For me this news is about as interesting as if Tim Cook made a statement about being proud to be gray. As a fellow gray haired person, I wish someone would stand up publicly for the gray - we are just like everyone else, but too many people feel they have to hide their true colors from the public.

Being gay ought to be about as controversial as being gray.

It seems when it comes to mobile data, "unlimited" always means unlimited up to a point, when the service gets throttled unless you pay more. So "unlimited within the envelope of activity that we decide to allow". Even having no information about this particular offer, I would guess there is either a "reasonable use" clause hidden somewhere in terms of service, or somehow being able to throttle the service, e.g. by limiting upload bandwidth.

"Unlimited" seems to be one of those words that are used mainly for marketing, leading consumers to think it actually means there is no limit - but then redefining the meaning of unlimited in terms of service to something else. Just as misleading as e.g. offering "transfer speeds _up to_ 20 Mbps", "reliability _up to_ 100%", or being "guaranteed to be _possibly_ the best service available". At some point we should have laws against language which is intentionally misleading to consumers.

Congratulations to Adobe, as I would congratulate a fellow human being (since the supreme court ruling that corporations are people), for truly living the hardcore capitalist version of the American Dream. Doing whatever you can legally or illegally get away with to make more money, and not giving a [your favourite naughty word for excrement goes here] about anyone you walk over in the process.

It is the spyware part which bothers me the most. It is like having a plummer come to fix your toilet, you step out of the house for a few minutes, only to find when you come back that he is going through all your stuff - in order perhaps to understand you better as a person so that he can service you better in the future - or figure out if you are rich so he can charge you more. Or perhaps sell a list of your inventory to someone, for whatever purpose which is no longer the plummer's concern once he gets payment.

I should probably be upset about this whole Adobe thing, but after watching John Oliver's Last Week Tonight show from yesterday about how the police in the US can cease assets and bring cases against physical objects such as money or houses on a guilty until proven innocent basis, and proudly spend the money on whatever they want including machines for making frozen margueritas in the office - I just give up. How can you expect companies to do the right thing when the whole system is rotten to the core.

Compared to osx and linux distro updates, Windows (at least Win 7) is a true dinosaur. Imagine how many man-hours are wasted worldwide while waiting for Windows to update, with a reboot required pretty much every single time. Even if you don't consider the time spent applying a patch during shutdown, there is often the additional waiting during boot, and more often than not it seems Windows want an additional reboot during startup. Which sucks hard if you have default dual-boot into Linux, because you fire up the PC, choose Windows, go grab a coffee, and when you come back ... behold, there is the Linux login. Because Windows of course decided to do some additional rebooting.

Yes, osx some times goes offline for a while when applying a large system patch, but this happens only every few moons, whereas with Windows you know you are in for a system update ride if you haven't touched that particular install in a couple weeks.

If it's not part of the Win 10 sales pitch, then my 99% confidence answer is no. They are not going to invest in some feature that no customers will know about (because noone is talking about it).

Plus, as someone else pointed out, it may very well be part of the master plan, that system rot leads to users wanting to upgrade. And there definitely is some system rot going on - someone wrote in another post that this is no longer a problem since Win 7, but I have experienced this countless times with Win 7 over the years, with just standard installs without any fancy tinkering on my part.

It makes sense embedding into the identity itself the means to prove that identity. Linking a public key identity to an email address would be simple; you just put a self-signed certificate somewhere which claims "this email address belongs to me". There could be public, distributed lookup services for this.

To make things simpler, instead of using complex schemes for carrying private keys around, better just to use a deterministic key generation scheme which builds the identity from a passphrase. It is easy to use slight variations of this data to create alternate identities for different services and "ID spaces". There exist implementations of this concept, e.g. search Google for "decentral identities". There would be no need for password based login to services, because you would log in with the public key of your identity, and you would use the private key to prove your identity. Server side password theft is no longer possible. With such a scheme, you could possibly maintain only one single very complex password, and all identities are generated from that password, by adding e.g. service name. No need for any password manager or such.

If the key is compromised, then the identity is effectively lost. The identity would have to be revoked by distributing a self-signed revocation certificate, and the user would have to register a new identity to associate with service accounts and for contacts.

Or perhaps, an alternative ... Simplification (Software): the act of modifying software so that it offers an efficient, intuitive and "good enough" user experience for a broad range (and possibly various groups of) users, with minimum complexity in UI and design.

