Any blanket assertion of GMOs being bad for you is just as idiotic and pointless as a blanket assertion GMOs are not bad for you.
Every case must be judged on the merits and it must not stop with the question of the qualities of the product. One must also consider the secondary effects playing god has on the environment and fucked up geopolitics of globalization meets Monsanto.
I am not at all impressed with the current state of electronic communications and I especially am not impressed by fronts with skin in the game who want you to pay them to do shit that should be accomplished between peers over an IP network for free.
Email is a sad pathetic sorry useless joke. If it is not the endless stream of junk mail it is legitimate messages being silently discarded by some crazy baysian monster. When you do get a message you take a leap of faith assuming the sender is actually who you think it is or that it has not been altered in transit.
If you really want to get someones attention especially if it is to get them to pay a bill snail mail still works better than electronic delivery.
I have never been the type that prints out anything..if the printer stopped working I would never know it. I just think on the tools side no real progress has been made on the inter-office front. Intra-office is a different matter.
I should be able to transfer documents directly between interested parties using common protocols that actually work. I should not have to pay middlemen to convert faxes or store confidential documents on servers which are not a natural party to the communication and only provide value because a legitimate solution does not exist.
If people are still using paper perhaps you can blaim them for being old fashioned yet I would not be at all surprised if they have legitimate reasons for doing it that have simply not been seriously addressed.
This is a shining example of why every effort must be made to shitcan any certified mental cases in positions of authority within your organization before it is too late.
It is ok to throw the ethics rulebook out the window without regard for who it may fall on if it gets the batshit crazy idiots in your company fired.
Or, to put it another way - why waste resources studying astronomy when there are so many sick people in the world so it would be better for humanity to put our resources into curing disease?
Protien folding simulation is such a large and basic need globally there ought to be enough large scale interest to make development of specialized ASICs to deal with these problems cost effective and exceedingly useful for all who need to do these simulations. A quick check of google shows such chips do in fact exist with unbelivable performance figures which kick the snot out countless tens of thousands of CPU/GPUs. There is no shortage of funding for medical research so it begs the question why waste CPU/GPU resources on folding simulations?
I still do seti and milkyway at home because there are no resources allocated for seti and milkyway at home is interesting to me personally.
IThe temperature scale is too imprecise to be practically useful. You loose a lot of precision using celsius vs fahrenheit without resorting to having to communicate fractional values. It is something like a few degrees f for every c.
Kilometers are just as arbitrary and useless as miles. If you want to standardize on something non-arbitrary I would rather see the world standardize on nautical miles which represents a minute of arc on the earth. Something much more useful for navigation than either the metric or imperial options.
The metric order of magnitude conversions are nice. There is also value in consolidating systems I just don't think Metric is necessarily better in cases that matter to me but what you are most familiar tends to override all else.
Trying to shoehorn the 'tux onto the ARM Surface is stupid. No shit Microsoft has locked the thing up, they're subsidizing the damned hardware by assuming that you'll run Windows on it and buy applications through the Windows App Store.
Subsidizing!?!? Have you seen the prices of these things?
This is almost as dumb as buying a set of kitchen utensils then wondering why you can't build a shed with them.
In this case those kitchen utensils are fully capable of carrying out that mission.
LEDs of all types (lasers excluded) have no "spike". Typical half-power bandwidth is 20 nm. It's not smooth enough for color comparisons of paint or makeup, but it's nowhere near the monochromatic implied by "spike".
Since we're talking about cree lights check out their data sheets on their own LED lighting products. The graph on pg5 looks like a spike to me.
So if I install a gas furnace and start hauling tanks in every month (I'm out in the sticks), someone will pay me twice what I'm paying now for heating? Cool. Sign me up
Do you have cows? If you bottle enough cow farts heating is free!1!!
Unless you're already using the lighting for a particular purpose.
Irrelevant.
Than that "waste heat" is already going towards the heating, which is the parents point, and mine
Natural gas is cheaper per BTU generated than electricty.
If you use electricity effeciently and use gas for heat you save the most money on your energy bill.
Waste heat from ineffecient electricty usage costs you MORE than cheaper heat from gas.
