Chromium based Edge? It works well for my work stuff.

Did XP have signed binaries? On more modern versions of Windows, it will bugcheck if a boot-critical binary is not properly signed by Microsoft.

You should automate your crap work....and then do something more valuable with your time for your employer and become more valuable.

I don't think it is ethical to automate your work, and then pretend like you are still doing it.

When I was in school for a CS degree, I had a co-op as a web admin. The old co-op gave me all of her crap work that used to consume all of her time. After a few weeks, I had it all automated so I didn't have to do any of that crap work anymore. I guess I could have slacked off and collected a paycheck, but that would be unethical and furthermore a big waste of time and opportunity.

I used the free time to do cooler jobs that I was more interested it. I got in to be more involved the higher-level architecture of our web farm while the old co-op was still doing crap work. I thought myself ASP. I was able to do DBA work when I wanted to learn about it. I built a new homepage and template for large site, etc.

Anyway, be smart and use the free time to make yourself more valuable.

If the place doesn't value you for being proactive, then I would quit and find a better place to work that does.

Is this some kind of click bait? Maybe a joke? If you can Google how to do your job, then your job must be very easy that anyway who knows how to Google and knows basic math can do it. It sounds like the next job to be automated. :) Anyway, I wouldn't hire anyone to work for me as a programmer than has a 4th grade level math understanding or hates math. Anyway, programming and algorithms are math, or at least a sub branch of math...at least up unitl the 50-60s or so when Computer Science was its own thing. ....sigh... Thanks for the reminder of only taking programming jobs that can't (likely) be done by a person like this, or someone who went to a coding boot camp of some kind.

Congrats! TAILS accomplished what Knoppix first did 14 years ago! http://www.knopper.net/knoppix...

I guess my question is more, along the lines of why not be pragmatic about it? Some people use that term. It has a specific meaning for them. Why not leave it at that? Being dogmatic doesn't help the cause of free software adoption.

Working on GPL'ed source code can be a major problem. It can cause taint to the closed source software especially if the projects are similar. Companies that work on both, like say Intel, normally firewall employees from open source and closed source projects for this reason.

I am a software developer for a large software company working on a large proprietary (read: not free) OS. How can I achieve forgiveness for my sins in this life?

Why don't you like the term open source?

"No longer are there different kernels for Windows 8, Windows Phone or Windows RT it's now all just One Windows. As goes the Windows kernel, so goes the entire company." Seriously what is he talking about? The kernels were already the same on Windows 8, Windows Phone 8, Xbox One, and Windows RT. This already has been happening for many years now. This is public knowledge that anyone could know if they just bothered to look. By the way, they announced at the //Build conference a few weeks ago that even the app model an WinRT APIs are going to be converged now between Windows, Phone, and Xbox so you can write one app for all of all platforms once.

I assume you didn't run the Windows 8 or 8.1 previews then. I did and don't recall it having this level of fail. In fact the software ran almost completely reliably. I am speaking of software quality and reliability and not personal preference in the UI design.

"Almost Awesome" I think that must have been meant as a joke. Constantly crashing and crap battery life on release software is probably the opposite of awesome...at least for me. Maybe he meant that it would have been completely awesome if it managed to electrocute him or kick him in the nuts some how.

FORTAN used to be it back in the day, but now days Matlab is the stuff that many engineers use for scientific computing. Many of the math libraries are very good in Matlab and don't require you to be a computer scientist to make them run fast. I used to work with scientists in my old lab to port their Matlab code to run on HPC clusters porting them to FORTAN or C. Often the matlab libraries smoked the BLAS/Atlas packages that you find on Linux/UNIX machines for instance. The same would hold true for Octave since they just build on the standard GNU math pacakges like BLAS.

Is Windows done on ARM? Two words: Windows Phone. So obviously not. Windows on ARM will continue for the foreseeable future. Are Windows RT tablets dead? Well not yet. Who cares about running 7 year old productivity apps. That didn't seem to hamper iPad adoption not being able to run Mac apps. Once you have all of the consumption apps you need from the store, I think ARM RT or x86, it doesn't really matter.