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Wait...TWO icons in one? How the fuck are users going to parse that? A picture and a gear - does that mean it automatically opens the file? A picture and a hamburger? A picture and a small bird? A document and two lines with a dot between them?

Users will screw things up no matter how you do it because there is no common language for executable, text file, picture, slide, pdf, rich text, etc. And with the propensity for UI designers to change the look of icons just to be "new and hip" with every other OS release (ex: settings icons), the users will never "catch up" before accidentally "executing" what they think is a picture file.

There are two problems. The first is that the OS allows you to run porn.jpg.exe having downloaded it from some random place on the 'net. I don't think that either OS X or Windows do: they'll both pop up a thing saying 'You are trying to run a program downloaded from the Internet, do you really want to?', which isn't normally something that happens when people try to open a file so ought to trigger them to avoid it (if it doesn't, then seeing the .exe extension probably won't either).

The second is that the OS allows programs and other file types to set icons at all before their first run. This also leads to confused deputy-like attacks where you think you're opening a file with one program but are actually opening it with something that will interpret it as code. The solution to this is probably to have programs keep their generic program icon until after their first run. If you double click on something that has a generic program icon, then you probably intend to run it...

...and wouldn't understand even if they did. The only people who enable file extensions are those who understand file extensions, that's a pretty big bias right there. Sure, you can show the rest a file extension but it'll fly right past them just like all the dialogs they don't read but click "OK" on. Like when I accidentally made a rar instead of a zip file and my friend couldn't figure out how to open it. Nice guy, but he doesn't use Google. He wouldn't install 7z or WinRAR unless you pointed him to it and said download this. And I'm pretty sure he'd run absolutely anything I pointed him to.

Yeah, we tried that with Windows 3.1, but Win32 permitted storing the icon in the executable because you could do that on the Macintosh.

If you want all exes to have a boring icon, use a boring file manager for admin tasks.

Try comparing it to one of the clones. Diddle the settings until you get similar visual detail and then check the frame rates. Prepare for jaw droppage. Minecraft is absolutely awful about performance.

No, just not everyone is complaining. But Minecraft falls down very hard on complex scenes which render fine with e.g. minetest.

Also, they want to sell you paint. Although I have noticed that their primer in particular truly is epic. I've used it even in automotive applications, as a midcoat to get around a paint interaction. I sure wish I knew who made it for them so I could get it at a reasonable price.

What Linux users are pissed off at Microsoft for adding fluff? They must have sad and pathetic lives even by Slashdot standards, because you can turn all that stuff off.

What Linux users get pissed off at Microsoft for is forcing fluff, like when you have to use a GUI tool to configure something. But they are getting much better about embracing the command line. The next Windows will supposedly have even better headless support.

Compiz does do all the eye candy shiny shiny stuff. But you can turn features on and off atomically, and there is a great deal of configuration available for each feature. If for example you like many of the aspects of the OSX desktop, but some of the features bother you or you wish they worked a little bit differently, you can get the precise effect you're looking for with Compiz.

Sadly, my favorite window manager (emerald) is not being developed any more, but between emerald, compiz, and avant-window-navigator it's possible to build a maclike desktop which actually works properly, and which has only useful eye candy like smooth moves (nice for seeing where windows go) and an Expose-like feature with no borders. That is, you can turn them off. And of course, mipmapped previews.

This post needs a '-1 not even wrong' moderation. I started to write a reply to your points, but I honestly can't tell if you're trolling or completely fail to understand any of the parts of the hardware and software stacks involved.

Not really. Self has multiple prototype chains, Smalltalk and Java have only single inheritance. Both JavaScript and Smalltalk lack any declarative mechanism for defining classes in the language and do so by manipulating objects.

Did you? All I saw in that discussion was an argument over whether it was stupid to need seven lines to split a string instead of one. And it is. It's still a stupid argument, because any problem you can solve with a free and common library is not a real problem.

The idea is that your receptionist should be able to follow the instructions, install Windows, and set up your small office. "Back in the day" it was ordinary to make the receptionist the sysadmin because they were the person in the building deemed to have time to take on additional duties. I've spent some fun times doing UUCP support with someone who has to have Unix characters (like bang and pipe) explained to them as a result.

The GUI is still the primary way to do things.

Well, it's an open question of who's living in a fantasy world. I'm actually old enough to remember these people. Show me a Republican today who'd be as aggressive as Nixon on regulation. Who would sign the Clean Water Act, or the Fair Credit Reporting Act, or appoint someone like Elliot Richardson the head of HEW. Nixon also took the single most intrusive act of economic intervention ever by an American president (including FDR): the wage-price freeze. It's fair to say that there's nobody in national politics anywhere on the spectrum that would undertake a step like that. For one thing it was hopeless; there is no way to stop incipient runaway inflation without restricting the money supply and reducing government deficit spending so as to induce a temporary contraction of the economy.

This removes the need for a shader language parser in the graphics driver. It still needs a compiler, unless you think the GPU is going to natively execute the bytecode. If you remove the compiler from a modern GPU driver, then there's very little left...

Segregated emails annoying? Are you kidding me? I go out of my way to keep personal and business emails separate, to the point of having a stock"bounce" email I send to people who accidentally send to the wrong email address. Same with phone numbers - one personal, one business.

She's either lazy or evil. Given it's Hillary, I'm going to split the difference and call it both. Too lazy to have two emails, just evil enough to know that if she says something awful she can at least delete it from her end. (I mean, every email goes somewhere so it's not like you can delete all of the copies yourself.)

As a (mostly) Democrat, I sincerely hope she doesn't run for President. While I think she has been vilified by the right beyond her actual failings, I'm not a fan of her in general. More importantly, I might get stuck voting for her as a result of some nutjob who makes it through the GOP primaries. Either that or I'll have to write in Bill 'n' Opus.

A generation ago, Paul Wolfowitz was on the left fringe of the Democratic party. People change.

Nelson Rockefeller was to the left of Hillary. So was Richard Nixon.