It'll take sites to transition away from Flash. Including business sites. Yes, some businesses have built business-critical sites on Flash. Hell, ESXi's vCenter Appliance used Flash for its UI until recently.
The fact that there will still be sites using Flash means that people will still need to install the plugin. That means that Adobe will still need to support it. The announcement today is a clear signal to those sites to start moving away from Flash.
I'm not trying to be difficult or argumentative, but MS Paint always seemed like such a crappy program. Hearing that there's an outpouring of support for keeping it seems weird.
So let me ask, what's the concern here? Couldn't you just download an alternative? Or does MS Paint do something that other paint programs don't? Is the point that people want some kind of graphic editor pre-installed in Windows? Or if Microsoft open sourced Paint, would that satisfy people? What, exactly, isn't satisfying about their new "Paint 3D"? Or is this just an issue of impractical nostalgia for a crappy old app that's been around for decades?
Personally, I'd be in favor of Microsoft doing more to modernize all of their old built-in apps. Notepad, Wordpad, and Paint could all probably use a rethink/rewrite, and not just new icons and a ribbon toolbar.
I can also say, I'd prefer Microsoft not make these kinds of built-in apps in the new Modern/Metro style. Those UI conventions suck for desktop use.
Also, "http://www.snopes.com/save-snopes/" redirects to "https://www.savesnopes.com". Maybe I'm just being stupid, but how did they get that url to redirect if they "cannot modify the site"?
Yeah, I agree. Apps in the background may be largely frozen most of the time, but they can still be doing some stuff. They might be using the GPS. They might be downloading stuff. In fact, there was a bit of a dust-up a year or two ago because Facebook had designed their app to constantly download what was basically an empty file. I don't know all the technical details, but by constantly downloading a file, it kept the app from really freezing in the background, which meant that the app was able to update more frequently that Apple designed iOS to allow. It was using a bunch of bandwidth and draining battery life until Apple told them to knock it off.
So it's definitely not always the case that things freeze in the background. I think there's an argument to be made that it's generally not worth closing your apps *unless you're having a problem*. However, it doesn't seem to be at all true that open background apps don't use resources.
GOP is locked in a civil war of its own between Trump being the titular head (though they despise him for that being the POTUS and all), and blue blooded establishment types.
I think that's a misunderstanding of what's going on. There isn't one big unified "establishment" that doesn't like Trump. There are bunch of factions within the Republican party. Most of them don't like Trump. Like... loads and loads of people on all sides of things don't like Trump. It's not because he's disturbing their comfortable status quo, it's because he's a dangerous moron. He's a narcissist and a con man, but he doesn't even understand how things work well enough to fool anyone except people who are even bigger morons.
But he seems to have reached a deal with the Republican leadership that amounts to this: Republicans will support Trump publicly and try to protect him from his scandals, and Trump will do whatever they say. If Republicans can pass a healthcare bill, he'll sign it, even if it violates all of his campaign promises. Meanwhile, Republicans will try to defend his lining his own pockets and abusing power. It's been an uneasy detente, but Trump is specifically *not* upsetting the comfortable status quo for "the Establishment". He's hurting poor people and minorities, and not the rich and powerful.
However, even that's starting to break down. Republicans haven't been able to get much done, so while Trump will sign anything that gets put on his desk, that's not very valuable if they can't get a bill to his desk. Meanwhile, his scandals have gone from, "Trump is profiting off of the presidency in ways that are unethical and probably illegal," to "Trump conspired with the Russians to fix the election," so he's becoming harder and harder to defend.
Of course he tries to make it sound like people are out to get him. It's just like the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that was out to get Bill Clinton. You know the saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you"? Well, just because people are out to get you doesn't mean you aren't guilty. Trump may have plenty of political enemies, but even the facts that he's willing to concede show a pretty clear pattern of coordinating with Russia, and undermining our national security in order to serve Putin's interests.
Hah. Joke's on you. I'm also a small "L" libertarian, too... sort of. That is to say I don't think the government should be involved in things it shouldn't need to, except I'm not of the opinion that the government shouldn't need to be involved in anything. That is, I'm a libertarian, not an anarcho-capitalist.
And also, I think you got your order backwards. Trump is in the process of destroying the GOP right now, and next you'll need to figure out how to deal with Democrats.
I know you don't get it. Most people don't. And no, you're not a smart as you think you are.
Geeze. What, are you 15 years old?
The fact is the GOP Establishment (Washington DC) is in alignment with Democrats with mutual (but differing in other areas) interests. In effect, it's Trump vs. the World at the political and geo-political level.
