http://www.newsgroupreviews.co...

I'm not saying it's a good usenet service; there are rumors that it's been outsourced to Highwinds anyway. Even so, it's still under their name, and it's plenty for people like me who use Usenet for things other than alt.binaries.

Microsoft Office 2003. Now, to be fair, this does indeed depend on how you count. Office 2003 is still feature complete for most Office users. Office 2007/2010/2013 has a fresh coat of paint, and Sparklines are nice and all, but functionally speaking, it may fit your criteria. Alternatively, we can point to the fact that most Office clones (Open/LibreOffice, AbiWord, iWork) have a very similar layout and functionality.

But, let's assume that we're talking about current iterations. eBay and Paypal are still very recognizable from 2005. Amazon still sells books. The iTunes Music Store hasn't changed much. My ISP still offers Usenet access, and Yahoo mail is still quite popular; hell "e-mail" is quite possibly the longest lived digital communication protocol ever created. Google's search page hasn't changed significantly in ten years.

Now, to be fair to your point, this is certainly a list of exceptions that took a bit of time to come up with. However, I'll also point out that the reason why Office 2003 was my primary example is that it's still possible for users to install it on a computer purchased today as long as they have their installation discs. Google discontinues products when they're no longer viable for Google, and that's their prerogative. However, I submit that if Google is going to devise a means of facilitating the generation of data, to which they have the exclusive means by which to make that data useful, that the onus should be on them to ensure that the users receive copies of that data if the service is to go down. Now yes, I understand that the users are the product, not the customers, but that then lends credence to the grandparent's point. Office 2003 may long be discontinued, but Microsoft didn't take my data with them when Office 2007 was released. Google's "everything on Google's servers" philosophy has its merit, but its caveats are clear as well. I have AIM conversations from 1999 that are still stored as HTML files. I cannot say the same for discussions in Google Wave.

Counterpoint: Where do we see precedent for this as of late? Most of the high-profile cases that come to mind of late involve people getting off scot free. Enron, Martha Stewart, and Bernie Madoff are about the only names that stick in my head that had any sort of repercussions for their actions, and those are the better part of a decade ago. The level of corruption in this day and age leads me to believe that, had he intended to let the merger go through, he could have easily went to Comcast, asked for $50 million and a tenured job as a middle manager somewhere, gotten it, and had Comcast's legal department ensure that no one raised any questions.

Yes, everyone had him under an electron microscope with clubs in hand...but I sincerely doubt anyone would have actually threw the first punch, had this gone the other way.

From what I've read thus far in the thread, few are questioning whether or not a dog can reliably smell drugs/bombs/whatever. explosive/drug sniffing dogs at border checkpoints and airports make perfect sense for this very reason, and my understanding of the case is such that the use of dogs in these cases aren't being called into question.

The problem stems from a scenario like this: A cop pulls someone over for a traffic stop. During the traffic stop, the officer wants to search the car, for whatever reason - anything from what might be a genuine concern, to simply wanting to give someone a hard time because he's a jerk. So, the cop calls in a K-9 unit to smell for the "drugs", the dog smells them, and now "probable cause" has been established to search the vehicle.

The objection isn't with the dogs themselves, but with the fact that the cop explicitly calling a drug sniffing dog for what should be a routine traffic stop. The odds are highly unlikely that the dog won't be signaled to give a false positive, because at the very least it's a major embarrassment to the officer if the dog smells nothing, vs. the dog giving a false positive. Dog smells nothing, cop has egg on his face in the eyes of the citizen and the K-9 unit. Dog "smells something", cop does the search, finds nothing, "well...the dog gave the signal" is something for which there are witnesses, and for which the officer cannot be faulted.

The case here is that the cop cannot detain an individual to wait for a dog, as it applies to one-to-one scenarios such as a traffic stop. The efficacy of dogs at checkpoints and airports makes a lot more sense, because you're basically searching everyone in one shot, and are less likely to signal the dog to make a false positive in a targeted manner.

