The fact that few people seem to know this could be part of Yahoo's problem. They just don't seem to have a strong corporate identify. I'll bet that just about anyone here could tell you what products and services Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, HP, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, and other companies are best known for. For Yahoo, I probably would have answered "mediocre e-mail, crappy search, and some decent services like news and Flickr", but beyond that, I really had no idea.
I agree. C++ has really seen something of a renaissance in the last few years with C++ 11 and 14. CPU core speed has flattened, and people are realizing that efficiency isn't really something that can be ignored in many cases. Moreover, C++ is and always has been a very portable language, as you can compile it on just about every platform imaginable.
Nowadays, you can write C++ and be assured that you'll rarely have to even think about explicit memory management or leaks. Moreover, what really surprised me was how I actually now prefer the simpler, more versatile, and more predictable referece-counted paradigm over managed memory and garbage collection. The lack of a destructor mechanism means that releasing resources in a predictable manner tends to be a bit less elegant because it's handled in a different way. In C++, memory is just like any other resource.
A lot of people talk about the complexity of C++. There are a couple of things to remember. C++ IS a pretty big and complex language of course, but you don't necessarily have to actually deal with much of that complexity in many circumstances. First, a lot of complexity is related to it's own backwards compatibility both with C and it's own early features. Unless you're maintaining or interfacing with old code, many of those features are largely irrelevant when writing modern C++. If that's not the case, you either have some exceptional circumstances, a very old codebase, or you're not really using the language correctly. Second, C++ can be viewed as two different languages: one suited for library writers, and one for library users (or application programmers). Writing C++ for use in languages can actually be rather difficult - it should be viewed as expert-level language skills. However, C++ actually makes it extremely easy to use a library. And in fact, a well designed library should actually be very difficult to use incorrectly, especially when compared to C.
The language definitely has it's strengths and weaknesses, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it for everything. I'd say C++ starts to really shine when you talk about extremes. If you need your program on a lot of different platforms, need it to run extremely fast, or it has to run with extremely limited constraints, or it's an exceptionally large and complex program, then C++ may be a good fit.
As of January 2015, the U6 rate is at 11.3%, from a high of 17.1% in 2009-10. U6 includes discouraged workers (U4 and up) and even "underemployed" workers (part-timers that would prefer to be full time), and so is probably a bit high if you're talking about actual unemployment. No, we're absolutely not at record levels of unemployment.
Moreover, no one uses "percentage of working age people not working" as an unemployment metric (unless you want to inflate the figure), because that includes people who choose not to work, such as spouses of full time workers, students, or those who retire early.
How about the baby boomers? Awesome, more wildly inaccurate statistics. It's not great news, but it's a far cry from what you indicated:
* 33 percent of Boomers have put aside less than $50,000 * Baby Boomers have saved an average of $262,541, about a third of the $805,398 they predict they’ll need at retirement.
I'm not claiming things aren't tough out there, but just pulling made-up statistics out of the air isn't going to inspire confidence in your arguments.
"Phishing" actually makes a bit of sense, as in an attempt to snare victims with a false lure of sorts, such as a phony website. "Spear phishing" is a logical extension of this, a very directed phishing attack made at a particular company, or even a specific person, used to gain corporate access. I thought those were sort of clever, and gave us an accurate way to describe those very common attacks.
This one... yeah, not so much.
According to Wikipedia:
The term "pharming" has been controversial within the field. At a conference organized by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, Phillip Hallam-Baker denounced the term as "a marketing neologism designed to convince banks to buy a new set of security services". Scott Chasin, a former CTO of McAfee and founder of email security firm MX Logic, coined the term in 2005.
Let's just call it what it is: a specific type of phishing attack.
Naturally there's going to be a limit with the current silicon-based technology. At that point, we'll probably see attempts to work in other directions, such as moving into the realm of 3D, using new materials like graphene, silicon-germanian, or even pure germaniam (which could allow for lower voltages, and thus less consumption, tunneling, and leakage), or other techniques that no one has even contemplated yet.
