The requirements of the kernel and scheduler are largely different than the requirements of the main processing cores/threads of a CPU.

Giving the scheduler its own die/core/silicon would allow it to have cpu-reflection primitives so it can make more informed decisions, and the benefits of not having an interrupt come along and stomp your cache/bus states would help high-perf apps a lot.

Think about a big-data or finance linux server architecture for a moment. You have these finely-crafted, high-perf processes burning cpu threads to try and process expensive data loads and, when you paw thru the code, you find lots of repetition of scheduling and system reflection for self tuning, because the operating system does such a terrible job of scheduling once you stop pretending it's a 386 system.

You need a lot more insight into CPU state to be able to determine whether super-massively tuned, false-cache-avoiding, cache-warming super-app or "tail -f" would be worst affected by swapping it with a bash process or syslogd or ...

Providing some dedicated kernel silicon would (eventually) be massively advantageous. Initially for virtualization and containerization, but ultimately (if you think it through) having the bulk of the kernel or it's facilities on separate silicon would have huge benefits.

web.archive.org/web/20171220115909/https://www.gop.com/

Maybe they shouldn't have skipped that lecture.

Remember the term "surfing"? That's not what you're trying to do when you use a web-browser on your TV. This is for things like connecting your plex account to the plex app you just installed, or being able to hand off sites from your kindle to the big screen to show the family without a lot of fussing about and transferring stuff.

This isn't a new browser, it's the kindle/alexa ecosystem browser becoming available on a kindle/alexa ecosystem device, so the "PRAAHVAHCY!" response to this smacks of knee-to-the-nuts-in-the-mirror-jerk reaction.

For those of us who live the Kindle/Alexa lifestyle, this means Alexa being able to bring up pages on my TV instead of having to go fetch my kindle; it means that when I get pissed off trying to navigate thru Domino's pizza-ordering voice-state-machine farce, I have it bring up the web interface.

If this is "one more reason" you won't be buying a Kindle or Alexa, tell me about those aliens...

After the clusterfucks of Vista and 8, I had no hopes for 10. But then I have *switched* to using the full-screen start menu. It's my context-switch page. And yes, I do actually draw immense benefit from the live tiles because I've chosen apps with live tiles that actually suit me and help me keep my phone out of mind.

In a nutshell: A few seconds looking at my start screen replaces all kinds of other activities.

There are opportunities missed - like the ability to pin live tiles to the desktop, or the ability to pin a preview of an app as a live tile to the desktop or start screen/menu.

In particular, it's the long-running processes that would benefit here. Whether its a developer compiling a large project, someone converting a video or waiting on an upload. Progress dialogs would be a fantastic thing to be able to minimize an app to, especially when they are modal, and why not make that a tile?

But we're in agreement on the store. There's useful stuff in there, and as someone who trial-ran the Windows 7 Phone and watched it die because of the Windows 8 announcement and the immediate death of W7P app development, it's been forever clear that the Windows Store would never achieve the levels of usefulness of even PIP let alone something like the debian repos or brew.

San Fran isn't the most expensive part of the bay area, and $3000 rent is a pretty good deal. We pay $4k for a 3 bed in an Irvine Company complex at the San Jose end of the bay, 1600sqft: we're living comfortably. San Mateo, 30 minutes south of San Fran, you'd be looking at $3k for low quality. Redwood City, expect $3.6k+ for an apartment complex where the 2year old kid *walking* across the floor in the apartment above you will make the glasses in your kitchen shake...

Menlo Park, Mountain View, Sunnyvale - homes to Facebook and Google? Forget it.

People who can afford to live there are either earning ridiculous 6-7 figure salaries or they are grandfathered. Guy cut my hair in San Carlos bought his house for $75k and sold it last year for $1.5mil...

The rest of them have to commute. At Facebook, there was a group of ladies who carpooled in from near Gilroy, up to 2 hours each way.

They commute insane distances.

I'm missing that because its your imagination. And regardless of rank of the people who felt this strongly about the material, the simple facts remain: no stories were suppressed, whomever leaked this would have been all over that, there was just a discussion. "Facebook" didn't try anything, contrary to, what the article implies. Facebook asked itself whether it should act based on how some of what Trump says measures up to what non-followers gauge as hate speak. And they recognized they shouldn't.

