No need to get personal.

FYI you actually slow performance down when you turn off aero and other 3d effects due to the fact that GPUs accelerate the load off the cpu. :-)

Going flat uses the exact same GPU in Windows 8 as it is accelerated anyway so you use all those precious cpu cycles to emulate the early 1990's. No gain what so ever.

Yes in 1984 the mac was slow due to graphics but our computers are literally 180,000 more powerful (not even counting the cpu). The mac had 1 mips. An i7 has 130,000 of them! It just doesn't make sense that even your cell phone can do gpu acceleration effects with full color without draining battery at all in good old 2015.

Because they are stupid and gullable who believe anything Rush or Fox has to say.

It is called lobbying and psychological manipulation. Use scary words like Obama, socialism, communism, take over, abuse of power, and their blood starts to pump and they ignore all rational at this stage and get into emotion.

Hey Hairy if this drives you crazy you got to take a look at the new Windows 10 screenshot icons? All 8 color galore in these pics. :-)

Take a look at these low color icon beauties.

The art professors I am sure who teach this UI stuff to future designers are drooling already.

Hey it beats adding leather to the addressbook in skuemorphic design right? You all whined and complained. Well you got it.

Even when it involves being jerks, Americans think they're unique. ;)

Yeah, that's not the problem. The problem is that people fell for that line in the first place.

Aren't bitcoins, between the drop in value and the ASIC enthusiasts, at the point where clandestine CPU mining is close to pointless? I realize that free as in stolen has its virtues; but it likely wasn't free to get their shitware, rather than somebody else's, bundled with utorrent, so I'm surprised that it was worth it.

The init system handles the initial startup of a linux os. It's been acknowledged for some time that it has some limitations, especially in terms of threading and dependency management but for the server world that's usually not that big a deal since the primary users are technical specialists who are comfortable mucking around with that sort of thing. For desktops and mobile devices though those are more serious concerns because they impact user experience and many users don't have the skills to modify things themselves. Systemd is a replacement for init.

Kinda sorta. You missed the fact that init itself is also a process manager. In that it's responsible for starting and stopping processes based on runlevels. (Yes, init can start and stop processes on runlevels)

There's a nasty hack called SysVInit that adds a bunch of shell scripts to init in order to try to replicate the functionality of init. This is done because instead of fixing init's fundamental flaw, people decided to hack a workaround and create a lamer version of a process manager and its hacks. The flaw? Init relies on /etc/inittab for all its process management information needs. One file makes it extremely non-trivial to add and remove services from it programmatically.

It's why we have to deal with daemons that monitor other daemons that restart daemons should they quit (something init does quite well - even handling cases where a daemon restarts too quickly by pausing it so it doesn't hog system resources).

And on another note, we have userspace versions of init that manage user processes on login. The desktop/mobile use cases often have per-user applications that startup and run in the background for the user, and need to be managed on a per-user basis.

So in the end, we end up with the system master process manager, init, a set of hacks and shell scripts to try to emulate it (SysVInit), and one for individual users who wish to have personal services run. Because it's more unix-y to hack three different tools that do almost the same thing, but each with their own limitations and idiosyncrasies rather than one tool to do the job well.

Technology is increasingly removing our ability to make mistakes and move on with our lives. That is a hellish future.

This.

And it's actually occurring today because the internet doesn't forget. This has never happened before in human history - sure people can write stuff down to preserve it, but they retain the ability to self-edit, hence why history belongs to the victors.

But now, all your online activities are recorded pretty much permanently for everyone to see (sorry, privacy policies or settings just encourage people to spill the beans). People have lost jobs over stuff they posted on Facebook, by trolling others, and other stuff.

Forget government surveillance making everyone "do good". Simply having the inability to edit your history (because doing so can cause it to go viral) means everyone is forced to "do good" all the time. One fuckup and quite possibly you've screwed yourself.

Even worse, while we hope people would discount transgressions made decades ago, dates are often missing or hard to find. That one time you made a bad decision will haunt you down the road because even though it happened 20 years ago, no one put a date on it so it appears just as recent as it did 20 years ago. No one can tell without the hidden or missing timestamp.

Hell, kids are getting caught up in it too - where once we let kids be kids, they can't be kids if what they did when they're 5 will be recorded and exposed when they're 18.

Get off your butts. Instead of whining on a forum spend the next 2 minutes of your life emailing your representative for the American slashdotter.

Remember these legislators only hear and get their information from lobbyists and pacs.

Tell them it is not acceptable to have a monopoly cut off your Netflix. If your representative has an R tell him or her that there is no free market and it harms innovation and our economy as a result. If he or she has a D explain monopolistic powers and pacs are writing rules.

Yes they check with their staff all day. If they get a surge of angry citizens they will notice. Remember the law to ban opensource and force drm? I posted that link and the bill died. We can change this if we act together. Religious right did this and won. It's time geeks do the same

I'll be interested to see how this works out for them: Architecturally, MS is reasonably well placed to pull it off(to the degree that it is possible, no common language runtime is going to make a 40GB XBone game run on a low end Lumia phone); they can presumably produce whatever set of software services and shims a PC of sufficient power needs to run an Xbox game, given that this generation's xbox is mostly a PC and MS wrote the software on it; and their CLR is available across x86 and ARM, for programs that don't end up indirectly depending on some native binary.

What is less clear, and will be a matter for both MS and the people they hope will be writing 'universal' software, is how well 'cross platform' is going to work between platforms with different UI characteristics. An xbox and a PC with an xbox controller plugged in? Yeah, sure, no problem(though the compromises made to ensure snappy frame rates on the xbox might not look so hot on the PC, sitting closer to the screen). Meaningful interaction with a smartphone, though, will demand developer commitment on par with that that Nintendo needs to secure when trying to convince people to use the WiiU's weird little quasi-tablet controller thing. Will they bother? Will they half-ass something in order to get MS to pat them on the back and feature their game in some prominent location for a couple of weeks? Will they ignore it?

True. At this point, I say 'Welcome aboard!' to any of them who decide that maybe trying science would be cool after all; but it's not even worth the effort to try to convert through additional evidence.

I just wish that there were more who were willing to be honest about it: "I'm a 6-day young earth creationist because I'm interested in faith, not empiricism." isn't my cup of tea; but I'm not interested in fighting with you about it. "No, no, empirical evidence actually proves creationism and a young earth for reasons wholly aside from my interest in it doing so!!!" effectively assures arbitrary amounts of bullshit, intellectual dishonesty, and atrociously bad science standards. Not Good.

That is likely fair; though I would be curious to know if construction of the system would have been delayed by some years or decades if it turned out to be useless for those purposes: GPS is much more elegant and powerful, as well as useful for timekeeping and available more or less worldwide; but there were various RDF/ADF systems in use in specific areas at least as far back as WWII, and something like the LORAN system was comparatively mature and, being all ground based, cheap, before the first GPS satellite ever launched.

Sooner or later something GPS-like would almost certainly have become either cheap or compelling enough to be put into place (if the mind-blowing money pit that was the Iridium constellation before it was sold at bankruptcy to the present operators could be rationalized, GPS certainly could); but if it didn't offer something compelling to munitions and missiles I would not have been surprised if ships and troops and civilian applications had been allowed to handle themselves with existing radio beacon technologies and other inferior-but-available options for years, maybe a decade or two, longer.

Complete line isn't good enough: I'll need two fossils and the sex tape before I agree that a gap in ancestry has been filled.