And Trump is such a rebel against the Republican Establishment that he's just been turning to the Republican party and saying, "Let's do whatever you want. Give me bills, and I'll sign them. I don't really care what they do." He's so against globalism that he recently moved to expand a program to bring in unskilled immigrant labor.
The truth is, you've been played. Worse, the guy who played you is only barely trying to hide it. It's like you're watching a magician who says, "Hey, watch me 'saw my assistant in half'. Right? I mean, obviously you can't saw a person in half, but I'm going to do it. That's the trick!" And then you see his assistant climb out of the box's false bottom, but you're still sitting there in awe, saying, "This guy is brilliant! I can't even figure out how he did it!"
This wasn't an election about values. It was an election about justice. It was rural vs urban. And, it's being played out all over the world. It's how the Brexit happened. It's how the world is pivoting away from Globalism due to the stratification of wealth it has caused, eviscerating the middle-class in the process.
Well, no, it was an election about values. One of the chief values was "fuck Democrats". Also, "I want to get mine, even if the rest of the world goes down the tubes." And also, "we need to get rid of all these Mexicans and Muslims, and put these black people in jail."
And really, it wasn't about urban vs. rural. It was about cosmopolitanism vs nationalism far more than that. It was about pro-authoritarian xenophobic nationalists wanting to give a poke in the eye to "city fags" because "they think they're smarter than me!" There are a lot of apologists who want to make it about, "Oh, these poor coal miners. The coastal elite are in a bubble, out of touch with the poor coal miners." Nope. You had some people who were sold a pack of obvious lies, and some people who were straight up bigots, but it was never about the struggling rural areas or the evisceration of the middle class. Trump isn't doing anything to help those people.
The rest... it's paranoid nonsense. Try a news source other than InfoWars.
I have to say, at first when all this news about Russia started coming out, I thought that most likely, we'd find that Trump wasn't involved with the Russia hacking. Putin probably got him elected because he knew Trump was a moron, he wanted to sow chaos into the American political system, and putting Trump into the presidency was a convenient way of damaging the US.
But as time has gone on, it's become evident that can't be the case. First, because of Trumps repeated attempts at obstructing the investigation. Second, all these meetings are really adding up, and we know that they were, at the very least, coordinating with the Russian government. They were aware that the Russian government was trying to get Trump elected, and his campaign welcomed the help. But it's also weird that the Russians had sanction put on them last year, and they've sat around patiently for months, only now getting upset that the sanctions haven't been lifted and their property hasn't been returned. It's weird that Trump has had these private meetings with Kislyak, Lavrov, and Putin. Trump has repeatedly hinted at wanting to remove the sanctions. And now, he basically wants to bring in Russian security personnel involved in our elections?
I've actually come to believe that Trump himself was involved with colluding with the Russians. I think that, if we had his tax returns, we'd see that he's getting income and loans from Russia. I think Russian intelligence probably has the Russian prostitute pee tape. I think Putin just owns him. And honestly, I suspect that this "joint cyber security unit" is an attempt to put our elections under control of Russian intelligence, so that they can fix it in favor of Trump. He's going to drum of some bullshit claims of election fraud by Mexicans, claim we need help ensuring the security of our elections, and hand the keys over to Putin so that Putin can rig the election.
Seriously. Honestly. I think that's the plan. Trump once said that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue and not lose his supporters, and I think he's right. I think he's so correct in that assessment that he's demonstrating, in fact, that he could hand control of our country over to Russia, and he wouldn't lose his supporters.
Trump didn't collude with Russia. If he did, there would already be articles of impeachment and Pence would be the acting POTUS. Period.
First, the investigation isn't done. You don't really want to start a trial before you've gathered all the evidence you think you need. Second, impeachment is a political process, not a law enforcement process, and so it's entirely dependent on the majority of Congress deciding they want to bring charges. I think we've already seen that the Republicans want to cover this up.
Umm... let's look at this article. First sentence:
Three members of the legal team known to have been hired so far by special counsel Robert Mueller to handle the Russia investigation have given political donations almost exclusively to Democrats
So *three* members. Three out of five. Three of them have given political donations "almost exclusively" to Democrats. From the use of the word "almost", we can conclude that they didn't give money exclusively to Democrats. It says later in the article that one of the three donated to Jason Chaffetz and George Allen, both Republicans.
And that's just political donations, not active campaigning. It's not terribly uncommon for people to donate some money to a political party. So what do you want? You want to disqualify anyone who ever donated money to a Democratic campaign from working on the investigation? That'd be absurd.
As for Robert Mueller himself has close ties to Comey. While is in of itself isn't a problem per se, it's highly biased.
