Wouldn't The Thaw be a more appropriate move reference?
I thought the story was click-bait for a British TV series on Sky (and Amazon) called Fortitude. Totally same idea, except in the show the reindeer is a mammoth, and instead of anthrax it's larvae from an ice-age insect that infect people's brains. Coincidence?
This. Before IBM gave up, ThinkPads were great. Well-built, good looking, cute little pointy stick and yes, the company would actually repair it if it broke. Cost more, but worth-it compared to the consumer-grade shit going around from HP and Sony. Sad day when IBM sold it off to Lenovo.
They face no consequences unless they post copy (write something). True? Untrue? Don't matter. Tomorrow's another day. Business journalism. Pays bills.
Whatever. Probably fit the entire Pentagon inside the courtyard of that spaceship. But if they would just take an 8-figure round-off error on that cash and give it to me, I would be ok with that.
* good-looking and solid compared to so much bendy creaky plastic PC clunkware.
* OS tailor-built for the hardware, with no crapware added on by some shady vendor.
* better support for Hi-DPI displays; Windows 10 still don't always get it right.
* high-quality, attractive peripherals - magic mouse; magic trackpad; gorgeous huge 4K and 5K screens (iMacs are screens with a computer attached), all color-matched with each other.
* Time Machine - a backup system that actually, really works, both for recovering a file and for restoring an entire drive, even cloning to a new drive.
* a very good, vendor-agnostic e-mail application.
* free, but not mandatory, OS upgrades; they may suggest you upgrade to Sierra, but you will never wake up in the morning to find some "creative edition" has installed itself overnight without your express consent.
* and lastly, they honor their warranties, and fess up when they built something bad; had a friend who's macbook pro from 2010 started acting up in 2016, sure-enough it was on a list and the Apple Store swapped out the motherboard three times, free of charge, until they got it right.
That last part is a thing. Dell and HP are now, finally, making some laptops that definitely do not suck, but I have no confidence these companies would help if their hardware went dead. OTOH, if you live near an Apple Store, show the problem to a tech, he takes the machine with a smile and two days later FedEx asks you to sign for the replacement... even if the machine is 6 years old.
Apple Stores are also a thing... feels good to actually see/touch before you buy. All this adds up to you feeling better for the extra cash you're putting out. If you roll your own PC, know what you're doing and do it your way, none of the above matters to you. Good luck, enjoy your killer god-box PC. But if you don't got the time, need to get shit done and got no patience for vendor crapware, shaky warranty deals or Microsoft shenanigans, Apple's the only game going.
Not so fast. AFAIK, jurisdiction over the Internet has been removed from the FTC, and it would take an act of Congress to put it back... and that sure as shit don't look likely. Any talk of the FTC, for now, is a head-fake excuse for gutting the FCC and letting Comcast and its ilk get drunk and party at your expense.
Face it, ladies. The Internet is the new telephone system - the FCC should regulate it as a common-carrier. Period. That makes it boring to the carriers, gutting a lot of "opportunities" to squeeze extra money out (like selling your browsing histories), but too fucking bad. The Internet ain't no luxury anymore - shit, your grandma needs it just to get her goddamn meds.
Besides, the FTC is not invulnerable to politics. Maybe they don't have a politically ambitious loud-mouth tool as Chairman who wants nothing more than to see himself on TV, but a GOP-controlled everything can muzzle the FTC, and they will, if the price is right.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) [says] "...now this engine of growth is threatened by the Federal Communications Commission's 2015 Open Internet Order, which would put federal bureaucrats in charge of engineering the Internet's infrastructure."
What a heaping pile of horseshit, afloat in a vat of raw sewage. Did the good senator's staff come up with this on their own... or did they perform a ritual sacrifice to enlist assistance from the Demon? Show me their hands... this statement was written in blood and one of Lee's staffers is missing a finger.
Let's try and fix this, shall we? Now this engine of growth is threatened by would-be monopolists and their crony politicians who would put marketers and profiteers in charge of monetizing the Internet's infrastructure to squeeze the highest prices from users of the Internet in return least possible investment.
Chairman Ajit Pai says net neutrality "hurt investment" and "small internet providers don't have 'the means or the margins' to withstand the regulatory onslaught" of net neutrality.
So, obviously, all you startups are just wrong. Because he said it. Good Mr. Pai and his holiness overlord Trump are looking out for you, and you should grovel in appreciation.
