If web browsers removed the code that implements popups, then it would be far less likely that they show up, regardless of what privacy laws are in place.
Modern Web Browsers have Popup blockers that block standard HTML popups, giving indication that a popup was blocked, with options to create an exception. However they still seem to allow popups created by other means (JavaScript, HTML5, etc). The result seems to be annoying popups still show up, but useful popups from a legacy application are blocked.
We've seen several prominent examples of how it's rather impractical to try to bridge these two very different use cases, and the companies that have attempted to do so are backing away from that attempt now.
Windows 8 was a half-assed attempt at making their desktop OS a touchscreen tablet OS by making half their control panel items oversized touch sensitive tablet menus, the other half are desktop windows, and they replaced the start menu with a shitty start screen.
Windows 10 still has half the control panel items designed for tablets, the other half are still desktop Windows. They replaced the shitty start screen with a scaled down model of a shitty start screen, that still doesn't display the start menu tree, and tries to push useless active flashing tiles, wants you to let Cortina listen to everything you say, and generally wants you to give up all control and privacy you have to MS, much like Android and iOS.
It took Windows 10 to make Windows 8.1 look good. 8.1 still has shitty start screen, still has shitty "half the control panels are designed for tablets the other half aren't", but it doesn't force updates, not as much of your privacy is leaked, and there are some under the hood improvements over Windows 7.
Well, ya know, the patents on NTFS are surely running out by now, and Linux knows NTFS inside and out too. MS just doesn't feel comfortable without some kind of lock-in.
In unrelated news, FAT32 is about to have patents run out, thankfully somehow patent encumbered exFAT was selected as the successor on SDXC instead of UDF.
In my experience Firefox crashes because the memory leaks cause it to reach the 2GB per-32 bit process memory barrier, then it crashes. Now commit charge can grow to 8TB before crashing!
I sort of wish we could call smartphones and tablets "personal computers", and PCs as we know them could be re-designated as "workstations". To me, those monikers actually make a lot more sense. There's no real doubt that the "personal computer" for the modern masses is the smartphone, and the PC has been related to the platform where "work gets done".
Kind of like back in the day "Home computers" vs "Personal Computers". Home computers were simpler and more appliance like. This is more similar to the user experience expected of smartphones and tablets. Which is ironic because PCs (in the Laptop / desktop sense) spend most of their time at home, while smartphones and tablets are typically always on the go.
Fuel cost alone is EV=0.03 cents per mile and ICE = 0.20 cents per mile. (YMMV) Also, EVs have low maintenance cost. Tires are about the only cost. Brakes last forever; no oil changes; drive train has a few thousand fewer parts to wear and break. The more you drive, the more you save.
On the maintenance, a lot of "maintenance" items I see in cars are outside the base powertrain. I will grant you the brakes(hybrid versions of my car have significantly longer brake life), and I also live in snow country which isn't kind on cars (from corrosion and potholes), but I see people struggling with: -Tie rod ends -Ball joints -Wheel bearings -Shocks -body work from corrosion -random shit failing (instrument cluster, switches, fans, stereos, lights [bulbs or wiring problems], power window motors, power lock solinoids, water leaks, etc).
Electric cars are great and all, but they still have the above.
If Intel had wanted to OWN this market, they already did, back in the 90s through mid '00s. 8051, the non-milspec i960 models, strongarm, you name it, they probably had a product line to cover it.
They were once one of the largest embedded device and memory manufacturers in the world, but divested themselves of it because it was high volume and low profit, unlike x86, which they chose to focus on at the expense of almost all else
Which is a good thing, because in the early to mid 2000's their flagship was the Netburst Pentium 4 / Pentium D which was a piece of fucking shit. They were making laptops with built in toaster ovens, while AMD was making (relatively efficient) K8 at half the clock rate, and pushing for x86-64, while Intel was investing in the flop of the Itanium. Thankfully they released the Pentium-M, onto which they based their whole business (further developing it into Core) while they threw Netburst wholesale into the garbage. AMD unfortunately stagnated quite a while after their K8 win.
