It may be patched faster (not sure about that, but maybe) but it's also a lot less hardened. A fairly trivial amount of dumb fuzz testing (take some complex PDF files that use different parts of the spec, randomly corrupt some bytes to random values, try to open it) will reveal a whole slew of security vulnerabilities. It's sort of the Apple of the security world - much easier to find vulnerabilities (yes, easier than Adobe Reader) but not enough market share to make it worthwhile in the economically-driven world of modern malware.
I do actually use it at home, but I'm under no illusion that it's a secure program (for the record, I'm a security tester by profession).
I like having one shortcut that forces an app to run at Low IL, and one for normal level. Use the Low for most things, use Normal when you have to do something like write to the filesystem (honestly, how often do you write a file from a PDF reader? I don't even print them, usually).
Don't we already have materials that care very much about the direction of charge? I suspect you'd have a hard time posting on Slashdot if the silicon in your computer stopped being a semiconductor.
That's not to say that your claim of "it's just reversed charges; everything else is the same" is wrong, but there's certainly interesting science to be done. If nothing else, there's value in validating our assumptions. Our current models don't really account for antimatter, much like Newton's laws don't account for relativity. That doesn't mean they aren't useful, but it also doesn't mean we should simply accept them as a given instead of testing them in new environments.
Actually, it sounds like there's already a mechanism that (sort of) protects against this. Using BitLocker (full drive encryption, Vista and up) with a TPM (Trusted Platform Module, a sealed chip that can store crypto keys and keeps a running checksum of CPU instructions) won't technically prevent you from getting infected, but it will make automatic unlock fail. Automatically unlocking a bitlocked drive (where "automatic" means anything short of manually entering an AES256 key) usually uses the TPM. However, if the bootup instruction sequence was modified, for example by modified MBR code, the TPM won't unlock. You can still enter a manual recovery key, but it would be suspicious to suddenly need to.
Note that this doesn't prevent dual-booting; you just need to chainload GRUB from the Windows bootloader so that if you boot straight to Windows the TPM doesn't freak out. Note also that you can have one or two additional forms of authentication past the TPM, such as a PIN/passphrase, or a physical device (flashdrive, smartcard, etc.) Just usign the TPM alone will prevent anybody from putting in an Ubuntu CD and booting it live to read your Windows volume, but it won't stop somebody from booting Windows normally, then getting past the login screen using Firewire (not a Windows vulnerability, just a really stupid partof the ieee1394 spec that requires DMA).
It's not a full "I hold all the keys and I decide what runs" but it's close.
Well, that was direct (the first part, at least). Here's some directness fo ryou in return: Bullshit. You're ignoring a couple hundred years of rapid scientific progress.
A. Compared to Earth orbit, Mars has plentiful resources. We have the technology to extract them. B. Compared to Earth orbit, Mars has excellent gravity and natural radiation protection (dirt). We have the technology to utilize it, and create our own "climate" in a habitat. C. City-dwellers in the 1700s knew nothing more about surviving attacks by angry natives than we know today about surviving the Martian environment. D. People have successfully lived for months on space stations and in submarines, where there is no air outside. Mars has CO2 at least, which we can produce O2 from using modern technology. E. See point D. Mars has some water that we could extract, and we're good at recycling it. We have the tech. F. We can artifically generate atmosphere sufficient for a colony, small though it would need to be initially. That includes coping with micrometeorites (see current space program). We have the tech. G. The natural resources available for building are easily accessibly (with modern cunstruction equipment) in the form of the terrain itself. Other options include transparent domes and scavenged spacecraft parts. We have the tech. H. There are plenty of huge volcanoes on Earth, and there are plenty of areas that they don't threaten. There were also diseases deadlier than radiation is to today's medicine. Invalid comparison. I. More people died per capita on early long-range naval voyages than on current space missions. Invalid comparison. J. Current spacecraft are the equivalent of canoes and rafts relative to the ships used by Earth's old explorers. We have better theoretical designs, and while we don't have the tech yet, we will soon.
YOU'RE MISSING THE POINT ANYHOW: PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO LEAVE THEIR OLD LIVES BEHIND COMPLETELY TO COLONIZE A DANGEROUS NEW PLACE.
I'd say a large portion of this is your choice of AV. Symantec's consumer line has been crap for about a decade.
