Counterpoint: MS Office compatibility, mouse support, and USB host (including mass storage, HID peripherals, scanners, printers, and whatever else...) are things which Surface already has. In light of that, what's stopping you from taking away *both* the iPad and the laptop and buying them a Surface? I don't soubt that you have reasons - probably involving the apps that are available for the iPad - but from the perspective of Apple vs. Microsoft, MS is actually meeting your needs here better than Apple. The catch is, of course, the third-party software (an odd place for MS to be behind, but such is the modern tech world...).
Of course, even when iOS finally got app support, it took it some time (over a year, IIRC) to surpass the number of apps available for WinMo (they weren't collected into a tidy store the way iOS apps were, though). It's possible that MS could surpass Apple again in time, the same way that Android is on a course to do to iOS despite coming out later.
When it comes with a built-in kickstand and optional keyboard+touchpad screen cover, I see being able to run Office apps as potentially quite useful. The reason it sucks trying to use productivity apps on the iPad is because you have to use the on-screen keyboard or third-party wireless keyboard + stand. With Surface, that stuff is included...
For that matter, I open Word documents frequently, and Excel occasionally, on my phone... it's useful if on a conference call somewhere that I can't pull out my laptop easily. Since I *can't* open those on an iPad - not without third-party software - that is certainly a point against the iPad for me. I'm not even talking about editing the files; just viewing them.
Furthermore, if you want a keyboard that doubles as a screen cover but has actual keys with travel, the "Type Cover" is only $20 more than the "Touch Cover" and 2mm thicker, but is an actual keyboard + touchpad, unlike the "Touch Cover" (which is at least pressure-sensitive, so it's not *just* a capacitive panel, but still not as easy to type on).
A) It's a lot less walled than you think. Contrary to the complete bullshit that some Slashdotters keep repeating, even the RT version comes with the Windows desktop, Windows Explorer, CMD, Powershell, etc. You can move files (including binaries) onto a SD card or flashdrive, or mount the SD card or flashdrive into the root filesystem (yes, NTFS supports this; has done so for years). You can even move your user profile onto the external storage if you really want to (Windows doesn't include a tool to do this explicitly, but it's possible either with some registry edits or with symbolic links, and both are possible with the tools that ship on Win8 and therefore on WinRT).
B) You plan to install 64GB of apps? Even leaving aside room for the OS and opre-installed Office install footprint, you plan to install even 50-odd GB of apps? A few AAA PC games combined will take up that much space, but hardly anything in *any* of the "app stores" is more than a few hundred megs, and most apps are less than 10MB. You'd need to install a horrendous number of those to fill up even 32GB of storage.
C) The "point" of the 64GB version is, of course, that some people would rather just buy their storage integrated, rather than needing to buy an additional storage module, even if that's the less economical approach. Additionally, if you don't rely on having an SD card inserted all the time, then you can actually use the SD slot for removable storage (although the presence of USB ports helps there too). Also, SD cards tend to have relatively crappy random-access time compared to SSDs (good bandwidth, but high "seek" time for flash storage due to the tricks used to get that high bandwidth out of so little silicon) and therefore you'll get slightly better performance accessing files on the internal storage.
It didn't; not by a long shot. MS had a smartphone OS (complete with full ActiveSync capabilities) before Apple even released a first-gen dumbphone with an unusually good web browser, much less before they updated that dumbphone into a smartphone (programmable third-party apps) and added support for things like device encryption.
I'll grant you that, from an enterprise standpoint, WP7 was full of DERP. MS targeted it at the consumer market in some ways (Xbox Live integration), at the business / professional market in others (built-in support for Word / Excel / PowerPoint), and dropped the ball on both in a few ways. It's still not nearly so bad an OS as many people seem to think - I have a first-gen model myself, along with some other devices, and it has some features that Android could sorely stand to copy - but the whole thing appears to have been one big beta test for WP8. We'll see how that comes out. If I have some spare cash, I may buy one (bit of a gadget whore...) but only if I can hack on it. The gen1 WP7 models were quite hackable; not so much as the typical WinMo or Android perhaps, but close (well ahead of iOS at least).
What planet are you on? Or perhaps more accurately, what decade are you from? Slashdot hasn't given karma for "Funny" in over 6 years (I don't know exactly when the change occurred; it was before I first got mod points).
In fact, Funny is a bit of a dangerous mod to seek if you want karma, because while you'll get the occasional mod point of "Interesting" on a funny post, you're also likely to draw at least a few Troll mods from people who either have no sense of humor or think you're being serious, or Offtopic from people who just don't get the joke. Those cost karma, and all the Funny in the world won't bring it back.
Yeah, I messed up, my bad. It's about median for tech sector jobs. It is, as other posters have pointed out, way above median overall.... damn but the median is low, too. I live in a relatively affluent state (Washington, home of Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, etc.) and am a lot less familiar with expected incomes in other parts of the country (the only other region I've looked at is the greater Bay Area in California, which is even more affluent but has an outrageous cost of living). I doubt you can buy a house anywhere within 50 miles (80km) of here for anything close to $120K, but I know there are places in the country where you could. Apparently, that's because that's all that the market will bear...