Can they offer basic video drivers / let people use an video card?
SVGA / visa fall back?
windows server basic video mode?
No. Even Windows 7 made it extremely difficult to do that. That is why when XP went out of support, I had little choice but to replace my mother's 9 year old laptop (with i915G chipset)...
How did Windows 7 make it extremely difficult? It will run out of the box on VESA drivers, and the 915 will work with XPDM drivers which IIRC will pull down from Windows Update. Only real downside is lack of Desktop Composition / Aero. Hell I even installed Windows 7 on a Pentium III with an Intel 815 GPU, and it worked with Windows 2000 drivers.
Don't get me wrong, the 915 is a big driver around the "Vista Capable" fiasco, since apparently Intel had warehouses of this shitty GPU they wanted to continue to foist on the public.
Is my post being truncated? Is the summary being truncated? We're talking about MPC-HC, which comes with codecs built in, but aren't installed into the Windows framework. No additional steps required. As an option it can tap into the Windows' codecs. Here's their website: https://mpc-hc.org/
Now take an MKV file on a clean Windows 7 machine (no aftermarket codecs). Install MPC-HC. Try to play it with Windows Media Player, watch it fail.
Take the video and play it in MPC-HC, watch it work with the built-in codecs.
Try a FLAC file, watch it fail in media player, but work in MPC-HC.
In MPC-HC go View-Options-Internal Filters. These are the internal codecs availible. Go start-run-msinfo32 Components-multimedia-video codecs. Notice Windows still only has the built in codecs.
See subject: For Media Player Classic to do as good a job as VLC you need to install codec packs (3rd party) - VLC has them built-in already & iirc (correct me IF I am off/wrong - feel free on this note) they are installed LOCAL to the folder/subfolder structure VLC has (not in a public folder like %WinDir%\system32 for example - which IS iirc, what codecpacks do).
* You "bloat" MPC's installation right there by adding more libs/dlls for it to work as well as VLC does (has libs in its distro already).
APK
P.S.=> Lastly - I like them both - both decent programs (coming from another freeware dev in myself no less) BUT this is WHY I prefer VLC (no need to install 3rd party codec packs)... apk
You're wrong. MPC (Media player Classic) relies on installed codec packs. MPC-HC (Home Cinema) takes the same player, can link to the codecs in the Windows Framework, but also include most required codecs to make it work "Out of the box".
I have to admit I've used MPC-HC for many many years now, in fact I'm using an old out of date version. I wonder if basically it's "good enough" that it doesn't need further development? There's products like "PuTTY" which essentially don't update for ages because the open source product fulfills it's function. Unless the product needs more fancy features which often risks breaking things. Time will tell I suppose.
I certainly don't disagree. There's a lot of projects, some 5, 10, even 15 years since their last update that still do what they are supposed to, and do it well. You know the UNIX philosophy. While I get annoyed every time an Android app wants to update so it can change the icon, or replace menu key with a hamburger icon, or replace hamburger icon with three dots, or replace color icons with dark grey on light grey icons, or replace local access with required Facebook linked account, others get annoyed or call an app dead if it hasn't been updated in 3 weeks.
Look at TeX, it asymptotically approaches Pi, with the idea that fewer and fewer changes should be required.
On PuTTY: While new requirements for terminal emulator features aren't increasing, there are still some potential improvements, which are sometimes achieved in forks like ExtraPuTTY, KiTTY: -Ability to save and load sessions to file instead of registry -File Transfer (X/Y/Z Modem, Kermit,) like TeraTerm -Custom key mapping (make mapping identical to a DEC LK keyboard so an old VT520 can be replaced with PuTTY with no training required for the user.)
Everyone seems to be mentioning Windows XP and 7, arguably some of Windows better work. Everyone seems to be forgetting Vista, 8, and 8.1 that shall we say, were not so great.
Compared to those, Windows 10 is a quite decent OS. Personally I didn't mind Vista so much, though it certainly did have a lot of compatibility issues, but I think that was more so because it was the first to follow XP which had been around for so long (and the transition was rushed with hardware folks due to MS development/deployment deadlines).
