Am I the only one that thinks things have gotten a bit hyperbolic. I hear a lot of non technical people talking about how "bad" the architecture is.

This is a new product and has more users a few weeks in then most of the big boys had in over a year.

We are not selling a iPhone or a plane ticket here. This is a complex infrastructure with lots of back end interactions. The front end is fairly modern. They haven't gotten around to minimizing and consolidating the JS files, but that will come I'm sure.

I've gotten through the sign up process, they added some stuff to do some ad-hoc shopping. I've seen much more dragging of feet by supposed enterprise players. What are we 20 days into this enormous platform? Most of the people complaining don't even need the damn thing because they already have insurance.

At the end of the day the exchanges are not even selling insurance. Insurance companies are doing that. It's like using googles shopping feature. Ultimately the insurance company is Amazon.com. If you need the insurance you'll go directly to the person selling it. Hell we probably should have started with the exchanges being nothing more than a fancy craigslist.

People who need insurance because they are sick or scared will get it. They will get the subsidies etc. The vast majority of these so called "healthy young" are just declining insurance through there employers. They just have to fill out a bunch of paper work with their HR department.

At the end of the day healthcare.gov is something to help people get insurance. The subsides and the new rules are what will get it for them.

"Since Microsoft has a very vague idea of what users want" ... BS

Do you own a truck? If you don't and don't want one you wouldn't tell Ford and Ram(Dodge) what they should put in their trucks.

Excel is the Grep\AWK\Sed of the enterprise\business world. Not all of it, but a large percentage. The fact of the matter is there is a whole lot in your life that was built with the assistance of Word, Excel, and hell even PowerPoint. You think the construction company that built the building your in uses VIM to manage there shit.

Slashdot in general does not get this. I'm sure there are plenty of desktop support guys on here who do. Google docs is great an I use them all the time, but it's a tinker toy to some of the more advanced features in Excel that most people haven't even heard of.

Throw together a pivot table with a slicer and then see me in the morning. Take a look at stock symbol DATA for tableu...there is a world outside of compilers, web servers, and VIM people.

You can't tell me you haven't heard a iPad guy tell you he wishes he had Excel on there.

MS has done okay with the XBox. I think the phone and tablet is a catch 22 for them. If they don't do it people will wonder why. If they do people will wonder why.

I wouldn't be surprised if UPS would be interested. Trucker gets tired just hand off. No more potty breaks etc.

I'm interested in the security and reliability of the connection. Cloud cover, overpasses, etc etc. Although I suppose you could combine a little auto driving in there like auto breaking and dealing with being cutoff. I don't think you could react fast enough remotely...plus if you wrecked the impact is less for you so you might get lazy.

I know we all hate MS here, but doesn't it worry you that you can't have a product name with the word Sky in it.

I mean if MS renamed themselves to SkySoft or something maybe...and even then...

Seems like we just gave this company a bunch of free publicity that wasn't actually being harmed. Was anyone confused by the names?

Have they been asked? Do they keep a copy?

Regardless of your political leanings this is a job that the private sector could handle way way better. It is super hard to create a good software shop...let alone being the military.

We use paycor and we have good to great IT in general. We could program a pay app, but why the hell would we? Is pay schedule really that complicated....if it is why not simplify it...a great opportunity for reform.

from you, but not from the masses

CNBC asked a bunch of kids if they wanted glasses or least wanted to try them. Some CNET guy was there.

All the little kiddies raised there hands. Then told it was 1500 bucks they lowered them.

I think cost is its biggest problem. Everyone who sees the videos thinks it is cool..everyone will use them why they drive or walk around town. They will probably take them off when they sit down at the bar.

Seems like an easier data set to parse and a bit more truthful. You can tweet how happy you are, but at the end of the day your taking pills for depression your are not(of course excluding certain medical conditions). L.A. and other areas might be exposed for people seeming to be happy, but ultimately not.

would a secondary dedicated IP stack work. Hardware wise could we tell the CPU that a byte or range is where stack is and fault if its written twice...write once or clear.

Are we ever going to fix the real issue? You generally use one to start horking the stack and then get the CPU to jump to some address. Then these protections come into play.

I get the feeling people have just given up versus trying to change compilers and hardware to protect the stack. I should be able to keep writing into an unprotected char array and never come close to some instruction pointer shouldn't I. Is it too much to demand?

So the tech note mentions that this is only accessible from a small subset of ips...WHAT IPS!!!!!!

At least it doesn't sound like a zero day so we have time to get it patched. Since we block the management ips from our firewall it sounds like this would only effect attacks from within your network.

Why exactly do we need applets on joe smoe's machine? If your a corporation enable it.

It would be great if all browser had a whitelist of domains that you tag a site for any of this stuff. Yes youtube can play flash, other sites not. Advertisers will just use animated gif\javascript or whatever.

Sure there is this plugin and that to accomplish this...time for FF, Chrome, and IE to build this stuff in and make it off by default and super simple to address. Of course you've got grandma on IE 6/7/8, but even then MS could put out a patch that just turns off applets. The next time IE starts up it ask the user. Group policy would override.

What a developer thinks, but not what managers who actually sees the forest through the trees think.

The guy who knows what he is going off and does his thing. No one meets or talk. Developers later finds out someone else was doing the same thing or solved the same problem.

Meetings can increase productivity if they have a point, use some kind of software to manage work originating from (like Trello), and have general rules.

You can take my daily standup meeting from my cold dead hands.

Bad meetings are just that. It's like people who hate government not being good at running a government. Since you demise them so much you probably go in with a super negative attitude about them. You doom yourself and your team to fail. I've seen meeting make measurable improvement, watch the meeting stop happening because of it, and then watch it revert, rinse repeat...not a horrible approach at the end of the day. Syssies with developers, developers with qa, etc. etc.

Productivity claims are just people bitchin...and a lot of it has to do with the simplicity of the product, users, and other measurements. You go into companies with lots of complexity, legacy overhead, needy clients, and you'll end up with low productivity.

And oh yah, don't capitalize meetings. It only shows your immaturity. Claiming that other people don't know what they are doing and that you do is also pretty cocky...I'm sure you know everything right? Come on slashdot stop being so reactionary.

Marketing is the only group that are bigger divas then developers these days. Relax your not nearly as smart as you think you are...you are just used to people telling you are because you like math.

I want this patched, but I'm very curious as to how this really compromises anything.

I can see how it can affect virtual keyboards. Who exactly is this market? People using IE and using Virtual keyboards for security reasons? Can we have a slashdot poll of virtual keyboards users and there favorite browser.

It says these ad sites are using the data. What exactly does this give them...maybe the fact that I click the start button at 10:01 A.M. every day? Otherwise it is just random X,Y coords without knowing what app has focus.