What the hell did Musk do to deserve that comment?

Interesting, I didn't know that. Neither ISE nor Vivado will run on Win8? Why not?

Pretty much goes without saying. The surest way to build a billion-dollar empire is by emulating everything the last billion-dollar empire did except for the mistake that brought it down.

Trouble is, you eventually become the monster you fight. Ask Microsoft, for instance.

When companies put facebook.com/company instead of company.com in their TV ads, you know something is fucked up.

Wait, wait, I thought it was aol.com/company. No wonder that doesn't work anymore.

Oh, I get it, it's like a game.

Windows key zork
You are standing in a large server room on the 69th floor of the FrobozzCo building, next to a rack.

>examine rack
The rack contains various servers, patch panels, and cable looms. On a shelf nearby is a Windows 8 laptop and a pipe wrench.

>check email
With what?

>laptop
You'll have to open it first!

>open laptop, then check email
I don't know the word "email."

>you did a minute ago, dumbass
I don't know the word "dumbass."

>open laptop. press windows key. type 'email'
A list of programs whose names contain 'email' appears. However, the list is empty.

>open window
Perhaps you missed the memo. Given the tragic and (more important) costly events following the last round of layoffs, FrobozzCo management has decreed that the windows in the server room must remain locked at all times.

>get pipe wrench
Taken.

>break window
What do you want to break the window with?

>wrench
CRASH! A shower of heavy plate glass fragments cascades into the parking lot below. Somewhere in the distance, an alarm begins to sound.

>throw Windows 8 laptop out window
THUD! A near miss on your boss's new Porsche. Using passages unknown to you, a security team rushes to its defense.

* * * YOU ARE FIRED * * *

Your score is 0 out of 400 possible points. This gives you the rank of Welfare Recipient. Play again? Y/N

The real irony is what Microsoft actually resembles most: a Communist central planning agency. They hand down five year plans that look good on paper and test well in "focus groups" but that end up causing general mayhem and malaise when force-fed to the workers.

It's as if Ballmer was visiting East Germany when the wall came down, and got a good deal on a bunch of old books they were throwing out.

That's true, too -- there is no reason for anyone to upgrade from 7 to 8. There was no good reason for Microsoft to produce Windows 8 to begin with. But most people who are still running versions prior to 7 can safely upgrade to 8 plus ClassicShell or one of the other Start menu replacements.

ClassicShell is nice for those of us who never liked the Start menu in 7. It has an amazing array of customization options.

The 'minimum effort' way to access programs, control panel snap-ins, etc hasn't changed since Vista: press the start key on your keyboard, type the first, occasionally second (and possibly third, for lesser-used programs) characters of the name, then hit enter

I liked this feature better when it was called "MS-DOS."

Correct, there's no reason to downgrade to Windows 7 if you install Windows 8 plus ClassicShell.

But the Start Menu hasn't been restored in Windows 8.1. It's just another raised middle finger from Ballmer to the rest of us, and hopefully the last.

I'm not qualified to explain the details, but it comes down to the fact that we had to pick an easily-reproducible definition of the second, and at the time, the ground-state Cs-133 hyperfine transition was the one that made sense.

Today there are more stable clock designs based on other quantum transitions but the caesium standard serves well enough for almost all purposes that it's not worth the trouble to change it.

There is no such thing as "perfect time," or perfect knowledge of just what time it is, but we have a very good wiorking approximation of it, one that has actually outpaced Moore's Law in terms of increasing stability over the past few decades. Time is still the ultimate basis for virtually all other physical measurements, so it pays to define and understand it as precisely as we can.

The ultimate reference is the SI second standard that's based on the difference in energy levels associated with a particular ground-state hyperfine transition in the caesium-133 atom, approximately 9.192 631 770 GHz.

A clock is 'accurate' to the extent that its long-term stability can be traced to the SI second. It is 'stable' if its stability over a given time interval (which must be specified for the term 'stability' to have any meaning) is consistent between intervals.

Better cash in those BallmerBucks(tm) soon. They won't be worth much in a few months, and you'll have nothing to show for your shill posts except for a vaguely dirty feeling.

This. Ballmer had one job: don't fuck up Windows.

He failed at the modest task which was his charge.

In a great many cases, yes. Your point?

You had one job. Billg left you with one job. "Mind the store and don't fuck up Windows."

Well, I guess that was two jobs, technically. Either way, the results need no further elaboration.

Enjoy your retirement.