Someday, the Republicans will deregulate... the NFL. No refs, no rules. Football played the way it's meant to be played: all out war, with guns!
Yep. when our biggest fear was the Soviet Ruskies and their godless nuclear and rocket scientists burying us in nuclear dust, engineering and science was a rewarding career in the U.S., math and science education was a big deal, and shit got built and done. Grab your pocket protector and your slide rule and join the government research lab, we gotta beat the Russians!
If Trump and Putin are just a little too tight with each other (I mean, get a room for chrissakes and get it over with), maybe a little red scare from China is what we need to kick this Trump "be dumb and trust me gonna be huge" ignorance trip to the curb. Science and engineering ain't cheap, and sorry all you "just deregulate" people out there, China won't wait for a bunch of Elon Musk's and other magic pixies of the free market to just appear and make everything happen tax-free.
Gotta pay, and make science a thing again, or else, in the future, when the moon comes up, you can point at the sky and say "Hey look! The new territory of China!" (and why not declare it a territory? China says, don't like it? try and take it from us, bitches... oh, you can't get past low-Earth orbit, can you? well, you got your Trump tax break and your new wall with Mexico to comfort you. Hang on, gotta go, the Space Creatures just arrived and they're impressed with Human forays off the Earth... Yes, WE will Represent the Human Race to the Galactic Community, thank you, 'cause YOU AIN'T HERE, ARE YOU BITCHES?)
If you agree with Net Neutrality you disagree with the Republican party. Maybe not individuals, but with the party's ideals.
This party has no ideals... just well-worn talking points that they adapt to whatever their biggest doners want. Trump is reversing himself on virtually everything he promised the suckers in his campaign, now that the real money is starting to speak to him. And here, suck-up party-shill chairman Ajit Pai had the nerve to say net neutrality hurt investment and said that small internet providers don't have "the means or the margins" to withstand the regulatory onslaught. So, it's all about the small providers, sure, except that he permits all the big providers to swallow-up smaller ones, and if a smaller one happens to be a small regional, municipal provider, then it's ok for the states to prohibit their expansion or shut them down. Free-market competition is for suckers, when you can just buy them or lobby the GOP to take 'em out.
This Party only believes in money... not crowd-funded money or populist money, but the back room quiet-handshake money of the biggest, richest lobbying groups backed by the largest corporations here (and abroad) who measure their wealth in property and territory. Government by the people is supposed to be in part about consumer (i.e., people) protection from the excesses of monopoly. But shills like Pai are giving away everything... for principle? hell no... to show his loyalty and secure a piece of the billion-dollar lobbying pie (Pai's already been one... and he's feathering his nest for a bigger piece when his term is through). Spit slogans for dumb people like how free markets always benefit the consumer... bullshit when "free" means free to capture the market and charge the most for the least in return, which is awesome, hell it's the goddamn objective, if you're the one collecting the fees, all shared among senior management, shareholders, lobbyists and their politicians. Sucks if you're the one paying up, but when you're a small fish what choice do you have? Your government could regulate this away, your government could do anything if the right people are elected and do the right thing, but the guy on TV says regulation = bad. So, elect shills and idiots and shit happens.
Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy, Boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl, Girl Dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
Free OTA TV could be a good thing, just like a free Internet could be a good thing (free as in free from being spied on by your ISP, and free as in hosting your own server w/o having to pay for "business class".. still gotta pay a fair price for the service). But no, in the name of the most holy imaginary hand of the free market, everything consolidates under the biggest umbrella to get the biggest profit out of the least effort.
It doesn't have to be this way. The airwaves, and the Internet, belongs in one way or another to the public. You know, us. But we keep electing goons who give it away to people who take 'em out to pricey steak dinners and give 'em free rides on private jets. Do you know who your goon... uhhh Congressman is? What's he's been up to? I'll bet not, and that's why we can't have nice things.
And yet we've gotten to a point where politics is so ridiculously polarized that none of the Republicans care about him looting the public treasury and taking bribes from anyone and everyone, as long as he's not a Democrat.
We've also gotten to the point that it doesn't matter if he reverses himself (aka "flip-flops") on his campaign promises. Used to mean hot death for a politician from his... base. But now...
