Hardly.

That means instead of the apps being written for the Win32/MFC/.NET runtime, they are written for the Android runtime ... how is that any different? Please explain how its different other than you're a fanboy for Chrome/Android rather than Microsoft.

Right, except no its not. If you want ad-ladened crap, Android is where its at. The 'market' is everywhere else. There may be a lot of apps there, but that doesn't mean anyone cares, which the stats have shown by the number of apps with exactly no downloads.

So basically, just like Windows now. People don't want 'windows' they want an environment they are used to and works well, and more importantly the apps they've been using for years. You've given no actual reason why people would want new android apps that work entirely differently over what they already have and are used to. On top of that, the end result for those people would be exactly the same as they already have, except now Google would be in Microsofts place.

Thats just stupid. With Microsoft, at least you are the customer and your data is yours. With Google, you're the product and your data is their data. The whole point is to push more advertising on you and manipulate you into spending more money. Awesome.

Awesome, so instead of being locked into desktop apps with 30 years of evolution and growing, we're locked into phone and tablet apps ... on the desktop ... which are still infants made mostly by random people who think installing Eclipse makes them a developer, awesome. Thats my favorite lock-in right there. Lock in and shitty apps made for tiny screens ... on my 27" inch displays.

There is nothing that magically makes this better than just using an OS and skipping the extra layer of crap added by running your tablet app on your desktop. Have you really thought about how silly this actually is? Turn off your fanboy for 15 minutes and think about it. Its a stupid idea that no one is actually going to use for anything other than some very rare instances.

Never before has someones OS runtime layer been a real product on someone elses OS. Java hasn't ruled the world, Android isn't going to magically make that so just because people use it on their phones. Adding another standard on top of existing standards never results in this magical silver bullet that revolutionizes the world and changes everything. Proper design from the bottom up does that.

We should expect more from people who post on slashdot ... sadly, its silly to have expectations.

TLDs have certain requirements associated with them, unless Amazon magically also has some super special secret deal that Google hasn't told the world about after losing ... then Amazon won't be able to monopolize or otherwise use the TLD to an unfair advantage.

They can set certain things related to how the TLD operates, but they don't get it all to themselves. They didn't buy a TLD for themselves, they bought the right to run a TLD under ICANNs guidelines.

It doesn't work that way. Judges don't make rules, they judge the application of existing ones. Apple can not be compelled to do something that isn't already codified into law, regardless of what the judge or enforcement want.

Like wise, the most the cops can do is enforce existing laws.

The federal congress or state congress would have to pass a law requiring back doors. And congress we control. They are elected not selected. What you need to worry about is making sure congress can't do this sort of change in a secret vote and that you will vote them out of office if they try!

Sadly, they know most people don't vote, and most of those that do just check the party checkbox they've been checking since mommy and daddy indoctrinated them into the sport of politics.

Thats about the easiest solution to your problems. Pretty much every other solution you see in this thread is going to require more maintenance than a windows machine. You can't expect a bunch of armchair admins to provide you sensible answers, 90% of the response you get here are going to be custom solutions that aren't completely thought out and require 100 times more effort than the person giving them to you realizes. You're just getting spew from a bunch of guys who think they are super clever.

The solution is to make it so you don't need to support them, and if all they do is browse the web, a Chrome Book is the answer. The down side is that they become Google's bitch, but its probably worth it for your needs.

Yes, modern drives don't have a problem waiting and resuming writing once data arrives, and thats been true for god knows how many years.

Lets make some notes about your experience:

And you don't understand that ridiculous hours and fear driven work style is the norm in this region for many people? Yes, in this region, its not likely to go away anytime soon.

As far as Scott Hanselman's comments, he's mixing 3 different things into the same umbrella, the first 2 of which are actual things that SLOW development down, not drive it. Only the 3rd is what you're referring to. And really, picking a random dude who blogs a lot and has worked for MS for a few years probably isn't the best place to quote. He's got nothing really that impressive to make him an expert on properly managing development practices that most people don't have as well.

Yes, your single experience is an indicator of how the whole world is going to operate for the rest of eternity.

Or not. Your experience is indicative of local culture, be happy they let you off one day a week and gave you pizza, most won't get that.

In the rest of the world, no FDD is a rare thing that usually is one of the last things a company does before it collapses into a heap of rubbish and ceases to exist because the only people working at it are unqualified people who can't get a job ANYWHERE else, so they HAVE to stay there.

FDD is the result of managers not having any clue about how to manage people, nothing else. The solution is to go somewhere else. In the case of southeast Asia, you probably will have to physically move somewhere else to get away from it, but thats better than jumping off the roof in a year or two.

The fact that you're posting on slashdot means you don't live in a country that will prevent you from changing your situation, only that you have not bothered to change your situation and seem to think your one experience is how they all are.

That or you're just Scott Hanselman trying to drive traffic to your blog in a slashvertisement ... which seems more likely, because otherwise your post is kind of dumb ... just like Hanselman's blog entry on the subject.

Either you don't use an iPhone, you don't use OSX, or you're intentionally lying. Other than the general change in icons/theme, what makes it more like iOS in this version? Are you one of those people that still manually starts Launchpad and then bitches about it looking like iOS because you started an app designed to add some very specific iOS functionality to OSX ... an App that is in no way the default and takes manual lunching every time you want to use it ...

