I wound agree, the only problems with Win95 came from incompatible software, and Win98 was just fine for me. I never tried Win98SE, but I agree that ME was crap. In fact, I think Win ME started the bad - good - bad cycle. Think about it: Win 3 and Win 3.1 were both kind of ok, too.
> I knew about Linus Torvalds's distaste of C++
And for good reason, C++ in kernel space is a recipe for disaster. Some parts of it may be useful, others would be highly inappropriate.
> What is it with open-source leaders and their irrational hate of C++?
There is nothing irrational about it. C++ is one of the most powerful compiled languages ever conceived, but it is very ugly. It also supports just about any programming paradigm, badly, making the choice between them especially hard. Every other language out there has more focus and more style, except maybe perl.
It seems that in good Slashdot style, nobody has even read the abstract. It is quite specific:
"The higher-order “g” factor is an artifact of tasks recruiting multiple networks"
Now that is an interesting statement, it says that there is not one key element (or factor) for intelligence, which helps with a lot of tasks. Rather many tests measure the same core aspects of intelligence. That is an interesting finding, but it is also very hard to support: how do you measure that which you cannot measure? And at the end of the day, I am not sure it has much significance in a practical sense.
There is more truth in this than it first appears. Apple wants 30% of your profits with the app - and that may be fine for retail software, but it is hardly acceptable for specialist software. Then again the app store is designed for a general audience, not for specialist software.
I think the logical conclusion is that specialist software should not be distributed over the app store. It should be side loaded.
Exactly. I would recommend to dial back the paranoia, not every bug is evidence of being hacked. Unfortunately the WiFi stack of Android is absolutely full of bugs, but most only cause a bad connection or a disconnect.
That being said, Android 2.2 is way out of date, and you should not consider it secure in any sense of the word. Watch the information that you put on your phone, including login data. And there is nothing you can do about it, except complain to the manufacturer about it not being "fit for purpose".
> Meanwhile they're not competeing in servers or smartphones, the PC market
And they are not competing in the PC market, either. You can get the same performance (and usually less driver issues) by just going with Intel. AMD lost the performance advantage that they had with the Athlon64, and now they have lost the price advantage, too. The only thing they have going is the APU concept, but single thread performance is terrible, power consumption is high, and the price is again not that much less than you would pay for Intel plus an entry level graphics card.
> "amd64" is called that because that's what AMD branded their implementation of x86_64. You know what Intel calls their x86_64 implementation? "Intel 64"
No, they don't. Intel 64 is the Itanium architecture, which is lesson in how you can turn a good idea into a bad product.
> "maybe we should wear helmets when we climb ladders or get into a bath"
Of course we should wear a helmet (or better a harness and a safety rope) when climbing ladders. It is know to be one of the most dangerous activities in a normal household.
But you also have to look at the context. Free-climbing for example is technically much more dangerous than climbing a ladder, but people are typically skilled and very concentrated when they do it. Average folk climbing a ladder are inexperienced and often distracted. This combination can make any activity dangerous.
> Interesting as my multi-national (70k +) corp still runs Office 2003
And why exactly would they do that? Office 2010 is so much more functional, and a lot easier to use to. Word may not have changed all that much, but it has a new GUI and a good equation editor. PowerPoint has changed massively, from an ugly program to complete the package to something actually quite useful.
I understand that you may want to wait with updates, and not do every version. But since Office 2010 has SP1, there is really no reason not to start upgrading. Plus of course the support is running out soon, and there should be time for an orderly conversion...
> I save all my Office documents in the old format -
You can get converters for all supported Office versions. And obviously you should not run an unsupported Office version if you exchange documents.
LibreOffice may be a better reason: it is ok with the old document format up to a point, but it really struggles with the new format. Given that the new format has a much cleaner design, I think the problem is that nobody put the effort into making it work.
Seconded, MSE works just great, without any hassle. The other product that I use is Panda Cloud Antivirus. It does occasionally try to persuade you to buy the full version, but otherwise it just works, and it is lighter on the CPU than MSE. I used to be a bit fan of Avira Antivirus, but it got too annoying, and had too many false positives for comfort.
That's not the original, but a licensed copy.
Anyway, I think Apple will just remove the circle tip of the second hand, and that should make it sufficiently different. It is only the icon, not the clock, and the hands are actually shaped slightly differently already.
Ubuntu 12.04 had a lot of updates, that is true. Mostly kernel and libraries though, and the occasional Java update, of course.
However, now we have Ubuntu 12.04.01, and it is much more mature (as announced). We should see updates going back to the usual level of maybe once a week, and less for a base system.
There is not much Ubuntu can do about - the bugs are in the software used to make Ubuntu, and unless you prefer old (stale) versions like in Debian stable, you will get frequent updates.
> but AMD is still sadly lagging years behind Intel.
Exactly, so a promised 15% increase in efficiency next year is not going to cut it. Intel has an advantage of about 50%, and they will probably deliver improvements by next year, too.
So for me, this message says that AMD has lost the race.
> a certain percentage of the jury just didn't really care to be there and was ready to call it quits pretty quickly.
It may have something to do with the fact that they get $50 per day, including expenses? Is that even above the minimum wage?
This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian
