Actually, 8.1 was the pinnacle as far as touch operation goes. The only think I dislike about Win10 is that it's not as good in that regard as 8.1 was. (8.0 was medium awful - there's actually a huge difference in that minor-version-number change!)
I don't mind paying for good software. Windows 10 is bloody good software.
THIS! I'm not anti-Linux - I love and use Ubuntu on Win10 w/WSL - but Win10 is without question the finest operating system I've ever used, and it's getting better at a decent pace. (It took until Win 8.1 to wrest that title from Ultrix...)
A decade ago, it was clear that Linux was going to take over the server world for two important reasons: 1) It was free and you didn't have to futz with licenses, and 2) It was getting better faster than anything else in the world. Linux only has the first advantage, now.
FWIW, I'd give up my iPhone before I'd give up my Surface Pro and OneNote - it's my "killer app". (Well, that and some CAD/Design apps...) OneNote is that good - but I wish they'd bring back some of the touch/pen optimizations they've lost since 8.1...
I *really* don't get anyone advising *anyone* to use the GIMP - it's one of the most user-hostile GUIs ever devised, and in addition, its capablilities are pretty weak, especially in comparison to newer programs like Krita. (I have Corel and Adobe licensed products, but still use Krita and Inkscape for some things becasue they're better at some things. I literally can't think of a single thing GIMP is better at, other than frustrating people.
Microsoft is having enough trouble getting app developers to build apps for their own store. Not enough developers were doing native Store apps, so they added the tools to convert existing Win32 apps to store apps with just a recompile.
It's even harder for Linux - from a commercial perspective desktop Linux is *way* too fragmented - anything but Ubuntu, RedHat, and maybe SuSE can't even conceivably be worth supporting from any rational software business P.O.V. Also, I can say from experience that there's little worse than trying to support know-it-all Linux users who generally don't actually possess a clue, but are happy to eat endless support resources while badmouthing you the whole time.
Sadly, Linux desktop users tend to be like Tesla drivers - they're just pretty much all a**holes, and think they're superior because of the moral purity of their technology choices, no matter how impractical they may actually be.
FWIW, I like Linux (not as much as BSD, but I really do like it), and I've *really* tried using Linux as my primary desktop every couple of years for the past two decades, and it's never been good enough for me to keep wanting to use it for more than about a month. I've always gone back to Mac or Windows, until Win 8.1 on Surface Pro, when I gave up on MacOS, too. (I do keep a USB stick around with Puppy on it, for use when I need basic Linux on a borrowed computer.) And with WSL on Win10 now (search "Linux" in the Windows store), I get nearly every advantage of real Linux with a lot less pain, and full Windows support for most all good software as well as 21st century hardware like pens, touchscreens, dials, etc.
The difference to most (even pretty technical users) is that when you're done with the install, Windows will give you a modern OS* capable of running apps many (not all) people really need, and providing capabilities no Linux system really can (pen, touch, dials, etc. for CAD, design, visualization, etc.) And Linux will drive you crazy trying to get a "some assembly required" OS fully functional. This is why I now use WSL on Win10 as my preferred environment (see post elsewhere in this thread...)
* The internal design of NT and its progeny have always been excellent due to Cutler's experience with VMS, the OS around those internals sucked for a long time)
Severs is a different story. Outside of active directory I really can't think of many things that Windows Server outshines Linux on. Linux simple makes a far better general purpose server than Window Server does. Infact if it wasn't for AD I doubt that Windows Server would have the presents it does.
And this is why MS built WSL - they recognize that Linux/Docker/etc, is the preferred deployment environment in most cloud applications, so they really do seem to have "gotten religion" and are now building and supporting tools that make it easy to deploy wherever and however makes sense, rather than trying to force everything into their server environment. This is especially true in newer "big data" type architectures, where Azure can play, for sure, but many folks may already be heavily invested in things like Spark/Kafka streaming, Mesos/Kubernetes, OpenStack, etc.
