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Comment Re:Google Focused on the Chrome NOT the OS (Score 2) 161

Treating multiple open processes as simply "tabs" makes it really hard to get around.

My workplace has about 30k chromebooks in use, and the "tabs" is a source of complaint for some web apps because Chrome will suspend those tabs (regardless of settings) and require a fresh login to re-connect the setting. Cookies don't work for everything, esp high-security stuff.

Comment Re:Whose ox got gored by Joe on this job? (Score 1) 163

Wouldn't be the least bit surprised to read that the Russians did it. They don't favor the GOP, they simply aim to sow distrust in any government that isn't theirs. The GOP suited their goals in 2016, but they may see things tilting the other direction and are hedging their bets.

Comment Re:It's because Windows Update is shoddy (Score 1) 103

You're acting like XP is some weird outlier. How about if they were on Ubuntu 4, Red Hat 2, or CentOS 3 instead? All of which were released 3-4 years after XP. The vendors for those operating systems don't support those anymore either. They'd tell you to update, and failure to update is completely on you. No wonder you posted as AC.

Comment Re:membership is likely revocable (Score 1) 103

...so what happens to all tech that now depended on them? There must be some future protection, right? How does it work?

Patent sharing doesn't mean all the code built on the patents becomes open source. They'll still keep that source code closed.

Comment Re:Microsoft has changed (Score 1) 103

Speaking of Bing... now that Google's shutting down Google Plus rather than endure bad press for a product that will never compete with FaceBook, I wonder if Microsoft will similarly accept that Bing will never compete seriously with Google. Different markets, I know. Bing vs Google doesn't have to deal with the network effects of 'everybody's already on Facebook'.

VERY different markets. Bing's search technology is getting expanded on and used within Office/Azure tenancies. I think MS announced something about this at Ignite last month. I see Bing as more of a tech experiment than an actual Google rival. Maybe MS captures a share of the search engine market, but I think their real aim was to learn how to build a better search engine, one that they could use elsewhere.

Comment Re:I don't understand (Score 0) 103

It makes everything worse. Less control over your possessions is always worse.

Yes, because companies that either delay or outright refuse to update has brought us such wonderful things. Why, if everything was updated properly, we'd miss out on the wonders of botnets, and exploits that were patched 5 years ago raging through hospitals.

Comment Re:Security Theater (Score 1) 62

It's of limited utility so long as .vbs/.bat/.cmd still can run without such protections in the same context.

And on the 'you have to have admin rights', there is something deeply wrong with the Windows userbase. I made an app for Windows and made it available to some testers and went to see what they did. About 7 out of 10 of the test users right clicked to 'run as administrator' without even *trying* to run it normally. Even after telling them as the developer of the application that it does not need admin rights, 2 of them refused to run it normally, because they didn't believe that it could work without it.

That's why we (or at least I) deny users administrative rights. Expect your users to be useless in regard to security, and harden your systems accordingly.

Comment Re:Tradition (Score 1) 312

From the License:

"The software may collect information about you and your use of the software, and send that to Microsoft."

Telemetry is built into so many things now, it's a losing battle. Do you have a phone? With an app installed? It's tracking you more than VSCode ever will. But you keep wearing that tinfoil hat, and we'll keep doing what the aliens tell us with their brain rays. :)

Comment Re:Programming is a very wide topic indeed (Score 1) 312

Starting with a scripting language such as Ruby or Python might be up your alley as neither requires compiling and both are pretty easy to read and understand. See if you like the idea of coding for long periods of time and banging your head against the desk in frustration.

If you work in a primarily Microsoft IT department, I'd place powershell on the top of the scripting language options. It's built on top of DotNet, which means you can be simple and get around, but you can also call up DotNet, or import other libraries built upon it. You can even do some C# code right in powershell, and use it in your scripts, so it's a language that can grow with you, and one that sets you up for jumping to C#.

There's also the details about DotNet and Powershell having their open source versions so you can take that knowledge set to Mac and Linux. :)

Comment Re:You first programming language (Score 1) 312

On top of 'build a web page' I'd add, 'learn how to use the Chrome/Firefox dev tools'.

Learning how to use the available tools to dig through your code is how you fix bugs. It helps you to 'peel back' the layers and understand whats going on. Once you've had a mild exposure to the tools, you'll find yourself doing some dabbling in them (because it operates as a live editor in some instances) and some in your text/WYSIWYG editor.

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