It should be interesting to see whether they'll succeed or not, and what that will mean for the tech industry either way.
However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.
That's because it's nearly impossible to predict specific future technologies with any accuracy. A century ago, no one could have even dreamed of the job I currently have. A decade ago, "mobile app developers" didn't even exist, at least not in any real quantity.
The industry’s newest chips have “pitches” as small as 180 nanometers (billionths of a meter). To accommodate Moore’s Law, according to the biennial “road map” prepared last year for the Semiconductor Industry Association, the pitches need to shrink to 150 nanometers by 2001 and to 100 nanometers by 2005. Alas, the road map admitted, to get there the industry will have to beat fundamental problems to which there are “no known solutions.” If solutions are not discovered quickly, Paul A. Packan, a respected researcher at Intel, argued last September in the journal Science, Moore’s Law will “be in serious danger.”
Most new chips are at 22-28 nanometers now, 14nm chips are gearing up, and 10nm is in the pipeline. It's always amusing to read those types of papers with the benefit of hindsight. Even now you can find 2014 papers saying that 28nm is the last node in Moore's Law.
Prediction: They'll remake these games for the current gen consoles, and when they do, they'll make several mistakes.
1) They'll release new instruments that aren't compatible with the old. 2) All the DLC songs people paid for won't be transferable to the new game. 3) The game will essentially be exactly the same, just with shinier graphics and a few new features no one cares about.
Results: All the old fans are angry, and sales will be lukewarm compared to previous generation sales. Executives will blame the declining market on the poor reception rather than their own greed.
How about educating them on the real history and telling them about your personal disagreement with the new planetary designations?
Personally, as I remember reading about how Pluto was non-spherical and had an overlapping orbit, and thought that it was rather odd for a planet. When I learned about other similar objects that were *not* considered planets, it also seemed fairly odd to me. I never gave it *much* thought of course, and just figured Pluto was to remain a "planet" purely for historical reasons.
When Pluto was reclassified, I was surprised, not because I disagreed with the reclassification, but because I thought the historical precedent and simple "nostalgia factor" would be too difficult to overcome. That it wasn't is actually encouraging to me, in terms of that scientific body, because it demonstrated a willingness to challenge their own assumptions and biases, and to move beyond them when evidenced suggested that they should do so.
With 'BD Live', disks can be authored to include access to network resources
I'm in a many-years-long battle with my PS3, which may be the best example of my irrational stubbornness that I can think of. Every time I play a Blu-ray disk, it asks me if I want to give it internet access. Every. Damn. Time. Why even make a setting called "BD Internet Connection: Allow/Confirm"? Seriously, I can't just set it to "no"?
For years now, each time that question comes up, I select "no" and think to myself "Screw you, Sony!" There's no way to rationally explain it, but hell will freeze over before I select "yes".
Now I just have another reason to keep selecting "no". Faith in my cause renewed, the battle continues...
Right on. It annoys me when I see people using google search to go to a specific website, rather than use the address bar to go there directly. If you try to explain to them that the address bar will take them there without having to click the first search result, it's like they don't even want to know.
And you know what annoys them? Your insistence on harassing them about trying to use their computer more "optimally" when what they're doing works just fine. Moreover, you're actually wrong.
Frankly, I think it's probably better for most people to use search than typing urls anyhow. A search captures their intent better than an actual URL in most cases. Consider the case of a single mistyped letter. The actual search will likely correct this error automatically. A URL with a mistyped letter may well be a scam or malware site. In fact, the indirection of "search as address" is also a handy safety filter, as search providers like Google have the resources to scan and block sites with active malware being hosted on them.
Even if you discount all those factors, the point remains: Is it really worth bothering people about a few seconds of wasted time when they're still getting the same results? Save your battles for the important stuff.
