cnahr

When I recently tried to purge my server logs of referrer spam, I found that a whopping 80% of all visitors had either no referrer or referred from my own website. About a third of the rest were spam. So judging from my small sample, referrer headers are largely useless except as spam machines. They should probably be removed from HTTP anyway.

Not really, no. Most people post a couple of times and get few reactions beyond one-liners, if that. Over time, fewer and fewer people who aren't Google employees (1) bother posting anymore. Picture posts get by far the most +1s and shares. Completely incomparable to the text-based discussion networks.

(1) As well as anyone promoting a business, I should add. I've seen a couple of writers and lots of professional photographers using G+ for self-promotion. That seems to work quite well for them, especially the photographers given how image-heavy G+ is.

Journalists love to talk about how "beautiful" Google+ is -- first the mobile apps, now the web interface. But you are posting this link here, on a picture-free text-only website, because that's where we go for discussion. (Or to Reddit or Metafilter.) "Beautiful" does not enable discussion, it enables advertising.

Google+ vs Facebook misses the point. Having lots of random people chatting about random things isn't very profitable, as Facebook discovered. There's no point in emulating that. Instead, Google+ is the universal publishing & commenting platform for the highly profitable Google advertising ecosystem. Here's where Google talks to its actual G+ target audience:

https://www.google.com/+/business/

Also take note of the main page, The Museum of Unworkable Devices, for tons of more information.

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/museum/unwork.htm

While I don't know about that Vista problem, it's not true that Microsoft doesn't innovate in the kernel. Windows 7 introduced the "MinWin" kernel refactoring which significantly reduced the OS footprint, see the 2009 talk & slides by Mark Russinovich:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/video/windows-7-and-windo...

http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/C/2/8C21BAFE-3432-4...

Changes in Windows 8 were smaller, but it did for example improve the efficiency of memory allocation:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/10/07/reducing-runti...

Windows 7 and 8 both have lower system requirements than Vista while offering more features. That fact was widely advertised and acknowledged. Sure, not everything was improved, but it's not true that MS never fixes things for better performance. They simply have different business priorities, such as supporting tablets in Windows 8 rather than supporting 1000 Mbps.

It's not, it's just that progress towards 4.0 has been slow:

http://blog.getpaint.net/2013/03/30/paint-net-4-0-brushes-an...

Macrium Reflect: http://macrium.com/ I haven't had occasion to use its recovery features yet, but works great as a disk backup solution.

Using OpenJDK is completely free, as far as I'm aware. Redistributing OpenJDK bits is covered by GPL2 with some Sun/Oracle amendments: http://openjdk.java.net/legal/

It doesn't. OpenJDK provides no binaries for Windows as far as I'm aware. The build setup is pretty complex and requires a combination of Cygwin and Microsoft tools: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk7/build/raw-file/tip/README-bu...

Basically, Oracle's JDK/JRE is the OpenJDK build for Windows that normal people can use. That's it.

Aside from synchronization between multiple devices there's also Google Reader's enormous cache of old articles. The RSS feeds themselves usually keep only a dozen or so of their latest entries while GR usually presents the entire history. Sadly, I don't think any replacement will be able to duplicate that.

Different hardware. The Surface Pro (and the Sony Vaio Duo which is the other Windows 8 convertible with a Wacom stylus) include an additional dedicated sensor grid for the stylus. The iPad and most other tablets (including Surface RT) can only use a capacitive stylus that emulates finger taps, and therefore is relatively inaccurate.

The trouble with proprietary social networks is not just that they mostly rely on advertising but that they are proprietary. So is app.net and you have to pay for it, too. Why would I pay to be confined in yet another (and very small) walled garden?