And what's happened?

We have gone back to large, simple, flat icons.

We have gone back to a desktop akin to Program Manager (large square blocks of programs on a plain background).

We have gone passed through Active Desktop, only to have it ripped to shreds and reincarnate in the form of the (still loathed) Metro.

We have gone back pre-Start Menus and removed taskbars (in Metro at least), albeit with added features. Then we've put them back in.

The people who work in IT know that these fads come round in cycles and eventually you'll go back to how you were because some things work and some don't. At one point, Windows 95 was going to be "the last Windows OS with a CLI", now we've brought in PowerShell, etc.

And all because, at some point, Microsoft have this ego trip about never being wrong and knowing better. And all the IT guys want is an option. Do I want shiny new stuff, or boring old stuff? Let me choose. It's really that simple. You can put EVERYTHING you want into an OS. Just give me a switch (and ideally a Group Policy setting) to turn it back off if it's not what I want.

I don't want Metro to be thrown in the bin, I want my users to be able to choose whether or not they want to use it. And that means giving them years of both that they can choose between at a click. It takes THIRD-PARTY FREEWARE and faffing about to do that, which isn't the best solution when I've paid for the OS for all my users on an annual subscription.

Nobody cares whether you want new-and-fancy stuff or not. But inevitably, it'll go out of fashion, then come back, then go out. All I want is the option. It's not hard. If a freeware project can give you the option, why can't Windows?

(P.S. Why can't I make Group Policy use AD stored user photos as the Windows 8 login? It's almost impossible with lots of login scripts and downloading an image via third-party software into a particular location on EVERY machine that they might even log onto. Why can't I set a myriad of basic options that are there on the screen for my users, and why can't I *stop* them changing them just as easily? Why can't I just have "skip Metro screen" as an option in Windows to go straight to an old fashioned desktop? Really... it's not that hard).

Scaling is a one-off for the particular size of screen.

There's almost zero overhead in keeping the icons as SVG or similar, and rendering to a bitmap in the device dpi that you require, and then using that bitmap until the screen resolution changes.

Cache enough of them and after the first few resolution changes, you'll never have to render the SVG on that machine again.

So the "scalable has a cost" rules go out of the window, really. And even back in the 90's, did you ever see the stuff you could do with vector formats? Some of them were amazing even if they took 10 or so seconds to render on the machines of the day. Nowadays? Pah. Make it render in the background the first time you change resolution with a "Please Wait" screen showing while you do so. If it takes more than 20-30 seconds for extremely complex icons for the entire Windows control set on a modern machine, I'll be amazed.

There are issues, much like those that plague font sizing, where you have to "hint" at lower resolutions how you want the final bitmap to show (because you might want what looks like an insignificant single pixel to render as a single pixel no matter what the size to make it look right, e.g. cursors, etc.). But those are all solved problems.

Have you seen the speed and zooming size you can get on the MacOS bottom bar? It's fabulous (and I hate Mac with a vengeance). And I've seen it do the same speed on a VM with no 3D acceleration at all.

There's no excuse. This is just designer-pandering where "design" means "look", not functionality, usability, human interface guidelines, intuitiveness, etc.

I've often backed a return to the Windows 3.1 interface for even modern Windows because it was simple, plain, boring and worked, and the icons you could tell roughly what they did. But this is a STEP BACK from Windows 3.1 even. Urk.

And, yes, I have deployed the previews in VM's for on-site testing and, apart from the look-change, there's little of note there. I'd have been infinitely more happy with a 7 or even 8 clone with newer features.

Hell, I've used 8 on a tablet and on touchscreen PC's and each time it's easier to turn that Metro junk off and use it, and even then it's just NOT designed for proper touch usage.

1) Robots cannot replace all jobs. We've yet to make a self-fixing robot of any note. AI is NOWHERE NEAR capable of doing the simplest of paperwork or administration. Hell, we've barely automated anything of the IT departments, let alone anywhere else. All they can automate are mindless, repetitive, labour-intensive (and sometimes dangerous) jobs. Though that puts a LOT of people out of work, that's by far not the majority.

2) If robots do replace all jobs, the "money" comes from sale of goods just the same. Half the workforce are working and doing the work of the other half - the robots produce the goods / services, and the humans lounge at home. In fact, if anything, we'll have more money because we could produce more for less maintenance costs and have no union troubles - once the machine is in, it'll carry on working until the power goes out, effectively, and cost pence to run in the meantime as an "hourly wage".

3) The result of the above is that food and goods become so cheap and plentiful that the concept of "buying" them will seem old hat. If a government could pay for itself by selling goods to other countries still, then it doesn't really matter what you do - you could quite literally be paid to stay at home, if all you have to do to "do" the same amount of work is power up a robot and oil him once a week Mass amounts of automated robots also make self-sufficiency much more possible - imagine that you don't have to farm or buy goods, just let the same robot that works for Kelloggs loose on your land and it'll feed you for minimal cost.

