https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's different this time with Microsoft as they can actually make the argument that there is effective competition, as well as a need for a more secure browser. Microsoft may still be the dominant laptop and desktop operating system but in the 2010's they can now successfully argue that phone and tablets compete with them in this space. The other big difference with Windows S vs Pro is that S is given away to manufacturers for almost free. Microsoft can and has is structuring this as a discount for major manufacturers.

If google had given android away for free but allowed Samsung to pay $30 a device to have the non-open source portions of the google ecosystem as an "Android Pro" then they would probably be fine. By saying manufacturers of Android devices couldn't selectively choose which Google apps to place on the system and then restricting them from placing competing apps is how they shot themselves in the foot.

This is one area I used to be hopeful on with Trump when he was elected (we had to try to make the best of a bad situation, right?). I had hoped his promised rules on "Buy American" with regards to technology would include a significant amount of internal components of things to be included as well.

But the not actually existent yet rules seem to lean towards manufacturing includes being packaged/assembled only here.

VA Spending is just massively delayed military spending. If you didn't promise medical for life, you wouldn't have the VA.

(Just to be clear, I am not advocating for less VA spending, and in fact I would allocate more to help the PTSD and other health issues plaguing our soldiers from Afghanistan and Iraq. But lowering the spending on the current military system is still something we can do without lowering spending on past military ventures, which the VA most certainly is.)

That's one of the problems with this system. Most of the shells will land just outside of that range. But any shell that has issues with it's targeting system from the start could potentially end up hundreds, even thousands of yards off target. With missiles there are usually backup electronics in the system that can take over plus a redundant emergency system that can detonate the missile harmlessly if it is malfunctioning in many cases (Not all, but much better than most other systems we have) I'm actually perfectly fine with how the navy has worked with this technology. They were trying many things that have never been tried before on any ship and we now know what works and what doesn't. The Pork Barrel issue kept them from killing off parts of this project as soon as they would have liked, but at least the lessons learned can be used on other systems. A direct result of the technologies used for the railgun fired projectiles is a better understanding of how to build those systems better and in a less complex manner on future projects. One of these is a smaller railgun system that can be used to fire off many more dumb projectiles quickly in a phalanx like manner but at ranges of up to ten miles (versus 2 miles or less). Another is adapting the technology used to fire larger payloads at slower speeds - 1000 to 2000 miles an hour versus 4500 miles per hour. This leads to a shell that can only be fired 50 miles, but because the projectiles are larger they are actually testing launching small missiles this way. Launching a 14 inch "shell" at 1000 miles per hour means a missile can have drastically reduced fuel and reach hundreds of miles away. This same technology could also be used to launch smart pebble filled missiles towards ballistic targets much more effectively than the missile batteries we use now. So why these guns are a failure, the designs used to build and test them will still be useful with future projects that could be much more effective.

The F35 program on the other hand.... That is a much better example of throwing bad money away. Unfortunately air force procurement is usually spread out to far more states than Navy is which leads to less chances to overcome pork.

Only because Microsoft releases drivers to work with older chipsets and instruction sets. If Intel or AMD want to release drivers for them they are free to write their own. I suspect that they will run in short order (someone will hack something together) but they will be non optimized.

This is actually good for news linux developers, just not in the way most people think. A very large part of this push is to try to make yet another step away from legacy x86 code. Newer windows binaries is much more easier to port to other systems and in fact Microsoft is developing the tools to do quite a bit of this for you. All of this easy to port code will be easy to port to linux and any other OS you want. Microsoft is trying to become the place to go for cloud hosted computing and while they know they are way behind apple and google right now they can stay relevant by making their tools and back end services work with as many different platforms as possible. It will be interesting to see what the market looks like 5 or 10 years from now. Who ever thought Microsoft would have even done a 10th of what they have done in the past year or two for open source based on what they were like 10 years ago? The landscape has changed and Google is becoming more and more restrictive with what they do and how they handle your data every year. Apple is the same, but they've always been like that to a degree.

Just the other day google put the halt to rolling out fiber in San Jose, CA. the rumor is they are looking at using their acquisition of WebPass to proceed at a later date with this rollout.

I'm wondering how close and feasible this technology is, and if it could be used with simple antennas mounted externally and one microcell every block? would it be comparable to fiber and have most of the speed and bandwidth? That would make the cost of rolling it out drop quite a bit wouldn't it?

You can already make this trip on a highway that is 4 lanes for a large portion of it by going up through oslo and central Norway. The reason it would take so long with the path they are wanting to connect is that this path is along the coast. Even after getting rid of the ferries it's still going to be winding and longer mileage. I suppose the coast might be a bit warmer and less likely to have winter conditions, but a gale along the coast already shuts down the highway in quite a few parts as it is.

They really just want to connect all the cities along the coast without having to take a ferry (down if bad weather) or having to drive a hundred kilometers or more inland and back out again.

In addition, the largest drop has been people under 50. People under 50 have never been exposed to above ground nuclear tests. Those stopped in 1963. And for the last decade at least, most urban areas of the country have not even allowed smoking in bars and restaurants, and we've had very effective maintenance medicines for common high blood pressure issues, heart related conditions, type 2 diabetes and others. These conditions being controlled help keep our bodies healthier and most likely allow our own immune systems to fight off more serious conditions.

I always seem to get Mod points on days I don't have anything I really want to give points to.

The robot will be there for the long haul. Sure there will be some maintenance but it'll still be making fries 5 years from now, and efficiently doing so for all of that. Automation is coming and it has little to nothing to do with wages.

The government website includes proprietary HTML. This should not be allowed. The HTML code on their website should be exactly the same as every other website. It should not include any customizations or references to anything that is not HTML, and the HTML itself should be laid out in a standard, easy to read manner that is not any different from any other site. This means everything else should match those other sites, including any use of frames, italics, bold and paragraph markup.

Oh yeah, and brink back the BLINK Tag as well!

Actually, I think that's the issue. There are paid results on google too but google puts them at the bottom of every page and bing always puts 2-3 at the top of the first page ala amazon.

The main difference is google has become very adept at removing clickbaity sites from the first page and Bing has not. I don't think Microsoft is making money off any of those results, they are just not good at removing them.

Microsoft is a 800 lb gorilla still. When they make a large, sweeping move that affects the world of developers, it will be covered. If Oracle was to offer a free version of their SQL database that was fairly full featured but limited in memory like SQL express, it would be all over the news. But aside from Apple, Google and Amazon, very few companies can make changes that affect as many people as they do, and you certainly don't see successful tools become free or get ported to other operating systems that were always (and still are) in the competing column.

Microsoft's announcements are not normal announcements. There's a few other big companies that could do things that generate this much press but quite honestly very few of them have as much impact as what Microsoft does. The motto of this website is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters". It certainly fits the first bill, and for a vast majority of us who deal with the microsoft ecosystem on a daily basis (and sometimes even enjoy certain products) the moves that they have made are not only news...

...but they also matter quite a bit to us some of us..

However these same people do not usually complain about the release of yet another point patch for Ubuntu, or the release of a new flavor of tool. Those that do operate under the microsoft umbrella increasingly embrace other tools as well, and while we might not click and read all of the stories we don't begrudge the fact that they are here.