...the real reason this got cleared is that MS assured the Indian government that all Nokia phones in India would have a backdoor accessible by the Indian government, like they demanded from BlackBerry?

If an app doesn't need to be a service, then it shouldn't be running as a service. LED Light? Not a service, and I'm almost fed up with having to kill it every time I close Opera. I spend an outrageous amount of time killing things that I don't want running, and freeing RAM.

Not to worry, they won't filter out the keyboard noise until it's being sent from the server to the other person(s) on the call, so the NSA can still hear and analyze the keystrokes.

None of the names I've seen on the shortlist should get the job. MS rose to power with a technologist (Gates, FWIW) at the helm, but under an accountant (Ballmer) has mostly moved forward on intertia that Gates created. If the MS Board wants to see the company get back on track, they need to install another technologist... ideally someone with credibility to satisfy business customers, and a likeable personality that end-user consumers (and developers) can identify with favorably. There are probably perople who better fit that description, but Ray Ozzie comes to my mind... too bad everyone as MS thoroughly pissed him off.

That being said, Elop can't strictly pull a Nokia on Microsoft... he was a Trojan Horse sent by MS to dismantle Nokia. Who would be Odysseus in this new scenario?

I never have GPS or network location location enabled, but damn if don't still kill that infernal MapsPrefetcherService a dozen times a day, along with a bunch of other crap that insists on running as a service. Google is the reason why I find myself trusting Android a little bit less every day.

Hardly. Every time they change the UI it feels less like email, and more like a strange conglomeration of email, social media, and instant messaging, where email always loses importance. I personally find the whack-a-mole buttons annoying as hell, especially since the one I use second most ("mark as read") is buried under "More".

And I'm sure anyone here who has tried to deal with Gmail as an IMAP server has yanked out at least one fistful of their own hair.

I am absolutely certain that Bruce Schneier weighs the same as a duck.

As a web developer, I understand the need to allow users to create content. However, I consider full blown web-based WYSIWYGs (such as TinyMCE and CK Editor) to be terrible tools. Yes, they take care of most of the dirty details, but they also have the capacity produce bloated garbage markup. I've always found bbCode annoying. I've used a couple of Wiki syntaxes as well (MediaWiki, Jira), and find them only slightly less annoying than bbCode. Because I know HTML, I prefer to just write HTML when I know the final format will be HTML.

Markdown syntax is clean, succinct, and can be extended when needed. The vast majority of non-savvy users only need to do basic formatting (bold, italics, headlines, lists) and Markdown covers that very well, in a way that the user can't do much damage to the prescribed styling of the content.

I've very briefly experimented with LaTEX, not enough to have actually used it for anything. I was not aware of PanDoc, but it looks very interesting.

it's intentionally trying to hide all the things you expect to be there

This is what Windows has been doing for decades. Dumbing down the UI (GUI or otherwise) doesn't make the system "better", it just makes the quality of users worse.

Uploading images or other files that will not be executed by the CMS is not the issue here. The ability to upload modules and plugins is a much greater risk. Being able to delete those things (as granted by write permission) can render the entire CMS inoperable. The further insanity of allowing code to be editable within the CMS is even more dangerous, as that can introduce simple breakage via a syntax error and be a good place for malicious code to hide, easily placed there by a compromised CMS account.

Yes, it very much is batshit-insane. To allow such a thing is to put an inordinate amount of trust in your web application and your http server, both of which should be considered insecure no matter how secure you think they are. WP goes one step further and allows its plugins to be edited from the admin interface, which is batshit-donkeyfuck-insane.

There is always a trade off between security and user friendliness... these anti-features cross the line so far that they've disappeared beyond the horizon.

Tablets are the same.

Touch (even multi-touch) is a step backward in human computer interfaces.

I am, but my sketch is populating and manipulating a 40x4 array of uint8_t values with a simple fire algorithm, it doesn't use many library calls. I've made a few optimizations, but I don't think I can get more than 30 loop() interations per second even in this preliminary stage on an Uno. I'll be able to achieve more than I originally planned by using a Tensy 3.0 instead.

• Apps.

Maybe. This is MS after all; outside of XBox, they have absolutely no clue how to market to consumers.

With my first Arduino project, I'm finding the Uno's 16mhz clock speed to be more limiting than 2k of RAM.. all I'm really doing is twiddling an RGB LED strip with generated values.

I'd personally be happy if there was an Arduino with a 64 mhz clock, but Atmel doesn't make such as chip as far as I know, the fastest AVR is 32mhz, and even that would be a huge improvement.