You mean biased toward ethics and fair enforcement of the law? I'll take that bias. And if Mueller is so terrible, why was he being considered for the head of the FBI? Why was he appointed by the Deputy Attorney General. Why is it that of all the major Republican figures, only Trump has anything bad to say about Mueller?
I mean, exercise a little judgement. Think for yourself, at least a little bit.
Oh please. Robert Mueller investigation into Trump is staffed with people whom have had direct campaigning with the Clintons.
So first, I've heard about this accusation, and then heard disputes, claiming that some people had been somewhat involved with campaigning for Clinton, while others were Republicans. I haven't investigated that myself, but it seemed worth mentioning.
And honestly, beside all of that, these people are respected independent investigators. And even if they were biased against Trump, it's not entirely a conflict of interest for an investigator to be biased against the people they're investigating. If a police officer is investigating you for murder, it's not really a defense to say, "I must be innocent because the police officer doesn't like me." If a police officer thinks that you're a murderer, you could expect that he wouldn't like you. It'd be far more of a conflict of interest for the investigator to be a political ally.
If you had some evidence that Mueller is trying to frame Trump or misrepresent the facts, that'd be one thing. As far as I've heard, no one reputable has raised any doubt about Mueller's ethics.
And beside all that, they've already been caught. No need for a fishing expedition. No need to frame anyone. The Trump campaign colluded with Russia. First the defense was, "we didn't collude," then it was, "we colluded a little, but there wasn't anything illegal," and now it's turned into, "it may have been a little illegal, but those laws don't count." We know there were meetings with people representing the Russian government to coordinate efforts to influence the election, which coincided with Russia hacking Democrats, hacking election systems, and pushing an advanced propaganda campaign. There were multiple meetings and communications between many people in the Trump campaign and the Russians, they tried to hide it, they lied about it under oath, and now they're caught.
There's still work for investigators to do. It's not enough to know it. They need hard proof of violation of specific laws. They want to know exactly what was done, how, and by whom. That'll take a while. But we already know they did it.
I don't particularly doubt that *someone* in the government would give verbal approval. I doubt that there's someone in the government who has the authority and influence to give verbal approval and have it mean anything.
Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded..
To which I can only say, at least he's being honest. He wants to guard the election hacking and many other negative things. He's not saying that he wants to guard against election hacking, but he wants to guard the election hacking to prevent American law enforcement from interfering and allowing fair elections.
Seriously, though, we need to get this guy out of office. Just yesterday, he admitted that he wouldn't have appointed Sessions to Attorney General if he'd known that Sessions wasn't going to help cover up his campaign's collusion with the Russian government. Even if Putin weren't involved, Trump's involvement already means that this wouldn't should not be trusted with the security of our elections.
Yeah. They're trying to make it so you can't get the latest OS on old hardware, and you can't use the latest hardware on an older OS.
I can see a few possible reasons that Microsoft would want to do this. First, and most innocently, they could be trying to limit OS development costs by shrinking the amount of hardware they have to support. In a sense, they may be trying to emulate Apple, which supports far less hardware and is quick to break backward compatibility, generally producing faster development with a better user experience. A lot of the instability in Windows is actually caused by bad drivers, so limiting their hardware support should help with that.
Second, as you point out, breaking compatibility this way keeps customers on the upgrade treadmill. Forcing people to buy a new workstation also means buying a new OEM copy of Windows, which is pretty much the only way people buy Windows. I could also see them start to break backward compatibility support in the OS, like making an OS update that is no longer compatible with old versions of Office, for example, prodding people to sign up for Office 365.
And in that sense, this could also be just another way that Microsoft is looking to expand their control. Years ago, Microsoft starting pushing Activation and WGA. We've seen Microsoft pushing updates more aggressively, denying users the ability to control when updates are installed. They tried to push BIOS standards that would prevent people from installing alternate operating systems. We've seen them forcing telemetry into the OS. They've started pushing people into buying software from their app store. More and more, you can't do anything on your computer without Microsoft signing off. Whether or not there's a particular goal, and even regardless of whether this expansion of control is done consciously and deliberately, I'm sure they'll find some use for the control once they have it.
Finally, I could see this being used peripherally to push people into buying a Microsoft hardware device. That may be one of the uses they find for this control, even if it wasn't intended at the outset. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if some laptop you buy from Acer stops being supported in 3 years, but the Surface Pro continues to get updates for an additional couple of years. The discrepancy could even be somewhat justified by the idea, "It's our device, built to the specifications that we thought were good, so it's easier for us to support." Even if they don't explicitly target Microsoft devices, they might say, "We'll only continue to support older devices that have one of these processor models and one of these video cards," and choose processors and video cards that they use in their own devices. If that kind of thing starts happening, people might be more inclined to buy Microsoft devices on the understanding that they're most likely to receive continued support.
