AKA "silent mode" installs that people who actually know anything about Windows have been using for automated installs for almost as long as Linux has existed. MSFT was already providing apps/CLIs like dism for their own packages.

The amount of feedback isn't surprising, but I would be surprised if anyone in the Redmond bubble ever made any changes (even slight) in response to any of that feedback. By the time they have a public release they're too far along in their big-company release process to accomodate changes.

I certainly agree that a redesign isn't a smoking gun. This does have the potential to also work against the public's best interest. E.g., an engineer could propose a change to improve reliability of a part or that might potentially increase safety. Management then refuses the change because someone else might later "discover" the change and use it in litigation against the company as "proof" that it was a known defect.

All he did was notice a change in parts, ie, the outcome of an Delphi engineer's actual discovery. Not at all news or noteworthy. It would have been if Delphi hadn't already fixed it and he did the initial discovery.

MSFT must agree Win 8 is shit, which is why its support is ending in just 2 years in January 2016. The preinstall aspect must explain why its market share grew despite the pending doom.

This is being handled differently than Vista SP1, which was really a disguised upgrade of Vista to Server 2008's codebase but it didn't involve an actual heavyweight OS upgrade & software reinstall (which seems to be the case for going from Win 8 to 8.1).

There's the proverb about not attributing to maliciousness that which can be explained by stupidity.

VMware (also an EMC subsidiary) used an RSA implementation for their SSO product. It had a ton of problems and bugs, and each new patch release introduced more bugs. Applying pressure to RSA via EMC didn't help, so VMware ripped out the RSA implementation with a band new in-house implementation.

There's a big difference between Windows where problems are a corner case, vs. Linux where success is a corner case. But the point still remains that I've used sleep and hibernate on most of my Windows machines without really fearing problems or data loss (I'll still save any progress before initiating it, though thanks to Office 97 I'm in the habit of saving regularly regardless), but I can't think of even bothering to try such a thing on Linux (nor can even of the people I know who love Linux enough to actually enjoy updating to a new distro every few months/years). I probably won't even think of trying to use sleep or hibernate on a Linux box until I see that the Linux kernel has developed drivers models that have some hint of being designed with power management in mind. Heck even the PCI driver model in Linux doesn't fit the spec well. Most Linux drivers I've had to deal with need to mess with the device's PCI configuration space themselves, whereas on Windows that's pretty rare because it's usually handled by the core kernel (which was the intent of the PCI spec based on how it's written).

Power Management has worked well on Windows for 15+ years. I'm still waiting for Linux's first year, so problem on Linux are with the kernel and/or the drivers.

As the posts there point out that only works if you're still in range of the old network. It's a pain to have to remember to forget a network each time I check out of a hotel, nor do I want to have to reset all settings and reteach the phone about the networks I do want it to use.

I've wanted the ability to tell my iPhone to forget old networks so it doesn't waste time and power sending probe frames trying to provoke any hidden access points/SSIDs to advertise themselves. The security concern raised by this article is yet another.

The Hollywood Entertainment Museum had a ST:TNG set (and Cheers bar) so I'm left wondering which set that was unless it was reconstructed from the destroyed remnants.

Don't require someone to be a compiler or makefile or package expert to "install" an app, get X to perform decently on a heavily loaded system, get power management/sleep/hibernate to perform decently/reliably, and don't make it a pain to do basic configuration changes like change screen resolution. Also stop thinking that having so many distros doing things in different ways is a good idea. I prefer MSFT's one set of rules over the chaos and disorganization of Linux.

This is only noteworthy or nonobvious if you only have a basic understanding of computers. RTP allowed extension headers, and IPv4 does as well so you could embed extra data for almost any type of traffic on the Internet.

WoL doesn't have to a specific packet. On Windows you have a choice between a magic packet (which is special), or just allowing the system to wake on any ARP or IP packet that's sent to the system's IP address. What was added in Windows 7 was a way for NICs to respond to ARP, ping, NDP while the system is in low power so the system doesn't wake for these. Seems like MSFT research should have factored this into their, um, "research".

The other thing they added was that waking on ARP/IP has historically been designed around using a sequence of bits and a mask as a filter to decide which frames should wake the system. This approach was changed so that more generic concepts like "TCP SYN" can be used to match packets. The difference is that you need multiple filters to handle TCP frames that use different extension lengths, while the latter approach only needs one.