OSX is unfortunately bitmap based and many parts look pretty terrible if you turn the HiDef monitor option on. Windows is actually a little better with arbitrary % scaling, but many third party programs will still look awful.
Which is hilarious, because the OS X UI was originally based on Display PostScript, which evolved into Quartz2D, where one of the stated design goals is "resolution-independent rendering."
Which, of course, it does not really do. I remember seeing a non-"retina" app running on a retina MacBook, apparently they "solve" this case by bilinearly scaling the app up. Genius!
I opened up my MacBook and it informed me that XCode 5 was available and "would I like to update it?" Sure, why not? Well, I can tell you why not. XCode 5 made software written in previous version not work!
Yep, I learned that lesson with Xcode 3 and Xcode 4. (Or was it even worse, between Xcode 4.1 and 4.2 or something like that?)
Never update Xcode to a new version until you're ready to support a new version of iOS!
Newer versions of Xcode flat-out remove support for older iOS versions and Apple pulls the older SDKs from download. You can still find dubiously legal downloads of the older SDKs, but you can't target old devices.
Which is great, because originally the app I was working on was targeting iOS 5 on an iPad 1, and whatever the update was, it forced us to iOS 6. Oops - went to go to revert to an earlier version Xcode, and you can't! Because it's only available through the App Store, you can't get older versions anywhere. (And as said above, you can't just download the older SDK and use it with the new Xcode, because they pull those, too.)
So now I have a useless iPad sitting around my office that can't be used for anything. I'm pretty sure you're not even allowed to install apps that used to work on iOS 5 on it any more if they've ever been updated. It's just a useless hunk of no-longer supported hardware wasting desk space.
But, yeah, lesson learned: never update Xcode! Small patches (like a 0.0.x upgrade) are probably OK, but when the major or minor version changes, expect to be forced to drop devices or rewrite code.
Rumor has it that they've had exploits which allowed malicious users to, for instance, sell a stack of 99 cheap items to a vendor, but inform the game that they had sold very expensive items. Or instantly level themselves to the level cap by handing in a single quest.
It's better than that. Apparently most of the client UI is written in Lua, and is allowed to run SQL queries directly against the server's database. Including update queries. It's unclear how they "fixed" that, but apparently you used to be able to directly change any stat about your character using SQL. (I'd bet they just blacklist certain queries rather than really fixing the design.) There was also a bug that allowed people to execute purchases through the market system as other players. There have to be a ton of other security flaws just waiting to be discovered. It's not a well-designed game, security or technology wise.
On that note, since they use TCP for the game communications, you can get a hilarious effect where basically the game will "freeze" briefly when a TCP packet has to be retransmitted, and then everything will suddenly happen all at once as the TCP stream catches up. This also becomes a bit of a problem for people suffering from "buffer bloat:" the game expects you to move out of the way of attacks, but some players find that their update packets are condensed into larger, less frequent updates. Which means that depending on ISP, some end-level content can be literally impossible.
I'm sure the game will be showing up in a Slashdot story sooner or later when the entire database gets hacked. It's clear Square Enix still doesn't know how to run an online game.
You can. Not just local government offices, but local community centers. You can also call someone with the government over the phone to help you find insurance.
Uh, you can, but it won't do you any good: they all just use the website to sign you up. Those options are for people without computers, not ways around the website.
Or, alternatively, you can get the information directly from the insurance companies (whom you have to sign up with anyway, even when using the website).
This, however, will work. You just won't get to price compare.
There's an intentional obfuscation of the situation here to try and equate the roll out of the website with the roll out of the law. They are not the same thing.
But they are a great demonstration of why we don't want the government running something as important as healthcare. If they can't do something as simple as build a website, do you really want them involved in deciding if you live or die?
Now you might think "wait, but Massachusetts has Romneycare, of course they had 0 signups, everyone's already signed up." And you'd be wrong. Turns out that a bunch of people who had plans they liked under Romneycare are going to lose them under Obamacare. (Why does that sound familiar?) Which means that they have to reapply to the state exchange.
The state exchange was redone due to Obamacare, and the new version flat-out doesn't work. So a whole bunch of people are going to lose their Romneycare plans thanks to Obamacare.