"Employees" and "pushed for". According to Google, Facebook had over 12,500 employees in 2015. So some employees felt strongly enough about Trump's posts to raise a discussion, and the company said "No". Zero conspiracy. Nobody stole the secret codes to the hidden filter chamber.

Basically, this articles takes Facebook taking things seriously, doing what I think most of us would hope it would do, and tries to paint it as beastial. I would *hope* that Facebook /doesn't/ hire based on political perspective, so I would hope it has employees of all ends of the political perspective and seeks to maintain a neutral stance. That doesn't mean that it's employees shouldn't be able to raise their concerns internally either way.

The article misses a key word for both takedowns: briefly. It portrays Facebook as being unreachable by the posters, and yet tucked away at the end of the article, Facebook has reversed the decision and apologised *before* the takedown made press.

In that light, the article and your presumption of intent really don't hold up to scrutiny.

I mentioned that it does "feel" heavy, but I have no discomfort using it where I used my kindle before or for as long as I did. But I also find that in situations where the form factor is inconvenient, it's so easy to set down. Everything from using it to read sheet music, plonking it on the rumpled sheets of the unmade bed - I was *convinced* it would fall over but it's actually at that intersection between lightness and heft that even with me banging on the osk it stayed stable, damn it.

What you're saying will likely be true for many users, but I think it's also the same argument that us old farts were making about phones and then tablets in the first place. It's a different form factor and you adapt to it. If I were looking for a device to put in the hands of the forklift operators in a factory? A 6-8in tablet; maybe even a 4-5in phone or pad with a REALLY simple UI.

The surface, to me, feels like a revival of the sub-notebook form factor. I was never comfortable with that because the keyboard got in the way, the surface solves that.

Umm. So, I'm writing this at my desktop, but I'm using my surface, which I'd dropped on the most convenient thing on my desk - my keyboard (pic)

- Oliver

Stay your pitchforks a moment: My desktop is a Lin/Win box, my laptop is a MacBook Pro that dual boots Mac/Lin, my phones are a Galaxy S5 and a iPhone 5c, I have a kindle, a verizon droid tablet (which I forgot I had), an ipad, heck my TV is a Samsung smart with a hacked evolve that can boot mint (because, seriously, if you're going to use cssh you really need to do it on a 4K UHD display ;)

I picked up the surface because - well, because of a 30 day return option. I wanted to rip the heck out of it. So I upgraded it straight to 10 (10 wasn't officially supported on it when I did, I wasn't about to give the thing a chance at success)

About 20 days in I realized I had pretty much migrated everything off of drop box onto One/Sky drive, and my Drive usage had become more organized and well deliniated against that usage.

A little later on I realized that I haven't had a single one of my esoteric usb/bluetooth devices /not/ work with the Surface. Somewhere about 10-14 days in, I stopped even trying to use them on my/my wifes other devices, I'd just automatically reach for the surface.

Truth be told, it was "Fresh Paint" that distracted me enough to get suckered in. It helped me discover the remarkable versatility of the devices form factor and the combination of the kick stand and the foldable keyboard and the magnetic attachment points for the power/keyboard.

I've used the surface now everywhere that any of my other devices used to go and places none of them would: Balanced on the dash of the car, on the tiny ledge by my shower.

I can't begin to do it justice trying to describe the versatility, I will just say that it was a huge part of enamoring me to the device.

It has the best wifi/bluetooth of any of my devices and it is fast at connecting; it talks to all of my devices, and windows 10 comes with an app for setting up a small handful of windows features against iphone/ipad/droid phones.

Battery life is pretty good, and unless you're trying to play an mmo at ultra-high-graphics it's very easy to switch to a battery saving mode to squeeze a few more hours of facebooking/solitaire out of it. The only problem is it's so good that when the battery does get low, you get a bit 10ish ("I don't want to go") #1stworldproblems.

Time for the cons:

The weight is just a few grams heavy, and although it's not, with the keyboard attached it feels heavier than the (17in) MacBook Pro. It does sometimes feel a little large and unwieldy, but yesterday I realized that's because I'm using it now where I would previously have used my phone. I wouldn't give up an inch of the form factor, tbh.