Simplification is not so much about removing features, as it is about transforming user experience into something leaner. Simplification does not have to be a bad thing, it is all about how you do it. Simplification is really hard; it has to do with how a piece of software is structured, from the ground up. E.g. stuff that is not encoded into the data model, you will never be able to do in the UI. If you have a data model that does not fit the problem, the UI will never be a good one. You cannot simplify an UI just by rearranging icons. Well, you can rearrange, but it does not necessarily get any simpler - you are only giving it a minimalistic appearance, which "fakes" simplicity.

I organize my kitchen on a Huffman-style principle. The stuff which needs to get accessed more often, is more accessible. Why should a UI be any different. You want the stuff you need more often to be readily available, thus minimizing the total number of user actions. That does not mean you cannot have layers of functionality, or possibly alternative UIs (click to enable/disable wizard menu mode).

"Power tech users" are doing themselves and communities a disservice by inisisting on cumbersome, archaic, complex UIs in order to be able to fully wield their power in the UI they know already. Why? Because it hurts general adoption, which hurts software usage, which makes it less attractive as a software ecosystem, which gives it a competitive disadvantage vis a vis other platforms. You want lots of users, so the platform can live on for years and years.

Don't misunderstand me here; I hate ribbons as much as the next guy, and after I recently had to try out Office365, that interface had me going absolutely bonkers, having to send off an angry user feedback in order to vent.

I consider myself a power user, but tech is not my day job, and I am getting old enough that I no longer wish to spend evenings sitting in a basement learning the ins and outs of every piece of program I come across. I spent years creating complex high tech infrastructure setups at home, only to change it all into something simpler because I cannot be bothered to maintain it anymore when it breaks. Life is too short, and even as a "power user", you may not want to have to be an expert on everything. These days, I will choose the program which just works without having to spend too much time figuring it out.

Good point, they are not as widespread as I projected they would be at this point (I've left business to do other things the last 4-5 years). Though in a business, it could actually be useful. Not so much for interactive apps, but for interactive presentations, and for note keeping. I've had countless meetings using whiteboards, and at some point "invented" (locally in my company) the technique of using the cell phone camera for taking pictures of the whiteboard. It was quite frustrating having to work with regular whiteboards, because in a previous job they had these fancy boards which you could just push a button and the board content would be printed to a sheet of paper. Which was absolutely brilliant.

Smart boards can be useful for businesses. The people who manage schools want the schools to have the same stuff as the businesses, so they end up investing in smart boards. Unfortunately, they are not all that useful in school.

Students quickly get tired of powerpoint slide shows (which is how smart boards would normally be used, run some type of slide show and draw circles and stuff as you go), and most presenters tend to overload slides with information - because they can, and because they are bad at organizing and prioritizing information. School is not about putting content before students, it is about students actually learning. Using a regular board is a great learning tool, because it forces the presenter to pace himself to a speed which students can follow. Plus you actually have to prioritize a bit.

Smart boards are usually a bad replacement for regular boards. Why? Because they add little value. I have not heard about any great smart board apps that are actually being used in class, it is all about the "possibilities" which never quite seem to actually happen in real life. But are there any disadvantages to smartboards? Yes, instead of a nice and big board which you can structure into segments and organize lots of content, you are now limited to this tiny little smart board. Plus you have to fire up the computer, and there are all sort of technological pitfalls.

The best type of board; an old style board for using with chalk. Extremely low tech, and as long as there is any tiny piece of chalk around, you have a functional setup. No PC to boot, no spending time getting the smart board set up - you just grab the chalk and start the lesson.

I can highly recommend Logitech for home infrastructure. I decide to invest in the Logitech Squeezebox line with two SB Touch, four SB Radios, and even a Boom sitting around somewhere. Rather than going with something with short shelf life, it is good to be on a platform from a known long-term player, with a long-term commitment for maintaining and further developing that platform. Their server software is rather well hidden on the internet, but hey ... if something is not worth spending lots of time chasing, then it is probably not of much value - I understand, you are just playing hard to get Logitech. I know that deep down you actually want my business.

I also own a Harmony remote. It works great, except the one annoyance that it cannot be programmed so that the TV button actually controls the TV, unless you reprogram the entire thing. I am sure they will get around to fixing that eventually, they are probably just too busy rolling out the next Squeezebox upgrade, so I don't mind waiting a few years more for that one.

