It was one of the least militarized cities in Japan, which is why it had been so little touched by conventional bombings.
Not exactly. There actually was an important military base in the city (headquarters of the Japanese 5th Division and the 2nd Army Headquarters.), as well as many industrial targets, and it was an important port city. Keep in mind that Japan had converted most private enterprises and even many homes into places of war materiel production. There was no such thing as a non-militarized city in Japan at that time. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and several other cities had not been bombed only because they had been taken off the bombing list some time before. The idea was to keep some prime targets "pristine", so accurate bomb damage assessment could be done afterwards. Everyone was well aware there would be massive civilian casualties.
Truman knew exactly what he was doing, incidentally. It was true he had moral qualms, but it was reported his Secretary of State told him "What will you say, Mr. President, at your impeachment proceeding, when the American people learn that you had a weapon which could have ended the war and did not use it?" The US leadership also feared the planned invasion of Japan by the Soviet Union, with the real threat of Japan being split into a communist and democratic zones similar to Germany. The bombing was seen as the quickest and surest way to end the Pacific war
Many in the US leadership and military brass had also been wildly optimistic about the "imminent collapse of Nazi Germany", after which the fighting had gone on for half a year still. History is fairly clear that the Japanese were unlikely to surrender before the bombing. Even after the two atomic bombs were dropped and the Soviet Union joined the war, the Japanese military leadership was still evenly split about whether to continue the war. It took the emperor to make the final decision. Even after the emperor publicly surrendered (without ever using the word 'surrender' or 'defeat' in his speech), a small group of Japanese officers actually mutinied and invaded the palace, fortunately not succeeding.
pranksters plant signs that mess with their vehicles
Pranksters planting signs? Hmm... how many times have I actually seen this in my entire lifetime? Oh yeah... zero. Let's see... how easy would it be to simply put a logical limiter so it doesn't ever read 170mpg instead of 70mph? Trivial.
This technology is simply an incremental step to a completely autonomous car, in case you didn't figure that out. You're going to see more and more incremental steps like this as we move along the path first to partially autonomous and finally fully autonomous vehicles over the next decade or two.
"It's nothing but a short-term profit grab" What else have US corporations become in the last 20 to 30 years?
Amazon is a pretty good example of bucking the trend. They've caused plenty of conniptions among the Wall Street "in-crowd" by eschewing short term profits, and instead investing in long term strategies. Look at where they're at compared to IBM now. Wall street only cares about the next quarter's earnings.
Or is it USA?
The US doesn't have the explosive growth of China (which is showing signs of slowing, btw), but that's only because China is transitioning from third-world to first-world status. That doesn't mean the US is necessarily in decline, just that it's relative dominance is decreasing. There's nothing wrong with that. We'll remain competitive for the foreseeable future, because this is still a country where start-ups can make it big. When that changes, you know we'll be in trouble.
On the other hand, don't count your chickens before they are hatched; remember IBM was also dead back in the nineties
Notice I said a *slow death*. They've been declining for a while. Given their size, they can still probably hold out for another couple of decades, but unless they take some radical reforming steps, like cutting down it's 13 layers of management and bureaucracy, and actually attempting to innovate rather than simply grabbing onto anything that looks profitable (like this boneheaded move), they'll just dwindle down to nothing. Remember, it took about fifteen years for Kodak to implode from when they were still a behemoth. Sheer inertia can keep a massive company going for a very long time.
I think you're underestimating how easily and quickly both technology and infrastructure can be copied given a concerted effort. The Chinese are absolutely brilliant at creating clones of American-designed products. What can take generations to invent for the first time can be duplicated in mere years. Consider the case of the Americans and the atomic bomb technology, and how quickly the Russians achieved parity. Or consider Germany's initial lead in rocketry and then the US / Russia catching up to them in mere years. This is all done with high-level transfer of knowledge. Once you know how something is done, it's much, much easier to duplicate those results rather than inventing all that technology through expensive R&D the first time.
China has clearly indicated that they're not interested in long-term relationships with the west in terms of critical technological infrastructure, and honestly, I can't really blame them. Would we want to buy Chinese-designed operating systems and computer systems? We're already starting to become wary of products *built* in China, let alone designed there. They're going to absorb and utilized the knowledge gained from IBM far faster than people are predicting, and once their industry is kick-started, they'll say goodbye to IBM. This is essentially a one-time sale for IBM - they're just selling off their IP and expertise for short term profits.
