Yeah, what I've wanted for a long while is basically "X Box OS for Desktops" (but hopefully without the advertising bloatware...)

You can do Linux swap on a regular file, but using a file is the real bonkers. Files exist in the file system, which means that they don't necessarily represent a contiguous area of disk space, which is the main property you want from a swap file (on spinning rust, anyway).

On Windows if your swapfile grows it may fragment. On Linux the swap is a partition and doesn't grow on demand. If you really need to, you can create a file in /tmp and attach it as swap, dynamically, and remove it when you're done (or just reboot, and pow, it's gone).

All in all, the Linux way makes more sense to me. The Windows swapfile was always a massive pain in the ass, stuck on your C partition eating valuable space and growing unexpectedly when you had an unanticipated memory demand and then never shrinking again.

Yeah, I did this for years. So much better than struggling with a Windows build that's devoted almost entirely to running software designed to stop it being useful.

I also took the liberty of installing 4GB of extra RAM because the IT department wouldn't spring for it - why would they, when they only allowed us a 32-bit version of Windows.. alas, you had to boot the thing once a week to get it onto the network (tied to Active Directory login). During one of those boots some kind of hardware audit ran and next week they came and stole half the RAM. They wouldn't admit it.

That's at least the third time you shilled for that phone in this thread. You have an impressive array of marketing videos.

It's not very good.

You can't move windows from one desktop to another, which is something I do frequently - move a pad of notes from one screen to another, move a meeting reminder with a webconf ID to the screen with my Windows VM (because the webconf software only works on Windows).

There are other third party programs that also try to do it, but they do weird crap like remembering where windows are and moving them around.

It's just not as developed as the Linux solutions have been for as long as I can remember - key combos to switch desktop, to switch desktop but drag the current window with your viewpoint, to place a window on all desktops, etc. I'll be interested to see what the Windows 10 implementation is like, but Windows 10 will likely remain just my "gaming" OS with my real work done on Linux.

Plus of course, 1.8x at brand new means that all other things being equal, you'll have many fewer charge cycles.

Would be interesting to see someone do the math, but the battery decay curve on these should be much shallower overall (until some doofus uses it to make a smaller phone - which isn't really very likely, they're already reaching the limits of what you can do in terms of structural strength if you can bend them by sitting on them...)

And the policy has a lot to do with the OS and the design of it's default apps, which encourage people to shoot themselves in the foot.

* No "executable" flag for files
* Hiding file extensions by default
* The whole notion of embedding arbitrary binary code in webpages (ActiveX)
* Training people to click "yes" on everything by spamming approval dialogs for everything

Even as a local administrator, and with the rights to approve of any executable, this whitelisting software was an obstacle. And sucked performance out of everything - some I/O heavy operations took 7 times longer because it wanted to hash every file. I agree it was spectacularly bad policy, but if Windows wasn't so vulnerable to being infected with malware at the hands of its own user, it's not a policy that would be necessary.

+1 to that.

Windows is no longer useful to the power user or developer in a corporate environment (that doesn't grok these things), just because security policy will usually demand that your computer is made to be useless, because an unrestrained computer is a powerful general purpose tool, and in most people's hands, a powerful tool is going to lead to unpleasant injuries fairly quickly.

The effort then required to work around the security so you can actually do your job gives me an acid stomach. The new fad is whitelisting, which means I have to approve of every program that I run on my machine. Including the ones I write. Even batch files.

Oh, but not new JAR files. >-<

Security theatre, makes you sick. People are making big bucks off this shite.

Even if it was true... millions of dollars for ... 44 arrests?

Wonder what the arrest rate of 20 extra pairs of feet on the street is?

He's saying that Java, because of it's nature, and the type of programmer that uses it, could reasonably be expected to be more rigorously programmed than Javascript, so if there are horrific problems with Java, then the problems with Javascript are like the Elder Gods descending upon the web.

Possibly not so bad at the client side, but all this Node.js stuff that's popular....

Oh, yes, testing doesn't fix bad design. But it helps to avoid the problem mentioned - which is that projects use versions of components with known problems that are known - and thus have been fixed in newer versions.

I've only ever seen instances where new versions of Java broke things by removing deprecated components like JINI, but I generally tend to stick to OpenJDK for everything - as the "official" Java (the benchmark for certification) maybe it has less "clever" in it than the others.

Clients may be keen to move onto newer versions of Java because of the immense litany of security defects that get listed by Oracle when they release a new version, and because of their apparent enthusiasm for end-of-lining support (alas, Java 7, we knew you well, but no more public updates after April 2015).

Why?

Because if you don't test your code, you don't know if changes to it break it.

Changing the components your code is composed of is a big change.

Therefore : people get nervous about changing the components they have used (even changing the version).

What should be happening : when you're planning a new release, raise the component versions to the latest and run your test suite. If it passes, good job, release it.

What is actually happening : the version numbers never get edited, because that version worked, and if you change it, OMG, it might stop working.

Talky seems to screen share in Firefox without an extension, but in Chromium it wants to install one.

It seems to have varied levels of support right now.

And if you want to to work better : Kickstart it a bit

https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...