And I'm sure the new website not working has nothing to do with Massachusetts using the exact same contractors who built Healthcare.gov.
You'd think they would have told us before October 1 that there were going to be some problems with healthcare.gov. They were either ignorant, incompetent or in denial.
Could you not say exactly the same thing about AT&T's "private" data? Substitute "peer to peer" with "web server" where appropriate.
Actually, probably not. There was an access control on the data in the weev case, as I understand it, it was just a brain-dead stupid one: your user agent. Basically, you could only pull the email addresses from the AT&T web server if you were using an iPad.
Which leads me to why I expect the two are legally different: when you put something up on a P2P service, they become searchable and not just accessible. Half of the point behind a P2P service is make it possible to find interesting files, the other is to make it possible to access them.
Due to AT&T's half-assed access control scheme, their files were not searchable by search engines. Which is probably enough to make the two cases legally distinct, but as with all legal speculation as Slashdot, IANAL.
If the companies couldn't upgrade the policies, how are they even able to offer them in the first place? The simple answer is that they could, but they won't because that won't make you angry at the administration.
Huh? They were able to offer them originally because Obamacare wasn't in force. Obamacare only kills them starting in 2014, which is why people are getting the cancellation letters now.
The only plans Obamacare allows to be grandfathered in are those that were made before 2011 that have never changed. That simply was never going to happen, inflation guarantees that details about the plan must change over time, and as soon as the insurance company changes the plan, it can no longer be grandfathered in under Obamacare.
Basically, the rules for being grandfathered in under Obamacare were written explicitly to guarantee that no one would be able to keep the plans that Obamacare made illegal, while being sold as "you will be able to keep your plan, period." Obama was lying, period.
No, no it doesn't. Grandfathered in plans were not allowed to change at all since 2011, and that simply is never going to happen over three years. Change the doctors covered under the plan? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in. Adjust costs due to inflation? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in. Increase coverage? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in.
Obamacare was written in such a way to guarantee these plans would be dropped. Period. Obama knew you weren't going to be able to keep your plans. Period.
You can't blame the insurance companies for this. There was no way they were ever going to be able to actually meet the requirements to grandfather in plans, if for no other reason than simple inflation.
And that's exactly what the individual mandate was--a huge compromise of liberal values to adopt a Republican idea. The fact that no Republican voted for it even then shows how spiteful and divisive they are.
Or that they looked at Massachusetts, saw that Romney's attempt at implementing it didn't work, and didn't want to send the nation down the same path. It's not hard to see that Obamacare doesn't and never will work. The HealthCare.gov debacle is proof enough of that.
It reinstalls the device drivers every time you plug the *same* device into a different USB port.
It's even worse than that. If it were just reinstalling device drivers, that would be time consuming and pointless, but it actually treats the thing as an entirely new, different device. Which means that I have like five different copies of my USB headset in the device list, and every single one of them has a different set of settings.
Which is especially annoying because my headset driver pretends it's a "surround" device, but it handles surround sound horribly, so I always disable that in the device settings. Which I had to do again every time I used a different USB port for whatever reason. Thankfully, I'm pretty sure I've got all the USB ports I'd actually use it in set up now...
Wow, you sure found a lot more problems with Windows 8.1 than I did. Really, I only had one problem with it: when booting, after making it past the Windows logo, it just sits at a black screen. You can move the mouse around at this black screen, but you can't log in or do anything.
Other than it crashing to a black screen on boot, I've had no problems with Windows 8.1.
Well, OK, I've posted about this on Slashdot before, and finally got it fixed. Apparently Windows 8.1 decided to nuke the drivers that came with my laptop and use broken ones instead. Reinstalling the original drivers fixed everything. So, thanks for that, Windows 8.1 upgrader.
And because they're still hilarious, here are Microsoft's instructions for booting Windows 8/8.1 into Safe Mode. Note that the instructions to enter Safe Mode requires the computer to be booting successfully. Also note that they tell you that you can't use F8 to boot into safe mode any more, but don't tell you that it's now shift-F8. The bit about Windows 8 giving you no chance to hit this is actually true; I wound up powering off the laptop during boot to "trick" Windows 8.1 into taking me to the recovery menu. (As getting to the black screen counted as "booting" as far as Windows cared.)
