As another poster pointed out, it is perfectly viable for a literate - or just sensible - individual to not use an antivirus. For more than 20 years, and for various reasons (monetary, but also relating to general hassle), I have been running my family's Windows computers without any AV save for MSE in the last few years. I have yet to have any significant problems in doing so. My parents, my wife and my son (although he just uses and iPad now) are perhaps unusual in not surfing pr0n or not clicking links on emails that tell them to re-set passwords, etc. Gmail is pretty good at filtering out these in any case.

When I've mentioned this to others, it's a bit like saying you don't eat breakfast. The reaction is variously like I've broken some taboo, or that I'm risking the health of the Internet by allowing malware to botnet my machines to hell (which they aren't BTW, since I do the occasional scan using a LiveCD from time to time).

Copyright was a very minor factor in Microsoft's exclusion of effective competition and suppression of any real innovation in software design.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that comparisons to the Holocaust and world wars are in fact quite appropriate when discussing the magnitude of what Microsoft did to the history of computing, and by extension to human history overall.

The reason for this is simple. The effect of the Microsoft monopoly lasted so long and was so stultifying that it meant we will never know what a different word processor might be like. We will never know if spreadsheets or email might be more usable or efficient. We will never know (at least not in our lifetime) what an operating system or software might be like that doesn't use the conventions laid down by a company that had no incentive to make anything better, no need to design anything more than barely adequate, or to listen to its customers. Yet all these things are of fundamental importance to our lives - far, far too important to have suffered under a brutal, money-grubbing monopoly.

Despite (very) small innovations, Apple was not and is not a counter-balance because they were forced to ape the conventions that the Microsoft juggernaut had laid down with it's 95% market share. Jobs knew as well as anyone that it would be suicide to create anything that the market place was not already at least partially familiar with.

In the final analysis, the Microsoft era was a massive failure of free market capitalism that left us all driving Trabants while thinking they were the best that we could have. The blame lies of course with politicians and industry regulators who had no clue what an immense influence personal computing would have on society until it was too late. But it is too late. The die has been cast for personal computing for generations to come, and that is an utter and maddening tragedy for all of us.

The issue is of course far bigger than just one man, but holy mother of god do I hate what Bill Gates did to all of us.

Nice to see my mum's allotment garden on /. :-)

Use the Slashdot poll for something useful for a once.

Looks like Beta has hidden the comments on the polls. Coincidence?

Joking apart, putting up a list of features to vote on will just be chaotic. Better to put a list of high-level principles up first. For example:

1. Slashdot is about commenting on stories.
2. Slashdot is about finding out about new stuff in tech
3. Slashdot is about creating a community of like-minded people

etc.

Which one of those gets the most votes sets the direction for any re-design. Discreet functions like "mod up" or "quote OP" would just wear everyone down I think.

"My companies websites (Insurance) have an IE share of about 40%."

I concur. W3Schools is completely unrepresentative of a normal web demographic and I never know why people take their reports seriously. I worked for 5 years at a multi-national online travel agent operating in 48 countries. I posted some stats on our browser usage about 18 months ago as part of a similar rant about some loons called StatCounter claiming that Chrome was now the majority browser in the UK. There is no way in hell that IE has declined over 40% since then:

http://webtorque.org/?p=1802

(BTW the differences between China and India on weekends is quite striking though)

"You are confusing features with capabilities. The problem with features is mostly about complexity and interface."

No, you're confusing good UI design with bad UI design. That's a different thing to what I'm talking about because in your example features can be rendered easy or hard to use by the way they are designed into the interface. Put it another way, you can have great features poorly executed, or poor features well executed - and in both cases the outcome is fail. Features are neutral until executed (AKA designed).

Instead, what I'm talking about is the knee-jerk reaction of product managers (as opposed to designers) who immediately start listing "better features" in order to compete with a rival. They don't realise that what they need to do instead is list customer needs, then come up with features from there. That's much harder to do of course. Who cares if I have 1080p video if I don't need to record any video?

"detect speed, altitude, temperature, light and position. It has built-in GPS, Bluetooth 4.0 and a microphone. ..."

OK. It'll fail.

When will product managers understand that trying to compete by stuffing features into products does not a better product make? Has the tech design industry learnt *nothing* from the likes of Apple?

When Google's "inferior" product completely crushes them, I bet these idiots will be crying to their mystified managers that they didn't "market" it hard enough.

Muppets.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senkaku_Islands:

"The island group consists of five uninhabited islets and three barren rocks."

In other words, purely symbolic and having no real impact on anyone. These ain't no Falkland Islands.

Far east Asian foreign policy is even more about playing off internal factions than it is in the West. I bet this is just a case of the Chinese making nasty noises in the hope that a) somebody will be placated, and b) Japan will know this and just play along until things die down.

The chances of nukes and bang bangs over this are very, very low. See also North Korea.

It is true that they may now start to resort to tactics that were not imaginable just a few years ago, ...

The sooner you realise that your attitude to a minuscule terrorist threat is actually the problem here, the better.

I would suggest you are suffering from a form of mental illness similar to that of obsessive compulsives who refuse to touch door handles for fear of picking up "germs". You cannot see the obvious facts for what they are: there is no significant threat from terrorism, and there never was one. The fact that you are willing to drive around in cars, or ride on the subway when a) there is a far higher risk of you dying from non-terrorist causes doing that (and pretty preventable causes too, given TSA-like funding) and b) terrorists could just as easily attack those as well, is plainly deluded when the price you pay in return for "safety" on a plane is so utterly disproportionate.

The sheer Owellian nature of what is going on in the minds of Americans like you is amazing. Land of the free? Don't make me laugh.

This is worth a read:

http://newint.org/features/2012/04/01/bill-gates-charitable-giving-ethics/

TL;DR

Gates's and others' philanthropy prolongs poverty by sowing as it does the seed of more inequality (in Gates's case, through the formation of health policies in the third world that make it easier for Western drug companies to open up markets for treatments there). They give away the fruit, but never the trees.

As Oscar Wilde observed of the philanthropists of his era: ‘They seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see in poverty, but their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.’ Then and now, as Wilde said, ‘the proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible.’

This is really the question that needs to be addressed: why is poverty still possible - and why can it even get worse - after 200 years of Gates's capitalism? Surely by now if capitalism was the answer, we'd not be where we are today.

As a developer, would you like to deal with this reality? If not, let a designer do it because what you regard as "useless" is part of the raw material of improvement for them - they are paid to make sense of "make it better".

I would wager there are not enough hours in the day to research and interpret user needs AND write code. Designers are there for a reason (and if they're not researching, observing and interpreting, then they are shit). Whenever developers ask me to get them more involved with the people who will use their software, I always warn them to be careful what they wish for. But they usually only turn up to the first couple of research sessions :-(

Hi - I'm a designer. What you describe is a property of computer interaction called "feedback." In principle (and design principles are important), you should always try to provide feedback to any input, regardless of whether that input is "useful" to the user or not. It means the machine is paying attention. That you have observed an unexpected input is a nice discovery. If you want, you too can build an entire career on doing this - because that's what I've done, and now I'm generally too busy and wealthy to read /. any more. But this story caught my eye.

From the article: "Vortex isn't available publicly or even in a closed beta form..."

As vapourwear goes, it would seem rather vapid then.