Windows 10 IS Windows 9. Microsoft engineers are even still calling it Windows 9. The source tree is the same, there have been no major changes.

What has happened is that Windows 9 has been getting very bad press and is still riddled with bugs. Instead of releasing a version number nobody will buy and would only have to patch almost immediately anyway, OR getting slagged off for Yet Another Delayed Release, Microsoft is renaming it version 10 and delaying the release until the bugs are sorted.

You will observe Microsoft has been talking up Windows 9 for some time, but now all talk (and apparently all memory) of it has ceased. Newspapers suffering amnesia is amost acceptable. Slashdotters??? WTF??? I'm sorry, but there is no-one in or around IT that has a single, solitary excuse.

There have been cases of Boeing 777s and modernized 737s developing unexplained system faults. Do not be so sure that RFI was not to blame. These have had much worse reliability than other Boeing models in recent years and as no other faults have been offered by Boeing as explanation, it is illogical to simply dismiss the one fault we know about as unrelated to the unusual number of abnormalities and crashes specific to these two models.

Obviously, Boeing has no interest in being honest about the problems they know about, be they software or hardware. Nor are they likely to Open Source anything, so there is no possibility of scrutiny by an independent party.

Simple logic (and self-preservation) says they have an unattributed defect capable of causing catastrophic failure, and a defect that can potentially cause catastrophic failure, therefore fixing the defect is essential.

The cost? The cost is insignificant. Boeing is hardly poor and is quite capable of covering the airlines' cost as this is a manufacturing defect. The airlines? They're making enough money that they can afford riots on board when seats are tilted. Besides, this is the cost of doing business. There's a price for bad decisions, all other sectors (except, apparently, banks) are expected to take the rough with the smooth. If several go bust because they chose unwisely, that's how life in business goes. You pay your money, you take your choice. Besides, they'd still be doing better than the German in Last Crusade.

If I went into business and made bad choices, would you be telling people to ignore my expenses? No? Good. If I'm not fit for purpose as a businessman, I've no business expecting support. So why should Ryanair, a notoriously incompetent company, deserve better? Because they're too big to fail? Not a good reason.

All you need are some windows that open in flight. Problem solved.

I used to have to do a clean install of Windows every few years to keep things performing well, but I don't recall doing that since the switch to NT-based systems (starting with 2000 for me personally). For users that keep installing malware/adware/spyware on their systems, it seems entirely likely that they'd have to do a clean re-install to get rid of all the cruft every once in a while. Some of that stuff is pretty hard to remove, and can really cause issues with system stability and performance.

When people talk about "OS decay", they're probably dealing with systems that have either a huge amount of software churn, a lot of crapware, or very often both. It's not so much about "learning how to use Windows 7" so much as not installing free, sketchy utilities that contain system-hogging spyware. Or perhaps it's better termed "learning not to abuse your operating system". People do the same sort of nonsense with their phones - install dozens of apps that all want do stay resident for whatever reason, and then they wonder where the battery life went. Same deal - if you give people the freedom to customize their device, some people will inevitably make bad choices.

I don't know if this applies to you parents or not, but I've certainly seen plenty of cringe-inducing systems for people to know just enough to be dangerous. My parent don't know enough to really do anything of consequence on their computer other than check e-mail, surf the net, and play solitaire, so their system (Windows XP) has stayed nice and tidy for the last seven or eight years (I think) they've had that machine.

No but the Dumb-ass developers and Distro makers throw config files all over hell in random places.

If your config files are not in /etc or ~/.appname then the developer is a complete moron. /opt/dev/random/stinky/appname/config.cfg is NOT acceptable.

XP was fast as hell until you patched it up to SP3. Microsoft borked the hell out of that OS. Windows 7 I have not had the gradual slowdown problem at all.

