I don't know what you're doing about updates you don't want, but Microsoft has "revised" the update in question at least ten times so far. Each time an update gets "revised", the hidden status goes away. If you simply "hide" updates that you don't want and leave Windows Update on automatic, one day you will wake up to Windows 10. You probably aren't doing this, but a lot of people are.
I just gave up and turned Windows Update completely to manual-only and stopped bothering with it. But I normally don't use Windows for anything but playing a limited number of online games, and I certainly don't use IE/Edge (web browsing is done on a laptop running OS X), so my attack surface is a bit smaller than average.
In contrast, I've seen an "Upgrade to El Capitan!" window only two or three times, and I have at least three Macs that I work with regularly. I've tried to figure out how to stop it, but it's never happened enough for me to learn anything about it. It never tries to force the update (I'm sticking with 10.9 for now), and apparently it actually respects your decision not to upgrade, instead of repeatedly nagging, downloading 6+ gigabytes without permission, and then forcing the install. Maybe Microsoft could learn something from that.
but at the time you could still make the point and not be openly mocked
The thing is, I could tell that 64K segments were a dumb idea back in the early '80s, when 64K was becoming the standard RAM in computers. That's why I went straight from TRS-80 to Macintosh in 1985.
GP should've taken the hint and gotten a real modem, and not stayed with some gimped piece of junk where the manufacturer tried to save a few pennies by not putting a proper ROM in it. By the time the driver was reverted, a real modem should have been affordable. Or maybe even, you know, re-compile the old driver, since that's kind of a major point of using an open-source operating system.
A friend of mine and I both used OS/2 as a DOS multitasker for running FidoNet BBSes back in the '90s. I remember one time he was unable to install because he had an Oak brand VGA card which was somehow not 100% compatible with the IBM original. I never really cared much for it other than it was probably the best multitasking environment for DOS programs. I still have that old PC stowed away somewhere, and it still boots OS/2.
As far as OS/2 being fucked up, I would say that the blame lays mostly with IBM, including their original requirement to run the 286, just as the 386 was becoming the hot thing. (Microsoft's ambitions didn't help things get better, either.) The 286 was honestly a very dumb design on the part of Intel, if only because of the 64K segment size. The other dumb thing about the 286 was ignoring the base of real-mode code out there that did tricks to get over that 64K segment size. You literally had to reboot the machine and have BIOS check a flag bit in the CMOS to get back to real mode, which shows just how far the heads of the 286 design team were up their asses.
I know that the thermostats at http://www.radiothermostat.com... can be configured to disable the cloud function (or I guess you could change its URL to a home server), and they have a JSON-based web interface that a custom home server could use.
Macs that crash a lot 20 years ago could very well have due to hardware problems with the RAM. There was this Mac SE that would crash if you turned it on and left it untouched for a few minutes. I brought in my special long-length torx driver (thanks Steve Jobs!), cleaned the SIMM contacts with a pencil eraser, then carefully re-inserted them. Fixed.
The OS had no memory protection and used cooperative multi-tasking, but that just encouraged developers to be more careful, because they don't like rebooting either.
If you want a "solid and stable platform", you need to stay at least one major revision down. I only recently upgraded from 10.6.8 to 10.9 on my late-2011 17". (It shipped with 10.7, and I had to do special stuff to downgrade it so I could have Rosetta.) I still have a few things that won't work under 10.9, including MT NewsWatcher (Open Transport was removed in 10.9!), but I needed to upgrade because too much stuff needed the newer OpenGL. (Minecraft 1.6 would take down the graphics subsystem badly enough to need a reboot.)
The computer itself has been working quite well. It's now 4 years old, and still going strong. It has had a few problems from time to time, but I've been able to fix them and it's still working okay. The only thing that's getting troublesome is the trackpad, but I learned about those problems and how to tune it up just a few weeks before it started having trouble. It's really annoying when it won't stay clicked for drags.
the schedules are actually broadcast along with the video these days
I don't know where you are that this applies, but digital TV puts digital guide data in the bitstream. And while the guide data in ATSC can support a week or two of data, in reality most US stations only put 12 hours because so many TVs have crap firmware that gets confused or can even crash with too much guide data. This is fine for seeing what's on tonight, but it's very difficult to tell a DVR to record that new show that starts next week when its name doesn't appear in the guide data until that morning.
You could always set up a MythTV, but that requires a lot of work to keep going, and it won't work with cable. Which isn't so bad if you ditch cable; it's nice to have literal direct rips of ATSC broadcast streams, completely unprotected.
I recently tried to use an old all-in-one VHS+DVD recorder to archive some old home camcorder tapes. It constantly aborted by seeing the noise from recording gaps as copy protection. So now I'm going to have to use a capture-based solution after all. At least the equipment is a lot smaller than it was 10 years ago.