You're right though - AD is kind of the last of the Windows server crown jewels they're holding on to - it will be interesting to see if they add AD integration to Linux/cloud environments.
It seems really odd, then, that Microsoft has spent a very significant amount of time and money creating and expanding the support for the revolutionary WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) in Windows 10, which allows you to run a full Linux OS environment transparently on top of the native Linux kernel. Microsoft supports Linux in very meaningful ways now: The Microsoft Store currently offers Ubuntu, OpenSUSE (two versions), Debian, and Kali as WSL distros.
If you run Win 10 on anything and haven't tried WSL, you're really missing out - there's some very serious, and very good, software engineering (not just development) going on at MS to support Linux on Windows, and it's improved a LOT in the past few years. (See https://devblogs.microsoft.com... for more information.) They not only took the time to make sure Linux development environments work well on Windows, but they also made substantial changes to Windows itself, including, finally, updating the ancient, crippled, and otherwise horrible Windows command/terminal model!
In addition, MS is also putting a LOT of effort into supporting things like PowerShell on Linux (it's very different, but it does do some things way better than the traditional Unix/Linux tools, mainly since its pipelines handle structured data instead of just text.) I'm not fully convinced that PoSH is the way all of these things should work, but it's clear that this it's the first time in decades that anyone has taken a good, honest look at how these things *need* to work in 21st century systems, and Linux folks should give it a good hard look, as I could see it becoming a vital and important part of the enterprise/cloud/container Linux environments that everyone recognizes are important going forward. (See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... )
I will probably never use a Linux desktop again - Windows 10 is just dramatically better in almost every way that matters (especially pen/touch support, which brings a computer into the 21st century - I'll never again settle for a "caveman laptop" after using Surfaces!), and it now offers all of the Linux features I want and need. It really is the best of both worlds. (And I say this as someone who once had some serious (and not reactionary, but seriously justified) dislike of Microsoft - check my/. posts from 20 years ago. I have no affiliation with Microsoft - I just like and admire what they're doing to bring together the best of Windows (doing lots of things Linux *cannot* do) and Linux (doing most things standalone Linux *can* do), and their commitment to partnering with the Linux community (see distros above for starter list) to create a fusion that's truly better than either OS alone.
That really only works for OS-initiated disk activity. Think about what would have to happen with applications, which can (as they should) access disks in any way their programmers need or want to. Also, where does the state for an incomplete transfer exist? At what point is it invalidated, and for what reasons? In the real world, this is a lot harder than you're thinking it is...
This is not so much a problem with Amazon Basics per se, but rather a problem with the Chinese Shit that seems to be all that comes out of that wretched country. I used Amazon's brand for batteries until I got burned with a $20+ box of batteries that lasted only a few hours each - Chinese Shit.
I have no idea if Amazon's other branded products are any good or not - once they burn me like that, it's game over - they've totally lost my trust. This had a big impact, as our household was on the way to buying everything from Amazon. That's changed over the past few years - not only do we not buy ordinary things from Amazon anymore, but they used to get quite a bit of our Christmas gift spending, which was cut down to just a few books and another item or two this past year..
Chinese Shit can be really expensive to those selling it when it destroys the most valuable thing any merchant can ever have - customer trust.
A "tear-down" of something you don't fully understand does not tell you how to replicate it, especially if it's a technology you're not fully fluent in. For chips, reverse engineering can be a pretty involved process, since you not only have to back out the design (which is still somewhat difficult for many chips these days, but is getting even harder with 3D structures such as finFETs and the like*), but also the manufacturing processes that produced it - and that is NOT always easy from looking at the end product. Even if you know what it is, you may have no clue how to recreate it...
Otherwise, we'd have flying saucers now after having retrieved that one at Roswell, right?;-)
*Doing this right can mean obliterating the chip in very small chunks (at a molecular/atomic level) with exotic things like scanning Auger microscopes - doing that for an entire chip would be both expensive and very time-consuming...