Well first, Detroit is just fucked in its own special way. Lots of things went wrong there, and it doesn't make sense to extrapolate.
Second, Detroit does sort of serve to illustrate my point. From what I hear, the downtown area has been improving, and there have been some tech companies setting up shop there. However, things get more bleak as you move outward.
I don't know the exact situation, but I suspect that "the sticks" where you're talking about aren't as remote and rural as the parts of the US I have in mind. I'm talking about areas that are larger than the entire UK, without a major city anywhere in them. Like, you couldn't say, "I'd live around there too, but the housing is too expensive." You would *have to* live in a rural area if you worked there, because it might take hours to drive to anything larger than a small town. And the land is pretty cheap because there's basically nothing out there.
Setting aside the difficulty of giving such preferential treatment to a particular region, it won't really help. The problem isn't actually the contrast between the success of Silicon Valley vs. the implosion of the Rust Belt. The problem is actually more about the success of urban areas vs. the implosion of rural areas. And allowing more H1Bs in rural areas, aside from being difficult to enforce, would be ineffective.
You can have technology startups in any number of cities, but you aren't likely to see many in rural areas. First, because the infrastructure might not be available to support it. Second, because educated tech workers increasingly want to live in more urban areas. Third, because there's a lot of demand for specialized workers, and a fair amount of turnover, which means you need a high population density, which runs entirely contrary to the idea of a "rural area".
And that's not even dealing with the question of whether H1Bs are good for American workers.
You can't just have the government enforce cheap labor in an area and expect that companies are going to flood in. Cheap labor is great, but a lot more goes into running a company than that.
Yeah, honestly, Windows 10 has a lot of improvements over Windows 7. I'd say the improvement is more than incremental, even. And the problem, in my mind, isn't even the UI changes. It's all the forced advertising and telemetry, as well as stripping out various features and control. You don't want to install updates for some reason? Tough. They're being pushed down. You don't want to have your computer reboot randomly on Microsoft's schedule? Sorry, no choice.
If Microsoft would just ease up, they might have a good product that people want.
Oh, that. I wouldn't put too much stock in that. That's market share in terms of the "market" being a website's audience, and their numbers are derived from a subset of sites. That doesn't tell you how many computers are running a given OS, but how many web browsers reporting that OS are visiting a specific selection of sites.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that 26% isn't actually "market share", but install base, or maybe some kind of adoption metric. I don't know what it means, either.
So someone posted what you thought might be a bullshit number, and you responded by making up different numbers?
I'm not asking you to cite a source, no. I'm just wondering what market you're talking about, if that makes sense. Like Macs have (last I saw) somewhere around a 15% market share of the PC market, so 3% sounds lower than I'd expect. Now, my number might not be right, but I'm not sure if you're talking about a different thing.
Market share in terms of OS purchases? I'm not sure when you'd count a MacOS purchase. Do Windows upgrades count as purchases? Do Mac upgrades? Do free Linux installs count as purchases?
Do you see what I mean? I'm not looking for a citation, just a vague idea of what those numbers mean.
What I'm going to say may sound crazy, but this is honestly what I think Microsoft should do:
Open source Windows. Not every single thing, every single feature, but most of it. Make it so, if a home user wants to use Windows 10, they can just download and use a free version of it. If they really want, they could still make the licensing such that OEMs would need to pay a small licensing fee to include it bundled on a new system, saying that the open source license is for non-commercial use only. They may lose some purchases of Windows licenses from home users, but excluding OEMs, how many of those are there?
They can reap the rewards of open source software without losing much.
Among the things that they don't open source, put those features into office 365 licensing. Basically, make it so you can get an open source version of Windows Home for free. Take some of the Pro/Enterprise features that individual users might want, and bundle them into the Office 365 individual licenses. Take the features that businesses might want, and bundle them into the Business and Enterprise plans.
Doing it this way would win them huge points with the FOSS crowd, simplify their licensing, and provide additional incentive for businesses to use their subscriptions (which is what they really want anyway). Plus, it just makes everything simpler.
You can say the idea is stupid, but they're trying to force everyone to use Windows 10, and they're saying they don't plan to come out with a Windows 11. Purchases of new Windows versions will only come through OEMs regardless. I honestly think they'd have a lot to gain, and not much to lose.
Slashdot Mirror
So you're implying that this is all about sentimentality? People feel about MS Paint the way a person might feel about their grandmother?
It'll take sites to transition away from Flash. Including business sites. Yes, some businesses have built business-critical sites on Flash. Hell, ESXi's vCenter Appliance used Flash for its UI until recently. The fact that there will still be sites using Flash means that people will still need to install the plugin. That means that Adobe will still need to support it. The announcement today is a clear signal to those sites to start moving away from Flash.
