Yeah, that's not what "the Halo effect" means Microsoft.

"Of those 1.37 billion web requests, over 58% came from a Windows system. Even Windows 8.1 alone has more users than OS X does in total, and that's one of the most despised versions of Windows!"

Lets think back to 2000 or so when around 99% of web requests were coming from Windows and think about just how far Windows has fallen in that time. While I agree that Mac OS X isn't really setting the world on fire (and I say that as a Mac user) I do see an awful lot of Macs out there and far more than there were in 2000 so Apple has certainly made up a lot of ground. Also, consider that when you're sitting at a desktop you're likely using the web a lot, but a phone is just occasional use so the fact that 42% of web requests aren't coming from Windows tells you a lot about how much kit is out there that is connecting to the internet. The important change since 2000 is that you could barely manage on the web without IE on Windows. I know, I was a Linux user then and browsing was very painful at times. These days, the web is much better to use because it has to handle all these different browsers on phones and alternative desktops. The thing that kept Windows at the top for all of the 90's was the fact that alternatives couldn't get a shoe in the door. These days, it is very easy to drop Windows. If you want a nice desktop, a Mac is a really good place to go because you get a real desktop OS without all that touch screen, phone UI rubbish shoved into it. You want a phone that works well as a phone and has lots of software? Android and iOS have you covered. Windows has lost the software high ground and the only reason it still has 58% of web requests going to it is simply inertia. MS is desperate to slow the slide but it keeps on going down. I've used Windows 10 and I don't see anything there that will stop this process if they can't get devs to actually put out apps that are unique to Windows and attractive. I don't think they can get back to the heyday of the 90's and having lived and worked through it, I don't think they ever should because we're in a much better place today with real choice. MS should be happy that they still have any customers under the circumstances given just how badly they treated everyone when they were on top.

Microsoft heard about this halo effect around the iPod and now iPhone bringing people to the Mac and totally misunderstood what it meant. Hence, Cortana and Spartan.

I don't care what they name it but it will definitely have Microsoft..... in the name and as others have said, they'll likely stick with the Spartan branding and maybe even pile on the 'Halo' theme even more. Pity Halo itself is a smoking shell these days. Halo 4 was just sad.

They better watch what they google for.

"...you're not even allowed to talk about tooth decay."

Because they're all so old they don't have any teeth. Not that they would hear you anyway.

European universities are really good. The overall education standard in Europe is higher than the US and while there's some possibility that they may want to work in the US in the future it shouldn't be impossible for them if they've got relatives there to get in even without citizenship. They can work in any european country they like so there's plenty of opportunities without forcing them to go through the tax burden of being a US citizen. Having lived and worked in the US myself (silicon valley) I just don't see the attraction other than maybe money but the standard of living isn't great all things considered.

Here's MS' problem, there's a strong perception that they don't exist in the phone market. I was watching the news the other day and they were covering various gadgets and they had this thing which paired over bluetooth with a phone and had an app. The reviewer actually said that it supports all smartphones, both android and iPhone. Boom, there's your problem MS. No-one even knows or cares that you exist.

As a long time Linux user, it feels good that MS is getting killed because no-one is supporting their product however good it may be.

OK, so the post, moderate etc buttons are green text on a green background, and the stories list on the home page doesn't have the old 'more' button but instead has 'days' which frankly don't work because I'm in a country that is a day ahead of the US so 'today' is yesterday and I have to read thursday to get friday etc. Bring back the more button. Don't get me started on how messed up the layout is in Safari - I'm having to use Chrome just to get the thing to be legible.

Dave Lister: Sometimes I think it's cruel giving machines a personality. My mate Petersen once brought a pair of shoes with artificial intelligence. Smart Shoes, they were called. It was a neat idea. No matter how blind drunk you were, they would always get you home. Then he got ratted one night in Oslo, and woke up the next morning in Burma. See, the shoes got bored just going from his local to the flat. They wanted to see the world, man, y'know? He had a helluva job getting rid of them. No matter who he sold them to, they'd show up again the next day! He tried to shut them out, but they just kicked the door down, y'know?

Arnold Rimmer: Is this true?

Dave Lister: Yeah! Last thing he heard, they'd sort of, erm, robbed a car and drove it into a canal. They couldn't steer, y'see.

Arnold Rimmer: Really?!

Dave Lister: Yeah. Petersen was really, really blown away by it. He went to see a priest. The priest told him, he said, it was alright, and all that, and the shoes were happy, and they'd gone to heaven. Y'see, it turns out shoes have soles.

Here (NZ), we use a lot of hydro power. In fact the electricity company I use is 100% renewables. The benefit of hydro is you can also use it as a battery and use excess generation from houses with rooftop solar to pump water back up into the reservoir storing the energy for use at night when solar doesn't work. Here we've also been having a series of dry spells which have caused issues with the reservoirs emptying too quickly and running the risk of blackouts, and again having distributed solar on houses will help a great deal to conserve the energy stored in the hydro lakes.