However nuanced you believe this move to be, I just don't see it that way. It's nothing but a short-term profit grab that will hurt IBM in the long run. You don't see the most successful tech companies racing to sell their IP or expertise to the Chinese... only their manufacturing. And that's only if they feel it's worth giving up their control over that process - note that Intel keeps it's fab plants mostly in the US or other first-world countries. That's because IP/expertise *is* the crown jewels of a tech company.
IBM is already dying a slow death, desperate to snap out of years of declining revenue. This will just hasten it by a few more years.
And this will be the last of the money made by IBM in China. They're going to spend a few more years teaching other companies everything they know, and then the Chinese will kick them out and undercut them with their own technology. Just brilliant, IBM. *golf clap* Now they're actually training their own competitors for some short term profits.
If you haven't yet sold your IBM stocks in the last few decades, now might be the time to do so.
I've always rationalized it like this: in the films, they always showed the last shot that blew up the ship, since that was more dramatic. In addition to the Y-Wing squad leader you mentioned, Porkins ship was damaged and ultimately destroyed by the turret fire from the Death Star's tower cannons (very similar to WW2 flak towers, btw).
The shield on Hoth was explained via dialogue. Not only did it make for my favorite battle in the entire serious, it was specifically designed as protection against bombardment from space. By the time the shield went down, the base was nearly evacuated of personnel, and the imperial troops were already closing in. Obviously, a massed ground attack was NOT what Darth Vader had in mind as an optimal strategy, and as we saw, it gave the rebels just enough time to evacuate and scatter. I've always wondered what Vader would have done instead.
Oh, and I forgot a huge shield-related plot point in the original Star Wars movie: "The shaft is ray-shielded so you'll have to use proton torpedoes".
In the original trilogy, I don't recall seeing the shields themselves, but both the rebels (on Hoth) and the empire (on Endor) protected their assets with large, ground-based shield generators. There are also references in the dialogue as well ("Switch your deflectors on - double front!").
It's nothing but a metaphorical representation, not a percentage or actual time. It was born in an age when people genuinely feared that nuclear Armageddon may happen any day, and seemed to capture those fears in an evocative manner. Nowadays, it's much less relevant, as the fears of an all-out nuclear war have largely subsided. One could cynically argue that the addition of global warming is simply an attempt to stay relevant.
Incidentally, three minutes to midnight is about as bad as the clock has ever read. The worst is two minutes to midnight in the fifties. The breakup of the Soviet Union and relaxing of global tensions moved it back to 17 minutes to midnight. People will have to decide for themselves whether they think that's an accurate representation of our proximity to Armageddon.
I think the biggest problem I've seen with math teachers is a lack of empathy and context. That is, by nature, math teachers are people who were probably pretty good at math, and found the subject interesting and fun. As such, they can't understand why other people don't find it as fascinating and intuitive as they do. Many people find math to be difficult, frustrating, and completely unnecessary to their lives, at least in the abstract form. In college, I had a professor teaching matrix math who had no idea that it was used in 3D graphics and robotics. He was perfectly fine teaching it in a completely abstract form, which likely left many students wondering "what the hell is this stuff even good for", and "why in the world am I learning this?"
So, the math teachers often explain the concepts in a purely abstract form, and the students are left to try to memorize the rules without understanding the context in which they're learning them. Learning anything without a proper context to frame it in, at least for me, made things 10x harder than it needed to be. It was only when I was long out of school and working in videogames that I finally felt like I found an actual use for trigonometry, geometry,and linear algebra.
The middle class income keeps stagnating and prices keep going up. The first thing to go is entertainment.
Believe it or not, as someone in the entertainment industry (videogames) who has worked through a couple of recessions, my job has been far more recession-resistant than I would have anticipated. No, the first thing to go is expensive luxuries, or other big-ticket items. Even during a recession, most people are still working, and even if they don't have enough for more expensive purchases, they still apparently have enough to buy a videogame or two, go out to see a movie or to dinner, or pay for some music.
I'd blame the major media industry's resistance to new business models more than anything. Oh, and the fact that they target their customers with lawsuits and push shitty laws through Congress. It's no wonder they've engendered such hatred among their customers (not that EA and Activision haven't done the same, of course). I've never understood how companies that make entertainment products can manage to continuously piss off their customers with such regularity.