I agree, a mouse is horrible to draw with. A few people have mentioned Wacom tables. There are even models available with a built-in screen, for example, which makes it pretty easy for anyone to draw right on it with little training. It's normally used mostly by digital artists, but I could see it being useful for digital whiteboard sessions as well. It's also superior to tablets in that it's optimized for pen use rather than finger touches, which makes it much more precise for actually drawing.
That was my first thought as well. "It uses Java (probably an older, unpatched version), so of course it's got massive security holes." But seriously, does anyone think there's even a remote chance that in 2015, malware is going to be transported by Blu-ray disc? This is an interesting tech demo, and it's always good to be aware of the potential of these things, but it doesn't seem to be a likely threat vector.
Based on my own experience, CS classrooms don't really need to be high tech. You can hold them anywhere, as long as you have a laptop computer with a projector attachment. The labs are where things always got crowded, and that may be what's currently limiting CS enrollment.
This would mean that the total number of enrolled students wouldn't increase, but the specific number of CS students from the population of the campus could increase as a percentage of all majors. This makes some sense, because to increase the total student population, you can't just add a CS building. You'd also need to add dorms, dining facilities, etc. So, even if the goal is to increase the number of CS students, they might not actually need any new classrooms if the total student population is staying relatively stable.
You could very well be right, of course, but I'm not sure you should necessarily assume the worst. I'm just tossing out a possible hypothesis.
Start with good information. The actual commandment is "Thou shall not murder" when properly translated from Hebrew texts.
The bit telcos could stand to remember this old rule (again, oft misquoted): For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. - 1 Timothy 6:10
There's nothing wrong with businesses making a profit, but there's a difference between that and profiteering. During WWII, the Chrysler corporation sent the government rebate checks for millions of dollars when they were able to produce war goods under budget. Seriously, could you imagine that today? Wall Street would shit itself.
And this one is for our politicians who have spent years cozying up to said telcos, particularly those who claim to adhere to these teachings: The greedy bring ruin to their households, but the one who hates bribes will live. - Proverbs 15:27
Even if you don't subscribe to the religious aspect, some of those are still pretty decent "old rules" to live by.
I've shopped at a small boutique dealer for years for my desktop PCs, and they pride themselves on excellent quality, customization, and customer service. They'll install Windows, Ubuntu, or even no OS at all, and naturally, no crapware in sight. The QA they put each custom machine through is also impressive, and you can actually watch your machine as it goes through the process.
That sort of quality still exists if you look around a bit, and are willing to pay for it. I haven't done any real price matching, as it's hard to make perfect apples-to-apples comparisons (for instance, other chains often don't tell you the exact motherboard model or what type of power supplies they use), but you do certainly pay considerably more than the typical computers you'd find at Dell or other large chains. Totally worth it to me though.
The fact that China is increasingly hostile to the internal use of Western tech (promoting their own OS, banning Apple products, etc) could also be a factor, not to mention things like their anti-monopoly lawsuit against MS. And let's face it, it's not like anyone in China really *paid* for their copy of Windows anyhow.
What really irks me is that the opposite of skeumorphic doesn't have to be "postmodern fugly". It feels like the designers have swung the pendulum so far in the opposite direction that they've eliminated a lot of helpful and attractive design elements, such as the judicious use of borders, bevels, gradients, gloss, and transparency.
Of the big three adopting this new style, I much prefer Google's approach, which I've heard described as skeuominimalism. I'm completely fine with ditching the tacky faux-leather, felt, or wood-panel backgrounds that were rightfully mocked and discarded. But Google seems to be a bit more sane in how they're also using subtle gradients, border, and shadows where appropriate, rather than going so flat it makes the damn thing harder to navigate.
When Schneider says "we", I understood that to mean he's talking about the vast majority of the public, not security or privacy-conscious people - who, let's face it, are almost certainly a minority. It feels like you're reading those statements as *advocating* those positions, when instead I think he's just describing the reality of the current situation.
