If there was a requirement to stop distributing the JS module under that name, probably. Once trademark infringement has been legally determined to be occurring, continuing to distribute the infringing service or product could open them to legal action. (IANAL)
Of course, there was no such requirement and no guarantee that the IM application could have secured one. As people have pointed out, a library and an application aren't the same thing and unless the library concerned messaging in some way I doubt anybody would confuse them. At that point, while NPM is probably not legally required to continue hosting the package, they sure as hell aren't required to take it down. This isn't copyright, with its bullshit DMCA takedown notices.
Are you claiming trademark law requires that a third-party provider remove other peoples' content without their permission in response to a letter from a lawyer? Because I'm skeptical of that. There was no legal action taken - no lawsuit, no determining of infringement, no finding in favor of either party, no out-of-court settlement, etc. - and there is no trademark equivalent of the DMCA's bullshit takedown notices.
Now, NPM was most likely within their legal rights to remove the module. The only way they wouldn't be is if they had signed a contract or made some similar promise to not do that, and that seems quite unlikely. However, defending their actions as followed trademark law is bullshit. There was no legal requirement yet, and may never have been one, that prohibited distributing that JavaScript module.
I also doubt if ticket sellers were really paid 57% more in the past. Why would a movie theater pay that much for a job requiring near zero skills?
Or for the simplest reason of all: minimum wage has not kept up with inflation (and TFA's numbers are, as you'd hope, inflation-adjusted). Obviously if you go far enough back, minimum wage didn't exist. However, if you look at historical, inflation-adjusted minimum wages, they trend downward nationally... because for some reason, the minimum wage wasn't indexed to inflation and requires an act of congress to update it.
I don't know that I'd call Edge buggy, unless you're running the preview versions (which are pre-release software and expected to have bugs). It is undoubtedly getting better, feature-wise, too. However, it is still fundamentally a toy browser, an overgrown mobile phone app, and it is really quite worthless as a consequence.
It has nothing resembling good tab session management (although they did add an interesting feature in that general area in the last preview update). It offers basically no support over what JS can and cannot do. It has basically no cookie filtering. It has no tracking protection or ad blocking (IE first got these almost a decade ago). It built-in Flash that can be globally disabled, but cannot be enabled and disabled for specific sites. It has no support for tab grouping or switching tabs in last-used order. It cannot understand RSS/ATOM feeds at all (renders them just as XML files, no feed reading ability). It doesn't support per-tab taskbar items.
I'm sure there's many more features missing; I don't use it enough to find out because the list above already contains multiple deal-breakers for me. The only things it does well are its dev tools (which are not mobile-app-like at all), its rendering engine, and displaying which tab(s) are playing media. Nobody who has any choice in the matter should be using it on a desktop PC, and I say this as somebody who voluntarily uses all off Pale Moon, Opera, IE11, Chrome, real Firefox (on occasion), and Midori (on occasion, though it's pretty feature-less too).
Thermocouples are really inefficient. From the book: 1500 W of total energy from the RTG. 1400 W of it gets radiated as heat, 100 W is produced as electricity. The rover had (IIRC) 14000 Wh - 14 KWh - of capacity in each battery. You could charge that off the RTG, sure, but only if you gave it 140 hours (approximately six days) per battery. I think he did actually plug it into the system - got a few percent more range that way - but it was the difference beteen depleting the battery in 4.5 hours and in 4.7 hours or something similarly inconsequential.
On the other hand, the fact that the RTG mostly produces heat is really useful, because it meant he didn't have to sacrifice a bunch of the rover's range running its own heaters. 1400 W of heat would drain one of the rover's batteries in 10 hours (electricity converts very directly to heat; it's the reverse that's hard) even if it wasn't used for propulsion at all. That was actually more heat than the rover was designed for; he had to remove some insulation.
Speaking of Russian armed spacecraft, though... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... 80-ton satellite armed with a megawatt laser. Too bad about their control system...
Windows Phone NNN for v7.0 - 8.1. Commonly abbreviated WPX (WP8) Windows Mobile NNN for 6.5 and down, though MS did try re-branding 6.5 as Windows Phone right before WP7 shipped. Abbreviated WinMo or WMX (WM6) Windows 10 Mobile (note the order) for the new version. Abbreviated Win10 Mobile or W10M.