So, you claim that organized efforts to ensure that religious dogma stays out of science classes, or to find ways to avoid the demonization that atheism receives in many communities and societies around the world, would constitute "ritual and tradition for nothing"? I contest the "ritual", the "tradition", and the "for nothing" in that statement.
Let's start with tradition, as that's probably the easiest for you to claim. Here's the thing: unlike (organized) religions, where one is more-or-less expected to carry out certain actions (go to church, pray toward Mecca, celebrate some holidays, whatever), there is absolutely no expectation that athiests go to athiest conferences. Nor is there a "tradition" of athiests, as a community, even holding such conferences. Pilgrimage is considered a tradition in some religions, even if many people never take one, because it's seen as a thing that "people in that religion do". Aside from in the context of this discussion, though, I've never heard of "go to athiest conferences" as a thing that atheists do (and I've been athiest, or at least agnostic, for over 80% of my life; I knew that I didn't believe in a deity before I knew there was a word for it).
Moving on, consider the claim that it's a "ritual" to hold or attend such concerences. I suspect this is your own unfamiliarity with the thought process of people who reject the very notion of "take it on faith", here. Ritual implies something practiced, something repeated, a sequence of actions that people have learned to do for the sake of the ritual itself. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the actions of a ritual, just that, if you're trying to build on things, to understand them and improve them, it isn't a ritual at all. With most devout Christians, for example, going to church is a ritual; they may know why they do it, but they don't try to analyze the behavior. For a good preacher, writing and delivering a sermon should be absolutely not a ritual; he or she should be trying to guide people, to convince them of something or dissuade them from an action, to speak to the congregation in terms that they will understand, or at least that they think they understand. That's a matter of thought and creativity and understanding. By contrast, at an athiest conference, those things are expected of everybody. People host conferences because they want to bring others who are interested in a topic together. People attend conferences because they want to talk about, or listen to, what others have to say on a topic. Both the hosts and the attendees have their own ideas to share, their own questions to ask. Nobody is going through rote actions. Everybody has thought about it and made a conscious decision to attend, rather than simply carrying out some practice that is ingrained in them. It's the opposite of a ritual.
Finally, let's consider the claim that these things which a tiny handful of atheists sometimes do, are done "for nothing." It is a simple fact of history that religions tend to be supporessive of radical ideas. The very concept of "heresy" is an impediment to human progress. It is one thing to disprove a hypothesis, or even discredit a publication which makes fraudulent claims. It is quite another to denounce a line of thought purely on the basis of what one was taught. Allowing religious beliefs to be taught in schools, or to guide public policies, acts contrary to the core concept of science, and therefore to human advancement: that ideas (theories, in the common usage) must be testable, demonstrable, and refutable, before they can be accepted as the basis for new theories. What's more, the old theories are never considered to simple facts; they are always open to refutation by alternative theories that explain observations better. The idea that religion, with its dogma and concept of heresy, can guide the lives and actions of people, either in the individual or as a society, is perhaps the greatest single man-made retardant to the advancement of human knowledge. For those who take an active i
MS certainly, and Apple probably, have the technical expertise to do so. Of course, there are usually other barriers. The problem isn't necessarily red tape, either... Chrome is a fairly young product, and has very little legacy code relying on its functionality. Even so, I question whether they did anything close to a full regression test on this patch. That's not to say that I expect the patch to have caused regressions; I just doubt that they can say, with full confidence, that it didn't. For something like IE, here there is a *huge* amount of third-party legacy code, some of it very crufty yet effectively unreplaceable, finding the root cause of the problem and writing the patch are trivial compared to the time that MS absolutely must spend on regression testing. There have been times in the past where a patch for a serious issue was made available quickly (within a day or so) as an opt-in hotfix, but typically they can't do a full "push to production" (i.e. make it an automatic update) in less than about a week.
The hacker/cowboy-coder culture often serves young products well, but it doesn't work once the product matures and develops a legacy. Assuming Chrome succeeds at making serious inroads in business, which is quite possible over the next few years (whether that's Google's current main goal for it or not), Google will have to slow down their "push to production" patch speed a little.
60K USD isn't exactly "make you rich" territory in the US, but it's a hell of a lot of money for a teenager. That's pretty close to the median annual salary. It's easily enough to get you through college if you don't go somewhere expensive (do it twice, like he did, and you're looking at enough money for an unsubsidized Ivy League education if you're careful about other expenses). It's enough money to start up a very small business, or enough to buy a modest house in the less expensive parts of the country.
Even assuming that his expenses are very low, it's probably not enough to live on as an investment. If he can pull it off a few more times, though, it certainly could be (again, assuming a modest standard of living and some smart investing). It's definitely enough to live on until he can expect to get a good job (with skills like that, there are a *lot* of good jobs available, either in a big company that hires in-house security people like Google, or as a consultant).