No one of any credibility has ever claimed that anything can be made 100% secure. However, the bar for cracking today's state-of-the-art encryption schemes is significantly higher than older standards. Not just a little higher, but exponentially higher. At the moment, it would take a modern PC until far past the heat death of the universe to crack a modern 4096-bit encoded certificate. That means that unless a fundamental weakness is found or we invent quantum computers, no one will brute force that key in our lifetimes, and probably our children's lifetimes as well, even given continued improvements of hardware speeds and proliferation. Many of our modern encryption schemes rely on the premise that a very large semiprime number is hard to factor. As long as that holds true, it's likely our cryptography will hold as well.
Many early algorithms, such as WEP or early ZIP encryption, were created behind closed doors by security novices, and as such were broken by design. Current encryption standards are well vetted in public by crypto-analysists from all over the globe for many years before they're adopted. It's a really big deal if an analyst discovers a way to reduce even one or two bits of entropy in a modern encryption standard. Of course, it would be equally foolish to declare that we'll *never* crack our current standards, but I'm not sure I'd compare them to relatively simplistic or fundamentally flawed standards of the past. Our current technology is at the trailing end of a very Darwinian process, and has been made much stronger because of all the failures of the past. Engineering of all types works this way: failures result in gained knowledge, and we use that knowledge to build better systems going forward.
Nowadays (as you correctly indicated), security is much more likely to be breached because of a side-channel attack: a faulty implementation of an otherwise solid encryption algorithm, stolen keys, or even by deliberately weakened random numbers. I'm much more pessimistic about our current security in this regards compared to the actual encryption algorithms, simply because of the huge attack surfaces our infrastructure has.
Cryptography is a field where confidence can only be gained by longevity, so we'll just have to see how things play out. Still, the fact that our three-letter agencies seem desperate to force us to use encryption with backdoors seems like a pretty good indicator of how strong they perceive modern encryption to be.
If anything, my guess is that it may make possible the creation of unique dishes and designs that would be too time-consuming to create by hand, at least in the commercial market. It's probably only in the home market that you'd use it to create pasta or other dishes that commercial machines can already easily do, since an all-in-one machine may be more economical, both cost and space-wise.
Windows 10 seems to continue this behavior. I was initially hopeful, because the auto-sorting didn't seem to occur when I made and renamed a few files in the root Documents folder. I recalled hearing that there are some exceptions to the auto-sorting in virtual folders, so I tried making a subfolder and renaming the files there, and saw the same auto-sorting behavior.
This is a good lesson for software designers. When you try to be too "clever", you're occasionally going to guess incorrectly and actually make things harder for your users instead. Always provide a way to turn those sorts of features off. Anyone who has experienced the frustration of MS Word refusing to let you precisely highlight a portion of a word (it helpfully highlights the *entire* word for you instead) well understands that phenomenon.
Yep, I actually agree they've been listening and changing things that actually matter, such as things that really affect usability. It makes it all the more odd to me why they're so stubbornly focused on making the UI look like crap. Either I'm just part of a vocal minority which really doesn't like it and it is complaining about the modern look (it's possible, as a bunch of people don't seem to mind it), or the people in charge just believe so much in their new aesthetic that they don't really care what the ignorant masses (i.e. dinosaurs that can't get with the times like me) think.
Like I mentioned, Windows 10 is actually shaping up nicely in terms of both functionality and usability. The "flat" look just feels like a massive over-correction from the gloss, transparency, and eye candy of previous versions to me. I think the fact that one of the biggest complaint about Windows 10 is the aesthetics is actually a fairly positive sign for the new OS.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that few people seem to know this could be part of Yahoo's problem. They just don't seem to have a strong corporate identify. I'll bet that just about anyone here could tell you what products and services Microsoft, Google, Apple, Amazon, HP, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, and other companies are best known for. For Yahoo, I probably would have answered "mediocre e-mail, crappy search, and some decent services like news and Flickr", but beyond that, I really had no idea.
