From the OED. The original sense, in English, refers to sex. The Americans later came up with a different meaning, which is under 3b.

3a. gen. Males or females viewed as a group; = sex n.1 1. Also: the property or fact of belonging to one of these groups.Originally extended from the grammatical use at sense 1 (sometimes humorously), as also in Anglo-Norman and Old French. In the 20th cent., as sex came increasingly to mean sexual intercourse (see sex n.1 4b), gender began to replace it (in early use euphemistically) as the usual word for the biological grouping of males and females. It is now often merged with or coloured by sense 3b.
1474 in C. L. Kingsford Stonor Lett. & Papers (1919) I. 142 (MED) His heyres of the masculine gender of his body lawfully begoten.

3b b. Psychology and Sociology (originally U.S.). The state of being male or female as expressed by social or cultural distinctions and differences, rather than biological ones; the collective attributes or traits associated with a particular sex, or determined as a result of one's sex. Also: a (male or female) group characterized in this way.
1945 Amer. Jrnl. Psychol. 58 228 In the grade-school years, too, gender (which is the socialized obverse of sex) is a fixed line of demarkation, the qualifying terms being ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’.

I'm guessing you're not in the UK. Over here, the IT curriculum in secondary (high) school mandates learning about databases... and the way that's been done for the last 20+ years is via Access. The absence of an equivalent in GSuite stands out like a sore thumb and until that gap gets filled Office will still be widespread.

" It's probably a killer feature of the Google suite."

Working in a school, the "killer feature" (using the term differently) is that Google Docs uses so many resources on our older PCs it makes it almost unusable - whereas regular old Office works just fine on our 10-year-old Core2 Duos with 2 to 4GB of RAM.

(The reason is that emulating a word processor in a Web browser like Chrome takes an order of magnitude more resources than just running a native EXE. It kind of makes me wonder how Chromebooks do it, considering the ones aimed at schools have crummy Atoms in them!

The school has done remakably well out of Intel's stagnation over the past decade. The way things are going we'll not have 10-year-old computers ever again!)

Um, you know that the chips in all the phones and gadgets that everyone has are RISC, right?

As per the BBC, the "backdoor" was actually just Telnet.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/liv...

"Vodafone said: "The issues in Italy identified in the Bloomberg story were all resolved and date back to 2011 and 2012.

"The 'backdoor' that Bloomberg refers to is Telnet, which is a protocol that is commonly used by many vendors in the industry for performing diagnostic functions. It would not have been accessible from the internet."

Your timeline is a bit out.

The DOS-based line included everything up to WfW 3.11 (or 3.2 in China), 95, 98 and ME, albeit MS went to some lengths to stop you booting into real mode with ME.

The NT line started in 1992 with NT 3.1, then went through 4, 2000 (Workstation was renamed to Pro), XP, Vista and so on.

Even though I have a connection more than capable of handling the streaming there's no way I'd ever want to stream my games.

Lag aside (and it's inevitable there will be some, simply due to the physics), the lacklustre hardware they're using to render hardly fills me with excitement - heck, even my laptop is faster than their hardware (I use a Clevo desktop replacement, on the basis that if I'm going to be gaming outside of home, it'll be at a friend's place or a hotel, so will have a desk and power).

Still, for those who don't mind lag, don't mind compression artifacts and who have the bandwidth it'll be fine. The rise of streaming audio and video shows that up well enough - I'd rather have a blu-ray with high bitrate and minimal artifacts, but most people would disagree.

If you dig deeper into the UK, at least, we have some ageing nuclear reactors and a real reluctance to build new ones (it seems we have to import the know-how and nukes have a real image problem).

It's a pity: one of the fads we have now is importing "biomass" (i.e. bits of chopped-down Canadian trees) by boat, then burning it. That counts as "renewable", but it's clearly not in the same league as wind, solar and hydro. I'd far rather see another nuclear plant or two built and leave the trees for the Canadians, it seems most wasteful shipping them a third of the way around the world to be burnt.

Gas isn't too good either, but it at least beats coal... that has been very much in the minority now.

I'm assuming the USA doesn't have to go to France (or China!) to get their nuclear reactors as we do.

I find it interesting seeing the mix used in power generation over in the States - I'd always assumed nuclear would have played a much bigger role. I'm also surprised at just how much energy is put out by hydro power, albeit that site only refers to a chunk of the USA rather than the entirety.

As I write this, the majority of the power in the National Grid in the UK is being supplied by wind - but that's not surprising as it's presently windy across much of the country. That's one of the perks of being a small island nation, there's plenty of wind around!

http://gridwatch.co.uk/ shows the stats.

