The prices for engineers are quite high, and the PR cost in importing them is also quite high, so they're pouring money into education as a long-term investment in driving down the cost of developers in the future.

That's like a 5-10 year plan. The messaging here is that Microsoft wants engineers from the US and wants people to become computer programmers, and they're doing "everything they can" to stimulate it, so just let us hire all the H1Bs we want this quarter. The messaging presents the premise that "there aren't enough engineers" in the US, thus H1Bs are justified today. "Maybe in the future" this situation will change, but for now we "have to" have "targeted, short term high-skill immigration reforms."

Nadella and the people involved might just love computer science and want to share it with the world, these things do happen.

You don't have to be Mitt Romney to question PBS's announcement that it will air the Microsoft-funded 'reality' show Code Trip

Why are we supposed to question it, exactly? Is it some question of MS influencing PBS programming? That couldn't be it, considering how dependent PBS is on corporate sponsorship.

Is it that the program itself sounds sorta fluffy and probably won't reach a wide audience, but it'll be a boondoggle that MS can use for tax evasion, while getting the Center for Public Broadcasting and several charitable foundations to pay for what essentially Microsoft's public relations? Maybe.

So you are an author who sits in front of a word processor and writes a magazine article ("crafting content," in your language). That article is then printed in an "accessible format," called a magazine. The end user (reader) then "crafts a request" by sending in a magazine subscription request, and the content is then delivered to the end user. Sound about right? We should definitely regulate magazine publishers, making sure that they can't decide how many to print, how many pages to create, which advertisers they should contract with, how often they publish, or which letters to the editor the choose to print. Because we can't have all of that unfairness, especially if the publisher decides they'd rather make arrangements themselves to deliver their printed material to news stands or find other ways best suited to their advantage to get their publication in the hands of their audience.

No, that's you making stuff up. The telecommunications service is the telephone service between you and the answering machine that happens to answer the call. The telephone service between the two end points is no different when you talk to an answering machine than when you talk to a person who answers the call instead. It's exactly the protocols, the same bandwidth, the same use of the resource during the exchange ... makes no difference, answering machine vs. human.

A network of computer networks passing routable packets around based on peering agreements between the operators of those separate (frequently privately owned) networks is NOT the same as making a phone call.

I get it, now. You're being deliberately obtuse. You're trolling.

Their point is that having some servers pass around packets of information using a protocol like SMTP is exactly NOT like making a phone call. If you're saying that anything that is a form of communication is the same as a phone call, then please get back to hand-delivered daily newspapers, for example, and explain why that process shouldn't be subjected to the laws that impacting the publisher of a web site who wants to fatten up the network routes - even if it costs money - to make sure his audience gets a good, timely view of the content.

As laughably stupid as not knowing how to spell "penalize?" Your half-baked vitriol on the subject is an example of exactly why this topic is a bad fit for most people, cognitively. Please don't do things like vote if it involves similarly complex subject matter. Thanks.

I got into this with an audiophule type a few years ago. He, with a completely straight face, asserted that double-blind testing was an inherently flawed methodology for evaluating the objective marvelosity of some silly audiophule crap he was touting.

This has been a consistent argument from audiophiles for several years:

In short, for the important stuff, like "Do amplifiers or cables or differing storage media sound different", "blind testing" of any kind, single or double isn't likely to work because there are simply too many characteristics present and changing, and (if only because of the way human perception works) it's virtually impossible to isolate them and make sure that all of the testees are hearing the same test of the same thing in exactly the same way.

In short, "we believe in high fidelity but only in a purely non-falsifiable experiential sense." You can talk all you want about your error rates and THD+Ns but all they want to hear about is the "clarity," the "smoothness of the tone," and the "space around the instruments."

And these aren't crazy things to talk about, but insisting that a physical thing, a $300 ethernet cable, can actually create these things in a way that a cheaper one cannot is a kind of fetishism.

They tested the $340 one because they weren't willing to pay for the $1000 "Ethernet audio" cable.

Under normal circumstances a manufacturer would provide a sample for a media outlet. Audiophile gear manufacturers don't do this, for some reason -- reviews in audiophile mags usually seem to come from enthusiasts who've already bought-in, literally.

Keep in mind that the "directional" cables are grounded at only one end, and you can't guarantee that digital and analog will have separate ground paths.

The ones the audiophiles sell don't generally lift the ground on one end; also this is an ethernet cable which means it's electrically isolated, it usually doesn't have a shield and "signal" doesn't flow unidirectionally down it.

It makes sense to lift the ground on an XLR cable because in that case the cable shield is connecting either the audio or chassis grounds on two pieces of gear, but again we don't automatically lift the ground on the sending or receiving side, because it usually depends on wether or not both sides are audio ground, wether the ground is lifted in the box on one end or the other, and where this cable connects relative to where the ground stake is. Ground lifting is something you do once you've built the room, you don't just let the manufacturer do it.

"Also, did you know that WAV (and AIFF, with some minor differences) puts samples into "chunks" of 64k each?"

Um, no. The data chunk of WAV and AIFF files may be page-aligned, it may start on a 4k offset, but the chunk itself is contiguous.

However... From my experience, the leading edge systems have been getting much MUCH better.
Many of the core stuff has been stabilized for years.

Windows 10 still uses the NT based Kernel. Like the previous versions. Most of the drivers are the same as well. The buggy stuff are in the new features, that are often not yet implemented into the prod environment anyways.

