Facebook / Bing, now Facebook / Yahoo. With these models where giant companies can be at war and in love with one another at once, it's safe to conclude there will be many more. Though they both already own your Android phone, we're going to end up with Facebook / Google soon enough, and that is not going to be good. The privacy leaks of Facebook cannot be allowed to trickle into the rest of my online life even after I refuse to join FB.
I disagree: there's no valid "people are uninformed" excuse.
To compare: Windows always runs on machines both expensive and DIRT CHEAP and users do not need the level of hardware knowledge that you agree is OK for phones. Despite the obvious benefit to MS, the upgrade nonsense has never been as influential to microsoft, or they'd have expiring licenses and all the stuff I mentioned in my original post.
But to contrast: PC OEMs do NOT force you to upgrade, fully admiting that the PC world is dying in favor of practices that they could just as well port into PCs.
And if you never install windows, I'm guessing you'll never get Windows 8.
Going to cry about being stuck on XP? DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
I know, I know your sarcasm. But allow us to illustrate a few gentle listeners: XP, VISTA and WINDOWS 7... with a life 3 to 5 years between sequels *rarely* encourage developers to build Applications to nag you to upgrade. Bargain bin items till about 3 years ago commonly boasted Windows 2000 backward compat*
Yet Android versions last a year and are ripe with annoyances:
EULA warnings that X feature is unavailable in your 1.5, 1.6, 2.0, 2.2, 2.3 (your phone will always be missing that ONE app in this ever-sliding scale )
Website warnings that you need 2.3 which is just 18 months old and not widely deployed on low-end phones. Worse...
Invisible Apps in Google market, though your friends have no trouble showing you their phone can find the app --leaves you scratching your head because sometimes it's the OS, and others it's the CPU speed or manufacturer's choice of whether you deserve the app on it (Flash player)
Funny, it hasn't been a full 4 years since September 2008 (compare to my numbers above for full OSs). Since that's the year of the first Android release, we can see a forced trend like NO DESKTOP^H^H^W WINTEL PC has ever required. I recall, MacOS back in 1998 did have tons of programs that condemned you for needing OS 7.1, or 7.5 or 8.1 or 8.5, or 9.0 or 9.1 to run due to library compat --though Windows still gave you the chance of downloading, say VBRUN300.dll or whatever VC or DotNET runtime you needed. I see what phonemakers learned from that boldness to just stay quiet and block you before you download.
99.9% of people don't upgrade. Get new computer, let the OEM introduce you forcibly to Windows ME, XP, Vista, Seven, Eight... profit. Those OS upgrade boxed sets are for proactive geeks with nothing to lose but some cash.
* meaning the laziest, cheapest developers who might actually pick new SDKs to look shiny don't care if you have a dinosaur PC... it's the largest companies with much to lose who actually ostracize their userbase via platform shifts
Trust kill is a very dangerous move for any company's self-preservation. Trust attracts *new* users from other services into your own. In the past 3 years the crisis caused many free services to get DROPPED and BOUGHT by someone you hate. Among the technical minded, trust for even having to "activate" free that for some reason are off by default on our current account is dubious. I'm looking at you Youtube and you too, Google Plus. I will NOT provide EXTRA info and accept new EULAs. Especially annoying it is that my I was able to use log into youtube years back, till they felt like I now need to link it to a google account. I never uploaded a single video, so I lost almost nothing by refusing to sign in.
Purchasing my very first Android took longer when I hated Verizon, AT&T, didn't trust sprint, AND AT&T threatened to buy T-Mobile. Things have grown to the point where I just won't join any new service at all. Still pray that I wake without being forced to get a facebook account to sign into old services, or have my Yahoo data bought by facebook or something. I really hated to see my Barnes and Noble data scooped by Borders. Things are getting ridiculous and I don't trust anything online. Too bad. My thousands of pictures that could have gone to Picasa, Yahoo's Flicker, Instagram (pre-facebook buyout) or even Facebook are just chilling in my hard drive as wallpaper slideshows visible only by my friends.
Soon, EVEN slashdotters hating Metro will acquiesce to forced adoption of Windows 8 or 9 by machine attrition and new shiny hardware (like needing wireless N, USB 4, octo-core --whatever the next hot thing.) The price to pay is Trusted platform will end up driving out linux and cementing Windows into our hardware. Windows Market adoption on native MacOS and Windows will bring players like Facebook to our machines. What's more, we'll see the inevitable "porting" of Smartphone carrier cancers like non-removable Apps AND sponsored-Ads-everywhere.
At that point even my current "private wallpaper" sharing will upload my metadata, picture names and everything else but keystrokes to the big guys (maybe keystrokes WILL be fair game, given the this year's Android mini-scandal).