Yes, it's terrible and stupid. Microsoft branding sucks and pretty much always has. Sometimes I want to know where they *find* these idiots.
None have anything to do with Windows CE (WinCE) except that the CE kernel was used for legacy WM and for WP7.x. WP8.x and W10M use the NT kernel, same as on PCs.
W10M at least makes more sense than calling the previous versions "Windows" did; it not only uses the same APIs and same kernel, but can actually run same of the same, unmodified, apps. It also supports USB (or Bluetooth) keyboard and mouse (WP8.x supported USB keyboard but no mice at all) and can display to an external screen if it has the right hardware (Continuum for Phone). Windows 10 Mobile is, in many ways, the same OS as Windows 10.
AppLocker, in recent Windows versions (and building on Software Restriction Policies, dating back to XP), provides similar controls. It's actually a lot more fine-grained than that, though it can be made to act much like how you describe.
Technically, Windows Defender in Win7 is was built from Giant AntiSpyware and only provided anti-spyware/anti-adware protection; it doesn't have detection for things like worms and other sorts of malware. For that you need the (free, but optional download) Microsoft Security Essentials. However, starting with Win8, Defender (the built-in thing) includes the MSE scanning engine and signatures.
The obvious difference between Win7 and Win8 in this regard is that when Win7 came out, MS was still under some anti-trust restrictions against bundling software that competed with commercial offerings (and anti-virus would definitely count). Those restrictions expired before Win8 was released, so they could bundle the full scanner instead of requiring that people go seek it out on their own.
This applies to existing businesses and entrepreneurs as well. Stop trying to start new businesses in the Bay Area! Yes, there's lots of local talent, but they're going to be bloody expensive because nobody will work for you in the bay area unless you pay through the nose, and your office space won't be cheap either. In an online world, finding people who will come work for your company is less a matter of how many people are in the area where you're located, and more of how many people want to come work where you're located. Move somewhere nice that *isn't* so crazy-expensive, and you'll find lots of people who are willing to move there because even on lower salary, they'll still get to keep more of their pay after rent/mortgage.
Chicago, Denver, Austin, Seattle, and many other cities already have some tech scene, but are nowhere near as crowded and overpriced as SF. Go start your new company, or open a new office, in one of them. Feel free to recruit in the Bay Area, and if anybody sounds hesitant to move remind them that they can get a better place for 1/3 the money in the new city.
San Francisco is not some monolithic hive mind. It's not even a truly representative democracy; lots of people are unable to vote for some reason or another (in many cities - not sure about SF in particular - lower-income people usually simply can't afford the time to vote in an election, much less to research the options and then go vote for the one that best represents their interests).
Stop talking about the "ACTUAL CHOICES" that "they" make as though these choices are made by an entity that represents the will of the entire city. There *is* no unified will of the entire city.
Fully agreed, but it actually goes even further than that. The order of cards in the library is unknown to both, but the specific cards in it are fully known to one player (but usually not the other; in some situations you'll know the opposing deck already). As you play against an opponent in multiple games, you'll learn their deck, which will give you some knowledge of what they have. As you watch their play, you can observe some of their strategy and therefore be able to predict things about the rest of their deck (and their hand), especially if you are aware of the current meta. Then there's things like drafting, which not only has its own strategy but also provides information about the strategy of the people around you, which can later be leveraged as partial (and usually unreliable) knowledge of their deck.
M:tG often (though not always) has far fewer moves available than something like chess, but the state of the game is *far* more complex, even if there were perfect knowledge. Since there isn't perfect knowledge, and since many elements of the game either actively exploit this lack or provide one-sided mitigations for it, the state of the game is not only extremely complex but also completely probabilistic. It's a mess.
Not even all the lower 48. The west coast had an absurdly warm winter. I joke that the east stole our winter (I'm from Washington, the one on the west coast in case that's unclear). We had a day in February hit 70F (about 21C), about 10F (5C) above what would normally be considered a warm day for February in the Seattle area last year. The ski season basically didn't exist, especially on this side of the Cascades; base snow depths that should have been in the upper double digits were in the single digits. This year's winter has actually been significantly colder than last year's, here, although it's still way above the historical average.
