Actually there is one positive thing about it, potentially
Microsoft is actually taking a gamble. If Windows 8 won't succeed they will be in trouble. However they are doing some things which are partly right. They will sooner or later have to get rid of their old complex win32 and win16 APIs. And that's what they are trying to do now. Had they acted earlier to provide a more abstract generic API, that transition would have gone a lot smoother.
My guess is that Windows 8 will fail on mobile ARM devices, and Micorosoft will buy a start-up making x86 emulators for ARMs including an automatic GUI refit so they are more usable for mobile devices, perhaps by rendering the original GUI into a hidden framebuffer, then either parsing the graphics or using API functions to determine the position of GUI elements. This will then be arranged into a new touch compatible GUI. Alternatively the position of the elements and/or the new GUI could be manually determined and stored.
First of all, don't make the requirements to strong. If you want your people to have at least 3 digits and 3 letters in their passwords, they need to change every month, you'll end up with passwords like June2012.
In some cases it may be wise to write down passwords onto a sheet of paper you carry around with you, or even a plain passwords text file. However those instances are rare and need to be well thought out. Don't put such a file onto a computer you neither can secure nor own. (e.g. an iPhone)
However the main point is to use public key authentication whenever possible.
Microsoft's influence on the world is not about the money. It's about making the world a worse place. People start to become contempt with absolutely horrible software which doesn't even have usable file formats. They work around this by using internal scripting languages.
Ever since they had an accidental success with MP3 because some guy in New Zealand bought a product key with a forged credit card, they believe they are great inventors.
Just don't treat your customers like idiots. Give them a device which caters to their needs and integrates well with what they already have.
A few examples of what can be done better:
1 Button per source on your remote, no having to go through long menus to switch your source.
Usable network interfaces, make your set play anything it can do reasonably well, like MPEG4 AVI-files from an NFS share, have a simple web interface for control and automation. Implement a VNC client, etc...
Make any "image improvement" technology optional and explain in the manual what exactly it does.
We have enough "devices for idiots", it's time to make something proper. And no, that doesn't mean it will be unusual to the general public. You can make systems which are both user friendly and powerful.
The same goes for DVDs or Blu-Rays. It's just inconvenient to use them directly, and since its digital you have no quality disadvantages from playing a copy.
Wasn't that the guy who wanted to have an "Internet Passport" so we'll all be identified on the Internet... which would in his opinion somehow make the Internet safer?
I'm sorry, but by wanting to put his software onto IOS he contradicts himself, proving that he doesn't believe in code signing being a security feature.
Go to the server versions. From a desktop point of view you have everything you need, without all the crappy stuff in the "consumer" versions, like simplified access right dialogues which allow you to lock yourself out of your data.
Just face it, Windows is legacy software, Microsoft won't make something affordable to replace Windows 2000 or XP. What they want to do now is consumer stuff.
It doesn't matter who re-sells the computer, but if they are fit for professional use. Apple's high-end Macs are certainly able to compete with good Linux workstations. It may be a niece market, but it's an existing one. Just don't expect an iBook to be of much use in a business, or plan for them being a good fraction of their time in factory service.
So in a nutshell, carry business-ready computers, and leave the consumer stuff at home.
The main public channels mostly got rid of their children's programming years ago. It's now, in much worse form, on the combined channel "KIKA".
Actually the main "analogue" channels are barely watchable. They spend great deals of money on banale shows. The "digital" channels however actually seem to try to make good television. They are quite experimental with some horribly bad stuff, and a bit of true gems.
They were one of the companies who let their business products "bleed into" their consumer lines. I think they even had things like a TV-set which was just a low-end professional monitor with an added tuner.
Betamax, Sony's most popular consumer format (which doesn't say a lot) was just a scaled down U-Matic. U-Matic was aimed as a format for the budget conscious user who wanted to carry around his VCR, in case you don't know.
You always got the idea that a Sony product was just a bit better than something cheap. This may have been true in the analogue age, however when they switched to digital, they failed to grasp what this would mean. A Sony DVD or Blu-Ray Player cannot have a better picture or sound than its cheap Chinese version. If Sony would have been smart, they would have targeted the technical user and added a networked media player which can access NFS and SMB shares and auto discover them, playing as many formats as humanly possible. They would have made the NetMD Players to support as many formats as possible given the constraints and being as open as possible.
