Re: Don't buy an Xbox One

To be entirely honest, I'm more likely to play an old game again than watch an old movie again. I'm just not much a movie-goer.

Re: Instead of

"Now I want to install Access and program in VBA"

I'm so sorry.

Re: Licenses 'sold'.

"Tell me again how good Win 8 is as a touch driven device when I'm 10 feet away from my telly?"

Well, on the plus side, if you're using Metro Modern apps, all the text will be freaking huge and in ALL CAPS, so it will be perfectly legible from 10 feet away...

Re: No network = No Work

"Keith I can agree with one or two pcs kicking about with their own dedicated printers but 800 pcs !!!!"

Don't think of it as 800 PCs. Think instead 1 PC out of 10 in an entire prefecture's governmental offices.

Re: Rush, rush, rush

In all honesty, the non-LTS releases are simply milestones for those wanting the latest and greatest as soon as stable, more or less "Community Previews" in Microsoft's newer marketing lingo for betas. The shortening of the support period from 18 months to 9 months should especially emphasize that point.

If the features get left out of the LTS releases, yeah, I can see your point - you'll have to wait two more years for the features to land in a proper release. That said, the non-LTS releases just can't afford to be delayed. You can usually add a repository for backported features as soon as they're stable (or even before, as is the case with Smart Scopes) if you just can't wait another 3 months for the features to arrive past your hypothesized 3 month delay.

Re: just under a year to go, for formal end of IE 6

Don't forget that IE6 is also supported in Server 2003 until 2015-07-14. Furthermore, XP Embedded doesn't EOL until 2017-01-30, and IE7 will be supported until 2020-01-14 along with Windows Server 2008.

Re: Time to go Steve

Correction: Third paragraph, second sentence - "[...] NOT what the vast majority of people want."

I re-emphasize my previous PS.

Re: Time to go Steve

While Internet Explorer 9 was in public beta, I sincerely tested it and tried just about every new feature it promoted. Long before I knew of the Metro fiasco, I noticed an inconsistency in the UI when you pinned a website to the taskbar - what effectively acted as the home button to take you back to the root of that website, the website's icon, was to the left of the Back button, while the home button itself disappeared for a pinned window. The inconsistency itself isn't that the home button disappeared but that its effective replacement suddenly moved from the right side of the window to the left. I reported that inconsistency as a bug, actually thinking it might have been something they hadn't addressed yet, only to be told that that inconsistency was by design.

What I described is a minor detail (and I personally know of only one person that uses pinned websites... and only because I pinned it for her to make it convenient to log into Facebook), but that very same response appeared to bug reports about Metro - that everything about it was by design, even as the complaints grew.

Yes, I get it - they have a vision. The problem is that their vision is incomplete and quite simply what the vast majority of people want. For the moment at least, both OS X and other *nix desktops are a niche market, so Apple and *nix desktop developers have more freedom to experiment with interfaces if for no other reason than they don't have to satisfy as many people.

Most people still use Windows for two primary reasons - their legacy applications work on it, and they're used to its interfaces (graphical and otherwise). With Metro, they've just lost their GUI familiarity, and with Windows RT, they've lost their legacy applications. People who use Windows expect it to look and feel like Windows.

PS: Curse the lack of an edit button. I was looking at the wrong tab when I first responded...

Re: Hmm...

I don't approve of blackmail and have not seen the pictorial evidence, but that said, if pictures of the act in progress were indeed taken and distributed, then I would believe that the pictures should be sufficient to demonstrate guilt.

I do not AT ALL support releasing names for vigilante justice, but obviously the girl is receiving no justice from the proper authorities so far. I feel sorry for the girl and her family. I'm sure the family just wants peace, and blackmailing the police is not going to give them that.

Re: WHAT!

The PS3 also accepts mouse input quite well (though very few games support it) and supports network printers, even without OtherOS.

Your reasoning is quite flawed. The service may have been free, but it's something that I'm sure many users would pay a nominal fee to use if given the chance. I know I sure would. The problem is that's not even an option.

Google is attempting to shift the world to the cloud, particularly with their Chromebooks where local applications aren't even allowed, and yet they keep killing their cloud services. Supposedly it's an underutilized service. Is that really true? I know I didn't visit reader.google.com itself often at all, but I use Reader on iGoogle and on my Android devices. Even my mother uses it on her tablet to keep up with the local news.

Re: Oh right, it's an RSS reader

Furthermore, if your device that aggregates feeds is offline for several days, a cloud-based service will still work and collect all the feeds for you, even if the source has since dropped the article from the feed. With a local client, your computer must be on and online all the time just to make sure no articles are missed.