Vista "compatability" issues stemmed from: -A different Driver model. Particularliy with the Intel i915 and "Vista Capable" fiasco. Time is what remedied this. 7 used the same driver model, but 3 years in the future WDDM drivers were stable for the release of Windows 7 -Serious enforcement of "don't assume every user is administrator". While UAC is no different that Sudo on linux, and equivalent on OSX, it took time for software vendors to take it into account. Usually software written to take into account Vista's security model will continue to work fine on newer versions. -Performance issues were largely fixed in Vista SP2 which was released just before Windows 7. There's a few minor feature additions to 7, but otherwise it's very similar to Vista-SP2 -The Minimum requirements jumped between XP and Vista, but didn't jump between Vista and 7. Computers were 3 years newer at Windows 7 launch, and thus more powerful so fewer people were running at "minimum requirement level" than were at Vista's launch. Indeed Windows' requirements haven't largely increased since then (Software on the otherhand expanded to fill the void).
Windows 8.1 has some genuine improvements under the hood, but suffers from a terrible start menu / start screen. It won't display the folder layout that had been used since Windows 95. Control Panels are half in "modern UI", half in classic control panel. Adding Classic Shell makes the start menu acceptable.
Windows 10 didn't fix anything. They shrunk down the same unorganized start menu, added useless "live tiles", added useless Cortana that is hard to disable. The control panels still have mobile/desktop identity crises, and you give up all control over your computer with telemetry and forced updates.
It took Windows 10 to make Windows 8.1 look like a good option.
The billions of dollars of student debt is directly attributable to the Republican insistence on cutting taxes and support for state Universities.
In 1975 states paid for approximately 75% of an education at a State University with the student contributing the other 25%, meaning the majority of students could pay for college with a summer job and working part-time during the school year, maybe with some help from family. Additional financial assistance was available for truly needy students. The taxpayer accepted their part of the social compact to provide a higher education to the youth and support the large Public Research and Land Grant universities. Universities that were established and funded by our founding fathers that valued higher education for all youth.
Fast forward to today, the percentages are reversed 75% student/25% state funding with the gap made up by even public university students going into debt that will take decades to pay off. The conservative Republicans that insist on paying as little in taxes is short-changing today's youth and repudiating the vision of the founders as the the value of higher educations.
I wonder how much of the rising costs is actually due to the runaway costs of varsity athletic programs with high dollar coaches and stadiums. https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
I am guessing that you don't teach or otherwise work in the education sector. Just off the top of my head, here are people or groups would have an incentive to make that claim:
Textbook publishers trying to go the ebook route (remember, ebooks are nearly free to reproduce/distribute compared to dead tree books)
And importantly for Textbook publishers is the ability to impliment DRM so the book can't be resold, printed, or in some cases even accessed after the semester ends. If a textbook edition is still current, or even still compatible (n-1 edition is usually good enough), it has a strong demand on the used market. Textbook Publishers don't want that if they can enforce charging everyone $150.
As a plus for everyone else is the growth of open learning materials. First year Calculus hasn't changed in decades / centuries. There's no reason to pay hundreds of dollars for reference material.
In most cases education has tried to defend technology as a replacement for books and yet the costs do not measure out in the long run.
I've yet to even hear people raving about ebooks in education: While novels work well in an ebook format, in my experience textbooks don't, as you want to flip back and forth sections or pages, write in the margins, etc. Although annotation tools are available, they still don't seem as good. I will grant that you can carry more books in less space, and search work better. This is best case scenario. Worst case scenario is DRM ridden ebooks that can't be resold, and the student has to use crappy software with lots of restrictions.
For the latter problem there does seem to be a rise in popularity of "open" textbooks and learning content. First year calculus hasn't changed in decades, so there's no reason to pay $100 for books. Even ignoring the tablet / ebook concept, I had some courses where instead of published textbook, the required reading was a 300 page printout of the instructors notes, prepared by the campus print shop for $10. I would like to see more push in this direction. Open textbooks available electronically for free, or in dead tree format for the cost of production.