Swatters have been known to intentionally act irrational/hysterical, and put time pressure on the police. They could talk about how they're going to kill someone in the next hour, and perhaps talk about how they'll kill any police that they see as well. They may tell the police that if anyone tries to call them back or contacts them in any way, they'll kill a hostage.
We got a militarized police force when people started holing up in places with guns, sometimes taking hostages, sometimes just killing people randomly. You talk about how they "just go in armed to the teeth ready to shoot anything that either moves or doesn't move fast enough", yet to my knowledge, no one has actually died as a result of a swatting yet, despite *many* incidents. That demonstrates that those police teams in question are showing a significant level of restraint in what, to their knowledge, may be a life-and-death situation.
It's easy to criticize. It's a bit harder to actually figure out how to solve the problems.
Classic Shell uses DLL injection to get a lot of its functionality to work. This is pretty much the definition of undocumented functionality. You're essentially dynamically inserting code into another process to re-routing function calls to your own code. It allows you to do a lot of really cool things (measuring FPS in any game and displaying it in an overlay, like Fraps), but it's also used by malware writers to do sneaky things (such as hiding itself from the file system or processes viewer).
I have no doubt that the classic shell programmers did a fine job in getting these things to work, but again, it's impossible to know for sure what the side effects may be. In all honesty, classic shell is probably well-vetted enough that there are probably no major issues with it, but I tend to err on the safe side.
Under the covers, Windows 8 is arguably superior to Windows 7 in many ways, such as performance, account syncing, improved multi-monitor support, storage pools, etc. I'd have to give equal marks to stability simply because it's hard to get better than "never crashing". I've actually never seen Windows Vista or Windows 7 crash (except for a case of bad RAM). It's just that they really screwed up the UX in Windows 8, making the mouse + keyboard user without a touch interface a second-class citizen.
I also don't think it's acceptable have to install third-party shells that hook into the guts of Windows with all sorts of undocumented APIs (meaning you have no real idea what it will do to security or stability of the system), essentially giving MS a pass for screwing it up in the first place.
So, no, it's not a terrible OS by any means. I just feel that it's worse than Windows 7.
Have you seen those pictures? So... this apparently isn't some sneaky "we couldn't tell they were cheating" issue. This was the examiners apparently not caring at all about blatant cheating going on right in front of them. I mean, you really can't miss this, right? That being the case, why wouldn't the students just hide the crib sheets on them somehow, or cheat in a way that's not quite as likely to involve a family member falling to death from outside the building's third and fourth story windows?
Can anyone give a plausible explanation? I'm genuinely curious.
From a Windows user to Mac users, my condolences if you're forced to use Windows 8. You'll probably see what Windows users were bitching about. I'd definitely recommend you just skip it and move straight to Windows 10, as it's got most of the cooler features and internal improvement of 8 and much less of the crap.
Oh, and it will fit in nicely with the flat-looking aesthetic that both Microsoft and Apple designers are apparently still madly in love with. You'll note that Apple designers, of course, can still make that look fairly decent, while Microsoft, as you'd expect, just makes it look hideous.
My curiosity got the better of me, and I wanted to see if the article actually sounded as much like an insane manifesto as the summary indicated. Damn, it's actually worse! This is a childish, incoherent, first-world-problem rant of epic proportions. She doesn't just Godwin her own article. She pulls off a double Godwin. She not only brings up the Nazis, but Stalin and the Soviet gulag are thrown there in a few times for good measure. Also, I couldn't help but notice the word "optimize" and its variations appears 40 times in this article, if you include the title. Quite the subtle theme, huh?
If you must read this tripe, please only do so for sheer entertainment value. Any attempt to actually extract a coherent point from this blathering is in for a stress-induced headache. Fortunately, this is Slashdot, so it's likely I'm the only one who will bother actually reading TFA.
Extremely monocultural? As opposed to the US, where... what, if I recall correctly, Linux has a 1.5% desktop market share and Macs are around 5% or so? South Korea is certainly worse off, but honestly, it's a little hard to argue about a "monoculture" in South Korea when in reality it's only a few percentage points away from the rest of the world in terms of PC OSes.