China? No longer a hated job-killing currency manipulator. Iran? Yeah, they're ok. Ban the Muslims? Hasn't stuck, blocked in court, oh well, probably the fault of Dems, move on, move on... what happened to that wall, anyway? and Russia? Liked Russia, g'head and spy on crooked-Hillary, no, don't like 'em anymore, but that has nothing to do with the cyber-spying during the election. NATO? Yeah, maybe they're ok after all. Clean Coal? well yeah, about that, energy prices, invisible hand of the econo-*yawn*. Bridges and roads? headin' off to my golf resort call me later. and Obamacare? That biggest disaster in the history of all mankind ever? Ehhhh, let's keep it... for me to poop on for the next four years.
Nope, nobody seems to care, as long as he's not a Democrat.
Yep, but you need to look at this from MSs viewpoint. If you stabilise your core product and start just putting out bug fixes people will exit the upgrade cycle and your profit goes bye-bye. On the other hand if you keep adding (cough) "exciting new features" (the hype carrot) and leave just enough bugs/irritants in the system to ever so mildly annoy people (the stick) you keep people hungry for the next release, and so the money keeps on flowing.
It's like built-in obsolescence for the software industry.
and I thought all they had to do was introduce a new file format. oh. wait. they did that.
I personally LIKE the ribbon interface. The ribbon is a MUCH more efficient use of screen space compared to the old days where 2/3 of your screen could be taken up by various "toolbars". Since the advent of the ribbon UI, there's also been a considerable reduction in the number of nested dialog boxes. It took some time to retrain myself to use them, sure, but ultimately they have probably saved time by making settings more shallow. You can customize the ribbon UI probably just as much as the told toolbars, with the exception that you can't have a Word session open where you can only see 1-2 lines of text because you have a toolbar button for every function.
I know people who like the Ribbon, and there was a tendency pre-Ribbon for toolbars to multiply until they took up half the screen. But toolbars could be customized without limit.. you could even add pull-down menus, and a simple bitmap editor was provided to create your own icons. So, if you rely on a lot of macros, you could build custom buttons, ordered just right in a toolbar, nested in menus if necessary so a toolbar didn't get too long.
To my knowledge, you can't customize the stock Ribbon tabs... you can make your own tab, but the icons can sometimes appear strange. There's no way to create your own icons, you have to pick from a small stock set of smiley faces and other stupid things that don't remotely suggest what your macro does. And pull-down menus and other advanced widgets are gone completely. Yes, I know you can bind macros to keys, but try getting a secretary to memorize a bunch of magic key combinations. OTOH, just point to the pretty little icons you designed, right there on screen, just a click to get the thing done.
We work with versions of Word in both ribbon and non-ribbon forms... I'm still way more productive in the non-ribbon version, so I hold onto it like money. I understand what Microsoft was trying to go for with the Ribbon, but yanking out the stuff that allowed me to automate and speed up my workflow was a show-stopper. Hell, I thought the whole point of macros and customization tools was to lock-in Office products into businesses like mine. Then, they up and kludged it. Extend foot, take aim, pull trigger. Microsoft.
Since 2013, all I wanted from Office and Windows was bug-fixes. Instead, their new "features" almost always amounted to taking some useful feature away, like how the Ribbon took away menus and truly customizable toolbars, like how the Start screen took away the Start menu in Windows 8 (ok, they fixed that, sort of), like how Settings continues to rob from the Control Panel with lesser capability, all messing up years of reliable workflow.
but the bugs remain. and File Explorer still doesn't have tabs. For what? 3-D in Microsoft Paint? There's plenty of that around already. Just fix bugs, Microsoft. Fix the damn bugs.
Trump wouldn't have needed Congressional approval, Senate confirmation, even a budget hearing. Just ask his Chief of Staff to hire some people. That's it. Done. Simple, promise kept, cross it off the list (uhh, is there a list?) Instead, he tweeted a lot of nonesense, rubber-stamped a bunch of stuff from Ryan and the Generals, and played golf at his estate on weekends at taxpayer expense.
Ok, I get it that some people just hate Dems, foam at the mouth and all. But this guy is doing a lot of nothing, all the while his hotels and other properties mop up the bucks (STAY at the "official" Hotel of the Prez-Z-Dent!!! Sweet Deal! Get a Free Hat if you book the PrezeeDential Suite!) while he gives his entourage free miles on Air Force One (plus secret service details). I guess none of that counts, as long as you keep hating Dems?
Cue Apple Lawsuit in 3.. 2.. 1.. Gotta keep those liars err lawyers in work, doncha know??
Idiot. All MacOS updates up to 7.5.3 where freely available for download.