Out of curiosity, why?
I'm not trying to be difficult or argumentative, but MS Paint always seemed like such a crappy program. Hearing that there's an outpouring of support for keeping it seems weird.
So let me ask, what's the concern here? Couldn't you just download an alternative? Or does MS Paint do something that other paint programs don't? Is the point that people want some kind of graphic editor pre-installed in Windows? Or if Microsoft open sourced Paint, would that satisfy people? What, exactly, isn't satisfying about their new "Paint 3D"? Or is this just an issue of impractical nostalgia for a crappy old app that's been around for decades?
Personally, I'd be in favor of Microsoft doing more to modernize all of their old built-in apps. Notepad, Wordpad, and Paint could all probably use a rethink/rewrite, and not just new icons and a ribbon toolbar.
I can also say, I'd prefer Microsoft not make these kinds of built-in apps in the new Modern/Metro style. Those UI conventions suck for desktop use.
Also, "http://www.snopes.com/save-snopes/" redirects to "https://www.savesnopes.com". Maybe I'm just being stupid, but how did they get that url to redirect if they "cannot modify the site"?
Yeah, I agree. Apps in the background may be largely frozen most of the time, but they can still be doing some stuff. They might be using the GPS. They might be downloading stuff. In fact, there was a bit of a dust-up a year or two ago because Facebook had designed their app to constantly download what was basically an empty file. I don't know all the technical details, but by constantly downloading a file, it kept the app from really freezing in the background, which meant that the app was able to update more frequently that Apple designed iOS to allow. It was using a bunch of bandwidth and draining battery life until Apple told them to knock it off.
So it's definitely not always the case that things freeze in the background. I think there's an argument to be made that it's generally not worth closing your apps *unless you're having a problem*. However, it doesn't seem to be at all true that open background apps don't use resources.
GOP is locked in a civil war of its own between Trump being the titular head (though they despise him for that being the POTUS and all), and blue blooded establishment types.
I think that's a misunderstanding of what's going on. There isn't one big unified "establishment" that doesn't like Trump. There are bunch of factions within the Republican party. Most of them don't like Trump. Like... loads and loads of people on all sides of things don't like Trump. It's not because he's disturbing their comfortable status quo, it's because he's a dangerous moron. He's a narcissist and a con man, but he doesn't even understand how things work well enough to fool anyone except people who are even bigger morons.
But he seems to have reached a deal with the Republican leadership that amounts to this: Republicans will support Trump publicly and try to protect him from his scandals, and Trump will do whatever they say. If Republicans can pass a healthcare bill, he'll sign it, even if it violates all of his campaign promises. Meanwhile, Republicans will try to defend his lining his own pockets and abusing power. It's been an uneasy detente, but Trump is specifically *not* upsetting the comfortable status quo for "the Establishment". He's hurting poor people and minorities, and not the rich and powerful.
However, even that's starting to break down. Republicans haven't been able to get much done, so while Trump will sign anything that gets put on his desk, that's not very valuable if they can't get a bill to his desk. Meanwhile, his scandals have gone from, "Trump is profiting off of the presidency in ways that are unethical and probably illegal," to "Trump conspired with the Russians to fix the election," so he's becoming harder and harder to defend.
Of course he tries to make it sound like people are out to get him. It's just like the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that was out to get Bill Clinton. You know the saying, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean people aren't out to get you"? Well, just because people are out to get you doesn't mean you aren't guilty. Trump may have plenty of political enemies, but even the facts that he's willing to concede show a pretty clear pattern of coordinating with Russia, and undermining our national security in order to serve Putin's interests.
Hah. Joke's on you. I'm also a small "L" libertarian, too... sort of. That is to say I don't think the government should be involved in things it shouldn't need to, except I'm not of the opinion that the government shouldn't need to be involved in anything. That is, I'm a libertarian, not an anarcho-capitalist.
And also, I think you got your order backwards. Trump is in the process of destroying the GOP right now, and next you'll need to figure out how to deal with Democrats.
I know you don't get it. Most people don't. And no, you're not a smart as you think you are.
Geeze. What, are you 15 years old?
The fact is the GOP Establishment (Washington DC) is in alignment with Democrats with mutual (but differing in other areas) interests. In effect, it's Trump vs. the World at the political and geo-political level.
And Trump is such a rebel against the Republican Establishment that he's just been turning to the Republican party and saying, "Let's do whatever you want. Give me bills, and I'll sign them. I don't really care what they do." He's so against globalism that he recently moved to expand a program to bring in unskilled immigrant labor.