Besides, more and more people are moving away from PCs to phones and phablets for day to day computing needs, and Samsung phones (and Android in general) are much popular than iOS over there. That article was written in 2007, before smartphones really took hold of the market like today. Is it still a monoculture if everyone has Windows computers but the vast majority use Linux-powered Android smartphones, and the rest are iOS phones?
At the very least, getting away from ActiveX is a good start, not just because it will help to eliminate the lock-in of Windows for PCs, but because it's a dead-end technology anyhow. Here's hoping they don't rewrite their web apps using Silverlight!
Most likely because Microsoft will give them an additional discount. It is how MS controls the OEMs - do it this way or lose $5 discount on every one of the million PCs you will make this year. It worked for Netbooks.
I would think that doing this would open themselves up for another anti-trust lawsuit. Seriously, the 99% dominant player is paying OEMs to lock out the 1% player, the only real alternative for PCs? Both they and Google have gotten into anti-trust trouble for a hell of a lot less.
Doing what you suggested seems incredibly risky just to quash their "competition" which has never measured more than a statistical margin of error, and in a computer demographic of lessening importance, no less. However evil people may think MS is, I just don't think they'd be that stupid.
Enforcing FCC regulations is not quite as arbitrary as you make it sound. My understanding is that the FCC has clearly stated in writing exactly how they intend to apply the Title II rules to ISPs. In order to change their enforcement, a vote is required by the FCC commissioners on new policies. I don't believe they can just change their enforcement policies on a whim.
To be honest, I wasn't entirely happy with the internet becoming government regulated either, but let's face it: the ISPs had free reign for quite some time, and they eventually couldn't seem to help themselves in pooping all over their customers, because (surprise) we have no real competition in the industry. I would have been much happier if we enacted legislation to ensure proper competition, but for whatever reason, that seemed like a dead end.
I guess at this point we have no choice but to wait and see how it plays out.
Who says that this car necessarily belongs to the teenage driver? It may belong to the parent, and they just give the kids their own keys which activate these features. I didn't own a car for the first several years that I was driving, and just borrowed one of my parents' vehicles (a Honda Civic stickshift or an old full-sized Ford van). If I had a teenager about to start driving and wanted a new car for the family, this would be an attractive feature for when they started borrowing the car.
Also, people seem overly-preoccupied about these being new cars. Well, naturally any new feature is going to be introduced first in new cars. After a few years, guess what? This feature will also be available in used cars!
If something has compromised your system at the boot sector level, your entire machine is now completely compromised as well. What other option is there? Give the user a warning that they'll just ignore and click through?
One would assume these computers have some sort of "rescue disc" to boot from external media, recover data, and then reinstall the OS and core software.
Microsoft is now saying that OEM hardware that doesn't allow disabling secure boot would still be "Windows 10 certified". What's in it for the OEM to do this? Why would they purposefully lock their customers out of a choice of OSes? I have a hard time seeing this happening for PCs. It seems more likely that this is actually intended for smaller-form-factor hardware like phones or tablets, similar to how Apple attempts to lock down the devices they sell. It's hard to say since all versions of the new OS are simply called "Windows 10".
Regarding PCs though, I can think of nothing that would generate a new anti-trust lawsuit faster than this. MS had better walk damn carefully here if they do ANYTHING that could be perceived as unfairly locking Linux and other OSes from PC hardware. Frankly, I think the first OEM to try this is going to generate a shitstorm of controversy the moment an unsuspecting user tries to install Linux in a secondary partition or to replace Windows altogether. While it's good to be aware of this and watch to see how things go, I don't think the sky is falling quite yet.
So, that being said... Can anyone explain to me why Microsoft can use the Secure Boot feature but Linux can't offer the same as an "out of the box" experience? Or why Windows can apparently be patched and continue to work, while Linux somehow can't? Is this true for Linux in general, or just for people who modify and compile their own kernel (which I'm guessing probably isn't that many)?
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It was one of the least militarized cities in Japan, which is why it had been so little touched by conventional bombings.
Not exactly. There actually was an important military base in the city (headquarters of the Japanese 5th Division and the 2nd Army Headquarters.), as well as many industrial targets, and it was an important port city. Keep in mind that Japan had converted most private enterprises and even many homes into places of war materiel production. There was no such thing as a non-militarized city in Japan at that time. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and several other cities had not been bombed only because they had been taken off the bombing list some time before. The idea was to keep some prime targets "pristine", so accurate bomb damage assessment could be done afterwards. Everyone was well aware there would be massive civilian casualties.