Not so fast, cowboy. It's the "right" in copyright, which means Apple has the "right" to give it away for free for a day, a week, whatever, and also the "right" to stop and lock it away again if they want to. Anyway, the real jewel in the old Macs is the code in the ROMs. Mac and even Apple// emulators available on the web still wink-wink that you need to own your own old machine to legally have a "right" to the ROM code (that you can nonetheless find in bin form on the web) crucial to getting old Mac software to run.
Anyway, as with most cool stuff that archive.net puts up, DMCA says it can stay there until someone with the rights sends a takedown notice, afterwhich it will disappear because archive.net doesn't want the kind of hell that DMCA permits if you give the finger to a takedown notice.
So, enjoy it while it lasts. Dark Castle is a real favorite of mine - crazy good what they could do with an 8 MHz 68000, 1MB RAM, a little sound hardware, and a small monochrome screen.
Unenforceable sure, but I've yet to see a way of definitively knowing if your ISP is selling your data. They could say one thing and do the other.
Sadly, this is true. So long as there's no federal prohibition against this kind of thing, ISP's will have no reason not to invest in the infrastructure to collect data, and then try and monetize it. With laws like Minnesota's, the burden would be effectively shifted to consumers (or perhaps state's attorneys general, depending on how the law is written) to catch the ISP's in violation, and then sue. By then, your browsing habits are already sold to third-parties, probably out-of-state. The best we can hope for is many states passing similar prohibitions, all providing the possibility of very large fines, so that ISP's would recognize a substantial risk of losing a LOT of money if they sell data. But ISP's could foreseeably tie things up in litigation for years and years while they pocket their profits.
Minnesota's law is not useless, but it's not a cure either.
They'll just put it into their Terms of Service and you won't be able to get service from any ISP without agreeing to them. So this is weak sauce, that looks good but doesn't;t accomplish anything.
Depending no how the law is written, any conflicting clause of the Terms of Service would simply be unenforceable. So, it may accomplish quite a bit (if you live in Minnesota, at least).
9. Game mode: It "ensures" your computer is always maximizing its resources for an optimal gaming experience. Ensures how? throttling my background tabs? How will it affect streaming?
ArsTechnica has a brief review of Creator's Edition. Concerning Game Mode:
Game Mode is intended to boost gaming performance by a few percent. The idea is straightforward enough: when a game is using Game Mode, Windows plays around with thread affinities to dedicate processor cores to games, shuffling background tasks to other cores...
Game Mode is available for both regular Win32 games, and for UWP games sold through the Windows Store. In the case of the latter, Microsoft intends to offer an API so that games can automatically enable the mode. For the former, the user will have to opt in explicitly.
How much difference does it make in practice? Frankly, I'm not seeing any real difference in the games I've used—to the extent that I'm not even sure Game Mode is functioning.
So, kinda meh. A lot surely depends on the game, and what else you got going on in your system, but I wouldn't expect a night-to-day difference.
The rules issued by the FCC last year would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers' opt-in consent before selling or sharing Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information with advertisers and other companies. But lawmakers used their authority under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to pass a joint resolution ensuring that the rules "shall have no force or effect" and that the FCC cannot issue similar regulations in the future.
Republicans argue that the Federal Trade Commission should regulate ISPs' privacy practices instead of the FCC. But the resolution passed today eliminates the FCC's privacy rules without any immediate action to return jurisdiction to the FTC, which is prohibited from regulating common carriers such as ISPs and phone companies.
If Trump signs the resolution to eliminate privacy rules, ISPs won't have to seek customer approval before sharing their browsing histories and other private information with advertisers.
Slashdot Mirror
Wouldn't The Thaw be a more appropriate move reference?
I thought the story was click-bait for a British TV series on Sky (and Amazon) called Fortitude. Totally same idea, except in the show the reindeer is a mammoth, and instead of anthrax it's larvae from an ice-age insect that infect people's brains. Coincidence?
This. Before IBM gave up, ThinkPads were great. Well-built, good looking, cute little pointy stick and yes, the company would actually repair it if it broke. Cost more, but worth-it compared to the consumer-grade shit going around from HP and Sony. Sad day when IBM sold it off to Lenovo.
since they face no consequences
They face no consequences unless they post copy (write something). True? Untrue? Don't matter. Tomorrow's another day. Business journalism. Pays bills.