This just seems like an advert.

Maybe it's different over there in the States, but here in Europe there are plenty of companies selling bare-bones laptops (by the likes of MSI and Clevo) without an OS installed. As components these days are largely standard (same chipsets, same CPUs, same GPUs), Linux runs just as well on them as it does on companies who make a point of mentioning Linux.

Buy one of those, boot up Ubuntu from a memory stick and bam, all done.

(I guess if you want someone to install Linux for you at the factory your options are more limited, but if you're thinking of Linux rather than Windows I'm sure you're more than capable of booting from USB and installing it yourself!)

...and the same stuff will be available in a Clevo chassis for much less than Dell are charging.

I use one of Clevo's previous generation machines with an i7-6700K and a GTX 1080, with a 17" 4K screen. It's absolutely gorgeous, even if it does weigh half a ton!

The price of that was something like £1000 (~$1270) less than the big-brands were charging.

(And yes, you're lucky to get an hour out of it on battery, even just surfing the Web. It's designed to be plugged in, perhaps in an airport lounge or a hotel rather than used on the bus!)

My next laptop will be another desktop-replacement from Clevo. Once you've experienced the power of a desktop CPU in a laptop, as opposed to the constantly-throttling, castrasted "H" series chips, you won't want to go back

The ironic thing with this story is that 13 years ago, before Spotify and the like, HMV offered digital downloads (as did many other shops, like Tesco and Virgin Records). The downloads were clunky, required Windows Media Player and if you stopped paying the monthly subscription you lost access to the downloads entirely - they'd just redirect you to a login screen if you tried playing them. I only lasted two months as a subscriber back in the day as I realised I'd be stuck paying £10/month forever just to keep access to the tracks I'd downloaded. I still have the (now useless) WMA files as a souvenir!

The modern way of downloading music to keep (MP3s via Amazon, for example), is much better, as the music doesn't expire.

It doesn't make any sense whatsoever, especially as we don't even get a day off work out of it as they do in the States! It seems to have taken over from the traditional Boxing Day/January sales here in the UK, even though those sales were a place to pick up a bargain (in terms of unsold stock brought in for the Christmas rush).

If anything, it seems to have hastened the demise of our High Streets, as people now expect discounts (whether real or imagined) before Christmas rather than afterwards... right during what used to be peak profit-making season.

I work in a school in the UK. I'm currently having arguments over exactly this subject: the powers that be want to roll out Google quickly (having already wasted *lots* of money on some iPads a few years ago, and Asus eeePCs before that). Apparently I'm the only IT guy across the multi-academy Trust who's been kicking up a stink, the rest have just rolled over and moved to Google, Chromebooks and all.

We presently have just under 1000 PCs and laptops running Windows 10 and Office 2016 / Office 365 (the latter for its easier integration with Gmail - feedback is people hate the Gmail website but get on well with Outlook). I'm doing my damndest to make sure that any new devices also run Windows and Office, so as to hook into our existing network. Pointing out that cheap laptops can do everything a Chromebook can, plus hook into our existing infrastructure has delayed the Chromebook push for now (they've already had experience with how awkward printing / file access was with the iPads). I still strongly feel that this whole one-device-per-child thing is a colosal waste of time and taxpayer money, but the sellers in education do a really good job of painting a Utopian picture of classrooms full of kids all eagerly collaborating with teacher. (What actually happens, of course, is a good chunk off them instead browse photos / websites / play games etc).

It doesn't help that there are political moves afoot to force a move to Google, such as banning removable drives (which I'm resisting, currently enforcing Bitlocker for write access). Banning removable drives would, of course, stop our SLR cameras in Photography from working, stop teachers recording the children using our video cameras on the school farm (for Animal Care), stop audio CDs being burnt for speaking and listening exams in French, stop them recording performances in Drama (again, on nice video cameras), stop potential teachers and people coming in from outside using memory sticks for their lessons / presentations and much more besides.

Google Apps isn't perfect either - as well as having less-than-great viewers for Office formats, it has no answer for Access, something which is deeply embedded in the curriculum. That means we need Office and proper PCs in our IT suites... and as such we may as well keep it elsewhere too.

I suspect, though, that eventually moves will be made to move our network storage to Google Drive, despite the lack of being able, for example, to get an Access database back from last Tuesday, as it's been overwritten by mistake. They're already planning to migrate email away from Exchange to Gmail by next summer.

Mind you, there is one thing from all this. I was brought up with Windows (2) and Office (Word 1, Excel 2) at school back in the 90s. It's quite true that if you get them at school, they'll carry it over into their adult lives...