while both forgot the fundamental purpose of an OS which is STFU, get out of the way, and let the user run their programs with the least effort or interference by the OS not to give them inroads into markets they suck at
This is simply wrong. The purpose of a commercial OS is to make money for the company that sells it, and as much money as possible. If that means making users' lives miserable in the process, and selling off their private info, then so be it. Even if they do illegal things, that's OK as long as the cost of lawsuits or government fines is less than the profit generated.
Honestly, I'm utterly shocked lately at how many people simply do not seem to comprehend the fundamental purpose of a for-profit corporation like Microsoft, and keep expecting companies like that to act morally, and are then disappointed when they don't. This isn't rocket science; it's very simple. If an action will make the company more money, then it's the right action to take. Spyware, adware, forced updates, etc., make MS more money, so for MS they're the proper course of action. Worrying about pissing off users will not make MS more money (since they're not going to abandon Windows anyway), so wasting time and resources on that is not the proper course of action.
As for their marketshare numbers, they really don't matter that much. They're not going to make money with people who stick with Win7; that product has already been sold, and has been in the market for quite some time. They don't have to worry significantly about people choosing between Windows and other OSes, so there's no reason to offer Win7, or an otherwise less-user-hostile OS; that will simply cost them more money in resources and give them less profit. The obvious course of action is to simply coerce users into upgrading into Win10 where they can generate more profit through spyware. While many users will hold out for a while, eventually they'll be forced to upgrade to 10, which is why they've locked out Win7/8 for the newest CPUs for instance. Users' hardware and software isn't going to last forever; eventually they'll want something newer and faster, or want to use some newer SW which only works in 10, and they'll be forced to adopt it. And any users who really can stick with an ancient system forever aren't going to make MS any money anyway, so there's no point in catering to them.
You do realize that some people's Internet costs dollars per megabyte, right?
Maybe those people will get a clue and switch to an OS vendor that aligns better with their situation and needs. I doubt it though.
Microsoft are completely clueless about computers in the real world
I see no evidence to support this claim. Instead, it's pretty obvious that they simply *don't care* about users' petty little problems, like having extremely expensive metered connections. If you have one of those, that's your problem, not Microsoft's. If you don't like the way they manage their OS, you're free to pick another. But how many people are going to?
My next Windows PC will basically be a $2000 game console, because I'd never try to do real work on a Windows PC again.
People keep making these bold claims, but they never follow through.
The problem is that there simply is no solution to the problems you complain about. The only thing you can do is enjoy the good times while they last, get out of it what you can (which perhaps could mean buying into the realty market before it explodes), and then get out when things go downhill and move on to the next green pasture.
The problems you cite: 1) congestion (including public transit) 2) housing costs
For congestion, there's simply nothing that can be done. You're always going to have lots of congestion when all traffic has to move along a 2-dimensional planar route: at the intersections, there's going to be congestion. Public transit doesn't work because it has to follow the same roads as cars and stop at the same stoplights (for buses), and for other modes (subways) they're horrifically expensive and completely inflexible. They only sorta-work in places where geography limits the building, like Manhattan. Even in NYC, public transit is terrible if you can't afford to live in Manhattan; go ask the people in the Bronx or Staten Island or even Queens how they like their subways. Add into that that the public transit has to stop at every stop along the way, and can only follow fixed routes, and the larger the city is, the worse it's going to be; there's simply no way to move people between arbitrary points in the metro area quickly. There technically is a faster way, which is personal rapid transit, but no one believes it'll work so it cannot work, and will never get funding to be developed to prove it works, so it'll forever remain something in sci-fi.
For housing, there's simply nothing that can be done. This is greatly affected by #1 of course, as congestion worsens when more people move farther out to where housing is more affordable. The only ways to change this are to build higher, so you pack more people into smaller footprints, and to change zoning to encourage this. But this doesn't work that well because existing homeowners fight against it politically, so the rate of density increase is always far behind the rate of congestion increase.
So in summary, there's simply no solution to this stuff which doesn't involve having an unelected authoritarian regime take over and forcibly mold society to their whims. The best thing regular people can do is to take advantage of the situation while they can, and for their kids to help prepare them to do the same.
