Of course it's a bid for profit, whether immediate or long term. Why they thought it'd give them more profit has a bunch of reasons too, which may or may not pan out.
* make people buy the new console for the new games - check, though that may not have got as much market as they hoped
* hidden feature to later steal market share (ps4 lacks backward compat... which, IMO, is dumb... xbox can enable it easier due to less significant architecture changes).
* As said below, this is NOT enabling all games to work. It doesn't even use your old game - it just uses it to verify you have it so it can get you a digital copy of the xbone version. This is not backward compat in any way - it's a port they'll give you for free, and only for ones where all the red tape is cleared and they have a copy (ie. AAA titles could refuse to port to force repurchase; small titles may not have the means; etc).

AFAICT, this is smart, though misleading, marketing, and nothing more.

Except that the very link that "mystuff" provided shows that WiFi DOES work under ubuntu 14.04 on the Surface Pro 3. Where'd you get your info? Seems you just need to copy the wifi firmware into place, which is trivial (use a thumb drive). The hardest part seems to be getting the windows partition resized (forcing system files to move by using PerfectDisk).

Correct me if I'm wrong (I'm not intimately familiar with either), but it seems like the major difference is that:
* mac : can download and install and puts up a reminder to reboot. When you shutdown, the shutdown doesn't take extra long applying the updates - that's done in the boot up part, and usually only takes seconds.
* windows : it's choices are:
1. download and do nothing. When you do install, you'll have to sit through the entire install as well as the lengthy shutdown while it applies stuff.
2. download and install, notify of restart. When you finally shutdown to go home, you're now stuck waiting for a lengthy shutdown (this was the original complaint).
3. don't do anything. Like #1, but you also have to download everything.
4. Some mix of the above, but only for critical stuff, or for everything.

I know that I've experienced the lengthy shutdowns on Windows on many occasions. If you're not seeing that, then you're not applying updates. The GP claimed OSX lacked any lengthy delay on reboot (maybe an additional 10secs on boot). I can vouch for the majority of Linux distros - on the rare occasion that a reboot is needed, it takes no longer than normal (it doesn't rely on some shutdown or startup hooks to complete the installation of various components, except on the very very first boot). That's a pretty significant difference in behavior.

I'm surprised you haven't put two and two together. All your phones last longer than all your wifes phones. That's one of the two major trends your case shows, the other being that, coincidentally, all your phones were Android devices and hers were iphones. I'd be willing to wager real money that usage patterns are quite different (ie. she probably uses her phone more, or some feature of it that draws more battery power - maybe just checking it more often (screen use); maybe she keeps gps/wifi/bluetooth all on all the time and you don't; maybe it's apps or talk time; maybe just one game she plays a lot; etc).

FWIW, I've never owned, and do not plan to ever own, and iphone. My own usage patterns have GREATLY affected my own battery life. I picked up an addictive game a while back, and my battery life dropped from days down to about half a day. It doesn't even get much actual phone time, but when it does, it sucks down juice like crazy. If you want a better anecdotal experience, swap phones with her for a week (turning off all background apps the other used), and use similar stuff to what you used on the other phone.

By the way, CSV was the golden standard for many years. Given the tight compactness/memory budget that space projects have, CVS with it's small foot print might well be the logical choice.

We're talking about telemetry beacon data written once every 15 minutes. CSV is NOT the ideal format for that, and is nowhere near compact. Naive CSV parsers are trivial, but also break very very easily (ex. embedded new lines in a quoted field; quotes in a quoted field; mixed quotes; etc). Also, while CSV can be read in a text editor, it doesn't format nicely there and can be difficult to read, so human readability is low; add to that the fact that humans are unlikely to be logging in directly and reading the file directly, and it being in plain text is pretty much useless. A fixed format binary file would be FAR more compact, easier to parse via a program, trivial to convert to CSV if needed, and really has no downsides besides users not being able to double click it and open it in excel/oocalc.

Using a binary file would also allow more efficient access. There were comments implying that they were sucking the whole thing into memory at some point, which isn't needed for CSV either (unless a stray quote got in there and the parser didn't have a max record length limit), but it's certainly easier to jump to a specific record if you have fixed length records (which, being telemetry data, should be entirely possible).

None of that really matters though. They file grew in size, and wasn't getting truncated or rotated - that's broken by design. Waiting for reboot is crazy (and implies that this was going to a tmpfs in memory, which is all the more reason to use a more compact format).