Bleak freedom ahead for privacy holdouts. Stock up on some hardware and save it for installing today's linux on it before it's too late;)
Bugs do not "happen" when you have a supposed active userbase of 10% of 7 billion people. Coders first test ANYTHING major in a contained lab environment. Then they stage this. Eventually they roll out to maybe a tech team or two within the company. When happy, they roll out country by country. Don't believe me? Remember when EVERYONE wanted Google Buzz but you had to wait your turn for this update to reach your particular account? Irrelevant? then remember that Facebook timeline itself was slowly rolled out too. So they're not just randomly seeing bugs.
Because you very well know that 1 production change cannot be undone when it's out of staging. After all, App makers like zinga and all have revenue to worry about, and a userbase of 500 million isn't something that would they'd think better before going overwriting things in a way that would kill their userbase. If that's the app makers, then you well know the App store / platform API providers will take their business seriously. Everything else is just backslash due to stupid decisions. Facebook is by now expected to do something NASTY every year, so they by know Zuck's gathered enough "bad publicity" feedback that he knows people won't walk out. They got no other virtual roof to take all their FB connections because network effect only works when there's a new and "better" network to move to.
FB is a US company subject to our laws. So you're forgetting several things. To help you recall them more clearly, see this example:
1) Your company succeeds to legally attract all 500 of your local neighborhood's children daily under the pretense of giving AWAY ("free", see?) food and candy. Everyone wins: parents bring them in daily since they no longer pay for kid's food and socialization sounds good to them and feels great for their kids... what's there to lose?
2) On the not-so-well appreciated side is the team covering the costs in exchange for monitoring EACH child closely behind 2-way walls for behaviors, choices of candy and identifying clothing trends and optimizing their products for future sales to the community's children.
3) At some point, the food starts making a select few children's teeth ALL fall out.
4) THIS. IS. AMERICAAAAA! Ergo, the next step is in this analogy in the real world would be "Lawsuits! Lawsuits, of course! Free doesn't mean we're your guinea pigs and my loss is your loss"
But given that we're talking about 'damage' + "on the innn-ternet" our laws do not fully have any meaning most of the time and the crime is allowed to continue thanks to how far behind the governments are in paying attention and lazily adapting old laws to new problems without losing lobby money.
The children's teeth will not come back on their own for those who lost, so they'll probably go elsewhere, but all the other kids are addicted to daily free food and gameplay... parents have been saving cash and WON'T leave because they rationalize the chance of loss against their chances of saving. Ergo, free is still better unless your child gets hit with the next russian roulette round.
Wow, a nuanced old-version supporter... cool. I wonder how many of us are left here on slashdot. I am not a true supporter anymore: at some point it my systems just stopped sticking around long enough.
Leaving them behind for a relative when moving out, equipment death and robbery have forced me to PURCHASE newer hardware. I'm surprised to see your system survive this long. A truth younger slashdotters need to know is that you cannot easily add new programs to old machines.
Kudos if you have seen your share of errors of missing dotnet, DirectX, Flash 7+, VisualC++ DLLs, Visual basic VBRUNDLL and bad HTML support for hotmail/yahoo. Cheers if you've known the joy of working around some or found alternative browsers and programs. It's sad that the only people using older software are either poor old people or their grandchildren. Middle aged people I know just fork over money for overkill hardware and pirate their way through Windows version upgrades.
That makes it harder on us given they perpetuate adoption of things (remember the first year of docx files?) and proliferation of overkill RAM amounts / bad coders who assume everyone buys a new machine every 3 years.
Now that there's a huge apps landgrab, it looks like they're cashing in on the fact that the "multimedia" story-telling was forgotten somewhere along the way. Without reading the article I'd say they're just re-implementing the nineties' land grab that low-res animations + voice tracks + music introduced... and they'll discover that without CD-size media to deliver all that, apps will need either multi-meg bundles or slow and pricey bandwidth requirements.
My old and "disconnected" dumb phone still has a more useful alarm feature than any Android phone due to design choices of the OS makers. It wakes up from full "Off" mode to beep at me (these are all non-MP3 presets, mind you) and then goes right back to Off when I am awake.
The problem is that I keep misplacing it because it is so small, and the trick of dialing its number doesn't work since it's off the grid. Given that it can make emergency calls, it's still not entirely invisible should the police need to turn on the spying power. It would be awesome if I could track down my own phone via its always-on GPS beacon. I mean, the authorities that we pay for with tax mondy are able to in the US, so why can't we since we're already paying for the feature?
I decided to just use airplane mode and make the phone last many times more off a single charge after realizing that GPS and emergency services are just a dead weight since my smartphone duplicates that functionality.
THANKS! That link is an unexpected surprise for me, and I'll be putting it to good use seeing how 3.6 will soon come to deprecation this month, if it hasn't already.