Shift-F8 does work, by the way, if you get lucky and hit it in that incredibly short window that the OS checks for it.
Reminds me of a (government, natch) contract I worked on where the customer insisted we use "agile" development and then refused to allow access to the end users for any form of testing.
In the end they got... something. I have no idea if it worked for them, of course, as we never did any user testing or got any user feedback. But we did do two week "sprints" like they asked. Not that they ever checked...
I might as well post my final update - after tweeting to Samsung support, they explained how to get the SW Update tool to download older drivers. The original AMD graphics drivers for Windows 8 work just fine - the crashing is indeed caused by the Windows 8.1 upgrade itself installing broken drivers.
I probably should have included this earlier, but here's the official Microsoft support page where they tell you that you can't use F8 any more and to first boot into Windows successfully to enable Windows recovery options. Notice that they don't mention shift-F8 anywhere on that page.
It's deeply broken and bad, and Steam refused to allow me to return for refund, so I watch people play it on Youtube sometimes, and it's in my library. Worst 6$ in recent memory.
I disagree entirely. The physics screwups just add to the hilarity.
Don't play it to be any good at it. Play it for the absurdity of the entire thing. Grab the hammer and whack away at the guy's rib cage, rip out his organs, and chuck a heart in. I'm sure he'll live.
The controls being bad is the entire point to the game and makes for some truly hilarious situations. Whoops, there goes my watch. Oh crap, I accidentally lost the bone saw and am now going to have to make do with the hammer. Oh no, I accidentally stabbed myself with the syringe! Gotta keep going through the psychedelic effects!
If possible, play it with friends. Having a group laughing at the misadventures of Nigel the surgeon makes the entire thing great.
QWOP is just a silly web game purposefully eliciting utter hilarity, but calling this thing a "Surgeon Simulator" is intellectually insulting. It's just an advanced QWOP.
It's a joke on "Train Simulator" and "Farming Simulator" and all those other "Thing Simulator" games on Steam. That's why the PC version is called "Surgeon Simulator 2013" - to mock things like Train Simulator 2014, Farming Simulator 2013, or Euro Truck Simulator 2. I'm sure there are more.
Incidentally, for a laugh, go to that Train Simulator 2014 link, find the DLC section, and hit "see all." Currently at the bottom I see "$2953.65 - Add all DLC to Cart".
Aw man, you're fucked. And just because it's hilarious, here's the official way to enter Safe Mode in Windows 8 and 8.1:
From the Power menu, hold down Shift while selecting Restart.
Those who know Windows 8/8.1 you will realize that the "power menu" is the menu available either via the power button in the login screen or the power button in the Settings charm in the charm bar.
And that you need to have already booted Windows successfully in order to use it.
Meaning that the only way to force Windows 8/8.1 to boot into Safe Mode is to first boot successfully, thereby not needing Safe Mode in the first place.
The way I got my ATIV Book 6 "working" was because it spent enough time at the boot screen that turning it off during that was able to force it into "recovery mode" that let me choose to boot into Safe Mode.
Also, the BIOS key on the ATIV Book 6 is F10, so you might try mashing that while pressing the power button to see if that works. It won't help you get into Safe Mode to actually fix anything, of course, but might let you boot from other devices.
I have a Samsung laptop and upgraded it to Windows 8.1 too.
The short answer is you're fucked. The laptop will not work with Windows 8.1.
The longer answer is that as part of the upgrade, Windows 8.1 installs broken display drivers. You need to disable the AMD graphics device in order to restore functionality. Unfortunately working drivers are flat-out not available on Samsung's site, and it's no longer possible to enter Safe Mode in Windows 8/8.1 by pressing F8 while it starts.
Instead, start it booting and then IMMEDIATELY hold down the power button. The idea is to get it to power off while Windows is starting, forcing it to allow you to choose to enter Safe Mode. Once you do that, you can go to the Device Manager and disable your AMD graphics.