A couple years ago they quietly retired the bill-borg icon for Microsoft. I am sure a whole branding team at Microsoft worked for years to make that change happen.
Wasn't there also the "Windows" icon with smashed out panes? I think it was very popular in the era when Vista was a flop, and before Windows 7 arrived.
While I feel like part of me dies when I see signs and documents at work printed in Comic Sans, interestingly It can be a big help for people with dyslexia. With e-readers, either Comic Sans, or an official dyslexia font can open up a whole world of books.
The real obstacles are needing to increase total electric generation capacity as you slowly replace oil. ..
Electrical utilities have an issue of trying to balance out peak demand vs supply. Demand usually goes up and down during the day, with peaks early in the morning and at dinner time, and lows overnight. On the supply side large nuke plants can't spool up and down quickly, and the wind may blow windmills at random. Currently utilities use concepts such as interruptable industrial customers that can be shutdown if the utility needs the capacity. There is also customers charged time of day billing. With a large install base of electric cars, imagine the utility being able to control charge rates to ensure an even supply-demand balance. If you want a rapid charge, you can pay a premium. If you don't care when between now and 8:00AM tomorrow your car gets charged, you get a discount.
What will eventually happen, once there are enough EVs on the road, you will see batteries becomming a standard and battery stations will start cropping up. Essentially Gas stations will start carrying these standard batteries, you will pay monthly/yearly fee for the service. Once you are running low, you pull into these battery stations and someone or robotically, your battery will be replaced with a fully charged one.
The problem is battery packs in electric cars are normally designed to maximize dimensions of the car model since they struggle to get the range they get. Someone (Tesla? Nissan?) tried swappable battery packs, but I think they withdrew from the market.
What may be doable is an addon. For normal driving the built-in batteries are sufficient. For extended range rent either a standard format swappable battery pack, or an ICE Genset that mounts on the roof, trunk, or in a trailer.
You realize that there are Prius autos out there that are hitting 500,000 miles on their original batteries, yes? Or that electrics have about 2,000 fewer parts to wear out and break as opposed to ICEs?
And I just saw an article recently that ran down the top 20 most common repairs needed by modern ICE-powered cars... and none of them apply to EVs.
If you're wanting reliability, a simple electric motor beats an ICE hands down, and twice on Sunday.
Agreed on the batteries. People still act as if Hybrid technology is so new as to not be proven yet. The Prius has been available in North America and Europe since 2000. Seventeen years. If there was a massive problem with premature battery failure we'd have heard about it by now. It's no more statistically significant than major powertrain issues on an ICE vehicle.
On repairs, in my experience, a lot of repairs done to ICE cars could easily be applicable to Hybrid or Electric cars. Tires still wear out, tierod ends, shocks still fail, body panels will still corrode in the saltbelt. I will agree on scheduled maintenance (oil change, brakes, etc), but a lot of the same parts could breakdown. Major powertrain problems aren't that common in ICE vehicles.
POSReady: 2019-04-09 Windows 7: 2020-01-14 8.1 Pro: 2023-01-10
That's Security patches only. Hardware support for XP was dropped quite a while ago, and application support is falling off rapidly. Even with Windows 7 hardware support is dropping off.
Hardware support is a bigger issue from a practical point of view. If hardware (via PCI interface, etc) requires XP, the rest of the system must be able to run XP. If it is just an application that only needs (firewalled) network support, or USB support, or Serial support, it can be run in a VM on a modern hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
If web browsers removed the code that implements popups, then it would be far less likely that they show up, regardless of what privacy laws are in place.
Modern Web Browsers have Popup blockers that block standard HTML popups, giving indication that a popup was blocked, with options to create an exception. However they still seem to allow popups created by other means (JavaScript, HTML5, etc). The result seems to be annoying popups still show up, but useful popups from a legacy application are blocked.
