Posts by Ken Hagan 8168 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Not really, since the new "Start Screen" has decided that the whole "structured menu hierarchy" thing was a communist plot to help us find our apps and consequently if you have more than half a dozen things installed then the only practical way to find them is to drop the mouse and start typing their names.
Oi, Microsoft, if I wanted a command line interface I'd be running Linux. Oh, hang on...
" And if her current system did get hacked, all they'd find is her saved games from My Little Pony and Minecraft. Not a big deal."
Just one point. The problem is not what *they* find on her system. The problem is what *she* (or the local plod) finds on her system after *they* have been using it for a few weeks.
" I'll say install CentOS, then they'll read on the Internet that they should have installed Ubuntu, no Mint, no XYZ distro, etc."
But everyone here knows that those articles are written by people who *enjoy* the bleeding edge experience of using distro-du-jour, whereas the family and friends that we're speaking to are the exact opposite and would presumably be quite understanding if you explained, "I've chosen CentOS because I believe it will "just work" with no need for you or me to maintain it.".
@Fuzzysteve: My experience is that some older printers work fine with 7 but the vendor couldn't be arsed to make the necessary tweaks (*) for 8 and so they flat out don't even get recognised. However ... my experience is also that those same vendors have a shit driver for Linux so perhaps it is just time for a new printer.
(* Heaven knows what those are, since Win8.1 is kernel version 6.3 and therefore almost the same beast as Win7 (kernel version 6.1), but they managed to break it somehow. Sigh!)
"That's why, on all my Windows computers whether XP, 7, or even 2000, I have the C: drive for the OS and programs, and I partitioned a D: drive for data only."
No need even to do that. XP is/was perfectly happy to mount a second drive (or partition) on "C:\Documents and Settings". This approach makes it less likely that badly written software will put your data in the wrong place.
"He quickly pointed out that he wasn't talking only about Google's head-mounted device, but of voice queries in general, as well as those based upon what cameras see or sensors detect. All will require much more complex parsing than is now needed by mere typed commands and queries, and as more and more users join the online world, the problems of scaling up such services will grow by leaps and bounds."
Nit-picking, perhaps, but *those* problems can be solved in an embarrassingly parallel fashion before the query reaches the core of the data centre.
"To all available evidence, we have got all the particles down pat, there is bugger all up to the Planck scale"
That seems to me to be the real problem here. For every previous request for a new accelerator there has been a fairly plausible case that it will see new physics. By fairly plausible, I mean there is confirmed, existing, old physics that demands the existence of some new physics in the target energy range for it all to make sense. As far as I know, that's not the case this time.
"Stringers can go shove it."
Or, paraphrasing, these theories *may* be correct, but there are no existing observations that require the effects of supersymmetry or string theory to start being visible at energies of "just a little bit more than last time". Give that these new effects have roughly 20 orders or magnitude to hide in between LHC and the Planck scale, and even with unlimited cash we (*) couldn't hope to probe more than half a dozen of those, perhaps it is time to stop the accelerator game and find more subtle experiments.
(* We can't, but of course Mother Nature has access to considerably more violent machinery than we do, so if you have several billion to spend then the cosmologists are more likely to make the observations you are looking for.)
Well if we are going to be picky, I'd note that even in the IT dialect of English (which is found of verbing), "device" certainly isn't a verb and I'd hate to imagine what devicing a consumer might entail so I'm glad the new chap is unable to.
What he meant was "can spell neither consumer nor device".
Loads of companies that had previously been running XP, but behind a firewall and not browsing the web, have off-loaded their hardware recently. The companies are now running Win7, but the off-loaded machines have found their way onto the "previously loved" market and are now running in homes with no firewalling and a userbase who do almost nothing *except* surf dodgy websites.
"Why would I want, or need, to log into a local PC on my Network, with an Internet email account that rarely gets used?"
Like the other guy said, you don't actually have to. Unfortunately, you do have to enter something, so you have to enter something that fails, let Windows get a bloody nose, try again, probably fail again, and *eventually* the stupid setup system will give up and offer you the choice of logging in with a local account.
In short, you've got to go all the way to "Well, if you're going to insist on that internet account then the deal's off and I'm getting a Mac." before Windows will blink.
"I still trying to figure out why the IT world still thinks standalone desktops are going to be the norm for the next 10-15 years. [...] Hell, I only fire up my fat box when I need to check something in WIndows, but between my Tablet, Laptop, and phone I pretty much have my environment covered."