Well, if it's consistent with previous Windows RT releases, it'll also have a boneheaded restriction against running any non-Windows-Store applications unless they're signed by Microsoft. That means you can't run.NET applications (even though.NET is architecture-agnostic), and can't run Win32 applications (re)compiled for ARM (which is usually very easy to do).
Of course, if it's consistent with previous versions of RT, it will be jailbroken to remove that particularly idiotic bit of anti-user bullshit.
Nope. Windows RT and WinRT are completely different things, courtesy of Microsoft Branding being couldn't-pour-piss-out-of-a-boot-with-instructions-on-the-heel stupid.
Windows Universal apps use a (new) version of the WinRT framework, yes, but not all things the run on Windows RT (such as Internet Explorer, Powershell, Regedit, Windows Explorer, Microsoft Word, Microsoft's debugging tools, or any of the many ported apps for jailbroken tablets) use WinRT.
"Windows 10 IoT" is already a thing, at least in preview builds. It's intended for RasPi 2 and similar. It's not *called* Windows 10 RT, but that may be nothing but a difference of branding.
The point of the jailbreaking is to remove the signature requirement, actually. Without the jailbreak, you can't run anything unless it's signed by Microsoft.
I ported a few programs to RT, and I don't remember any missing Win32 APIs. Some stuff like OpenGL and down-level DirectX was missing, but the core Win32 API was fully intact. Are you perhaps thinking of Windows Phone, which also runs on NT but is missing most of the shell and GDI APIs?
Mostly true. As long as you stuck to true Win32, CE and 9x and NT were all close enough, though there are still some Win32 APIs that are only partially implemented on CE. However, if you wanted to deal with things like file or registry permissions (which CE didn't support), or multiple users (which CE didn't support), or stuff like that, the differences between CE/9x and NT (RT uses the NT kernel) quickly become relevant. Same if you wanted to write drivers.
RT is a multi-user operating system. It uses NTFS, not CE's weird variant of FAT. It supports all of NT's security features, including restricted tokens for sandboxed applications (IE, Windows Store apps, etc.). If you write a program or even a driver for x86 NT 6.x (8.0 is NT v6.2, 8.1 is v6.3, same as on PC), and don't use anything x86-specific (like inline assembly or similar), it will compile and run flawlessly on (jailbroken) RT.
There are jailbreaks for both Win RT 8.0 and 8.1 that will let you run Win32 (what you call "WinAPI") programs on RT, either your own or any of a body of ported (mostly open-source) software. You can also run.NET programs - they don't even need to be recompiled, if they target.NET 4.x, since that's already on RT and.NET binaries are intermediate code - and of course programs written for any of the ported runtimes (Python, Perl, Ruby, sort of Java, etc.).
There's even a (very unofficial, but I think it's open source now) program that provides a binary compatibility layer for legacy Win32 x86 apps, using dynamic recompilation and shim libraries that thunk Win32 APIs from the x86 program to the ARM host operating system. This avoids the need to run an entire x86 copy of Windows on top of RT, though this is technically possible too. It's sort of like OS X's "Rosetta" feature from when they were switching from PPC to x86. The compatibility isn't great yet, and the performance probably never will be, but it's usable for some apps and supporting others is often just a matter of getting the shim libraries written. Not bad for something hacked together from bits of open source software and Windows header files in a few hackers' spare time.
Of course, all of this is utterly unofficial. Microsoft broke the 8.0 jailbreak with 8.1, and has patched the 8.1 jailbreak (but you can easily skip that patch, or roll it back). It really highlights how much MS was shooting themselves in the foot, though; Jailbroken RT tablets are cheap Windows PCs with great battery life, and just happen to run on a different architecture. Since recompiling is often just a matter of changing the target platform in Visual Studio and hitting Build again, RT could easily have had a substantial library of software, and the compatibility program (which Microsoft could have put a lot more resources into than a few folks on XDA could spare) could have filled in the gaps.
But noooo, then somebody might have actually used it for something useful. Much better to just write off a $900M loss on the thing...
Kindle Fire has a lock screen. I have no idea what you think you're talking about, but it definitely supports local security (and, until the latest update, that included device encryption).
