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Comment Re:Still Waiting for The Other Shoe (Score 1) 322

They've clarified this many times.

No, they haven't. All the "clarifications" I can find are simply regurgitations of the same ambiguous phrasing.

When you realize that Microsoft have been openly discussing a subscription-based version of Windows, then the phrase, "Free for the first year," takes on an entirely different meaning, now doesn't it? Microsoft has not clarified this, even to discredit it.

And even if MS isn't planning on a subscription-based flavor of Windows, they still have been abundantly less than clear exactly which version of Windows 10 you'll be receiving for free. Will it be a kind-for-kind trade (Home version for Home version, "Pro" version for "Pro" version, etc.), or will everyone get the lowest tier SKU available, probably with Bing plastered everywhere?

It would be nice if I were wrong about this. But Microsoft's history demands that I be very suspicious of Gateses bearing gifts.

Comment Still Waiting for The Other Shoe (Score 0) 322

A few week ago we heard that upgrades from Win7 and Win8 to Windows 10 would be "free for the first year," a deliberately ambiguous phrasing that they have yet to clarify. Now they're offering "free" Win10 upgrades from unsanctioned copies of Win[78] as well.

All of which makes me deeply suspicious of what this "free" version of Windows actually is. We clearly haven't been told the whole story yet.

Comment The 3DO Deal that Never Happened (Score 1) 153

It was never widely known that Sega of Japan was, for a time, negotiating to merge with/acquire The 3DO Company. Unfortunately, best available information suggests that Trip Hawkins, 3DO's chairman and CEO, wanted too much, and the deal fell through.

As it happens, about three years ago I started doing an irregular series of Let's Play/Drown Out videos on YouTube with my colleage, GammaDev. Both of us are former employees of 3DO, and we covered The Deal that Never Happened in a video about two years ago (seek to 25:12).

Comment Re: Lenovo (Score 2) 144

That's a nice concept as far as it goes, but at some point you're still dependent on hardware-specific drivers from Lenovo. As of this writing, you can pick up device drivers piecemeal. But once they get it into their tiny little brains to create a single "Universal Installer" that bundles all the necessary drivers with all the unnecessary, unwanted bloatware and spyware, you're back in the same leaky boat.

Frankly, I'm having a hard time seeing how Lenovo recovers from this.

Comment Re:Crap hardware, not surprising (Score 0) 192

Define "better". So very few devices work well for things in the $35 category. You typically have to spend double that for similar gear- and IT isn't any better- they're all bare boards and each have gotchas gallore for their use.

Most people aren't going to shell out $500 or more for the board that accounts for all the possible concerns- which is what you get to pay for someone to have done most of the gotcha removals on the design. Well, unless they're building a system to commercially control an industrial CNC machine or the like...

Comment Re:What's coming next ... (Score 2) 471

  1. Expand systemd to the point where large swaths of everything depend on it, so that he is controlling as much of the code base as possible.
  2. Insult Linus Torvalds for a while to try to undermine his authority.
  3. Fork Linux, or demand that Linus give control of Linux over to him, or he will rage-quit and take his code with him.

I don't see it unfolding that way. Remember what happened when BitKeeper tried to get up in his business. Linus, if provoked, could write an init/system management framework in a couple weeks (and probably name it "twerp" or some such). And I suspect he would do so long before things got to stage #3, just to prove the point.

Comment Re:He-3 mining? (Score 3, Interesting) 283

SMH... You do know what He3 is, right? It's a Helium Isotope.

Helium's melting point

Absolute Zero

Helium freezes at just a degree above Absolute Zero. The dark side of the moon's entirely too warm for frozen He3. It's sequestered in the regolith of the Moon's Surface and is constantly replenished over time by the Solar Wind.

I guess I shouldn't expect better...it is /. after all.

Comment Re:He-3 mining? (Score 2) 283

It's sequestered in the regolith and rock on the surface. You could call it mining, since that's the same premise behind most mining- you peel rock/sand out, you extract what you were after and leave behind tailings. Fortunately it's largely in the regolith, so you wouldn't disturb it too much and the Sun's always in the process of replacing it over time. You could also call it extraction- which would also be accurate.

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