4) This is all a pipe-dream. By the time you have that sort of automation, the only jobs left would be bureaucratic - and they'd realise they're the only ones working. Things would flip on their head.

5) Who cares? If you have no job and no money but food is so cheap that going an oiling a robot once a month pays for everything - wow... perfect life.

To protect the metadata of the recipient is daft. How are intermediary servers ever supposed to know? And if you and the other end of the connection both set up a connection and know who it's for, that blows out the "fact that a message was sent" before you start.

Message length is also stupid to try to hide. Sure, it may not be exact but if I send a 200Mb email and you send 20 characters, how are you supposed to encrypt those to be indistinguishable without literally padding to the nearest 200Mb? And padding might be able to be done on a smaller block basis, but it's exactly that kind of padding that broke open gzipped-and-encrypted data in SSL sessions for a while.

Timestamps? Who needs them - if someone's listening, they know what time you contacted the server and it'll be +/- a couple of minutes of when you wanted the email sent (i.e. immediately, in almost all cases).

Sender? Obscuring that while connecting FROM an email server that's trusted to be honest about only delivering mail for known local users (untrusted ones are spam sources and will get blocked no matter what encryption they use)... there's your metadata.

Metadata is, in and of itself, almost impossible to remove. The fact that you've connected to a target mail server is metadata.that you're probably sending an email to an email account at that server. Anything else is either between you and that first server (so forwarding is a pain, re-enveloping is a pain, bouncebacks are a pain, there's a stupidly high computing cost associated with receiving spam, etc.) or has to be announced somehow.

And that would all come back to entirely encrypted and obfuscated and peer-to-peer networking globally. You're talking about a Tor problem, not an email problem.

If you don't want people to read a message, encrypt it. If you don't want people to ever know a message existed, you have to be able to send it in such a way that nobody could ever know. And that's all-but impossible at the moment. The best we have is hoping that sending it in bits to a random selection of unknown strangers will protect you enough that they could never collaborate against you (Tor).

That's not the problem with GPG.

The problem with it is that I could never be bothered to use it, not because of privacy (it would be incredibly convenient to send, say, a password required in an emergency via a verifiably-encrypted email) - but because it's such a faff. And it interferes with everything (searching, archiving, re-enveloping etc.). And to do so is all bolt-on-and-bodge-job methods. None of the major email clients offered anything like proper encryption by default.

And as soon as you get into using plugins, most people just won't bother. There are plugins for PFS for all your instant messenger programs, etc. - I had one installed for about 5 years, the only other person I know with one installed has a different, incompatible one. Now I don't use IM much any more anyway, so it's dead in the water.

And all email encryption is a ton of messing about with publishing keys in the right places, and having to verify against those places, etc. It's ugly.

The only place I've seen anything like GPG working is in package signing for third-party software. And there you have to download the package, download the key (either from the same website as the package - WOOP WOOP - or independently crowd-source a verified key), and then check it works. I've only ever bothered for Slackware, for which I believe the ISO images are signed with the official Slackware key.

GPG is just a pain in the butt and not automated at all. It's easier to compose and encrypt the message ENTIRELY OFFLINE and then send the encrypted text, and that shows you what kind of automation is missing, and what kind of trust system is actually in place.

Sure, there are plugins, helpers, hacks, extensions and all sorts. But none of them ever progressed to being "in" the software. Not even software designed to do nothing else but send email.

It gets as bright as a quarter full moon on a pinpoint in the sky.

Where the feel of "what we would see (and feel)" comes into it, I have no idea.

Long article, for simple answer, that isn't even that interesting.

Personally, the most interesting bit was the bit about a previous supernova in the 1000's that looks like a cloud of dust now.

There are four twisted pairs. Assume they are 100MHz each. That's only 400MHz (800 if you think the other one of a pair does anything (*)). Yet you push 1000Mbits a second over it (and, yes, that's the actual speed) .

How? PAM, QAM, and a bunch of other tricks - because you think you need an entire cycle/wavelength in order to encode a single bit of information, which just isn't true.

(*) it doesn't - the other half of the pair allows you to subtract interference received along the same route by an equal length cable. Much like MIMO antenna differencing.

And if she'd eaten them when you were in the womb, you'd have had her contaminated blood, and all her immune response (i.e. zero) to it.

And if you'd been given them to eat, it would have been different too.

But nobody is saying that there aren't the 1% who might be allergic to peanut. But, unless and until you have a reaction, why avoid them? That's the point. Avoiding them can provoke an immune reaction to a "foreign" agent.

Instead of the 1% having a visible allergic reaction, we have the 50% who say they are "intolerant" to a major food group and/or make themselves allergic by avoiding it altogether. And then guess what reaction their children have, and so on.

Everything in moderation. Don't shove peanuts down your newborn's face, but don't avoid them in pregnancy either.

Cat5 cables is only aimed at 100MHz signals, but you can put Gigabit Ethernet over it.

