Damn... if only we had some sort of device that could perform tremendously complex real-time calculations - thousands, or maybe even millions of them per second. Then they might... just might... have a shot at pulling this off.

This is a form of camouflage known as "dazzle", and it's designed to break up the shape of the object rather than necessarily hiding it from view.

Where have you been? GM is too big to fail.

He said a car, not a golf cart.

In both cases, you're citing specific Windows Update bugs, which is rather different than "Windows slowing down with age".

My primary Windows 7 development machine is still on it's original installation from four years ago and is just as snappy as ever. And it's been like this with all my machines every since I switched to the NT line starting with Windows 2000. What do you think would make my systems magically immune from the apparently inevitable slowdown you think is destined to occur?

My guess? Look at the crap people have in their system tray. All those knick-knacks are services that are consuming systems resources all the time, and it's astounding how much cruft some people tend to accumulate on their PCs over time. Unless you're fairly vigilant about keeping these off your system, it's only natural that performance is going to degrade over time. If you're on a PC with only a minimal amount of memory, all these knick-knacks may push a system over the edge to the point where memory thrashing becomes more frequent, which obviously would have a huge impact on performance.

Naturally, a reformat and reinstall is going to "fix" all these issues, in the same way that burning your house down and rebuilding it will "clean" your bathroom.

Vista was disliked because it performed poorly on mediocre hardware - which is, quite frankly, what most people have. The changed driver model meant poorer initial hardware support. Microsoft didn't help matters by grossly exaggerating the "minimum requirements", which were a joke, and even the "recommended requirements" probably should have been the "minimum".

Win8 was disliked because Microsoft removed a comfortable, familiar interface and replaced it with a UI that was optimized for a touch-screen, which again, most people don't actually have or use when they buy a *desktop* operating system. No one complained about the technical aspects of Windows 8, which were actually quite excellent. It's a shame MS hid it behind an abomination of a UI. It looks like they're correcting that in Windows 10, fortunately, even though they're keeping the ugly aesthetics.

Fragmentation typically isn't an issue anymore because Windows will defrag its own drives daily by default. Fragmentation is also irrelevant if you've got an SSD, which I'd hope most people have for their primary drive nowadays. Your registry only grows indefinitely if you're constantly adding new software AND it doesn't clean up after itself properly, something that's a bit less common than it used to now that most programs use the standard Windows Installer libraries.

Microsoft Windows runtime requirements actually haven't increased significantly since Microsoft Vista, which was a *big* jump in hardware requirements (and they significantly understated the minimum requirements as well). MS has actually done a good job at keeping the runtime requirements fairly constant the last few releases, because we haven't seen the constant increase in CPU hardware speed like we used to. If you've got a machine that ran Vista reasonably well, it will probably run Windows 10 as well.

The second issue looks more reasonable to me, as I've seen this happen with terrible AV products and underpowered machines at work before as well. Frankly, the scans should NOT be taking place during the day, as long as people's machines are left on and connected. The whole drive encryption is likely not the issue, as that has much lower overhead than most people expect - it's the security software constantly thrashing the hard drive. If you get two competing programs trying to access the hard drive, access tends to slow down exponentially, because the drive head now has to constantly swap between two different points on the drive to service multiple requests. IT is correct in that SSDs would make a huge difference here, as they don't have this issue.

Those hundreds of MB of security patches are just the same binaries that already exist on your system, simply modified and re-compiled to patch security vulnerabilities. They don't appreciably change the runtime requirement of the OS. The *disk space* requirements ARE affected, but only because Windows retains the older copies of the systems files via it's "snapshot" system so you can roll back if needed. Keep in mind that this has NO effect on the runtime requirements of the OS.

Heh, you don't have to tell me how painful short falls can be, as I've also had my own rather nasty injury at a very close proximity to the ground (albeit down a couple of steps).

The point is that that anything *above* a few meters - which is where you're likely to be flying the vast majority of the time - should be much safer, since the parachute should deploy at those higher altitudes. We'll have to see what the safety limit actually is in practice, but again, this is like seatbelts and airbags for cars. They're not going to save everyone, but it's a hell of a lot better than not having them.

They're opposing the building of a modern institution of science and learning for the sake of "sacred land". I can't think of a better way to describe this than "ignorance". Or, they could admit this is a political issue of the separatist movement, and not really a cultural one.

The Hawaiians had their nation stolen from them about five generations ago. US citizens overthrew the Hawaiian constitutional monarchy, then the US annexed the territory. I feel bad about, and even the US government has apologized at this point. Yes, I have some sympathy with those who feel disaffected because of this, but after five generations... sorry, we're not going to hand the state back to the native Hawaiians.

Just watched the video, and Martin reps are claiming the parachute system will start functioning in just a few meters. As Ellis mentioned below, this obviously must mean they're ejecting and inflating the parachute via some sort of mortar, and as such, it probably starts working almost instantly.

I wouldn't be surprised if the parachute was automatically triggered, as it's pretty simple to detect freefall acceleration or a catastrophic engine failure, although this is just my sceculation. So, in this case, human reaction time is also not a factor, which would be significant at low flight levels.

Also, that thing can fly at 1km in the air and ascend faster than a typical helicopter. It's actually more of a personal VTOL aircraft than a jetpack IMO.

Sorry, I need to correct myself. I typed "turbofan", which is not what the summary or article said. A turbofan is a type of jet, of course, but I believe these are simply using normal ducted fans. So I guess it's not actually a jet, strictly speaking.

I think it's a lot more accurate to call this a single-person VTOL aircraft than a "jetpack", but that doesn't sound nearly as sexy I guess.

It's a little sad to see people fighting so hard for the cause of ignorance... not that it's so rare, I guess. It's almost more depressing if you consider that some of them are probably sincere, instead of simply wanting either payola or publicity.

Design by committee often fails, in my experience, if you have a group of equals on the committee and no one is empowered to make the final decision, or is not willing to make the final decision when it needs to be made.

In this sort of programming environment, I'd think it would be critical to have at least one person with the authority to make a final decision on any matters of disagreement or contention - likely the senior programmer when it comes to technical issues, or the feature/product owner when it comes to decisions related to functionality. Likewise, when part of a group dynamic, members need to learn the skill of knowing which battles are important enough to fight, and when it's best to just shrug and disagree. Otherwise, nothing would ever get done.

Keep in mind that human beings are pretty good at creating a shared mental context of their conversation, and programmers would also have a lot of shared knowledge, both of the problem at hand as well as more generalized knowledge that most programmers (should) know.

For instance, if I said "We should use a proxy object here to create a streamlined interface and minimize coupling between these various systems"... how much information did that convey? If you're a programmer, that probably said a quite a bit in a very few words, because you understand a deeper meaning behind all those words.

I guess you can consider shared knowledge to be a highly effective form of compression for personally-transmitted information (spoken communication is only part of it, remember).