The truth is, you've been played. Worse, the guy who played you is only barely trying to hide it. It's like you're watching a magician who says, "Hey, watch me 'saw my assistant in half'. Right? I mean, obviously you can't saw a person in half, but I'm going to do it. That's the trick!" And then you see his assistant climb out of the box's false bottom, but you're still sitting there in awe, saying, "This guy is brilliant! I can't even figure out how he did it!"
This wasn't an election about values. It was an election about justice. It was rural vs urban. And, it's being played out all over the world. It's how the Brexit happened. It's how the world is pivoting away from Globalism due to the stratification of wealth it has caused, eviscerating the middle-class in the process.
Well, no, it was an election about values. One of the chief values was "fuck Democrats". Also, "I want to get mine, even if the rest of the world goes down the tubes." And also, "we need to get rid of all these Mexicans and Muslims, and put these black people in jail."
And really, it wasn't about urban vs. rural. It was about cosmopolitanism vs nationalism far more than that. It was about pro-authoritarian xenophobic nationalists wanting to give a poke in the eye to "city fags" because "they think they're smarter than me!" There are a lot of apologists who want to make it about, "Oh, these poor coal miners. The coastal elite are in a bubble, out of touch with the poor coal miners." Nope. You had some people who were sold a pack of obvious lies, and some people who were straight up bigots, but it was never about the struggling rural areas or the evisceration of the middle class. Trump isn't doing anything to help those people.
The rest... it's paranoid nonsense. Try a news source other than InfoWars.
[Trump] wants to work with Russia specifically
I have to say, at first when all this news about Russia started coming out, I thought that most likely, we'd find that Trump wasn't involved with the Russia hacking. Putin probably got him elected because he knew Trump was a moron, he wanted to sow chaos into the American political system, and putting Trump into the presidency was a convenient way of damaging the US.
But as time has gone on, it's become evident that can't be the case. First, because of Trumps repeated attempts at obstructing the investigation. Second, all these meetings are really adding up, and we know that they were, at the very least, coordinating with the Russian government. They were aware that the Russian government was trying to get Trump elected, and his campaign welcomed the help. But it's also weird that the Russians had sanction put on them last year, and they've sat around patiently for months, only now getting upset that the sanctions haven't been lifted and their property hasn't been returned. It's weird that Trump has had these private meetings with Kislyak, Lavrov, and Putin. Trump has repeatedly hinted at wanting to remove the sanctions. And now, he basically wants to bring in Russian security personnel involved in our elections?
I've actually come to believe that Trump himself was involved with colluding with the Russians. I think that, if we had his tax returns, we'd see that he's getting income and loans from Russia. I think Russian intelligence probably has the Russian prostitute pee tape. I think Putin just owns him. And honestly, I suspect that this "joint cyber security unit" is an attempt to put our elections under control of Russian intelligence, so that they can fix it in favor of Trump. He's going to drum of some bullshit claims of election fraud by Mexicans, claim we need help ensuring the security of our elections, and hand the keys over to Putin so that Putin can rig the election.
Seriously. Honestly. I think that's the plan. Trump once said that he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th avenue and not lose his supporters, and I think he's right. I think he's so correct in that assessment that he's demonstrating, in fact, that he could hand control of our country over to Russia, and he wouldn't lose his supporters.
Trump didn't collude with Russia. If he did, there would already be articles of impeachment and Pence would be the acting POTUS. Period.
First, the investigation isn't done. You don't really want to start a trial before you've gathered all the evidence you think you need. Second, impeachment is a political process, not a law enforcement process, and so it's entirely dependent on the majority of Congress deciding they want to bring charges. I think we've already seen that the Republicans want to cover this up.
As for the accusations, they're true. http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/12/... [cnn.com]
Umm... let's look at this article. First sentence:
Three members of the legal team known to have been hired so far by special counsel Robert Mueller to handle the Russia investigation have given political donations almost exclusively to Democrats
So *three* members. Three out of five. Three of them have given political donations "almost exclusively" to Democrats. From the use of the word "almost", we can conclude that they didn't give money exclusively to Democrats. It says later in the article that one of the three donated to Jason Chaffetz and George Allen, both Republicans.
And that's just political donations, not active campaigning. It's not terribly uncommon for people to donate some money to a political party. So what do you want? You want to disqualify anyone who ever donated money to a Democratic campaign from working on the investigation? That'd be absurd.
As for Robert Mueller himself has close ties to Comey. While is in of itself isn't a problem per se, it's highly biased.
You mean biased toward ethics and fair enforcement of the law? I'll take that bias. And if Mueller is so terrible, why was he being considered for the head of the FBI? Why was he appointed by the Deputy Attorney General. Why is it that of all the major Republican figures, only Trump has anything bad to say about Mueller?
