Unfortunately, I'm in the UK, where the selection is much more limited.

For example, Dell UK's web site lists exactly one laptop with a 17+" screen and SSD, and it is also a touchscreen and comes with Windows 8.1.

HP do at least promote the Windows 7 option (via Win8 downgrade rights) for the high-end ZBook laptops on their site. However, the pricing on those tends to make the closest equivalent Retina MBPs in specification look cheap.

Also, Microsoft UK don't seem to have any high-end devices at all within their Signature Edition range, so it's invasive crapware city all the way with a lot of the big name brands, even on their expensive, high-end models.

But the screenshots I've seen of Windows 10 still mostly look flat and/or garish, and it seems to be more a case of trying not to make the visuals too much worse than what is already available via Windows 7 than actually trying to be better. Another example is the icons, which have gone from being widely ridiculed to being... well, slightly less widely ridiculed... in all of the reviews I've come across, and with considerable justification if the examples I've seen myself were representative.

It's not just the visuals that put me off, though. It's also the fact that I use a traditional desktop PC with multiple large monitors, and I want an OS and software that work well in that kind of environment. I saw a review the other day of the new preview release where literally every screenshot that had substantial content in it also included the word "tap" somewhere, with obvious concessions to touchscreens that just don't make sense for a desktop workstation. This was one of the big problems with Windows 8, and it seems like with the Surface tablet hardware and Windows 10, Microsoft are doubling down on touchscreens. #donotwant #haverealworktodo

I'll wait to see what people say when Windows 10 actually ships and we're not just talking about preview releases and educated guesswork, but so far the signs don't seem promising. Windows 7, on the other hand, is tried and tested and works just fine on the numerous computers I use it with today, so as I said, if I could buy an approximate equivalent with newer and more powerful hardware right now, I'd be right in there. Sadly, I'm in the UK, and what you can pick up over here is quite limited compared to what you can get in say the US.

If I could find a good high-end laptop that came with vanilla Windows 7 instead of 8 and all the pre-installed extra junk, I would be throwing money at the supplier and begging them to sell me one. That has far more to do with avoiding more recent versions of Windows and their kindergarten, touch-obsessed UIs than it does with wanting a cheap upgrade when 10 ships.

What? I... wait...

Are you fucking with us?

Until I started chatting regularly with some gamer buddies in the UK, yes, it sounded rather odd. I dealt with it the same way you do. :)

Doing some some PCI compliance certification stuff and a scan shows that the site is not compliant, the reason being that TLSv1 is supported. Turning TLSv1 off kills off support for a number of older browsers, all types of browsers.....

(nginx)

    server {
        ssl on;
        #ssl_protocols TLSv1 TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2;
        ssl_protocols TLSv1.1 TLSv1.2; .....
        }
    }

Now I am trying to figure out what to do about this problem, how to detect the clients that do not support TLSv1 and to redirect them to a simple html page instead of the clients pretty much receiving 'connection reset by server' error.

No dice so far, but I thought this was only supposed to happen a year from now (June 2016, not 2015), oh well.

You might want to tighten that wording so as not to prohibit lawyers becoming judges, because having non-lawyers as judges is not going to improve things.

Of course it does. It has the same advantages in terms of security and your visitors' privacy as any decision to host your own material instead of quietly using a third party service. Whether you consider those significant advantages is a different question, and whether your visitors would is a different question again, but clearly there is a difference.

fopen() -> fjopen() but fclose()->jfclose()?

Rasmus, is that you?

This is a popular claim, but what little real data I've seen says quite the opposite. There are so many different minor versions of a library like jQuery that the chance of any given visitor to your site actually having visited another site using the exact same version from the exact same CDN within the cache window turns out to be pretty low.

There are still reasonable performance-related arguments in favour of hosting static content on a CDN, and for splitting resources across domains unless you're in SPDY or HTTP/2 territory, but those aren't quite the same issue and you can avoid them without resorting to loading libraries from third party hosts you don't control.

My position on copyrights and patents was always the same: abolish all patents and copyrights and prevent government from providing monopolies with these laws.

Basically this is nearly the ultimate absurd result that we are seeing here and it probably can even get worse. You want to build a road somewhere? Well, you are violating a copyright on other people building horizontal surfaces to allow circular wheels (and legs I suppose) to run on them. You want to build a house? Are you going to have a roof? Foundation? Walls? Windows? Doors? Fucking copyright violator. Absurd, isn't it? Or is it really absurd to expect that ruling like that can actually be passed given the fact that it is a government entity that can pass that ruling and given that governments are already given authority to rule on these issues?

No, the real solution is not even about money exchanging hands (though I wouldn't be surprised in case of Oracle), it is about the power that governments have over our heads, and this power is as insane as it is absurd.

No company or person should be given government protected monopoly on anything, including any invention, copyright, whatever. That's not how evolution works, that's not how cultures worked and still keep working. That type of power is destructive, not constructive in any way. Let the people and companies decide how to provide their services and products in a world that does not automatically protect them from any type of competition. At the very least this cannot be a power granted to government, deal with these issues on contract basis and using trade secrets if you must.

Anyway, I can only leave 1 or 2 comments here now given that 24 hours passed since my account's 'karma' was obliterated again by moderators who want to make sure I cannot reply to comments made to me, so don't expect many comments here either.

You mean in the same way that a manufacturer of a spoon "illegally copied" information about a human mouth?

In the same way that a road construction crew "illegally copied" information about wheels being round?

In the same way that a manufacturer of a catheter "illegally copied" information about urethra?

This is API, API is information about CONNECTING pieces together, it is a contract information, definition of connectivity, not implementation details.

This is not a problem that is just related to Java somehow either, this concerns everything, every language, nearly every field and industry.

Ah, I see. I think I have erased from my memory the time when my daily commute was measured in hours -- I could only stand it for a few years early in my career and then gave up and moved to a job closer to home. I do sympathise, though.

1. Who says 'my business' is causing a disturbance? Do you generally know which hotel somebody stays in if they are running around drunk on the street?

2. I don't believe for a moment that there is an actual problem of that type, most people sleep at night and I am almost completely sure this entire fucking article is a gigantic exaggeration like pretty much everything else that pops into the media.

3. Hotels being in so called 'commercial districts' does not change the hotel customers being drunk 1 block away from the hotel, beside which hotels are mostly located near private housing anyway, not in factory or warehouse zones.

4. By my standards there is no question at all, I am completely against all government involvement into any business and money, so no, by my standards this is a cut and dry case of government oppression. You are the one full of shit, hotels are located near other houses and buildings all the time and their clients can get drunk and noisy anywhere at all, be it a city or a beach or transit or whatever.

Only the first few times. Then it's just annoying.