As for the "itch for luxury", not everybody is subject to that. I make, after tax, about 3x what I live on, and that's been true for the 2.5 years since I graduated. I still live more-or-less like a college student, though. I drive a nicer car now than I did back then, and I eat fancier food and have a bigger apartment, but all those extra luxuries combined add up to far less what I was spending in school (and my school was a high-quality but public university, which I was able to make it through without loans; not exactly super-expensive).
Potential class-action lawsuit and/or government fines in countries where warranty and suitability for a purpose can't be completely disregarded? Hell, possibly even a class-action in the US, where you don't even really need the law on your side if you can simply show that an action that a company took, or failed to take, had a known risk of harm to you and did in fact result in harm?
Or there's the risk of big and highly-visible companies (think Google) publically announcing that they're getting rid of Java because they see it as a security threat, similar to what happened when some Google computers were exploited due to an IE6 vuln. I realize that in Google's particular case, getting rid of Java entirely is highly unlikely, but if they simply make the effort to publicly tar-and-feather it as insecure - which they could do easily, for example by displaying a warning on the search results page if they detect the Java plugin on your browser - that would hurt Oracle's reputation badly even if it were specific to the applet plugin.
Speakingof los of reputation, companies may decide that if Oracle can't keep the applet sandbox secure, then maybe they can't be trusted to keep their enterprise products secure either... and hey look, there's at least a few competing systems out there for pretty much every product or service Oracle offers. If Oracle came to be known as a company that can't ensure reasonable security, that will make them a lot less attractive to the prospective customers of their more expensive products too.
GP has no idea what he's talking about with phones, either. First of all, Windows Mobile absolutely supported multitasking. In fact, it suported it too well; battery life and RAM exhaustion were serious issues. As for WP7, it initially had no multitasking for third-party code (same as earlier iPhones) and now has "iPhone-style" multitasking, with a mixture of very limited background tasks, instant task suspend/resume with a switching tool, full background task support for audio, and support for high-power scheduled tasks while the phone is being charged.
Zune hardware was excellent. The first generation of the PC software sucked, badly, and while the second generation was a lot better, it was too little, too late. The firmware upgrades, even for gen1 models, indicated that they really did care about their customer base... but it was a small customer base. The problem is that Microsoft totally dropped the ball on marketing the things, which actually seems to be a common problem of theirs in the consumer space; aside from Win7 and the Xbox (360), I haven't seen a consumer-oriented MS product that got anywhere close the the quality or quantity of marketing that its competition did in... basically as long as I've paid attention to such things.
I don't entirely get this litany of "Windows N is just Windows N-1 with more window dressing and bloat" even when I hear it from non-technical people. A few things which XP added over 2000: wifi autoconfig, fast user switching, DEP, a firewall, system restore, a degree of Windows Update integration, JPEG wallpaper without the crap of Active Desktop, the ability to autohide the system tray... those are all user-relevant features, either visible or important enough that anybody technical should appreciate them, and don't even include new or updated software that comes with the OS. The really sad thing is that I could product similar lists for Vista, Win7, and Win8, yet even Win7, the most accepted of that list by far, still faces this bullshit.
You're correct on Xbox so far as I know. Even though things like Kinect helped push the division into profitability over a small period, the overall cash flow for the decade+ of the product line is negative.
HTC phones also have some of the best audio you can get in a smartphone. If you use yours as a media player like I do (and it has enough storage to be used that way...) then this is a major point in their favor, IMO. Hell, most phones seem to have a buzz or hiss!
Also, WTF do you mean by "locked bootloaders"?? HTC explicitly allows unlocking the bootloader on all their recent (i.e. last year or two) Android models. They have step-by-step instructions on their website for doing so! In my opinion, that's one of their better features...
I think it's quite fair to ignore the "Inspect Element" feature when discussing developer tools. IE8 has better, from the perspective of development needs.If all you need is to see where something is in the DOM hierarchy, fine, use Inpect Element and be happy. If you actually need development tools on Firfox - you know, proper script debuggers and stylesheet inheritance info and page-load profilers and such - you have to use extensions.
To be fair, Firebug (the main extension in question) did kind of lead the way here, driving a lot of developer attention to Firefox.
FWIW, console.log absolutely is supported by IE9. I don't know what browsers it's not supported by - probably some 5+ year old ones - but the modern IE dev/debug/profiling tools are actually reasonable to work with. They're no Firebug, but they beat the shit that actually ships with Firefox.
Actually, given the specific expertise and experience required for such compliance (at least, for doing it right), I can see an argument for specialized IT services companies that handle the needs of companies up to a certain size (bigger than you were talking about, though not necessarily by much; still too small to make it worth hiring a team of such people). The problem is, you've got to assign responsibility along with that contract. LOTS of responsibility, as in no-feasible-way-in-hell-you-could-save-more-money-from-negligence-that-puts-our-compliance-at-risk-than-you'd-have-to-pay-for-breach-of-contract levels of responsibility. If the outsourced company has a serious stake in the matter, then it shouldn't be a problem... yeah, they could still screw up and be grossly incompetent or have a malicious insider, but the same is true of in-house people.
