I need no cheater tools, because it's easy spell, easy score

Huh. Today I learned that a fence isn't just a wall without a ceiling.

Who's going to inform all of the would-be muggers that the world of cell phones suddenly changed? Bad muggers! Stop mugging! That'll show em! They know they can still sell the phones for parts and make more money than they would just selling a phone. It's not going to deter them from stealing the phone. Besides, JTAG and such will continue to render inoperable phones operable, not to mention that it may be possible to bypass the kill function if you get into the phone fast enough.

Look at Egypt and Turkey and wherever else. This is an excellent way for a government to say "No more smartphone for you, protestor!" Even if they don't use it in the USA, who WILL use it? The hardware will be built to allow it, so the next nation to have unrest will simply broadcast the kill bits en masse, and the protestors will be censored. Sounds quite delicious from a dictatorship's standpoint.

I once worked with a team that invented three different prototypes of that idea. The first one was fast and accurate, but would have been very expensive to deploy. The second was developed in response to concerns about budget, and substituted a slower CPU which meant it couldn't analyze its sensor data as accurately in realtime, which meant it would take longer and require manual intervention to accurately retrieve the data. There was a third prototype with a very new CPU that had just become available (you may remember the Pentium?) but it was large and turned out to have a buggy floating-point math unit. Remember FDIV? We submitted our findings to Intel, who informed us that we were the first to isolate the error in the unit's circuits. I digress. That prototype was scrapped after much expense, leaving us with two models. Ultimately the research and development department told us we didn't have enough budget to continue developing both prototypes for the next year, so we were forced to choose the lesser of two weevils.

The summary actually says they are considering this for standalone stores and distribution centers.

What do we do with packages?

DROP THEM!

Yes. But what else do we drop?

MORE PACKAGES!

The problem is that idiots run the world from management positions and tell us they don't care, just make it work.

Reference the guy who handed an iPad and an Office 2003 install disc and said get this working by tomorrow.

Well, if we're going to get specific, okay. We agree and disagree on some things here. Java without some sort of qualifier refers to the ecosystem, right? So Java means the Java programming language, the Java compiler, the JVM (JRE), J2EE, the Java plugin... you know, all that stuff. The Java programming language isn't vulnerable, it's just a language. The rest of the Java products, the ones with actual executable code, are all exploitable and there are plenty of CVEs and breaches across the entire product line to prove it.

The JRE, arguably the least replaceable part of the whole ecosystem, is exploitable in many well-known ways. That number grows just about every week, it would seem. You know about the Java plugin, that's one large piece of the problem. There are other parts that deserve scrutiny. Many devices and applications - of particular note, big ticket server-side applications exposed to the Web that query databases - rely on a VERY specific version of the JRE which is usually 2 or more years old by the time the product makes it to market. These products cannot be upgraded at all, in some cases, and in others cannot be upgraded without breaking the application functionality and/or vendor support contract. The companies using these products spent hundreds of thousands or even millions on them and can't switch because it might be the only application that does what it does, or the expense of migrating is larger than the SEC fines and lawsuits a breach would incur. I've actually seen that reasoning before - it's cheaper to lose the data than to close the hole. The vendors aren't going to recode the entire application to get around a security flaw in some part of Java, and they shouldn't have to, but their applications will get pwned and blamed for the breach. Oracle doesn't lose when that happens, we do.

Java as a whole has a security problem eating away at its core because of the JRE. You simply can't say it's all going to be fine just because one popular brain-dead client platform+browser is slowly going away. Server attacks are going to continue to raid databases for PII via XSS and other attacks. Let's not forget about the recent cross-platform (Windows AND MacOS/X) desktop exploits circulating around. Exploits are alive and well on modern OSes.

Blaming the OS and browser is partially okay since a lot of drive-by Web attacks depend on a sequence of flaws in the JRE, the plugin, the browser, and the OS. How much of DEP's necessity do you think was brought about by Java applets? It's not entirely Microsoft's or Apple's or Mozilla's fault, but they aren't blameless. They continue to fail to sandbox applications and plugins.