3 - It supports fingerprint-based login, not face recognition. This is my strong preference. I do not want face scanning for login. I would prefer to go back to PIN entry first.
Yup, forgot this. FaceID is an anti-feature for me - this, along with the lack of a small form factor phone (and the execrable iTunes as the only viable backup and storage management tool), are the reasons I can't see myself ever buying another Apple phone. The problem is that Google is enough more evil that I just won't buy an Android/Fuschia phone, so my next phone will probably have to be some semi-lame third-party deal. Either that, or I go back to an actual dumb phone as a phone and get something like a Surface Go as a real tablet for mobile browsing and the like. (BTW, if MS were smart, they'd build a truly minimal phone that smartly links to a next-gen (Andromeda?) tablet in rational ways: Clicking phone numbers in a Surface web browser launches a call on the phone, contacts and calendar can be easily shared and managed (but hopefully w/o Outlook!), etc. (Apple's contact manager sucks heuvos - Palm Desktop was *way* better 20 years ago!)
Agree. I bought an SE as soon as they (finally) introduced the 128GB version, which is still less room than I'd like.
I have NO desire to carry a huge tablet that won't fit in my pocket, so I'll stay with the SE until Apple or some other manufacturer comes to their senses. BTW, a bezel-less 5-inch screen exactly fits the SE's body size, which is definitely the largest phone it's possible to run with one hand, even with its 4-inch display. (My ideal phone would be an Andromeda-type pen-capable folder the size of the SE, running an OS alternative (Win10? OneNote is not negotiable) to iOS and Android, with a real filesystem and the ability to be a full network peer to a PC/Mac/Linux computer.)
Also agree the headphone jack is really handy, too, although I never understood why Apple didn't adopt the 2.5mm plug used by Palm and others - if they had, there would still be plenty of room for audio jacks even in modern phones.
Yeah, Netflix on a 4-inch screen is pretty much exactly as bad as Netflix on a 6-inch screen. Movies are intended to be a big-screen experience, remember?
I'll admit to being a Telebit modem bigot: Those things were awesome (essentially CDMA over an audio channel), doing 19.2 Kbps when everyone else was stuck at 3, and 56 Kbps long before there were any "standards" for that.
They really weren't modems, but rather outboard intelligent communications processors (most used the Motorola 68000, the same processor that powered the Macs of the day, so in some cases they were faster and smarter than the computers they connected, and of course, pretty expensive, too.) I used the a lot of Telebits on international projects, because they were staggeringly noise resistant, just slowing down in the event of noise but ramping back up rapidly and automatically and dynamically selecting channels based on whether there was noise at that frequency band. This was pretty close to communications magic! Interestingly, given the high cost of international long distance back then, you made your money back on the things in less than a year.
I'm for the courts here, because the right to downgrade firmware to restore functionality is at least as important as the right to repair.
I'm against government intervention, but would be in favor of laws that require batteries to be replaceable. (Interestingly, this is less of a problem with phones than with tablet-type devices like iPads and Surfaces...)
Agreed - iOS 12 is definitely an outlier, to the point that I'm thinking I may never allow it to update. (Apple's famous for Fall updates that cripple the performance of phones, driving Christmas sales...)
I bought an iPhone SE (basically, a 6s that actually fits in a pocket) as soon as they came out with the 128GB version, and it's definitely quicker after the upgrade to 12... What I'd really like, though is a setting that says, "NEVER upgrade my phone automatically - let me decide what version to upgrade to, and when!"
No, I'd say at least half the problem is that these manufacturers (especially Apple) deliberately *prevent* owners of their products from ever "downgrading" to restore previous functionality. Apple regularly revokes signatures for older releases when a new one comes out, so if an "upgrade" horks your phone, too bad, so sad - you're stuck. (Without having to resort to hacky stuff - the point is that ordinary users should be able to restore prior function after they discover an "upgrade" actually destroys the usability of their device.)
Worse yet, there wasn't even a real investigation. Just preemptive exoneration before she had even been "interviewed" (The quotes around interview are justified in that when an interview finally was done, she was not under oath, as is normal practice in cases involving Top Secret/SCI information...)