Fuck you behind whatever name you hide behind, Macrovision.
Find me something that does all this and does it from OSX and I'm all over it.
The problem iTunes has is mostly with the Windows version. It was and has remained shit since the first Windows version. And there are a lot more Windows users around to bitch about it, when their version is significantly worse to begin with. I seem to vaguely recall that iTfW was part of a strategy Apple had to come up with an API to cross-compile OS X apps for Windows, which like all their previous strategies from the '90s and early 2Ks, ended up completely abandoned. Except, in this case, for iTunes and QuickTime, which was their "proof of concept" example.
However, even the Mac version has gotten worse over the years, interface-wise. I tend to be very conservative about OS X updates (I only recently updated from 10.6 -> 10.9 on a late-2011 17" MBP, which shipped with 10.7!), and likewise with iTunes updates. The UI changes over the years have been some serious WTF rearranging of everything. It wasn't too bad when they made it the way to load iPod, but then they wedged iTunes Music into it, then videos, then apps. And more UI changes that weren't needed for store stuff, but were just to be different than before. (Apple of the past 10 years or so has been bad about that, especially their infatuation with skeuomorphism.) Now it's this god-hub of everything Apple. Even the old Software Update is now mixed up with the App Store.
Those "other symbols" were generally added because at the time (the '90s) there was already a font that had them (such as Dingbats and Wingdings Wingdings from Microsoft), or more significantly, a code system (like JIS) that had them. They were trying to unify dozens of code systems, of which there were sometimes four or five for the same 2-byte language. Emoji was originally added because Japanese cell phones at the time had a couple hundred emoji in custom character ranges. I don't think they had color either, strictly black and white outlines; all this "racial emoji" crap started after OS manufacturers like Apple added special color fonts for emoji with Simpsons-yellow skin.
What they are talking about now is making completely new sets of emoji that weren't being used somewhere else before, so there is a difference.
It would have been nice if TFS or TFA had explained what EMV is. I only this past month got my first chip card (I'm in the U.S.) and had never seen the acronym before.
And yes, it is annoying to have to leave the card in there for so long, not to mention the card slots that are placed where they are hard to see. Even more annoying is that before I got the chip, I basically was never asked to sign for amounts less than $50. Now I'm sometimes being asked to sign for smaller amounts. I don't mind the industry wanting more security, but maybe they could think about the user experience side of things a bit more?
Which two ISPs varies by region (can also be AT&T and Time Warner), but generally it's the local telephone company and a single cable TV company. The cable company may even have official local monopoly status with the city. If you're lucky that is. If you're not lucky, you only have one of them (or neither in rural areas), at which point wireless (whether mobile or fixed) becomes more important as competition.
Will common shortcuts like alt-tab, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X work in OS-X?
Alt-tab was from Windows (but OS X has had it for over a decade), and how the hell do you not know that the Z/X/C/V for text editing came from the original 1984 Macintosh? It only got changed to use ctrl because Microsoft couldn't force computer manufacturers to add a command key to the keyboard. (They clearly got more powerful since then, as you can see from modern PC keyboards.) Just be thankful you don't have to use the original 3-button X Windows copy/paste!
I haven't cared much about the package management stuff in a while, but Fink is long dead, I think the current one is macports. And I don't know about what you've "heard" about breaking programs, but any OS can have DLL hell, even Linux. Maybe that's why Linux package managers are so good, because they have to be. The newer versions of OS X try to lock down the core OS, which can cause problems for some things, but it is well documented how turn that protection off. (Spoiler: you have to reboot in a special way first)
You could always try to find a cheap old unibody Macbook Pro laptop (be warned about trackpad click problems, they can be fixed if you know what to adjust, but you should research it first) and try it out. It might be better to get a cheap "learner" one before you go full into it. Or if you can get a good deal on a 2011 (pre-retina) model with an i7 in it, that might be as good for software development as a brand new one, plus you can easily upgrade to 16GB RAM. I'm still using my 2011 17" i7 and I'm a bit surprised that five years later it's still far from obsolete.
But no matter what you do, you'll always be lost for a few months when switching to a new OS until you get used to it. I only recently upgraded to 10.9 (OpenGL improvements motivated me) and that was essentially the same OS. On PCs, I'm still using Windows 7.
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It started when you decided to use Chrome as your web browser? (ducking)
I don't know what you're doing about updates you don't want, but Microsoft has "revised" the update in question at least ten times so far. Each time an update gets "revised", the hidden status goes away. If you simply "hide" updates that you don't want and leave Windows Update on automatic, one day you will wake up to Windows 10. You probably aren't doing this, but a lot of people are.