Not everyone has access to gas. Where you do trying to make silly assertions the waste heat is not being wasted because it is being used to help heat your home will still result in a higher energy bill than necessary.
From my perspective the problem with secure boot is if such a technology even exists it is more likely to be mandated to be implemented in an oppressive manner by government(s) as a means of enforcing state control over all computing.
Its existance means at some much sooner future point this is something that becomes practical to legislate as it can be trivially implemented for all systems sold in a given region.
None of these campaigns are against the mere existance of secure boot itself. I think this is a mistake regardless of its chance of having any impact.
The studies I've read that involve what you are referring to only applied to blue lights being on when a person is sleeping.
Just because you think white leds look white does not mean they don't have a nasty blue spike in their output spectrum. What you can't see can still hurt you.
Most people know exactly what I'm talking about (Starcraft) I see no need to cater to professional nitpickers.
I still enjoy it, but I straight up do not like grinding for gear. My time is definitely worth more to me than my money, and spending a couple dollars to avoid playing for hours to get the same item seems like a decent trade-off. Gamers should never be obligated to pay beyond a game's initial buy-in
More likely the game will be intentionally boaring and montonous to get you to pay up.
But pretending that piracy doesn't exist isn't going to help the industry either.
Your words not mine.
When you sit down and look at it, this argument doesn't even make any sense. Are you angry at tutorials? If you're worried that it's too easy, turn up the difficulty
Turning the high accuracy weapons (sniper, lightning..etc) into shit. Getting rid of various combos and countermoves to keep the noobs from getting slaughtered by more experienced players.
This might shock you, but international sales matter.
So what are you saying? Games should only be as cool as the most oppressive market? FUCK THAT. If you can take the time to localize a game you can take the time to censor content for markets which require it.
Don't make multi-player games that can't be played on a LAN or which can't be hosted by players.
Don't do in-game advertising, purchases of virtual crap for real money and assorted bullshit.
Don't install spyware or otherwise contact the mothership unless required to fullfill the users request.
Don't do CD keys, limited activations, professor zorgs guides to alien etiquette or any other such anti-piracy garbage that treats the purchaser as a suspect.
Don't require the user to wade thru a bunch of bullshit screens before starting the game.
Never lobobotomize gameplay in order to give noobs a fighting chance.
Stop making games that are impossible to loose.
Never remove language or funny shit for political reasons.
Basically make games that are fun to play again. Things have "evolved" to where this has simply become impossible to do so I no longer bother.
You can't fix unprofessionalism by being unprofessional. Linus's response is uncalled for, and if anyone I work for ever tells me to shut the fuck up, he can start looking for my replacement, and won't ever need to hear me speak up again.
I just now realized the reason soo many people here express dislike of Linus's style. It is because they have inflated ego issues they have not yet bothered to worked thru. They still think they are gods or are in some way important.
Let me see if I can help:
You are not the smartest person in the world.
Plenty of other people can do your job and better in every respect.
Everything you do sucks, get over it.
You are an idiot, get over that too.
Anyone who does not believe these things I mean without reservation know them to be true has issues and lacks the required introspection to improve themselves and their work.
Respect only matters to those who have a need for it. In my book it is just another sin on par with pride.
I would rather work with people who say what they are thinking rather than hide behind PC bullshit or care about hurting feelings.
I've found myself thinking or agreeing with most of what Lanier has had to say in various contexts but I think overall I disagree with the larger question.
In my opinion the most important key is forming structures which promote a desired outcome by anticipating human nature. It is all about governance. It is about systematic promotion and reinforcement of good over crap. Curtailing nameless action or leveraging shame never seems to me to have ever been all that effective in the aggregate.
The most successful and useful sites as judged by myself on the Internet today allow some level of participation without even having to register an account. The various *overflow sites use feedback and restrict voice and actions such as comments and editing until you have shown yourself to be trustworthy.
Wikipedia is as anonymous as it gets with its total value purely derived from crowdsourcing yet it has substantial internal structures and governance to enable it to filter out noise and present accurate and useful information in a number of areas. The volume of legitimacy wikipedia enjoys is still a little amazing and a little difficult to understand.