Actually, connecting water heaters via (secure) smart grid IoT has tremendous promise as perhaps the best possible large-scale energy storage method known: https://www.esource.com/ES-WP-...
This is one reason I won't have any Obamacare-compliant "health insurance" plan - I want control over my own health information, and expressly do not want it digitized or shared with anyone electronically, ever. (I've spent way too many years building and working with large-scale electronic medical records systems and healthcare networks to ever want my data in there...)
This is the downside of making docs the gatekeepers for the things patients really need: A LOT of docs make a significant portion of their income from referrals for labs, imaging, prescriptions, etc. Straight kickbacks, of course, are illegal, but there are all kinds of investment groups, etc. that are used to get around these, and it's not uncommon at all for docs in the US to get connected with one of these groups and make tens of thousands of dollars a month (and I've seen reports listing almost a million/mo!) *just* for their referrals.
Healthcare costs in the US can NEVER be fixed until we kill the FDA/AMA complex, which enshrines the physician as the all-purpose gatekeeper. Why can't I just straight-up *buy* the things I need w/o having to go through my Doc first? More and more people *want* to take responsibility for their own treatment - we should be enabling them. (I know my position is radical, but I agree with Milton Freidman that we should have no occupational licensing, not even for physicians. Given the large and repeated failures we've had over the years, it's clear that licensing is no guarantee of safety or competence...
At the moment, for instance, I'd just like to drop $20 for a quick prescription update from an eye-scanner machines - that could be a good business for somebody, if it weren't for the doc lobby making sure I can't do that w/o paying for a $100-150 doctor's visit. (Thanks to Obamacare, I now have no insurance, and have to pay everything out of pocket, which means I pay several times what the insurance companies pay, but at least I'm not paying for things I don't need and won't use...)
FWIW, NOBODY can afford to "properly maintain" their copper infrastructure anymore, given how little revenue can be extracted from it these days. In many cases, especially in northeastern states, the incumbents like Verizon are *prevented* from fully replacing their copper infrastructure, since they are the "carrier of last resort", and must continue to offer POTS service by law....
That's certainly not true of Time-Warner/Spectrum where I live in Austin. I pay for 200 Mbps service (there's no point in paying for more, as you'll see in a moment), but I have NEVER gotten more than 60 Mbps on any speed test ever. It galls the crap out of me to be paying so much and getting so much less.
The problem is that actually fixing the real problem is expensive (I live in the hard limestone hills - trenching to run new fiber is expensive, so they're still running crappy coax infrastructure), so despite 1-2 truck rolls a year for 20 years, they've never been able to fully deliver their promised speed, and reliability is simply deplorable - cable modems are forced to reset every few hours much of the year. I've decided it just wont' get any better than this, and sadly, there are no real alternatives (AT&T only offers their laughably slow DSL from last century as an alternative.)
TWC/Spectrum is literally the WORST company and service I've ever paid for (and that takes some doing), but due to the corruption of the Austin City Council, I have no alternatives: Any competitors are fist required to build out the "underserved" parts of town that will never buy enough to support themselves, leaving no cash to continue the buildout to the parts of town that want it and can pay for it. (This policy almost bankrupted Grande Communications, which spent a fortune on infrastructure in East Austin to reap only a pittance in revenue. Google saw this and has successfully bribed the council to allow Google Fiber to cherry-pick to ensure the maximum number of subscribers, so long as they offer free 5 Mbps Internet to low-income customers.)
One thing's sure: I'll kick Spectrum to the curb as soon as there's any competition...
I once had dub@sun.com (and even signed/. posts with it before they finally made me create an account), which is clearly about as good as an email address can get. (Everyone calls me "Dub", even my family, so for all practical purposes it *is* my first name, even if it makes people think I stutter when introducing myself as Dub Dublin...)