1) If you're a tech worker looking at moving to a new city, unless you're a fresh-out looking for your first job, chances are you're far enough past college-aged that college girls are not at all a consideration in a new location.
2) While American college girls can be very pretty, just wait until they pass the age of 30. They'll mostly turn into fat, unpleasant, entitled and spoiled women. No thanks.
VueScan is a Windows-esque GUI program; there's no way I know of to script it. Now he might be able to do this without VueScan, following those other instructions posted for getting SANE working on it, I don't know.
Well aside from government policies banning its use in government law texts, it's not banned per se, it's just that certain journalism style guides disallow it. But other style guides recommend/require it. Oxford, Harbrace, and many others are in favor, others (mostly British) are not. It looks like it's mainly a way to save a little space because space is valuable on printed newspapers, but that's a pretty silly reason these days, and also doesn't apply to non-newspapers. There's no reason to worry about saving a tiny iota of space on a government law text; Maine is just stupid for adopting this.
You sure VueScan doesn't allow this? It's been a while since I checked it out, but I thought it did support most features of the ix500 scanner I was using. But I'm really not sure; I only used the trialware(/nagware) version, and only briefly because the watermarks were unacceptable and I really didn't want to spend $20 for using my employer's scanner on work stuff.
There, look. That's how it is morally bankrupt. Why do you think the word "bankrupt" is in there? It is literally about selling out your morals.
What are you talking about? What morals? We're talking about a corporation here; there are no morals involved. Corporations are fundamentally amoral, and they're run by fundamentally amoral people.
What they did that was wrong was put a lock on an update for no good reason.
Bullshit. They have a very good reason: to coerce people into upgrading to Windows 10, where they can make money from them with advertising and spying.
They had to write extra code to make that happen.
Yes, that very small investment will pay for itself by coercing more people to upgrade to Win10.
When you pay Microsoft you are paying them to code useless extra stuff that nobody wants or needs?
What makes you think "nobody" wants this stuff? Microsoft wants this stuff, and that's all that matters.
Is that really how you want to spend your money?
I don't spend my money on Microsoft. I'm simply explaining the rationale for MS's decisions. You should ask that question to the legions of people who *do* spend their money on MS-ware.
They need a better ad campaign than "we are going to sabatoge our old software to make you upgrade."
What they're doing now seems to be working, and could likely be the most optimal method of generating revenue.
I'm fine with Windows 7.
Have fun not getting any new security updates, not being able to upgrade to newer CPUs, and at some point not being able to run newer software. If you're OK with all that stuff, then knock yourself out.
The Oxford comma IS a good idea. It's less ambiguous. The problem is that in recent years, people have gotten lazy and leave it out to save a single keystroke.
How is it "morally bankrupt"? Why do they have any obligation to support customers with brand-new hardware on an ancient OS version that they're phasing out? The OS they're selling now is Windows 10. If you hate it so much, then buy an old CPU, or find an OS that you do like. It's not their responsibility to make you happy; their responsibility is to make money.
Exactly. Why shouldn't they brag about it? They can happily fuck over their users with shitty, ugly spyware, and people just keep coming back for more! If it were my company, I'd be bragging about that too.
Sure, this sounds totally sociopathic, but that's how corporations are. Remember, they're only able to act this way because you (plural) allow them to get away with it.
For ScanSnap (as I said in another post but it's buried farther down so I'm repeating myself here), you need to buy yourself a copy of VueScan from hamrick.com. Sorry for the shameless plug, but it's the best solution. (I'm not a customer BTW, but I tried out their nagware version for our ScanSnap at work when I wanted to get it working on Linux and it worked great, except for all the watermarks.)
Even better, VueScan works far better than Fujitsu's own bundled software, which is a horror show. ScanSnap devices have fantastic hardware, but their software is bloated, horrible crap.
Scanning on Linux is one of the problem areas remaining. VueScan does a great job here if you're willing to pay $20, and is a necessity for non-TWAIN scanners like the ScanSnaps. For regular old flatbed scanners, I use "gscan2pdf".