I more or less agree with sentiments on "big data" and facebook. These are systems designed from the start to make money incresingly by expliotation as their objective function. They are hopelessly doomed to suck. When anti-snooping/stalking/privacy regulation catches up their drivers will hopefully be no different than any other large business.
One thing individually about the Internet is it forces lots of us to grow a brain and not accept the BS of trolls, crackpots and idiots on credit alone. After a while some may come to realize these things have never been limited to the Internet in the first place. To the extent where all of the garbage, useless babble and nonsense forces people to grow a brain we are better off for it.
On balance the Internet is full of crap but what do you do about it? Crowds sometimes make terrible choices and mindlessly propogate stupid memes. Marketeers, paid shills and governments work the masses. Various groups with an agenda do the same on the Internet as they have all done since the dawn of civilization.
If you want to do something about it online (which is the wrong place to begin with) you just have to be smart about governance to creativly align your goals with the goals of your customers. The cost of bandwidth continues to fall like a ton of bricks, computers continue to get cheaper... there is no excuse.
One thing I know for sure it is pointless to try and force people to stop drinking, prey to a different god, use their real identity, pay for paywalled content or behave themselves. The key to effecting positive outcomes is creative governance and carefully selecting your battles.
When your primary weapons are lame DDOS attacks and repetitive, predictable poor quality "we are anonymous" youtube videos spoken by dr sbaitso it is hard to see much of a future.
What is really sad is any agreeable lawful or vigilante activities are often trivially derailed and delegitimized by correlating "anonymous" with some asshat who once upon a time claimed to be anonymous defaced a web site dedicated to helping poor children.
I think IR #3 is a bit too nebulous and abstract to be useful... I can't imagine how you top "information age" or what could ever possibly come next.
Instead I think you really need to think in terms of a tech tree with more specific items such as cheap high density batteries, memristers, large scale 3d stacking / optical or plasmon gates, room temp superconductors, optical frequency fourier antennas, quantum computers with thousands of entangled qbits, tabletop fusion, warp drives..etc are likely to dominate the landscape of future changes vs general themes.
I think a mistake is made when you confuse the effects of diminishing first order returns on information and information processing technology from the more important secondary effects it has on the worlds industries and feedbacks on information technology itself.
For example faster Internet or a faster computer at this point would continue to provide ever diminishing returns to the average consumer.
Likewise the always connected mobile computers and communications provide limited little additional value over traditional fixed hardwired systems.
When you end your analysis with this narrow view of technology itself you are blind to what is really going on in terms of aggregate effects on all of industry.
All advances in pharmaceuticals / chemistry / material science is fully contingent on complex large scale computation.
Astronomy and basic research.
Computational biology and insanely cheap + fast sequencing is just now starting to go apeshit..
Automation in design, manufacturing and logistics of all kinds throughout all of industry.
Facebook, mobile phones, twitter and assorted consumer gadgets are red herrings... They are just noise that never really mattered.
There's no perfection to be found anywhere, but you can be about 10000X safer on Linux than on Windows
Are you sure it is 10000x and not 100000000x? How does one go about calculating the proper number of zeros?
There's a huge variety of software in the repositories and any malicious software would be quickly removed
It often takes people years if ever to find innocent bugs and remove these defects... yet whenever your faced with an advasary who has intentionally hidden an expliotable defect then of course it will be detected...and quickly where the innocent bugs have not...yes...sure... of course... this makes perfect sense.
Is this perfect? Of course not
Is this gyberish? Of course it is.
But it's WAY WAY better than the situation on Windows where people install random malware to see "dancing bears"
Are you saying it is not possible for users to install random malware to see dancing bears on a linux machine? If a user downloads and runs a linux program... does it not execute?
or where Windows will auto-run executables just because you put a USB key into your system. Seriously microsoft, WTF?
And I won't bother asking what happens when that random USB key emulates a HID device and opens its own shell.
So, set up a Linux machine, don't run javascript from web sites unless it's a well known trusted site like your bank, only use software from the repos, and you'll be secure for most practical purposes as a "normal person" who isn't the target of the KGB or something.