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Actually, 8.1 was the pinnacle as far as touch operation goes. The only think I dislike about Win10 is that it's not as good in that regard as 8.1 was. (8.0 was medium awful - there's actually a huge difference in that minor-version-number change!)
I don't mind paying for good software. Windows 10 is bloody good software.
THIS! I'm not anti-Linux - I love and use Ubuntu on Win10 w/WSL - but Win10 is without question the finest operating system I've ever used, and it's getting better at a decent pace. (It took until Win 8.1 to wrest that title from Ultrix...)
A decade ago, it was clear that Linux was going to take over the server world for two important reasons: 1) It was free and you didn't have to futz with licenses, and 2) It was getting better faster than anything else in the world. Linux only has the first advantage, now.
FWIW, I'd give up my iPhone before I'd give up my Surface Pro and OneNote - it's my "killer app". (Well, that and some CAD/Design apps...) OneNote is that good - but I wish they'd bring back some of the touch/pen optimizations they've lost since 8.1...
I *really* don't get anyone advising *anyone* to use the GIMP - it's one of the most user-hostile GUIs ever devised, and in addition, its capablilities are pretty weak, especially in comparison to newer programs like Krita. (I have Corel and Adobe licensed products, but still use Krita and Inkscape for some things becasue they're better at some things. I literally can't think of a single thing GIMP is better at, other than frustrating people.
Microsoft is having enough trouble getting app developers to build apps for their own store. Not enough developers were doing native Store apps, so they added the tools to convert existing Win32 apps to store apps with just a recompile.
It's even harder for Linux - from a commercial perspective desktop Linux is *way* too fragmented - anything but Ubuntu, RedHat, and maybe SuSE can't even conceivably be worth supporting from any rational software business P.O.V. Also, I can say from experience that there's little worse than trying to support know-it-all Linux users who generally don't actually possess a clue, but are happy to eat endless support resources while badmouthing you the whole time.
Sadly, Linux desktop users tend to be like Tesla drivers - they're just pretty much all a**holes, and think they're superior because of the moral purity of their technology choices, no matter how impractical they may actually be.
FWIW, I like Linux (not as much as BSD, but I really do like it), and I've *really* tried using Linux as my primary desktop every couple of years for the past two decades, and it's never been good enough for me to keep wanting to use it for more than about a month. I've always gone back to Mac or Windows, until Win 8.1 on Surface Pro, when I gave up on MacOS, too. (I do keep a USB stick around with Puppy on it, for use when I need basic Linux on a borrowed computer.) And with WSL on Win10 now (search "Linux" in the Windows store), I get nearly every advantage of real Linux with a lot less pain, and full Windows support for most all good software as well as 21st century hardware like pens, touchscreens, dials, etc.
Uh, isn't Google killing off ChromeOS for everything but Chrome itself on Chromebooks in favor of Android?
The difference to most (even pretty technical users) is that when you're done with the install, Windows will give you a modern OS* capable of running apps many (not all) people really need, and providing capabilities no Linux system really can (pen, touch, dials, etc. for CAD, design, visualization, etc.) And Linux will drive you crazy trying to get a "some assembly required" OS fully functional. This is why I now use WSL on Win10 as my preferred environment (see post elsewhere in this thread...)
* The internal design of NT and its progeny have always been excellent due to Cutler's experience with VMS, the OS around those internals sucked for a long time)
Severs is a different story. Outside of active directory I really can't think of many things that Windows Server outshines Linux on. Linux simple makes a far better general purpose server than Window Server does. Infact if it wasn't for AD I doubt that Windows Server would have the presents it does.
And this is why MS built WSL - they recognize that Linux/Docker/etc, is the preferred deployment environment in most cloud applications, so they really do seem to have "gotten religion" and are now building and supporting tools that make it easy to deploy wherever and however makes sense, rather than trying to force everything into their server environment. This is especially true in newer "big data" type architectures, where Azure can play, for sure, but many folks may already be heavily invested in things like Spark/Kafka streaming, Mesos/Kubernetes, OpenStack, etc.