At this point you'll have a working laptop that runs really, really badly. Anything you used to use accelerated graphics for is fucked.
Obama calls it "Obamacare." That's good enough for me to call it Obamacare.
I'd also call it "broken" and "in desperate need of repeal," but that's because I live in Massachusetts and already watched Romneycare flame out. Enjoy repeating the process, rest of the nation. It was a nice experiment here, too bad it didn't work.
I can't for the life of me figure out why this is so hard to understand, but I'll try one last time: Both parties thought they had something to gain from the government shutdown, which is why both parties let it happen, which is why both parties deserve to be blamed for the shutdown.
This isn't a hard concept. You can't "blame" the Republicans for a shutdown that the Democrats wanted as much as they did. Both sides wanted a shutdown. Both sides should receive equal blame, and both sides should be voted out next election.
If the GOP is so smart and the president built this as a trap for them, why have they been planning for months to throw themselves into the pit?
What trap? It's not 1995. The Democrats just think it is. The only fall-out the GOP can expect from this is that Boehner might lose his speakership, and even that's somewhat unlikely.
Why do you think the Democrats did nothing to seriously try and prevent the shutdown? Why do you think Obama made the shutdown as painful as possible, closing things that neither Clinton nor Regan felt the need to close? Because they're convinced that they're going to repeat 1996 in 2014 that way.
It's not that hard. Both parties are playing politics here. You can't assign blame to just one, both are to blame. Both parties wanted the shutdown. The Democrats just hoped that they'd be able to pretend that it was all the GOP's fault.
Don't fall for that trick. The government shutdown was entirely avoidable, if only either party wanted to actually avoid it. Neither did - both were hoping to score political points through the shutdown.
And since the government shutdown is part of the Democratic party strategy to win back the house in 2014 (in the mistaken theory that it's 1995) - maybe they should take some of the blame too, huh?
It's important to realize that both parties wanted to shut the government down: the GOP in an attempt to do what they think would help the US, and the Democrats in an attempt to win seats in 2014. They're both to blame, and trying to pretend otherwise is simply naive.
In fact, Facebook's advertisers are their customers, and Facebook users are the product.
Yep. One of the things my mom hates is that Facebook keeps on resetting her news feed to "top stories" or whatever Facebook calls it instead of "most recent." Why does Facebook do that, she asks?
Well, simple: because "most recent" shows her what her friends have been doing most recently, and "top stories" shows her ads for random pages she's liked, along with a couple of posts from actual humans scattered amongst the ads. Not that hard to understand, really: Facebook's customers pay them to show ads to their users, so Facebook constantly forces users back to the ad-based view.
(And to be clear, what I'm calling "ads" are in fact regular posts, they're just posts from pages like "American Idol" and "Top Chef" or whatever else my mom has "liked" on Facebook. In some cases she does actually want to see those updates, just not at the expense of not showing updates from actual people. So the obvious answer of "install AdBlock Plus" won't help in this case. It's already installed anyway.)
Aside from the whole 'a tightly sandboxed "app" taking down the system' thing (which makes one wonder if Apple's apps follow the same rules as everyone else's, or whether there is some Nasty bug in an API)
It looks to be a bug in their text-to-speech API. If you watch the video, he triggers the BSOD by starting the app speaking, then returning to the home screen (which stops the app, remember, iOS doesn't do real multitasking*), then restarting the app. So presumably it's a bug in the accessibility APIs that are used to do text-to-speech.
* OK, yes, it does, but you know what I mean in this instance, yes? User apps are not allowed to use multitasking, so the running app is stopped.
You're right, the OP should have said iOS 7 is their Windows 8. I've heard literally nothing but complaints from users about the new iOS 7 UI, much like you'll hear people complain about Windows 8's new UI.
Apparently there are some good new features (copied from Android, natch), but the one thing everyone can agree on is that the iOS 7 UI is absolute crap.
Slashdot Mirror
OSX is unfortunately bitmap based and many parts look pretty terrible if you turn the HiDef monitor option on. Windows is actually a little better with arbitrary % scaling, but many third party programs will still look awful.
Which is hilarious, because the OS X UI was originally based on Display PostScript, which evolved into Quartz2D, where one of the stated design goals is "resolution-independent rendering."