I agree. C++ has really seen something of a renaissance in the last few years with C++ 11 and 14. CPU core speed has flattened, and people are realizing that efficiency isn't really something that can be ignored in many cases. Moreover, C++ is and always has been a very portable language, as you can compile it on just about every platform imaginable.
Nowadays, you can write C++ and be assured that you'll rarely have to even think about explicit memory management or leaks. Moreover, what really surprised me was how I actually now prefer the simpler, more versatile, and more predictable referece-counted paradigm over managed memory and garbage collection. The lack of a destructor mechanism means that releasing resources in a predictable manner tends to be a bit less elegant because it's handled in a different way. In C++, memory is just like any other resource.
A lot of people talk about the complexity of C++. There are a couple of things to remember. C++ IS a pretty big and complex language of course, but you don't necessarily have to actually deal with much of that complexity in many circumstances. First, a lot of complexity is related to it's own backwards compatibility both with C and it's own early features. Unless you're maintaining or interfacing with old code, many of those features are largely irrelevant when writing modern C++. If that's not the case, you either have some exceptional circumstances, a very old codebase, or you're not really using the language correctly. Second, C++ can be viewed as two different languages: one suited for library writers, and one for library users (or application programmers). Writing C++ for use in languages can actually be rather difficult - it should be viewed as expert-level language skills. However, C++ actually makes it extremely easy to use a library. And in fact, a well designed library should actually be very difficult to use incorrectly, especially when compared to C.
The language definitely has it's strengths and weaknesses, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it for everything. I'd say C++ starts to really shine when you talk about extremes. If you need your program on a lot of different platforms, need it to run extremely fast, or it has to run with extremely limited constraints, or it's an exceptionally large and complex program, then C++ may be a good fit.
Obligatory XKCD.
As of January 2015, the U6 rate is at 11.3%, from a high of 17.1% in 2009-10. U6 includes discouraged workers (U4 and up) and even "underemployed" workers (part-timers that would prefer to be full time), and so is probably a bit high if you're talking about actual unemployment. No, we're absolutely not at record levels of unemployment.
Moreover, no one uses "percentage of working age people not working" as an unemployment metric (unless you want to inflate the figure), because that includes people who choose not to work, such as spouses of full time workers, students, or those who retire early.
How about the baby boomers? Awesome, more wildly inaccurate statistics. It's not great news, but it's a far cry from what you indicated:
* 33 percent of Boomers have put aside less than $50,000
* Baby Boomers have saved an average of $262,541, about a third of the $805,398 they predict they’ll need at retirement.
I'm not claiming things aren't tough out there, but just pulling made-up statistics out of the air isn't going to inspire confidence in your arguments.
"Phishing" actually makes a bit of sense, as in an attempt to snare victims with a false lure of sorts, such as a phony website. "Spear phishing" is a logical extension of this, a very directed phishing attack made at a particular company, or even a specific person, used to gain corporate access. I thought those were sort of clever, and gave us an accurate way to describe those very common attacks.
This one... yeah, not so much.
According to Wikipedia:
The term "pharming" has been controversial within the field. At a conference organized by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, Phillip Hallam-Baker denounced the term as "a marketing neologism designed to convince banks to buy a new set of security services". Scott Chasin, a former CTO of McAfee and founder of email security firm MX Logic, coined the term in 2005.
Let's just call it what it is: a specific type of phishing attack.
"Remember the BMG rootkit fiasco."
Exactly. I'm not trusting in their ethics... just that they're not so incredibly stupid as to try the same disastrous plan a second time.
Naturally there's going to be a limit with the current silicon-based technology. At that point, we'll probably see attempts to work in other directions, such as moving into the realm of 3D, using new materials like graphene, silicon-germanian, or even pure germaniam (which could allow for lower voltages, and thus less consumption, tunneling, and leakage), or other techniques that no one has even contemplated yet.