You're right though - AD is kind of the last of the Windows server crown jewels they're holding on to - it will be interesting to see if they add AD integration to Linux/cloud environments.
It seems really odd, then, that Microsoft has spent a very significant amount of time and money creating and expanding the support for the revolutionary WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) in Windows 10, which allows you to run a full Linux OS environment transparently on top of the native Linux kernel. Microsoft supports Linux in very meaningful ways now: The Microsoft Store currently offers Ubuntu, OpenSUSE (two versions), Debian, and Kali as WSL distros.
If you run Win 10 on anything and haven't tried WSL, you're really missing out - there's some very serious, and very good, software engineering (not just development) going on at MS to support Linux on Windows, and it's improved a LOT in the past few years. (See https://devblogs.microsoft.com... for more information.) They not only took the time to make sure Linux development environments work well on Windows, but they also made substantial changes to Windows itself, including, finally, updating the ancient, crippled, and otherwise horrible Windows command/terminal model!
In addition, MS is also putting a LOT of effort into supporting things like PowerShell on Linux (it's very different, but it does do some things way better than the traditional Unix/Linux tools, mainly since its pipelines handle structured data instead of just text.) I'm not fully convinced that PoSH is the way all of these things should work, but it's clear that this it's the first time in decades that anyone has taken a good, honest look at how these things *need* to work in 21st century systems, and Linux folks should give it a good hard look, as I could see it becoming a vital and important part of the enterprise/cloud/container Linux environments that everyone recognizes are important going forward. (See https://docs.microsoft.com/en-... )
I will probably never use a Linux desktop again - Windows 10 is just dramatically better in almost every way that matters (especially pen/touch support, which brings a computer into the 21st century - I'll never again settle for a "caveman laptop" after using Surfaces!), and it now offers all of the Linux features I want and need. It really is the best of both worlds. (And I say this as someone who once had some serious (and not reactionary, but seriously justified) dislike of Microsoft - check my /. posts from 20 years ago. I have no affiliation with Microsoft - I just like and admire what they're doing to bring together the best of Windows (doing lots of things Linux *cannot* do) and Linux (doing most things standalone Linux *can* do), and their commitment to partnering with the Linux community (see distros above for starter list) to create a fusion that's truly better than either OS alone.
That really only works for OS-initiated disk activity. Think about what would have to happen with applications, which can (as they should) access disks in any way their programmers need or want to. Also, where does the state for an incomplete transfer exist? At what point is it invalidated, and for what reasons? In the real world, this is a lot harder than you're thinking it is...
This is not so much a problem with Amazon Basics per se, but rather a problem with the Chinese Shit that seems to be all that comes out of that wretched country. I used Amazon's brand for batteries until I got burned with a $20+ box of batteries that lasted only a few hours each - Chinese Shit.
I have no idea if Amazon's other branded products are any good or not - once they burn me like that, it's game over - they've totally lost my trust. This had a big impact, as our household was on the way to buying everything from Amazon. That's changed over the past few years - not only do we not buy ordinary things from Amazon anymore, but they used to get quite a bit of our Christmas gift spending, which was cut down to just a few books and another item or two this past year..
Chinese Shit can be really expensive to those selling it when it destroys the most valuable thing any merchant can ever have - customer trust.
A "tear-down" of something you don't fully understand does not tell you how to replicate it, especially if it's a technology you're not fully fluent in. For chips, reverse engineering can be a pretty involved process, since you not only have to back out the design (which is still somewhat difficult for many chips these days, but is getting even harder with 3D structures such as finFETs and the like*), but also the manufacturing processes that produced it - and that is NOT always easy from looking at the end product. Even if you know what it is, you may have no clue how to recreate it...
Otherwise, we'd have flying saucers now after having retrieved that one at Roswell, right? ;-)
*Doing this right can mean obliterating the chip in very small chunks (at a molecular/atomic level) with exotic things like scanning Auger microscopes - doing that for an entire chip would be both expensive and very time-consuming...