In other news, Apple has $250 Billion sitting around in cash, in spite of spending on a completely insane spaceship headquarters and still not offering a decent tower workstation. Upcoming iPhone 8 rumored to be cool.
Whatever. Probably fit the entire Pentagon inside the courtyard of that spaceship. But if they would just take an 8-figure round-off error on that cash and give it to me, I would be ok with that.
I'd like to add:
* good-looking and solid compared to so much bendy creaky plastic PC clunkware.
* OS tailor-built for the hardware, with no crapware added on by some shady vendor.
* better support for Hi-DPI displays; Windows 10 still don't always get it right.
* high-quality, attractive peripherals - magic mouse; magic trackpad; gorgeous huge 4K and 5K screens (iMacs are screens with a computer attached), all color-matched with each other.
* Time Machine - a backup system that actually, really works, both for recovering a file and for restoring an entire drive, even cloning to a new drive.
* a very good, vendor-agnostic e-mail application.
* free, but not mandatory, OS upgrades; they may suggest you upgrade to Sierra, but you will never wake up in the morning to find some "creative edition" has installed itself overnight without your express consent.
* and lastly, they honor their warranties, and fess up when they built something bad; had a friend who's macbook pro from 2010 started acting up in 2016, sure-enough it was on a list and the Apple Store swapped out the motherboard three times, free of charge, until they got it right.
That last part is a thing. Dell and HP are now, finally, making some laptops that definitely do not suck, but I have no confidence these companies would help if their hardware went dead. OTOH, if you live near an Apple Store, show the problem to a tech, he takes the machine with a smile and two days later FedEx asks you to sign for the replacement... even if the machine is 6 years old.
Apple Stores are also a thing... feels good to actually see/touch before you buy. All this adds up to you feeling better for the extra cash you're putting out. If you roll your own PC, know what you're doing and do it your way, none of the above matters to you. Good luck, enjoy your killer god-box PC. But if you don't got the time, need to get shit done and got no patience for vendor crapware, shaky warranty deals or Microsoft shenanigans, Apple's the only game going.
Not so fast. AFAIK, jurisdiction over the Internet has been removed from the FTC, and it would take an act of Congress to put it back... and that sure as shit don't look likely. Any talk of the FTC, for now, is a head-fake excuse for gutting the FCC and letting Comcast and its ilk get drunk and party at your expense.
Face it, ladies. The Internet is the new telephone system - the FCC should regulate it as a common-carrier. Period. That makes it boring to the carriers, gutting a lot of "opportunities" to squeeze extra money out (like selling your browsing histories), but too fucking bad. The Internet ain't no luxury anymore - shit, your grandma needs it just to get her goddamn meds.
Besides, the FTC is not invulnerable to politics. Maybe they don't have a politically ambitious loud-mouth tool as Chairman who wants nothing more than to see himself on TV, but a GOP-controlled everything can muzzle the FTC, and they will, if the price is right.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) [says] "...now this engine of growth is threatened by the Federal Communications Commission's 2015 Open Internet Order, which would put federal bureaucrats in charge of engineering the Internet's infrastructure."
What a heaping pile of horseshit, afloat in a vat of raw sewage. Did the good senator's staff come up with this on their own... or did they perform a ritual sacrifice to enlist assistance from the Demon? Show me their hands... this statement was written in blood and one of Lee's staffers is missing a finger.
Let's try and fix this, shall we? Now this engine of growth is threatened by would-be monopolists and their crony politicians who would put marketers and profiteers in charge of monetizing the Internet's infrastructure to squeeze the highest prices from users of the Internet in return least possible investment .
Chairman Ajit Pai says net neutrality "hurt investment" and "small internet providers don't have 'the means or the margins' to withstand the regulatory onslaught" of net neutrality.
So, obviously, all you startups are just wrong. Because he said it. Good Mr. Pai and his holiness overlord Trump are looking out for you, and you should grovel in appreciation.
Someday, the Republicans will deregulate... the NFL. No refs, no rules. Football played the way it's meant to be played: all out war, with guns!
Yep. when our biggest fear was the Soviet Ruskies and their godless nuclear and rocket scientists burying us in nuclear dust, engineering and science was a rewarding career in the U.S., math and science education was a big deal, and shit got built and done. Grab your pocket protector and your slide rule and join the government research lab, we gotta beat the Russians!