It should be interesting to see whether they'll succeed or not, and what that will mean for the tech industry either way.
However, they are slow to name specifics. The few they could name are also ripe for offshoring.
That's because it's nearly impossible to predict specific future technologies with any accuracy. A century ago, no one could have even dreamed of the job I currently have. A decade ago, "mobile app developers" didn't even exist, at least not in any real quantity.
Regarding the demise of Moore's Law. I'd like to share with you a quote from a year 2000 paper entitled "The End of Moore's Law?"
The industry’s newest chips have “pitches” as small as 180 nanometers (billionths of a meter). To accommodate Moore’s Law, according to the biennial “road map” prepared last year for the Semiconductor Industry Association, the pitches need to shrink to 150 nanometers by 2001 and to 100 nanometers by 2005. Alas, the road map admitted, to get there the industry will have to beat fundamental problems to which there are “no known solutions.” If solutions are not discovered quickly, Paul A. Packan, a respected researcher at Intel, argued last September in the journal Science, Moore’s Law will “be in serious danger.”
Most new chips are at 22-28 nanometers now, 14nm chips are gearing up, and 10nm is in the pipeline. It's always amusing to read those types of papers with the benefit of hindsight. Even now you can find 2014 papers saying that 28nm is the last node in Moore's Law.
Most people suck at predicting the future.
Prediction: They'll remake these games for the current gen consoles, and when they do, they'll make several mistakes.
1) They'll release new instruments that aren't compatible with the old.
2) All the DLC songs people paid for won't be transferable to the new game.
3) The game will essentially be exactly the same, just with shinier graphics and a few new features no one cares about.
Results: All the old fans are angry, and sales will be lukewarm compared to previous generation sales. Executives will blame the declining market on the poor reception rather than their own greed.
How about educating them on the real history and telling them about your personal disagreement with the new planetary designations?
Personally, as I remember reading about how Pluto was non-spherical and had an overlapping orbit, and thought that it was rather odd for a planet. When I learned about other similar objects that were *not* considered planets, it also seemed fairly odd to me. I never gave it *much* thought of course, and just figured Pluto was to remain a "planet" purely for historical reasons.
When Pluto was reclassified, I was surprised, not because I disagreed with the reclassification, but because I thought the historical precedent and simple "nostalgia factor" would be too difficult to overcome. That it wasn't is actually encouraging to me, in terms of that scientific body, because it demonstrated a willingness to challenge their own assumptions and biases, and to move beyond them when evidenced suggested that they should do so.
With 'BD Live', disks can be authored to include access to network resources
I'm in a many-years-long battle with my PS3, which may be the best example of my irrational stubbornness that I can think of. Every time I play a Blu-ray disk, it asks me if I want to give it internet access. Every. Damn. Time. Why even make a setting called "BD Internet Connection: Allow/Confirm"? Seriously, I can't just set it to "no"?
For years now, each time that question comes up, I select "no" and think to myself "Screw you, Sony!" There's no way to rationally explain it, but hell will freeze over before I select "yes".
Now I just have another reason to keep selecting "no". Faith in my cause renewed, the battle continues...
Right on. It annoys me when I see people using google search to go to a specific website, rather than use the address bar to go there directly. If you try to explain to them that the address bar will take them there without having to click the first search result, it's like they don't even want to know.
And you know what annoys them? Your insistence on harassing them about trying to use their computer more "optimally" when what they're doing works just fine. Moreover, you're actually wrong.
Frankly, I think it's probably better for most people to use search than typing urls anyhow. A search captures their intent better than an actual URL in most cases. Consider the case of a single mistyped letter. The actual search will likely correct this error automatically. A URL with a mistyped letter may well be a scam or malware site. In fact, the indirection of "search as address" is also a handy safety filter, as search providers like Google have the resources to scan and block sites with active malware being hosted on them.