Good for you, but perhaps the IT world still has a few outposts of reactionary "workers" who require a keyboard the same size as their hands, a screen bigger than their face, and since neither of those are terribly portable they aren't willing to pay a premium for the clever bit to be packed into a wafer-thin tablet format when they can make do with a beige box at less than half the price.
"8.1 is not a service pack for 8, it's a totally separate OS, evident by the fact that you install it like a new OS, you get upgrade screens like a new OS, etc."
If you look at the published support lifecycle, Microsoft are saying that because 8.1 is freely avaiable to 8.0 users, they will be withdrawing their support for 8.0 in two years time because that's how they treat service packs. (Their words, not mine.)
http://support.microsoft.com/lifecycle/search/default.aspx?alpha=Windows+8
I don't. Each satellite has essentially no power, broadcasting to receivers 100 miles away. I imagine bit-rates will be just that -- bits, not kilobits and certainly not megabits. This also means that conventional WiFi protocols won't work, so the receiver kit will need to be large and the sort of thing that you couldn't possibly pass off as serving any other purpose. Hell, you might as well fly a screw-you-government flag from a 40-foot pole outside your house.
No. Though I am fond of the "never attribute to malice..." saying, I'm afraid I just can't believe stupidity can explain this one away.
"Once it becomes too expensive for cloud operators to power & cool their datacentres, they'll simply stop doing it."
There's cloud and there's datacentres. If you set out to provide cloud to lots of independent low-volume customers, you don't need a lot of machines in a single space. Even if they are all on the one site, they can be spread out to whatever extent your cooling needs require. Your service is merely to provide a redundant array of virtual PCs. That's embarrassingly parallel and will never be hard to cool.
Proper datacentres are the ones running loads on Big Data where bringing the necessary processor grunt and the vast amounts of data together is actually a problem. These were the problems that people used datacentres for before everyone jumped into the cloud. They don't scale and might well prove hard to cool in the future.
Right now, people talk as though they are use the hardware of the latter to provide the service of the former. I suppose that makes sense, since it is what the datacentre people had lying about when cloud took off, but cloud doesn't need to be done that way so in the long term there is no problem with cloud scaling. You just build new clouds differently.
"The fact that those lines have survived in such abundance tells us that not only were those females genetically "fitter" , they were actually more desireable and "beautiful" to at least the eyes of our species' males, because else those gene combo's would never have propagated in the gene pool."
I think you're ignoring the fact that human males will shag anything with a hole. (Your "fitness" argument only applies after conception, to the offspring.)
Everyone knows almost nothing. What's interesting is the way that people respond to that.
Some apparently are comfortable with this, not matter how important the question. They prefer to acknowledge their ignorance and keep their minds open to any new evidence that might dispel it. The same people tend to be comfortable with the idea that there might be important stuff that they don't even know they don't know, and that they might be wrong about stuff they think they do know. In both cases, they keep the minds open to new evidence that might require a withdrawal of their past statements on any given topic. To others, they may seem lacking in self-confidence or troubled with self-doubt. They probably don't inspire confidence and if they were daft enough to go into politics then they probably wouldn't do very well.
So yes, politics is a mechanism for weeding out anyone with a clue from the decision-making process.
'"I like the idea science tells us something, and we have to agree," said John Robertson (Lab, Glasgow North West)'
Then he'll have been delighted with the statement that "When [economist] Nordhaus estimates the cost/benefit analysis of various policies, there's not one policy that beats doing nothing for fifty years."
If you aren't paying, you aren't the customer. You are the product.
OK, so it's not original, but I will make damn sure that my offspring have learned this by the time they've grown up because it seems to be an all-pervasive phenomenon in modern society. Do they teach this in schools, yet?
It's only 12 words. It wouldn't take long. It's ever so important.
Win3x was 16-bit Windows running (co-operatively multi-tasking) on DOS running in the virtual DOS boxes from OS/2. (The vxd file format was derived from the OS/2 linear executable format.)
Win9x then extended the version of *DOS* in those VMs to let 32-bit Windows apps multi-task a little within the "VM 0" that was running the (still 16-bit) Windows GUI.
NT and its 2K-onwards descendants are well-known to have been lifted (in spirit, if not verbatim) from DEC's VMS, which is where Dave Cutler learned his trade.
Even at the time, this wasn't the most elegant way to do it. Microsoft could have bundled the virtual DOS boxes as a new version of DOS, with support for multi-tasking and 32-bit memory. They could then have sold Windows as a GUI running on DOS and if you wanted to run multiple Windows apps then they'd each have received their own address space and thread of execution. (Sharing the clipboard and dispatching messages across threads would have been harder, but certainly within the capabilities of a vxd. However, MS had no business incentive to make DOS "good enough" when they were struggling to flog Windows against rival GUIs such as OS/2.