If Trump and Putin are just a little too tight with each other (I mean, get a room for chrissakes and get it over with), maybe a little red scare from China is what we need to kick this Trump "be dumb and trust me gonna be huge" ignorance trip to the curb. Science and engineering ain't cheap, and sorry all you "just deregulate" people out there, China won't wait for a bunch of Elon Musk's and other magic pixies of the free market to just appear and make everything happen tax-free.
Gotta pay, and make science a thing again, or else, in the future, when the moon comes up, you can point at the sky and say "Hey look! The new territory of China!"
(and why not declare it a territory? China says, don't like it? try and take it from us, bitches... oh, you can't get past low-Earth orbit, can you? well, you got your Trump tax break and your new wall with Mexico to comfort you. Hang on, gotta go, the Space Creatures just arrived and they're impressed with Human forays off the Earth... Yes, WE will Represent the Human Race to the Galactic Community, thank you, 'cause YOU AIN'T HERE, ARE YOU BITCHES?)
If you agree with Net Neutrality you disagree with the Republican party. Maybe not individuals, but with the party's ideals.
This party has no ideals... just well-worn talking points that they adapt to whatever their biggest doners want. Trump is reversing himself on virtually everything he promised the suckers in his campaign, now that the real money is starting to speak to him. And here, suck-up party-shill chairman Ajit Pai had the nerve to say net neutrality hurt investment and said that small internet providers don't have "the means or the margins" to withstand the regulatory onslaught. So, it's all about the small providers, sure, except that he permits all the big providers to swallow-up smaller ones, and if a smaller one happens to be a small regional, municipal provider, then it's ok for the states to prohibit their expansion or shut them down. Free-market competition is for suckers, when you can just buy them or lobby the GOP to take 'em out.
This Party only believes in money... not crowd-funded money or populist money, but the back room quiet-handshake money of the biggest, richest lobbying groups backed by the largest corporations here (and abroad) who measure their wealth in property and territory. Government by the people is supposed to be in part about consumer (i.e., people) protection from the excesses of monopoly. But shills like Pai are giving away everything... for principle? hell no... to show his loyalty and secure a piece of the billion-dollar lobbying pie (Pai's already been one... and he's feathering his nest for a bigger piece when his term is through). Spit slogans for dumb people like how free markets always benefit the consumer... bullshit when "free" means free to capture the market and charge the most for the least in return, which is awesome, hell it's the goddamn objective, if you're the one collecting the fees, all shared among senior management, shareholders, lobbyists and their politicians. Sucks if you're the one paying up, but when you're a small fish what choice do you have? Your government could regulate this away, your government could do anything if the right people are elected and do the right thing, but the guy on TV says regulation = bad. So, elect shills and idiots and shit happens.
Boy finds girl, boy loses girl, girl finds boy,
Boy forgets girl, boy remembers girl,
Girl Dies in a tragic blimp accident over the Orange Bowl on New Year's Day.
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-j1o-...
Free OTA TV could be a good thing, just like a free Internet could be a good thing (free as in free from being spied on by your ISP, and free as in hosting your own server w/o having to pay for "business class".. still gotta pay a fair price for the service). But no, in the name of the most holy imaginary hand of the free market, everything consolidates under the biggest umbrella to get the biggest profit out of the least effort.
It doesn't have to be this way. The airwaves, and the Internet, belongs in one way or another to the public. You know, us. But we keep electing goons who give it away to people who take 'em out to pricey steak dinners and give 'em free rides on private jets. Do you know who your goon... uhhh Congressman is? What's he's been up to? I'll bet not, and that's why we can't have nice things.
And yet we've gotten to a point where politics is so ridiculously polarized that none of the Republicans care about him looting the public treasury and taking bribes from anyone and everyone, as long as he's not a Democrat.
We've also gotten to the point that it doesn't matter if he reverses himself (aka "flip-flops") on his campaign promises. Used to mean hot death for a politician from his... base. But now...
China? No longer a hated job-killing currency manipulator. Iran? Yeah, they're ok. Ban the Muslims? Hasn't stuck, blocked in court, oh well, probably the fault of Dems, move on, move on... what happened to that wall, anyway? and Russia? Liked Russia, g'head and spy on crooked-Hillary, no, don't like 'em anymore, but that has nothing to do with the cyber-spying during the election. NATO? Yeah, maybe they're ok after all. Clean Coal? well yeah, about that, energy prices, invisible hand of the econo-*yawn*. Bridges and roads? headin' off to my golf resort call me later. and Obamacare? That biggest disaster in the history of all mankind ever? Ehhhh, let's keep it... for me to poop on for the next four years.
