If so, it is usually securely stowed in Stallman's beard, but can suddenly come loose when he gets agitated.

-Oliver

The biggest threat to Windows RT / Windows 8 is Microsoft's recent destruction of developer (that is, the money people at dev houses) confidence in Microsoft's ability to "lead" any kind of technology drive.

I got my Windows Phone 7 phone because I could return it just in time for the phone I wanted. It took me by surprise and I got quite attached to it. You have to unlearn some bad habbits from years of working with UIs that came from keyboard and mouse toting designers. And then, Oh My Gosh.

My big issue was lack of any apps: People seemed reticent to jump into this untested pool. It turns out, developers target Windows because of the userbase and not because they think Microsoft employees poop magical and adorable APIs that are so cute, cuddly and just outright gorgeous that you just HAVE to develop with them.

WP7 had no userbase and no cross-over beyond ... well beyond that it uses technologies that Microsoft had recently kinda poo-poohed like .NET. So yes! If you just blew a billion dollars on .NET, come to WP7 because that's about all it's useful for.

Developers started to hear Metro was influencing Windows 8, and there was a brief spike in app ports to WP7. There's a Garmin app, Yelp, and a handful of others.

Then W8/Windows RT were announced in a sort of arm flurrying of "don't worry about the money you've invested in what's on the market now because Windows 8 will make lots of money with all the new tech it's going to introduce". Because, yes, "new tech" doesn't impart the sense that OMG YOU'RE SAYING OUR WP7/METRO INVESTMENT IS A DEAD END?

So very few apps have matured into real Metro apps and the WP7 experience isn't everything it could be because the app store is just ... crappy.

Windows 8 - and thus Windows RT - is very risky looking waters. I know it's not important in the grand scheme of things, but imagine a million bucks in your pocket, a pen in your hand ready to sign it off and ... tell me that Microsoft -- MICROSOFT! -- futzing the name of their flagship UI redesign doesn't scream "EYES NOT ON THE BALL" as you evaluate the risks of committing resources to dedicated Windows-8-UI tech and development rather than simply making sure your existing userbase and Windows 8 adopters will be able to run app smoothly on the desktop...

IMHO: Windows 8 is the Vista/ME of this particular Windows phase-shift. And that's cool, but as it applies to phone/tablet, the OS immediately preceding it ALSO happens to be a Vista/ME.

Uhm, some of the headers had opening comments with dates that would require a negative value unix time...

http://web.opennet.ru/docs/FAQ/network/Mail/mmdf-faq.html

... (but can't afford $90 for Win 7 Home?)

1. [Re-]install the OS that came with your laptop - you already paid Microsoft once (both games run under Vista/XP)
2. Microsoft Security Essentials and Malware Bytes together are an excellent way to protect against malware etc,

But more importantly

"the kids have [...] their Nintendos, PS2/3's and mobile phones"

yet your kids have to forego traditional PC gaming or suck it up on a crappy laptop because you """"can't afford"""" to give them a reasonable gaming PC?

Yes - reasonable gaming PC means Windows, not Wine. Suck it up cupcake. By all means, I encourage you to be angry about the matter and get to work on sponsoring/contributing to the Wine project, etc - but right now - they are NOT viable alternatives and those are your kids. If they turn out to be interested in programming/etc, then later on you can start holding the carrot of bigger/better gaming hardware for Linux boxes if they want to get involved in those projects. But for now - they just wanna play games, and that means a decent PC running some version of the MS OS. Quit trying to be a technohippie and let them play.

... and risk damaging my belief they use ice-pops.

-Oliver

What is your expectation of how the drives will begin to fail - are you expecting bulk simultaneous failures or are you expecting to get plenty of degradation warning before you start to see failures?

I think that that is usually to avoid the same batch to avoid physical manufacturing defects. When you're dealing with corporate/industrial grade drives, you want the drives to be as similar to each other as possible.

SSDs and Spindle drives have finite life spans for very different reasons; and the reasons behind SSD lifespan seem like they would make matching a con rather than a pro.

I was in the last year not to have comp sci courses at our schools in Grimsby: 1987. I had to go out on a limb to get any formal computer courses by signing up for "adult education" at the local college. Our lecturer turned out to be a former oil-tanker pilot with no desire to answer the question "what programming experience do you have?" other than "I was an oil-tanker pilot".

We were taught that basic was a high level language that was the mainstay of business programming; that assembly language, like machine code, was being phased out; "C" outright didn't exist; it was physically impossible to connect two computers together.

So when he flat out refused to grade my programming project - I gave him the option of either a multi-player BattleShips or the BBC Basic terminal app that allowed the other player to participate, both of which were written, tested and documented - I decided not to take the exam.

-Oliver

The links in the article are a bit ... odd

http :// www.taodyne.com.nyud.net / shop / en / blog / 42-showing-rss-feeds-in-3d

Whereas taodyne actually have their own site, www.taodyne.com/

200,000 measly lines of code?

Having done a lot of code maintenance - including Y2K certification of the "MMDF" code base (first comments/headers would have negative unix timestamps) - he needs to start by learning about code beautifiers and finding a style he finds easy to read.

Then, personally, I try to storyline the code. Some times, more creatively than others but those are extreme cases.

I almost want to call Time Warner Cable and offer the same zero-package deal to their sales staff, after all, they were always so perplexed by how I couldn't understand the value of the ~150 incomprehensible foreign language channels, 1/4 of the channels being the same channel at different resolution and the hundreds of "channels" which are actually just on-demand listings.

How are these companies selling DVRs and STILL not understanding that the consumer is DONE with the old-style TV channel.

When Vista was released, it backpedaled on its OpenGL claims, allowing vendors to create fast installable client drivers (ICDs) that restore native OpenGL support. The OpenGL board sent out newsletters proving that OpenGL is still a first-class citizen, and that OpenGL performance on Vista was still at least as fast as Direct3D. Unfortunately for OpenGL, the damage had already been done -- public confidence in OpenGL was badly shaken.

http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

Solution: Reduce the advertising footprint on your site.

Problem:

Pervasiveness: the more ads you squeeze onto each page, the reduced opportunity each one has to catch the users eye. But it's also cumulative. More ads = less content space = increased selectivity by visitors. With so many ads everywhere, we just don't have TIME to click, compounded by the fact that with so many ads everywhere it takes a lot more time to get the stuff we actually came for.

Ad companies need to look not just at visitors and page impressions, but how much time visitors are spending on pages, more simply put: content value.

Here's a thought: put article bodies in a scrolling panel and provide a single, choice, ad space next to it. Don't rotate it, don't cycle it, and let me expand the article panel out over it if it doesn't appeal to me -- that piece of information is valuable to marketeers if coupled with which article I was viewing.

What you have now is an item to retain my attention alongside the ad. Put a second ad there, and you'll make twice as money for a couple of cycles. But more than one ad risks immunizing your readers by conditioning them to just close the ads before their eyes can get there.