Truman knew exactly what he was doing, incidentally. It was true he had moral qualms, but it was reported his Secretary of State told him "What will you say, Mr. President, at your impeachment proceeding, when the American people learn that you had a weapon which could have ended the war and did not use it?" The US leadership also feared the planned invasion of Japan by the Soviet Union, with the real threat of Japan being split into a communist and democratic zones similar to Germany. The bombing was seen as the quickest and surest way to end the Pacific war
Many in the US leadership and military brass had also been wildly optimistic about the "imminent collapse of Nazi Germany", after which the fighting had gone on for half a year still. History is fairly clear that the Japanese were unlikely to surrender before the bombing. Even after the two atomic bombs were dropped and the Soviet Union joined the war, the Japanese military leadership was still evenly split about whether to continue the war. It took the emperor to make the final decision. Even after the emperor publicly surrendered (without ever using the word 'surrender' or 'defeat' in his speech), a small group of Japanese officers actually mutinied and invaded the palace, fortunately not succeeding.
pranksters plant signs that mess with their vehicles
Pranksters planting signs? Hmm... how many times have I actually seen this in my entire lifetime? Oh yeah... zero. Let's see... how easy would it be to simply put a logical limiter so it doesn't ever read 170mpg instead of 70mph? Trivial.
This technology is simply an incremental step to a completely autonomous car, in case you didn't figure that out. You're going to see more and more incremental steps like this as we move along the path first to partially autonomous and finally fully autonomous vehicles over the next decade or two.
I think we've got a long way to go to catch up to India or China.
"It's nothing but a short-term profit grab" What else have US corporations become in the last 20 to 30 years?
Amazon is a pretty good example of bucking the trend. They've caused plenty of conniptions among the Wall Street "in-crowd" by eschewing short term profits, and instead investing in long term strategies. Look at where they're at compared to IBM now. Wall street only cares about the next quarter's earnings.
Or is it USA?
The US doesn't have the explosive growth of China (which is showing signs of slowing, btw), but that's only because China is transitioning from third-world to first-world status. That doesn't mean the US is necessarily in decline, just that it's relative dominance is decreasing. There's nothing wrong with that. We'll remain competitive for the foreseeable future, because this is still a country where start-ups can make it big. When that changes, you know we'll be in trouble.
On the other hand, don't count your chickens before they are hatched; remember IBM was also dead back in the nineties
Notice I said a *slow death*. They've been declining for a while. Given their size, they can still probably hold out for another couple of decades, but unless they take some radical reforming steps, like cutting down it's 13 layers of management and bureaucracy, and actually attempting to innovate rather than simply grabbing onto anything that looks profitable (like this boneheaded move), they'll just dwindle down to nothing. Remember, it took about fifteen years for Kodak to implode from when they were still a behemoth. Sheer inertia can keep a massive company going for a very long time.
I think you're underestimating how easily and quickly both technology and infrastructure can be copied given a concerted effort. The Chinese are absolutely brilliant at creating clones of American-designed products. What can take generations to invent for the first time can be duplicated in mere years. Consider the case of the Americans and the atomic bomb technology, and how quickly the Russians achieved parity. Or consider Germany's initial lead in rocketry and then the US / Russia catching up to them in mere years. This is all done with high-level transfer of knowledge. Once you know how something is done, it's much, much easier to duplicate those results rather than inventing all that technology through expensive R&D the first time.
China has clearly indicated that they're not interested in long-term relationships with the west in terms of critical technological infrastructure, and honestly, I can't really blame them. Would we want to buy Chinese-designed operating systems and computer systems? We're already starting to become wary of products *built* in China, let alone designed there. They're going to absorb and utilized the knowledge gained from IBM far faster than people are predicting, and once their industry is kick-started, they'll say goodbye to IBM. This is essentially a one-time sale for IBM - they're just selling off their IP and expertise for short term profits.
However nuanced you believe this move to be, I just don't see it that way. It's nothing but a short-term profit grab that will hurt IBM in the long run. You don't see the most successful tech companies racing to sell their IP or expertise to the Chinese... only their manufacturing. And that's only if they feel it's worth giving up their control over that process - note that Intel keeps it's fab plants mostly in the US or other first-world countries. That's because IP/expertise *is* the crown jewels of a tech company.
