Apple just lit 3 Billion Dollars on fire? Awesome! It's not like they could have used that money for more important things like improving their own audio hardware using their own iconic music brand, start their own music service using their established music industry contacts and programming team, bought both Spotify and Pandora and still have enough money left to make the first rap star billionaire.

At this rate, Steve Jobs will be vertical due to the sheer speed of his spinning corpse.

http://www.colbertsuperpac.com...

At least the commercials were funny.

Writes like paper
Syncs to evernote
Saves everything to pdf and can easily be printed for paper archival

also going to agree. Web browsing would be easy, since Firefox performs almost identical to Firefox on XP. Same Goes with Thunderbird. LibreOffice and OpenOffice would probably be the hardest transition and most likely the deal breaker.

It's great for simple spreadsheets and documents, but when they start asking about office options that they use almost everyday, like mail merging address labels, either you, their's or both of your heads will explode either in sheer confusion or rage due to the sheer complexity of a process that in word is literally done in less then 15 mouse clicks.

If I had to make a call there, it would be Ad Supported. Although MS is getting very ad happy with their metro apps as of late. Hell even Solitaire is coming with Ad's now. At least so far they've been static images which i'm ok with more than virus infected flash ads. The same goes with banner ads for Android apps as well.

I define Adware as an application installed by a third party that is not associated directly with the downloaded app in any way and disrupts your experience outside of that particular app. A good example would be bundleware installers that love to install VLC media player for you as well as "Value added apps to enhance your experience" (if you want to see what I mean, Search for VLC media player in Google and Bing and click on one of the ads) or ads in the android notification bar popping up every 5 minutes.

Now this is where it gets dicey. What if the developer Wants you to see ads because its their revenue stream? Fine, but only show the ads when I'm directly using the app. I don't want you making money off me when I'm browsing the web by covering up malware infected website ads with malware infected banners (BTW I use Adblock plus for this reason), or annoy me about how I need to pay you to fix my 23409 registry errors every 5 minutes by about 12 different registry scanners running on my machine at once sucking down CPU time to scan. Or notify me that there's this great game I need to download from Google play every five seconds.

I wouldn't call the Bing Bar (or the Bing desktop for that matter) Adware per say simply because it doesn't attempt to sell anything, but it definitely is bundleware and needs to die in a fire like the rest of the toolbar garbage.

That's going to be the real test for this initiative. Is it going to at least ask you remove the more legitimate toolbars like Ask, Bing Yahoo and Google Toolbars or is it going to ignore them. If it ignores them, Conduit's going to have a field day suing the hell out of MS for blocking their "Non harming" toolbar while ignoring the others. If they do detect them they better make sure Bing Bar is on the list or Google will be screaming "Antitrust" until the cows come home

It's about time they start doing something about adware. At least put that "Low Threat" section in MSE to good use.

On the other hand, if they detect adware the same way the other AV's do, I wont be out of a day job. The only thing I've found that removes adware is ADWCleaner and the Junkware Removal Tool. The rest either don't detect it all, Detect only the most virulent or damaging forms of it, or detect it and won't remove it.

Technically it's not that bad.

$9,000,000.00 / (85% of 800000 or 680000) = $12.34 Per Machine / Yr.

Assuming that the PC's are running XP on XP period machines, and would either have to be replaced or upgraded, $12 is a bargain. I don't think you could even license windows at that price. Although that doesn't excuse the fact that the money could have been used for more constructive purposes like software modernization so that you wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.

Yep. just noticed this. It's been awhile since I looked at a Enterprise Distro but it looks like RHEL and Suse both go 10 years or more now.

Regardless, If I had to make a call an RTOS would still be a better choice. More control, less overhead and better reliability.

I don't see where Linux would be that much of a better benefit for ATM's since it's lifecycle is typically short as well.

XP is kind of a enigma for MS, since they supported far longer than most of their OS'es (I think windows NT and maybe DOS had a longer support cycle) Lifecycle was one of the reasons OS/2 survived so long since IBM supported it for 10 years.

In the Linux world, the longest LTS distro support I've seen is 5 years. Sure you can upgrade Linux easier than Windows in many cases but you may still run into issues from one kernel update to the next.

Best practice would be the ATM Vendors (Diebold, NCR, ETC) supporting their own RTOS build specifically designed only for ATM use, and Hardened to the hilt for financial transactions.

There are still a ton of windows XP PC's out there capable of running 8.1. Any Core 2 (and some last gen P4's) or Athlon 64 PCs or Higher will run it fine as long as it's got at least 2GB of RAM, but it's the transition that's the pain, especially since MS removed Windows Easy Transfer From Windows 8.1

There is talk that MS is going to release a Free edition of Windows 8.1, but it will most likely be gimped or restricted on who can install the OS, such as Large OEM's only. If they played their cards correctly (Like add the start menu back) they could get those users to convert and get some windows 8.1 share, but since that's not happening soon enough...

Probably as much as the Keurig Vue, which has pretty much bombed in the marketplace.

In fact, you would think Keurig would have learned from Vue sales that if you make a machine that's not compatible with existing K cups, it doesn't sell. Just adding K cup functionally to the Vue system out of the box (without some third party adapter) would have made them sell like hotcakes and give them the patent encumbered Vue Cups to upsell, instead their going to make a third (Technically forth if you count the Rivo) incompatible brewer that will most likely not accept previous generation cups and wonder why they can't sell the thing but the K cup units fly off the shelves.

Hell, it wouldn't surprise me if they stop making K cup machines altogether and really screw themselves over.

Ask TWC how that worked for them. One of the reasons they're a buyout target is because of the CBS blackout.

if CableCo's were smart, they would sneak a semi a-la-Carte Package (for example, a Disney Package, a Viacom package, a CBS Package, ETC) on content providers contract renewals and execute it in the program lineup. Any time the CP's decide to raise rates, the CableCo's simply nod their head "Sure!!" and proceed to immediately raise the rate on just the affected package 1:1. When Sub's Cancel, the CP's will get less because Less people actually get the content now (which can now be officially documented since the CableCo's are A-La-Carte Now), and they'll think twice before raising rates.

Now I know this will never happen, because most of those contracts explicitly state you cannot do this sort of a-la-carte tiering, but that's where the lawyer sneakiness comes in.

Considering that he is sort of an icon to nerds and is dying of a recently announced disease, I would considering it newsworthy.

Although I doubt that smoking is the main reason he has COPD now considering he stopped smoking so long ago, but it may have been a contributing factor. He was an avid Photographer, and if he did a lot of darkroom work, he could have contracted the disease from breathing in the Caustic Developer Chemicals.

This.

I've been on this site for a long time. My Low 6 digit number should be a testament of how long I've been on this site. Hell I don't Even use Deathlizard any more as my handle on any site but this one. but I can tell you what my Display Options are set to.

1) I Use the Classic Interface because I like the classic Interface. It's simple, Loads fast, and gets me my News For Nerds and Stuff that Matters.

2) I use the Classic Discussion system, and not the one that was reworked the last time the site had a modernization.

What makes this site special is the simple fact that it is so customizable. I don't have to update my look of the site but others that want to can get the new whiz bang tech site that the kiddiez crave. I can keep it the way I want and the Kids get the new wave look because they are either not logged in or they signed up with a new account with the look turned on by default.

I know it would be a pain to maintain both looks, especially since it looks like they want to do away with the generic icons as news points and replace it with stock photos, but I can't imagine it being so hard to maintain when it's pretty much been the same for over 15 years now and pulls data from the same database, and I think it would be worth maintaining rather than lose your user base to other options or even to a forked, Slashcode running, classic slashdot site.