The feds are only thwarted by public-key crypto in Apple's case because their hardware on the 5C trusts the software too much. If Apple had designed their hardware crypto correctly in the first place, the software wouldn't matter. The actual device encryption is 100% symmetric-key (and the key derivation probably involves hash functions, which are another beast entirely). However, the lockout / device wipe is in software, and it's that software the feds want to replace. Code signing (public key) stops them from doing that, but even then, all they get is the ability to try pin codes as fast as the hardware will permit (which is probably enough to get the phone unlocked in a reasonable time, unless the lock screen code is way beyond what mere mortals ever use).
If the lockout / device wipe were implemented in hardware, the software wouldn't matter. Imagine a hardware security module (HSM) that itself tracks whether the device is locked. Software can tell the HSM to lock, but not to unlock; only the code can do that. Hardware (physical connection to the power button, hardware timer in the HSM, whatever) can also lock the HSM, of course. Software can tell the HSM to change the lock code or maximum allowed attempts, but only while the HSM is unlocked. Software can tell the HSM to reset, even if the HSM is locked, but doing so permanently purges material needed to re-derive the device encryption key. Similarly, if too many lock code entry attempts are made while the HSM is locked, it automatically resets and purges the key derivation material. Even if the actual data was backed up or is never erased to begin with, it can now never be decrypted short of cracking AES-256; the storage is, in effect, wiped.
Good fucking luck breaking *that* with a court order, or a stolen signing key, or anything else. This is what Apple (and everybody else) should have been doing.
Also, yes, fuck mandatory code signing. I'm OK with the signing concept in principle, but it *must* be under the owner's control. That same HSM could hold the list of allowable public keys, and (when the HSM is unlocked) could allow people to manage their own keys (including the pre-loaded OEM one), for example.
The world is not homogenous. In many areas, Windows Phone's market share is far higher than its global average. A lot of those areas are also areas of very high WhatsApp usage, so it makes sense that the company would want to keep that market.
When I was in India for a couple weeks last year, I saw more Windows phones than iPhones (according to an admittedly old article - 2013 - iOS has only a 2.3% market share in India, Android has 91%, Windows Phone has 5.4%). Based on what I saw last year, Windows Phone and iOS has probably both made gains there - if you have more recent statistics, it'd be interesting to see them - but Windows Phone more than iOS. Another example where WP market share exceeds its global average (even though, unlike India, it's still only in third place) is Europe last year: 10.1% across UK, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.
In the case of Europe, some of that is probably brand loyalty to Nokia, even though they were already owned by Microsoft at that point (although if that were the case, I'd expect northern Europe - especially Finland - to feature in the list). In the case of India, it's simpler: low-end Windows phones are nearly as cheap as low-end Android phones (you can get a Windows phone, new, contract-free, and SIM-unlocked, for $50 even in the US if you know where to look, or a bit less if you don't mind previous-generation hardware) but are much more functional. A Lumia 520 - one of the lowest of the low when it comes to Windows Phone devices - is still supported and can be upgraded to Windows 10 Mobile. This on a handset that launched as a minimum-specs WP8.0 device in 2013 and available on Amazon.com for $40 new. An equivalent Android phone would have been lucky to get the first major OS upgrade (8.0 to 8.1, for Windows Phone), or even be hardware-compatible with the second.
The "Insider" program (i.e. the thing where they give you pre-release builds, and include this feedback mechanism) is 100% optional and you have to go well out of your way to enable it.
I think you just have no idea what you're talking about. "Pushing" indeed.
Serious question: does LO handle tracked changes correctly yet? That was only the most obvious deal-breaker feature the last time I tried to switch of MS Office entirely, but it was a really obvious one. At work, we use tracked changes all the time.
Of course, we also have very complicated template files at work, which render correctly in Word 2010 - 2016 but which I would be impressed if they were correct in Libre/OpenOffice
Win10 has a "Windows Insider" program which gives you access to pre-release builds (remember, Win10 is getting ongoing upgrades, sort of a mini-service pack every few months). People who opt into this program are beta testing the next version of Windows. It may still call itself Win10, but the build numbers are going up and new features are being added.
There's also Win10 Mobile, which *is* still pre-release; they shipped preview builds on a couple phones (Lumia 950 and 950 XL) but the only way anybody else can get it is by joining the Insider program.
This feedback stuff is for people in the Insider program, as you'd expect.