That doesn't solve the problem for people who don't know any better, and it certainly doesn't exonerate Symantec's bullshit, but they're not all anywhere near that bad.
Enron is a completely different case. They were actually lying about their financial status. MS did in fact earn as much money as their reports say, and did have as many expenses. They just decided that, for reporting purposes, it looks better if they attribute a greater share of that profit to sales of Windows and Office rather than sales of Xboxes. Nobody is going to suddenly discover that MS is actually bankrupt and has been lying in their statements; at worst they might learn, in surprise, that enterntainment devices have become bigger business that previously expected.
To address his complaint about the ads he sees from his wife's shopping:
Why is she using your account? Multi-user operating systems have been mainstream for the last decade, and have existed for decades before that. Why is she using your browser? If you don't want ads targeting her, try having her use a different ad-delivery platform (web browser). Why are you seeing targeted ads at all? Filter out tracking cookies. If you block ads altogether from sites that serve ones for stuff you don't want, you'll have a nicer web experience.
You are both partially wrong and completely wrong.
Partially wrong because, even though your argument that "how something looks [is not] a reliable indicator of how much work went in..." is correct, that isn't how customers view it. Customers see the UI, not the underlying code, and the WP7 UI is totally new. It makes the UI changes of Vista and even Office 2007 look like minor revisions. Regardless of how many man-hours went into writing it (a ton, but that's almost irrelevent) it's the very first product to feature such a UI. That sounds pretty "v1" to me.
Second, you're completely wrong that WP7 is "the good old Windows Mobile with a new UI." WinMo is an OS on top of the WinCE kernel. Although WP7 also uses WinCE, there were substantial changes to the kernel. However, everything of "Windows Mobile" is pretty much gone - the runtime libraries and application model are totally different, for example.
Windows Mobile is to Windows Phone as Maemo is to Android (no offense to Maemo). Both run the same kernel (modulo version and customizations), but very little above it is the same. That doesn't meant that the first Android releases weren't decidedly v1 products, despite using an established kernel.
For a specific purpose like that, the app would almost certainly be written using the native SDK. Among other things, that pretty much guarantees it wouldn't be portable to a phone.
Really? Can you name 10 aspects of the Win7 UI that Vista didn't have? I can, depending on how pedantic you want to be, but many people couldn't. Your claim is completely ridiculous. Win7's main UI difference from Vista is the taskbar change, which still performas the same functions through the same interactions as the taskbar allthe way back to Win95 (though it does some new stuff too, now). The Notification area/system tray changed as well, though not in any drastic way. The Explorer shell received fairly little change.
WinPhone7 is not only completely bears-no-resemblence different from WinMo, it's also different from all its contemporaries.
WP7 is very much a "social network from anywhere" device. Quite a lot of the Kin's features, including most of those best suited to a smartphone-like data paln, are in WP7.
SLED (Suse Linuex Enterprise Desktop) is another good option. Commercial support, long-lasting support cycles, widely enough deployed to have excellent package repositories, and lots of testing. It's not free of cost (unlike openSuse) but I would no more recommend openSuse than I would Fedora, and for generally the same reasons.
I find it easier to get things done on Linux than on OS X, but then maybe I'm just weird. I'm also not a "non-technical" user so maybe you're right for most people. I detest trying to do anything IT-ish on OS X though. The downside of "it just works!" is that when it doesn't, it's a *real* bitch to fix.
Windows can use both NFS and remote UNIX printing. They're optional features, disabled by default, but they are present. Requires at least Professional and possibly Enterprise (Vista or Win7), though. Check in "Turn windows features on or off" control panel (accessible via appwiz.cpl).
Pretty sure games like Age of Empires and such were profitable. It wouldn't surprise me if Encarta was too, back before the Web became widely available. MS has produced a ton of software, not just the big things that have 90%+ market penetration.
Um, no, it is a v1 product. It comes from a company that has previously shipped products meant for the same class of task (OS for a phone), but that doesn't mean it has ancestors. The UI is totally new, built from scratch. That's what people are seeing and responding to.
You have to go clear down to the kernel to find anything much in common with WinMo, and even there it's received a huge degree of improvement. Would you call the first Android phones not a "v1" product just because Google obviously took lessons from the iPhone? That's about the degree of relation between WinMo and WP7; another existing but very different product in the marketplace.
