I'm guessing it was a decision made at an executive management retreat. And alcohol was involved.

If you recall, they wanted to get on the "rapid release" train, and Windows "8.1" was probably supposed to be Windows 9. But, you know, that pesky reality and all. So now they think they can catch up just by bumping the number.

The real problem here is that Microsoft has run out of anything useful to add to their OS. So now they are running around in circles trying to find ways to take things away, or fuck things up so people think they need yet another version.

Honestly, bumping it to "10" makes no sense whatsoever. If they wanted to give it some weird alternative fancy name like "Selenium Edition", ":P", "Xista", or whatever, that would at least make some sense. But this is just... stupid.

All "Windows 10" tells me is that they can't count, and we shouldn't count on Microsoft.

For now I am going to call it "Windows Can't Count Edition".

the ease with which projects can be allowed to die â" often without any clear cut time of death.

And that doesn't happen with closed source projects? Sure it does, you just don't hear about it when some PHB slowly takes a group of developers and has them put everything on the back burner for some pet project. Then years pass, the old project isn't officially dead, but nothing has gotten done. On and off new business requirements are analyzed, and eventually a mysterious mandate from far higher up comes down to re-write everything in "HTML5" or whatever the current buzzword is.

consider that in the future they may be wanting to wire you up just to make sure you aren't a source of bugs

While completely ignoring that the specs handed down from the higher-ups are gibberish, contradictory, and physically impossible garbage. But, you know, that is not a possible source of bugs now is it?

Someone should first wire up management to zap them every time they get an idea for a "brilliant" addition.

Ebola, while a horrible deadly disease is not the doom and gloom its being made out to be

You wouldn't know that listening to the idiotic TV news. They seriously have been playing it as if everyone in the US is at grave risk of dropping dead from this.

The threats made against that second infected doctor being brought back to the US were almost certainly a direct result of the media's irresponsible reporting.

Despite all their condescending scaremongering, there is simply zero realistic risk to the US general public.

Obligatory Dilbert: http://dilbert.com/strips/comi...

Here is how their new compression method works. It reduces all images down to a single one or zero. If the bit read in is one, it display a picture of a cat. If it is zero, it displays a picture of Peter Griffin farting. And as a bonus, if no bit can be read, it displays the goatsex guy.

Can they also put a switch in this to make Office usable? I can't stand that fucking ribbon interface that makes everything I used to do the most often 5 times more difficult.

I'll second that. (They could just offer an additional normal menu bar like the Mac version) It is their reluctance to back off of this and several other past design mistakes that makes me surprised they would even consider backing down from their Windows 8 Metro stuff.

While it is nice to see Microsoft undo a horrific mistake for once, lets not be too quick to forgive and forget. (And don't even start until the gold release of Windows 9 is sitting on user's desktops)

The fact that Microsoft created this monster in the first place should tell you something about the remaining competence level there. You should be worried about their long-term stability. What is to keep them from pulling a similar stunt on you in Windows 10?

I think the real story here is that someone in Atlanta figured out how to use a computer. :P

Agreed that it's not in the summary, but as you correctly note, it's just a "summary". Anyone who reads the underlying blog post will read this among the facts on which the court based its opinion: "The public was allowed to search by keyword. The search results showed only the page numbers for the search term and the number of times it appeared; none of the text was visible."

So those readers who RTFA will be in the know.

It is great to see more of ID's early work opened up.

A while back there was even some talk about releasing the hard drive images from some of their NeXT computers used to create DOOM. http://serverfault.com/questio...

I wonder if anything will come of that? It would be doubly awesome right about now because the NeXT emulator "Previous" has gotten far along enough where it can actually boot to a 68K NeXTSTEP desktop!

Don't I wish.