Being a "normal person" is no fun. I thought the whole point of TFA was cloak and dagger on the cheap?
I will never understand what people at Microsoft are smoking... the latest and greatest flagship windows phone 8 platform won't even play wave files... a format Microsoft itself had a hand in creating and still widely used for lossless audio.
There is soo much missing in windows phone 8 existing in windows mobile since almost a decade ago..really basic shit still does not exist in the platform. Bluetooth HID, serial bluetooth profiles, PAN, file transfer, VPNs and basic data synchronization all totally missing. Wireless authentication is totally fucked up the platform does not even attempt to validate WPA enterprise certificates.
Is it really that hard to dust off and just port this shit from crap you've already done years ago? I mean it is all windows and RT is just an abstraction on win32 so what the fuck is the problem? Why is it always ten steps back one step forward? Are your new programming pardigrams you spent all of this time and effort on rewriting your shit constantly really that bad??? Even the old windows CE APIs you exposed from what I remember circa 2002 were more or less poor analouges of win32 APIs and concepts even if the CE kernel was nothing allike.
Nobody cares about your endless schemes to take over the world and turn computing into a fricking walled garden. Neither is it acceptable in 20 fucking 12 to develop a platform that can only show one app on screen at a time. Get fucking real.
The EE's are giving us all of this cool shit and the OS vendors are running around with their fingers up their asses schemeing ever more impressive ways to fuck us over and piss us off.
If only MS actually cared about the well being of its customers.
I would rather starve than write software for walled in computing systems at the total mercy of the OS vendor. It is sad to see developers just going along with vendor bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares what he has to say?
Any blanket assertion of GMOs being bad for you is just as idiotic and pointless as a blanket assertion GMOs are not bad for you.
Every case must be judged on the merits and it must not stop with the question of the qualities of the product. One must also consider the secondary effects playing god has on the environment and fucked up geopolitics of globalization meets Monsanto.
I am not at all impressed with the current state of electronic communications and I especially am not impressed by fronts with skin in the game who want you to pay them to do shit that should be accomplished between peers over an IP network for free.
Email is a sad pathetic sorry useless joke. If it is not the endless stream of junk mail it is legitimate messages being silently discarded by some crazy baysian monster. When you do get a message you take a leap of faith assuming the sender is actually who you think it is or that it has not been altered in transit.
If you really want to get someones attention especially if it is to get them to pay a bill snail mail still works better than electronic delivery.
I have never been the type that prints out anything..if the printer stopped working I would never know it. I just think on the tools side no real progress has been made on the inter-office front. Intra-office is a different matter.
I should be able to transfer documents directly between interested parties using common protocols that actually work. I should not have to pay middlemen to convert faxes or store confidential documents on servers which are not a natural party to the communication and only provide value because a legitimate solution does not exist.
If people are still using paper perhaps you can blaim them for being old fashioned yet I would not be at all surprised if they have legitimate reasons for doing it that have simply not been seriously addressed.
This is a shining example of why every effort must be made to shitcan any certified mental cases in positions of authority within your organization before it is too late.
It is ok to throw the ethics rulebook out the window without regard for who it may fall on if it gets the batshit crazy idiots in your company fired.
Or, to put it another way - why waste resources studying astronomy when there are so many sick people in the world so it would be better for humanity to put our resources into curing disease?
Protien folding simulation is such a large and basic need globally there ought to be enough large scale interest to make development of specialized ASICs to deal with these problems cost effective and exceedingly useful for all who need to do these simulations. A quick check of google shows such chips do in fact exist with unbelivable performance figures which kick the snot out countless tens of thousands of CPU/GPUs. There is no shortage of funding for medical research so it begs the question why waste CPU/GPU resources on folding simulations?
I still do seti and milkyway at home because there are no resources allocated for seti and milkyway at home is interesting to me personally.
IThe temperature scale is too imprecise to be practically useful. You loose a lot of precision using celsius vs fahrenheit without resorting to having to communicate fractional values. It is something like a few degrees f for every c.
Kilometers are just as arbitrary and useless as miles. If you want to standardize on something non-arbitrary I would rather see the world standardize on nautical miles which represents a minute of arc on the earth. Something much more useful for navigation than either the metric or imperial options.