Not that I disagree that outsourcing such critical roles is a terrible idea in general... but sometimes, it really is the only economically practical option, and that shouldn't mean you can't do business at all. Besides, just because the current way the outsourcing is done is broken, that doesn't mean you have to throw the whole idea out; it may be possible to fix it instead.
It's not mentioned in the summary, but the first sign of the rerouting was, as you'd expect, their network slowing to a crawl. That earned the IT guy responsible for it a reprimand. A reprimand, for routing an entire company's trading data through his home modem for a week!
There's other gold in there too, like the time the guy pulled the cable on a production rack in order to create a catastrophe so he wouldn't have to travel to a business meeting, or his habit of remoting into IT infrastructure (Blackberry and Exchange servers were mentioned) on the weekends to fuck up their configuration, just so he could "magically" fix it on Monday morning.
I'm actually one of those people you mention in the second paragraph. The real problem isn't Win32, it's that the filesystem stack is below Win32. Win32 is a subsystem layer that sits on top of NT, preserving compatibility with Win9x apps and presenting a similar user experience. Direct NT programming is a different beast in many ways, even when you stay in user-mode. Kernel-mode NT is just another level of fun on top of that. It's certainly possible, of course, but the overlap of people who are interested in FUSE and who are sufficiently knowledgeable to write an NT driver which lives in the storage stack but can be accessed like a device driver (i.e. can be accessed when there's no filesystem using it mounted) is... small.
That said, the project I worked on was three undergrads for three months, and by the end of it we had a userspace component that was basically compatible with any FUSE driver you could compile with MinGW, a driver that you could load and call IOCTLs on, and support for maybe four filesystem operations (list directory contents, at least half of stat, open, file and read file). It even didn't usually crash until you tried to unload the driver (or shut down the machine; for obvious reasons we used virtual machines to test on). I still have the code for the various components somewhere; if I find myself in need of a new hobby project at some point (no time soon, but maybe eventually...) I may dig it out and have another go at the project. I really would like to see it succeed.
Well, and the laws of robotics (not I, Robot specifically, but Asimov in general).
And the concept of exploring what happens when a robot built with the three laws is put in command over human civilization.
And the idea of the "zeroeth law" (which comes directly from the previous two points).
And... yeah. Look, I'm not trying to claim it was a great movie in any way, shape, or form, but a lot of the criticism leveled at it is unfair. No, it wasn't a film re-enactment of a series of short stories from a time in Asimov's writing when, for some reason, true AI was considered more realistic than pocket calculators. Is that really what you wanted? The movie is based on some of the ideas explored in the book, and in one story in particular, expanded to full-length and given a bit more attention to character development than Asimov almost ever bothered with. Review it from that point of view, and while you may well still find it lacking, at least you might actually have a valid reason for doing so...
It's rather interesting actually... his personal views on homosexuality and such do leak into his writing a little bit if you know to look for them, but but I think he still comes off better in that regard than most other popular authors if you consider the writing alone. The simple fact that he's willing to write gay characters, and even give them the occasional POV without making them sound like *completely* horrible people... that's more than a lot of other authors will do. I still can't bring myself to buy his books anymore, now that I know what he does with the money, but it beats either full-on expression of the "hide your gays!" trope, or blatant homophobia, as seems more common in writing these days.
Obviously, I'm mostly talking about books other than Ender's Game here, but the discussion has (somewhat predictably) diverged onto Card himself. As for the movie, I'm thinking I'll follow the suggestion of a friend of mine: see the movie, then donate the full ticket price to an equal-rights/civili liberties group. That will more than offset the chunk that goes to the NOM or its ilk. If I don't think I'll like the movie enough to pay double the normal rate, I won't go.
Read Ender's Shadow (parallels Ender's Game, but from Bean's point of view) and you'll see that he definitely does figure it out. In fact, ho not only figures it out, he figures out *why* it's being kept secret, and doesn't tell the others. I suspect a few of the others may have figured it out too.
Interesting... the only NT4 boxes I ever used were single-display, so I never knew that. Win8 definitely handles it better than that, though; it understands display boundaries (handy for things like Aero Snap, where you can send a window to fill half of one monitor) and doesn't really care how the displays are connected or what graphics cards you're using (you can connect a 1920x1200 off DVI and a 1600x1200 off VGA if you want to, for example). It will make a best-effort if the resolutions don't align, although obviously the experience is a bit better if they do.
As has process and service control. You don't even need Powershell itself for that; Windows comes with dedicated programs (tasklist, taskkill, net, sc and more). Powershell does make it easier to do some of that (filtering the output of get-process and piping it to stop-process is easier than doing the same with tasklist.exe to taskkill.exe, for example) but it's not necessary.
I suspect Viol8 is just trolling, though; Powershell also includes built-in commands for services and disks.
Just the same way people have been doing since Vista. I don't get how somebody like the GP could both know so much about the OS's features and have actually used it for any length of time, and yet be ignorant of that to the point of actively claiming that it doesn't exist...