Well there's profit _now_. However if you look at long term successful companies, you will find that they always invested into the _next_ technologies. Even bean-counters acknowledge this.
While IBM was having great success selling typewriters and tabulators, they invested in general purpose computing, even though that business probably wasn't very profitable till the 1970s. If they wouldn't have, there would be no IBM today.
Capitalism has very little to do how companies are run, at least it hadn't. Now capitalism is seem as the way modern MBAs run companies, where someone could seamlessly migrate from a company making bottled sugar water to a computer company.
Each one of those boxes needs a custom prepared Version of Linux. You can't just install Debian or Gentoo on any of those unless the distributions are modified for that particular box.
What the PC has done right in that respect is to be operating system neutral. Your BIOS includes a tiny piece of code loading the bootloader from disk, as well as routines to access and enumerate what hardware you have. This way you can have any operating system you want on your PC, and it'll simply work. If it doesn't have special drivers for your hardware, it can simply use the routines provided in the BIOS. If it doesn't know what hardware you have, it can simply look it up.
This is what's missing in the ARM world. A standard "firmware", perhaps based on OpenFirmware or something. Or perhaps something rather more minimalistic. A table of the hardware in ROM, and some primitive routines to access the most important hardware (network, display, input) in its most primitive way as well as a routine to load the bootloader from the mass storage device.
Well but that's short sighted. Cars stop being the must have status symbol they used to be. The youth is already trying to avoid having to have a car. Meanwhile China and India are producing cars of increasing quality at hard to beat prices.
So you are faced with a situation where people who used to buy your cars now either don't buy a car at all, or if they must, by an Indian one.
If the laptop has a parallel or serial port, or USB-adapters or network printing servers work for that configuration, you can simply get an old HP LaserJet 4. Those are darn cheap (<<100Euro) and the residual toner typically lasts for years.
The operating system came with all the GUI stuff coded in. Which made GUIs more or less consistent, particularly when it came to things like colour.
Windows is hardware independent, you can never be sure if the hardware the user has can even display "red" or "green". If it's CGA it most likely cannot. So people just made buttons and other controls, leaving the OS to deal with colours.
I'd say it depends on whether Intel or ARM manages to implement a stable "PC-like" mobile platform leading the mobile market out of the "home computer" market to the "PC era", when suddenly platforms _really_ span multiple vendors and you can separate the software from the hardware.
Currently the mobile world is like home computers used to be. You couldn't be sure that software bugs ever were fixed. Back then that only meant some minor inconvenience, today it can mean serious security holes. While on a "PC" (or whatever stable hardware platform) you can simply update, upgrade or exchange your operating system without your hardware vendors consent. It is, in fact even quite easy. You boot from an USB-stick or CD-Rom and there you go, having another operating system without touching any stored data.
Please don't don't just paste a set of pictures 1:1 from some other site. That's not creative, that's just lazy.
Ideally, you go into a museum of technology, or some other place, and snap your own photographs.
If you cannot do that, you could search such sites for facts. For example you could try to get the unique properties of certain systems, and derive questions from that. There is genuine humour hidden in things like the Dectape (or Linctape). Maybe you also shouldn't restrict yourself to computers, but allow information processing devices in all of their diversity.
If all that fails, try to ask your readers for such things. I'm sure you could recruit some for such a task.
Where the first poster literally found the site those pictures were taken from, one after another, exposing the extremely lazy puzzle making and making it trivial to solve it.
What baffles me is that none of the commentards seemed to read that post.
Instead of, for example adding community based repositories to encourage secure software distribution, Apple will simply have an "AppStore", locking out all other forms of software distribution. This of course doesn't bring any actual security.
Well that's exactly the point. I used to be sensible _at the time_. Today it's just idiotic. The requirements of a society change. Maybe one day, we won't strive for faster computers any more, just like we don't want faster modes of transports.
When people actually thought the Concorde was something sensible and that there would be faster planes after it.
Technology often reaches a certain peak. We now wonder why people once thought that sitting for 4 hours in a plane to cross the Atlantic is a good thing, when you can just use e-mail or the telephone.