We've seen several prominent examples of how it's rather impractical to try to bridge these two very different use cases, and the companies that have attempted to do so are backing away from that attempt now.
Windows 8 was a half-assed attempt at making their desktop OS a touchscreen tablet OS by making half their control panel items oversized touch sensitive tablet menus, the other half are desktop windows, and they replaced the start menu with a shitty start screen.
Windows 10 still has half the control panel items designed for tablets, the other half are still desktop Windows. They replaced the shitty start screen with a scaled down model of a shitty start screen, that still doesn't display the start menu tree, and tries to push useless active flashing tiles, wants you to let Cortina listen to everything you say, and generally wants you to give up all control and privacy you have to MS, much like Android and iOS.
It took Windows 10 to make Windows 8.1 look good. 8.1 still has shitty start screen, still has shitty "half the control panels are designed for tablets the other half aren't", but it doesn't force updates, not as much of your privacy is leaked, and there are some under the hood improvements over Windows 7.
Well, ya know, the patents on NTFS are surely running out by now, and Linux knows NTFS inside and out too. MS just doesn't feel comfortable without some kind of lock-in.
In unrelated news, FAT32 is about to have patents run out, thankfully somehow patent encumbered exFAT was selected as the successor on SDXC instead of UDF.
If I remember correctly, Adblock itself consumes quite a lot of memory. You might consider trying uBlock Origin. It uses much less.
Hush or you'll summon APK.
In my experience Firefox crashes because the memory leaks cause it to reach the 2GB per-32 bit process memory barrier, then it crashes. Now commit charge can grow to 8TB before crashing!
I have old 486 motherboards where the ISA slot board edge connectors are branded Foxconn.
You have any Intel branded Mobo from the last 15 years? Made by Foxconn.
Apparently not. that this is not und only uses 25 year old 486 computers.
Never get a master's. Never ever ever. You might as well spend your money on a gun and shoot yourself in the head.
Masters are a mixed bag. Some get success with them, others don't.
Now your advice is 100% correct for PhDs. They are a big waste of time and money.
I sort of wish we could call smartphones and tablets "personal computers", and PCs as we know them could be re-designated as "workstations". To me, those monikers actually make a lot more sense. There's no real doubt that the "personal computer" for the modern masses is the smartphone, and the PC has been related to the platform where "work gets done".
Kind of like back in the day "Home computers" vs "Personal Computers". Home computers were simpler and more appliance like. This is more similar to the user experience expected of smartphones and tablets. Which is ironic because PCs (in the Laptop / desktop sense) spend most of their time at home, while smartphones and tablets are typically always on the go.
Fuel cost alone is EV=0.03 cents per mile and ICE = 0.20 cents per mile. (YMMV)
Also, EVs have low maintenance cost. Tires are about the only cost. Brakes last forever; no oil changes; drive train has a few thousand fewer parts to wear and break.
The more you drive, the more you save.
On the maintenance, a lot of "maintenance" items I see in cars are outside the base powertrain. I will grant you the brakes(hybrid versions of my car have significantly longer brake life), and I also live in snow country which isn't kind on cars (from corrosion and potholes), but I see people struggling with:
-Tie rod ends
-Ball joints
-Wheel bearings
-Shocks
-body work from corrosion
-random shit failing (instrument cluster, switches, fans, stereos, lights [bulbs or wiring problems], power window motors, power lock solinoids, water leaks, etc).
Electric cars are great and all, but they still have the above.
If Intel had wanted to OWN this market, they already did, back in the 90s through mid '00s. 8051, the non-milspec i960 models, strongarm, you name it, they probably had a product line to cover it.
They were once one of the largest embedded device and memory manufacturers in the world, but divested themselves of it because it was high volume and low profit, unlike x86, which they chose to focus on at the expense of almost all else
Which is a good thing, because in the early to mid 2000's their flagship was the Netburst Pentium 4 / Pentium D which was a piece of fucking shit. They were making laptops with built in toaster ovens, while AMD was making (relatively efficient) K8 at half the clock rate, and pushing for x86-64, while Intel was investing in the flop of the Itanium. Thankfully they released the Pentium-M, onto which they based their whole business (further developing it into Core) while they threw Netburst wholesale into the garbage. AMD unfortunately stagnated quite a while after their K8 win.