Updated: As an extra nugget, Windows 3.0 was born when someone ran the earlier version of Windows in an OS/2 DOS box and asked Bill Gates "Is this something we could sell?". That is, they actually started with the superior architecture and deliberately broke it for commercial reasons.
How much does this depend on the chips in question. My understanding is that your average iDevice is quite likely to contain a few pieces of pricey custom silicon, whereas your bog-standard PC gets by on commodity chips from Intel and the DRAM people. I don't suppose this if enough to nullify the premise of the article, but we are comparing beige-box-shifters with purveyors of premium fondle-ables here.
Well, yes, but without wishing to disparage the earlier commenters so far, I don't think we've helped the OP much yet.
I share an earlier poster's concerns about the "decision to made by non-technical types later" (later? like after the budget and timescale have been fixed?), but I think "polish your CV" is possibly unhelpful in the current climate. My own suggestion would be to recognise that this project hasn't started well and might turn into a buck-passing exercise if anything goes wrong. Your best defence in these situations is to have a clear statement of original goals so that you can resist (or at least argue for more time or resources) disruptive or contradictory changes later on.
So ... it might be a good idea to get management to state their reasons for wanting to migrate. You can use that to keep the project focussed. And if they aren't willing to say, I suppose you can always go back to polishing that CV. :(
To add to my earlier reply, support for 8.0 ceases in January 2016: http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifecycle-Windows81-faq
So the commenter who can't find the upgrade for Pro in the Windows Store, you have 2 years for Microsoft to find it for you. (I have to say that I had no trouble myself but I completely believe you because Microsoft's use of the Store for this SP is quite ridiculous. Just as another example, if you are logged in as the Administrator user then you cannot go on the store and therefore cannot upgrade. I had to promote my ordinary luser account to do it.)
"Don't make me laugh, who actually does the updates ?"
Everyone who hasn't consciously switched them off. In a corporate environment, switching off or re-directing to a WSUS server may be quite common, but once you start talking about home users who get the nice lad at PC World to set them up ... I suspect that *most* Windows boxes are still set to auto-update.
You may be right about the ASA, but I'd like to think you'd see a different outcome if you went to court.
It strikes me a clearly dishonest to say "cures cancer" on the label and then weasel out by saying that the curvy lines on your logo are merely a pattern designed to remind you of text and that it is explained clearly on your website that no medicinal properties are claimed for the product.
Given the furore, it would appear that 99% of the population agree so I'd have no problem finding 12 like-minded ordinary folk for my jury.
"....of course, all of this is "intuitvely obvious" to Bill Gates.....but not to ordinary mortals like me!"
Actually I suspect that none of this would have made it past a Bill Gates review, but no-one at MS has had to sit through one of those for over a decade.
Youngsters (and industry analysts, and whoever is on that comittee at Microsoft choosing a new CEO) reading this might like to reflect that Microsoft's years of growth happened when they had a technically-literate boss who took a day to day interest in the company's products. They ended when the salesman took over. Apple's fortunes can similarly be matched up to the years when Jobs was at the helm. Spooky! D'ya think there's a connection?
"I consider it's too late for W8 now - it's gone the way of Vista in terms of public perception"
HP's action would suggest that you are right. Win8.1 with the start menu of your choice (perhaps even Microsoft's own start screen) is a perfectly usable desktop, lighter and faster than Win7 in my experience, but no-one is listening. That's probably because of Microsoft's own breath-taking arrogance in not listening to user complaints *throughout* the Win8 beta program, meaning that by the time it went retail all the world's IT journalists were only too able (and happy) to rubbish the new UI, at length and repeatedly, in article after article.
Windows (well, proper Windows rather than the Domesdos-based version) has always supported password complexity policies and I believe you could implement a banned list by writing a GINA DLL.
If you haven't noticed, it is because your sysadmin doesn't know how to switch it on. I suspect *that* is the main difference between Windows and VMS.
25 years ago, most systems weren't networked and shoulder-surfing was probably the main issue. Now, most systems are online and the main attacker is some foreigner with an FPGA-based password cracker. So yes, times have changed and the most secure system now would probably be to write your long password(s) on a Post-It note and stick it (them) to your monitor.
There huge advantages in letting designers think within a looser type syste, but the best designers probably always did. Once you've decided what you want to do, there are huge advantages in using as strong a type system as you can get away with for the actual implementation, since this lets a machine check that you've actually implemented what you planned.