Which, of course, it does not really do. I remember seeing a non-"retina" app running on a retina MacBook, apparently they "solve" this case by bilinearly scaling the app up. Genius!
I opened up my MacBook and it informed me that XCode 5 was available and "would I like to update it?" Sure, why not? Well, I can tell you why not. XCode 5 made software written in previous version not work!
Yep, I learned that lesson with Xcode 3 and Xcode 4. (Or was it even worse, between Xcode 4.1 and 4.2 or something like that?)
Never update Xcode to a new version until you're ready to support a new version of iOS!
Newer versions of Xcode flat-out remove support for older iOS versions and Apple pulls the older SDKs from download. You can still find dubiously legal downloads of the older SDKs, but you can't target old devices.
Which is great, because originally the app I was working on was targeting iOS 5 on an iPad 1, and whatever the update was, it forced us to iOS 6. Oops - went to go to revert to an earlier version Xcode, and you can't! Because it's only available through the App Store, you can't get older versions anywhere. (And as said above, you can't just download the older SDK and use it with the new Xcode, because they pull those, too.)
So now I have a useless iPad sitting around my office that can't be used for anything. I'm pretty sure you're not even allowed to install apps that used to work on iOS 5 on it any more if they've ever been updated. It's just a useless hunk of no-longer supported hardware wasting desk space.
But, yeah, lesson learned: never update Xcode! Small patches (like a 0.0.x upgrade) are probably OK, but when the major or minor version changes, expect to be forced to drop devices or rewrite code.
Rumor has it that they've had exploits which allowed malicious users to, for instance, sell a stack of 99 cheap items to a vendor, but inform the game that they had sold very expensive items. Or instantly level themselves to the level cap by handing in a single quest.
It's better than that. Apparently most of the client UI is written in Lua, and is allowed to run SQL queries directly against the server's database. Including update queries. It's unclear how they "fixed" that, but apparently you used to be able to directly change any stat about your character using SQL. (I'd bet they just blacklist certain queries rather than really fixing the design.) There was also a bug that allowed people to execute purchases through the market system as other players. There have to be a ton of other security flaws just waiting to be discovered. It's not a well-designed game, security or technology wise.
On that note, since they use TCP for the game communications, you can get a hilarious effect where basically the game will "freeze" briefly when a TCP packet has to be retransmitted, and then everything will suddenly happen all at once as the TCP stream catches up. This also becomes a bit of a problem for people suffering from "buffer bloat:" the game expects you to move out of the way of attacks, but some players find that their update packets are condensed into larger, less frequent updates. Which means that depending on ISP, some end-level content can be literally impossible.
I'm sure the game will be showing up in a Slashdot story sooner or later when the entire database gets hacked. It's clear Square Enix still doesn't know how to run an online game.
You can. Not just local government offices, but local community centers. You can also call someone with the government over the phone to help you find insurance.
Uh, you can, but it won't do you any good: they all just use the website to sign you up. Those options are for people without computers, not ways around the website.
Or, alternatively, you can get the information directly from the insurance companies (whom you have to sign up with anyway, even when using the website).
This, however, will work. You just won't get to price compare.
There's an intentional obfuscation of the situation here to try and equate the roll out of the website with the roll out of the law. They are not the same thing.
But they are a great demonstration of why we don't want the government running something as important as healthcare. If they can't do something as simple as build a website, do you really want them involved in deciding if you live or die?
You left out Massachusetts, which has also managed to sign up 0 people.
Now you might think "wait, but Massachusetts has Romneycare, of course they had 0 signups, everyone's already signed up." And you'd be wrong. Turns out that a bunch of people who had plans they liked under Romneycare are going to lose them under Obamacare. (Why does that sound familiar?) Which means that they have to reapply to the state exchange.
The state exchange was redone due to Obamacare, and the new version flat-out doesn't work. So a whole bunch of people are going to lose their Romneycare plans thanks to Obamacare.
And I'm sure the new website not working has nothing to do with Massachusetts using the exact same contractors who built Healthcare.gov.