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If there was a requirement to stop distributing the JS module under that name, probably. Once trademark infringement has been legally determined to be occurring, continuing to distribute the infringing service or product could open them to legal action. (IANAL)
Of course, there was no such requirement and no guarantee that the IM application could have secured one. As people have pointed out, a library and an application aren't the same thing and unless the library concerned messaging in some way I doubt anybody would confuse them. At that point, while NPM is probably not legally required to continue hosting the package, they sure as hell aren't required to take it down. This isn't copyright, with its bullshit DMCA takedown notices.
Are you claiming trademark law requires that a third-party provider remove other peoples' content without their permission in response to a letter from a lawyer? Because I'm skeptical of that. There was no legal action taken - no lawsuit, no determining of infringement, no finding in favor of either party, no out-of-court settlement, etc. - and there is no trademark equivalent of the DMCA's bullshit takedown notices.
Now, NPM was most likely within their legal rights to remove the module. The only way they wouldn't be is if they had signed a contract or made some similar promise to not do that, and that seems quite unlikely. However, defending their actions as followed trademark law is bullshit. There was no legal requirement yet, and may never have been one, that prohibited distributing that JavaScript module.
Or for the simplest reason of all: minimum wage has not kept up with inflation (and TFA's numbers are, as you'd hope, inflation-adjusted). Obviously if you go far enough back, minimum wage didn't exist. However, if you look at historical, inflation-adjusted minimum wages, they trend downward nationally... because for some reason, the minimum wage wasn't indexed to inflation and requires an act of congress to update it.
I don't know that I'd call Edge buggy, unless you're running the preview versions (which are pre-release software and expected to have bugs). It is undoubtedly getting better, feature-wise, too. However, it is still fundamentally a toy browser, an overgrown mobile phone app, and it is really quite worthless as a consequence.
It has nothing resembling good tab session management (although they did add an interesting feature in that general area in the last preview update).
It offers basically no support over what JS can and cannot do.
It has basically no cookie filtering.
It has no tracking protection or ad blocking (IE first got these almost a decade ago).
It built-in Flash that can be globally disabled, but cannot be enabled and disabled for specific sites.
It has no support for tab grouping or switching tabs in last-used order.
It cannot understand RSS/ATOM feeds at all (renders them just as XML files, no feed reading ability).
It doesn't support per-tab taskbar items.
I'm sure there's many more features missing; I don't use it enough to find out because the list above already contains multiple deal-breakers for me. The only things it does well are its dev tools (which are not mobile-app-like at all), its rendering engine, and displaying which tab(s) are playing media. Nobody who has any choice in the matter should be using it on a desktop PC, and I say this as somebody who voluntarily uses all off Pale Moon, Opera, IE11, Chrome, real Firefox (on occasion), and Midori (on occasion, though it's pretty feature-less too).
Thermocouples are really inefficient. From the book: 1500 W of total energy from the RTG. 1400 W of it gets radiated as heat, 100 W is produced as electricity. The rover had (IIRC) 14000 Wh - 14 KWh - of capacity in each battery. You could charge that off the RTG, sure, but only if you gave it 140 hours (approximately six days) per battery. I think he did actually plug it into the system - got a few percent more range that way - but it was the difference beteen depleting the battery in 4.5 hours and in 4.7 hours or something similarly inconsequential.
On the other hand, the fact that the RTG mostly produces heat is really useful, because it meant he didn't have to sacrifice a bunch of the rover's range running its own heaters. 1400 W of heat would drain one of the rover's batteries in 10 hours (electricity converts very directly to heat; it's the reverse that's hard) even if it wasn't used for propulsion at all. That was actually more heat than the rover was designed for; he had to remove some insulation.
The USA launched one fission-powered (not radioisotope-decay-powered) spacecraft. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The Russians have launched quite a few: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Speaking of Russian armed spacecraft, though... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... 80-ton satellite armed with a megawatt laser. Too bad about their control system...
Windows Phone NNN for v7.0 - 8.1. Commonly abbreviated WPX (WP8)
Windows Mobile NNN for 6.5 and down, though MS did try re-branding 6.5 as Windows Phone right before WP7 shipped. Abbreviated WinMo or WMX (WM6)
Windows 10 Mobile (note the order) for the new version. Abbreviated Win10 Mobile or W10M.