For ScanSnap, you need to buy yourself a copy of VueScan from hamrick.com. That should solve all your scanning problems. It's not free (or Free), but the $20 or whatever is a lot cheaper than a Windows license.
For Atmel studio, that's a problem with embedded design tools in general. You need to keep an old copy of Windows around for that crap. At work, I use Altera Quartus software. It doesn't work on Windows 10 at all. The IT department is pushing to upgrade us to Windows 10. I have no idea how this is going to work out.
The problem here is that this lawsuit wasn't brought by "ADA students" (implying students of this university), it was brought by a couple of asshats who don't even attend this university!! The university was trying to be helpful by making this material available for free for everyone in the world, not just students who've paid tuition. But they were ruled to be out of compliance with ADA because they didn't also spend a ton of money doing high-quality transcription for all the freeloaders.
As the old saying goes, "no good deed goes unpunished".
The workers, by and large, aren't the ones who make the working environment shitty; that's management. The workers aren't the one who pushed open-office plans.
You need to read through a thread a little more before making comments like this. My statement there is a response to someone who said, "Nice! Got one for sequels that were better than the original?" after apparently liking my list of reboots.
The new Battlestar Galactica pushed the term "reImagining" to stress that they were changing the story and doing it differently, but it was still a remake (a fantastic one).
Only until around the 3rd season, where it jumped the shark. That was a real shame, because it truly was fantastic in the beginning.
I was about to write "WTF are you talking about?" or something along those lines. So I checked them out on Wikipedia, and sure enough, the other one transitioned 1 year ago. Very weird. Not that there's anything wrong with being trans, but two brothers both being trans and transitioning, fairly late in life to boot, is highly unusual.
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while both forgot the fundamental purpose of an OS which is STFU, get out of the way, and let the user run their programs with the least effort or interference by the OS not to give them inroads into markets they suck at
This is simply wrong. The purpose of a commercial OS is to make money for the company that sells it, and as much money as possible. If that means making users' lives miserable in the process, and selling off their private info, then so be it. Even if they do illegal things, that's OK as long as the cost of lawsuits or government fines is less than the profit generated.
Honestly, I'm utterly shocked lately at how many people simply do not seem to comprehend the fundamental purpose of a for-profit corporation like Microsoft, and keep expecting companies like that to act morally, and are then disappointed when they don't. This isn't rocket science; it's very simple. If an action will make the company more money, then it's the right action to take. Spyware, adware, forced updates, etc., make MS more money, so for MS they're the proper course of action. Worrying about pissing off users will not make MS more money (since they're not going to abandon Windows anyway), so wasting time and resources on that is not the proper course of action.
As for their marketshare numbers, they really don't matter that much. They're not going to make money with people who stick with Win7; that product has already been sold, and has been in the market for quite some time. They don't have to worry significantly about people choosing between Windows and other OSes, so there's no reason to offer Win7, or an otherwise less-user-hostile OS; that will simply cost them more money in resources and give them less profit. The obvious course of action is to simply coerce users into upgrading into Win10 where they can generate more profit through spyware. While many users will hold out for a while, eventually they'll be forced to upgrade to 10, which is why they've locked out Win7/8 for the newest CPUs for instance. Users' hardware and software isn't going to last forever; eventually they'll want something newer and faster, or want to use some newer SW which only works in 10, and they'll be forced to adopt it. And any users who really can stick with an ancient system forever aren't going to make MS any money anyway, so there's no point in catering to them.
You do realize that some people's Internet costs dollars per megabyte, right?
Maybe those people will get a clue and switch to an OS vendor that aligns better with their situation and needs. I doubt it though.
Microsoft are completely clueless about computers in the real world
I see no evidence to support this claim. Instead, it's pretty obvious that they simply *don't care* about users' petty little problems, like having extremely expensive metered connections. If you have one of those, that's your problem, not Microsoft's. If you don't like the way they manage their OS, you're free to pick another. But how many people are going to?
My next Windows PC will basically be a $2000 game console, because I'd never try to do real work on a Windows PC again.
People keep making these bold claims, but they never follow through.
