steer clear of Windows 10

[Feliks, Moderator]

Don't upgrade your current Windows O/S to this new edition. It's a disaster for privacy. Microsoft intends to deliberately scrape people's private data to sell to advertisers and marketers. Not just traffic, but the content of any traffic. What websites you visit. Not merely the numbers you dial on your phone, but the content of the conversations. Its all openly stated right there in the contract agreement.

[Samuel]

Feliks wrote: "Don't upgrade your current Windows O/S to this new edition. It's a disaster for privacy. Microsoft intends to deliberately scrape people's private data to sell to advertisers and marketers. Not jus..."

I was wondering what that pop up message was. Thank you for warning me just in time :)

[Feliks, Moderator]

in event of cyber-attack, Pentagon 'doesn't know' who is in charge

http://tinyurl.com/z3nguel

[Agnieszka]

Thank you for the information. I'm no friend of this idea and got another contra-point :-)

[Feliks, Moderator]

I hope you all know as well, that lots of key areas of US Govt and military technology still runs on floppy discs? "Home consumer" computing is not the norm; its driven by gamers

this is another reason I groan and roll-my-eyes at things like '24' with 'Jack Bauer'. Government tech is sooooo NOT like that

[Michael]

Actually, it really depends on what type of US Govt system you're talking about. Mil-spec gear that's installed in great numbers in the field tends to be of currently outdated technology because of the extraordinarily long time it takes to perform IV&V to ensure that everything about them is rock solid and they won't fail in the field.

Spec Ops units, however, have wide leeway in picking their own equipment outside of the normal DOD procurement and IV&V processes, and so often end up with pretty much state-of-the-art gear.

The intelligence community always has bleeding edge computing equipment, often well ahead in technology compared to what's available to the general public. They fund quite a bit of advanced computing research efforts and readily adopt it when it becomes usable.

[Feliks, Moderator]

Fair enough. Well said.

Put it this way then: proportionally I'd call it an eighty/twenty split. Eighty/twenty ratio of clunky to slick. Isolated pockets of 'cutting edge' vs 'bleeding edge'. And often the places where you'd naturally assume that there'd be hi-tech, instead there are surprising amounts of (misplaced) low-tech.

Of that twenty per cent, I'm often still dubious because (as I mentioned earlier) I'm more impressed by human intelligence gathering than I am with remote sensing. Just a healthy bias I intend to stand by...