Yes, it's terrible and stupid. Microsoft branding sucks and pretty much always has. Sometimes I want to know where they *find* these idiots.
None have anything to do with Windows CE (WinCE) except that the CE kernel was used for legacy WM and for WP7.x. WP8.x and W10M use the NT kernel, same as on PCs.
W10M at least makes more sense than calling the previous versions "Windows" did; it not only uses the same APIs and same kernel, but can actually run same of the same, unmodified, apps. It also supports USB (or Bluetooth) keyboard and mouse (WP8.x supported USB keyboard but no mice at all) and can display to an external screen if it has the right hardware (Continuum for Phone). Windows 10 Mobile is, in many ways, the same OS as Windows 10.
AppLocker, in recent Windows versions (and building on Software Restriction Policies, dating back to XP), provides similar controls. It's actually a lot more fine-grained than that, though it can be made to act much like how you describe.
Technically, Windows Defender in Win7 is was built from Giant AntiSpyware and only provided anti-spyware/anti-adware protection; it doesn't have detection for things like worms and other sorts of malware. For that you need the (free, but optional download) Microsoft Security Essentials. However, starting with Win8, Defender (the built-in thing) includes the MSE scanning engine and signatures.
The obvious difference between Win7 and Win8 in this regard is that when Win7 came out, MS was still under some anti-trust restrictions against bundling software that competed with commercial offerings (and anti-virus would definitely count). Those restrictions expired before Win8 was released, so they could bundle the full scanner instead of requiring that people go seek it out on their own.
This applies to existing businesses and entrepreneurs as well. Stop trying to start new businesses in the Bay Area! Yes, there's lots of local talent, but they're going to be bloody expensive because nobody will work for you in the bay area unless you pay through the nose, and your office space won't be cheap either. In an online world, finding people who will come work for your company is less a matter of how many people are in the area where you're located, and more of how many people want to come work where you're located. Move somewhere nice that *isn't* so crazy-expensive, and you'll find lots of people who are willing to move there because even on lower salary, they'll still get to keep more of their pay after rent/mortgage.
Chicago, Denver, Austin, Seattle, and many other cities already have some tech scene, but are nowhere near as crowded and overpriced as SF. Go start your new company, or open a new office, in one of them. Feel free to recruit in the Bay Area, and if anybody sounds hesitant to move remind them that they can get a better place for 1/3 the money in the new city.
San Francisco is not some monolithic hive mind. It's not even a truly representative democracy; lots of people are unable to vote for some reason or another (in many cities - not sure about SF in particular - lower-income people usually simply can't afford the time to vote in an election, much less to research the options and then go vote for the one that best represents their interests).
Stop talking about the "ACTUAL CHOICES" that "they" make as though these choices are made by an entity that represents the will of the entire city. There *is* no unified will of the entire city.
Fully agreed, but it actually goes even further than that. The order of cards in the library is unknown to both, but the specific cards in it are fully known to one player (but usually not the other; in some situations you'll know the opposing deck already). As you play against an opponent in multiple games, you'll learn their deck, which will give you some knowledge of what they have. As you watch their play, you can observe some of their strategy and therefore be able to predict things about the rest of their deck (and their hand), especially if you are aware of the current meta. Then there's things like drafting, which not only has its own strategy but also provides information about the strategy of the people around you, which can later be leveraged as partial (and usually unreliable) knowledge of their deck.
M:tG often (though not always) has far fewer moves available than something like chess, but the state of the game is *far* more complex, even if there were perfect knowledge. Since there isn't perfect knowledge, and since many elements of the game either actively exploit this lack or provide one-sided mitigations for it, the state of the game is not only extremely complex but also completely probabilistic. It's a mess.
Not even all the lower 48. The west coast had an absurdly warm winter. I joke that the east stole our winter (I'm from Washington, the one on the west coast in case that's unclear). We had a day in February hit 70F (about 21C), about 10F (5C) above what would normally be considered a warm day for February in the Seattle area last year. The ski season basically didn't exist, especially on this side of the Cascades; base snow depths that should have been in the upper double digits were in the single digits. This year's winter has actually been significantly colder than last year's, here, although it's still way above the historical average.
