And the lesson is if you care about privacy you should avoid storing your data with multinational companies because every nation in which the company operates is a nation that could potentially coerce the company into handing over your data..

AIUI the original plan was not to have it at all but they couldn't get office converted to metro in time so they included the desktop mode but crippled it by forbidding desktop apps other than the handful bundled with the OS (a cut down version of office, some of the built in windows tools).

The only reason I can see for crippling the desktop mode on the arm port was pushing developers to switch to metro.

Would windows on arm have succeeded if people could just recompile their software for it rather than having to redesign their software to fit within the constraints of metro and then on top of that pay a 30% appstore fee to MS? We will never know for sure but I strongly suspect it would have had a better chance than in the crippled state it was sold in.

From a software perspective what sets memory/IO mapped busses apart from each other is how the OS reads and/or sets their configuration, not what they are like on an electrical level. ISA was either manually configured or (later) used a hacked on plug and play mechanism. EISA had it's own configuration system.

Java protects against some of the common screwups that lead to security holes in C (and to a lesser extent C++) programs. It simply won't let you do things like read/write beyond the end/before the start of an array, perform an unprotected typecast between two object types or use memory that you have already freed. However there are many other classes of security hole it doesn't help with.

Java sees lots of security patches for a couple of reasons

1: Java provides sandboxing features intended to allow safe running of untrusted code. Unfortunately such sandboxes seem to be very difficult to get right (whether it's java applets, flash or javascript in browsers).
2: Java provides a massive standard library. It's virtually an OS within an OS and that means lots of code to be potentially vulnerable (especially in light of point 1)

The tricky situation comes if you've built your application on top of windows network functionality rather than directly on top of TCP/IP. That can make it very difficult to lock things down with a firewall because the high risk ports and the ports your application relies on can be one and the same.

And then there is a the question of portability. There is a C compiler for virtually anything powerful enough to support a compiler. C++ rules out some of the smaller microcontrollers but is available virtually everywhere else. Sure the code may need some work to remove platform specific assumptions, deal with missing library functionality on very small targets or deal with compiler bugs but that is still likely to be much easier than a complete rewrite.

Any new language that is intended to be compiled to native code (either at compile time or at runtime by a JIT) has a massive uphill struggle to come close to the portability of C/C++. AIUI GDC only got proper support for arm linux very recently and is still missing proper support (e.g. the libphobos standard library) for many architectures.

Scripting languages have things a bit easier because they usually piggyback on the existing C/C++ compilers. So the developers for the most part only have to worry about OS portability, not CPU portability.

Theres a couple of causes

One is something called interleaving, DSL uses forward error correction algorithms to provide resistance to noise/interference. However these algorithms fall apart if there are too many bit errors in a block. To reduce the chance of this happening in the face of interference spikes they interleave the blocks (such that a burst of interference has a small effect on multiple blocks rather than a large effect on one block) but this comes at a price in terms of latency. At least here in the UK some of the more techie ISPs will turn this off if asked.

The other is that your "first hop" can be considerablly longer than just the DSL line to the telephone exchange because your connection tunnels through the phone providers network to reach the ISP. If you are on a small ISP in the UK your packets will most likely go to london before they hit a visible IP router. Larger providers are likely to hit the IP network sooner but it may still be a considerable distance from where you live.

Desperate teenagers who are priced out from getting insurance any other way!

As I understand it it comes down to table lookups. The details of full unicode support are unfortunately not trivial and theres a reason libraries like ICU are as big as they are.

As I understand it normally the base character is first and then things added to it follow.

So if you cut the end off a string and cut in the middle of a cluster then the last character may be missing some bits but the string is likely to be otherwise OK.

If you cut the start off a string and cut in the middle of a cluster things get messier. You then have combining characters at the start of the string with nothing to combine with. If you just ask a display library to display it then it's going to be down to the display library what happens but I expect the combiners will either be not displayed at all or displayed with no base. If you add the cut string to the end of another string then the combiners will combine with whatever was at the end of the string you combined it with.

All in all you will probablly end up with something "ugly but usable".

No it's moved from mainstream support to extended support. Still nearly 5 years left before EOL.

You don't get any free support incidents with OEM copies anyway and most crippling bugs will have been fixed or worked around by now. So for most users the transition from mainstream support to extended support isn't really a massive deal.

My understanding was that the long term plan was to return most first stages directly to a landing site on land. When they don't have enough fuel to do that they would land it on the barge then partially refuel the stage and fly it back to base. Of course this relies on them managing to convince the powers that be that it's safe to land falcon 9 first stages on land.

I would imagine that anything that goes to mars will either have separate ascent and descent stages or some kind of CO2+energy->fuel conversion setup on the mars surface.

AIUI the "red dragon" sample return proposal from spacex had an unmanned dragon capsule landing and then a much smaller ascent craft to take the sample to mars orbit (where presumablly it would dock with a craft for return to earth).

MS recently introduced something called "Windows 8.1 with Bing". Basically they are giving away windows free for low end laptops and tablets on the condition that the PC vendor doesn't change the default search engine.

Until very recently computer education in the UK was heavilly focussed on "ICT" which to a large extent ammounted to "pushing buttons in MS office". There was an attidude that permated the computing world (both inside and outside schools) that "you don't need to understand how it works" or "it's too complex for you to understand". Microcomputers that started up at a basic prompt where replaced with PCs were the ability to program was hidden if it was there at all. Systems that curious kids could fiddle with were replaced by systems locked down by network admins.

The result of this attidude persisting for a long time (a couple of decades afaict) was a decline in the number and skill of people applying to university for computing related programs. This decline got the attention of people in high places and there is currently a push to move away from "ICT" to a computing syllabus that actually includes programming and learning about the fundamentals of computers.

https://www.gov.uk/government/...

Hence teachers pushed into teaching an area in which they have little knowlege and confidence. Combine that with the availability of material on the internet and through various other outside-school sources and it's not going to be difficult for the top pupils to legitimately overtake the teachers and the mediocre pupils to give the impression that they know more than the teacher.

MS has one of the better support lifecycle policies in the desktop OS market. Mainstream support lasts 5 years from release or 2 from the release of the successor whichever is longer. Then extended support lasts another 5 years or 2 from the release of the second successor, again whichever is longer.

The problems are that they sometimes turn out turds, often vendors of other software can sometimes be very slow on getting it to work properly with the new OS and often people are too cheap to upgrade their other software even when a compatible version is release. The overall impact of this is that people kept commisioning new windows XP machines right through the time when windows vista was the current version and into the time when windows 7 was the current version until they were pushed to windows 7 by a combination of security worries from the end of extended support and hardware vendors dropping driver support.

I would expect the same to happen with windows 7. Lots of people/companies will stick with windows 7 until windows 10 has been released and got through it's teething problems, then they will have an upgrade panic while windows 7 is in the last couple of years of extended support.