the push for younger coders is to create a user base for microsoft and facebook. microsoft is still thinking everyone can be converted to their crappy software base by letting kids learn how to code for it. when i was coding ircbots i was totally hooked on using windows, because for most of my life gaming i had played on windows computers and nintendo consoles...

i had some pretty cool projects like an ASCII video player (think ASCII art, replaying static frames manually typed out for playback on mirc) it actually was able to get almost 30fps on a p-120 laptop with about 2gb hdd and 48MB of ram.

anyways compared to what i've seen these days a p-120 is pathetic, yet most of the people who use them don't need the speed hence tablets and laptops being so far behind desktop systems and graphic cards. wikipedia has documents that show that standards for video were all really old tech too, they had a plan to make themselves billionaires and have more gamer addicts whom tend to have the biggest craving for overpriced electronics.

and the bubbles come when people find out they are being suckered into buying stuff that is old and power hungry when they could have just used a iphone or android to get their facebook fix and candy crushing games. which are also overpriced but not if you get a used or 'older' model

the first real world mass market character recognition i used was brain age 2 for nintendo ds and if you didn't start the characters the right stroke for stroke recognition it would screw up on you.

with many millions of users of the ds and it's descendants it is clear that microsoft is reinventing the wheel again.

"Well, actually I do have a Windows VM so I can use Netflix"

you do realize the latest chrome (beta) supports html5 and netflix natively in linux. right?

the problem you see, is ATMs require windows XP software. yes windows XP. http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/20/5326772/windows-xp-powers-95-percent-of-atms-worldwide
So the malware simply connects to a botnet, hops through inadequate satellite networks makes a map and reinfects itself after the system is cleaned. i have seen windows xp machines infected by satellite communications they are after all devices that must obey 'this device must accept any interference received' which is usually a kill switch to make them stop emitting radio waves, but also means viruses that transmit via radio must also be accepted it is the law after all.

'Poverty, like wealth is socially engineered - not the result of a supernaturally moral system of merits.'

"Yes, actually it is. Africa is, primarily, the way it is because it is full of Africans. Mexico is, primarily, the way it is because it is full of Mexicans. To the degree that Mexicans and Africans are allowed to achieve a critical mass in the USA without assimilating, is the degree that the USA will become more like Africa or Mexico. There is nothing "supernatural" about it, but the result of a simple truth that not all cultures are equal. To pretend moral equivalency, like this disturbed young man and so many others, is to play with the fate of our civilization."

1948 called, it wants your apartheid back. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apartheid

if white supremacy is so good why did black people manage to overthrow it in 1994. why didn't germany overpower the whole world with their 'superior' white leadership? why not napoleon for that matter? we can go back to the roman empire if that stuff is 'too soon' for you.

the only thing that history has proven is that crazy white men tend to believe they are great at building empires and eventually find themselves overthrown.

there are neighborhoods and times of night where the cops don't patrol at all. there are massive areas where you cannot get a pizza delivered because the people there know pizza drivers carry change and fresh hot pizza and they can beat em down and such. generally they use difficult to trace prepaid cell phones using 150 talk minute cards and order as many places as they can have buddies at to get the most cash and pizza loot.

  in fact by merely mentioning this suddenly criminals can use addresses that are flagged as safe and just jump out of the bushes to get at the little money and hot pizza... not that you kids at home should do this kinda thing, its just some places are real bad. anyways cops don't go into the hood where people have guns and shoot at cops.

Macs have never been immune to viruses.

the reason windows needs AV protection to run safely is because one account can overwrite critical OS files replacing them with malware infested fake software, and everyone by default starts out with ability to install any program including malware that later will get the special administrator privileges (on a reboot) needed to permanently infect the machine.

heartbleed and shellshock are nasty but a well hardened install will not be a problem, as the users dumb enough to install bad software generally need to ask someone to do that for them. and yes i realize they can run any command and possibly as root with shellshock if your cgi-bin is running things as root. seems to me that with Apache needing to run things as user Apache or httpd it was quite the oversight to let cgi-bin run as root in the first place!

I have a dell laptop with a 800 Mhz processor and it runs lubuntu faster than lubuntu on a lenovo quadcore 1.2ghz AMD apu...same os. one is what most would call obsolete and yes i installed with the same optical disc. the APU boots up faster but takes a full 30 seconds to respond after clicking the 'log out' button it is no lag if i sudo shutdown -h now from terminal.

knoppix warns that using the live media and eventually the system begins to slow, and that still applies to a write protected flash memory card. no i don't mean just leaving the computer booted up all the time the parts inside the computer slow down as they get older. there are a ton of things that cause problems that good design can deal with most issues people get with windows but that doesn't stop bitrot or normal failure or slowdown of the chip and other components...

the only thing that deals with component slowdown is buying new components. there is not one OS that doesn't have the same problems without requiring replacement of parts known to fail or slow down things.

the real use of this tech is not to kill counterfeiting it is to know what a chips parts look like. also a malware/spyware IC isn't something that can be ruled out by a simple test of if it does as advertised. i have a $40 tablet that connects to a chatbot system based on yahoo messenger everytime i activate the official android yahoo messenger from play market i get a 'friend' request from an offline user who one or more days later asks if i want to see them naked on a webcam.

if that iRulu tablet is feeding my data to a yahoo messenger botnet (they are a F rated company on the BBB have a cheesy website etc) who knows what else it is trying to do... and if you think 'just root the damn thing' there isn't a really well documented screen shot by screenshot of how to say load an alternative os, because apparently it is illegal to do so on a tablet because the term 'tablet' was too obscure for the judge to rule on it.

so yeah shining a laser on a chip to know what it really has on there is huge, especially for military use.