... One feature: Continuity. Done. I just beat innovation in every other OS for the last couple of years as far as desktop users are concerned. What have other OSes been doing thats so innovative? Linux certainly doesn't have ANYTHING impressive to show off for the last several years unless you want to be really geeky, which 99.9% of the Linux desktop users don't care about, let alone the rest of the world. Most would argue Windows is going downhill in the UI aspect, with the pending save from Windows 9. So what is this innovative OS that you seem to be comparing to? OpenBSD? What?

Now you've just proved you're being intentionally obtuse. I know I know, Windows doesn't get any bug fixes either. And yet somehow we see stories on slashdot about bug fixes causing some people problems. Just because your obscure bug doesn't get fixed doesn't make such a generalized statement fair.

You're one of those people who just bitches to bitch, not because you have something useful to contribute.

I have some complaints about 10.10 myself, but most of them revolve around aesthetic preferences, not actual usability. This whole 'everything should be flat squares with single colors and MAYBE some basic gradients at a 45 degree angle' crap that everyone jumped on the bandwagon of its just retarded.

Good, this indicates that doctors and people who think they should take antibiotics like vitamins haven't completely screwed up our natural immunities and that most of the world still fights off this infections even though drugs no longer work on them.

Can we please get back to the point where we take antibiotics when we're in need of them, not just because we might have an infection or have a mild infection?

I'm all for taking them in the cases where it will be life threatening not to, but FFS not just because we're sick. We're making all of these things capable of fighting off the drugs and getting ourselves to the point where first world countries with antibiotics are going to be less safe than 3rd world shit holes where the people at least have functional immune systems that can fight off what they see in their environment.

We have survived for hundreds of thousands of years without taking daily antibiotic doses, why do some people and worse still some doctors think we should take them like candy now when someone gets the sniffles.

So lets summarize the authors babbling: Apple has no actual incentive to OSS Swift other than appeasing people like the author who think Apple should do what they want even though they don't care for Apple.

Basically, he's a freeloader and thinks Apple should support him.

He seems to think his opinion of whats good for Apple matters, and that Apple doesn't know what they are doing. Ironically, Apple is sitting on ridiculous amounts of cash, and the author is a writer for Infoworld.

Now, I'm not even bothering to address the technical reasons the author is a moron, just the plain old common sense things. This guy's just grumpy he can't install some sort of Swift capable IDE/Environment on his windows machine for free, thats the only reason the article exists.

From a technical perspective he doesn't seem to understand that Swift, as done by Apple, without Cocoa ... is fucking pointless. The whole point of swift is a language that works perfectly for a nextstep/cocoa style universe. Trying to shoehorn the rest of the computing world into swift is just pointless.

Its not actually a problem, thats why. The submitter doesn't actually understand what he's suggesting and why the current method of dealing with this issue works fine.

You know who is doing the damage and 'attacking' you, they are easy to identify, and you just stop talking to them. They're only going to connect to a relatively small number of people so disconnecting bad players is trivial, then you never talk to them again. They bare the cost of having all the money invested in setting up the original connections they used to 'attack' with being lost. And lets be clear, BGP attacks aren't done via virtual connections, they're done across physical connections so you know EXACTLY who is doing them and which cable to unplug to solve the problem.

Do you upgrade every router running BGP, or just turn off the 2 connections to the bad guy? Its just not worth the effort to 'fix the problem' with a technical solution when good old fashion common sense tactics work just as well and for far less cost (read: effort for everyone involved) Even if it were a major backbone provider, the number of connections to cut is still trivial compared to even upgrading all the routers that the single largest backbone providers connect to.

This is a stupid question to ask and just illustrates not understanding the actual problem. The costs of 'fixing' the problem technical FAR outweighs the benefits of doing so (not having to manually disconnect troublesome players).

... because they won't need to support Linux or perform maintenance on it? Or do fairys do that for you with Linux?

The retraining alone will cost far more than licensing costs over the last 10 years, let alone interoperability issues.

Licensing costs are a drop in the bucket compared to an employees salary and time, the fact that you don't realize or consider this just shows how utterly disconnected you are from the realities of running a business.

Are you seriously trying to claim Office 2013 in Windows 8 is radically different? And that its not that much different than Linux and something like LibreOffice on KDE/Gnome?

They'll lose more than 300 in dealing with interoperability with the rest of the world alone trying to exchange documents, let alone the training.

Metro is a branch of applications, not the entire OS.

You are so ridiculously uninformed about Windows you can not possibly comment on what migration would be like based on the silliness of your post.

Pretending they'll save money on the migration is just ignorant. If you want to argue that in 15 years, they'll save money, you MIGHT have an argument, IF you ignore the cost of shitty interoperability, but only if you ignore that. You have to have a pretty narrow view of the world to think they'll actually save money.

Of of them tried, but were slapped with gag orders so they couldn't even mention it to anyone.

Since when did Google test android apps?

... Right because Redmond doesn't know anything about forcing a tablet style UI on desktop/laptop users and having it fail utterly.

While theres nothing wrong with a Chromebook, pretending its going to take over the world is kind of silly.

Native Client ... REALLY? Let me put a VM in your VM so you can run VMs ...

This may sound like a great idea, but I suspect you'll find after using it a minor amount that its not all that great in reality.