IBM is already dying a slow death, desperate to snap out of years of declining revenue. This will just hasten it by a few more years.
And this will be the last of the money made by IBM in China. They're going to spend a few more years teaching other companies everything they know, and then the Chinese will kick them out and undercut them with their own technology. Just brilliant, IBM. *golf clap* Now they're actually training their own competitors for some short term profits.
If you haven't yet sold your IBM stocks in the last few decades, now might be the time to do so.
I've always rationalized it like this: in the films, they always showed the last shot that blew up the ship, since that was more dramatic. In addition to the Y-Wing squad leader you mentioned, Porkins ship was damaged and ultimately destroyed by the turret fire from the Death Star's tower cannons (very similar to WW2 flak towers, btw).
The shield on Hoth was explained via dialogue. Not only did it make for my favorite battle in the entire serious, it was specifically designed as protection against bombardment from space. By the time the shield went down, the base was nearly evacuated of personnel, and the imperial troops were already closing in. Obviously, a massed ground attack was NOT what Darth Vader had in mind as an optimal strategy, and as we saw, it gave the rebels just enough time to evacuate and scatter. I've always wondered what Vader would have done instead.
Oh, and I forgot a huge shield-related plot point in the original Star Wars movie: "The shaft is ray-shielded so you'll have to use proton torpedoes".
In the prequels, we saw them on the Naboo fighter ships. Also, don't forget the destroyer droids with their bubble shields, and the Gungans with their animal-mounted battlefield shields, and even hand-held shields. There are plenty more examples from the next two movies as well.
In the original trilogy, I don't recall seeing the shields themselves, but both the rebels (on Hoth) and the empire (on Endor) protected their assets with large, ground-based shield generators. There are also references in the dialogue as well ("Switch your deflectors on - double front!").
You really blocked out a lot, didn't you...
It's nothing but a metaphorical representation, not a percentage or actual time. It was born in an age when people genuinely feared that nuclear Armageddon may happen any day, and seemed to capture those fears in an evocative manner. Nowadays, it's much less relevant, as the fears of an all-out nuclear war have largely subsided. One could cynically argue that the addition of global warming is simply an attempt to stay relevant.
Incidentally, three minutes to midnight is about as bad as the clock has ever read. The worst is two minutes to midnight in the fifties. The breakup of the Soviet Union and relaxing of global tensions moved it back to 17 minutes to midnight. People will have to decide for themselves whether they think that's an accurate representation of our proximity to Armageddon.
Math teachers are terrible at teaching math.
I think the biggest problem I've seen with math teachers is a lack of empathy and context. That is, by nature, math teachers are people who were probably pretty good at math, and found the subject interesting and fun. As such, they can't understand why other people don't find it as fascinating and intuitive as they do. Many people find math to be difficult, frustrating, and completely unnecessary to their lives, at least in the abstract form. In college, I had a professor teaching matrix math who had no idea that it was used in 3D graphics and robotics. He was perfectly fine teaching it in a completely abstract form, which likely left many students wondering "what the hell is this stuff even good for", and "why in the world am I learning this?"
So, the math teachers often explain the concepts in a purely abstract form, and the students are left to try to memorize the rules without understanding the context in which they're learning them. Learning anything without a proper context to frame it in, at least for me, made things 10x harder than it needed to be. It was only when I was long out of school and working in videogames that I finally felt like I found an actual use for trigonometry, geometry,and linear algebra.
Heh, I was hoping you'd get a chance to read it after the effort I put into typing all that up. ;-)
The middle class income keeps stagnating and prices keep going up. The first thing to go is entertainment.
Believe it or not, as someone in the entertainment industry (videogames) who has worked through a couple of recessions, my job has been far more recession-resistant than I would have anticipated. No, the first thing to go is expensive luxuries, or other big-ticket items. Even during a recession, most people are still working, and even if they don't have enough for more expensive purchases, they still apparently have enough to buy a videogame or two, go out to see a movie or to dinner, or pay for some music.
I'd blame the major media industry's resistance to new business models more than anything. Oh, and the fact that they target their customers with lawsuits and push shitty laws through Congress. It's no wonder they've engendered such hatred among their customers (not that EA and Activision haven't done the same, of course). I've never understood how companies that make entertainment products can manage to continuously piss off their customers with such regularity.