Well, if it's consistent with previous Windows RT releases, it'll also have a boneheaded restriction against running any non-Windows-Store applications unless they're signed by Microsoft. That means you can't run .NET applications (even though .NET is architecture-agnostic), and can't run Win32 applications (re)compiled for ARM (which is usually very easy to do).
Of course, if it's consistent with previous versions of RT, it will be jailbroken to remove that particularly idiotic bit of anti-user bullshit.
Nope. Windows RT and WinRT are completely different things, courtesy of Microsoft Branding being couldn't-pour-piss-out-of-a-boot-with-instructions-on-the-heel stupid.
Windows Universal apps use a (new) version of the WinRT framework, yes, but not all things the run on Windows RT (such as Internet Explorer, Powershell, Regedit, Windows Explorer, Microsoft Word, Microsoft's debugging tools, or any of the many ported apps for jailbroken tablets) use WinRT.
"Windows 10 IoT" is already a thing, at least in preview builds. It's intended for RasPi 2 and similar. It's not *called* Windows 10 RT, but that may be nothing but a difference of branding.
The point of the jailbreaking is to remove the signature requirement, actually. Without the jailbreak, you can't run anything unless it's signed by Microsoft.
I ported a few programs to RT, and I don't remember any missing Win32 APIs. Some stuff like OpenGL and down-level DirectX was missing, but the core Win32 API was fully intact. Are you perhaps thinking of Windows Phone, which also runs on NT but is missing most of the shell and GDI APIs?
Mostly true. As long as you stuck to true Win32, CE and 9x and NT were all close enough, though there are still some Win32 APIs that are only partially implemented on CE. However, if you wanted to deal with things like file or registry permissions (which CE didn't support), or multiple users (which CE didn't support), or stuff like that, the differences between CE/9x and NT (RT uses the NT kernel) quickly become relevant. Same if you wanted to write drivers.
RT is a multi-user operating system. It uses NTFS, not CE's weird variant of FAT. It supports all of NT's security features, including restricted tokens for sandboxed applications (IE, Windows Store apps, etc.). If you write a program or even a driver for x86 NT 6.x (8.0 is NT v6.2, 8.1 is v6.3, same as on PC), and don't use anything x86-specific (like inline assembly or similar), it will compile and run flawlessly on (jailbroken) RT.
There are jailbreaks for both Win RT 8.0 and 8.1 that will let you run Win32 (what you call "WinAPI") programs on RT, either your own or any of a body of ported (mostly open-source) software. You can also run .NET programs - they don't even need to be recompiled, if they target .NET 4.x, since that's already on RT and .NET binaries are intermediate code - and of course programs written for any of the ported runtimes (Python, Perl, Ruby, sort of Java, etc.).
There's even a (very unofficial, but I think it's open source now) program that provides a binary compatibility layer for legacy Win32 x86 apps, using dynamic recompilation and shim libraries that thunk Win32 APIs from the x86 program to the ARM host operating system. This avoids the need to run an entire x86 copy of Windows on top of RT, though this is technically possible too. It's sort of like OS X's "Rosetta" feature from when they were switching from PPC to x86. The compatibility isn't great yet, and the performance probably never will be, but it's usable for some apps and supporting others is often just a matter of getting the shim libraries written. Not bad for something hacked together from bits of open source software and Windows header files in a few hackers' spare time.
Of course, all of this is utterly unofficial. Microsoft broke the 8.0 jailbreak with 8.1, and has patched the 8.1 jailbreak (but you can easily skip that patch, or roll it back). It really highlights how much MS was shooting themselves in the foot, though; Jailbroken RT tablets are cheap Windows PCs with great battery life, and just happen to run on a different architecture. Since recompiling is often just a matter of changing the target platform in Visual Studio and hitting Build again, RT could easily have had a substantial library of software, and the compatibility program (which Microsoft could have put a lot more resources into than a few folks on XDA could spare) could have filled in the gaps.
But noooo, then somebody might have actually used it for something useful. Much better to just write off a $900M loss on the thing...
Kindle Fire has a lock screen. I have no idea what you think you're talking about, but it definitely supports local security (and, until the latest update, that included device encryption).
