Yup, if it wasn't Microsoft, all kinds of other companies could have dominated the desktop market. IBM (OS/2), Quarterdeck (DESQview/X), Apple (Mac OS), NeXT (NeXT), any number of *nix companies (X11), and others.

Microsoft got big because they got the consumers interested, and questionable deals with vendors.

Plenty of people only know the tunnel-vision version of computer history and they believe Microsoft is it. They either don't remember (or are too young to have seen) software boxes (ahh, the good ol' days) had logos to indicate which OS they worked on so you could pick the right one.

...until they get their personal data stolen because of a security flaw in the OS, which of course was long patched in later version of Android.

Saying "We're sure he had..." without evidence is not evidence. They have to have the evidence that he actually *did* have what is claimed.

That's the hard part. They have to gather the evidence to get the conviction. Without evidence, they can't get a conviction. At least if you have a competent attorney. If you have a crappy one, you'll get the 5 years because they talked you into taking a pre-trial plea agreement. That's how innocent people go to jail.

I've never bought that argument. Comments simply need to be properly maintained along with the code. If you're not updating the comments when you change the code, you're doing a half-assed job.

Besides, my take is that comments are generally most useful when they explain *what* you're attempt to do rather than *how* exactly you're doing it, and that tends to change far less frequently. The only exception to that general rule is when the code is particularly complex or tricky, and at that point, you should be writing comments in paragraphs.

Interesting, thanks for the response. I suppose it makes some amount of sense, because for every possible chip out there, it generally has a C/C++ compiler that supports it. And it's not surprising that you'd tend to find a lot more people well-versed in C or C++.

C++ gets a lot of hate (some deserved, some not), but you can actually use it in such a way that makes it very difficult for programmers to make silly mistakes like clobbering raw memory, and all in a way that requires little or no overhead beyond equivalent C code. I think that's part of why it's so popular in game development (my particular field).

And as you indicated, an effective strategy is to find a subset of the language that works well for your project and stick to that.

You don't need a "friend" inside Microsoft to actually try out the beta, you know. Anyone can sign up, download it, and use it. Millions of people are using it right now, and we've heard NOTHING about such stability problems. Buy all the popcorn you like. Windows 10 may have it's faults, but instability is not going to be one of them.

In the current Windows 10 beta, the only option you appear to have under the setting Choose How Updates Are Installed is "Automatic" and "Notify to schedule restart". It appears you have no choice but to get the patches as they're released, with the only exception being if you indicate you're on a metered connection (possibly useful loophole there).

I'll admit, I was a bit surprised by this as well. I understand the logic of pushing patches out as soon as they're ready to home users. "Patch Tuesday" was done entirely for the convenience of corporate users, not home users, but it has the downside of potentially delaying critical patches for many weeks that could otherwise be deployed much sooner. Even so, I'd prefer to see an option to allow home users to actually *install* the patches at their own leisure like with previous versions of Windows.

Question: is some other language actually replacing Ada for aerospace, DoD projects, and other mission-critical type projects, or is it you just don't want to work on those projects anymore?

http://citeseer.uark.edu:8080/...

They already have options that they worked on back in 1993.

putting QWERTY on the screen is stupid, you have to use a different input method, the clock face is the one that makes a lot of sense.

I was under the impression that Ada is still widely used in many mission-critical systems. For example, the latest Boeing planes' software (777 and 787) is nearly all written in Ada. I haven't heard about another language making inroads in those applications, but I suppose it's possible. More likely IMO is that the relative percentage of mission-critical software has shrunk compared to the explosion of commercial software.

Keep in mind language "popularity" is very industry-specific, so it's often a bit misleading to look at global rankings of language popularity. For example, in my own industry (videogames), C++ is completely dominant for game code, C# is very popular for tools, and Lua is popular as an embedded scripting language. If you look at Lua on it's own, it typically ranks pretty low compared to most languages, but there's no doubt it would be much higher if constrained to just my industry.

Because making it look for ANY device means I can insert another USB device and then disconnect yours.

Just set up a script on the machine looking for a specific USB device, start shutdown if the device is not present. This is pretty common stuff, hell my old Lenovo laptop has a smartcard slot in it that would do the same thing if the card was removed.

In fact if you look you can find the same thing all over the place for the last decade on many hacking sites, even back in the late 90's this kind of stuff was on the "scene" I had back to back modems in telcom rooms inside boxes that if the box was opened it dumped 110V into the modem logic boards so that when discovered they would self destruct.

Most "hackers" today probably dont even own a buttset.

Were you trying to say:

"LOL, nei, (th)að var ekki augljóst að "here" ((væri?)) Ísland og að (th)ú værir íslensk. En ((??????)) Google Translate get ég látið eins og hálfviti á tveimur tungumálum. Ef gert er ráð fyrir auðvitað að Slashdot ((sé ekki að flækja Unicodeið?))"

That is:

"LOL, no, it wasn't clear that here is Iceland and that you were were Icelandic. But (????) Google Translate I can come across like an idiot in two languages. If one assumes of course that Slashdot isn't screwing up the Unicode"?

If you want to write in Icelandic here, the only letter you need to swap out to prevent Slashdot from mangling it is thorn, just write it as TH or something.

Hmm, quick test... áéíóúöæðÁÉÍÓÚÖÆÐ - everything but the thorns should be in there.

What on Earth was that? I can make out portions of what you wrote through the mangled bits but not all of it.