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Counterpoint: MS Office compatibility, mouse support, and USB host (including mass storage, HID peripherals, scanners, printers, and whatever else...) are things which Surface already has. In light of that, what's stopping you from taking away *both* the iPad and the laptop and buying them a Surface? I don't soubt that you have reasons - probably involving the apps that are available for the iPad - but from the perspective of Apple vs. Microsoft, MS is actually meeting your needs here better than Apple. The catch is, of course, the third-party software (an odd place for MS to be behind, but such is the modern tech world...).
Of course, even when iOS finally got app support, it took it some time (over a year, IIRC) to surpass the number of apps available for WinMo (they weren't collected into a tidy store the way iOS apps were, though). It's possible that MS could surpass Apple again in time, the same way that Android is on a course to do to iOS despite coming out later.
When it comes with a built-in kickstand and optional keyboard+touchpad screen cover, I see being able to run Office apps as potentially quite useful. The reason it sucks trying to use productivity apps on the iPad is because you have to use the on-screen keyboard or third-party wireless keyboard + stand. With Surface, that stuff is included...
For that matter, I open Word documents frequently, and Excel occasionally, on my phone... it's useful if on a conference call somewhere that I can't pull out my laptop easily. Since I *can't* open those on an iPad - not without third-party software - that is certainly a point against the iPad for me. I'm not even talking about editing the files; just viewing them.
Furthermore, if you want a keyboard that doubles as a screen cover but has actual keys with travel, the "Type Cover" is only $20 more than the "Touch Cover" and 2mm thicker, but is an actual keyboard + touchpad, unlike the "Touch Cover" (which is at least pressure-sensitive, so it's not *just* a capacitive panel, but still not as easy to type on).
A) It's a lot less walled than you think. Contrary to the complete bullshit that some Slashdotters keep repeating, even the RT version comes with the Windows desktop, Windows Explorer, CMD, Powershell, etc. You can move files (including binaries) onto a SD card or flashdrive, or mount the SD card or flashdrive into the root filesystem (yes, NTFS supports this; has done so for years). You can even move your user profile onto the external storage if you really want to (Windows doesn't include a tool to do this explicitly, but it's possible either with some registry edits or with symbolic links, and both are possible with the tools that ship on Win8 and therefore on WinRT).
B) You plan to install 64GB of apps? Even leaving aside room for the OS and opre-installed Office install footprint, you plan to install even 50-odd GB of apps? A few AAA PC games combined will take up that much space, but hardly anything in *any* of the "app stores" is more than a few hundred megs, and most apps are less than 10MB. You'd need to install a horrendous number of those to fill up even 32GB of storage.
C) The "point" of the 64GB version is, of course, that some people would rather just buy their storage integrated, rather than needing to buy an additional storage module, even if that's the less economical approach. Additionally, if you don't rely on having an SD card inserted all the time, then you can actually use the SD slot for removable storage (although the presence of USB ports helps there too). Also, SD cards tend to have relatively crappy random-access time compared to SSDs (good bandwidth, but high "seek" time for flash storage due to the tricks used to get that high bandwidth out of so little silicon) and therefore you'll get slightly better performance accessing files on the internal storage.
It didn't; not by a long shot. MS had a smartphone OS (complete with full ActiveSync capabilities) before Apple even released a first-gen dumbphone with an unusually good web browser, much less before they updated that dumbphone into a smartphone (programmable third-party apps) and added support for things like device encryption.
I'll grant you that, from an enterprise standpoint, WP7 was full of DERP. MS targeted it at the consumer market in some ways (Xbox Live integration), at the business / professional market in others (built-in support for Word / Excel / PowerPoint), and dropped the ball on both in a few ways. It's still not nearly so bad an OS as many people seem to think - I have a first-gen model myself, along with some other devices, and it has some features that Android could sorely stand to copy - but the whole thing appears to have been one big beta test for WP8. We'll see how that comes out. If I have some spare cash, I may buy one (bit of a gadget whore...) but only if I can hack on it. The gen1 WP7 models were quite hackable; not so much as the typical WinMo or Android perhaps, but close (well ahead of iOS at least).
What planet are you on? Or perhaps more accurately, what decade are you from? Slashdot hasn't given karma for "Funny" in over 6 years (I don't know exactly when the change occurred; it was before I first got mod points).
In fact, Funny is a bit of a dangerous mod to seek if you want karma, because while you'll get the occasional mod point of "Interesting" on a funny post, you're also likely to draw at least a few Troll mods from people who either have no sense of humor or think you're being serious, or Offtopic from people who just don't get the joke. Those cost karma, and all the Funny in the world won't bring it back.
Yes, this is also OT. :-)
Yeah, I messed up, my bad. It's about median for tech sector jobs. It is, as other posters have pointed out, way above median overall. ... damn but the median is low, too. I live in a relatively affluent state (Washington, home of Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing, etc.) and am a lot less familiar with expected incomes in other parts of the country (the only other region I've looked at is the greater Bay Area in California, which is even more affluent but has an outrageous cost of living). I doubt you can buy a house anywhere within 50 miles (80km) of here for anything close to $120K, but I know there are places in the country where you could. Apparently, that's because that's all that the market will bear...