Can they offer basic video drivers / let people use an video card?
SVGA / visa fall back?
windows server basic video mode?
No. Even Windows 7 made it extremely difficult to do that. That is why when XP went out of support, I had little choice but to replace my mother's 9 year old laptop (with i915G chipset)...
How did Windows 7 make it extremely difficult? It will run out of the box on VESA drivers, and the 915 will work with XPDM drivers which IIRC will pull down from Windows Update. Only real downside is lack of Desktop Composition / Aero. Hell I even installed Windows 7 on a Pentium III with an Intel 815 GPU, and it worked with Windows 2000 drivers.
Don't get me wrong, the 915 is a big driver around the "Vista Capable" fiasco, since apparently Intel had warehouses of this shitty GPU they wanted to continue to foist on the public.
Is my post being truncated? Is the summary being truncated? We're talking about MPC-HC, which comes with codecs built in, but aren't installed into the Windows framework. No additional steps required. As an option it can tap into the Windows' codecs.
Here's their website:
https://mpc-hc.org/
Now take an MKV file on a clean Windows 7 machine (no aftermarket codecs). Install MPC-HC. Try to play it with Windows Media Player, watch it fail.
Take the video and play it in MPC-HC, watch it work with the built-in codecs.
Try a FLAC file, watch it fail in media player, but work in MPC-HC.
In MPC-HC go View-Options-Internal Filters. These are the internal codecs availible.
Go start-run-msinfo32
Components-multimedia-video codecs. Notice Windows still only has the built in codecs.
See subject: For Media Player Classic to do as good a job as VLC you need to install codec packs (3rd party) - VLC has them built-in already & iirc (correct me IF I am off/wrong - feel free on this note) they are installed LOCAL to the folder/subfolder structure VLC has (not in a public folder like %WinDir%\system32 for example - which IS iirc, what codecpacks do).
* You "bloat" MPC's installation right there by adding more libs/dlls for it to work as well as VLC does (has libs in its distro already).
APK
P.S.=> Lastly - I like them both - both decent programs (coming from another freeware dev in myself no less) BUT this is WHY I prefer VLC (no need to install 3rd party codec packs)... apk
You're wrong. MPC (Media player Classic) relies on installed codec packs. MPC-HC (Home Cinema) takes the same player, can link to the codecs in the Windows Framework, but also include most required codecs to make it work "Out of the box".
I have to admit I've used MPC-HC for many many years now, in fact I'm using an old out of date version. I wonder if basically it's "good enough" that it doesn't need further development? There's products like "PuTTY" which essentially don't update for ages because the open source product fulfills it's function. Unless the product needs more fancy features which often risks breaking things. Time will tell I suppose.
I certainly don't disagree. There's a lot of projects, some 5, 10, even 15 years since their last update that still do what they are supposed to, and do it well. You know the UNIX philosophy. While I get annoyed every time an Android app wants to update so it can change the icon, or replace menu key with a hamburger icon, or replace hamburger icon with three dots, or replace color icons with dark grey on light grey icons, or replace local access with required Facebook linked account, others get annoyed or call an app dead if it hasn't been updated in 3 weeks.
Look at TeX, it asymptotically approaches Pi, with the idea that fewer and fewer changes should be required.
On PuTTY: While new requirements for terminal emulator features aren't increasing, there are still some potential improvements, which are sometimes achieved in forks like ExtraPuTTY, KiTTY:
-Ability to save and load sessions to file instead of registry
-File Transfer (X/Y/Z Modem, Kermit,) like TeraTerm
-Custom key mapping (make mapping identical to a DEC LK keyboard so an old VT520 can be replaced with PuTTY with no training required for the user.)