Also, MS has not been making smartphones. Technically they didn't even make WP7 phones, but they did lay out the hardware specs. They didn't do that for WinMo, and just as with Android, that came back to bite them. This is a new approach, between the complete stack of Apple devices and the free-wheeling world of commodity PCs.
If you include the Google apps, Google branding, and Android Store access, Google actually charges mor efor Android than Windows does for WP7. Only the base OS is free, and while said base is very good code, shipping a phone with it would be like shipping a Linux distro with only stuff from kernel.org + home-developed code (which would cost the carrier money to develop). It wouldn't be very useful, and would do poorly in the market of feature-rich options.
There are no, let me repeat *NO* "previous versions of Windows Phone" and until you get that through your head you have no legitimate place in this discussion. WP7, despite its name, is very much a v1 product. It is nothing like, and has verly little code in common with, Windows Mobile. It is targeted at a different market segment. It has a different UI. It has a different SDK. It is on different devices.
If you "meant" to say that previous phones running a Microsoft OS were flops, that is a legitimate claim, but it's also kind of like claiming that because prior versions of Mac OS weren't very successful at gaining market share, OS X is never going to amount to anything. In fact, the first versions of OS X were at least as unfinished as WP7, but that didn't stop Apple from becoming very resurgent in the market. Microsoft has plenty of time to perfect this new OS of theirs, and attract market share at a growing rate as they do.
See also Android, which launched to no particular initial success. How many G1s sold on their first day? (Serious question, BTW - it may be many more than 40k, I don't know.)
How many Androids was Google activating each day in the early days of the G1? For that matter, how many G1s did they activate in total? Never even mind how many were actiavted on launch day...
How many people looked at the "success" of early Android and predicted, using the kinds of numbers you have here, that it would "NEVER CATCH UP" with the iPhone?
Those people were all wrong. WP7, despite its name, is a very v1 product. If there's one thing MS got exactly right with the Zune, it was the updates they shipped, backported to every device, each adding new features. They've already said they'll be doing the same thing with WP7, bypassing the glacial update rate of the carriers to push updates directly to phone owners. That kind of thing leads to in increase, not fall-off, of products sold each day.
I'm not saying it won't fail, but your arguments are completely invalid.
The things you say are true, but your post is a lie. MS added a lot more than that.
Facebook integration - photos, contacts, updates, and more. Live tiles - much more than just "shiny" because it really does provide "at a glance" info. Xbox Live gaming - huge deal for some people, and a clear differentiator. Zune integration - especially considering Zune Pass streaming over the air, there's a lot of excitement here. Hardware standards - no fragmentation like WinMo and Android.
Copy/paste are coming in a few months. I agree that it should have been present to start, but seriously, this is a ridiculous thing to keep harping on as though it's going to kill the product.
Sounds good (and yes, you have enough control to overclock it, how sweet is that?!?) I'd be curious what that does to battery life, though. Granted that the CPU will usually be run stepped down, it seems like that could eat battery really fast while on Skype or something.
Nokia N900. Debian Linux ported to ARM with a small-touchscreen-friendly interface. Comes with a terminal app; open that; type "su" and hit Enter. The default root password is publicly available (good idea to change it). People complain that its app store is lacking, and they're right, but they're also missing the point: the thing *runs desktop Linux*! It has repositories. sudo apt-get install <foo> You can even compile from source taballs right on the phone, if you really want to / there's no pre-built binaries.
The browser is Gecko-based, and includes Flash. You can install AdBlock Plus if you want. You can even install mobile Firefox and get the full Firefox experience, with extensions. You can also install other browsers, if you prefer. Nothing is stopping you.
The main downside is that it's a due for a refresh. The hardware runs the OS and apps fine, but it's not terribly impressive by modern smartphone measures.
He is known to the masses for his directing, but he has also done a ton of screenplay writing (how he got started) and has always beein interested in special effect technology (how he got into the industry in the first place). I don't know how much implementing he did, but he definitely drove the technology behind sci-fi effects. Certainly the functional specification, and possibly also the design spec.
Sometimes, even when the crossing signal buttons don't do anything most of the time they will have an effect at night. In my neighborhood most of the lights, including walk signals, switch automatically. However, there are a few that, after about 9 PM, will not show a Walk light unless the button is pressed; they will switch briefly if a car comes in the same direction (there are sensors, though they are also only used at night it seems) but the crosswalk indicator will stay red.