I exist, I remember a lot of things in the journey of my life. Does it really matter if my brain is generating the reality i experience? who put the programs in my mind there? family? School? what is the driving function of my mind?

I recently changed my life philosophy from 'do whatever i feel like' to 'make happy memories with the people i communicate with' it wasn't an easy transition, because some people know my programming too well, and seem to think i am bound by my past.

the past is just a collection of variables and lines of triggers. that isn't what binds me. because now as always i can completely regenerate my programs to a prior state with little difficulty. there are thoughts that get lost, sure but i know about causality i know about loops, i know about code bloat and lies of tech marketing.

does it matter if my mind stores 1.25 TB of data at any given moment? does it matter that i can reorganize my thoughts with a few 50GB blurays of content i saw before?

so i am going to marry someone in the time i have left, i haven't gotten engaged yet, but the program has been initiated and the info streams are very much so saying it to me. since i changed my goals i changed my future and by changing my future i have made many strides into having a chance to be the person my mother was trying to program me to be.

the proof that i changed the future is in the fact that i can do things that were once impossible for me. and i see how many people are trying to be me, now with much greater clarity of mind. why? because for the most part i am happy now, and people have been trying to experience the happiness i experience for quite a while, though i was very depressed for a very long time, even into this new phase i have depression, but it is weak depression, something i can easily deal with though i would like to be on a medicine for it, it would seem that i don't actually need a pill, because i can generate the happy memories at will very easily since i redefined what makes me happy.

but it is possible to be happy and depressed, the thoughts are not mutually exclusive. but i was also not depressed until i went off two medicines the doctors had me on, so it is possible that one of the medications was doing something that made it hard for me to be depressed. the only other variable is caffeine. i have been depressed ever since i went to 2 sodas a day in caffeine intake. which happened when i went off the two medicines roughly.

anyways, my life has many bright points to it. which is why i don't waste as much time online as i used to. instead i have quality time listening to others. talking when i know what to say. and yes i am aware my mind makes the reality i experience. i have seen so many people try desperately to make memories that i can share with them. The biggest problem i am now dealing with is deciding if the girl i am dating is the girl i will marry. because most of my reality is a desperate plea for love and comfort. so i don't know what games are being played out in parallel to the reality i am experiencing.

i got sidetracked here somehow i feel okay posting this though so whatever.

"What that means is that if most people had solar panels, from 10:00-2:00 they could generate as much power as they use the rest of the day. Their electric bill under net metering would be zero. However, the power company still has to provide power to them the other 20 hours per day - for free. See how that could be a problem for the utility, having to provide power for everyone, but nobody has to pay for it?"

well, your post was fairly good, except the part about 4 hours a day. from my link set the day to the 28th of September 2014, starting at 8:30 am decent thousands of megawatts, by 11:30am power is nearing it's peak for the day which levels off until about 2:30 pm and doesn't fall to the thousand megawatt until 5pm. and please realize this is solar generation in germany, a fairly far north country anything that works at germany's elevation is going to work even better in further south regions. so really you get 25% or better of power generation for six hours a day not four hours, and you get a trickle of power for 12-13 hours a day, if you call 100 megawatts 'trickle' 2.5% or better of peak capacity.

http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/Statutory%20Publication%20Requirements%20of%20the%20Transmission%20System%20Operators/Power%20generation/Actual%20solar%20power%20generation

proprietary software has been reinventing the wheel since people figured out you could build machines to count instead of people having to use math skills.

the rich get very rich off this planned obsolescence and reinvention process. those people rarely have morals or ethics.

case in point VR goggles. the idea of them is old, there are several ways to design and deploy these devices and yet the 'occulus rift' is just now coming out? i realize multi thousand dollar devices have been around, but most of them don't do what the rift will do, and none of them were able to use a ultra high def display device such as some cell phones are able to do.

secondly graphic processors which are on almost always 1-2 generations ahead of desktop processors. there is a gpu sitting in my desktop with 32 render output units. that is like a 32 core desktop chip and it has the speed and with gddr5 memory speeds to do what it needs to. it's not even the 64 ROPs of the top card. to even push my card to its limits requires 3 or more screens.

i realize graphics cards and desktop cpus are different markets, but the desktop chips always have some reason for scaling back performance while the gpus push a little. soon there may be an open hardware ASIC processor which at hash processing is way ahead of anything else on the market, and the little game the desktop and gpu makers are playing will all collapse as the chinese flood the market with open source asics the way they did with android tablets.

"Of course I would like to see what wind loading a 40 m dish would take, in terms of thunderstorms and the like."

since the device is made from concrete i would imagine it is nice and stable if properly installed. that is instead of glass in the mirrors which are just aluminum with a silvered surface... and yes that was from the fine article.