It has it's own, unique, special power connector, and doesn't seem to be capable of USB charging.

The little Windows insignia/button on the device is poorly placed. Instead of putting it near the camera, for example, it's on the right hand side roughly exactly where you would put your hand to hold the device a large part of the time. Good news: you can disable it.

Start-up time from off and sleep feel a little sluggish. They didn't at first, and I don't think they've gotten slower, I think I am just really eager to interact with the device now when I am turning it on.

If anything, the biggest drawback is the storage capacity. I have the Pro i5/256 and I have 167Gb left, mostly because I'm being very selective about what I install.

Some of the default Windows 10 apps for things I'm not very keen on. But hey, if you want default apps, go get an apple. Specifically, Groove Music. W.T.L.F, and I'm still very undecided on the photos app. I must confess that I had a Windows 7 Phone phone for a while, so I've experienced the original, pure, "Metro" experience, and I can imagine how the photos app would have been as a pure metro app and I like that idea - but using the photos app you can almost smell the blood that must have been spilled in the clashes between the mobile and desktop teams...

Lastly - and this is really Windows 10 rather than surface specific - the availability of the on-screen keyboard. The OSKs themselves (there are four modes, a phone-style keyboard, an split-ergo-style layout and a regular notebook style - plus there's a handwriting keyboard for the pen) I am actually very pleased with.

The problem is that there are too many places where they don't auto-pop up (I've given up hoping that tapping on an input box in Chrome or Edge will open an osk for me) and then they don't auto-hide when you're done with them. And it seems like closing the OSK trains it not to come back automatically for that input field.

Also, Chrome has this annoying behavior that when you try to type in the search box on the google home page, it switches you to the address bar which causes the OSK to go away.

The second half of this problem is that in order to manually invoke an OSK you have to use the taskbar rather than the "Action Center" (which you swipe in from the right). This is a dissapointing oversight I am hoping they'll fix soon (feedback submitted), because otherwise if you have the task-bar on auto-hide the flow is like this:

Tap input box. Sigh that you didn't get an OSK. Swipe the bottom right of the screen, causing the app/input box to lose focus. Focus change event causes the taskbar to auto-hide again unless you were really fast. Now you have to wait a few seconds for the task bar to be swipeable again. Repeat until you get an osk to appear. Except now, you probably have to tap on the app/input box again which causes the OSK to dissapear. Repeat entire process until you manage it fast enough that the focus change doesn't happen.

That said, point of kudos: Using the pen to summon the OSK is consistently reliable and the tablet notices you used the pen and will select the handwriting keyboard; if that's not what you want, it does appear to learn this on an app-by-app basis which also seems to feed more gradually into a global selection. The upshot is that in Chrome I get the keyboard, as I want, but in sublime/one note/etc I get the handwriting keyboard this way, as I want.

The only thing that beats the display is a retina display, but it's close enough for me and I'll gladly sacrifice that little for the extra battery life :)

I'll go say five Hail Linuses now, ok?

Yes. ho-use. I give up trying to edit today :)

GAH! That first paragraph should say "first ho-use dialup in the UK".

The first home-use dialup was Demon Internet in '92, by '94 there were numerous, small, local ISPs and several national to choose from. For all EU ISPs up to the mid 90s the big problem was connectivity to the US, but by '97 there was enough non-US content that being a non-US Internet user didn't mean your experience was gauged solely on the fatness of your US pipe.

Up until that point, the major portion of cost handed on by EU ISPs was their individual pipes to the US. Because of this, EU ISPs generally provided excellent national and European peering, their networks were robust and their speeds were great.

Transit ISPs emerged and big cables laid across the pond. All that competitive energy got redirected into building local/regional/national infrastructure and leveraging it right as the transition to broadband etc happened.

In the US, ISPs basically fell into the hands of the cable and phone companies, companies who have vested interested in non ISP related business models that are often actually threatened by the internet service they happen to provide.

My personal take - as a Brit-expat who worked in the UK ISP industry through 2002 - is that somehow Europe ended up with a very democratic and capitalistic internet industry, while in the US some very deep pockets essentially knitted it up into an entirely feudal system.