So, you claim that organized efforts to ensure that religious dogma stays out of science classes, or to find ways to avoid the demonization that atheism receives in many communities and societies around the world, would constitute "ritual and tradition for nothing"? I contest the "ritual", the "tradition", and the "for nothing" in that statement.
Let's start with tradition, as that's probably the easiest for you to claim. Here's the thing: unlike (organized) religions, where one is more-or-less expected to carry out certain actions (go to church, pray toward Mecca, celebrate some holidays, whatever), there is absolutely no expectation that athiests go to athiest conferences. Nor is there a "tradition" of athiests, as a community, even holding such conferences. Pilgrimage is considered a tradition in some religions, even if many people never take one, because it's seen as a thing that "people in that religion do". Aside from in the context of this discussion, though, I've never heard of "go to athiest conferences" as a thing that atheists do (and I've been athiest, or at least agnostic, for over 80% of my life; I knew that I didn't believe in a deity before I knew there was a word for it).
Moving on, consider the claim that it's a "ritual" to hold or attend such concerences. I suspect this is your own unfamiliarity with the thought process of people who reject the very notion of "take it on faith", here. Ritual implies something practiced, something repeated, a sequence of actions that people have learned to do for the sake of the ritual itself. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with the actions of a ritual, just that, if you're trying to build on things, to understand them and improve them, it isn't a ritual at all. With most devout Christians, for example, going to church is a ritual; they may know why they do it, but they don't try to analyze the behavior. For a good preacher, writing and delivering a sermon should be absolutely not a ritual; he or she should be trying to guide people, to convince them of something or dissuade them from an action, to speak to the congregation in terms that they will understand, or at least that they think they understand. That's a matter of thought and creativity and understanding. By contrast, at an athiest conference, those things are expected of everybody. People host conferences because they want to bring others who are interested in a topic together. People attend conferences because they want to talk about, or listen to, what others have to say on a topic. Both the hosts and the attendees have their own ideas to share, their own questions to ask. Nobody is going through rote actions. Everybody has thought about it and made a conscious decision to attend, rather than simply carrying out some practice that is ingrained in them. It's the opposite of a ritual.
Finally, let's consider the claim that these things which a tiny handful of atheists sometimes do, are done "for nothing." It is a simple fact of history that religions tend to be supporessive of radical ideas. The very concept of "heresy" is an impediment to human progress. It is one thing to disprove a hypothesis, or even discredit a publication which makes fraudulent claims. It is quite another to denounce a line of thought purely on the basis of what one was taught. Allowing religious beliefs to be taught in schools, or to guide public policies, acts contrary to the core concept of science, and therefore to human advancement: that ideas (theories, in the common usage) must be testable, demonstrable, and refutable, before they can be accepted as the basis for new theories. What's more, the old theories are never considered to simple facts; they are always open to refutation by alternative theories that explain observations better. The idea that religion, with its dogma and concept of heresy, can guide the lives and actions of people, either in the individual or as a society, is perhaps the greatest single man-made retardant to the advancement of human knowledge. For those who take an active i
MS certainly, and Apple probably, have the technical expertise to do so. Of course, there are usually other barriers. The problem isn't necessarily red tape, either... Chrome is a fairly young product, and has very little legacy code relying on its functionality. Even so, I question whether they did anything close to a full regression test on this patch. That's not to say that I expect the patch to have caused regressions; I just doubt that they can say, with full confidence, that it didn't. For something like IE, here there is a *huge* amount of third-party legacy code, some of it very crufty yet effectively unreplaceable, finding the root cause of the problem and writing the patch are trivial compared to the time that MS absolutely must spend on regression testing. There have been times in the past where a patch for a serious issue was made available quickly (within a day or so) as an opt-in hotfix, but typically they can't do a full "push to production" (i.e. make it an automatic update) in less than about a week.
The hacker/cowboy-coder culture often serves young products well, but it doesn't work once the product matures and develops a legacy. Assuming Chrome succeeds at making serious inroads in business, which is quite possible over the next few years (whether that's Google's current main goal for it or not), Google will have to slow down their "push to production" patch speed a little.
60K USD isn't exactly "make you rich" territory in the US, but it's a hell of a lot of money for a teenager. That's pretty close to the median annual salary. It's easily enough to get you through college if you don't go somewhere expensive (do it twice, like he did, and you're looking at enough money for an unsubsidized Ivy League education if you're careful about other expenses). It's enough money to start up a very small business, or enough to buy a modest house in the less expensive parts of the country.
Even assuming that his expenses are very low, it's probably not enough to live on as an investment. If he can pull it off a few more times, though, it certainly could be (again, assuming a modest standard of living and some smart investing). It's definitely enough to live on until he can expect to get a good job (with skills like that, there are a *lot* of good jobs available, either in a big company that hires in-house security people like Google, or as a consultant).
As for the "itch for luxury", not everybody is subject to that. I make, after tax, about 3x what I live on, and that's been true for the 2.5 years since I graduated. I still live more-or-less like a college student, though. I drive a nicer car now than I did back then, and I eat fancier food and have a bigger apartment, but all those extra luxuries combined add up to far less what I was spending in school (and my school was a high-quality but public university, which I was able to make it through without loans; not exactly super-expensive).