I mean the whole idea of a home computer, like we now all have, was to build a computer that was less powerful than a "real computer", but also a lot smaller and cheaper.
And they also had better videos of that event. BTW they deliberately chose not to do colour for artistic effect. The colour project is http://acab.muc.ccc.de/medien
Actually no. Symbian was their bestseller, and Elop shouldn't have killed it. What they did before him was actually quite smart. They developed side projects to explore new markets so they would be ready when Symbian becomes unpopular. It would be a natural transition to Meego/Maemo driven by the relative sales of those models.
Nokia's big problem is that they killed off everything except for Windows. And at least Windows Phone is far from being ready, and while Windows 8 seems to reach a small part of what Maemo used to be able to do in 2008, it still falls into the same pitholes as the other systems by trying to please operators.
Well they could have made an open hardware standard where the OS is stored on a micro-SD card and loaded into memory each time you boot your phone. That way the customer could just buy any hardware with any OS. That's not rocket science, that already works for PCs.
Exactly, and with HTML5 you at least have moderately secure concepts which could in theory be implemented securely.
I'm actually far more worried about the complexities within the DOM and CSS than the rest. The more complex a standard is, (and HTML+CSS without Javascript has already been proven to be Turing Complete) the less likely it is to be implemented correctly and without any security related bugs.
Unity was designed for people running a single application in (nearly) full screen mode (or maximized or whatever). This may be great for 800x480 netbooks, but it doesn't work on my 3840x1080 desktop.
Yes, Crtl+Alt+Delete doesn't mean "reboot" anymore, but instead, "go into a special 'secure' environment to not have any keyloggers". It's actually a shame they didn't use it for more things, like accessing the control panel. I guess the problem is that since setting on Windows are such a mess (every application needs to place it's own applet in the control panel) you could execute keyloggers in that environment.
Businesses buy Windows because they need to run their old 1990s software on, as well as their VBA based software infrastructure. That is the reason people have Windows. Nobody cares about "advanced features" or anything, people care about running what they have.
As soon as people think they can run their old programs better on Windows than on the alternatives, Windows will stay. Once they believe Wine is more compatible than the latest version of Windows they'll switch. That's why Windows on ARM won't be very popular. (Although SMB share access is quite an incentive)
Nobody builds anything new on Windows. It's a dead platform for new things. Browser GUIs are now good enough to replace most native applications. And thanks to visualization it's now possible to deploy even complex web-server based packages easily.
Just like that signed malicious driver code that occasionally pops up for Windows?
Seriously, this can only work if the whitelisting is done by the entity which owns the computers. Because there always _will_ be that special piece of software you will need, but which isn't in the whitelist.
It also wont help for code executing bugs in whitelisted software. If anything it will delay updates as they first have to be in the whitelist.
So at best its pointless, at worst it's insecure. And I'm not even talking about the possibility of it leaking program usage statistics to the server.
Actually, when young enthusiastic developers are developing mosty junk apps that's actually good. Back in the 1990s, young enthusiastic developers were developing code still in use today, like the Acrobat Reader or the Flash plugin. Apps are just a playground you can grow on. Nobody cares if Apps don't work nobody will have to use such apps in 10 years.
Again, that's actually a good thing. Nobody starts as a great software developer, everybody needs to fail first. And failing on Apps is a great way of failing without anybody getting hurt.
Other than that, I see most development wasted by the fact that phones are so needlessly different. I mean look at PCs, it doesn't matter if you have a Dell or a HP or whatever, you can simply install any OS you like onto it. And the OS will be able to easily enumerate what kind of hardware the computer has. Arm is lacking that currently. There is no way of installing a Linux onto a new Arm box without extensively porting it. And once support for your new platform runs out, you're screwed. So every mobile phone manufacturer needs to re-port Android or whatever to their platform. Granted, this is a big step forward over having to write their own systems, but it's still bad. That's where the waste in the mobile industry lies.
It's amazing through what lengths people will go instead of simply using proper touch screens. You know combination resistive and capacitive screens exist.
The way to be profitable is not to actually sell your app, that's pointless you cannot get money that way, but to appear important enough so someone will buy you for a billion or trillion or whatever number they come up with. Then you sell a small part of the stock (those people rarely will pay you in cash) so the bubble won't burst, and _that's_ your profit. Maybe you manage to slowly sell your worthless stock to some morons without causing suspicion, more profit for you.