The problem is that there simply is no solution to the problems you complain about. The only thing you can do is enjoy the good times while they last, get out of it what you can (which perhaps could mean buying into the realty market before it explodes), and then get out when things go downhill and move on to the next green pasture.
The problems you cite:
1) congestion (including public transit)
2) housing costs
For congestion, there's simply nothing that can be done. You're always going to have lots of congestion when all traffic has to move along a 2-dimensional planar route: at the intersections, there's going to be congestion. Public transit doesn't work because it has to follow the same roads as cars and stop at the same stoplights (for buses), and for other modes (subways) they're horrifically expensive and completely inflexible. They only sorta-work in places where geography limits the building, like Manhattan. Even in NYC, public transit is terrible if you can't afford to live in Manhattan; go ask the people in the Bronx or Staten Island or even Queens how they like their subways. Add into that that the public transit has to stop at every stop along the way, and can only follow fixed routes, and the larger the city is, the worse it's going to be; there's simply no way to move people between arbitrary points in the metro area quickly. There technically is a faster way, which is personal rapid transit, but no one believes it'll work so it cannot work, and will never get funding to be developed to prove it works, so it'll forever remain something in sci-fi.
For housing, there's simply nothing that can be done. This is greatly affected by #1 of course, as congestion worsens when more people move farther out to where housing is more affordable. The only ways to change this are to build higher, so you pack more people into smaller footprints, and to change zoning to encourage this. But this doesn't work that well because existing homeowners fight against it politically, so the rate of density increase is always far behind the rate of congestion increase.
So in summary, there's simply no solution to this stuff which doesn't involve having an unelected authoritarian regime take over and forcibly mold society to their whims. The best thing regular people can do is to take advantage of the situation while they can, and for their kids to help prepare them to do the same.
I realize you jest, but a couple of points:
1) If you're a tech worker looking at moving to a new city, unless you're a fresh-out looking for your first job, chances are you're far enough past college-aged that college girls are not at all a consideration in a new location.
2) While American college girls can be very pretty, just wait until they pass the age of 30. They'll mostly turn into fat, unpleasant, entitled and spoiled women. No thanks.
VueScan is a Windows-esque GUI program; there's no way I know of to script it. Now he might be able to do this without VueScan, following those other instructions posted for getting SANE working on it, I don't know.
Well aside from government policies banning its use in government law texts, it's not banned per se, it's just that certain journalism style guides disallow it. But other style guides recommend/require it. Oxford, Harbrace, and many others are in favor, others (mostly British) are not. It looks like it's mainly a way to save a little space because space is valuable on printed newspapers, but that's a pretty silly reason these days, and also doesn't apply to non-newspapers. There's no reason to worry about saving a tiny iota of space on a government law text; Maine is just stupid for adopting this.
You sure VueScan doesn't allow this? It's been a while since I checked it out, but I thought it did support most features of the ix500 scanner I was using. But I'm really not sure; I only used the trialware(/nagware) version, and only briefly because the watermarks were unacceptable and I really didn't want to spend $20 for using my employer's scanner on work stuff.
There, look. That's how it is morally bankrupt. Why do you think the word "bankrupt" is in there? It is literally about selling out your morals.
What are you talking about? What morals? We're talking about a corporation here; there are no morals involved. Corporations are fundamentally amoral, and they're run by fundamentally amoral people.
What they did that was wrong was put a lock on an update for no good reason.
Bullshit. They have a very good reason: to coerce people into upgrading to Windows 10, where they can make money from them with advertising and spying.
They had to write extra code to make that happen.
Yes, that very small investment will pay for itself by coercing more people to upgrade to Win10.
When you pay Microsoft you are paying them to code useless extra stuff that nobody wants or needs?
What makes you think "nobody" wants this stuff? Microsoft wants this stuff, and that's all that matters.
Is that really how you want to spend your money?
I don't spend my money on Microsoft. I'm simply explaining the rationale for MS's decisions. You should ask that question to the legions of people who *do* spend their money on MS-ware.
They need a better ad campaign than "we are going to sabatoge our old software to make you upgrade."