I'm had a frozen 12.0a1 nightly at work for the past few months that I decided to use at home this past weekend, so it's kinda funny that the real 12 is out and I have a big reset button via your link in case something fails.
Basically, it seems like a lot of software developers (or their managers) are trying to justify their existence by constantly coming up with unnecessary and downright bad user-interface changes, and forcing it on their users in the name of "progress", even though there's no actual evidence that their new UIs are better, and instead lots of users complain, with great specificity, about how much worse they are.
Yeah, but this is not actually new. It's 2012 now. ICQ 99 had little to show that ICQ98 didn't have, but I recall it taking being annoying. It probably had forced features or ads or something. Or maybe I'm mistaking it for AOL's IM competitor.
The point is we have a major difference today: applications back then never auto-updated. They could barely assume a modem, let alone an always on ISP. The programmers hadn't figured out how to seamlessly pull the rug out from under your feet overnight like Chrome and Firefox do nowadays. I got in the habit of going to oldversion.com precisely because new computers for me meant downloading the newest installer and losing features (Quicktime Player's "Fullscreen" in version 2.5 went away to make you pay for pro in 3.0 even though applescripts could summon the feature in the newer one)
I have version 12 of Firefox Nightly in my pocket, and have 14 at work. For some reason this "new" silent updater isn't something I saw in *my* 3 month old version of 12. That's scary... painful surprise additions on release day. Last year I kinda promised myself I'd stick with a non-chrome, non-Firefox browser, but I'm kinda stuck because Safari and Opera don't quite feel good.
Annoying that to close the "convenience" loop, the *browsers* started redirecting dns misses to search engines, and that even a mistyped ping target no longer returns "unreachable" because your ISP is trying to advertise their own affiliates. This all meaning that even a *wrong* number is a *number* pointing to someone. That's like doing chat-roulette.
I got tired of manually changing my ISP's modem IPs to non-poisoned DNS, because once in a while failing to use DHCP ones results in complete loss of DNS for some reason.
Off on a tangent about how fake our root level and IPv4 progress is: If I lived alone at home, I could undo all of these "nifty" features, but static IP settings often stop working with 30 days with my large ISP that I don't care to name. I've had to give up on IPv6 because tunnels were not trustworthy and turned flaky... Due to flakiness I stopped looking into enigmatic alternative DNS services, though rumors of any life in OpenNic are greatly exaggerated (even.FUR is apparently extremely sparsely populated.) And the two total search engines for that thing aren't even OOG_THE_CAVEMAN approved.
So we see only TLD infrastructure changes actually making it to a browser near us, but little else in terms of paradigm changes. New standards take huge companies and OS makers to push, when they feel like it, and then it's a whole decade for adoption to actually kick in (we got approval for ditching IE6 support only months ago, while sardonically non-IE browsers all decided to stop graceful degradation as users switch to them.)
Yup. I found out the hard way TWICE. Normal letters and office handouts don't fare so badly, but resumes are the most easy to mis-convert computer layout system that is mainstream out there: 1) bullet points always mess up by disappearing, getting retabbed in the wrong direction, or using some silly glyph 2) Fonts and spacing looks wrong 3) If you're lucky that 1 and 2 isnt' bad enough, your carefully crafted ODF [that got too-quickly exported to DOC] shows up in the hands of your 5 interviewers, but is no longer in the compacted one-page fit you so carefully battled your text into becoming... because everything repaginated without your knowing.
In fact, this may be your recruiter's fault --they go in there and add a company letterhead to customize your contact info adding bit-rot when resaving and potentially killing even a well-converted but unstable house-of-cards document.
Lacking office during my one serious linux-only period, I got the free and legal Word 2003 Viewer for windows. The downside was that dual-booting to Windows just to test against a hated MS product gets tiresome. And believe you me, if you become uninsured + unemployed then job boards, recruiters and dream postings will pull you to customize more times than you can mind OpenOffice has behaved with your formatting house-of-cards... you probably will make changes to your resume every week and have several parallel versions stashed, each with monthly changes. It's only a matter of time before you realize you messed up, but potentially losing job leads is a bitter experience.
Word is much more oriented towards ad hoc formatting.
If we remove the specifics of what you mentioned for a second
It's true that beginning ______ users usually don't understand this, but it's because they're trying to use _______ the same way they used __________
It reminded me how I used to overcompensate with car returns on my first few word-processor sessions given my earlier Typewriter "brain-damage."
MY relatives in their early sixties never actually get over that, actually. It's either every 80 chars or... type a grand total of one massive block of text as your email or wallpost... sometimes without punctuation.
More power to them chaotically speaking when they also never cared for the need to turn off CAPSLOCK in said messages. There may also be the quaint sighting of the office memo formatted haphazardly in spaces, waiting to fall like a house of cards when any single line needs a quick edit.