Everyone seems to be mentioning Windows XP and 7, arguably some of Windows better work. Everyone seems to be forgetting Vista, 8, and 8.1 that shall we say, were not so great.
Compared to those, Windows 10 is a quite decent OS. Personally I didn't mind Vista so much, though it certainly did have a lot of compatibility issues, but I think that was more so because it was the first to follow XP which had been around for so long (and the transition was rushed with hardware folks due to MS development/deployment deadlines).
Vista "compatability" issues stemmed from:
-A different Driver model. Particularliy with the Intel i915 and "Vista Capable" fiasco. Time is what remedied this. 7 used the same driver model, but 3 years in the future WDDM drivers were stable for the release of Windows 7
-Serious enforcement of "don't assume every user is administrator". While UAC is no different that Sudo on linux, and equivalent on OSX, it took time for software vendors to take it into account. Usually software written to take into account Vista's security model will continue to work fine on newer versions.
-Performance issues were largely fixed in Vista SP2 which was released just before Windows 7. There's a few minor feature additions to 7, but otherwise it's very similar to Vista-SP2
-The Minimum requirements jumped between XP and Vista, but didn't jump between Vista and 7. Computers were 3 years newer at Windows 7 launch, and thus more powerful so fewer people were running at "minimum requirement level" than were at Vista's launch. Indeed Windows' requirements haven't largely increased since then (Software on the otherhand expanded to fill the void).
Windows 8.1 has some genuine improvements under the hood, but suffers from a terrible start menu / start screen. It won't display the folder layout that had been used since Windows 95. Control Panels are half in "modern UI", half in classic control panel. Adding Classic Shell makes the start menu acceptable.
Windows 10 didn't fix anything. They shrunk down the same unorganized start menu, added useless "live tiles", added useless Cortana that is hard to disable. The control panels still have mobile/desktop identity crises, and you give up all control over your computer with telemetry and forced updates.
It took Windows 10 to make Windows 8.1 look like a good option.
The billions of dollars of student debt is directly attributable to the Republican insistence on cutting taxes and support for state Universities.
In 1975 states paid for approximately 75% of an education at a State University with the student contributing the other 25%, meaning the majority of students could pay for college with a summer job and working part-time during the school year, maybe with some help from family. Additional financial assistance was available for truly needy students. The taxpayer accepted their part of the social compact to provide a higher education to the youth and support the large Public Research and Land Grant universities. Universities that were established and funded by our founding fathers that valued higher education for all youth.
Fast forward to today, the percentages are reversed 75% student/25% state funding with the gap made up by even public university students going into debt that will take decades to pay off. The conservative Republicans that insist on paying as little in taxes is short-changing today's youth and repudiating the vision of the founders as the the value of higher educations.
I wonder how much of the rising costs is actually due to the runaway costs of varsity athletic programs with high dollar coaches and stadiums.
https://www.usatoday.com/story...
Other than businesses wanting to sell more laptop computers or students wanting to surf the web during class, who ever claimed computer use during a lecture or seminar would enhance engagement with course content?
I am guessing that you don't teach or otherwise work in the education sector. Just off the top of my head, here are people or groups would have an incentive to make that claim:
And importantly for Textbook publishers is the ability to impliment DRM so the book can't be resold, printed, or in some cases even accessed after the semester ends. If a textbook edition is still current, or even still compatible (n-1 edition is usually good enough), it has a strong demand on the used market. Textbook Publishers don't want that if they can enforce charging everyone $150.
As a plus for everyone else is the growth of open learning materials. First year Calculus hasn't changed in decades / centuries. There's no reason to pay hundreds of dollars for reference material.
In most cases education has tried to defend technology as a replacement for books and yet the costs do not measure out in the long run.
I've yet to even hear people raving about ebooks in education:
While novels work well in an ebook format, in my experience textbooks don't, as you want to flip back and forth sections or pages, write in the margins, etc. Although annotation tools are available, they still don't seem as good. I will grant that you can carry more books in less space, and search work better. This is best case scenario. Worst case scenario is DRM ridden ebooks that can't be resold, and the student has to use crappy software with lots of restrictions.