The users share some of the blame, too. They're the ones going out and downloading Trojan horses from spam, P2P and other less-than-legitimate sources. The enabling technology just happens to be Java sometimes, but the blame there rests on the users.

In summary... There's more going on than just some trojany crapplets that can be phased out.

It would be nice if they would just ask us professionals what we need, and then proceed to deliver that, instead of doing all this trend-surfing.

Who cares if people say Mac did feature X/Y first, or if it looks like a phone, or has / doesn't have some sort of fancy transparent chrome? Make it modern-looking but don't let that be the major selling point. I have to get work done on it.

All I care about is that I can sit down and work efficiently, and that my computer doesn't interrupt me with idiocy. I don't care if I have to learn how to use something new - I'll do that - but efficiency means that I want it to stay out of my way, present the current state of operations clearly to me (something both Windows 8 and MacOS/X fail at), and not demand that I use it like a phone! I already have a phone, I'll use that if I want to use a device like that, but I want to use a desktop computer more productively.

I know, I know... I'm using a Web browser and posting on Slashdot. Meanwhile I have a VS2012 situation happening on another screen and it is not pleasant.

I believe the parent post was saying that we are mostly consumers of software and hardware. That's different from content, which you're correct about. The average user isn't creating any software or hardware, just consuming the platform in order to create and consume content, and as such is beholden to the producers of their platform of choice.

Right now, none of the current popular platforms (Windows 8, MacOS/X, Ubuntu, Android, iOS, WP8) are even that great for content producers (people making presentations, documents, videos, music, etc ... and all the things we repost to Facebook), but they are excellent for content consumers (Facebook users clicking Like and Share on the reposts). The trend is aiming more and more towards pleasing the consumers since there are a lot more of them than there are producers, and that's where the money is.

When the producers of that platform (ugh, this sounds like such business-speak) decide to do something new, it's easier for the average user to go with the flow and experience some discomfort than to switch to a new platform and throw away all the investments made over the years in hardware and software.

How is having a Quick Launch toolbar really different from pinning things to the Taskbar? I mean, you're losing out on the Win+Number shortcut to start your top 10 items, and adding redundant icons when your programs are running.

Thank you. I am so sick of people texting during movies. Some of them even turn on the keypad tones on their smartphones. What is the protocol for such a situation? I gave up telling them to turn it off, because they just seem to get indignant about it.

Spot on. DX is the whole kit and parts of it come and go. DirectMusic, remember that?

I keep wondering, what about the Direct2D and DirectWrite components? It's still fairly new technology, being used for more and more GUIs as time goes by, and could be a huge deal for graphics performance during normal non-gaming computer use. IE and FireFox use them... You never hear about them, though.

Sounds about right. DX11.1 is the top of the line right now, is for Windows 8, and is not even going to be fully backported to Windows 7. Is anything even using the new features? The way I see it, demand for new features won't really happen until people are using the advanced features of the current version, which requires people to install the current version, which requires Windows 8. So it could be a long, long time given the lack of movement to Win8. There also has to be a big change to the API to cause a major version change, which is usually driven by new features that don't work well with the current way of doing things.

There's always been a noticeable lag in DX version releases right before a major hardware or OS release from Microsoft, so they might even be in early stages of development at the drawing board right now.

Who knows. I don't see it going away anytime soon. It seems to be all about the engines nowadays anyway...

So what, are they going to skip 12 and go to 13? They've done it before, with DirectX 4, so it's not a new idea. Maybe 12 turned out to be a huge mess.

I don't see DirectX being discontinued in favor of OpenGL/OpenAL/etc, since the GUIs in their latest products and frameworks all seem to use DirectX to some extent.

(asbestos underpants on) Or maybe they switched to FOSS-style versioning, and just don't see anything new that would demand a major version number. We're going to see abominations like DirectX 11.1.25.4-r6.3 for the rest of time.