The metric order of magnitude conversions are nice. There is also value in consolidating systems I just don't think Metric is necessarily better in cases that matter to me but what you are most familiar tends to override all else.
The reason Windows 8 sucks is because Microsoft chose to ignore the clear and unambiguous wishes of its users for selfish reasons.
I wish they would just grow keyboards already and stop with the vendor lockin walled gardens from hell shit.
Making robots that look like humans do not make people more comfortable... It freaks them out.
Trying to shoehorn the 'tux onto the ARM Surface is stupid. No shit Microsoft has locked the thing up, they're subsidizing the damned hardware by assuming that you'll run Windows on it and buy applications through the Windows App Store.
Subsidizing!?!? Have you seen the prices of these things?
This is almost as dumb as buying a set of kitchen utensils then wondering why you can't build a shed with them.
In this case those kitchen utensils are fully capable of carrying out that mission.
LEDs of all types (lasers excluded) have no "spike". Typical half-power bandwidth is 20 nm. It's not smooth enough for color comparisons of paint or makeup, but it's nowhere near the monochromatic implied by "spike".
Since we're talking about cree lights check out their data sheets on their own LED lighting products. The graph on pg5 looks like a spike to me.
http://www.cree.com/~/media/Files/Cree/LED%20Components%20and%20Modules/XLamp/Data%20and%20Binning/XLamp7090XRE.pdf
So if I install a gas furnace and start hauling tanks in every month (I'm out in the sticks), someone will pay me twice what I'm paying now for heating? Cool. Sign me up
Do you have cows? If you bottle enough cow farts heating is free!1!!
Unless you're already using the lighting for a particular purpose.
Irrelevant.
Than that "waste heat" is already going towards the heating, which is the parents point, and mine
Natural gas is cheaper per BTU generated than electricty.
If you use electricity effeciently and use gas for heat you save the most money on your energy bill.
Waste heat from ineffecient electricty usage costs you MORE than cheaper heat from gas.
Not everyone has access to gas. Where you do trying to make silly assertions the waste heat is not being wasted because it is being used to help heat your home will still result in a higher energy bill than necessary.
From my perspective the problem with secure boot is if such a technology even exists it is more likely to be mandated to be implemented in an oppressive manner by government(s) as a means of enforcing state control over all computing.
Its existance means at some much sooner future point this is something that becomes practical to legislate as it can be trivially implemented for all systems sold in a given region.
None of these campaigns are against the mere existance of secure boot itself. I think this is a mistake regardless of its chance of having any impact.
The studies I've read that involve what you are referring to only applied to blue lights being on when a person is sleeping.
Just because you think white leds look white does not mean they don't have a nasty blue spike in their output spectrum. What you can't see can still hurt you.
Color *is* spectrum.
What your eyes think they see and what "spectrum" is actually emitted are separate items.
What's inefficient? My house needs both light and heat. 100% efficiency as far as I'm concerned
Gas heat is at least 300% cheaper than electricty.
So how would you go about making an MMO?
Most people know exactly what I'm talking about (Starcraft) I see no need to cater to professional nitpickers.
I still enjoy it, but I straight up do not like grinding for gear. My time is definitely worth more to me than my money, and spending a couple dollars to avoid playing for hours to get the same item seems like a decent trade-off. Gamers should never be obligated to pay beyond a game's initial buy-in
More likely the game will be intentionally boaring and montonous to get you to pay up.
But pretending that piracy doesn't exist isn't going to help the industry either.
Your words not mine.
When you sit down and look at it, this argument doesn't even make any sense. Are you angry at tutorials? If you're worried that it's too easy, turn up the difficulty
Turning the high accuracy weapons (sniper, lightning..etc) into shit. Getting rid of various combos and countermoves to keep the noobs from getting slaughtered by more experienced players.
This might shock you, but international sales matter.
So what are you saying? Games should only be as cool as the most oppressive market? FUCK THAT. If you can take the time to localize a game you can take the time to censor content for markets which require it.
because the pickings have never been richer.
I wish.