Nope, nobody seems to care, as long as he's not a Democrat.
Yep, but you need to look at this from MSs viewpoint. If you stabilise your core product and start just putting out bug fixes people will exit the upgrade cycle and your profit goes bye-bye. On the other hand if you keep adding (cough) "exciting new features" (the hype carrot) and leave just enough bugs/irritants in the system to ever so mildly annoy people (the stick) you keep people hungry for the next release, and so the money keeps on flowing.
It's like built-in obsolescence for the software industry.
and I thought all they had to do was introduce a new file format.
oh. wait. they did that.
I personally LIKE the ribbon interface. The ribbon is a MUCH more efficient use of screen space compared to the old days where 2/3 of your screen could be taken up by various "toolbars". Since the advent of the ribbon UI, there's also been a considerable reduction in the number of nested dialog boxes. It took some time to retrain myself to use them, sure, but ultimately they have probably saved time by making settings more shallow. You can customize the ribbon UI probably just as much as the told toolbars, with the exception that you can't have a Word session open where you can only see 1-2 lines of text because you have a toolbar button for every function.
I know people who like the Ribbon, and there was a tendency pre-Ribbon for toolbars to multiply until they took up half the screen. But toolbars could be customized without limit.. you could even add pull-down menus, and a simple bitmap editor was provided to create your own icons. So, if you rely on a lot of macros, you could build custom buttons, ordered just right in a toolbar, nested in menus if necessary so a toolbar didn't get too long.
To my knowledge, you can't customize the stock Ribbon tabs... you can make your own tab, but the icons can sometimes appear strange. There's no way to create your own icons, you have to pick from a small stock set of smiley faces and other stupid things that don't remotely suggest what your macro does. And pull-down menus and other advanced widgets are gone completely. Yes, I know you can bind macros to keys, but try getting a secretary to memorize a bunch of magic key combinations. OTOH, just point to the pretty little icons you designed, right there on screen, just a click to get the thing done.
We work with versions of Word in both ribbon and non-ribbon forms... I'm still way more productive in the non-ribbon version, so I hold onto it like money. I understand what Microsoft was trying to go for with the Ribbon, but yanking out the stuff that allowed me to automate and speed up my workflow was a show-stopper. Hell, I thought the whole point of macros and customization tools was to lock-in Office products into businesses like mine. Then, they up and kludged it. Extend foot, take aim, pull trigger. Microsoft.
Damn, I meant 2003! Fourteen years of this! Get off my LAWN!
Since 2013, all I wanted from Office and Windows was bug-fixes. Instead, their new "features" almost always amounted to taking some useful feature away, like how the Ribbon took away menus and truly customizable toolbars, like how the Start screen took away the Start menu in Windows 8 (ok, they fixed that, sort of), like how Settings continues to rob from the Control Panel with lesser capability, all messing up years of reliable workflow.
but the bugs remain. and File Explorer still doesn't have tabs. For what? 3-D in Microsoft Paint? There's plenty of that around already. Just fix bugs, Microsoft. Fix the damn bugs.
Trump wouldn't have needed Congressional approval, Senate confirmation, even a budget hearing. Just ask his Chief of Staff to hire some people. That's it. Done. Simple, promise kept, cross it off the list (uhh, is there a list?) Instead, he tweeted a lot of nonesense, rubber-stamped a bunch of stuff from Ryan and the Generals, and played golf at his estate on weekends at taxpayer expense.
Ok, I get it that some people just hate Dems, foam at the mouth and all. But this guy is doing a lot of nothing, all the while his hotels and other properties mop up the bucks (STAY at the "official" Hotel of the Prez-Z-Dent!!! Sweet Deal! Get a Free Hat if you book the PrezeeDential Suite!) while he gives his entourage free miles on Air Force One (plus secret service details). I guess none of that counts, as long as you keep hating Dems?
Cue Apple Lawsuit in 3.. 2.. 1.. Gotta keep those liars err lawyers in work, doncha know??
Idiot. All MacOS updates up to 7.5.3 where freely available for download.
Not so fast, cowboy. It's the "right" in copyright, which means Apple has the "right" to give it away for free for a day, a week, whatever, and also the "right" to stop and lock it away again if they want to. Anyway, the real jewel in the old Macs is the code in the ROMs. Mac and even Apple // emulators available on the web still wink-wink that you need to own your own old machine to legally have a "right" to the ROM code (that you can nonetheless find in bin form on the web) crucial to getting old Mac software to run.
