailable for desktops, and only a handful of higher end laptops usually support it right now. So not only did they take a bad design, but executed it badly as well. Then MS corporate gets involved trying to push Windows 8 and makes the situation worse by basically making it impossible to get any computer without Windows 8 regardless of type unless you built it yourself (which I do, but not the primary market). Getting a desktop or a laptop without a touch screen essentially makes the Metro interface useless, which comprises pretty much half the OS (insofar as the consumer is concerned). Even with a touch screen what sort of user even wants or would use that on a desktop? Perhaps in some cases laptop users might, particularly if they have the reversible screen into tablet kind, but that is a pretty small market of users when you are forcing it on the population as a whole. I can only speculate that the MS PR folks got a hold of the reins and thought, "Gee, none of those users are going to get Windows 8, and are going to go with Windows 7, making our new OS look like a dud, thus they try to force sales. When really it would look like a dud, because it is actually a very niche market. So design fail, execution fail, then corporate direction fail, ultimately leading to: Epic fail.
Yes.
Two additions however:
1) While Diversifying mix of generation, it is usually referred to in its ability to handle a variable load. In that Natural Gas is one of the best alternatives. You can bring on (or off) generation very quickly, and it is constant power, both good things.
2) As you allude to at the end, diversifying also has the longer term implication of fuel source and cost of power. As your one fuel source becomes scarce, it obviously becomes more expensive. What you didn't mention (or perhaps assumed) is the fact that both nuclear (because it is complex and huge) and green energy (because of low energy volume) require a long time to actually build and bring online as replacements. Green is sort of good because you can gradually add as you build due to small size, but due to its low energy efficiency is wildly expensive (i.e. natural gas would have to get REALLY expensive). Governments tend to give big subsidies in terms of long term contracts, but you pay one way or another through taxation What that means, is that when gas prices do spike, you have no alternatives, and you won't for many many years, because it will take that long to build the installations to start generating by other means.
Meh, Windows 7 has UAC as well, and it really isn't that inconvenient really, particularly if you have admin control (and I would wager most businesses didn't go for Vista anyway over XP at the time).
As to the slow copy I haven't seen the issue, and I have a 2TB media drive full of stuff I regularly update and move around without much problem (30-60MB/s speeds if I recall correctly). Then again maybe I am just used to those speeds now, however I use Windows 7 at work at it doesn't seem any faster really (for copy operations).
Don't get me wrong, Windows 7 is a superior beast, but I don't think Vista is as bad as everyone seems to make it out to be. Likely because all the reviews that were done on first launch (when it was terrible) and simply stuck. I had a computer come pre-installed with Windows ME years ago, now if you want to talk about a truly horrible OS, THAT was the worst. I don't think I made it more than a week or two before I ditched it.
Or they could have a smidgen of sensitivity and break out a thesaurus.
Besides, these are individuals, not firms or companies, or groups acting together, nor are they price fixing or anything like that. They are simply improperly citing each other to boost their profile and readership. I have no doubt "Cartel" was used not for its definition but for is "sexiness" in a headline, which is what prompted my remark.
Sounds like someone needs a chair real quick!
This is what killed Vista. It wasn't so much that Vista was a bad OS (I have been running a Vista machine for 6 years now). It is the fact that when it FIRST released it was terrible, because NONE of the hardware drivers were available/worked. This was because Microsoft rushed it out, and didn't give companies enough time to come up with proper software (particularly for hardware). So initially it had tonnes of problems. Even after most of those had been figured out just to do a clean install would take forever as you needed to download about a metric fsck tonne of updated, patches, drivers, etc... to get it in working form. Once there it is fine.
People already hate Windows 8. Not just over elitist slashdotters like ourselves. I got a ultrabook for my folks this summer, and they hate it, and that is their core consumers. Alienate your core consumers and they will look for alternatives, Apple for example as it is easier (Metro is confusing as hell, and no start menu as well), or might as well try Linux (Chrome etc...) as it is no more daunting to use than Win8.
Just God's way of telling these people they need to donate more money to the MegaChurch! God works in mysterious ways etc...
What you thought he was just going to be some booming voice in your head?
Says Slashdot, oh the irony!