Even if you discount all those factors, the point remains: Is it really worth bothering people about a few seconds of wasted time when they're still getting the same results? Save your battles for the important stuff.
I agree, a mouse is horrible to draw with. A few people have mentioned Wacom tables. There are even models available with a built-in screen, for example, which makes it pretty easy for anyone to draw right on it with little training. It's normally used mostly by digital artists, but I could see it being useful for digital whiteboard sessions as well. It's also superior to tablets in that it's optimized for pen use rather than finger touches, which makes it much more precise for actually drawing.
That was my first thought as well. "It uses Java (probably an older, unpatched version), so of course it's got massive security holes." But seriously, does anyone think there's even a remote chance that in 2015, malware is going to be transported by Blu-ray disc? This is an interesting tech demo, and it's always good to be aware of the potential of these things, but it doesn't seem to be a likely threat vector.
Based on my own experience, CS classrooms don't really need to be high tech. You can hold them anywhere, as long as you have a laptop computer with a projector attachment. The labs are where things always got crowded, and that may be what's currently limiting CS enrollment.
This would mean that the total number of enrolled students wouldn't increase, but the specific number of CS students from the population of the campus could increase as a percentage of all majors. This makes some sense, because to increase the total student population, you can't just add a CS building. You'd also need to add dorms, dining facilities, etc. So, even if the goal is to increase the number of CS students, they might not actually need any new classrooms if the total student population is staying relatively stable.
You could very well be right, of course, but I'm not sure you should necessarily assume the worst. I'm just tossing out a possible hypothesis.
Yeah, exactly. I didn't phrase that very clearly.
Start with good information. The actual commandment is "Thou shall not murder" when properly translated from Hebrew texts.
The bit telcos could stand to remember this old rule (again, oft misquoted): For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. - 1 Timothy 6:10
There's nothing wrong with businesses making a profit, but there's a difference between that and profiteering. During WWII, the Chrysler corporation sent the government rebate checks for millions of dollars when they were able to produce war goods under budget. Seriously, could you imagine that today? Wall Street would shit itself.
And this one is for our politicians who have spent years cozying up to said telcos, particularly those who claim to adhere to these teachings: The greedy bring ruin to their households, but the one who hates bribes will live. - Proverbs 15:27
Even if you don't subscribe to the religious aspect, some of those are still pretty decent "old rules" to live by.
I've shopped at a small boutique dealer for years for my desktop PCs, and they pride themselves on excellent quality, customization, and customer service. They'll install Windows, Ubuntu, or even no OS at all, and naturally, no crapware in sight. The QA they put each custom machine through is also impressive, and you can actually watch your machine as it goes through the process.
That sort of quality still exists if you look around a bit, and are willing to pay for it. I haven't done any real price matching, as it's hard to make perfect apples-to-apples comparisons (for instance, other chains often don't tell you the exact motherboard model or what type of power supplies they use), but you do certainly pay considerably more than the typical computers you'd find at Dell or other large chains. Totally worth it to me though.
The fact that China is increasingly hostile to the internal use of Western tech (promoting their own OS, banning Apple products, etc) could also be a factor, not to mention things like their anti-monopoly lawsuit against MS. And let's face it, it's not like anyone in China really *paid* for their copy of Windows anyhow.
Lol, nice. I like that term.
What really irks me is that the opposite of skeumorphic doesn't have to be "postmodern fugly". It feels like the designers have swung the pendulum so far in the opposite direction that they've eliminated a lot of helpful and attractive design elements, such as the judicious use of borders, bevels, gradients, gloss, and transparency.
Of the big three adopting this new style, I much prefer Google's approach, which I've heard described as skeuominimalism. I'm completely fine with ditching the tacky faux-leather, felt, or wood-panel backgrounds that were rightfully mocked and discarded. But Google seems to be a bit more sane in how they're also using subtle gradients, border, and shadows where appropriate, rather than going so flat it makes the damn thing harder to navigate.
