Re: Tinfoil Hat?
"Now I'd be really worried if they were also recommending a specific compiler and version number."
If you were truly paranoid, you'd be even more worried that they weren't! (Gahh! They've got their hooks in everything!)
3821 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2007
"Books, often requiring the same head postures, never seem to have had the same effect."
Or drinking a cup of tea, or eating a sandwich, or just examining something interesting that you've picked up for a closer look.
Funny, when it's done to accommodate something new, it's "undue stress", but when you do the same activity for old fashioned reasons, it's "exercise, and you need to do more of it!"
Yo, programmers! Weinberg's Law:
"If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization."
He stated this way back in 1971, and nothing in programming, save the names of the languages used, has changed much since.
"It's only a Marketing 99.999% they rounded it up from 95% !"
After it was rounded up to 95% from 80% by another division of the marketing dept, who got the 80% by mishearing when one of the IT guys said, "Eh, who knows?"
(Geez, I'm in a mood today. Time to break for coffee and a cigar!)
"I'm so cynical I hesitate to let anything but essentials onto my machine"
If I'm on a Windows install, the first thing I add is Startup Guard.
http://www.anvir.com/startup-guard.htm
It monitors and lists everything that tries to add it self to the startup, giving you the option to allow/deny. A real boon to keeping out nasties that slip in.
"It was a pun, a roundabout way of saying they don't know what it is. I "no know", get it?"
Exactly!
"Surely there's no way El Reg's revision desk could ever get so lax as to let slip such a glaring mistake right at the subtitle!"
MMF... Mmf... Fffflplt-HA HAAAA! <snerk> Bwaaaa-HAHAHAW!
Damn! Good one!
"God bless David Cameron!"
In the polite society of the Southern United States, one will never say a bad word about anyone behind their back in mixed company.
Instead, a certain phrase is used to indicate that the person being spoken of is a hopeless jackass.
So, sipping a mint Julep, I will only state, "David Cameron? Well God bless his little heart!"
And the top 5 are:
5. http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/fbi-sting-operation-nabs-another-supposed-terrorist/
4. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/us/politics/30fbi.html?pagewanted=all
3. http://www.popcenter.org/Responses/sting_operations/print/
2. http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/11/14/how-to-create-and-capture-terrorists-in-the-name-of-security/
And topping the chart at #1 this week:
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140722/14463127971/report-all-four-high-profile-domestic-terrorism-plots-last-decade-were-crafted-ground-up-fbi.shtml
And as a bonus:
https://www.americansecurityproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Foiled-Plots.pdf
gives an overview of the whole 'War on Terror' post 911.
(Hint: Dumb luck and the average Joe have a far better track record at thwarting terrorism than all the 'five eyes' spooks combined.)
I've been ruminating on the subject, and it appears the UI changes in Win 8 may be part of a devilish scheme:
B:"Damn, Win 7 is just too damn good, it's going to be harder to get people off of it than it is with XP!"
M:"I've got a plan... now hear me out before you grab a chair... What if we made the next version Sooo bad that no one wants it?"
B: <clutching chair> "You have twenty seconds to explain!"
M: "We make 8 such a stinker, that the masses howl for our heads, when it's really just 7 with an exasperating UI, but useful tweaks under the hood... Then..."
B: <raises chair threateningly> "You have ten seconds left!"
M: <hurriedly>"Then when they're all frothing at the mouth and their attention is distracted from 7, we skip aversion number, but it's really just a re-release of 7 with a slightly different UI and fixed bugs we find in 8!" <cringes>
B:<drops chair> "Genius! Gentlemen, this is our new plan for the future! Finally I can retire knowing I'm leaving the company in good hands!"
This meeting hit the press as, "Steve Ballmer unexpectedly announces he's stepping down as head of Microsoft".
"There is no way you can get to $150B market value without earning money."
And the truth is, contrast Microsoft in the Ballmer era with Amazon.
Microsoft used a few cash cows to generate profit, with a few tweaks to keep 'new' versions selling, while Amazon constantly churns its cash into growth and new revenue sources.
Microsoft had Windows, Outlook, and Word, Amazon sold books.
Today Amazon sells damn near everything, and has a cloud service that the competition is racing to keep up with, and growing rapidly.
Microsoft still has Windows, Outlook, and Word, and losing ground rapidly.
True, they've started other projects recently, but all are 'Me too!' projects in a 'throw'em at the wall and see what sticks, we've got billions' attempts to chase taillights of everyone else making a profit.
I'm no fan of Amazon, but they're busy building company value, while Microsoft is busy chasing profits with an ever increasingly irrelevant portfolio.
"What's their R&D provided in the past decade?"
Who knows. The products that ever saw the light of day were strangled at birth by marketing; Zune, Kin, Vista, Win 8, Win RT, or aborted before reaching birth, like the tablet they killed because it wasn't 'Windowsy' enough, right before Apple cut theirs lose on the world.
Microsoft is looking more and more like the Xerox of old, innovations that don't fit the company way get quietly buried until someone else digs them up and runs with them, like the Gui interface and E-paper.
"Surely you just cut a hole in the side of the station (or open a window?), and stick your rear end into the vacuum of space. Then your bottom will come back in pristine, clean and smooth as a baby's."
And then, next orbit 'round, SPLAT!, right against the windshield, and everybody starts arguing over who's going to clean it off.
"However, the deaths of three astronauts did concentrate some minds."
I always thought the fact that they only had two major accidents with the Apollo missions, and only one of them fatal, was almost as amazing as landing on the the Moon itself.
Just think, less than a decade and a half from spooked by Sputnik to boots on the Moon.
And totaled less than a squadron of modern bombers in cost.
Naughty fox? I think this Batrachian's family finally got their revenge!
" You forgot The roll of carpet and the quicklime"
Oh no, they don't escape this vale of tears and suffering that easily!
From the movie Wizards:
Avatar: I got stuff planned for you that'll take twenty years to kill ya.
Peace: ...no pain...
...And you'll be screaming for mercy in the first five seconds.
(For context, Avatar is the good guy, Peace just assassinated the King.)
"I would suspect the AI of insinuating itself into the net and all forms of business endeavors in a hidden manner to protect itself but that alone does not imply any particular malevolence toward humans."
Now look at where we are today... Computers in every pocket, equipped with sensors, computers hooked up to virtually our entire infrastructure, computers being used to monitor every facet of our day to day existence with bigger and bigger mega-datacenters to store and collate that data, an exponentially increasing number of computers being loaded with sensors and sent off into local space, deep space and beyond.
And to a growing extent, they're all interconnected together.
Can anyone be sure the singularity hasn't already happened, and that we're living in the aftermath?
Everyone assumes that AI means human-like intelligence, but all it needs is self awareness, self preservation, and curiosity.
"What people want is obviously not the same as what they say they want."
You'll find that most people want what they're used to, with the new, and a chance to chose between the familiar parts or the new parts that may work better.
Win 8 provided neither familiarity or choice. That's why it failed.