The app business is probably where the Multimedia CD-Rom business would have went if it wasn't for the Internet. Once mobile Internet connections are fast, there's little need for having local apps, most of which need Internet connectivity anyhow.
Back then they didn't have Word, so they could have simply typed in the terms. Last time I've seen something like that was from a professor who didn't know how to use TeX.
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1129 posts • joined Friday 9th March 2007 09:48 GMT
Page:
Actually there is one positive thing about it, potentially
Microsoft is actually taking a gamble. If Windows 8 won't succeed they will be in trouble. However they are doing some things which are partly right. They will sooner or later have to get rid of their old complex win32 and win16 APIs. And that's what they are trying to do now. Had they acted earlier to provide a more abstract generic API, that transition would have gone a lot smoother.
My guess is that Windows 8 will fail on mobile ARM devices, and Micorosoft will buy a start-up making x86 emulators for ARMs including an automatic GUI refit so they are more usable for mobile devices, perhaps by rendering the original GUI into a hidden framebuffer, then either parsing the graphics or using API functions to determine the position of GUI elements. This will then be arranged into a new touch compatible GUI. Alternatively the position of the elements and/or the new GUI could be manually determined and stored.
It's a question of password management
First of all, don't make the requirements to strong. If you want your people to have at least 3 digits and 3 letters in their passwords, they need to change every month, you'll end up with passwords like June2012.
In some cases it may be wise to write down passwords onto a sheet of paper you carry around with you, or even a plain passwords text file. However those instances are rare and need to be well thought out. Don't put such a file onto a computer you neither can secure nor own. (e.g. an iPhone)
However the main point is to use public key authentication whenever possible.
It's not about the money
Microsoft's influence on the world is not about the money. It's about making the world a worse place. People start to become contempt with absolutely horrible software which doesn't even have usable file formats. They work around this by using internal scripting languages.
It's Fraunhofer
Ever since they had an accidental success with MP3 because some guy in New Zealand bought a product key with a forged credit card, they believe they are great inventors.
Differentiation is trivial
Just don't treat your customers like idiots. Give them a device which caters to their needs and integrates well with what they already have.
A few examples of what can be done better:
1 Button per source on your remote, no having to go through long menus to switch your source.
Usable network interfaces, make your set play anything it can do reasonably well, like MPEG4 AVI-files from an NFS share, have a simple web interface for control and automation. Implement a VNC client, etc...
Make any "image improvement" technology optional and explain in the manual what exactly it does.
We have enough "devices for idiots", it's time to make something proper. And no, that doesn't mean it will be unusual to the general public. You can make systems which are both user friendly and powerful.
Re: CDs are only a delivery mechanism now
The same goes for DVDs or Blu-Rays. It's just inconvenient to use them directly, and since its digital you have no quality disadvantages from playing a copy.
Kapersky?
Wasn't that the guy who wanted to have an "Internet Passport" so we'll all be identified on the Internet... which would in his opinion somehow make the Internet safer?
I'm sorry, but by wanting to put his software onto IOS he contradicts himself, proving that he doesn't believe in code signing being a security feature.
Re: FLAC
Hmm... the Nokia Maemo devices could run mplayer which supports FLAC.
If you want some sort of consistency with Windows
Go to the server versions. From a desktop point of view you have everything you need, without all the crappy stuff in the "consumer" versions, like simplified access right dialogues which allow you to lock yourself out of your data.
Just face it, Windows is legacy software, Microsoft won't make something affordable to replace Windows 2000 or XP. What they want to do now is consumer stuff.
I would be paying considerably more for DRM-free media
Considering how much time and effort it costs me for ripping DRM encumbered formats, I'd be willing to pay twice as much for a DRM free copy.
However in reality the DRM free copies usually are cheaper, either via Bittorrent or television.
Not a question of reseller
It doesn't matter who re-sells the computer, but if they are fit for professional use. Apple's high-end Macs are certainly able to compete with good Linux workstations. It may be a niece market, but it's an existing one. Just don't expect an iBook to be of much use in a business, or plan for them being a good fraction of their time in factory service.
