I was OK with 8.0. I've reached the point where I hate the new versions of everything (except maybe XFCE, which is pretty much pitched toward people who hate the new versions of everything). The reason is all this struggle to revolutionize the user experience seems to have left the goals of making common tasks convenient for the user behind. Impressive but pointless seems to be à la mode these days, and designers appear increasingly incapable of distinguishing creativity from novelty.

But given that virtually everybody has caught this disease, I pretty much have given up on insisting that things making sense. I only ask for a few things, that a user interface be stable and respond consistently (consistency was a huge problem with Vista), and that I can figure out how to do what I need done after a few days with the system. Windows 8.0 fit the bill. It didn't make much *sense*, but it didn't crash and responded in a stable way so I simply adjusted to its quirks.

Windows 8.1 doesn't fit the bill, because it doesn't respond consistently; it brings back some of the Vista experience of having the OS throw unpredictable little delays into your work. The file manager windows are especially bad (e.g. when you're ejecting a drive). How in Hades' name could someone screw up something like that in 2013?

And the 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade process was terrible. It was so poorly designed from an HCI standpoint that I was actually tempted to believe it was an abusive prank by a disgruntled MS employee.

MS these days is looking to ever more like Lotus Software in its declining days. Despite being located in city crowded with world class universities, Lotus seemed utterly incapable of addressing even basic user interface problems except by pasting cheery looking wallpaper over them. I used to reflect when I passed their headquarters on Land Boulevard that if they put up a billboard say "We'll pay $100,000 to anyone who can fix our stupid UI problems," probably twenty or thirty people a day would see it who could probably take them up on the offer.

Use your special system architecture x-ray vision, folks. This is not simple, stand-alone site like Slashdot that just has to do some database queries and generate some XML, then uses JQuery or something to asynchronously load some advertising into a DIV. This is a system that must orchestrate a complex *synchronous* process involving servers that belong to outside organizations.

Case in point; the system requirements say that the site must exclude illegal immigrants, so the system has to request and obtain proof of your status from Homeland Security's servers before it can proceed. Also, instead of issuing the same subsidy to everyone, the law specifies and income dependent, means-tested subsidy, which means the system ALSO has to check your claims against the IRS's computers before continuing. That's before it actually gets to obtaining the marketplace data.

So the most complex aspect of this system is essentially untestable short of a near-full scale roll-out. Hey, IRS, can I try hosing down your servers with JMeter? Even if you could orchestrate the non-functional testing you'd want to do, you won't know how the system works until it's handling real data. It's not like you can shove a test load equivalent to a thousand applications per hour, then another equivalent to ten-thousand, then draw a straight line that will tell you how the system will perform with twenty-thousand. There are some serious discontinuities in performance lurking, and the actual data submitted is likely to change things.

I think if I were in charge of this, the extreme difficulty of realistic non-functional testing might have led me to isolate some of the data interchange into a post-processing step. That is, I'd let people apply and take them at their word about their immigration status and income, then tell them to check back in a day while we confirm the data they submitted. It's more bureaucratic, but a big part of user experience is predictability. If someone knows they can complete their application in half an hour and come back 24 hours later for confirmation, it's not so bad. But if the system is designed to give them the expectation that they can finish in a half hour, but sometimes takes so long their sessions expire, that's a disaster.

"Begging the question" refers to a logical fallacy in which you pose a question that can't be answered without assuming something that really ought to be proved first. The common example is "Have you stopped beating your wife?" It seems to call for a yes or no answer, but such an answer is only possible until we all agree that you've been beating your wife.

"Begging the question" is sometimes a result of sloppy thinking, but it can sometimes be an "intentional fallacy" -- a dirty trick, as when a prosecutor asks you, "How long have you been stealing from your employer?"

The term "begging the question" has never been clear in English; it's a literal translation of the Latin term "petitio principii"; it might better be called "assuming the conclusion". "Begging the question" in the logical-fallacy sense was always jargon, and thus not a first class member of the English lexicon in my opinion.

Anyhow, your reaction proves my point. The majority of even reasonably educated people now think "begging the question" mens "raising the question"; and so we have to accept that's one of it's meanings. It's more practical to reform the dictionary than it is to reform the language. If it helps, this is a case of what linguists call metonymy. The fallacy of petitio principii does indeed involve raising a question -- the question of the implicit premise's truth. Over time that meaning has been broadened to include *all* instances of raising questions.