So all this reminiscing now comes to show how we at slashdot dreams bi-yet-similarly goofy dreams with our tools, but there is a dark underworld on the local office and non-geek global internet.
I kinda wish geniuses like Turing were rewarded as well as a second string shortstop or bench warming basketball player.
Scary that I've hear this twice today in a dozen hours: I finally got to read my dead-tree copy of a two-month old Wired article. Near the last paragraph, it similarly states that the only genius still strongly encouraged in the USA is that of athletes. In salaries, willingness of the masters / trainers to routinely take risks to trade or acquire good and bad players / rookies... and finally, public sway. Because you can usually pick one or two of those pluses in real-life decisions like picking a career.. but not all 3.
I'll look for the FF10 chiptunes a little harder. I couldn't find more than a handful PS2 ones at Zophars and definitely wanted FF10. I'll link to White Skies, a non-chiptune remix of Mt. Gagazet here. (The Youtube links tend to last a few months and die, so people finding this may just google that one.)
Back on topic, yeah, I followed the emulation scene up until 16 bit games. Having skipped owning other systems in between that and the slim PS2 left me without much to latch on to, but I am amazed at the glimpses of complex 3D emu I catch here and there.
Boy, am I rusty. First have to correct the dates with an AC post. Then the file format. Posting logged in again. I meant SPC, not SMC format. While I'm at it I'll also link to OCremix.
Yay for chiptunes! Too bad the site seems to use Java. I wanted to take a quick listen.
I never played much C64, so my own interests once I found computer playback tools were NES and SNES related.
It is true that it turns my real life friends off, so at some point near 2000 I turned to ocremix to get orchestrated remixes instead. But for the pure chiptune sound files in SMC and NSF format I still have from last decade's games, I recommend Winamp plugins, or standalone Nosefart, and Meridian player (it had a fake stereo for nonstereo 8bit games). For mac users, Audio overload from Banister.
Just 2 months ago I found that there's Playstation tunes out there, making the Chrono Cross and FF7 tracks finally something I could export to MP3 to best my older midi tracks. Today I was watching a playthrough of FinalFantasy XIII-2 and noticed most tracks in it now have vocals / actual lyrics. In a generation or two of consoles XBOX 720 and above there will probably be very little left in terms of that nice, cold triangle / square wave goodness.
Seriously, who actually uses google to find fb and twitter posts when those sites have their own search?
The same statistical first-timers who are always one minute away from *joining* said sites? There's millions registering all the time just to connect with those they've not talked with since highschool. For FB, they have no access to the posts unless they too join the club. ~90% of the world's 7,000,000,000 people are still *outside* of facebook's 700 million "active account-holders." Just because WE know the web inside down does not mean that most others discovered social media already.
The same people who thought the Clippy was actually an OS-wide help tool have morphed. Today, they are the ones who cannot tell that their url_bar != google_search != proprietary_site_search
Honestly to me it sounds like his current setup is working save for disk space. Why not just upgrade to 2TB disks?
Perhaps you missed the stories this past week about HD warranties scaling back 80% (down to a single measly year), prices being suboptimal until this week, and worldwide supplies all coming from the same compromised source. The heightened risk of expected dampness, environmental dust, and buggy/salvaged/new-but-untested factory equipment at the reconditioned factory makes it better to wait until the re-started post-flood production works out the bugs with some guinea pig other than US geeks.
What is 2, 4, or 1000000TB worth when the disk completely fails? It's more reliable to endure risk of his own equipment's current failure rates for a few more months than to switch to disks of unknown trustworthiness tomorrow. Especially if you're going to christen it with a huge stress on the first night in by transferring the full 2TB collection in one go.
Good point. I heard about that around may when I got this new PC.
A quick search led me to stackexchange. I know I read discussions on elsewhere about how google fails to honor it 120dpi rendering. Or maybe it my having to go under the hood for a config file where a simple "DO NOT let pages go under x point fonts" a la Firefox and Safari should be provided (Supposedly Chrome 13 or so came out with a fix, but like I promised, I'm still on FF3 at home.) Or perhaps the issue with text is that hardware-accelerated blurry-fonts a la Safari|Firefox/Vista+ are also not Chrome's goal.
This is starting to be too much work for those of us that must poke at fonts for older people or ourselves. The stock Widescreens we get at 720p aren't tall enough to comfortably read text at their max resolutions.
It will be at least another 5 years for displays to kill this plague of mere 800 pixels tall (to provide a bogus satisfaction for 720p checklists) in favor of real 1080p. 72 and 96dpis are still the only output configurations desktop developers test GUIs on, ever. Some day entry-level smartphone resolutions will reach "retina" levels. Thence, half-blind older geeks will finally be delivered a good out-of-box compromise between unreadably tiny menus and large, multi-pixel glyph strokes that your OS loves to silently truncate text from.
