The fact that someone bothered to make uPnP suggests that there's a need for this capability for average users.

There's also a "need" for antigravity and wish-granting genies. They're just needs that may remain unfulfilled due to impossibility.

I assume since you bring up uPnP without citing it as a viable solution, you're aware that it's disasterous for security. I think at least some of that is due to inherent problems in the concept, not just a poor implementation.

Granted, we seem to have gone down that path already (perhaps driven in no small part by the prevalence of NAT), and these services may have a place, but do we want it to be *all* there is to the internet?

I agree that we want people to not be reliant on centralized servers... however, the way to accomplish that would be to upgrade the "average" technical expertise of users to the point where they'd be competent to configure a firewall. That may be practically impossible, but I think developing a technical solution capable of saving them from themselves would be even harder.

I accidentally left my Windows box connected to the internet without an external firewall for a few months with no ill effects.

...that you know of!

Only when they are designed to rule out those groups...

In other words, "only" 100% of the time.

But was that before or after the Supreme Court decided corporations had free speech rights? If it was before, then the situation has probably changed (in the current Court's insane opinion, anyway).

Can you explain in more detail?

If you have a multi-dimensional set of factors of things and you design a metric to collapse them down into a single dimension, what you're really measuring is a combination of the values of the factors and your weighting of them. Since the "correct" weighting is a matter of opinion and everybody's use-case is different, a single-dimension metric isn't very useful.

This goes for any situation where you're picking the "best" among a set of choices, not just for compression algorithms, by the way.

Like, if you're trying to compress a given file, and one algorithm compressed the file by 0.00001% in 14 seconds, another compressed the file 15% in 20 seconds, and the third compressed it 15.1% in 29 hours, then the middle algorithm is probably going to be the most useful one.

User A is trying to stream stuff that has to have latency less than 15 seconds, so for him the first algorithm is the best. User B is trying to shove the entire contents of Wikipedia into a disc to send on a space probe, so for him, the third algorithm is the best.

You gave a really extreme[ly contrived] example, so in that case you might be able to say that "reasonable" use cases would prefer the middle algorithm. But differences between actual algorithms would not be nearly so extreme.

Well shit, if you're so worried about the viability of the platform that you're delaying it, then of course you're going to have a hard time attracting developers!

In theory, voter tests would rule out the gullible. In practice, voter tests would rule out the black / gay / poor / jew / undesirable-group-du-jour.

... which is soon to be overruled once some corporation notices and decides to challenge it, citing Citizens United as precedent, I'm sure.

Well sure, but the post would have been less amusing if I added that extra detail.

Project Orion would have been fission-powered, not fusion. This is fusion-powered!

"/" and"per" mean the same thing in that context, so "$X per per capita" doesn't make sense.

The Air Force isn't the only entity who's opinion matters. Did the Navy want it?

The end does not justify the means.

Also, was causing the creation of Git some kind of grand scheme by Tridgdell? If it was an accident, he shouldn't get credit for it.

There's also the people who think they "need" an SUV but get upset about how much they have to pay for fuel. It's a stupid market, but that market exists.

MSDOS also worked perfectly adequately as the centerpiece of Windows 95 and 98.

On the contrary, Win9x crashed all the damn time (and mostly due to the reasons I mentioned: lack of memory protection, etc.) and caught viruses more easily than an immune-compromised crack whore. NT was much better, if you were lucky enough that all your software and hardware was compatible with it.

Oddly enough Microsoft's stock price stopped rising about the time that NT started to replace Windows 9. And the rather widespread dislike of Microsoft started about that time. Just coincidence, I'm sure

Yeah, actually, it was! The stock quit rising and everybody started to hate Microsoft because of everything they did except Windows NT:

• Instead of targeting Windows 2000 to home users as well as business users, they released the buggy, terrible abortion that was "Windows ME" (the last DOS-based, non-NT Windows version)
• They were fucking up the entire Internet by forcing Internet Explorer on everyone (this was when the only other choice was Netscape -- Mozilla was barely starting and Firefox didn't exist yet). It was so egregious that even the US government investigated them for anti-trust violations, for crying out loud!
• They were diversifying into a whole bunch of unprofitable new areas, notably Xbox and assorted failed web stuff.

Even at the time, Windows 2000 was considered to be the greatest thing (or at least, least-terrible thing) Microsoft had ever made. If you ask people today, they'd say XP is best, mostly because fewer people used 2000 (because it didn't get marketed to home users) and because people started appreciating XP more once they had Vista to compare it to.

You're the only person I've ever heard of who liked DOS-based Windows better than NT.

All other things being equal, I would probably go with NT. But all other things don't seem to be so equal. MSDOS was simple and ran well on minimal hardware. NT isn't simple and doesn't seem to run all that well on slow CPUs.

MSDOS certainly was simple: it was 16-bit, it lacked preemptive multitasking, and each program was limited to 64kB of memory (that other processes were not prevented from overwriting)!

We have a couple of EEE PCs around the house running XT and Windows 7. They are both terminally slow.

Before, you were talking about the mid-90s (i.e., NT vs Windows 3.1 or 95). Other than compatibility with legacy DOS stuff, it's hard to argue that 3.1 or 95 was better than NT 3.5 or 4.0 in any way whatsoever.

Your problems with Windows XP or 7 on EEE PCs is not due to the NT architecture, but rather all the shit Microsoft piled on top of it. If Windows 2000 had the drivers, your EEE PCs would do better with it.