I think that RT was kind of a short stop-gap solution to fix the problem of making low(er) cost Windows tablets at a time when running full Windows would have been just too expensive. Not that you can get tablets running full X86 windows for $100-$200, there's much less of a reason to continue on with Windows RT.

I think costs may have been part of it but the bigger issue was battery life. Now that Intel has fully fledged x86 chips that are quite close on power consumption there's no longer any reason to settle for the RT 'port' that still won't run half the software users are expecting to 'just work'.

...the fact that easily 3/4 of these things are rocking 32gb of flash memory certainly isn't helping either. Lets see, we have windows RT, one or two other big applications and...we're out of space. You do have that handy SD slot but that doesn't help because you still can't install apps on it.

Edgar Allen Poe
Oscar Wilde
John Keats
Lewis Carroll
Robert Louis Stevenson
Charles Dickens
Florence Nightengale


...notorious opium abusers every one...fortunately for us they lived in a time before it was demonized, or they wouldn't have been able to make their various contributions to society.

As a former H1-B visa holder you should also be well aware that the 'prevailing wage' is subject to substantial interpretation and visa holders are essentially locked in to that company.

They can't leave unless it's to go back home. In the case of some countries it's just a few years, but if you're from someplace like India you'll probably be there a decade or more before you ever get a green card.

I've worked at a number of smaller companies, and (at least in that environment) this whole yearly wage increase thing simply doesn't happen. If you want a substantial raise, it means accepting an opportunity somewhere else. Something an H1-B holder cannot do, so it's no wonder that they're preferred. I wouldn't exactly call you slaves, you're really more like indentured servants.

My counter-view (sitting, between product and customer). Product have made something that's not quite right. We ask them to fix it. They don't want to, as they're adding the latest shiny new feature instead.

Um...if you're following the scrum process the product owner/project managers are firmly in control of this.

Developers certainly aren't the ones deciding what has priority, they're merely deciding how much each fix/feature 'costs' in terms of development time and letting you lot decide what they should be working on.

Likewise, if it's 'not quite right', you have only yourselves to blame since they're providing frequent builds and not just one ginormous deliverable every 8 months or so.

I believe you're thinking of vellum, which is parchment made from animal hide, not paper.
It was fairly common to scrape the pages blank and write over the existing texts. In some cases fragments of the original texts can be retrieved, but obviously that's fairly hit and miss.

Is it really though? When your only two choices are crap, and it comes in a choice of brown or dark brown it's really not much of a choice, and it seems perfectly reasonable for the voters not to care much. It's not as if anything substantial will change depending on which of these amoral fuckwads they vote in.

It doesn't take much to take down a drone, so a little flak ought to do wonders. That or AEGIS systems and conventional ammunition.

Actually...for ultrasonics piezoelectric speakers are far better than conventional cone drivers...just not the 2 cent variety you're referring to here.

Any kind of automated mass collection of data without a human in the loop to determine if a threat is credible or not is going to have significant problems.

If you haven't been paying attention lately, having any kind of civil servant in the loop to determine if a threat is credible or not is also going to have significant problems.

Keywords: Swatting, ATHF Movie/Boston, NSA/FISA Court, Hello Kitty "bubble gun" and/or pop-tarts, etc.

The police everywhere are given those assault rifles, military grade body armor, etc. just for the price of a stamp, so it's hardly surprising. This is where (some) of the boatload of money the DHS is spending goes.

It may be an environmental train wreck but if push comes to shove we can make our gasoline out it (coal).

...and just like our space program you can thank those cuddly Nazis for it.

There are very important reasons for this. Probably the most important one is DPI scaling, something Windows never supported properly until quite recently (Windows 8.1). With 8.1 it's possible, but any non 'DPI aware' apps (AKA almost all of them) may still need a lot of tweaking. The only reliable way of handling this is either increase the size of the screen or lower the resolution.

For anyone who hasn't experienced this for themselves, 4K laptop displays + Windows 7 = complete train wreck.

You know, it depresses me enough what we have to hack our phones to remove crappy "features" (disabled OS functions, bloatware) we don't want.

I for one simply cannot wait to do the same to my new car/refrigerator/thermostat. In the meantime, one alternate plan that's worked very well so far is to not buy any new cars or refrigerators or $200 learning thermostats.

The $1.5 billion rover, a near-copy of the Curiosity rover, will collect about 30 samples of rock and soil for eventual return to Earth.

Or we could spend that money on something worthwhile.

No problem. Would you prefer 3 weeks of corporate farm subsidies (20B/yr), one Ohio class submarine (2B/ea) or three B-2 bombers (500M/ea)?

"When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators."

-P.J. O'Rourke