You'd think they would have told us before October 1 that there were going to be some problems with healthcare.gov. They were either ignorant, incompetent or in denial.
No, they flat out lied. They knew back in March that the site wouldn't work. And that's an NPR link, lest someone accuse me of linking to a right-wing source.
Could you not say exactly the same thing about AT&T's "private" data? Substitute "peer to peer" with "web server" where appropriate.
Actually, probably not. There was an access control on the data in the weev case, as I understand it, it was just a brain-dead stupid one: your user agent. Basically, you could only pull the email addresses from the AT&T web server if you were using an iPad.
Which leads me to why I expect the two are legally different: when you put something up on a P2P service, they become searchable and not just accessible. Half of the point behind a P2P service is make it possible to find interesting files, the other is to make it possible to access them.
Due to AT&T's half-assed access control scheme, their files were not searchable by search engines. Which is probably enough to make the two cases legally distinct, but as with all legal speculation as Slashdot, IANAL.
If the companies couldn't upgrade the policies, how are they even able to offer them in the first place? The simple answer is that they could, but they won't because that won't make you angry at the administration.
Huh? They were able to offer them originally because Obamacare wasn't in force. Obamacare only kills them starting in 2014, which is why people are getting the cancellation letters now.
The only plans Obamacare allows to be grandfathered in are those that were made before 2011 that have never changed. That simply was never going to happen, inflation guarantees that details about the plan must change over time, and as soon as the insurance company changes the plan, it can no longer be grandfathered in under Obamacare.
Basically, the rules for being grandfathered in under Obamacare were written explicitly to guarantee that no one would be able to keep the plans that Obamacare made illegal, while being sold as "you will be able to keep your plan, period." Obama was lying, period.
The Government did allow you to keep your plan.
No, no it doesn't. Grandfathered in plans were not allowed to change at all since 2011, and that simply is never going to happen over three years. Change the doctors covered under the plan? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in. Adjust costs due to inflation? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in. Increase coverage? Plan changed and can't be grandfathered in.
Obamacare was written in such a way to guarantee these plans would be dropped. Period. Obama knew you weren't going to be able to keep your plans. Period.
You can't blame the insurance companies for this. There was no way they were ever going to be able to actually meet the requirements to grandfather in plans, if for no other reason than simple inflation.
And that's exactly what the individual mandate was--a huge compromise of liberal values to adopt a Republican idea. The fact that no Republican voted for it even then shows how spiteful and divisive they are.
Or that they looked at Massachusetts, saw that Romney's attempt at implementing it didn't work, and didn't want to send the nation down the same path. It's not hard to see that Obamacare doesn't and never will work. The HealthCare.gov debacle is proof enough of that.
It reinstalls the device drivers every time you plug the *same* device into a different USB port.
It's even worse than that. If it were just reinstalling device drivers, that would be time consuming and pointless, but it actually treats the thing as an entirely new, different device. Which means that I have like five different copies of my USB headset in the device list, and every single one of them has a different set of settings.
Which is especially annoying because my headset driver pretends it's a "surround" device, but it handles surround sound horribly, so I always disable that in the device settings. Which I had to do again every time I used a different USB port for whatever reason. Thankfully, I'm pretty sure I've got all the USB ports I'd actually use it in set up now...
Wow, you sure found a lot more problems with Windows 8.1 than I did. Really, I only had one problem with it: when booting, after making it past the Windows logo, it just sits at a black screen. You can move the mouse around at this black screen, but you can't log in or do anything.
Other than it crashing to a black screen on boot, I've had no problems with Windows 8.1.
Well, OK, I've posted about this on Slashdot before, and finally got it fixed. Apparently Windows 8.1 decided to nuke the drivers that came with my laptop and use broken ones instead. Reinstalling the original drivers fixed everything. So, thanks for that, Windows 8.1 upgrader.
And because they're still hilarious, here are Microsoft's instructions for booting Windows 8/8.1 into Safe Mode. Note that the instructions to enter Safe Mode requires the computer to be booting successfully. Also note that they tell you that you can't use F8 to boot into safe mode any more, but don't tell you that it's now shift-F8. The bit about Windows 8 giving you no chance to hit this is actually true; I wound up powering off the laptop during boot to "trick" Windows 8.1 into taking me to the recovery menu. (As getting to the black screen counted as "booting" as far as Windows cared.)