I mean, exercise a little judgement. Think for yourself, at least a little bit.
Oh please. Robert Mueller investigation into Trump is staffed with people whom have had direct campaigning with the Clintons.
So first, I've heard about this accusation, and then heard disputes, claiming that some people had been somewhat involved with campaigning for Clinton, while others were Republicans. I haven't investigated that myself, but it seemed worth mentioning.
And honestly, beside all of that, these people are respected independent investigators. And even if they were biased against Trump, it's not entirely a conflict of interest for an investigator to be biased against the people they're investigating. If a police officer is investigating you for murder, it's not really a defense to say, "I must be innocent because the police officer doesn't like me." If a police officer thinks that you're a murderer, you could expect that he wouldn't like you. It'd be far more of a conflict of interest for the investigator to be a political ally.
If you had some evidence that Mueller is trying to frame Trump or misrepresent the facts, that'd be one thing. As far as I've heard, no one reputable has raised any doubt about Mueller's ethics.
And beside all that, they've already been caught. No need for a fishing expedition. No need to frame anyone. The Trump campaign colluded with Russia. First the defense was, "we didn't collude," then it was, "we colluded a little, but there wasn't anything illegal," and now it's turned into, "it may have been a little illegal, but those laws don't count." We know there were meetings with people representing the Russian government to coordinate efforts to influence the election, which coincided with Russia hacking Democrats, hacking election systems, and pushing an advanced propaganda campaign. There were multiple meetings and communications between many people in the Trump campaign and the Russians, they tried to hide it, they lied about it under oath, and now they're caught.
There's still work for investigators to do. It's not enough to know it. They need hard proof of violation of specific laws. They want to know exactly what was done, how, and by whom. That'll take a while. But we already know they did it.
I don't particularly doubt that *someone* in the government would give verbal approval. I doubt that there's someone in the government who has the authority and influence to give verbal approval and have it mean anything.
Trump says:
Putin & I discussed forming an impenetrable Cyber Security unit so that election hacking, & many other negative things, will be guarded..
To which I can only say, at least he's being honest. He wants to guard the election hacking and many other negative things. He's not saying that he wants to guard against election hacking, but he wants to guard the election hacking to prevent American law enforcement from interfering and allowing fair elections.
Seriously, though, we need to get this guy out of office. Just yesterday, he admitted that he wouldn't have appointed Sessions to Attorney General if he'd known that Sessions wasn't going to help cover up his campaign's collusion with the Russian government. Even if Putin weren't involved, Trump's involvement already means that this wouldn't should not be trusted with the security of our elections.
Yeah. They're trying to make it so you can't get the latest OS on old hardware, and you can't use the latest hardware on an older OS.
I can see a few possible reasons that Microsoft would want to do this. First, and most innocently, they could be trying to limit OS development costs by shrinking the amount of hardware they have to support. In a sense, they may be trying to emulate Apple, which supports far less hardware and is quick to break backward compatibility, generally producing faster development with a better user experience. A lot of the instability in Windows is actually caused by bad drivers, so limiting their hardware support should help with that.
Second, as you point out, breaking compatibility this way keeps customers on the upgrade treadmill. Forcing people to buy a new workstation also means buying a new OEM copy of Windows, which is pretty much the only way people buy Windows. I could also see them start to break backward compatibility support in the OS, like making an OS update that is no longer compatible with old versions of Office, for example, prodding people to sign up for Office 365.
And in that sense, this could also be just another way that Microsoft is looking to expand their control. Years ago, Microsoft starting pushing Activation and WGA. We've seen Microsoft pushing updates more aggressively, denying users the ability to control when updates are installed. They tried to push BIOS standards that would prevent people from installing alternate operating systems. We've seen them forcing telemetry into the OS. They've started pushing people into buying software from their app store. More and more, you can't do anything on your computer without Microsoft signing off. Whether or not there's a particular goal, and even regardless of whether this expansion of control is done consciously and deliberately, I'm sure they'll find some use for the control once they have it.
Finally, I could see this being used peripherally to push people into buying a Microsoft hardware device. That may be one of the uses they find for this control, even if it wasn't intended at the outset. For example, I wouldn't be surprised if some laptop you buy from Acer stops being supported in 3 years, but the Surface Pro continues to get updates for an additional couple of years. The discrepancy could even be somewhat justified by the idea, "It's our device, built to the specifications that we thought were good, so it's easier for us to support." Even if they don't explicitly target Microsoft devices, they might say, "We'll only continue to support older devices that have one of these processor models and one of these video cards," and choose processors and video cards that they use in their own devices. If that kind of thing starts happening, people might be more inclined to buy Microsoft devices on the understanding that they're most likely to receive continued support.