So in a nutshell, carry business-ready computers, and leave the consumer stuff at home.
Re: When I were a lad . . .
I personally have a double edged strategy.
Facebook.com is blocked by my hosts file. There's nothing on there of value for me.
Flash Ads I kill with noscript.
I don't mind non-flash non-JS ads, they are OK.
In Germany
The main public channels mostly got rid of their children's programming years ago. It's now, in much worse form, on the combined channel "KIKA".
Actually the main "analogue" channels are barely watchable. They spend great deals of money on banale shows. The "digital" channels however actually seem to try to make good television. They are quite experimental with some horribly bad stuff, and a bit of true gems.
What I'm actually more impressed by
Have you ever seen this solar power plant near Vienna?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Wien_erdkabelstation_400kV_Nordeinspeisung.jpg
Just a tiny solar panel between the 2nd and 3rd while concrete column (from the left) giving enough energy to call for a 400kV line going to it.
Re: Long history
I don't think they use any of those. As far as I know they use thyristors.
So????
How is that something for a DVR? In DVR solutions you don't need speed, you need space, and 2 Tb surely isn't enough.
It's kV not kv, BTW
The unit sign for volt is the upper-case V, not the lower-case v.
Sony used to have a good repulation
They were one of the companies who let their business products "bleed into" their consumer lines. I think they even had things like a TV-set which was just a low-end professional monitor with an added tuner.
Betamax, Sony's most popular consumer format (which doesn't say a lot) was just a scaled down U-Matic. U-Matic was aimed as a format for the budget conscious user who wanted to carry around his VCR, in case you don't know.
You always got the idea that a Sony product was just a bit better than something cheap. This may have been true in the analogue age, however when they switched to digital, they failed to grasp what this would mean. A Sony DVD or Blu-Ray Player cannot have a better picture or sound than its cheap Chinese version. If Sony would have been smart, they would have targeted the technical user and added a networked media player which can access NFS and SMB shares and auto discover them, playing as many formats as humanly possible. They would have made the NetMD Players to support as many formats as possible given the constraints and being as open as possible.
Re: Now the main problem here is incompatibility
Yes, but what if I need special feature X like special DVB-drivers? Or what if my userland requires special kernel features?
Re: Pinko commie librul grumble grumble.
Well there's profit _now_. However if you look at long term successful companies, you will find that they always invested into the _next_ technologies. Even bean-counters acknowledge this.
While IBM was having great success selling typewriters and tabulators, they invested in general purpose computing, even though that business probably wasn't very profitable till the 1970s. If they wouldn't have, there would be no IBM today.
Capitalism has very little to do how companies are run, at least it hadn't. Now capitalism is seem as the way modern MBAs run companies, where someone could seamlessly migrate from a company making bottled sugar water to a computer company.
Re: Okay so...
It shouldn't matter if it catches fire or not. They put in a defective part, therefore they need to do a re-call or at least a warranty extension.
It's a way of faking caring about quality.
Now the main problem here is incompatibility
Each one of those boxes needs a custom prepared Version of Linux. You can't just install Debian or Gentoo on any of those unless the distributions are modified for that particular box.
What the PC has done right in that respect is to be operating system neutral. Your BIOS includes a tiny piece of code loading the bootloader from disk, as well as routines to access and enumerate what hardware you have. This way you can have any operating system you want on your PC, and it'll simply work. If it doesn't have special drivers for your hardware, it can simply use the routines provided in the BIOS. If it doesn't know what hardware you have, it can simply look it up.
This is what's missing in the ARM world. A standard "firmware", perhaps based on OpenFirmware or something. Or perhaps something rather more minimalistic. A table of the hardware in ROM, and some primitive routines to access the most important hardware (network, display, input) in its most primitive way as well as a routine to load the bootloader from the mass storage device.
Re: Pinko commie librul grumble grumble.
Well but that's short sighted. Cars stop being the must have status symbol they used to be. The youth is already trying to avoid having to have a car. Meanwhile China and India are producing cars of increasing quality at hard to beat prices.
So you are faced with a situation where people who used to buy your cars now either don't buy a car at all, or if they must, by an Indian one.