Potential class-action lawsuit and/or government fines in countries where warranty and suitability for a purpose can't be completely disregarded? Hell, possibly even a class-action in the US, where you don't even really need the law on your side if you can simply show that an action that a company took, or failed to take, had a known risk of harm to you and did in fact result in harm?
Or there's the risk of big and highly-visible companies (think Google) publically announcing that they're getting rid of Java because they see it as a security threat, similar to what happened when some Google computers were exploited due to an IE6 vuln. I realize that in Google's particular case, getting rid of Java entirely is highly unlikely, but if they simply make the effort to publicly tar-and-feather it as insecure - which they could do easily, for example by displaying a warning on the search results page if they detect the Java plugin on your browser - that would hurt Oracle's reputation badly even if it were specific to the applet plugin.
Speakingof los of reputation, companies may decide that if Oracle can't keep the applet sandbox secure, then maybe they can't be trusted to keep their enterprise products secure either... and hey look, there's at least a few competing systems out there for pretty much every product or service Oracle offers. If Oracle came to be known as a company that can't ensure reasonable security, that will make them a lot less attractive to the prospective customers of their more expensive products too.
GP has no idea what he's talking about with phones, either. First of all, Windows Mobile absolutely supported multitasking. In fact, it suported it too well; battery life and RAM exhaustion were serious issues. As for WP7, it initially had no multitasking for third-party code (same as earlier iPhones) and now has "iPhone-style" multitasking, with a mixture of very limited background tasks, instant task suspend/resume with a switching tool, full background task support for audio, and support for high-power scheduled tasks while the phone is being charged.
Zune hardware was excellent. The first generation of the PC software sucked, badly, and while the second generation was a lot better, it was too little, too late. The firmware upgrades, even for gen1 models, indicated that they really did care about their customer base... but it was a small customer base. The problem is that Microsoft totally dropped the ball on marketing the things, which actually seems to be a common problem of theirs in the consumer space; aside from Win7 and the Xbox (360), I haven't seen a consumer-oriented MS product that got anywhere close the the quality or quantity of marketing that its competition did in... basically as long as I've paid attention to such things.
I don't entirely get this litany of "Windows N is just Windows N-1 with more window dressing and bloat" even when I hear it from non-technical people. A few things which XP added over 2000: wifi autoconfig, fast user switching, DEP, a firewall, system restore, a degree of Windows Update integration, JPEG wallpaper without the crap of Active Desktop, the ability to autohide the system tray... those are all user-relevant features, either visible or important enough that anybody technical should appreciate them, and don't even include new or updated software that comes with the OS. The really sad thing is that I could product similar lists for Vista, Win7, and Win8, yet even Win7, the most accepted of that list by far, still faces this bullshit.
You're correct on Xbox so far as I know. Even though things like Kinect helped push the division into profitability over a small period, the overall cash flow for the decade+ of the product line is negative.
Acer and Asus both make smartphones, and while they may be minority-share phone manufacturers, they aren't exactly small companies in general.
There's also Sony/Ericsson, which I really can't recomend just based on those first four characters, but in theory they do make some good hardware.
HTC phones also have some of the best audio you can get in a smartphone. If you use yours as a media player like I do (and it has enough storage to be used that way...) then this is a major point in their favor, IMO. Hell, most phones seem to have a buzz or hiss!
Also, WTF do you mean by "locked bootloaders"?? HTC explicitly allows unlocking the bootloader on all their recent (i.e. last year or two) Android models. They have step-by-step instructions on their website for doing so! In my opinion, that's one of their better features...
I think it's quite fair to ignore the "Inspect Element" feature when discussing developer tools. IE8 has better, from the perspective of development needs.If all you need is to see where something is in the DOM hierarchy, fine, use Inpect Element and be happy. If you actually need development tools on Firfox - you know, proper script debuggers and stylesheet inheritance info and page-load profilers and such - you have to use extensions.
To be fair, Firebug (the main extension in question) did kind of lead the way here, driving a lot of developer attention to Firefox.
FWIW, console.log absolutely is supported by IE9. I don't know what browsers it's not supported by - probably some 5+ year old ones - but the modern IE dev/debug/profiling tools are actually reasonable to work with. They're no Firebug, but they beat the shit that actually ships with Firefox.
Actually, given the specific expertise and experience required for such compliance (at least, for doing it right), I can see an argument for specialized IT services companies that handle the needs of companies up to a certain size (bigger than you were talking about, though not necessarily by much; still too small to make it worth hiring a team of such people). The problem is, you've got to assign responsibility along with that contract. LOTS of responsibility, as in no-feasible-way-in-hell-you-could-save-more-money-from-negligence-that-puts-our-compliance-at-risk-than-you'd-have-to-pay-for-breach-of-contract levels of responsibility. If the outsourced company has a serious stake in the matter, then it shouldn't be a problem... yeah, they could still screw up and be grossly incompetent or have a malicious insider, but the same is true of in-house people.
