Defragging a potentially huge disk, in the background, on-the-fly, so the disk never slows down.
File search index, in the background, on-the-fly, so you can search faster. You can turn this off.
Full window dragging, and many other graphics enhancements. You can turn these off.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Port polling, did you know that a USB port might gett polled 50'000 times per second? You can turn this down. A lot.
Scheduled tasks. Oh so many scheduled tasks. You probably have over 1'000 defined.
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
An actual software Firewall. You can turn it off, or make it much simpler.
Multi-user, multi-profile. Everything gets doubled.
Is the printer still there? Let's check again.
Is the internet still connected? Let's check again.
Event logging. Windows knows what it's doing, because it takes the time to write it down.
The windows registry. It's probably the single most reliable aspect of any operating system. It's incredibly fast, always-on, used tens of thousands of times in a single moment by a any application -- my graphics suite writes 12'000 registry entries when I close the application. And you never need to worry about it getting corrupted.
No fewer than eight different scripting languages available at any moment.
Twenty versions of a single DLL loaded concurrently, for cross-decade application compatibility.

It's not just an operating system. It's a generic operating system that can run anything from decades ago. My 1985 application still runs on my vista machine, which is still running smoothly 7 years after I built it, and now it's running software 7 years newer than it is. iOS doesn't do that. Neither does OS X. Neither does Android.

But there's always been a version of windows with better battery life. It used to be called XP embedded. And it was exactly what you expected it to be -- you got to just start turning off huge parts of windows. You're welcome to do it. No, you don't want to. You don't want things to be slower, and you don't want to lose all of those great features. And many are tied together.

And that's why you chose a windows machine in the first place. Not because it does the bare minimum, and hence saves battery life, but because it does everything it's always done at a reasonable battery life.

But hey. If you want to complain about power vs features, I want you to look at my tvision's on-screen menu system. Now it's a smart tv, with a menu of icons to all sorts of dumb shit. And yet, just scrolling through those pages of icons is slower than my speak'n'spell. My tvision is plugged into the wall, with as much power as it wants. The led light bulb consumes more power than the computer running the on-screen menu. Why? I have no idea. But it also doesn't have a pre-amp, so I can't plug in any headphones or larger speakers without an optical cable and a home theatre amp/receiver. Thanks for that.

You sound like you'd be a huge admirer of George Bernard Shaw.

http://youtu.be/OBZsTf6oLfY

Strat

It's New York City. Everyone pays, well, except for the well-connected political elite, anyway.

They'll be howling for government and law enforcement to have access to that information to catch bogeymen and child molesters and other big scary people in the name of their little snowflakes.

...that the NSA managed to intercept more calls of French citizens.... ...than the French government.

Facebook's down! Oh my gosh, I'm jumping off a bridge.

Let's just get that out on the table. There's no such thing as a social contract in the United States and nor should their be. I would rather have an aircraft carrier battle group and the F-35 than someone else, but the preferred answer is to have that money back in my pocket. I earned it. It's mine. Like, yeah, I do have some social obligation but its only to people who are likewise productive or were productive. The permanent underclass of Federal Pets, is, in fact, just Federal Pets, and they should have about as much rights as Fido the family dog has.

We have Cannonball Runs, where our developers and engineers work long days, enjoy company-provided, catered meals, and concierge services to help in their absence at home, and of course preems, which are financial incentives for accelerating the schedule.

It's about as far from what this asshole is doing as you can get, but we get fantastic results, and the work product is very high quality. That's why I spend the money to do it. It does cost money - about $5k/day for a team of 10 people (I refuse to call them "resources").

My cup holder is broken!!!

Maybe people should think a little before posting on Slashdot...

Wow! Thanks for posting on /. Mr. President!

Strat

and even DRM is merely an obstacle to be overcome to get to the Game . That . You . Must . Play . Now .

The problem is that the games suck. Right now in the 'AAA' space we have an orientation something like:

85% production values
5% compelling and entertaining story and writing
10% gameplay
0% replay value

Show me a game like this, and I'll spend rather a lot, and even suffer DRM for it:

10% production values
20% compelling and entertaining story and writing
50% gameplay
20% replay value

When the technology didn't allow for production values to matter, everything was tied up in gameplay, writing, and replayability. Games had to be entertaining to sell.

Now, particularly given the ways that games are marketed (and the synergy between this kind of marketing and the marketing that happens on the hardware side), everything is about jaw-dropping renderings. It feels like the late '80s and early '90s, when everyone in CS departments were printing out raytrace scenes at 24x36 and hanging them on the wall.

At first, it was "omigod thassocool" to see a bunch of floating cones and spheres and rendered bolts with clearly articulated threads reflecting the image of the chessboard on the other side of the picture. But by the mid-'90s, it was like, "humf, what else you got, I am no longer amazed by the fabulousness of this technology."

That's how I feel about games now. A decade or a decade and a half ago, game engines and triangle count and an asymptotic approach to "photorealistic realtime" rendering were enough to make a person shell out $$$ just to "have the experience."

But now it's old hat. Someone else posted in this story about games being all about showing you sliding your car sideways into a flock of sheep. That pretty much sums it up—how many hours do they spend on tableaux like this? It's plots of shiny raytrace scenes on department walls all over again. I had occasion to play a few games (Silpheed, a few Sonics, etc.) on someone's Sega CD setup not so long ago. I was like "Shit, this is fun!" and then shortly after I realized why I had abandoned gaming in the early 2000's. I just preferred to spend my money on more entertaining things.

I find crossword puzzles to be as fun as many of the 'AAA' titles of the last half-decade.

I use markdown + Deadalus for long-form (i.e. dozens of pages) content that will go to print.

I use markdown + Mou for short-form content that will go online.

If you write for online distribution at all and you don't know about Mou, you should definitely check it out. Similar statement for those that write books but don't know about Daedalus.

As someone that writes a great deal both for online and offline distribution, I use markdown *extensively*.

It's fabulous for the grunt work of formatting: headers, italics, links. The rest can be done by tossing in HTML, XML, or whatever other markup code is needed. It's fabulously lightweight and fast and unobtrusive.

In fact, for all those "I wrote my dissertation in LaTeX, *sniff* *sniff*" people here on Slashdot, how about this:

I wrote my dissertation on an iPad 2, in Daedalus, in markdown, embedding HTML or other kinds of markup as necessary, then formatting it all in a final pass through a couple different parser/formatters. Sometimes the right tool for the job is the one that you have to think about the least—the one that stays out of your way—and for me, that's markdown+Daedalus.

(Yes, I'm prepared for the onslaught of accusers, ridiculers, and doubters here—prepared to ignore them.)