Re: Teleworking - yeah but, no but, yeah
If the laptop has a parallel or serial port, or USB-adapters or network printing servers work for that configuration, you can simply get an old HP LaserJet 4. Those are darn cheap (<<100Euro) and the residual toner typically lasts for years.
Re: Teleworking - yeah but, no but, yeah
Seriously, what consumer can afford "consumer level devices"? Last time I checked by consumer level printer cost 50 cents per page.
Re: Simples...
Actually I did have a root canal surgery some years ago. It was nearly completely painless.
Hmm, back when I developed for Windows
The operating system came with all the GUI stuff coded in. Which made GUIs more or less consistent, particularly when it came to things like colour.
Windows is hardware independent, you can never be sure if the hardware the user has can even display "red" or "green". If it's CGA it most likely cannot. So people just made buttons and other controls, leaving the OS to deal with colours.
Re: One wonders about...
That's actually the most important question. Non postscript printers are a pain in the a*** to get running.
Hmm, add radio and solar panels...
And you'll have cheap wireless routers you can stick onto lampposts.
Hard to predict
I'd say it depends on whether Intel or ARM manages to implement a stable "PC-like" mobile platform leading the mobile market out of the "home computer" market to the "PC era", when suddenly platforms _really_ span multiple vendors and you can separate the software from the hardware.
Currently the mobile world is like home computers used to be. You couldn't be sure that software bugs ever were fixed. Back then that only meant some minor inconvenience, today it can mean serious security holes. While on a "PC" (or whatever stable hardware platform) you can simply update, upgrade or exchange your operating system without your hardware vendors consent. It is, in fact even quite easy. You boot from an USB-stick or CD-Rom and there you go, having another operating system without touching any stored data.
This would be the next revolution.
Well please...
Please don't don't just paste a set of pictures 1:1 from some other site. That's not creative, that's just lazy.
Ideally, you go into a museum of technology, or some other place, and snap your own photographs.
If you cannot do that, you could search such sites for facts. For example you could try to get the unique properties of certain systems, and derive questions from that. There is genuine humour hidden in things like the Dectape (or Linctape). Maybe you also shouldn't restrict yourself to computers, but allow information processing devices in all of their diversity.
If all that fails, try to ask your readers for such things. I'm sure you could recruit some for such a task.
Ahh that was the contest...
Where the first poster literally found the site those pictures were taken from, one after another, exposing the extremely lazy puzzle making and making it trivial to solve it.
What baffles me is that none of the commentards seemed to read that post.
The problem will be Apples reaction
Instead of, for example adding community based repositories to encourage secure software distribution, Apple will simply have an "AppStore", locking out all other forms of software distribution. This of course doesn't bring any actual security.
Re: We all don't remimber
Well that's exactly the point. I used to be sensible _at the time_. Today it's just idiotic. The requirements of a society change. Maybe one day, we won't strive for faster computers any more, just like we don't want faster modes of transports.
Come on...
Unlike the BBC it's even on the Internet as Webm, what more can you expect?
Re: Uh ho...
Ahh you are thinking about things like this
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rj0FykXrjcc
We all don't remimber
When people actually thought the Concorde was something sensible and that there would be faster planes after it.
Technology often reaches a certain peak. We now wonder why people once thought that sitting for 4 hours in a plane to cross the Atlantic is a good thing, when you can just use e-mail or the telephone.
I mean the whole idea of a home computer, like we now all have, was to build a computer that was less powerful than a "real computer", but also a lot smaller and cheaper.
Re: Blinkenlights anyone????
http://blinkenlights.net/blinkenlights
And they also had better videos of that event. BTW they deliberately chose not to do colour for artistic effect. The colour project is http://acab.muc.ccc.de/medien
Re: Agreed
Actually no. Symbian was their bestseller, and Elop shouldn't have killed it. What they did before him was actually quite smart. They developed side projects to explore new markets so they would be ready when Symbian becomes unpopular. It would be a natural transition to Meego/Maemo driven by the relative sales of those models.
Nokia's big problem is that they killed off everything except for Windows. And at least Windows Phone is far from being ready, and while Windows 8 seems to reach a small part of what Maemo used to be able to do in 2008, it still falls into the same pitholes as the other systems by trying to please operators.