@AndrueC

AdAway does exactly that and does it automatically. It even allows for whitelists of websites to allow explicitly in your hosts file. It used to be on the Play Store, but it's open source and still available from Google Code for the meantime or from their recommended repository F-Droid, a repository of free software (FOSS) for Android.

http://code.google.com/p/ad-away/ <- AdAway's homepage

http://f-droid.org/ <- F-Droid's homepage

Re: More adverts, everywhere.

I have no problems with simple advertising, but I will never accept Flash ads (on the desktop); HTML5 ads that bounce around, play audio, play video, or otherwise distract me from what I'm trying to do and drain battery life; or ads that take up a significant portion of the display area and hinder my ability to do work. I'm fine with simple text ads like Google's or plain graphics.

At least in Firefox, AdBlock Plus even displays non-intrusive ads by default. Furthermore depending on the lists you download or rules you create, you can block only tracking syndicates, again such as Google, and take an active part in protecting your own privacy. Call me arrogant if you like, but I like being able to determine what information I divulge about myself and to whom I divulge it.

AdBlock Plus itself isn't any more parasitic than a computer or the Internet itself for enabling users to be able to do something. What the user often does with it is what you deem parasitic behavior, but that's not the tool's fault, especially since it does actually try to allow non-intrusive advertising by default. Furthermore, I try to only use services that only use advertising I deem acceptable.

I'm edging away from Skype now because of the intrusive ads Microsoft is starting to push during calls. I'll stop using any service that starts shoving advertising down my throat in the most obnoxious way they can. Meanwhile I'll pick up other publications or opt to receive advertisements from certain companies just to look at the ads.

It WAS going to be Friday, but at least in the US, the MSN Messenger switch off has been delayed by another three weeks.

Re: Just try to use a password longer than 15 characters... it won't allow you.

The limit is 16 characters, actually. The password I tried using for my account is 17 characters long. It accepted it when I set it. I just have to truncate it to 16 characters when signing in now.

Re: Surface Pro

'Ummm, he did say "lowest vulnerability counts versus time".'

The problem with that statement is that it relies on the assumption of a linear scale. On the release to manufacturing date, let's be naive nice and assume there are 0 known vulnerabilities in the product. If you rely on that statistic of 0 vulnerabilities over one day, it is therefore the lowest vulnerability count over time.

The problem is that growth in vulnerability discovery is nowhere anywhere remotely near linear, and you need a much larger sample size. Even a full year on the market is too small a sample size to judge vulnerabilities in systems. For example, take a look at Mac OS X. It has historically been promoted as being malware-free, but that's been since thoroughly disproved after several years, even if most (though not all) vulnerabilities have risen from third-party software.

Re: Surface Pro

You're assuming the hack doesn't work in IE9 as well.

Re: Hmmm

Shortly before Christmas, I set up a laptop a friend got for her ~10-year-old daughter. The mother wanted it to be ready for her out of the box so she didn't have to configure it, aside from adding a few personal accounts. The OEM had included several Windows Store apps that weren't their own, but I found absolutely no way to install other things she would use without tying it to a Microsoft account. I tried a few Google searches but found nothing relevant.

It's not as if I wanted to pirate anything - the apps were all freeware. I just wanted to pre-install the Windows Store version of Skype, the Amazon Kindle application to complement her Kindle Fire, a few game demos, the freeware Microsoft games, and a few other things. Yeah, that didn't happen. I ended up installing the desktop version of Skype and tried to make Metro as easy to use for her as possible, grouping things like Office and removing uninstall links that got dumped to the start screen.

So far, she's not had any troubles with it. It seems kids are more willing to adapt to new things than adults though.

Re: Oh no you jus dint...

Thanks. You just gave me the idea to set up busybox on one of my Pi SD cards instead.

Re: Good riddance to old trash...

Oh, and...

"I wouldn't be surprised if he has some commercial reason to provide such an inaccurate picture of Linux and Apple."

Yes, he does - he's a Microsoft MVP that now makes his living selling a .NET programming environment for Android, iOS, and Mac OS X.

Re: So, will this get rid of...

Damn, I forgot about Windows XP Embedded. Its EOL is January 12, 2016, so IE6 will live on until at least then, assuming I've not forgotten yet another esoteric build of Windows that runs IE6 and will be still supported.

Re: So, will this get rid of...