Initially those who used "begging the question" to mean "raising the question" were just ignorant people trying to ape the writing of their more educated betters. But that's gone on so long there's no practical alternative but to grant that sense of phrase naturalized citizenship. But there are some who will never accept it, so it's best to accept the use of that sense by others but not to use it oneself.

It didn't affect me directly because I was working on System V Unix and we weren't directly connected to ARPANet.

I remember thinking, "Gee, someone actually *made* one of those?"

The idea had already popped up in some 70s sci-fi stories, and I remember in the late 70s pranking was already fairly common on timesharing systems. As soon as people began to share systems pranksters began to fool around with them, creating "fork bombs" and "chain jobs". It was annoying for sysadmins, but I think it wasn't malicious. The people who did this stuff were fascinated with the edge cases, the things a system could be made to do that it wasn't designed to do; and, let's just say they weren't necessarily the most attuned to the needs and desires of others.

Since the idea of network-vectored malware had cropped up shortly after the idea of a networked world became commonplace (this was still sci-fi stuff in the 70s), people had been talking about the real possibility of such a thing in the 80s; there were even some academic papers on the notion. But our forward thinking was more focused on the positive things that networked computers would do. In the end I think most of us fell short on both ends. Most of us underestimated just how useful and ubiquitous networking would become, at least in our lifetimes. And although we knew network-vectored malware was a theoretical possibility, we had no idea what a major feature of the networked world it would become -- at least in our lifetimes.

in retrospect, the Morris Worm wasn't so remarkable. We'd already seen pranksters on timesharing systems. I called them "doorknob twisters"; people whose curiosity and distractability meant they couldn't walk down a corridor without taking a peek behind the closed doors. Often these were the best people; Ken Thompson even described putting hidden hacks the C compiler in his Turing Award speech. And people had been talking about the possibility for network worms, albeit in sci-fi terms. Again in retrospect, something like the Morris Worm was bound to happen, probably within the next two or three years.

The Morris Worm is remarkable because it was our introduction to the unpredictability inherent in the scale of the network world. Just a tiny miscalculation was enough to turn an intellectual curiosity into a widespread disaster.

Yeah, the word "data" is plural and "impact" is not a synonym for "affect".

When you insist that the vast majority of a language's speakers are speaking wrongly, you're just spitting into the wind. I've even given up on "begging the question". I used it "correctly" myself, but it's far past the point where only morons use it to mean "brings up the question".

Wow. It's rate to see genuine insight into positive relationship management these days. The norm today seems to be "if you're dealing with an asshole, be a bigger asshole until they give up". Unfortunately, it seems that the obvious flaw in this world view has been lost.

What am I saying? STFU, we don't need your stinkin' advice around here!

Enough with the deadpan humour.

Not yet, but I guess Switzerland must be.

Yes. Stop giving politicians money for making promises. Give them money for actually improving things. The teachers union won't need to "contribute" if education improves, and the state starts to benefit from the things that the better educated folks come up with. Under your current system, anyone who is really bright would just leave the country.

Who said I do? I just find it funny that he implies that their phones aren't as good just because they're cheaper, while at the same time saying they do the exact same stuff.

Why should anyone donate to have a government servant put in place? It's pretty ridiculous. There should be no donations allowed. And there should be voting on issues, rather than people. Being a politician should just be a job, not a popularity contest.

The camera is the least important part of a smartphone (in my opinion).

Android's interface philosophy is better than Apple's (see previous comment on the back button).

You could just say "lower half" instead of "bottom two quartiles". Though if your aim was to sound like a douche, then congratulations! Mission accomplished.

What's your problem with plastics? I always have my phones in wallet cases these days anyway, so the chassis materials are pretty much irrelevant to me.

I didn't say they're too expensive, I just think that thinking of everything as "premium" vs "piece of shit" is a bit harsh. For reference, my phone is an S4 and I drive a Toyota GT86, though outside of work I wear clothes that most people probably don't think of as all that nice (usually extremely baggy trousers with some kind of geeky t-shirt).

Well, the HTC One was okay, but the HTC version of Android isn't great. I used to use custom ROMs on HTC phones too. I saw someone with a Note, and I was quite impressed. I tried the S3 after that, and I really enjoyed it (though I do avoid most of the crapware). There's a reason Samsung devices are so popular, so I'd give one a try before complaining that the "Android world" sucks just because you didn't like HTC's version.

I'd think it says more about how much money you have spare to spend on gadgets.

Uh-huh. Not even a hint of irony?

That kind of attitude is sure to make you a lot of friends!