3 - It supports fingerprint-based login, not face recognition. This is my strong preference. I do not want face scanning for login. I would prefer to go back to PIN entry first.
Yup, forgot this. FaceID is an anti-feature for me - this, along with the lack of a small form factor phone (and the execrable iTunes as the only viable backup and storage management tool), are the reasons I can't see myself ever buying another Apple phone. The problem is that Google is enough more evil that I just won't buy an Android/Fuschia phone, so my next phone will probably have to be some semi-lame third-party deal. Either that, or I go back to an actual dumb phone as a phone and get something like a Surface Go as a real tablet for mobile browsing and the like. (BTW, if MS were smart, they'd build a truly minimal phone that smartly links to a next-gen (Andromeda?) tablet in rational ways: Clicking phone numbers in a Surface web browser launches a call on the phone, contacts and calendar can be easily shared and managed (but hopefully w/o Outlook!), etc. (Apple's contact manager sucks heuvos - Palm Desktop was *way* better 20 years ago!)
Agree. I bought an SE as soon as they (finally) introduced the 128GB version, which is still less room than I'd like.
I have NO desire to carry a huge tablet that won't fit in my pocket, so I'll stay with the SE until Apple or some other manufacturer comes to their senses. BTW, a bezel-less 5-inch screen exactly fits the SE's body size, which is definitely the largest phone it's possible to run with one hand, even with its 4-inch display. (My ideal phone would be an Andromeda-type pen-capable folder the size of the SE, running an OS alternative (Win10? OneNote is not negotiable) to iOS and Android, with a real filesystem and the ability to be a full network peer to a PC/Mac/Linux computer.)
Also agree the headphone jack is really handy, too, although I never understood why Apple didn't adopt the 2.5mm plug used by Palm and others - if they had, there would still be plenty of room for audio jacks even in modern phones.
Yeah, Netflix on a 4-inch screen is pretty much exactly as bad as Netflix on a 6-inch screen. Movies are intended to be a big-screen experience, remember?
I'll admit to being a Telebit modem bigot: Those things were awesome (essentially CDMA over an audio channel), doing 19.2 Kbps when everyone else was stuck at 3, and 56 Kbps long before there were any "standards" for that.
They really weren't modems, but rather outboard intelligent communications processors (most used the Motorola 68000, the same processor that powered the Macs of the day, so in some cases they were faster and smarter than the computers they connected, and of course, pretty expensive, too.) I used the a lot of Telebits on international projects, because they were staggeringly noise resistant, just slowing down in the event of noise but ramping back up rapidly and automatically and dynamically selecting channels based on whether there was noise at that frequency band. This was pretty close to communications magic! Interestingly, given the high cost of international long distance back then, you made your money back on the things in less than a year.
I'm for the courts here, because the right to downgrade firmware to restore functionality is at least as important as the right to repair.
I'm against government intervention, but would be in favor of laws that require batteries to be replaceable. (Interestingly, this is less of a problem with phones than with tablet-type devices like iPads and Surfaces...)
Agreed - iOS 12 is definitely an outlier, to the point that I'm thinking I may never allow it to update. (Apple's famous for Fall updates that cripple the performance of phones, driving Christmas sales...)
I bought an iPhone SE (basically, a 6s that actually fits in a pocket) as soon as they came out with the 128GB version, and it's definitely quicker after the upgrade to 12... What I'd really like, though is a setting that says, "NEVER upgrade my phone automatically - let me decide what version to upgrade to, and when!"
No, I'd say at least half the problem is that these manufacturers (especially Apple) deliberately *prevent* owners of their products from ever "downgrading" to restore previous functionality. Apple regularly revokes signatures for older releases when a new one comes out, so if an "upgrade" horks your phone, too bad, so sad - you're stuck. (Without having to resort to hacky stuff - the point is that ordinary users should be able to restore prior function after they discover an "upgrade" actually destroys the usability of their device.)