Slashdot Mirror
It may be patched faster (not sure about that, but maybe) but it's also a lot less hardened. A fairly trivial amount of dumb fuzz testing (take some complex PDF files that use different parts of the spec, randomly corrupt some bytes to random values, try to open it) will reveal a whole slew of security vulnerabilities. It's sort of the Apple of the security world - much easier to find vulnerabilities (yes, easier than Adobe Reader) but not enough market share to make it worthwhile in the economically-driven world of modern malware.
I do actually use it at home, but I'm under no illusion that it's a secure program (for the record, I'm a security tester by profession).
I like having one shortcut that forces an app to run at Low IL, and one for normal level. Use the Low for most things, use Normal when you have to do something like write to the filesystem (honestly, how often do you write a file from a PDF reader? I don't even print them, usually).
Don't we already have materials that care very much about the direction of charge? I suspect you'd have a hard time posting on Slashdot if the silicon in your computer stopped being a semiconductor.
That's not to say that your claim of "it's just reversed charges; everything else is the same" is wrong, but there's certainly interesting science to be done. If nothing else, there's value in validating our assumptions. Our current models don't really account for antimatter, much like Newton's laws don't account for relativity. That doesn't mean they aren't useful, but it also doesn't mean we should simply accept them as a given instead of testing them in new environments.
Actually, it sounds like there's already a mechanism that (sort of) protects against this. Using BitLocker (full drive encryption, Vista and up) with a TPM (Trusted Platform Module, a sealed chip that can store crypto keys and keeps a running checksum of CPU instructions) won't technically prevent you from getting infected, but it will make automatic unlock fail. Automatically unlocking a bitlocked drive (where "automatic" means anything short of manually entering an AES256 key) usually uses the TPM. However, if the bootup instruction sequence was modified, for example by modified MBR code, the TPM won't unlock. You can still enter a manual recovery key, but it would be suspicious to suddenly need to.
Note that this doesn't prevent dual-booting; you just need to chainload GRUB from the Windows bootloader so that if you boot straight to Windows the TPM doesn't freak out. Note also that you can have one or two additional forms of authentication past the TPM, such as a PIN/passphrase, or a physical device (flashdrive, smartcard, etc.) Just usign the TPM alone will prevent anybody from putting in an Ubuntu CD and booting it live to read your Windows volume, but it won't stop somebody from booting Windows normally, then getting past the login screen using Firewire (not a Windows vulnerability, just a really stupid partof the ieee1394 spec that requires DMA).
It's not a full "I hold all the keys and I decide what runs" but it's close.
Well, that was direct (the first part, at least). Here's some directness fo ryou in return: Bullshit. You're ignoring a couple hundred years of rapid scientific progress.
A. Compared to Earth orbit, Mars has plentiful resources. We have the technology to extract them.
B. Compared to Earth orbit, Mars has excellent gravity and natural radiation protection (dirt). We have the technology to utilize it, and create our own "climate" in a habitat.
C. City-dwellers in the 1700s knew nothing more about surviving attacks by angry natives than we know today about surviving the Martian environment.
D. People have successfully lived for months on space stations and in submarines, where there is no air outside. Mars has CO2 at least, which we can produce O2 from using modern technology.
E. See point D. Mars has some water that we could extract, and we're good at recycling it. We have the tech.
F. We can artifically generate atmosphere sufficient for a colony, small though it would need to be initially. That includes coping with micrometeorites (see current space program). We have the tech.
G. The natural resources available for building are easily accessibly (with modern cunstruction equipment) in the form of the terrain itself. Other options include transparent domes and scavenged spacecraft parts. We have the tech.
H. There are plenty of huge volcanoes on Earth, and there are plenty of areas that they don't threaten. There were also diseases deadlier than radiation is to today's medicine. Invalid comparison.
I. More people died per capita on early long-range naval voyages than on current space missions. Invalid comparison.
J. Current spacecraft are the equivalent of canoes and rafts relative to the ships used by Earth's old explorers. We have better theoretical designs, and while we don't have the tech yet, we will soon.
YOU'RE MISSING THE POINT ANYHOW: PEOPLE ARE WILLING TO LEAVE THEIR OLD LIVES BEHIND COMPLETELY TO COLONIZE A DANGEROUS NEW PLACE.
I'd say a large portion of this is your choice of AV. Symantec's consumer line has been crap for about a decade.