Slashdot Mirror
Facebook / Bing, now Facebook / Yahoo. With these models where giant companies can be at war and in love with one another at once, it's safe to conclude there will be many more.
Though they both already own your Android phone, we're going to end up with Facebook / Google soon enough, and that is not going to be good. The privacy leaks of Facebook cannot be allowed to trickle into the rest of my online life even after I refuse to join FB.
I disagree: there's no valid "people are uninformed" excuse.
To compare: Windows always runs on machines both expensive and DIRT CHEAP and users do not need the level of hardware knowledge that you agree is OK for phones. Despite the obvious benefit to MS, the upgrade nonsense has never been as influential to microsoft, or they'd have expiring licenses and all the stuff I mentioned in my original post.
But to contrast: PC OEMs do NOT force you to upgrade, fully admiting that the PC world is dying in favor of practices that they could just as well port into PCs.
And if you never install windows, I'm guessing you'll never get Windows 8.
Going to cry about being stuck on XP? DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
I know, I know your sarcasm. But allow us to illustrate a few gentle listeners:
XP, VISTA and WINDOWS 7... with a life 3 to 5 years between sequels *rarely* encourage developers to build Applications to nag you to upgrade. Bargain bin items till about 3 years ago commonly boasted Windows 2000 backward compat*
Yet Android versions last a year and are ripe with annoyances:
Funny, it hasn't been a full 4 years since September 2008 (compare to my numbers above for full OSs).
Since that's the year of the first Android release, we can see a forced trend like NO DESKTOP^H^H^W WINTEL PC has ever required. I recall, MacOS back in 1998 did have tons of programs that condemned you for needing OS 7.1, or 7.5 or 8.1 or 8.5, or 9.0 or 9.1 to run due to library compat --though Windows still gave you the chance of downloading, say VBRUN300.dll or whatever VC or DotNET runtime you needed. I see what phonemakers learned from that boldness to just stay quiet and block you before you download.
99.9% of people don't upgrade. Get new computer, let the OEM introduce you forcibly to Windows ME, XP, Vista, Seven, Eight... profit. Those OS upgrade boxed sets are for proactive geeks with nothing to lose but some cash.
* meaning the laziest, cheapest developers who might actually pick new SDKs to look shiny don't care if you have a dinosaur PC... it's the largest companies with much to lose who actually ostracize their userbase via platform shifts
Trust kill is a very dangerous move for any company's self-preservation. Trust attracts *new* users from other services into your own.
In the past 3 years the crisis caused many free services to get DROPPED and BOUGHT by someone you hate. Among the technical minded, trust for even having to "activate" free that for some reason are off by default on our current account is dubious. I'm looking at you Youtube and you too, Google Plus. I will NOT provide EXTRA info and accept new EULAs. Especially annoying it is that my I was able to use log into youtube years back, till they felt like I now need to link it to a google account. I never uploaded a single video, so I lost almost nothing by refusing to sign in.
Purchasing my very first Android took longer when I hated Verizon, AT&T, didn't trust sprint, AND AT&T threatened to buy T-Mobile. Things have grown to the point where I just won't join any new service at all. Still pray that I wake without being forced to get a facebook account to sign into old services, or have my Yahoo data bought by facebook or something. I really hated to see my Barnes and Noble data scooped by Borders. Things are getting ridiculous and I don't trust anything online. Too bad. My thousands of pictures that could have gone to Picasa, Yahoo's Flicker, Instagram (pre-facebook buyout) or even Facebook are just chilling in my hard drive as wallpaper slideshows visible only by my friends.
Soon, EVEN slashdotters hating Metro will acquiesce to forced adoption of Windows 8 or 9 by machine attrition and new shiny hardware (like needing wireless N, USB 4, octo-core --whatever the next hot thing.) The price to pay is Trusted platform will end up driving out linux and cementing Windows into our hardware. Windows Market adoption on native MacOS and Windows will bring players like Facebook to our machines. What's more, we'll see the inevitable "porting" of Smartphone carrier cancers like non-removable Apps AND sponsored-Ads-everywhere.
At that point even my current "private wallpaper" sharing will upload my metadata, picture names and everything else but keystrokes to the big guys (maybe keystrokes WILL be fair game, given the this year's Android mini-scandal).
Bleak freedom ahead for privacy holdouts. Stock up on some hardware and save it for installing today's linux on it before it's too late ;)
Bugs do not "happen" when you have a supposed active userbase of 10% of 7 billion people.
Coders first test ANYTHING major in a contained lab environment. Then they stage this. Eventually they roll out to maybe a tech team or two within the company. When happy, they roll out country by country. Don't believe me? Remember when EVERYONE wanted Google Buzz but you had to wait your turn for this update to reach your particular account? Irrelevant? then remember that Facebook timeline itself was slowly rolled out too. So they're not just randomly seeing bugs.