Google applications on virtually every stock (read:non-AOSP) ROM: not removable.
Microsoft applications on an AOSP ROM that, almost by definition, requires root and an unlocked bootloader: Good question; the fine summary says "integration", which could mean anything.

Still, I'd say the ultimate outcome is better with Microsoft than with Google. Not because of who Microsoft is, but because of who Cyanogen is.

They're probably thinking, "Rent is due this month, and I need to put gas in my car, and I'd like to eat something besides ramen noodles tonight", like the rest of us. Microsoft is willing to give them a pile of money to make it so that a build of their ROM prompts for an outlook.com address instead of a gmail address. Dropbox, Samsung, and HTC already do this, so as long as the MS additions don't dim the "uninstall" button, I see no reason why MS being the prompt at the beginning is any better or any worse.

Which is why the devil is in the details. If the pile of money means "It prompts to create a Microsoft account at the beginning and OneNote and OneDrive are installed by default, with a 'skip' button for the former and working 'uninstall' buttons for the two latter", then it's foolish to turn down that pile of money. If Cyanogen with Bing(r) is just as difficult to deal with as pulling the Google stuff from a stock ROM...then that *is* selling out.

Personally, I really like the new Outlook client for Android, especially since I have an Exchange account. Also, I don't always store stuff in The Cloud (tm), but when I do, I use OneDrive. However, I use Xprivacy, and I see no Windows Phone equivalent for the title. I use Root Explorer, and again, I see no WP equivalent. I use Swype, which doesn't exist on Windows Phone, nor does Titanium Backup or any number of other apps. "Buy a Microsoft device" is as shortsighted an answer as when zealots say "Get a Mac" to any and every problem that happens on a PC: it ignores any number of other variables.

The problem is that it works both ways. For example, if a non-admin user has smb://foo/bar mapped to z:, but the admin user does not, attempting to make a scheduled task running as admin that involves data in z: will fail, because admin doesn't have it mapped. If you go to %userprofile% in an elevated command prompt, you go to Administrator's profile folder, not the currently logged in user. "non-elevated being unable to talk to elevated" is the 'by design' situation you speak of. 'elevated being unable to talk to non-elevated' is another.

T9 is a terrible example for two reasons.

First, T9 was "clearly to the left of the uncanny valley" - the number pad is clearly not a rearranged QWERTY arrangement of keys, so the existing muscle memory doesn't apply. Moreover, the use of the letters on the phone keypad, while not a regular way of entering text up until that point, was still at least loosely familiar to anyone who needed to dial a vanity 800-number.

Second, the fact that "feature phones", aka "messaging phones" or "dumb phones with a QWERTY keyboard" were a huge market in the 2004(ish)-2009(ish) period indicates that T9 was very clearly considered nothing more than a stopgap measure. Alternatively, the mass adoption of feature phones and smartphones would lend credence to the possibility that T9 was an acceptable means of text entry for the very small amount of text that was generally going into a phone at that time, but the ceiling was quickly reached.

Bonus round: People will adopt an optimization to Swype and Swiftkey, just as they were adopted as an extension of the iPhone and older Android keyboards...as long as their existing knowledge is still useful. Knowing how to type on a QWERTY keyboard is useful when you need to type in a last name, and number pad dialing is still used for good ol' fashioned phone calls. If an optimized arrangement of the keys is genuinely helpful, then we'd be seeing an arrangement of keys that puts the vowels toward the edges to facilitate thumb typing...but we don't see keyboards like that gaining any meaningful traction. "Flow" (discussed by me and a few others further down in the thread) largely solves these problems, but it's in the 10K-50K range, rather than Swype and Swiftkey, in the 10M-100M realms.

https://play.google.com/store/...

I used that app back in 2012, and it wasn't just-out-of-beta then, either. When I used it, it effectively solved all of its intended problems: common letter combinations were in close proximity, and there were fewer "word collisions" than with Swype ("or" vs "our" immediately coming to mind).