Don't make multi-player games that can't be played on a LAN or which can't be hosted by players.
Don't do in-game advertising, purchases of virtual crap for real money and assorted bullshit.
Don't install spyware or otherwise contact the mothership unless required to fullfill the users request.
Don't do CD keys, limited activations, professor zorgs guides to alien etiquette or any other such anti-piracy garbage that treats the purchaser as a suspect.
Don't require the user to wade thru a bunch of bullshit screens before starting the game.
Never lobobotomize gameplay in order to give noobs a fighting chance.
Stop making games that are impossible to loose.
Never remove language or funny shit for political reasons.
Basically make games that are fun to play again. Things have "evolved" to where this has simply become impossible to do so I no longer bother.
You can't fix unprofessionalism by being unprofessional. Linus's response is uncalled for, and if anyone I work for ever tells me to shut the fuck up, he can start looking for my replacement, and won't ever need to hear me speak up again.
I just now realized the reason soo many people here express dislike of Linus's style. It is because they have inflated ego issues they have not yet bothered to worked thru. They still think they are gods or are in some way important.
Let me see if I can help:
You are not the smartest person in the world.
Plenty of other people can do your job and better in every respect.
Everything you do sucks, get over it.
You are an idiot, get over that too.
Anyone who does not believe these things I mean without reservation know them to be true has issues and lacks the required introspection to improve themselves and their work.
Respect only matters to those who have a need for it. In my book it is just another sin on par with pride.
I would rather work with people who say what they are thinking rather than hide behind PC bullshit or care about hurting feelings.
I've found myself thinking or agreeing with most of what Lanier has had to say in various contexts but I think overall I disagree with the larger question.
In my opinion the most important key is forming structures which promote a desired outcome by anticipating human nature. It is all about governance. It is about systematic promotion and reinforcement of good over crap. Curtailing nameless action or leveraging shame never seems to me to have ever been all that effective in the aggregate.
The most successful and useful sites as judged by myself on the Internet today allow some level of participation without even having to register an account. The various *overflow sites use feedback and restrict voice and actions such as comments and editing until you have shown yourself to be trustworthy.
Wikipedia is as anonymous as it gets with its total value purely derived from crowdsourcing yet it has substantial internal structures and governance to enable it to filter out noise and present accurate and useful information in a number of areas. The volume of legitimacy wikipedia enjoys is still a little amazing and a little difficult to understand.
I more or less agree with sentiments on "big data" and facebook. These are systems designed from the start to make money incresingly by expliotation as their objective function. They are hopelessly doomed to suck. When anti-snooping/stalking/privacy regulation catches up their drivers will hopefully be no different than any other large business.
One thing individually about the Internet is it forces lots of us to grow a brain and not accept the BS of trolls, crackpots and idiots on credit alone. After a while some may come to realize these things have never been limited to the Internet in the first place. To the extent where all of the garbage, useless babble and nonsense forces people to grow a brain we are better off for it.
On balance the Internet is full of crap but what do you do about it? Crowds sometimes make terrible choices and mindlessly propogate stupid memes. Marketeers, paid shills and governments work the masses. Various groups with an agenda do the same on the Internet as they have all done since the dawn of civilization.
If you want to do something about it online (which is the wrong place to begin with) you just have to be smart about governance to creativly align your goals with the goals of your customers. The cost of bandwidth continues to fall like a ton of bricks, computers continue to get cheaper... there is no excuse.
One thing I know for sure it is pointless to try and force people to stop drinking, prey to a different god, use their real identity, pay for paywalled content or behave themselves. The key to effecting positive outcomes is creative governance and carefully selecting your battles.
When your primary weapons are lame DDOS attacks and repetitive, predictable poor quality "we are anonymous" youtube videos spoken by dr sbaitso it is hard to see much of a future.
What is really sad is any agreeable lawful or vigilante activities are often trivially derailed and delegitimized by correlating "anonymous" with some asshat who once upon a time claimed to be anonymous defaced a web site dedicated to helping poor children.
I think IR #3 is a bit too nebulous and abstract to be useful... I can't imagine how you top "information age" or what could ever possibly come next.