Because you very well know that 1 production change cannot be undone when it's out of staging. After all, App makers like zinga and all have revenue to worry about, and a userbase of 500 million isn't something that would they'd think better before going overwriting things in a way that would kill their userbase. If that's the app makers, then you well know the App store / platform API providers will take their business seriously. Everything else is just backslash due to stupid decisions. Facebook is by now expected to do something NASTY every year, so they by know Zuck's gathered enough "bad publicity" feedback that he knows people won't walk out. They got no other virtual roof to take all their FB connections because network effect only works when there's a new and "better" network to move to.
FB is a US company subject to our laws. So you're forgetting several things. To help you recall them more clearly, see this example:
1) Your company succeeds to legally attract all 500 of your local neighborhood's children daily under the pretense of giving AWAY ("free", see?) food and candy. Everyone wins: parents bring them in daily since they no longer pay for kid's food and socialization sounds good to them and feels great for their kids... what's there to lose?
2) On the not-so-well appreciated side is the team covering the costs in exchange for monitoring EACH child closely behind 2-way walls for behaviors, choices of candy and identifying clothing trends and optimizing their products for future sales to the community's children.
3) At some point, the food starts making a select few children's teeth ALL fall out.
4) THIS. IS. AMERICAAAAA! Ergo, the next step is in this analogy in the real world would be "Lawsuits! Lawsuits, of course! Free doesn't mean we're your guinea pigs and my loss is your loss"
But given that we're talking about 'damage' + "on the innn-ternet" our laws do not fully have any meaning most of the time and the crime is allowed to continue thanks to how far behind the governments are in paying attention and lazily adapting old laws to new problems without losing lobby money.
The children's teeth will not come back on their own for those who lost, so they'll probably go elsewhere, but all the other kids are addicted to daily free food and gameplay... parents have been saving cash and WON'T leave because they rationalize the chance of loss against their chances of saving. Ergo, free is still better unless your child gets hit with the next russian roulette round.
Wow, a nuanced old-version supporter... cool. I wonder how many of us are left here on slashdot. I am not a true supporter anymore: at some point it my systems just stopped sticking around long enough.
Leaving them behind for a relative when moving out, equipment death and robbery have forced me to PURCHASE newer hardware. I'm surprised to see your system survive this long. A truth younger slashdotters need to know is that you cannot easily add new programs to old machines.
Kudos if you have seen your share of errors of missing dotnet, DirectX, Flash 7+, VisualC++ DLLs, Visual basic VBRUNDLL and bad HTML support for hotmail/yahoo. Cheers if you've known the joy of working around some or found alternative browsers and programs. It's sad that the only people using older software are either poor old people or their grandchildren. Middle aged people I know just fork over money for overkill hardware and pirate their way through Windows version upgrades.
That makes it harder on us given they perpetuate adoption of things (remember the first year of docx files?) and proliferation of overkill RAM amounts / bad coders who assume everyone buys a new machine every 3 years.
= Movies
Now that there's a huge apps landgrab, it looks like they're cashing in on the fact that the "multimedia" story-telling was forgotten somewhere along the way. Without reading the article I'd say they're just re-implementing the nineties' land grab that low-res animations + voice tracks + music introduced... and they'll discover that without CD-size media to deliver all that, apps will need either multi-meg bundles or slow and pricey bandwidth requirements.
My old and "disconnected" dumb phone still has a more useful alarm feature than any Android phone due to design choices of the OS makers. It wakes up from full "Off" mode to beep at me (these are all non-MP3 presets, mind you) and then goes right back to Off when I am awake.
The problem is that I keep misplacing it because it is so small, and the trick of dialing its number doesn't work since it's off the grid. Given that it can make emergency calls, it's still not entirely invisible should the police need to turn on the spying power. It would be awesome if I could track down my own phone via its always-on GPS beacon. I mean, the authorities that we pay for with tax mondy are able to in the US, so why can't we since we're already paying for the feature?
I decided to just use airplane mode and make the phone last many times more off a single charge after realizing that GPS and emergency services are just a dead weight since my smartphone duplicates that functionality.
ACTUAL Retina display resolutions... I wonder how many dots that would be...
I hope 1080p is not even looked at for this.
THANKS!
That link is an unexpected surprise for me, and I'll be putting it to good use seeing how 3.6 will soon come to deprecation this month, if it hasn't already.
I'm had a frozen 12.0a1 nightly at work for the past few months that I decided to use at home this past weekend, so it's kinda funny that the real 12 is out and I have a big reset button via your link in case something fails.
Basically, it seems like a lot of software developers (or their managers) are trying to justify their existence by constantly coming up with unnecessary and downright bad user-interface changes, and forcing it on their users in the name of "progress", even though there's no actual evidence that their new UIs are better, and instead lots of users complain, with great specificity, about how much worse they are.