Shift-F8 does work, by the way, if you get lucky and hit it in that incredibly short window that the OS checks for it.
Reminds me of a (government, natch) contract I worked on where the customer insisted we use "agile" development and then refused to allow access to the end users for any form of testing.
In the end they got ... something. I have no idea if it worked for them, of course, as we never did any user testing or got any user feedback. But we did do two week "sprints" like they asked. Not that they ever checked...
I might as well post my final update - after tweeting to Samsung support, they explained how to get the SW Update tool to download older drivers. The original AMD graphics drivers for Windows 8 work just fine - the crashing is indeed caused by the Windows 8.1 upgrade itself installing broken drivers.
I probably should have included this earlier, but here's the official Microsoft support page where they tell you that you can't use F8 any more and to first boot into Windows successfully to enable Windows recovery options. Notice that they don't mention shift-F8 anywhere on that page.
It's deeply broken and bad, and Steam refused to allow me to return for refund, so I watch people play it on Youtube sometimes, and it's in my library. Worst 6$ in recent memory.
I disagree entirely. The physics screwups just add to the hilarity.
Don't play it to be any good at it. Play it for the absurdity of the entire thing. Grab the hammer and whack away at the guy's rib cage, rip out his organs, and chuck a heart in. I'm sure he'll live.
The controls being bad is the entire point to the game and makes for some truly hilarious situations. Whoops, there goes my watch. Oh crap, I accidentally lost the bone saw and am now going to have to make do with the hammer. Oh no, I accidentally stabbed myself with the syringe! Gotta keep going through the psychedelic effects!
If possible, play it with friends. Having a group laughing at the misadventures of Nigel the surgeon makes the entire thing great.
QWOP is just a silly web game purposefully eliciting utter hilarity, but calling this thing a "Surgeon Simulator" is intellectually insulting. It's just an advanced QWOP.
It's a joke on "Train Simulator" and "Farming Simulator" and all those other "Thing Simulator" games on Steam. That's why the PC version is called "Surgeon Simulator 2013" - to mock things like Train Simulator 2014, Farming Simulator 2013, or Euro Truck Simulator 2. I'm sure there are more.
Incidentally, for a laugh, go to that Train Simulator 2014 link, find the DLC section, and hit "see all." Currently at the bottom I see "$2953.65 - Add all DLC to Cart".
Aw man, you're fucked. And just because it's hilarious, here's the official way to enter Safe Mode in Windows 8 and 8.1:
From the Power menu, hold down Shift while selecting Restart.
Those who know Windows 8/8.1 you will realize that the "power menu" is the menu available either via the power button in the login screen or the power button in the Settings charm in the charm bar.
And that you need to have already booted Windows successfully in order to use it.
Meaning that the only way to force Windows 8/8.1 to boot into Safe Mode is to first boot successfully, thereby not needing Safe Mode in the first place.
The way I got my ATIV Book 6 "working" was because it spent enough time at the boot screen that turning it off during that was able to force it into "recovery mode" that let me choose to boot into Safe Mode.
Also, the BIOS key on the ATIV Book 6 is F10, so you might try mashing that while pressing the power button to see if that works. It won't help you get into Safe Mode to actually fix anything, of course, but might let you boot from other devices.
I have a Samsung laptop and upgraded it to Windows 8.1 too.
The short answer is you're fucked. The laptop will not work with Windows 8.1.
The longer answer is that as part of the upgrade, Windows 8.1 installs broken display drivers. You need to disable the AMD graphics device in order to restore functionality. Unfortunately working drivers are flat-out not available on Samsung's site, and it's no longer possible to enter Safe Mode in Windows 8/8.1 by pressing F8 while it starts.
Instead, start it booting and then IMMEDIATELY hold down the power button. The idea is to get it to power off while Windows is starting, forcing it to allow you to choose to enter Safe Mode. Once you do that, you can go to the Device Manager and disable your AMD graphics.