Swatters have been known to intentionally act irrational/hysterical, and put time pressure on the police. They could talk about how they're going to kill someone in the next hour, and perhaps talk about how they'll kill any police that they see as well. They may tell the police that if anyone tries to call them back or contacts them in any way, they'll kill a hostage.
This leaves the police in a quandary. In the case of the Columbine school shootings, the police were criticized for waiting too long before moving in, and subsequently changed their tactics. Now they're criticized for rushing in too soon.
We got a militarized police force when people started holing up in places with guns, sometimes taking hostages, sometimes just killing people randomly. You talk about how they "just go in armed to the teeth ready to shoot anything that either moves or doesn't move fast enough", yet to my knowledge, no one has actually died as a result of a swatting yet, despite *many* incidents. That demonstrates that those police teams in question are showing a significant level of restraint in what, to their knowledge, may be a life-and-death situation.
It's easy to criticize. It's a bit harder to actually figure out how to solve the problems.
Classic Shell uses DLL injection to get a lot of its functionality to work. This is pretty much the definition of undocumented functionality. You're essentially dynamically inserting code into another process to re-routing function calls to your own code. It allows you to do a lot of really cool things (measuring FPS in any game and displaying it in an overlay, like Fraps), but it's also used by malware writers to do sneaky things (such as hiding itself from the file system or processes viewer).
Undocumented APIs are used by a lot of programmers. It's not all that hard, and many of them are "documented" outside of official channels, like this one: NtCreateThreadEx(), which is used to perform said dll-injection.
I have no doubt that the classic shell programmers did a fine job in getting these things to work, but again, it's impossible to know for sure what the side effects may be. In all honesty, classic shell is probably well-vetted enough that there are probably no major issues with it, but I tend to err on the safe side.
Under the covers, Windows 8 is arguably superior to Windows 7 in many ways, such as performance, account syncing, improved multi-monitor support, storage pools, etc. I'd have to give equal marks to stability simply because it's hard to get better than "never crashing". I've actually never seen Windows Vista or Windows 7 crash (except for a case of bad RAM). It's just that they really screwed up the UX in Windows 8, making the mouse + keyboard user without a touch interface a second-class citizen.
I also don't think it's acceptable have to install third-party shells that hook into the guts of Windows with all sorts of undocumented APIs (meaning you have no real idea what it will do to security or stability of the system), essentially giving MS a pass for screwing it up in the first place.
So, no, it's not a terrible OS by any means. I just feel that it's worse than Windows 7.
Have you seen those pictures? So... this apparently isn't some sneaky "we couldn't tell they were cheating" issue. This was the examiners apparently not caring at all about blatant cheating going on right in front of them. I mean, you really can't miss this, right? That being the case, why wouldn't the students just hide the crib sheets on them somehow, or cheat in a way that's not quite as likely to involve a family member falling to death from outside the building's third and fourth story windows?
Can anyone give a plausible explanation? I'm genuinely curious.
From a Windows user to Mac users, my condolences if you're forced to use Windows 8. You'll probably see what Windows users were bitching about. I'd definitely recommend you just skip it and move straight to Windows 10, as it's got most of the cooler features and internal improvement of 8 and much less of the crap.
Oh, and it will fit in nicely with the flat-looking aesthetic that both Microsoft and Apple designers are apparently still madly in love with. You'll note that Apple designers, of course, can still make that look fairly decent, while Microsoft, as you'd expect, just makes it look hideous.
My curiosity got the better of me, and I wanted to see if the article actually sounded as much like an insane manifesto as the summary indicated. Damn, it's actually worse! This is a childish, incoherent, first-world-problem rant of epic proportions. She doesn't just Godwin her own article. She pulls off a double Godwin. She not only brings up the Nazis, but Stalin and the Soviet gulag are thrown there in a few times for good measure. Also, I couldn't help but notice the word "optimize" and its variations appears 40 times in this article, if you include the title. Quite the subtle theme, huh?
If you must read this tripe, please only do so for sheer entertainment value. Any attempt to actually extract a coherent point from this blathering is in for a stress-induced headache. Fortunately, this is Slashdot, so it's likely I'm the only one who will bother actually reading TFA.