Yeah, but this is not actually new. It's 2012 now. ICQ 99 had little to show that ICQ98 didn't have, but I recall it taking being annoying. It probably had forced features or ads or something. Or maybe I'm mistaking it for AOL's IM competitor.
The point is we have a major difference today: applications back then never auto-updated. They could barely assume a modem, let alone an always on ISP. The programmers hadn't figured out how to seamlessly pull the rug out from under your feet overnight like Chrome and Firefox do nowadays. I got in the habit of going to oldversion.com precisely because new computers for me meant downloading the newest installer and losing features (Quicktime Player's "Fullscreen" in version 2.5 went away to make you pay for pro in 3.0 even though applescripts could summon the feature in the newer one)
I have version 12 of Firefox Nightly in my pocket, and have 14 at work. For some reason this "new" silent updater isn't something I saw in *my* 3 month old version of 12. That's scary... painful surprise additions on release day. Last year I kinda promised myself I'd stick with a non-chrome, non-Firefox browser, but I'm kinda stuck because Safari and Opera don't quite feel good.
Annoying that to close the "convenience" loop, the *browsers* started redirecting dns misses to search engines, and that even a mistyped ping target no longer returns "unreachable" because your ISP is trying to advertise their own affiliates. This all meaning that even a *wrong* number is a *number* pointing to someone. That's like doing chat-roulette.
I got tired of manually changing my ISP's modem IPs to non-poisoned DNS, because once in a while failing to use DHCP ones results in complete loss of DNS for some reason.
Off on a tangent about how fake our root level and IPv4 progress is: .FUR is apparently extremely sparsely populated.) And the two total search engines for that thing aren't even OOG_THE_CAVEMAN approved.
If I lived alone at home, I could undo all of these "nifty" features, but static IP settings often stop working with 30 days with my large ISP that I don't care to name. I've had to give up on IPv6 because tunnels were not trustworthy and turned flaky...
Due to flakiness I stopped looking into enigmatic alternative DNS services, though rumors of any life in OpenNic are greatly exaggerated (even
So we see only TLD infrastructure changes actually making it to a browser near us, but little else in terms of paradigm changes. New standards take huge companies and OS makers to push, when they feel like it, and then it's a whole decade for adoption to actually kick in (we got approval for ditching IE6 support only months ago, while sardonically non-IE browsers all decided to stop graceful degradation as users switch to them.)
Yup. I found out the hard way TWICE. Normal letters and office handouts don't fare so badly, but resumes are the most easy to mis-convert computer layout system that is mainstream out there:
1) bullet points always mess up by disappearing, getting retabbed in the wrong direction, or using some silly glyph
2) Fonts and spacing looks wrong
3) If you're lucky that 1 and 2 isnt' bad enough, your carefully crafted ODF [that got too-quickly exported to DOC] shows up in the hands of your 5 interviewers, but is no longer in the compacted one-page fit you so carefully battled your text into becoming... because everything repaginated without your knowing.
In fact, this may be your recruiter's fault --they go in there and add a company letterhead to customize your contact info adding bit-rot when resaving and potentially killing even a well-converted but unstable house-of-cards document.
Lacking office during my one serious linux-only period, I got the free and legal Word 2003 Viewer for windows. The downside was that dual-booting to Windows just to test against a hated MS product gets tiresome. And believe you me, if you become uninsured + unemployed then job boards, recruiters and dream postings will pull you to customize more times than you can mind OpenOffice has behaved with your formatting house-of-cards... you probably will make changes to your resume every week and have several parallel versions stashed, each with monthly changes. It's only a matter of time before you realize you messed up, but potentially losing job leads is a bitter experience.
Interesting you should mention this:
Word is much more oriented towards ad hoc formatting.
If we remove the specifics of what you mentioned for a second
It's true that beginning ______ users usually don't understand this, but it's because they're trying to use _______ the same way they used __________
It reminded me how I used to overcompensate with car returns on my first few word-processor sessions given my earlier Typewriter "brain-damage."
MY relatives in their early sixties never actually get over that, actually. It's either every 80 chars or... type a grand total of one massive block of text as your email or wallpost... sometimes without punctuation.
More power to them chaotically speaking when they also never cared for the need to turn off CAPSLOCK in said messages. There may also be the quaint sighting of the office memo formatted haphazardly in spaces, waiting to fall like a house of cards when any single line needs a quick edit.
So all this reminiscing now comes to show how we at slashdot dreams bi-yet-similarly goofy dreams with our tools, but there is a dark underworld on the local office and non-geek global internet.
I kinda wish geniuses like Turing were rewarded as well as a second string shortstop or bench warming basketball player.