The problem I found was the fact that while Flow is more accurate, it took me significantly longer to type out a message because I wasn't used to the layout. I've spent over 20 years on a QWERTY keyboard, and even though Flow is more efficient, QWERTY is basically like breathing for me, so any statistically-better keyboard would still be slower because I'd be re-learning to type all over again. Even with errors, I'm personally still a Swype person at heart. I've even tried Swiftkey and Go, but even there what holds me back is knowing where the punctuation keys are. The only alternate keyboard I'll use is "Hacker's Keyboard" when I find myself in an SSH session, but other than that, Swype got me in early in the WinMo 6.5 days, and has never let go.

Because they run the repository. It's not Google saying, "only these extensions may install", it's them having a centralized location for the ones they've approved.

As long as the appeals process is clear and genuine false positives are handled in a timely manner, this isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Github, Sourceforge, and "a Godaddy domain with the free-tier hosting" will happily enable independent developers to avail their Chrome extensions for download. If that's not okay, Firefox still has a viable market share, even IE supports add-ons. Depending on 1.) Google, 2.) Chrome, and 3.) the first party Chrome repo to distribute one's browser extension seems foolish, especially when it's still perfectly viable to take any combination of those away from the equation and still get a browser extension into the hands of end users. When Chrome sections off the greater internet...then we can talk.

Also, if I sound crabby and one sided about this, it's because half the users who have browser extensions have the malware-based ones that I need to remove because it keeps hijacking their search providers and home pages, injecting ads, and generally making a mess. I see this across every browser that supports extensions. While users should indeed be more vigilant about what they allow on their computer, I'll be okay with any measure to mitigate this problem that doesn't involve removing a manual override.

If they're selling them as new products, with the support entitlements that any new copy of Windows XP should expect, and Microsoft keeps their activation servers up indefinitely, then I'd say yes. If they're selling copies of Windows XP that won't activate...not so much. More to the point, the essence of what's being asked is that Microsoft can't sue someone for running

If the ISV doesn't have any server-side requirements and it's a matter of a simple keygen that displays or e-mails a serial number, then this request doesn't apply. Moreover, if the ISV does have a server side requirement, this request, if honored, simply means that the ISV can't file a lawsuit, citing the DMCA, should someone reverse engineer their software enough to enable the software to continue to perform its intended purpose. Conversely, if the software is reverse engineered in order to remove the requirement for the serial number to be entered, then that's already covered under garden variety copyright laws.

"Can the software perform its intended purpose after the vendor labels it end-of-life and deactivates the server side requirements?"
IF "yes" THEN request.applies = "false"
IF "no" THEN request.applies = "true"

About the only place where there's room for interpretation is in the term "indended purpose" - in the context of games, the continued availability of a single player campaign without multiplayer capability would be a point of contention for the lawyers to debate.

Such is the cross bore by a legal framework, and it's why "court judge" is an actual profession.

Copyright isn't, strictly speaking, in question here. The question is whether software under copyright that is symbiotically dependent upon a publisher that can unilaterally disable some form of authentication and/or data processing can be altered by the end user in order to restore the functionality that was initially paid for. Ordinarily, reverse engineering of that nature isn't legal...but it's also not necessary. The request is intended to decriminalize the situations where such reverse enginerring /is/ necessary.

http://www.freenas.org/downloa...
https://owncloud.org/install/
https://play.google.com/store/...
http://portforward.com/english...
http://www.startssl.com/

Or:
https://www.getsync.com/featur...
https://play.google.com/store/...

Either way, secured, real-time, SSL'd upload to your own server. No cloud vendors, and no credit cards.