Given Logitech's reputable history in the home media center market, I certainly have expectations what they could do to home automation.

Just buy a bunch of appropriately sized external drives, set them up with encrypted file systems (and make sure whoever may need it has the password), copy all videos to each drive, and get some friends and family to store them for you. Put all your other important content such as family photos etc. on the same drives (if you are going through all this hassle anyways, might as well save more data in the process). Redistribute updated copies in a few years (to back up new content, and to protect against ageing drives). In order for this scheme to fail, each drive has to either fail, get lost, or otherwise kept from you due to a scheming ex-friend.

But seriously ... what is the value of this data, really. Is anyone ever going to watch this stuff; will they notice if it goes missing. There is no need to over-engineer a system for nice-to-have data. If you have 2-3 independent offsite copies, that is already approaching that limit. Assuming this video material is probably never going to be used or watched, the best scheme is likely some system which provides a feeling that the data is safe - and then one can go on for the rest of one's life ignoring it exists. In this case, the subjective feeling of data safety is more important than actual data safety.

I may be wrong, your tapes may be really important ... but if they were, why would they be a random organization of clips sitting in a drawer, with no copies in the first place. This does not sound like something that requires a complex setup.

Using the voice of Dr. Evil in the Austin Powers movie: "two ... b i l l i o n ... dollars".

There are two options; either cash in and take the 2 Bn which then becomes a sure thing, or keep running the company with the two possibilities that you could make even more money (that you would never have the chance to spend anyway so there is in reality zero additional value in that scenario), or you could lose some or all of the value. The owner may even have knowledge they are currently headed in a bad direction. First option you have to do zero work for the rest of your life, second option you have to work really, really hard running the company.

Think of it in terms of game theory. For society as a whole, this is a suboptimal decision. However for the owner, it is probably the right decision.

... if you don't have to share it with family members. If you do not mind not watching content in HD. If your 5Mbps connection is actually stable and always delivering peak. If none of the devices in your house want to suddenly update themselves when you are trying to watch something. If you have have the self discipline and masochistic tendencies that you actually enjoy buying that shiny new game on Steam, and then spending hours waiting for it to download ... while also not being able to do any streaming. Source: I have a 5Mbps/750kbps wireless based connection, and it is the only option in my area. I also have several household members, a preference for watching content in HD, sometimes shitty connection with only 1-3 Mbps, and a bunch of PCs, tablets and mobile phones which may all suddenly decide to use the net.

I don't know; you would think society should be moving forward when it comes to planning and managing infrastructure. In the last century, they were able to deliver electricity, phone lines, paved roads, water, and what not to pretty much everyone. These days, it is a global news event if a couple cities in the US get Gbps home networks (which supposedly they have had for years in e.g. Japan), and fixing a few kilometers of road is a major investment which will drain local infrastructure budgets for a year.

Even today's corrupt authorities should take a page from the Romans' playbook, giving the people "bread & circus". If you want happy citizens, make sure everyone has a fast internet connection.

Some form of higher education involving logic, problem structuring and rational thinking is needed, though not necessarily computer science. Either that, or taking some sort of structured approach to learning that set of skills elsewhere, e.g. through mentoring or self-studies. You need to figure out what skill set it is that you need to learn, and then make sure you somehow learn it, either at university or some other way. That being said, I know plenty people with CS education who I would say make very poor programmers - it is easy to go through higher education and still learn very little. One of my favourite quotes, "he who has no plan goes nowhere fast". Just being somewhere and following some curriculum is not the same as pursuing a roadmap towards becoming a "real" programmer.

I myself am pretty much self-taught when it comes to programming, having taken an interest in that since the age of 9 with Basic and C64, but never taking any formal training. Higher education in mathematics has given me all the additional experience and skills I have needed. I have worked with programmers and managed programmers for several years, and though they are often better at coding than I am (which is not so strange given it is their job, whereas for me it has been just one of many different responsibilities), I often have an edge when it comes to e.g. structuring, algorithms, wading through complexity, or taking a critical point of view whether we are building the right thing.

If you want to be a top programmer who is productive in a work place, you need both programming skills and higher order rational logical thinking (plus being able to collaborate). It doesn't matter how you acquire it (in terms of learning it, not necessarily how attractive you are to employers). Everything else, e.g. new programming languages and such, is typically easy to learn once the basics are in place.

That sentence has the potential to become one of my frequently used quotes going forward, along with "it is what it is".