Anyway, as with most cool stuff that archive.net puts up, DMCA says it can stay there until someone with the rights sends a takedown notice, afterwhich it will disappear because archive.net doesn't want the kind of hell that DMCA permits if you give the finger to a takedown notice.
So, enjoy it while it lasts. Dark Castle is a real favorite of mine - crazy good what they could do with an 8 MHz 68000, 1MB RAM, a little sound hardware, and a small monochrome screen.
Unenforceable sure, but I've yet to see a way of definitively knowing if your ISP is selling your data. They could say one thing and do the other.
Sadly, this is true. So long as there's no federal prohibition against this kind of thing, ISP's will have no reason not to invest in the infrastructure to collect data, and then try and monetize it. With laws like Minnesota's, the burden would be effectively shifted to consumers (or perhaps state's attorneys general, depending on how the law is written) to catch the ISP's in violation, and then sue. By then, your browsing habits are already sold to third-parties, probably out-of-state. The best we can hope for is many states passing similar prohibitions, all providing the possibility of very large fines, so that ISP's would recognize a substantial risk of losing a LOT of money if they sell data. But ISP's could foreseeably tie things up in litigation for years and years while they pocket their profits.
Minnesota's law is not useless, but it's not a cure either.
They'll just put it into their Terms of Service and you won't be able to get service from any ISP without agreeing to them. So this is weak sauce, that looks good but doesn't;t accomplish anything.
Depending no how the law is written, any conflicting clause of the Terms of Service would simply be unenforceable. So, it may accomplish quite a bit (if you live in Minnesota, at least).
In an article posted by the Verge today, the members of Congress who voted to Shred the ISP Privacy Rules are listed, by name, along with information of how much they received in donations from the telecom industry and employees of those corporations.
Remember... Congress didn't need to do this. Newly-promoted FCC chairman Ajit Pai was going to gut the FCC rule behind Internet privacy all by himself. But with this move, the members of Congress named in this list took the extra step under the authority of the Congressional Review Act to expressly cause the privacy rules to "have no force or effect" and prohibit the FCC from issuing similar regulations in the future .
They might say that this move was just a legal technicality... that the real power for privacy should properly rest with the FTC. Bullshit. The resolution they passed eliminates the FCC's privacy rules without any immediate action to return jurisdiction to the FTC, which is prohibited from regulating common carriers such as ISPs and phone companies.
All that's left to happen is for Trump to sign it, and then, that's that. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
Thank you, thank you muchly. Will try.
9. Game mode: It "ensures" your computer is always maximizing its resources for an optimal gaming experience.
Ensures how? throttling my background tabs? How will it affect streaming?
ArsTechnica has a brief review of Creator's Edition. Concerning Game Mode:
Game Mode is intended to boost gaming performance by a few percent. The idea is straightforward enough: when a game is using Game Mode, Windows plays around with thread affinities to dedicate processor cores to games, shuffling background tasks to other cores...
Game Mode is available for both regular Win32 games, and for UWP games sold through the Windows Store. In the case of the latter, Microsoft intends to offer an API so that games can automatically enable the mode. For the former, the user will have to opt in explicitly.
How much difference does it make in practice? Frankly, I'm not seeing any real difference in the games I've used—to the extent that I'm not even sure Game Mode is functioning.
So, kinda meh. A lot surely depends on the game, and what else you got going on in your system, but I wouldn't expect a night-to-day difference.
Umm... the "explicit user opt-in" was what was just KILLED by Congress.
From ArsTechnica:
The rules issued by the FCC last year would have required home Internet and mobile broadband providers to get consumers' opt-in consent before selling or sharing Web browsing history, app usage history, and other private information with advertisers and other companies. But lawmakers used their authority under the Congressional Review Act (CRA) to pass a joint resolution ensuring that the rules "shall have no force or effect" and that the FCC cannot issue similar regulations in the future.
Republicans argue that the Federal Trade Commission should regulate ISPs' privacy practices instead of the FCC. But the resolution passed today eliminates the FCC's privacy rules without any immediate action to return jurisdiction to the FTC, which is prohibited from regulating common carriers such as ISPs and phone companies.
If Trump signs the resolution to eliminate privacy rules, ISPs won't have to seek customer approval before sharing their browsing histories and other private information with advertisers.