Instead I think you really need to think in terms of a tech tree with more specific items such as cheap high density batteries, memristers, large scale 3d stacking / optical or plasmon gates, room temp superconductors, optical frequency fourier antennas, quantum computers with thousands of entangled qbits, tabletop fusion, warp drives..etc are likely to dominate the landscape of future changes vs general themes.
I think a mistake is made when you confuse the effects of diminishing first order returns on information and information processing technology from the more important secondary effects it has on the worlds industries and feedbacks on information technology itself.
For example faster Internet or a faster computer at this point would continue to provide ever diminishing returns to the average consumer.
Likewise the always connected mobile computers and communications provide limited little additional value over traditional fixed hardwired systems.
When you end your analysis with this narrow view of technology itself you are blind to what is really going on in terms of aggregate effects on all of industry.
All advances in pharmaceuticals / chemistry / material science is fully contingent on complex large scale computation.
Astronomy and basic research.
Computational biology and insanely cheap + fast sequencing is just now starting to go apeshit..
Automation in design, manufacturing and logistics of all kinds throughout all of industry.
Facebook, mobile phones, twitter and assorted consumer gadgets are red herrings... They are just noise that never really mattered.
There's no perfection to be found anywhere, but you can be about 10000X safer on Linux than on Windows
Are you sure it is 10000x and not 100000000x? How does one go about calculating the proper number of zeros?
There's a huge variety of software in the repositories and any malicious software would be quickly removed
It often takes people years if ever to find innocent bugs and remove these defects... yet whenever your faced with an advasary who has intentionally hidden an expliotable defect then of course it will be detected...and quickly where the innocent bugs have not...yes...sure... of course... this makes perfect sense.
Is this perfect? Of course not
Is this gyberish? Of course it is.
But it's WAY WAY better than the situation on Windows where people install random malware to see "dancing bears"
Are you saying it is not possible for users to install random malware to see dancing bears on a linux machine? If a user downloads and runs a linux program... does it not execute?
or where Windows will auto-run executables just because you put a USB key into your system. Seriously microsoft, WTF?
Seriously Linux... WTF?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovfYBa1EHm4
And I won't bother asking what happens when that random USB key emulates a HID device and opens its own shell.
So, set up a Linux machine, don't run javascript from web sites unless it's a well known trusted site like your bank, only use software from the repos, and you'll be secure for most practical purposes as a "normal person" who isn't the target of the KGB or something.
Being a "normal person" is no fun. I thought the whole point of TFA was cloak and dagger on the cheap?
It's actually a nice boat. I wouldn't mind sailing on it.
Why in God's name would you want that bucket of bolts?
I will never understand what people at Microsoft are smoking... the latest and greatest flagship windows phone 8 platform won't even play wave files... a format Microsoft itself had a hand in creating and still widely used for lossless audio.
There is soo much missing in windows phone 8 existing in windows mobile since almost a decade ago ..really basic shit still does not exist in the platform. Bluetooth HID, serial bluetooth profiles, PAN, file transfer, VPNs and basic data synchronization all totally missing. Wireless authentication is totally fucked up the platform does not even attempt to validate WPA enterprise certificates.
Is it really that hard to dust off and just port this shit from crap you've already done years ago? I mean it is all windows and RT is just an abstraction on win32 so what the fuck is the problem? Why is it always ten steps back one step forward? Are your new programming pardigrams you spent all of this time and effort on rewriting your shit constantly really that bad??? Even the old windows CE APIs you exposed from what I remember circa 2002 were more or less poor analouges of win32 APIs and concepts even if the CE kernel was nothing allike.
Nobody cares about your endless schemes to take over the world and turn computing into a fricking walled garden. Neither is it acceptable in 20 fucking 12 to develop a platform that can only show one app on screen at a time. Get fucking real.
The EE's are giving us all of this cool shit and the OS vendors are running around with their fingers up their asses schemeing ever more impressive ways to fuck us over and piss us off.
If only MS actually cared about the well being of its customers.
I would rather starve than write software for walled in computing systems at the total mercy of the OS vendor. It is sad to see developers just going along with vendor bullshit.