It's Odd Windows versions, Even Star Trek Movie Versions....

I guess this is why it's going away... if even Brasil is not using Orkut anymore, then no one is.

A side conversation.... and Apple really isn't even in the conversation at this point. At least Google has a social network or two to shut down. Apple had what, Ping? Because of lawsuits iMessage isn't going to spread much past iOS/MacOSX. Though I don't like the explosion of places im supposed to lose my privacy to... it's like Oprah Winfrey "You get a social network! You get a social network!..." the big guys need one.

Boa tarde....

Not dead, it was actually pretty big in Brazil (therefore the tchau reference, which is how they say "ciao" in Brazilian Portuguese). Big in Brazil, not so much anywhere else.

Or a Hurd desktop.

I'd make a Duke Nukem Forever joke here, but that actually got released.

I was writing on my notepad when I put the baby in the playpen to calm her down. Then I discovered the pen was not working.

Natural language can be pretty vague. Talk to a programmer who takes down a ISP router with a misplaced semicolon on how strict they can be. Computers are not smart enough yet to do true natural language. When Watson can answer every single question, maybe.

as others have said, i'd call bs until i heard a model associated with this. Did you buy it new? off Ebay?
my wife's iPhone 4 is close to 4 years old, can run iOS7 (though never get ios8) and gets security updates.

Apple sees value in the software ecosystem. They want everyone on the latest OS so you can buy more apps from the Apple store. Google wants to sell you ads. The difference in perspective is why I lean iOS,

As may times DOS/Windows has been burned by bad design (Explorer hiding extension yet action dependent on extension being a big one) the lack of functionality helps it here. The * is not interpreted by the shell, but by the app. It sees a *, and does a library call to do the glob. So there's no chance of it being interpreted as a flag. My guess is that DOS was so restricted in memory, that executing a glob may have blown the stack, much like we use xargs on UNIX when a fileglob is too much.

I did some web stuff in the year 2000, back when PayPal was nothing but a Palm Pilot app. Even back then, as the rules were still being written (Javascript was relatively new), you "program convenince on the client, validate everything no matter on the server".

Seems they never learned that.

I'm a programmer. I've written GUI code, I've written a device driver that shipped in a commercial UNIX kernel. I've used Windows since 3.1 days (WindowsForWorkgroupsForTheWin!). I've even debugged and configured Windows Vista in Chinese even though I can't read it - I was able to get someone to translate the occasional dialog box.

I can not understand Win8. When my sister asks me to help configure something on her Win8 laptop, I struggle with the UI as if I'm some rookie coming from some stoneage tribe.

I hate hate hate hate Windows 8.

They'll do anything to pick them up cheaply, even trade some unwanted Surface 3's for some!

Jokes aside (and please don't mod for flamebait, it's sarcasm above, downmod for a bad joke if anything) ...

I don't think will go much. You're assuming that someone values their $1000+ dollar MacBook Air at $650 and values the Surface at something worth the discount. Considering the amount of work you'd have to do to migrate (either Windows to Mac, or Mac to Windows) you have to think about 200-300 realistically for swapping costs. Makes good headlines (as we see here) but won't help much.

Unions do the exact same thing, why isn't that collusion? I see no issue with a bunch of companies agreeing not to engage in a poaching war.

The rules for Unions are different. Would you have the same attitude with your 5 year old drinking and out til 3AM than a 22 year old? The rules for the companies is that it's collusion. They did something they weren't supposed to.

As to why, it's like the offside rule in soccer/hockey. The rule itself doesn't make much sense if you think about it by itself (why not let people charge on breakaways) but it has side effects (fewer forwards up, more guys back on defense, even FEWER goals, if that is possible with the top tier teams).

One company/corporation has a lot more power than an individual. A union does some work to make the power a bit more equal. But if you get corporations colluding, the power goes back to the corporation. Side effects? No growth in wages. No increased purchasing power (remember that the US economy is 70% consumer based, the bulk of that money comes from wages). People doing odd borrowing to maintain a standard of living (thinking of your home as a piggy bank is due to stagnant wages, and was a part of a great Economic Collapse). Squelching of wage increases has a lot of negative consequences, at least you can trim the illegal parts out.

Isn't the banana population under serious threat because of monoculture? I remember the current banana cultivar - the Cavendish - is under threat because of lack of disease resistance because of monoculture. The previous well used cultivar, the Gros Michel, was replaced because it lost to a disease threat - also due to monoculture. The article didn't mention anything about plant disease resistance.

I swear this is not flame-bait, but this is one reason why i like the iOS model. Selective perms. Even there, Google apps ask for too much. I disable a lot (e.g. location and microphone for Google Search).

Google seems to not like this. If you don't have location turned on for Google Search, all of Google Now gets turned off, even for explicit things i ask for that they don't need my location for. I specifically asked for Bulls news (yes, Im a masochist), you don't need to know where I am to show this. But Google doesn't show.

And even the old model wasn't all that good on Android. If I have an update, they'd ask for the new perms (not able to select any, it's all, or not update) or they give an option to delete the app. The implication is that you might as well push through the new perms, or delete the app as (nearly) useless.

Though this is a bit opinion based (as only any talk of where center is can be)... the Republican Party is already right of "center". It's all relative of course - the US Democratic party would most likely be Centre-Right in most other places.

This is kind of like the joke about morals. "Im perfectly moral, anyone looser is a slut, anyone tighter is a prude, i just happen to be perfect". Both parties like to claim the Center, to be "real America". Forget center, lets worry about relative - Republicans are (almost always) Right of Democrats, and Tea Party Republicans father Right still.

The Tea-Party wing isn't, by political science terms, "conservative". The proper term is Reactionary. They are moving from Right to much Farther Right. Conservative says "lets stay where we are". The Tea-Party is more "Lets go back to where we were before."

The Gold Standard? Generally accepted as unworkable during The Great Depression. It's cool in good times, causes horrible horrible spirals in bad times. Most countries moved off of it in the 1930's. We started then, and moved completely off in the 70's, Tea Partiers want to go back to that. The fact that the locked exchange rates of the Euro countries, which act as a mini-gold-standard, exacerbated and deepened a crisis there notwithstanding.

The New Deal? Trying to rollback a lot of it (though Republicans in general want to also).

Voting Rights? Attempted rollbacks. Though the rollbacks tend to hit minorities and poor people (who don't tend to vote Republican) more.

They claim to want to go back to the Constitution. Where women couldn't vote? Where a black man was defined as 3/5 of a white man? Very Reactionary. I'm in Chicago, which wasn't in the Union in 1783. Maybe as a Tea Party person, I'd really need to talk to the Algonquin Indian tribe for leadership. I'll make sure to find some nice French Canadians to trade furs with.

We live in a complex world. A lot of people want to pretend the complexity is just a screen, that it's a cloud inflicted by (assumed to be evil) men and that they can see the Truth, the Simplicity. These are the people who are voting Tea Party. Are they batshit? Dunno. But the world is complex. And if your model of the world is to ignore the complexity and pretend it's simple, you're going to want to pull the wrong levers, and you'll most likely cause some damage.

With the Snowden leaks, the NSA issues still roaming around, with the Supreme Court looking at Aereo, do you think that anything that affects national politics does NOT hit technology?