When Schneider says "we", I understood that to mean he's talking about the vast majority of the public, not security or privacy-conscious people - who, let's face it, are almost certainly a minority. It feels like you're reading those statements as *advocating* those positions, when instead I think he's just describing the reality of the current situation.
No one of any credibility has ever claimed that anything can be made 100% secure. However, the bar for cracking today's state-of-the-art encryption schemes is significantly higher than older standards. Not just a little higher, but exponentially higher. At the moment, it would take a modern PC until far past the heat death of the universe to crack a modern 4096-bit encoded certificate. That means that unless a fundamental weakness is found or we invent quantum computers, no one will brute force that key in our lifetimes, and probably our children's lifetimes as well, even given continued improvements of hardware speeds and proliferation. Many of our modern encryption schemes rely on the premise that a very large semiprime number is hard to factor. As long as that holds true, it's likely our cryptography will hold as well.
Many early algorithms, such as WEP or early ZIP encryption, were created behind closed doors by security novices, and as such were broken by design. Current encryption standards are well vetted in public by crypto-analysists from all over the globe for many years before they're adopted. It's a really big deal if an analyst discovers a way to reduce even one or two bits of entropy in a modern encryption standard. Of course, it would be equally foolish to declare that we'll *never* crack our current standards, but I'm not sure I'd compare them to relatively simplistic or fundamentally flawed standards of the past. Our current technology is at the trailing end of a very Darwinian process, and has been made much stronger because of all the failures of the past. Engineering of all types works this way: failures result in gained knowledge, and we use that knowledge to build better systems going forward.
Nowadays (as you correctly indicated), security is much more likely to be breached because of a side-channel attack: a faulty implementation of an otherwise solid encryption algorithm, stolen keys, or even by deliberately weakened random numbers. I'm much more pessimistic about our current security in this regards compared to the actual encryption algorithms, simply because of the huge attack surfaces our infrastructure has.
Cryptography is a field where confidence can only be gained by longevity, so we'll just have to see how things play out. Still, the fact that our three-letter agencies seem desperate to force us to use encryption with backdoors seems like a pretty good indicator of how strong they perceive modern encryption to be.
If anything, my guess is that it may make possible the creation of unique dishes and designs that would be too time-consuming to create by hand, at least in the commercial market. It's probably only in the home market that you'd use it to create pasta or other dishes that commercial machines can already easily do, since an all-in-one machine may be more economical, both cost and space-wise.
Windows 10 seems to continue this behavior. I was initially hopeful, because the auto-sorting didn't seem to occur when I made and renamed a few files in the root Documents folder. I recalled hearing that there are some exceptions to the auto-sorting in virtual folders, so I tried making a subfolder and renaming the files there, and saw the same auto-sorting behavior.
This is a good lesson for software designers. When you try to be too "clever", you're occasionally going to guess incorrectly and actually make things harder for your users instead. Always provide a way to turn those sorts of features off. Anyone who has experienced the frustration of MS Word refusing to let you precisely highlight a portion of a word (it helpfully highlights the *entire* word for you instead) well understands that phenomenon.
Yep, I actually agree they've been listening and changing things that actually matter, such as things that really affect usability. It makes it all the more odd to me why they're so stubbornly focused on making the UI look like crap. Either I'm just part of a vocal minority which really doesn't like it and it is complaining about the modern look (it's possible, as a bunch of people don't seem to mind it), or the people in charge just believe so much in their new aesthetic that they don't really care what the ignorant masses (i.e. dinosaurs that can't get with the times like me) think.
Like I mentioned, Windows 10 is actually shaping up nicely in terms of both functionality and usability. The "flat" look just feels like a massive over-correction from the gloss, transparency, and eye candy of previous versions to me. I think the fact that one of the biggest complaint about Windows 10 is the aesthetics is actually a fairly positive sign for the new OS.