IE6 will be officially damned after July 14, 2015, when the last operating system that runs it (Windows Server 2003) will reach end of life. IE7 will unfortunately probably linger until January 14, 2020 though...

Regarding those demos, yes, most I've tried actually do run under Firefox and Chrome, even in Linux. I haven't tried Opera, Safari 6, or anything else on Mac. HTML5 is an incomplete specification though, so until the W3C signs off on HTML 5.0 next year, nothing that implements HTML5 is actually standards-compliant.

Re: I have XP here so no use

And for the record, I wasn't the one that gave you a down-vote. I see no reason to vote someone down for a sincere question asking for clarification.

Re: I have XP here so no use

Though not all are applicable regarding Windows Vista, try reading these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_Vista

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_features_removed_in_Windows_7

Two quick examples in Windows Explorer itself are the lack of the ability to customize the navigation toolbar in Explorer and the classic one-column start menu. I personally am fine with those two changes, but others aren't. Classic Shell sort of remedies the navigation toolbar and completely remedies the start menu.

All that said, Windows XP only has 14 more Patch Tuesdays in its life. After April 8, 2014, when that zero-day that affects all versions of Windows is discovered, it will never be patched in XP, just like what happened to Windows 2000 in July of 2010.

Re: "Hollywood studios that put out the likes of Saw?"

As overheard in GameStop...

Employee: "I'm sorry, but we can't sell you this game without a parent's permission. It's rated M for 'mature'."

Prepubescent kid: "I've got my cousin here!"

Employee: "I'm sorry, but the answer is still no."

Kid: "But my parents let me watch Saw!"

I think those one million moms should be more concerned with the other hundred million in the country than what a commercial suggests might otherwise happen with a talking pig that drives a car.

Re: Agreed

Depending on implementation, NFC can work when your phone is off with a drained battery, not just when it's unlocked.

Re: Surface != Surface

You are indeed right, but the Surface Pro is a new player to the game. The only thing distinguishing the two is the "Pro". Microsoft is betting its money that that's all that's needed. Maybe it is, but I doubt it. This will probably end up like the Vista Capable kerfuffle.

Re: "Wonderful PCs"?

I agree to an extent and gave you an upvote, but to be fair, they've been marketing it as the Microsoft Surface, not as Windows itself. At least in the US, their ads have... not really shown much of Windows at all, to be honest. Just people jumping around and clicking things together with the occasional shot of the start screen. I'd say Microsoft's biggest mistake was not releasing it with compatibility for existing Windows Phone 7 apps.

I checked the Windows Store today from a Windows 8 PC at work and saw barely anything in the way of apps that people want. I deleted my Facebook account (for a reason), but given its popularity, I decided to check for a Facebook app in the store. Sure, there were a few third-party apps, several of which cost money, but there wasn't an official app from Zuck & Co themselves.

Like it or not, people with mobile devices want apps, not websites, even if that app is only just an HTML5 wrapper for the website. I'm not sure if there's a Facebook app for Windows Phone 7 either (pretty sure there is, if I recall correctly), but nevertheless, support for its apps would've brought about an instant cache of software available to the platform.

Samsung markets their Bada-powered devices under the Wave brand, as opposed to the Galaxy brand. It seems that it's the Galaxy brand, not necessarily just the Samsung brand alone, that matters to customers buying Android-powered phones who might be otherwise confused.

All Galaxy-branded devices ship with Google Play. Even if Bada were 100% compatible with Android and Dalvik, Google almost certainly would never license the Play Store to it. Whether customers know the difference between Android and the Galaxy brand or not, most do use the Play Store and would expect any purchases made in Android to be accessible from any Galaxy-branded phone.

If Samsung ever did hope to overthrow Android with Bada, they would have to do it by increasing consumer awareness of the Wave brand instead or by emphasizing their own app store in the Galaxy brand, downplaying Google Play. In the long term, things may be different, but as things stand, Samsung can't afford to drop Android. Sudden execution of the Galaxy brand would be corporate suicide, so for now at least, Google really doesn't have much to worry about.

@jubtastic1

I know at least on Android, Chrome has options to force the ability to zoom even if it's disabled, and Firefox has an extension that allows you to do that.

Re: Speedy fix!

As much as I'd like to agree with this, the problem has been known about for several months, though not the exact cause. I recall reading release notes back in October warning not to install Ubuntu on certain models of Samsung laptops with UEFI firmwares, that several had been bricked.

Re: Re-inventing the wheel again ?

FrontPage sucked, sure, but Expression Web actually mostly produced fairly readable and standards-compliant code.