That doesn't solve the problem for people who don't know any better, and it certainly doesn't exonerate Symantec's bullshit, but they're not all anywhere near that bad.
Enron is a completely different case. They were actually lying about their financial status. MS did in fact earn as much money as their reports say, and did have as many expenses. They just decided that, for reporting purposes, it looks better if they attribute a greater share of that profit to sales of Windows and Office rather than sales of Xboxes. Nobody is going to suddenly discover that MS is actually bankrupt and has been lying in their statements; at worst they might learn, in surprise, that enterntainment devices have become bigger business that previously expected.
To address his complaint about the ads he sees from his wife's shopping:
Why is she using your account? Multi-user operating systems have been mainstream for the last decade, and have existed for decades before that.
Why is she using your browser? If you don't want ads targeting her, try having her use a different ad-delivery platform (web browser).
Why are you seeing targeted ads at all? Filter out tracking cookies.
If you block ads altogether from sites that serve ones for stuff you don't want, you'll have a nicer web experience.
You are both partially wrong and completely wrong.
Partially wrong because, even though your argument that "how something looks [is not] a reliable indicator of how much work went in..." is correct, that isn't how customers view it. Customers see the UI, not the underlying code, and the WP7 UI is totally new. It makes the UI changes of Vista and even Office 2007 look like minor revisions. Regardless of how many man-hours went into writing it (a ton, but that's almost irrelevent) it's the very first product to feature such a UI. That sounds pretty "v1" to me.
Second, you're completely wrong that WP7 is "the good old Windows Mobile with a new UI." WinMo is an OS on top of the WinCE kernel. Although WP7 also uses WinCE, there were substantial changes to the kernel. However, everything of "Windows Mobile" is pretty much gone - the runtime libraries and application model are totally different, for example.
Windows Mobile is to Windows Phone as Maemo is to Android (no offense to Maemo). Both run the same kernel (modulo version and customizations), but very little above it is the same. That doesn't meant that the first Android releases weren't decidedly v1 products, despite using an established kernel.
For a specific purpose like that, the app would almost certainly be written using the native SDK. Among other things, that pretty much guarantees it wouldn't be portable to a phone.
Really? Can you name 10 aspects of the Win7 UI that Vista didn't have? I can, depending on how pedantic you want to be, but many people couldn't. Your claim is completely ridiculous. Win7's main UI difference from Vista is the taskbar change, which still performas the same functions through the same interactions as the taskbar allthe way back to Win95 (though it does some new stuff too, now). The Notification area/system tray changed as well, though not in any drastic way. The Explorer shell received fairly little change.
WinPhone7 is not only completely bears-no-resemblence different from WinMo, it's also different from all its contemporaries.
WP7 is very much a "social network from anywhere" device. Quite a lot of the Kin's features, including most of those best suited to a smartphone-like data paln, are in WP7.
SLED (Suse Linuex Enterprise Desktop) is another good option. Commercial support, long-lasting support cycles, widely enough deployed to have excellent package repositories, and lots of testing. It's not free of cost (unlike openSuse) but I would no more recommend openSuse than I would Fedora, and for generally the same reasons.
I find it easier to get things done on Linux than on OS X, but then maybe I'm just weird. I'm also not a "non-technical" user so maybe you're right for most people. I detest trying to do anything IT-ish on OS X though. The downside of "it just works!" is that when it doesn't, it's a *real* bitch to fix.
Windows can use both NFS and remote UNIX printing. They're optional features, disabled by default, but they are present. Requires at least Professional and possibly Enterprise (Vista or Win7), though. Check in "Turn windows features on or off" control panel (accessible via appwiz.cpl).
Pretty sure games like Age of Empires and such were profitable. It wouldn't surprise me if Encarta was too, back before the Web became widely available. MS has produced a ton of software, not just the big things that have 90%+ market penetration.
Um, no, it is a v1 product. It comes from a company that has previously shipped products meant for the same class of task (OS for a phone), but that doesn't mean it has ancestors. The UI is totally new, built from scratch. That's what people are seeing and responding to.
You have to go clear down to the kernel to find anything much in common with WinMo, and even there it's received a huge degree of improvement. Would you call the first Android phones not a "v1" product just because Google obviously took lessons from the iPhone? That's about the degree of relation between WinMo and WP7; another existing but very different product in the marketplace.