I just gave up and turned Windows Update completely to manual-only and stopped bothering with it. But I normally don't use Windows for anything but playing a limited number of online games, and I certainly don't use IE/Edge (web browsing is done on a laptop running OS X), so my attack surface is a bit smaller than average.
In contrast, I've seen an "Upgrade to El Capitan!" window only two or three times, and I have at least three Macs that I work with regularly. I've tried to figure out how to stop it, but it's never happened enough for me to learn anything about it. It never tries to force the update (I'm sticking with 10.9 for now), and apparently it actually respects your decision not to upgrade, instead of repeatedly nagging, downloading 6+ gigabytes without permission, and then forcing the install. Maybe Microsoft could learn something from that.
but at the time you could still make the point and not be openly mocked
The thing is, I could tell that 64K segments were a dumb idea back in the early '80s, when 64K was becoming the standard RAM in computers. That's why I went straight from TRS-80 to Macintosh in 1985.
A "proper" burial as in the "PC LOAD LETTER" kind of proper?
GP should've taken the hint and gotten a real modem, and not stayed with some gimped piece of junk where the manufacturer tried to save a few pennies by not putting a proper ROM in it. By the time the driver was reverted, a real modem should have been affordable. Or maybe even, you know, re-compile the old driver, since that's kind of a major point of using an open-source operating system.
A friend of mine and I both used OS/2 as a DOS multitasker for running FidoNet BBSes back in the '90s. I remember one time he was unable to install because he had an Oak brand VGA card which was somehow not 100% compatible with the IBM original. I never really cared much for it other than it was probably the best multitasking environment for DOS programs. I still have that old PC stowed away somewhere, and it still boots OS/2.
As far as OS/2 being fucked up, I would say that the blame lays mostly with IBM, including their original requirement to run the 286, just as the 386 was becoming the hot thing. (Microsoft's ambitions didn't help things get better, either.) The 286 was honestly a very dumb design on the part of Intel, if only because of the 64K segment size. The other dumb thing about the 286 was ignoring the base of real-mode code out there that did tricks to get over that 64K segment size. You literally had to reboot the machine and have BIOS check a flag bit in the CMOS to get back to real mode, which shows just how far the heads of the 286 design team were up their asses.
I know that the thermostats at http://www.radiothermostat.com... can be configured to disable the cloud function (or I guess you could change its URL to a home server), and they have a JSON-based web interface that a custom home server could use.
So which TV network is getting "Ow My Balls!"?
In a world... of only letters and numbers... a small group of kids... made their names famous... TO THE ENTIRE MALL!
Get ready for... 20 GOTO 10 the Movie!
They're just trying to keep up with Google canceling their "beta" projects all the time.
after which strong arm upgrade tactics should stop.
Microsoft finds a way.
Macs that crash a lot 20 years ago could very well have due to hardware problems with the RAM. There was this Mac SE that would crash if you turned it on and left it untouched for a few minutes. I brought in my special long-length torx driver (thanks Steve Jobs!), cleaned the SIMM contacts with a pencil eraser, then carefully re-inserted them. Fixed.
The OS had no memory protection and used cooperative multi-tasking, but that just encouraged developers to be more careful, because they don't like rebooting either.
If you want a "solid and stable platform", you need to stay at least one major revision down. I only recently upgraded from 10.6.8 to 10.9 on my late-2011 17". (It shipped with 10.7, and I had to do special stuff to downgrade it so I could have Rosetta.) I still have a few things that won't work under 10.9, including MT NewsWatcher (Open Transport was removed in 10.9!), but I needed to upgrade because too much stuff needed the newer OpenGL. (Minecraft 1.6 would take down the graphics subsystem badly enough to need a reboot.)
The computer itself has been working quite well. It's now 4 years old, and still going strong. It has had a few problems from time to time, but I've been able to fix them and it's still working okay. The only thing that's getting troublesome is the trackpad, but I learned about those problems and how to tune it up just a few weeks before it started having trouble. It's really annoying when it won't stay clicked for drags.
Or maybe some galvos and Pink Floyd music.
I think it's okay as long as it finishes booting before it needs to be recharged.
The only reason cable isn't dying faster than it is is because of live sports.
the schedules are actually broadcast along with the video these days
I don't know where you are that this applies, but digital TV puts digital guide data in the bitstream. And while the guide data in ATSC can support a week or two of data, in reality most US stations only put 12 hours because so many TVs have crap firmware that gets confused or can even crash with too much guide data. This is fine for seeing what's on tonight, but it's very difficult to tell a DVR to record that new show that starts next week when its name doesn't appear in the guide data until that morning.
You could always set up a MythTV, but that requires a lot of work to keep going, and it won't work with cable. Which isn't so bad if you ditch cable; it's nice to have literal direct rips of ATSC broadcast streams, completely unprotected.