Re: Does Samsung support Linux?

At the end of the day...regardless of what Samsung does on the Linux front, if it says LINUX is not supported on this hardware (or alternatively *only* OS xxxx is), then the risk is entirely yours.

So... What you're saying is... it's still Samsung's fault.

Re: Thanks Oracle, for showing us how to fix security issues

@AC 17:19

Yeah, sure, that's how you can "fix" the problem on your home PC, but this article is about its impact on enterprise environments, not home PCs. You can't just remove software from or change functionality on an enterprise system without testing how it affects your workflow, unless you simply want to gamble your institution's ability to conduct business.

As I see it, you appear to have read an article about enterprise software, commented about your own home situation, and followed up with a clause in parentheses indicating that you don't care about enterprise software. Did I miss something?

Re: Thanks Oracle, for showing us how to fix security issues

Linux on the desktop is not popular, true, but Linux on the server most certainly is very popular. Desktop environments may have security vulnerabilities that aren't too well-documented or known, but most of the security vulnerabilities in the Linux and GNU subsystems themselves are quickly patched as soon as they're discovered. That said, recent versions of Windows can be configured to be nearly as secure as the Unix-based and Unix-like systems nowadays. Most security issues tend to be Trojan horses nowadays, no matter the platform.

Re: 7% overprovisioning and a data protection nightmare

Given that solid state storage can't retain ghost data by nature of not relying on magnetic states, in theory, a single low-level writing of any bit pattern onto the entire device should suffice in securely deleting all data stored upon it. I wouldn't trust such a technique with highly sensitive data, but it should work in theory. In practice, the firmware may not write the data as you would expect it to be written due to wear-leveling, potentially leaving traces of something behind somewhere. That said, I'm not a security expert and don't claim to be.

Re: So I take it...

I'm aware you can't set anything else as default. I can't set the TomTom app as default on my Android phone either due to the developers' not implementing the ability, even though the Android API does allow for it. I'm not too bothered about it; I didn't buy my phone for maps.

Just because I don't personally own an iOS device doesn't mean I'm not educated about it and don't come into contact with it. Why do you think I read an article about a new iOS update in the first place? It certainly wasn't so I could take to the comments section just to chide people for their choice of mobile devices. I just wish people would accept that different people like different things and not bicker over trivial things like the integrated maps application on a mobile OS.

Re: So I take it...

Would you kindly give it a rest already? I don't even own a single piece of Apple equipment, and that's getting old. There are alternatives if the default maps app doesn't suit your needs.

Re: Serious question

"Better still, use Linux and be as free from legal risk as you can be."

I use a Linux distribution on all of my personal computers as my primary or even only operating system, but in any country which recognizes software patents, using properly licensed proprietary software most often puts you at the least legal risk.

Linux may very well be open-source, but the kernel itself supposedly violates approximately 200 Microsoft patents which they refuse to disclose openly. That alone will unfortunately put you at the wrong end of the gun barrel from Microsoft's legal team, particularly if you use it in any large-scale business. Do I agree with that situation? Not at all - I personally think software should be protected by copyright and trade secrets alone, given its mathematical and even literary nature, but the world at large seems to disagree.

Now, the maintainers of certain distributions actually do pay licensing fees for others to use the software contained within the distribution as shipped, such as Canonical with Ubuntu (at least regarding certain technologies such as MP3 decoding and playback). Those licenses extend only to the packages as shipped in the official distributions however and not to any packages which may lie in various repositories, officially supported (in the case of Medibuntu) or not.

While your personal ethics may permit you to break patent law, do remember that you are still by definition breaking the law and are as such at legal risk. If you do however live in a country which does not respect software patents, then sure, using Linux may put you at less legal risk. You have to do your own homework on that though.

Re: Windows licensing bootcamp - a TCO nightmare.

"Take Apple, they took the Mach kernel and used it for OSX and iOS. The licence for that software did not require Apple to contribute back the changes they made to it, so therefore it benefits Apple but no one else."

Sure, it doesn't require them to contribute back the changes... but they did anyway.

See http://opensource.apple.com/ and http://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-2050.18.24/ in particular, the kernel from OSX 10.8.2.

And you just made me defend Apple; I can't believe it.

Re: And meanwhile

Alas, Android phones don't work as Mass Storage Class devices anymore.

They do if you have root and make a quick change in a terminal emulator. Most people would prefer MTP instead though. I do think it should be an option that doesn't require root access, but that would probably confuse most people. Then again, they could always just throw that in an "Advanced" section.