Extremely monocultural? As opposed to the US, where... what, if I recall correctly, Linux has a 1.5% desktop market share and Macs are around 5% or so? South Korea is certainly worse off, but honestly, it's a little hard to argue about a "monoculture" in South Korea when in reality it's only a few percentage points away from the rest of the world in terms of PC OSes.
Besides, more and more people are moving away from PCs to phones and phablets for day to day computing needs, and Samsung phones (and Android in general) are much popular than iOS over there. That article was written in 2007, before smartphones really took hold of the market like today. Is it still a monoculture if everyone has Windows computers but the vast majority use Linux-powered Android smartphones, and the rest are iOS phones?
At the very least, getting away from ActiveX is a good start, not just because it will help to eliminate the lock-in of Windows for PCs, but because it's a dead-end technology anyhow. Here's hoping they don't rewrite their web apps using Silverlight!
Thank you, giant asteroid.
Most likely because Microsoft will give them an additional discount. It is how MS controls the OEMs - do it this way or lose $5 discount on every one of the million PCs you will make this year. It worked for Netbooks.
I would think that doing this would open themselves up for another anti-trust lawsuit. Seriously, the 99% dominant player is paying OEMs to lock out the 1% player, the only real alternative for PCs? Both they and Google have gotten into anti-trust trouble for a hell of a lot less.
Doing what you suggested seems incredibly risky just to quash their "competition" which has never measured more than a statistical margin of error, and in a computer demographic of lessening importance, no less. However evil people may think MS is, I just don't think they'd be that stupid.
Who knows... maybe I'm overestimating them.
Enforcing FCC regulations is not quite as arbitrary as you make it sound. My understanding is that the FCC has clearly stated in writing exactly how they intend to apply the Title II rules to ISPs. In order to change their enforcement, a vote is required by the FCC commissioners on new policies. I don't believe they can just change their enforcement policies on a whim.
To be honest, I wasn't entirely happy with the internet becoming government regulated either, but let's face it: the ISPs had free reign for quite some time, and they eventually couldn't seem to help themselves in pooping all over their customers, because (surprise) we have no real competition in the industry. I would have been much happier if we enacted legislation to ensure proper competition, but for whatever reason, that seemed like a dead end.
I guess at this point we have no choice but to wait and see how it plays out.
Who says that this car necessarily belongs to the teenage driver? It may belong to the parent, and they just give the kids their own keys which activate these features. I didn't own a car for the first several years that I was driving, and just borrowed one of my parents' vehicles (a Honda Civic stickshift or an old full-sized Ford van). If I had a teenager about to start driving and wanted a new car for the family, this would be an attractive feature for when they started borrowing the car.
Also, people seem overly-preoccupied about these being new cars. Well, naturally any new feature is going to be introduced first in new cars. After a few years, guess what? This feature will also be available in used cars!
If something has compromised your system at the boot sector level, your entire machine is now completely compromised as well. What other option is there? Give the user a warning that they'll just ignore and click through?
One would assume these computers have some sort of "rescue disc" to boot from external media, recover data, and then reinstall the OS and core software.
Microsoft is now saying that OEM hardware that doesn't allow disabling secure boot would still be "Windows 10 certified". What's in it for the OEM to do this? Why would they purposefully lock their customers out of a choice of OSes? I have a hard time seeing this happening for PCs. It seems more likely that this is actually intended for smaller-form-factor hardware like phones or tablets, similar to how Apple attempts to lock down the devices they sell. It's hard to say since all versions of the new OS are simply called "Windows 10".
Regarding PCs though, I can think of nothing that would generate a new anti-trust lawsuit faster than this. MS had better walk damn carefully here if they do ANYTHING that could be perceived as unfairly locking Linux and other OSes from PC hardware. Frankly, I think the first OEM to try this is going to generate a shitstorm of controversy the moment an unsuspecting user tries to install Linux in a secondary partition or to replace Windows altogether. While it's good to be aware of this and watch to see how things go, I don't think the sky is falling quite yet.
So, that being said... Can anyone explain to me why Microsoft can use the Secure Boot feature but Linux can't offer the same as an "out of the box" experience? Or why Windows can apparently be patched and continue to work, while Linux somehow can't? Is this true for Linux in general, or just for people who modify and compile their own kernel (which I'm guessing probably isn't that many)?