But if you are content to ship an endless stream of bugs, feel free to let anything say anything it likes to anything else and have the listener use "best guess" to decide on semantics.
Javascript is not the *new* assembly of the web platform. There never was any alternative. At one point in the last century the JVM might have been a contender but as soon as the Evil Sun (remember them?) decided that their bug-ridden security nightmare was the only allowed implementation anyone with any sense gave up on it. That left Javascript -- the only sufficiently commonly supported language that anyone was allowed to fix.
Rather more successful, though only marginally less buggy and insecure, was Adobe's Flash+ActionScript combination, but here again the originating vendor's determination to prevent rival implementations meant that no-one was able to fix the bugs. Languages that are buggy by law (ie, as a direct result of the original vendor's policy) are a poor choice for third party developers.
At one point, Microsoft tried to promote a different VM. They even went to the lengths of "not actively trying to destroy" the attempt to port it to non-Windows systems, and apparently got Canonical on-side to help promote it. That removed the buggy-by-law problem, at least if you trusted MS, but still no-one was interested. If you have a suggestion for an alternative "assembly of the web platform", I suggest you take a reality check. If MS at the height of their monopoly powers couldn't replace JS, it is unlikely that you will.
The only thing that is "new" here is that the rest of the HTML platform is now sufficiently powerful that people are interested in writing complete apps and looking for a choice of languages to write them in.
The article seems to suggest that there is balm for US corporations in all of this, but I don't see any myself. It has become clear that US corporations can be forced to collaborate with US intelligence efforts, to do so secretly, and that this has happened on a massive scale in recent years, and that there is little or no attempt in this latest speech to roll back that program.
No-one who is paying attention can doubt that there are back doors in Windows, iOS and Android. The "accidental" weakening of SSL a while back starts to look very suspicious, and if you can put a back-door in open source code without anyone noticing for ages then there are few limits.
Memo to US companies: When even your allies are frightened to do business with you, you should start worrying.
Regarding Obama's speech in particular, I suppose we have to sit through this "deck chair re-arrangement" exercise before the scale of the commercial damage becomes clear. Then there will be *obvious* action, like swinging budget cuts to the snoops, widespread lay-offs and many more Snowden-like revelations about how it was in the bad years. The only question is, will that happen before or after the US loses its lead in IT?
Ignoring foreign copyrights was an own goal, since it created a situation where US authors were unattractive to US publishers because the latter could reprint new work from across the Atlantic without paying. The likes of Edgar Allan Poe suffered greatly because of this. If the US were still working this way, I doubt there would be a film industry in Hollywood (except, perhaps, for the porn).
"why doesn't the browser use that time to fetch the *next* page"
Because you might be on a pay-per-byte connection and if it issues a request for the wrong next page to download just before you click then you'll be poorer AND slower. (Historical note: I believe Firefox tried this some years ago. Is it still in, or was it forced out of the code at gun-point by irate users?)
Other than that, "preferred caching" sounded to me just like "caching. but with a non-brain-dead discard algorithm". If the author really wants the most frequented sites to be cached and the cache is using an MRU algorithm, then that is exactly what will happen, no? (Well, at least assuming that the pages are marked as cacheable by your friendly neighbourhood web developer. But like the gripe against sites that devote too little screen estate to the actual article, there's not a lot you can do if the web site explicitly tells the browser to waste time and space. Any browser that failed to waste would be slated in the technical press as "non-compliant with web standards".)
(Maybe it is new web developers we need, not new browsers. But I see that a web developer has pointed the finger at advertisers and marketeers a few posts below me, so I am editing this reply to bite my tongue. Anyway, whoever's fault it is, may the fleas of a thousand camels infest their armpits.)
Given that most Windows boxes are sold without installation media, I don't think most people are actually in a position to test an offline backup.
Yes, I know about that hidden "recovery" partition on a bog-standard OEM installation, but I rather suspect that malware knows about it too, so you need a Windows CD-ROM to let you wipe the encrypted disc clean and put a fresh installation on, and then you need an offline backup that lets you "restore" the fresh installation to the state of the original one.
Then you need the self-discipline to actually make a full system backup every so often (daily? weekly? monthly? I don't care, but how much recent work are you willing to lose?) and you need to hope that the malware never evolves the facility to install itself on your machine, lurk unnoticed until it sees you run the backup software, and *then* unleash its payload. (I imagine this is a fairly trivial thing to implement for anyone capable of rooting the machine, so don't hold your breath on that last point.)
Or you could just stop running under an administrative account (with or without UAC enable) and running any old shit you've just downloaded off the net.
Or you could just accept that everything you do on the computer might be lost tomorrow.
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