The number of bits sent does not have to be less than the frequency of the carrier (or even half that).

Phase, amplitude, frequency-modulation, plus others, all combined allow you to get a lot more out of the signal than merely the carrier frequency rate.

Otherwise your old 56Kb/s modem of old would never have got to that speed, your DSL modems wouldn't come close, your wifi would be nothing more than a radio modem, etc.

Hasn't been true for decades, and with multiple antenna etc. tricks you can do even more.

Gemalto do the majority of the smartcard market these days.

I've used them for everything for business banking to access control.

Is it not scary enough that they have been compromised to the point of making almost every SIM on the planet useless? By comparison a banking smartcard here or there is nothing.

Ironically, every few months our bank will tell us that we have to replace the PIN-pads/smartcards/whatever for a newer model "to be secure". Nobody's yet answered then why their software only works on IE (and older versions at that).

"It's called Linux 4.0."

How's that?

Already some versions of Linux has been everything from Lucid Lynx to Trust Tahr. Windows is technically Chicago, isn't it?

And, sorry, but my software on my desktop at the moment consists of Xibo, Google, Putty, Audacity, GIMP, MonkeyJam, Scratch, GLPI (colloquially known as "gloopy"), and numerous others. And I work in a very posh independent school. This is what the kids see every day. Are the school bothered? No.

If you're put off by the name, use the version number like everyone else. And if your CIO doesn't allow you to deploy something because of a nickname, yet it fulfills all your business purposes and doesn't have the name visible ANYWHERE, he's an idiot.

Oddly, if I want what *I* want on a machine nowadays, things have turned on their heads.

On headless servers I run Ubuntu LTS - it means that when I want to suck in a new daemon, it's as simple as apt-get install, it installs all necessary dependencies (so though it might pick up KDE libs, it's unlikely to pick up X itself or anything else at all) and it all just works in a secure default config. And updates can happen automatically.

On desktops, where I need to choose what happens to each pixel of my desktop in detail, I tend to run Slackware. It leaves me in control, lets me have any desktop I like and doesn't pretend to know better than I about how I should click things.

The Linux world has been upturned for me over the last ten years. And with things like systemd dominance on the horizon, I can only see myself sticking with this setup. I don't particularly care how one of the remote headless servers I operate wants to show things, so long as it boots and I don't have to faff about worrying about the hardware. All I want is an initial SSH and be able to apt-get stuff and be up and running in minutes so I can put the rest of my config back on.

And my desktop still needs to be like, well, my desktop. You don't get to play with it. And doing so is as rude as throwing all my stuff of my desk and putting your own on there.

Strange, because I've used a number of Android devices that don't even have Google search on at all but some proprietary junk instead.

Not saying Google Search wasn't on there, but it wasn't shipped as the default.

Actually, MS claimed that even they COULDN'T unbundle IE from Windows for many years. Only when it was demonstrated in court that it was possible did they backtrack.

The fact is that MS didn't give you a choice. The only choice was to suffer the install of IE, ignore it repeated attempts to be the default, and have to leave it installed forever handling some things that it never needed to be handling.

And then the EU quashed all that crap and made them put a browser choice screen on every PC in the EU for several years to counteract it.

Yeah, sorry, even with crap translation, it doesn't read like that to me.

What they want is to be bundled as the default for everything by default. It doesn't really say that Google are strong-arming them into only ever providing Google and nothing else. There's nothing stopping Yandex putting out Yandex Android with all the defaults changed, but they'd have to convince phone manufacturers to use it, and then access to Google Play Store isn't guaranteed (but if it uses Android, you have a legal right to use the store as it says so in the Play EULA... like cheap tablets that don't get the official Google Play go-ahead and don't bundle it, Google aren't stopping you installing it yourself if that's what you want to do - and they don't even need to go that far... how many other types of machines are you allowed to connect to the iTunes app store and download your stuff with?).

Sorry, but it sounds like sour grapes to me. And it's a lot of waffle surrounding that the fact the PEOPLE don't change the defaults, not that the defaults aren't changeable with a 5-second search of how to do so.

Comparing it to the monopoly market position of bundling IE on Windows in a captive market is just hyperbole. If Google said to manufacturers you can only ever sell phones with Android, if you sell a phone with anything else we'll stop giving you any of our Android products and you won't be able to sell them, the default has to be left at Chrome when you sell, we'll never remove Chrome from the Android system because it's "all one thing", and they owned more than 90% of the market, and Chrome had almost zero market usage outside of such monopolistic actions, then it would be comparable. They aren't. By a long-shot.

Nothing is stopping them selling a Yandex Android phone with Yandex as the default and Yandex app store. In the same way that many of the cheap Android devices worldwide do just that. The fact is, though, that they want the Google name for the App Store so they don't have to pay a penny for running that, and run stock Android, but still have their search engine be the default, and expect Google to jump in and help them when the system is all open anyway.