My family owns a business in light manufacturing. When one of the workers gets a new tool set, they literally throw away the metric tools, because they're completely worthless in typical industrial use. Multiply that imperial-unit inertia by about a million small hardware-related businesses and manufacturers across the country, and you can see why no one has been eager to swallow the cost of that conversion.

I agree with you about the tooling and infrastructure issue. Go to a local home depot and check out the selection of nuts, bolts, washers, screws, pins, connectors, etc. Most of those are still in imperial units. Some people "pooh, pooh" the actual cost of a real, complete conversion from one unit system to another. Most of those people tend to neglect the actual hardware in use today, and how pervasive those units are throughout the entire US manufacturing base. It would literally cost billions of dollars in conversion costs, and in the end, all we'll end up with is a more "mathematically pure" measurement system - zero functional difference. To local businesses and firms, there is literally no benefit to the conversion in the short term - only cost. The government would literally have to mandate a change by law to kickstart this, and it would be a short-term but real hit on the US economy.

It would be great if the US could switch to metrics. Most people - educated ones at least - understand it's a saner system and is better both for internal consumption and for international interoperability. But it's not what we have, and no one currently believes the conversion is actually worth the price we'd pay. It's one of the prices the US pays for having such a large, isolated infrastructure. It's harder for us to adapt to changes in some ways because of our sheer size, and there's much less pressure externally than with smaller, individual markets. The cultural resistance is not insignificant either, but that could be overcome with time.

Probably the best way to make it happen is for the government to provide some tax benefits to companies willing to do the conversion, and allow the transition to occur a bit more naturally over time. That would help to disguise the cost (there's no free lunch there, though), and eliminate some of the grumbling, and as such, some of the political opposition. It's not enough to just label things in different but equivalent units. Until you make the internal conversions in the low-level infrastructure, all you're doing is creating more work by superficially labeling things less efficiently.

Degrees is also a generic term used for incremental measurement, as in "degrees of freedom". Just because something is measured in degrees doesn't mean it should be related to circular measurements of any sort. At least, I can't see the point in it.

Why are you blaming the doctors, lawyers, and bureaucrats? There's no way to universally extract data from these proprietary systems and transmit it via e-mail to someone else, and certainly not securely. It's obviously a kludge, and everyone is starting to recognize this, which is why it's generating headlines - that's a start. Fax machines will die as soon as there's no actual use for them. We're obviously not at that point yet, so it's a good thing we have these older systems in place. The current headlines are far preferable to "Doctors are unable to exchange medical records with colleagues".

Scanning and e-mailing a document is semantically *exactly the same* as faxing it, only it's likely harder for the average office worker to do. What's the point of that? The solution is to create actual digital interoperability, not simply to arbitrarily remove the *one* solution that is actually solving the current problem, however clumsily.

You say "we've never managed more than season colonies" on Antarctica, which is a little unfair, since we've never *tried* to do anything other than that. There's no good reason to build a large colony in Antarctica, and as such, it's neither been proposed nor attempted.

If you're suggesting this as an alternative solution, you forget that the entire point is to create an "offsite backup" for humanity. If it's for a technological litmus test of some sort, I don't see the point, because as you point out, there are huge differences between the two environments.

Honestly, just focus on the goal of making it self-sustaining from an industrial and technological standpoint - that's the hard part. Humanity will expand by itself and naturally create plenty of genetic backup genes. Expanding our population has never been one of our problem areas.

Whiny law enforcement being forced to actually do their job.... News at a11....

No surprise the broke out the "think of the children" straw man right away though....

The shiny side of the foil needs to be on the outside of the hat. The problem here isn't government intervention, rather a lack of same. The problem is corporate sociopathy and lack of standards. The standards should have been set up before anybody started building equipment. Where government fell down was not mandating that. Not a surfeit of regulations but a lack of them.

And had there been a monopoly there would have been no compatibility problems, but would have caused worse problems.

I was kind of hoping for some sort of creature deciding to try to crawl out onto dry land, finding no actual land, saying "screw it", and crawling back under the ice.