Well they could have made an open hardware standard where the OS is stored on a micro-SD card and loaded into memory each time you boot your phone. That way the customer could just buy any hardware with any OS. That's not rocket science, that already works for PCs.
Re: WebSocket
Exactly, and with HTML5 you at least have moderately secure concepts which could in theory be implemented securely.
I'm actually far more worried about the complexities within the DOM and CSS than the rest. The more complex a standard is, (and HTML+CSS without Javascript has already been proven to be Turing Complete) the less likely it is to be implemented correctly and without any security related bugs.
The reason why I don't like Unity
Unity was designed for people running a single application in (nearly) full screen mode (or maximized or whatever). This may be great for 800x480 netbooks, but it doesn't work on my 3840x1080 desktop.
Re: To be fair
Yes, Crtl+Alt+Delete doesn't mean "reboot" anymore, but instead, "go into a special 'secure' environment to not have any keyloggers". It's actually a shame they didn't use it for more things, like accessing the control panel. I guess the problem is that since setting on Windows are such a mess (every application needs to place it's own applet in the control panel) you could execute keyloggers in that environment.
Makes sense for that resolution
This must be great for a viewing distance of about 5 metres, which isn't all that unrealistic in a slightly larger living room.
However then you would need 4k content, which is still rare.
It's legacy technology
Businesses buy Windows because they need to run their old 1990s software on, as well as their VBA based software infrastructure. That is the reason people have Windows. Nobody cares about "advanced features" or anything, people care about running what they have.
As soon as people think they can run their old programs better on Windows than on the alternatives, Windows will stay. Once they believe Wine is more compatible than the latest version of Windows they'll switch. That's why Windows on ARM won't be very popular. (Although SMB share access is quite an incentive)
Nobody builds anything new on Windows. It's a dead platform for new things. Browser GUIs are now good enough to replace most native applications. And thanks to visualization it's now possible to deploy even complex web-server based packages easily.
So whitelisting...
Just like that signed malicious driver code that occasionally pops up for Windows?
Seriously, this can only work if the whitelisting is done by the entity which owns the computers. Because there always _will_ be that special piece of software you will need, but which isn't in the whitelist.
It also wont help for code executing bugs in whitelisted software. If anything it will delay updates as they first have to be in the whitelist.
So at best its pointless, at worst it's insecure. And I'm not even talking about the possibility of it leaking program usage statistics to the server.
Re: what shall I read out of this?
Actually, when young enthusiastic developers are developing mosty junk apps that's actually good. Back in the 1990s, young enthusiastic developers were developing code still in use today, like the Acrobat Reader or the Flash plugin. Apps are just a playground you can grow on. Nobody cares if Apps don't work nobody will have to use such apps in 10 years.
Again, that's actually a good thing. Nobody starts as a great software developer, everybody needs to fail first. And failing on Apps is a great way of failing without anybody getting hurt.
Other than that, I see most development wasted by the fact that phones are so needlessly different. I mean look at PCs, it doesn't matter if you have a Dell or a HP or whatever, you can simply install any OS you like onto it. And the OS will be able to easily enumerate what kind of hardware the computer has. Arm is lacking that currently. There is no way of installing a Linux onto a new Arm box without extensively porting it. And once support for your new platform runs out, you're screwed. So every mobile phone manufacturer needs to re-port Android or whatever to their platform. Granted, this is a big step forward over having to write their own systems, but it's still bad. That's where the waste in the mobile industry lies.
It's amazing
It's amazing through what lengths people will go instead of simply using proper touch screens. You know combination resistive and capacitive screens exist.
Missing the point
The way to be profitable is not to actually sell your app, that's pointless you cannot get money that way, but to appear important enough so someone will buy you for a billion or trillion or whatever number they come up with. Then you sell a small part of the stock (those people rarely will pay you in cash) so the bubble won't burst, and _that's_ your profit. Maybe you manage to slowly sell your worthless stock to some morons without causing suspicion, more profit for you.
The app business is probably where the Multimedia CD-Rom business would have went if it wasn't for the Internet. Once mobile Internet connections are fast, there's little need for having local apps, most of which need Internet connectivity anyhow.
Must be a fake
Back then they didn't have Word, so they could have simply typed in the terms. Last time I've seen something like that was from a professor who didn't know how to use TeX.
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