The single simplest answer I can come up with is "no exceptions". English is dumb like that: "i before e, except after 'c'...or when you run a feisty heist on a weird, caffeinated, foreign, beige, Atheist neighbor". We make a word plural by adding an 's' at the end...except for womans, childs, mans, oxs, mouses, mooses, gooses, and about 1,001 other 'exceptions'. Verb conjugation is a mess, typically using "helping verbs" to establish tense, except when you don't. Then, there are vowels. Spanish has this right "a" (ah), "e" (eh), "i" (ee), "o" (oh), "u" (oo), no exceptions. English has a "short" and "long" sound for each, and then there's the "schwa" sound, because apparently simply using a "short u" when you need one is too complicated for English. And then, there's this: http://www.buzzfeed.com/annane....

Trying to find a common denominator between Mandarin, Hungarian, Creole, and English is highly unlikely to happen. So, from my experience with languages, which is "English, with a high school understanding of Spanish and a handful of core phrases in other European languages (i.e. I can ask for a bathroom throughout Europe), my core answer would be consistency. This letter makes this sound, no exceptions. This word ending means that the word is in this tense, no exceptions.

Finally, minimize the "through context" words-with-multiple-meanings situation; "love" being a great example. If you love your mother, your super-fast computer, bacon, and your spouse the same way, then the language is the least of your problems....

Depends where it lives with respect to the infrastructure. As a web server with a public IP and nothing in front of it, running IIS? Probably not (though, to be fair, IIS8.5 has come a long way from versions 5 and 6). Running an application for an industry specific vertical product that is built on the IIS/ASP/MSSQL stack? I don't have a problem with that. Doing internal DHCP/DNS/AD/Exchange? I'm fine with that, too.

Microsoft's issue is that they made it very easy to configure in an insecure way. Similarly, they didn't give much help when it came to giving novice server admins enough guidance to fix their issues without disabling the security measures wholesale. Now, the natural Slashdot argument would be the very concept of a "novice server admin", but the alternative is that certain small businesses don't have a server, so they can't run their applications, so things get messy.

Think of a nail salon with two locations in neighboring towns. Not a large enough business to warrant an IT staff, but big enough to need a client/server model scheduling system, and not the kind of place likely to have an employee technical enough to really do the job right. Cloud vendors are starting to crop up to fill this kind of niche, but even five years ago, that was much less common. Back then, we'd get a server and a point to point VPN system up and running, but if the application runs on IIS/ASP/MSSQL, having a Linux server isn't an option, and the people in charge of choosing the product are unlikely to pick it based on platform. Situations of this nature are incredibly common on Main Street.

I love using Linux and BSD where appropriate, but sometimes Windows is the right tool for the job. Other times, it isn't. No sense in turning it into a religious debate.

Given how many programs I've used over the past decade that have required unreasonably high amounts of RAM, and/or were subsequent releases of software that solved a particular problem in earlier iterations but required 1/10th the memory to do it, I wouldn't mind a handful of these guys getting their desks back. Adobe is a great place to start.

I'm by no means a programmer, but from the handful of times I've seen what you're talking about, I'll say this: if it's possible to save 10% of RAM by shifting the ease-of-use burden to the comments instead of the actual code, then as an end user, I'm 100% in favor of commenting the everloving hell out of difficult to read code that saves RAM when users are running it.

Wrong. Use as much as necessary, but no more. I might have 12GB of RAM in my laptop, but it's not all for you. It's for EVERYTHING I do, and when I start adding VMs or large After Effects projects to what I'm doing, 12GB starts to get pretty cramped. Some RAM usage will be inevitable, but wasteful RAM usage is wasteful.

I most certainly have plenty of admiration for the Demoscene.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

Seriously guys, when Microsoft 1.) had the idea years ago, 2.) has the investment capital to give this a viable shot, and 3.) with Azure, has an immediately viable and marketable need for a set of servers that can be dynamically powered up and down...and THEY haven't gotten it to be a viable idea...I sincerely doubt that a startup in the Netherlands will have greater success.

To be fair though, one would imagine that the Netherlands is colder, for more of the year, than the majority of the continental US. Still, servers coming up and down with the thermostat does not seem to be a good enough idea to be of real assistance.