Scary that I've hear this twice today in a dozen hours: I finally got to read my dead-tree copy of a two-month old Wired article. Near the last paragraph, it similarly states that the only genius still strongly encouraged in the USA is that of athletes. In salaries, willingness of the masters / trainers to routinely take risks to trade or acquire good and bad players / rookies... and finally, public sway. Because you can usually pick one or two of those pluses in real-life decisions like picking a career.. but not all 3.
Having just finished reading this reminder gives me an even worse feeling that science will die to profit seekers. Especially with the ad potential.
Thanks for the reply.
I'll look for the FF10 chiptunes a little harder. I couldn't find more than a handful PS2 ones at Zophars and definitely wanted FF10.
I'll link to White Skies, a non-chiptune remix of Mt. Gagazet here.
(The Youtube links tend to last a few months and die, so people finding this may just google that one.)
Back on topic, yeah, I followed the emulation scene up until 16 bit games. Having skipped owning other systems in between that and the slim PS2 left me without much to latch on to, but I am amazed at the glimpses of complex 3D emu I catch here and there.
Boy, am I rusty. First have to correct the dates with an AC post. Then the file format. Posting logged in again.
I meant SPC, not SMC format. While I'm at it I'll also link to OCremix.
Yay for chiptunes!
Too bad the site seems to use Java. I wanted to take a quick listen.
I never played much C64, so my own interests once I found computer playback tools were NES and SNES related.
It is true that it turns my real life friends off, so at some point near 2000 I turned to ocremix to get orchestrated remixes instead. But for the pure chiptune sound files in SMC and NSF format I still have from last decade's games, I recommend Winamp plugins, or standalone Nosefart, and Meridian player (it had a fake stereo for nonstereo 8bit games). For mac users, Audio overload from Banister.
Just 2 months ago I found that there's Playstation tunes out there, making the Chrono Cross and FF7 tracks finally something I could export to MP3 to best my older midi tracks. Today I was watching a playthrough of FinalFantasy XIII-2 and noticed most tracks in it now have vocals / actual lyrics. In a generation or two of consoles XBOX 720 and above there will probably be very little left in terms of that nice, cold triangle / square wave goodness.
Seriously, who actually uses google to find fb and twitter posts when those sites have their own search?
The same statistical first-timers who are always one minute away from *joining* said sites? There's millions registering all the time just to connect with those they've not talked with since highschool. For FB, they have no access to the posts unless they too join the club. ~90% of the world's 7,000,000,000 people are still *outside* of facebook's 700 million "active account-holders." Just because WE know the web inside down does not mean that most others discovered social media already.
The same people who thought the Clippy was actually an OS-wide help tool have morphed. Today, they are the ones who cannot tell that their url_bar != google_search != proprietary_site_search
Sorry, /. posted under you instead of the GP.
Ugh.
Honestly to me it sounds like his current setup is working save for disk space. Why not just upgrade to 2TB disks?
Perhaps you missed the stories this past week about HD warranties scaling back 80% (down to a single measly year), prices being suboptimal until this week, and worldwide supplies all coming from the same compromised source. The heightened risk of expected dampness, environmental dust, and buggy/salvaged/new-but-untested factory equipment at the reconditioned factory makes it better to wait until the re-started post-flood production works out the bugs with some guinea pig other than US geeks.
What is 2, 4, or 1000000TB worth when the disk completely fails? It's more reliable to endure risk of his own equipment's current failure rates for a few more months than to switch to disks of unknown trustworthiness tomorrow. Especially if you're going to christen it with a huge stress on the first night in by transferring the full 2TB collection in one go.
Good point. I heard about that around may when I got this new PC.
A quick search led me to stackexchange. I know I read discussions on elsewhere about how google fails to honor it 120dpi rendering. Or maybe it my having to go under the hood for a config file where a simple "DO NOT let pages go under x point fonts" a la Firefox and Safari should be provided (Supposedly Chrome 13 or so came out with a fix, but like I promised, I'm still on FF3 at home.) Or perhaps the issue with text is that hardware-accelerated blurry-fonts a la Safari|Firefox/Vista+ are also not Chrome's goal.
This is starting to be too much work for those of us that must poke at fonts for older people or ourselves. The stock Widescreens we get at 720p aren't tall enough to comfortably read text at their max resolutions.
It will be at least another 5 years for displays to kill this plague of mere 800 pixels tall (to provide a bogus satisfaction for 720p checklists) in favor of real 1080p. 72 and 96dpis are still the only output configurations desktop developers test GUIs on, ever. Some day entry-level smartphone resolutions will reach "retina" levels. Thence, half-blind older geeks will finally be delivered a good out-of-box compromise between unreadably tiny menus and large, multi-pixel glyph strokes that your OS loves to silently truncate text from.
Neither has there been any QBASIC executable
(er, I meant to say "after Windows 98 or so" there)