The feds are only thwarted by public-key crypto in Apple's case because their hardware on the 5C trusts the software too much. If Apple had designed their hardware crypto correctly in the first place, the software wouldn't matter. The actual device encryption is 100% symmetric-key (and the key derivation probably involves hash functions, which are another beast entirely). However, the lockout / device wipe is in software, and it's that software the feds want to replace. Code signing (public key) stops them from doing that, but even then, all they get is the ability to try pin codes as fast as the hardware will permit (which is probably enough to get the phone unlocked in a reasonable time, unless the lock screen code is way beyond what mere mortals ever use).
If the lockout / device wipe were implemented in hardware, the software wouldn't matter. Imagine a hardware security module (HSM) that itself tracks whether the device is locked. Software can tell the HSM to lock, but not to unlock; only the code can do that. Hardware (physical connection to the power button, hardware timer in the HSM, whatever) can also lock the HSM, of course. Software can tell the HSM to change the lock code or maximum allowed attempts, but only while the HSM is unlocked. Software can tell the HSM to reset, even if the HSM is locked, but doing so permanently purges material needed to re-derive the device encryption key. Similarly, if too many lock code entry attempts are made while the HSM is locked, it automatically resets and purges the key derivation material. Even if the actual data was backed up or is never erased to begin with, it can now never be decrypted short of cracking AES-256; the storage is, in effect, wiped.
Good fucking luck breaking *that* with a court order, or a stolen signing key, or anything else. This is what Apple (and everybody else) should have been doing.
Also, yes, fuck mandatory code signing. I'm OK with the signing concept in principle, but it *must* be under the owner's control. That same HSM could hold the list of allowable public keys, and (when the HSM is unlocked) could allow people to manage their own keys (including the pre-loaded OEM one), for example.
The world is not homogenous. In many areas, Windows Phone's market share is far higher than its global average. A lot of those areas are also areas of very high WhatsApp usage, so it makes sense that the company would want to keep that market.
When I was in India for a couple weeks last year, I saw more Windows phones than iPhones (according to an admittedly old article - 2013 - iOS has only a 2.3% market share in India, Android has 91%, Windows Phone has 5.4%). Based on what I saw last year, Windows Phone and iOS has probably both made gains there - if you have more recent statistics, it'd be interesting to see them - but Windows Phone more than iOS. Another example where WP market share exceeds its global average (even though, unlike India, it's still only in third place) is Europe last year: 10.1% across UK, France, Spain, Germany, and Italy.
In the case of Europe, some of that is probably brand loyalty to Nokia, even though they were already owned by Microsoft at that point (although if that were the case, I'd expect northern Europe - especially Finland - to feature in the list). In the case of India, it's simpler: low-end Windows phones are nearly as cheap as low-end Android phones (you can get a Windows phone, new, contract-free, and SIM-unlocked, for $50 even in the US if you know where to look, or a bit less if you don't mind previous-generation hardware) but are much more functional. A Lumia 520 - one of the lowest of the low when it comes to Windows Phone devices - is still supported and can be upgraded to Windows 10 Mobile. This on a handset that launched as a minimum-specs WP8.0 device in 2013 and available on Amazon.com for $40 new. An equivalent Android phone would have been lucky to get the first major OS upgrade (8.0 to 8.1, for Windows Phone), or even be hardware-compatible with the second.
The "Insider" program (i.e. the thing where they give you pre-release builds, and include this feedback mechanism) is 100% optional and you have to go well out of your way to enable it.
I think you just have no idea what you're talking about. "Pushing" indeed.
Serious question: does LO handle tracked changes correctly yet? That was only the most obvious deal-breaker feature the last time I tried to switch of MS Office entirely, but it was a really obvious one. At work, we use tracked changes all the time.
Of course, we also have very complicated template files at work, which render correctly in Word 2010 - 2016 but which I would be impressed if they were correct in Libre/OpenOffice
Win10 has a "Windows Insider" program which gives you access to pre-release builds (remember, Win10 is getting ongoing upgrades, sort of a mini-service pack every few months). People who opt into this program are beta testing the next version of Windows. It may still call itself Win10, but the build numbers are going up and new features are being added.
There's also Win10 Mobile, which *is* still pre-release; they shipped preview builds on a couple phones (Lumia 950 and 950 XL) but the only way anybody else can get it is by joining the Insider program.
This feedback stuff is for people in the Insider program, as you'd expect.