My understanding is that early reactor designs were navy designs (destined for submarines and such) that was scaled up to gain a favorable ROI. As such, they were never really designed to be operated at that scale.

Reminds me of the early days of computing, where often a student that was found able to break school system security was often given tasks by the IT admin.

I just wonder if we will see someone taking the WoA requirements, skip the "secure boot" requirement and sell it with Android or Linux (Say Plasma Active, WebOS or Boot2Gecko). Hell, things seems to be happening in interesting ways right now. First there is the Spark tablet. And now i read that a company has started selling a hacker (classic sense) friendly set of tablets (7" and 4:3 10") for developer preview. In either case there are some driver issues tho...

This likely because they do not want to hand Linux the tools to become big on ARM. MS is mandating a very PC like system design for their ARM version. There will be a EFI/BIOS boot, PCI style device enumeration and similar. This is all things that Torvalds was ranting about ARM lacking and therefore painful to work with. By locking out alternative OSs, MS likely hopes to avoid what made them big in the first place. And that was the rush of PC clones once the IBM BIOS was reverse engineered (and proven as such in court). This because the rest of the PC was all off the shelf parts that any company could source and put together. Only the bootstrap was IBM proprietary. Once that cat was out of the bag, MS could sell its DOS layer for any of the clones and so provide a common API layer. And the rest is history.

That in part is what a scroll bar is. The one on the side of my firefox window right now shows i am about 1/4 down the page while writing this. I never understood this drive towards removing scroll bars from tablets. On phones they may eat up too much space, but on tablets? And now Apple appears to have stripped them out of OSX as well, so we can be damn sure that Gnome, Unity and Windows will follow suit.

Still, the latest ribbon idea from Microsoft seems to be to hide by default. With that, and perhaps setting a Word to fit the whole page on screen (much like a ebook or PDF) one could then use whole screen swipes to go back and forth (with some for paging interfaces that could come into view). Sometimes i wonder why they got the whole "ream of paper" idea from (tho the office toilet may be a good guess).

Still, i think MS is doing it this way to make the transition as painless as possible in terms of relearning. This is something they seem to always consider. Win8 may be the first time since Win95 that MS tries to do a whole new UI, and even with Win95 one could revert back to the Win3.x "desktop" if one wanted (it was hiding in the wings, iirc).

But the price is nuts.

Thing is that Microsoft have manged to maintain their hold on the office because "everyone" is familiar with Windows. This because even the cheapest x86 comes with Windows pre-installed. Now if MS wants to go big on tablet, they really need to get them into the hands of everyday users so that they can point out the window when a CEO/CFO/CIO raises the question of training.

And that sums up all that is wrong with the modern work day.

Funny thing is, Gates was gunning for just that in 2001. But the VP of Office or something basically stonewalled pen input integration, so on launch people had to do handwriting inside a small popup window rather than across the whole Word page. And the one program they had that could really show off pen input, Onenote, was not integrated with the typical Office workflow.

No need to get old to live like that...

Indeed. One truly need either a thick skin or a dark sense of humor to keep on going these days. And that is for the western world. Hell if i understand how someone in famine or war zone manage to keep going.

A light twice as bright burns twice as fast.

One could question if one is truly alive during the years frozen, as all biological processes comes to a halt.

Or a genetic bit limit...

Egg, vaccine, huh?

This most likely because unlike other devices that basically relied on appearing as a USB storage device, the iPod needed to go via iTunes for just about everything. Seems this and the AAC wrapper was enough to get RIAA to play ball. I guess they thought it would make the task of transferring those files elsewhere difficult.