Well first, Detroit is just fucked in its own special way. Lots of things went wrong there, and it doesn't make sense to extrapolate.
Second, Detroit does sort of serve to illustrate my point. From what I hear, the downtown area has been improving, and there have been some tech companies setting up shop there. However, things get more bleak as you move outward.
I don't know the exact situation, but I suspect that "the sticks" where you're talking about aren't as remote and rural as the parts of the US I have in mind. I'm talking about areas that are larger than the entire UK, without a major city anywhere in them. Like, you couldn't say, "I'd live around there too, but the housing is too expensive." You would *have to* live in a rural area if you worked there, because it might take hours to drive to anything larger than a small town. And the land is pretty cheap because there's basically nothing out there.
Setting aside the difficulty of giving such preferential treatment to a particular region, it won't really help. The problem isn't actually the contrast between the success of Silicon Valley vs. the implosion of the Rust Belt. The problem is actually more about the success of urban areas vs. the implosion of rural areas. And allowing more H1Bs in rural areas, aside from being difficult to enforce, would be ineffective.
You can have technology startups in any number of cities, but you aren't likely to see many in rural areas. First, because the infrastructure might not be available to support it. Second, because educated tech workers increasingly want to live in more urban areas. Third, because there's a lot of demand for specialized workers, and a fair amount of turnover, which means you need a high population density, which runs entirely contrary to the idea of a "rural area".
And that's not even dealing with the question of whether H1Bs are good for American workers.
You can't just have the government enforce cheap labor in an area and expect that companies are going to flood in. Cheap labor is great, but a lot more goes into running a company than that.
Yeah, honestly, Windows 10 has a lot of improvements over Windows 7. I'd say the improvement is more than incremental, even. And the problem, in my mind, isn't even the UI changes. It's all the forced advertising and telemetry, as well as stripping out various features and control. You don't want to install updates for some reason? Tough. They're being pushed down. You don't want to have your computer reboot randomly on Microsoft's schedule? Sorry, no choice.
If Microsoft would just ease up, they might have a good product that people want.
Ok, he may have gotten his number from the same place.
I don't even know if I care that much. I just wanted to know where the numbers came from.
What did they get wrong? It seems like they got the right mythological creature.
Oh, that. I wouldn't put too much stock in that. That's market share in terms of the "market" being a website's audience, and their numbers are derived from a subset of sites. That doesn't tell you how many computers are running a given OS, but how many web browsers reporting that OS are visiting a specific selection of sites.
If I had to guess, I'd guess that 26% isn't actually "market share", but install base, or maybe some kind of adoption metric. I don't know what it means, either.
So someone posted what you thought might be a bullshit number, and you responded by making up different numbers?
I'm not asking you to cite a source, no. I'm just wondering what market you're talking about, if that makes sense. Like Macs have (last I saw) somewhere around a 15% market share of the PC market, so 3% sounds lower than I'd expect. Now, my number might not be right, but I'm not sure if you're talking about a different thing.
Market share in terms of OS purchases? I'm not sure when you'd count a MacOS purchase. Do Windows upgrades count as purchases? Do Mac upgrades? Do free Linux installs count as purchases?
Do you see what I mean? I'm not looking for a citation, just a vague idea of what those numbers mean.
You'll have to point me to someplace that describes the distinction you're aiming for here. I'm honestly not sure what you're getting at.
What I'm going to say may sound crazy, but this is honestly what I think Microsoft should do:
Open source Windows. Not every single thing, every single feature, but most of it. Make it so, if a home user wants to use Windows 10, they can just download and use a free version of it. If they really want, they could still make the licensing such that OEMs would need to pay a small licensing fee to include it bundled on a new system, saying that the open source license is for non-commercial use only. They may lose some purchases of Windows licenses from home users, but excluding OEMs, how many of those are there?
They can reap the rewards of open source software without losing much.
Among the things that they don't open source, put those features into office 365 licensing. Basically, make it so you can get an open source version of Windows Home for free. Take some of the Pro/Enterprise features that individual users might want, and bundle them into the Office 365 individual licenses. Take the features that businesses might want, and bundle them into the Business and Enterprise plans.
Doing it this way would win them huge points with the FOSS crowd, simplify their licensing, and provide additional incentive for businesses to use their subscriptions (which is what they really want anyway). Plus, it just makes everything simpler.
You can say the idea is stupid, but they're trying to force everyone to use Windows 10, and they're saying they don't plan to come out with a Windows 11. Purchases of new Windows versions will only come through OEMs regardless. I honestly think they'd have a lot to gain, and not much to lose.