For the latter problem there does seem to be a rise in popularity of "open" textbooks and learning content. First year calculus hasn't changed in decades, so there's no reason to pay $100 for books. Even ignoring the tablet / ebook concept, I had some courses where instead of published textbook, the required reading was a 300 page printout of the instructors notes, prepared by the campus print shop for $10. I would like to see more push in this direction. Open textbooks available electronically for free, or in dead tree format for the cost of production.
October 2010 "66% of All Windows Users Still Use Windows XP"
The icon is the cracked Windows
A couple years ago they quietly retired the bill-borg icon for Microsoft. I am sure a whole branding team at Microsoft worked for years to make that change happen.
Wasn't there also the "Windows" icon with smashed out panes? I think it was very popular in the era when Vista was a flop, and before Windows 7 arrived.
While I feel like part of me dies when I see signs and documents at work printed in Comic Sans, interestingly It can be a big help for people with dyslexia. With e-readers, either Comic Sans, or an official dyslexia font can open up a whole world of books.
The real obstacles are needing to increase total electric generation capacity as you slowly replace oil. . .
Electrical utilities have an issue of trying to balance out peak demand vs supply. Demand usually goes up and down during the day, with peaks early in the morning and at dinner time, and lows overnight. On the supply side large nuke plants can't spool up and down quickly, and the wind may blow windmills at random. Currently utilities use concepts such as interruptable industrial customers that can be shutdown if the utility needs the capacity. There is also customers charged time of day billing. With a large install base of electric cars, imagine the utility being able to control charge rates to ensure an even supply-demand balance. If you want a rapid charge, you can pay a premium. If you don't care when between now and 8:00AM tomorrow your car gets charged, you get a discount.
What will eventually happen, once there are enough EVs on the road, you will see batteries becomming a standard and battery stations will start cropping up.
Essentially Gas stations will start carrying these standard batteries, you will pay monthly/yearly fee for the service. Once you are running low, you pull into these battery stations and someone or robotically, your battery will be replaced with a fully charged one.
The problem is battery packs in electric cars are normally designed to maximize dimensions of the car model since they struggle to get the range they get. Someone (Tesla? Nissan?) tried swappable battery packs, but I think they withdrew from the market.
What may be doable is an addon. For normal driving the built-in batteries are sufficient. For extended range rent either a standard format swappable battery pack, or an ICE Genset that mounts on the roof, trunk, or in a trailer.
You realize that there are Prius autos out there that are hitting 500,000 miles on their original batteries, yes? Or that electrics have about 2,000 fewer parts to wear out and break as opposed to ICEs?
And I just saw an article recently that ran down the top 20 most common repairs needed by modern ICE-powered cars... and none of them apply to EVs.
If you're wanting reliability, a simple electric motor beats an ICE hands down, and twice on Sunday.
Agreed on the batteries. People still act as if Hybrid technology is so new as to not be proven yet. The Prius has been available in North America and Europe since 2000. Seventeen years. If there was a massive problem with premature battery failure we'd have heard about it by now. It's no more statistically significant than major powertrain issues on an ICE vehicle.
On repairs, in my experience, a lot of repairs done to ICE cars could easily be applicable to Hybrid or Electric cars. Tires still wear out, tierod ends, shocks still fail, body panels will still corrode in the saltbelt. I will agree on scheduled maintenance (oil change, brakes, etc), but a lot of the same parts could breakdown. Major powertrain problems aren't that common in ICE vehicles.
POSReady: 2019-04-09
Windows 7: 2020-01-14
8.1 Pro: 2023-01-10
That's Security patches only. Hardware support for XP was dropped quite a while ago, and application support is falling off rapidly. Even with Windows 7 hardware support is dropping off.
Hardware support is a bigger issue from a practical point of view. If hardware (via PCI interface, etc) requires XP, the rest of the system must be able to run XP. If it is just an application that only needs (firewalled) network support, or USB support, or Serial support, it can be run in a VM on a modern hardware.