I've just taken out a loan to reroof my house and put solar up and I will be selling the excess energy back to the supplier - the savings will cover my usual electricity bill and offset the cost of the extra debt but then again I had to get a new roof anyway as the current one is leaking so why not put solar up at the same time? Sure, I'll still have to pay for the connection but in the end it is a win win. More to the point, next year I plan on getting a fully electric car to replace the current petrol model (we rarely do more than 50Km a day so it will be ample) and that will also be charged off the roof so I'll save a good chunk of money there. Most of our electricity use is during the day anyway because that is when we run our AC units mostly. A bit of thought and we can be rid of fossil fuels.

When I was a school (many many years ago) computers were metal boxes with black and white (or green) screens and a flashing cursor. That's it. We were taught logic, binary and all that stuff. In school. We learned structured programming, some minor graphics but mostly it was how to do calculations, and make decisions etc. That set me up to pick up multiple programming languages over the years, and I moved from 8 bit through to 64 bit computers with ease. A decade or so after I had finished, schools were focussing on teaching computer skills which pretty much focussed on how to do 'things' in Windows or on a Mac and no-one knew jack about how the computer worked, especially the teachers. The result has been a generation of people who really know nothing about computers or computer science. If we taught other sciences like this we would still be thinking of elements like 'air' and 'fire' etc. Students need to know what is going on rather than skipping all that and focussing on making powerpoints.

I've got a couple of Macs along with the usual iPhone and iPad combination and while the upgrade to Yosemite had some issues for me these were entirely related to older software with incompatible kexts and resulting kernel panics on a regular basis. Once I found the offending item the panics stopped and the machine affected has been fine since. I was a beta tester on Yosemite and have used it as my primary OS since the start of the beta and all in all it has been way better than the likes of Tiger which was terrible when it came out (you could only open a shell once out of about five tries up until 10.4.7 which fixed it) so I don't think the quality is getting any lower in my experience.

I've used the Mac's built in Disk Utility multiple times to image my HDs onto new SSDs and then they've been a simple drop in replacement but you're right, the activated commercial software may well refuse to run.

Adobe uses FLEXnet I believe and that does take a fingerprint of the hardware specifically to stop users from duping discs. The company I work for also uses FLEXnet and when a customer encounters this, their software won't work on the new drive and they have to reactivate on the internet with their original license key and often they run out of activations in which case they need to call our support line so we can identify the old dead activation from their old drive and release it for them.

I was buying CDs from 1986 and I certainly had discs which were 70 mins long even then so there certainly were discs longer than 45 mins. It was true that some discs threw the early players for six, but worse than that was the utterly terrible sound of both these early discs and early players. Without oversampling, the brick wall filters produced horrible audible artefacts, and there were real problems with the ADCs used in mastering the discs too. CDs sounded really rough throughout the 80's and it wasn't until the 90's that we started getting recordings on CD that were even close to audiophile quality, plus there were some nice players at that point which paid attention to the analogue components and PSU isolation to prevent electronic noise getting through to the speakers. I had a 16bit 16x oversampling, 8 DAC player at the time which was the first player I had heard that really did sound decent (Cambridge CD2) and compared to the usual CD players it was amazingly good. The whole digital is digital thing was wrong when it came to everything after the DAC, and even the DACs made a big difference. The first time I heard the oversampling players compared with my first gen Sony it was a revelation and the Sony got dumped shortly after with the Technics MASH unit, and then that got dumped for the Cambridge.

The main problem with the replay of vinyl in the future will be getting a working turntable because belts and other polymer components degrade over time just because. My current turntable is 25 years old and it still works fine but I worry about the drive belt and cartridge. However, the strong demand for vinyl suggests I'll still be able to source replacements for some time to come, just as I can easily replace the 6L6 valves in my amp (also 25 years old) whereas a transistor amp of that age would likely be junked if it failed. As for CDs that failed, I was a LaserDisc owner (still am, don't like to get rid of old formats) and laser rot was well known with those analogue discs and it also afflicts CDs where the aluminium oxidises and no longer reflects so the disc just stops playing. With LD it was obvious when it was happening because you got colour flecks on the screen, but with CD it should play fine until it doesn't.

Anyway, I'm preserving my old equipment and formats for the future as best I can. Sadly, it looks like my NAD cassette deck may have had it if I can't replace the capstan belt which literally fell to pieces when I tried it. Getting the transport apart and back together to put the replacement in is going to be an interesting exercise based on what I've seen having partially dismantled it. Like CDs, tapes don't have a long shelf life so vinyl may well be the best format for long term storage.

One last comment on the degradation of records - what you were hearing was the mould release agent, basically like a grease layer to allow the pressing to be removed from the mother easily and each time you play the record you move that into the grooves where it picks up dust and also smothers the fine details. Remove that stuff with a solvent and you'll find the vinyl doesn't wear out and it will sound brand new. I've run many 'worn out' records through a solvent cleaner and they come out amazing. A good turntable (mine is an Opus 3 Continuo, in fact it is the prototype for that model) will not suffer from rumble and will also minimise surface noise such that many people couldn't even tell it wasn't a digital source due to the lack of background noise, especially on a cleaned and cared for LP.