At this point you'll have a working laptop that runs really, really badly. Anything you used to use accelerated graphics for is fucked.
But, hey, working. Sort of.
Obama calls it "Obamacare." That's good enough for me to call it Obamacare.
I'd also call it "broken" and "in desperate need of repeal," but that's because I live in Massachusetts and already watched Romneycare flame out. Enjoy repeating the process, rest of the nation. It was a nice experiment here, too bad it didn't work.
I can't for the life of me figure out why this is so hard to understand, but I'll try one last time: Both parties thought they had something to gain from the government shutdown, which is why both parties let it happen, which is why both parties deserve to be blamed for the shutdown.
This isn't a hard concept. You can't "blame" the Republicans for a shutdown that the Democrats wanted as much as they did. Both sides wanted a shutdown. Both sides should receive equal blame, and both sides should be voted out next election.
It's not very complicated, really.
If the GOP is so smart and the president built this as a trap for them, why have they been planning for months to throw themselves into the pit?
What trap? It's not 1995. The Democrats just think it is. The only fall-out the GOP can expect from this is that Boehner might lose his speakership, and even that's somewhat unlikely.
Why do you think the Democrats did nothing to seriously try and prevent the shutdown? Why do you think Obama made the shutdown as painful as possible, closing things that neither Clinton nor Regan felt the need to close? Because they're convinced that they're going to repeat 1996 in 2014 that way.
It's not that hard. Both parties are playing politics here. You can't assign blame to just one, both are to blame. Both parties wanted the shutdown. The Democrats just hoped that they'd be able to pretend that it was all the GOP's fault.
Don't fall for that trick. The government shutdown was entirely avoidable, if only either party wanted to actually avoid it. Neither did - both were hoping to score political points through the shutdown.
And since the government shutdown is part of the Democratic party strategy to win back the house in 2014 (in the mistaken theory that it's 1995) - maybe they should take some of the blame too, huh?
It's important to realize that both parties wanted to shut the government down: the GOP in an attempt to do what they think would help the US, and the Democrats in an attempt to win seats in 2014. They're both to blame, and trying to pretend otherwise is simply naive.
And the Democrats let them, because they're convinced that this will be a repeat of 1996 and see them regain the house in 2014.
Make no mistake, the government shutdown is both parties' faults. They both wanted the shutdown for political reasons.
In fact, Facebook's advertisers are their customers, and Facebook users are the product.
Yep. One of the things my mom hates is that Facebook keeps on resetting her news feed to "top stories" or whatever Facebook calls it instead of "most recent." Why does Facebook do that, she asks?
Well, simple: because "most recent" shows her what her friends have been doing most recently, and "top stories" shows her ads for random pages she's liked, along with a couple of posts from actual humans scattered amongst the ads. Not that hard to understand, really: Facebook's customers pay them to show ads to their users, so Facebook constantly forces users back to the ad-based view.
(And to be clear, what I'm calling "ads" are in fact regular posts, they're just posts from pages like "American Idol" and "Top Chef" or whatever else my mom has "liked" on Facebook. In some cases she does actually want to see those updates, just not at the expense of not showing updates from actual people. So the obvious answer of "install AdBlock Plus" won't help in this case. It's already installed anyway.)
Aside from the whole 'a tightly sandboxed "app" taking down the system' thing (which makes one wonder if Apple's apps follow the same rules as everyone else's, or whether there is some Nasty bug in an API)
It looks to be a bug in their text-to-speech API. If you watch the video, he triggers the BSOD by starting the app speaking, then returning to the home screen (which stops the app, remember, iOS doesn't do real multitasking*), then restarting the app. So presumably it's a bug in the accessibility APIs that are used to do text-to-speech.
* OK, yes, it does, but you know what I mean in this instance, yes? User apps are not allowed to use multitasking, so the running app is stopped.
You're right, the OP should have said iOS 7 is their Windows 8. I've heard literally nothing but complaints from users about the new iOS 7 UI, much like you'll hear people complain about Windows 8's new UI.
Apparently there are some good new features (copied from Android, natch), but the one thing everyone can agree on is that the iOS 7 UI is absolute crap.
Much like Windows 8.