What they're doing now seems to be working, and could likely be the most optimal method of generating revenue.
I'm fine with Windows 7.
Have fun not getting any new security updates, not being able to upgrade to newer CPUs, and at some point not being able to run newer software. If you're OK with all that stuff, then knock yourself out.
The Oxford comma IS a good idea. It's less ambiguous. The problem is that in recent years, people have gotten lazy and leave it out to save a single keystroke.
Less ambiguity is a good thing.
How is it "morally bankrupt"? Why do they have any obligation to support customers with brand-new hardware on an ancient OS version that they're phasing out? The OS they're selling now is Windows 10. If you hate it so much, then buy an old CPU, or find an OS that you do like. It's not their responsibility to make you happy; their responsibility is to make money.
Exactly. Why shouldn't they brag about it? They can happily fuck over their users with shitty, ugly spyware, and people just keep coming back for more! If it were my company, I'd be bragging about that too.
Sure, this sounds totally sociopathic, but that's how corporations are. Remember, they're only able to act this way because you (plural) allow them to get away with it.
For ScanSnap (as I said in another post but it's buried farther down so I'm repeating myself here), you need to buy yourself a copy of VueScan from hamrick.com. Sorry for the shameless plug, but it's the best solution. (I'm not a customer BTW, but I tried out their nagware version for our ScanSnap at work when I wanted to get it working on Linux and it worked great, except for all the watermarks.)
Even better, VueScan works far better than Fujitsu's own bundled software, which is a horror show. ScanSnap devices have fantastic hardware, but their software is bloated, horrible crap.
Scanning on Linux is one of the problem areas remaining. VueScan does a great job here if you're willing to pay $20, and is a necessity for non-TWAIN scanners like the ScanSnaps. For regular old flatbed scanners, I use "gscan2pdf".
For ScanSnap, you need to buy yourself a copy of VueScan from hamrick.com. That should solve all your scanning problems. It's not free (or Free), but the $20 or whatever is a lot cheaper than a Windows license.
For Atmel studio, that's a problem with embedded design tools in general. You need to keep an old copy of Windows around for that crap. At work, I use Altera Quartus software. It doesn't work on Windows 10 at all. The IT department is pushing to upgrade us to Windows 10. I have no idea how this is going to work out.
Doesn't help much when all the employers have adopted open-plan offices.
The best choice is to leave the industry, and to advise young people to stay away.
That's *exactly* the way it works.
The problem here is that this lawsuit wasn't brought by "ADA students" (implying students of this university), it was brought by a couple of asshats who don't even attend this university!! The university was trying to be helpful by making this material available for free for everyone in the world, not just students who've paid tuition. But they were ruled to be out of compliance with ADA because they didn't also spend a ton of money doing high-quality transcription for all the freeloaders.
As the old saying goes, "no good deed goes unpunished".
I don't know of any public bathrooms that don't have locking doors on the stalls. I guess you wouldn't be going to the bathroom at all in France.
The workers, by and large, aren't the ones who make the working environment shitty; that's management. The workers aren't the one who pushed open-office plans.
Don't forget the *actual* D&D games that were published by TSR in the DOS days.
It was "ridiculous" compared to low-budget 70s camp, which re-used the same scenes over and over? You have some very questionable taste.
You need to read through a thread a little more before making comments like this. My statement there is a response to someone who said, "Nice! Got one for sequels that were better than the original?" after apparently liking my list of reboots.
As an engineer, I have far more education than a legal secretary.
I already gave my reasoning: they avoid this crappy profession where you can't get a decent workspace.
The new Battlestar Galactica pushed the term "reImagining" to stress that they were changing the story and doing it differently, but it was still a remake (a fantastic one).
Only until around the 3rd season, where it jumped the shark. That was a real shame, because it truly was fantastic in the beginning.
I was about to write "WTF are you talking about?" or something along those lines. So I checked them out on Wikipedia, and sure enough, the other one transitioned 1 year ago. Very weird. Not that there's anything wrong with being trans, but two brothers both being trans and transitioning, fairly late in life to boot, is highly unusual.
Sounds like Uber.