Yes, a pen register, which from 1984 - 2001 was defined as:

See also here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... ... a pen register did not require a warrant.

However, your nuts if you think the proposed bill is anything like pre-patriot act!

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act (1986) made it a requirement that law enforcement agencies obtain a court order in order to get a pen register approved for surveillance.

That wasn't for bulk collection, and there was no provision for storage, archival, historical access, etc etc etc. When they got their court order, they were then able to obtain a live feed from one line, the caller (how that was provided varied).

In addition, even the patriot act definition of pen register, which is much more broad, had provisions to exclude data the telco normally stored. An excerpt from title 18 (find more at the wiki link above):

It's still equal or worse IMNSHO. Are you sure you're not the one that's confused?

This.

So tired of seeing:
* "Would the other guy have done better?"... why is that singular?
* "the alternative wasn't much better" ... shouldn't that read, "the alternatives weren't much better"?

Every single person that repeats trash like that needs to open their eyes and start checking a different box. The other parties DO get elected into various positions across the country all the way up into the senate and house.

That's a piss poor scapegoat. "necessitated" my ass.
The provisions in the aforementioned legislation just move the data storage down a level, and still give them unfettered access to the same data (and probably even more data than before), and also push the burden of said collection, storage, API's, security, etc onto the telco's who, while they are quite large, are still companies. That would also further limit the ability for competitors to compete, as it's yet another significant hurdle/requirement that would legally need to be met. And what happens if and when there is a data leak? - it's the telco's fault then, even though they will have been forced into that precarious situation (forced to record said data for extended periods, and to centralize it, and to make it readily accessible).

He's essentially saying he would allow section 215 to be removed from the patriot act only if an equal or worse provision were enacted elsewhere. The worse the senate did here was to force his hand - risk allowing that provision to drop, or actively support it and be force to take a *little* responsibility for its existence.

FWIW, I'm neither red nor blue.

In both those cases, the problem also would have presented if there was no safety system in place. In addition, both examples are of someone knowingly ignoring the policy and actively doing something to turn off the safety and continue to ignore all the warnings it's giving. Those folks are doomed.

ONLY!?!? If there were only two accidents a year (note, correct use of "only"), that would totally be worth it. How high is the bar before this is justified? What's the drawback? After implementing PTC (assuing a 40% reduction in accidents), it'd be damn near impossible to have such a significant impact on the number of accidents with any other solution**.

** I know there's another 60% left, but those are going to be the more difficult cases by their very nature. The other solution would have to further reduce accidents by another 66% (4/6ths) to match the same level of added safety.

I doubt you meant to imply they should not implement it, but 40% is quite significant.

YMMV, but my dentist has netflix on a big screen in a comfortable place to watch while someone picks around inside your mouth.

In this case, someone copy/pasted from the article, and then introduced "Alan " into the text. The linked article reads:

I almost hope they introduced that error on purpose, just so we'd have something else to talk about. The alternative is just sad.

My vote would go to the Motorola Motofone F3.
It's a very thin GSM candy bar format phone with an eink display.

Many Nokia phones were really good (or so I've heard), but I have little experience with them.

I think my second choice would be to go back to my last non-smart phone - a Motorola Razr (I think I had the v3m version). Size, battery life, usability, durability, and voice quality were all very good.

Where do you see that? The gallery and all image links go to images with a maxwidth of 960. Even viewing that raw image, which is:
http://hothardware.com/Content...
And changing it to something larger:
http://hothardware.com/Content... ... doesn't result in full res. Nor does:
http://hothardware.com/Content...

I think you're full of shit, but feel free to post a link to correct me.

Ok, I stand corrected.
Still, not many (I don't count gentoo, as that's just whatever you compile; and unstable (ex. debian unstable) shouldn't count either).
Running down the list in distrowatch:
mint: 3.13
ubuntu: 3.19.0
debian (stable/testing): 3.16.7
mageia: 3.19.8
fedora: 3.17.4
opensuse: 3.16.6
arch: 4.0.4
centos: 3.10
pclinuxos 2014.12: 3.18.1
slackware: 3.18.11
freebsd: ... it's freebsd, not linux ...

So, out of the top 11 (I don't know why freebsd is even on there), arch is the only one whose current release is on 4.x.