I recently tried to use an old all-in-one VHS+DVD recorder to archive some old home camcorder tapes. It constantly aborted by seeing the noise from recording gaps as copy protection. So now I'm going to have to use a capture-based solution after all. At least the equipment is a lot smaller than it was 10 years ago.
Fuck you behind whatever name you hide behind, Macrovision.
Find me something that does all this and does it from OSX and I'm all over it.
The problem iTunes has is mostly with the Windows version. It was and has remained shit since the first Windows version. And there are a lot more Windows users around to bitch about it, when their version is significantly worse to begin with. I seem to vaguely recall that iTfW was part of a strategy Apple had to come up with an API to cross-compile OS X apps for Windows, which like all their previous strategies from the '90s and early 2Ks, ended up completely abandoned. Except, in this case, for iTunes and QuickTime, which was their "proof of concept" example.
However, even the Mac version has gotten worse over the years, interface-wise. I tend to be very conservative about OS X updates (I only recently updated from 10.6 -> 10.9 on a late-2011 17" MBP, which shipped with 10.7!), and likewise with iTunes updates. The UI changes over the years have been some serious WTF rearranging of everything. It wasn't too bad when they made it the way to load iPod, but then they wedged iTunes Music into it, then videos, then apps. And more UI changes that weren't needed for store stuff, but were just to be different than before. (Apple of the past 10 years or so has been bad about that, especially their infatuation with skeuomorphism.) Now it's this god-hub of everything Apple. Even the old Software Update is now mixed up with the App Store.
Those "other symbols" were generally added because at the time (the '90s) there was already a font that had them (such as Dingbats and Wingdings Wingdings from Microsoft), or more significantly, a code system (like JIS) that had them. They were trying to unify dozens of code systems, of which there were sometimes four or five for the same 2-byte language. Emoji was originally added because Japanese cell phones at the time had a couple hundred emoji in custom character ranges. I don't think they had color either, strictly black and white outlines; all this "racial emoji" crap started after OS manufacturers like Apple added special color fonts for emoji with Simpsons-yellow skin.
What they are talking about now is making completely new sets of emoji that weren't being used somewhere else before, so there is a difference.
If it's another "everybody can upvote/downvote every post, all the time" site, then it'll end up the same as Digg and Reddit.
So, sort of like when you "time warp" on Kerbal and your vehicle starts shaking?
It would have been nice if TFS or TFA had explained what EMV is. I only this past month got my first chip card (I'm in the U.S.) and had never seen the acronym before.
And yes, it is annoying to have to leave the card in there for so long, not to mention the card slots that are placed where they are hard to see. Even more annoying is that before I got the chip, I basically was never asked to sign for amounts less than $50. Now I'm sometimes being asked to sign for smaller amounts. I don't mind the industry wanting more security, but maybe they could think about the user experience side of things a bit more?
Which two ISPs varies by region (can also be AT&T and Time Warner), but generally it's the local telephone company and a single cable TV company. The cable company may even have official local monopoly status with the city. If you're lucky that is. If you're not lucky, you only have one of them (or neither in rural areas), at which point wireless (whether mobile or fixed) becomes more important as competition.
Will common shortcuts like alt-tab, Ctrl-C, Ctrl-V, Ctrl-X work in OS-X?
Alt-tab was from Windows (but OS X has had it for over a decade), and how the hell do you not know that the Z/X/C/V for text editing came from the original 1984 Macintosh? It only got changed to use ctrl because Microsoft couldn't force computer manufacturers to add a command key to the keyboard. (They clearly got more powerful since then, as you can see from modern PC keyboards.) Just be thankful you don't have to use the original 3-button X Windows copy/paste!
I haven't cared much about the package management stuff in a while, but Fink is long dead, I think the current one is macports. And I don't know about what you've "heard" about breaking programs, but any OS can have DLL hell, even Linux. Maybe that's why Linux package managers are so good, because they have to be. The newer versions of OS X try to lock down the core OS, which can cause problems for some things, but it is well documented how turn that protection off. (Spoiler: you have to reboot in a special way first)
You could always try to find a cheap old unibody Macbook Pro laptop (be warned about trackpad click problems, they can be fixed if you know what to adjust, but you should research it first) and try it out. It might be better to get a cheap "learner" one before you go full into it. Or if you can get a good deal on a 2011 (pre-retina) model with an i7 in it, that might be as good for software development as a brand new one, plus you can easily upgrade to 16GB RAM. I'm still using my 2011 17" i7 and I'm a bit surprised that five years later it's still far from obsolete.
But no matter what you do, you'll always be lost for a few months when switching to a new OS until you get used to it. I only recently upgraded to 10.9 (OpenGL improvements motivated me) and that was essentially the same OS. On PCs, I'm still using Windows 7.