The bad old days of the 1990's seem to be over for now. Quality is much better sense then. We can do a lot of things now without much fear of bad consequences.

Just like in the 1990's we stopped having to worry so much about failure in RAM as a major issue, because RAM has became a rather reliable component on the system.

I really wasn't impressed with edge at all. The touch interface is very buggy, pinch zoom and scrolling doesn't work past the first few seconds, in desktop mode. the browser stuff takes up a lot of screen real-estate. And still the lack of plugins such as adblock hinders the web experience.
I still don't see the point on drawing on your web page either.

There could be less demand, If we really had a good handle on the limited time to upgrade for free window.
There are a lot of people who are not in a rush to get windows 10. However this limited time means they might as well upgrade now vs waiting too long and having to pay for it. (Yes I am wide open about Free/Open Source Linux advantages...) But is it that important to give an artificial high demand to make investors thinks people really REALLY want the upgrade. vs just Getting it now for Free, vs waiting later for it.

No one goes on the bleeding edge, often the leading edge for production environments. But it is handy for your personal usage, as well for system testing. As the Leading Edge OS, may become you standard reliable OS.

Which is fine.
I had my Linux for a desktop kick for a while back in the late 1990 and early 2000s
then I was on on Solaris for a while, then Mac OS.
I am actually trailing on a Windows kick, it is getting to a point where I may want to switch a again.

Nothing is wrong with any of these system they have their pluses and minus.
However OS X and Windows, is less struggling for hardware compatibility. Linux seems to be hit or miss, unless you invest a lot of time trying to determine if it is compatible enough, as many of discussions on such hardware fail to state if it works with a distribution or not.

Linux: I tend to prefer when I need to be very productive, When I need to crunch a lot of data. Also it is handy for cases when I need to do something outside the box, as it doesn't dumb down lower level access.

Benchmarks are hard for comparing computing systems already. Design trade-offs are made all the time. As the nature of the software these systems run change over the time, so does the processor design changes to meet these changes. With more software taking advantage of the GPU there may be less effort in making your CPU handle floating points faster, so you can focus more on making integer math faster, or better threading...
2005 compared to 2015...
2005 - Desktop computing was King! Every user needed a Desktop/Laptop computer for basic computing needs.
2015 - Desktop is for business. Mobile system Smart Phones/Tablets are used for basic computing needs, the Desktop is reserved for more serious work.

2005 - Beginning of buzzword "Web 2.0" or the acceptance of JavaScript in browsers. Shortly before that most pages had nearly no JavaScript in they pages, if they were it was more for being a toy, at best data validation in a form. CSS features were also used in a very basic form. Browsers were still having problems with following the standards.
2015 - "Web 2.0" is so ingrained that we don't call it that anymore. Browsers have more or less settled down and started following the open standards, And JavaScript powers a good portion of the pages Display. the the N Tier type of environment it has became a top level User Interface Tier. Even with all the Slashdot upgrade hate. Most of us barely remember. clicking the Reply link, having to load a new page to enter in your text. And then the page would reload when you are done.

2005 - 32 bit was still the norm. Most software was in 32 bit, and you still needed compatibility for 16 bit apps.
2015 - 64 bit is finally here. There is legacy support for 32 bit, but finally 16bit is out.

These changes in how computing is used over the time, means processor design has to reweigh its tradeoffs it choose in previous systems, and move things around. Overall things are getting faster, but any one feature may not see an improvement or it may even regress.

Of course something can be done. But it's politically incorrect to do so. The most violent gangs are thick with illegal aliens from Central America. The leftier side of US politics really wants to be able to take legal Latino votes for granted. So they angle for policies that do everything possible to avoid ruffling feathers in that area ... including giving sanctuary to people who end up being enforcers for MS13, etc.

To deal with gangs like that, you have to actually arrest people and then once they're in prison, actually keep them there. We don't do nearly enough of that - the revolving door has those guys right back in action after short terms, and their habits of recruiting minors for a lot of their dirty work means little or no jail time for a big part of their operations. If they're deported, they just show right back up because we have a completely porous, unenforced border. That's only true because the federal government isn't bothering to do one of its main missions (controlling the border), and that is a 100% political problem. The existence and violent toxicity of powerful, organized, nation-wide gangs (like MS13) in the US is then left to local law enforcement to deal with.

So yes, when they move to deal with a place known to be protected by a bunch of MS13 soldiers, you better believe they want to show up with heavy equipment. Would you bring a nightstick to arrest a bunch of MS13 enforcers who consider killing police officers, cartel-style, to be a sport and a point of pride?

But none of that has to happen. Controlling the border and not tolerating tens of millions of illegals in a shadowy cash economy rife with internal, organized crime - it's a matter of political will. But because there are politicians who are too timid to talk plainly about it, and who would rather play identity politics in a craven hunt for votes, we have a system that perpetuates rather than addresses the problem. And the local cops get to risk their necks as a result. If I were in that line of work, yeah, I'd want an armored car when serving warrants, too.

>> If there is a market for people who do not want such there will be cars available without such.

Not at all. In the US at least, government legislation, special interest groups like MADD and billions spent in advertising/brainwashing easily trump anything that goes against any mass-market convention, whatever it is.

>> Other than that, try to keep up.
Maybe its actually you that needs to try to not be a dick.

There are other issues that you are insured for as well. Such as Window damage, chances are they can cover flat tires, and issues that may occur due to less then stellar maintenance. As less people will be directly driving the cars, they may not notice issues in performance as well.