Not that I disagree that outsourcing such critical roles is a terrible idea in general... but sometimes, it really is the only economically practical option, and that shouldn't mean you can't do business at all. Besides, just because the current way the outsourcing is done is broken, that doesn't mean you have to throw the whole idea out; it may be possible to fix it instead.
It's not mentioned in the summary, but the first sign of the rerouting was, as you'd expect, their network slowing to a crawl. That earned the IT guy responsible for it a reprimand. A reprimand, for routing an entire company's trading data through his home modem for a week!
There's other gold in there too, like the time the guy pulled the cable on a production rack in order to create a catastrophe so he wouldn't have to travel to a business meeting, or his habit of remoting into IT infrastructure (Blackberry and Exchange servers were mentioned) on the weekends to fuck up their configuration, just so he could "magically" fix it on Monday morning.
He was, apparently, eventually fired.
I'm actually one of those people you mention in the second paragraph. The real problem isn't Win32, it's that the filesystem stack is below Win32. Win32 is a subsystem layer that sits on top of NT, preserving compatibility with Win9x apps and presenting a similar user experience. Direct NT programming is a different beast in many ways, even when you stay in user-mode. Kernel-mode NT is just another level of fun on top of that. It's certainly possible, of course, but the overlap of people who are interested in FUSE and who are sufficiently knowledgeable to write an NT driver which lives in the storage stack but can be accessed like a device driver (i.e. can be accessed when there's no filesystem using it mounted) is... small.
That said, the project I worked on was three undergrads for three months, and by the end of it we had a userspace component that was basically compatible with any FUSE driver you could compile with MinGW, a driver that you could load and call IOCTLs on, and support for maybe four filesystem operations (list directory contents, at least half of stat, open, file and read file). It even didn't usually crash until you tried to unload the driver (or shut down the machine; for obvious reasons we used virtual machines to test on). I still have the code for the various components somewhere; if I find myself in need of a new hobby project at some point (no time soon, but maybe eventually...) I may dig it out and have another go at the project. I really would like to see it succeed.
Well, and the laws of robotics (not I, Robot specifically, but Asimov in general).
And the concept of exploring what happens when a robot built with the three laws is put in command over human civilization.
And the idea of the "zeroeth law" (which comes directly from the previous two points).
And... yeah. Look, I'm not trying to claim it was a great movie in any way, shape, or form, but a lot of the criticism leveled at it is unfair. No, it wasn't a film re-enactment of a series of short stories from a time in Asimov's writing when, for some reason, true AI was considered more realistic than pocket calculators. Is that really what you wanted? The movie is based on some of the ideas explored in the book, and in one story in particular, expanded to full-length and given a bit more attention to character development than Asimov almost ever bothered with. Review it from that point of view, and while you may well still find it lacking, at least you might actually have a valid reason for doing so...
It's rather interesting actually... his personal views on homosexuality and such do leak into his writing a little bit if you know to look for them, but but I think he still comes off better in that regard than most other popular authors if you consider the writing alone. The simple fact that he's willing to write gay characters, and even give them the occasional POV without making them sound like *completely* horrible people... that's more than a lot of other authors will do. I still can't bring myself to buy his books anymore, now that I know what he does with the money, but it beats either full-on expression of the "hide your gays!" trope, or blatant homophobia, as seems more common in writing these days.
Obviously, I'm mostly talking about books other than Ender's Game here, but the discussion has (somewhat predictably) diverged onto Card himself. As for the movie, I'm thinking I'll follow the suggestion of a friend of mine: see the movie, then donate the full ticket price to an equal-rights/civili liberties group. That will more than offset the chunk that goes to the NOM or its ilk. If I don't think I'll like the movie enough to pay double the normal rate, I won't go.
Read Ender's Shadow (parallels Ender's Game, but from Bean's point of view) and you'll see that he definitely does figure it out. In fact, ho not only figures it out, he figures out *why* it's being kept secret, and doesn't tell the others. I suspect a few of the others may have figured it out too.
Interesting... the only NT4 boxes I ever used were single-display, so I never knew that. Win8 definitely handles it better than that, though; it understands display boundaries (handy for things like Aero Snap, where you can send a window to fill half of one monitor) and doesn't really care how the displays are connected or what graphics cards you're using (you can connect a 1920x1200 off DVI and a 1600x1200 off VGA if you want to, for example). It will make a best-effort if the resolutions don't align, although obviously the experience is a bit better if they do.
As has process and service control. You don't even need Powershell itself for that; Windows comes with dedicated programs (tasklist, taskkill, net, sc and more). Powershell does make it easier to do some of that (filtering the output of get-process and piping it to stop-process is easier than doing the same with tasklist.exe to taskkill.exe, for example) but it's not necessary.
I suspect Viol8 is just trolling, though; Powershell also includes built-in commands for services and disks.
Just the same way people have been doing since Vista. I don't get how somebody like the GP could both know so much about the OS's features and have actually used it for any length of time, and yet be ignorant of that to the point of actively claiming that it doesn't exist...