Worse yet, there wasn't even a real investigation. Just preemptive exoneration before she had even been "interviewed" (The quotes around interview are justified in that when an interview finally was done, she was not under oath, as is normal practice in cases involving Top Secret/SCI information...)
Actually, connecting water heaters via (secure) smart grid IoT has tremendous promise as perhaps the best possible large-scale energy storage method known:
https://www.esource.com/ES-WP-...
This is one reason I won't have any Obamacare-compliant "health insurance" plan - I want control over my own health information, and expressly do not want it digitized or shared with anyone electronically, ever. (I've spent way too many years building and working with large-scale electronic medical records systems and healthcare networks to ever want my data in there...)
This is the downside of making docs the gatekeepers for the things patients really need: A LOT of docs make a significant portion of their income from referrals for labs, imaging, prescriptions, etc. Straight kickbacks, of course, are illegal, but there are all kinds of investment groups, etc. that are used to get around these, and it's not uncommon at all for docs in the US to get connected with one of these groups and make tens of thousands of dollars a month (and I've seen reports listing almost a million/mo!) *just* for their referrals.
Healthcare costs in the US can NEVER be fixed until we kill the FDA/AMA complex, which enshrines the physician as the all-purpose gatekeeper. Why can't I just straight-up *buy* the things I need w/o having to go through my Doc first? More and more people *want* to take responsibility for their own treatment - we should be enabling them. (I know my position is radical, but I agree with Milton Freidman that we should have no occupational licensing, not even for physicians. Given the large and repeated failures we've had over the years, it's clear that licensing is no guarantee of safety or competence...
At the moment, for instance, I'd just like to drop $20 for a quick prescription update from an eye-scanner machines - that could be a good business for somebody, if it weren't for the doc lobby making sure I can't do that w/o paying for a $100-150 doctor's visit. (Thanks to Obamacare, I now have no insurance, and have to pay everything out of pocket, which means I pay several times what the insurance companies pay, but at least I'm not paying for things I don't need and won't use...)
FWIW, NOBODY can afford to "properly maintain" their copper infrastructure anymore, given how little revenue can be extracted from it these days. In many cases, especially in northeastern states, the incumbents like Verizon are *prevented* from fully replacing their copper infrastructure, since they are the "carrier of last resort", and must continue to offer POTS service by law....
That's certainly not true of Time-Warner/Spectrum where I live in Austin. I pay for 200 Mbps service (there's no point in paying for more, as you'll see in a moment), but I have NEVER gotten more than 60 Mbps on any speed test ever. It galls the crap out of me to be paying so much and getting so much less.
The problem is that actually fixing the real problem is expensive (I live in the hard limestone hills - trenching to run new fiber is expensive, so they're still running crappy coax infrastructure), so despite 1-2 truck rolls a year for 20 years, they've never been able to fully deliver their promised speed, and reliability is simply deplorable - cable modems are forced to reset every few hours much of the year. I've decided it just wont' get any better than this, and sadly, there are no real alternatives (AT&T only offers their laughably slow DSL from last century as an alternative.)
TWC/Spectrum is literally the WORST company and service I've ever paid for (and that takes some doing), but due to the corruption of the Austin City Council, I have no alternatives: Any competitors are fist required to build out the "underserved" parts of town that will never buy enough to support themselves, leaving no cash to continue the buildout to the parts of town that want it and can pay for it. (This policy almost bankrupted Grande Communications, which spent a fortune on infrastructure in East Austin to reap only a pittance in revenue. Google saw this and has successfully bribed the council to allow Google Fiber to cherry-pick to ensure the maximum number of subscribers, so long as they offer free 5 Mbps Internet to low-income customers.)
One thing's sure: I'll kick Spectrum to the curb as soon as there's any competition...
I once had dub@sun.com (and even signed /. posts with it before they finally made me create an account), which is clearly about as good as an email address can get. (Everyone calls me "Dub", even my family, so for all practical purposes it *is* my first name, even if it makes people think I stutter when introducing myself as Dub Dublin...)