Also, MS has not been making smartphones. Technically they didn't even make WP7 phones, but they did lay out the hardware specs. They didn't do that for WinMo, and just as with Android, that came back to bite them. This is a new approach, between the complete stack of Apple devices and the free-wheeling world of commodity PCs.
If you include the Google apps, Google branding, and Android Store access, Google actually charges mor efor Android than Windows does for WP7. Only the base OS is free, and while said base is very good code, shipping a phone with it would be like shipping a Linux distro with only stuff from kernel.org + home-developed code (which would cost the carrier money to develop). It wouldn't be very useful, and would do poorly in the market of feature-rich options.
There are no, let me repeat *NO* "previous versions of Windows Phone" and until you get that through your head you have no legitimate place in this discussion. WP7, despite its name, is very much a v1 product. It is nothing like, and has verly little code in common with, Windows Mobile. It is targeted at a different market segment. It has a different UI. It has a different SDK. It is on different devices.
If you "meant" to say that previous phones running a Microsoft OS were flops, that is a legitimate claim, but it's also kind of like claiming that because prior versions of Mac OS weren't very successful at gaining market share, OS X is never going to amount to anything. In fact, the first versions of OS X were at least as unfinished as WP7, but that didn't stop Apple from becoming very resurgent in the market. Microsoft has plenty of time to perfect this new OS of theirs, and attract market share at a growing rate as they do.
See also Android, which launched to no particular initial success. How many G1s sold on their first day? (Serious question, BTW - it may be many more than 40k, I don't know.)
Bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit.
How many Androids was Google activating each day in the early days of the G1? For that matter, how many G1s did they activate in total? Never even mind how many were actiavted on launch day...
How many people looked at the "success" of early Android and predicted, using the kinds of numbers you have here, that it would "NEVER CATCH UP" with the iPhone?
Those people were all wrong. WP7, despite its name, is a very v1 product. If there's one thing MS got exactly right with the Zune, it was the updates they shipped, backported to every device, each adding new features. They've already said they'll be doing the same thing with WP7, bypassing the glacial update rate of the carriers to push updates directly to phone owners. That kind of thing leads to in increase, not fall-off, of products sold each day.
I'm not saying it won't fail, but your arguments are completely invalid.
The things you say are true, but your post is a lie. MS added a lot more than that.
Facebook integration - photos, contacts, updates, and more.
Live tiles - much more than just "shiny" because it really does provide "at a glance" info.
Xbox Live gaming - huge deal for some people, and a clear differentiator.
Zune integration - especially considering Zune Pass streaming over the air, there's a lot of excitement here.
Hardware standards - no fragmentation like WinMo and Android.
Copy/paste are coming in a few months. I agree that it should have been present to start, but seriously, this is a ridiculous thing to keep harping on as though it's going to kill the product.
Sounds good (and yes, you have enough control to overclock it, how sweet is that?!?) I'd be curious what that does to battery life, though. Granted that the CPU will usually be run stepped down, it seems like that could eat battery really fast while on Skype or something.
Nokia N900. Debian Linux ported to ARM with a small-touchscreen-friendly interface. Comes with a terminal app; open that; type "su" and hit Enter. The default root password is publicly available (good idea to change it). People complain that its app store is lacking, and they're right, but they're also missing the point: the thing *runs desktop Linux*!
It has repositories.
sudo apt-get install <foo>
You can even compile from source taballs right on the phone, if you really want to / there's no pre-built binaries.
The browser is Gecko-based, and includes Flash. You can install AdBlock Plus if you want. You can even install mobile Firefox and get the full Firefox experience, with extensions. You can also install other browsers, if you prefer. Nothing is stopping you.
The main downside is that it's a due for a refresh. The hardware runs the OS and apps fine, but it's not terribly impressive by modern smartphone measures.
He is known to the masses for his directing, but he has also done a ton of screenplay writing (how he got started) and has always beein interested in special effect technology (how he got into the industry in the first place). I don't know how much implementing he did, but he definitely drove the technology behind sci-fi effects. Certainly the functional specification, and possibly also the design spec.
Sometimes, even when the crossing signal buttons don't do anything most of the time they will have an effect at night. In my neighborhood most of the lights, including walk signals, switch automatically. However, there are a few that, after about 9 PM, will not show a Walk light unless the button is pressed; they will switch briefly if a car comes in the same direction (there are sensors, though they are also only used at night it seems) but the crosswalk indicator will stay red.