Yes, copying Apple, who is notorious and under a lot of fire for still not releasing a single Mac with a touchscreen. Copying THAT for your "touch-friendly OS." They're really smart up there in Redmond. Do I really need to place a sarcasm tag by that?
There will always be some people resistant to change because they have to learn how to do something a little differently. The thing is that the Windows 95 Start menu was objectively superior to Program Manager. No UI can be perfect but Start forced some useful hierarchy onto Program Manager's groups and placed really important stuff like Control Panel or the Run box front and center so they couldn't get lost in some minimized Program Manager or deleted from Program Manager by a careless novice user.
The problem people have with the loss of the traditional Start menu in 8.x/10 is that the most important fundamental benefits of Start were thrown out again. The Start screen in 8.x completely discards a layered hierarchy in favor of a two-level "pinned OR absolutely every shortcut in the entire Start shortcut pile" and in 10 the replacement "Start menu" crams the hierarchical stuff into one thin column in favor of searching for everything or (once again) "pinning a tile" instead. It's a half-hearted bone thrown to people who wanted the utility of Start back to shut them up. In the Anniversary Update they REMOVED the ability to use a keyboard to navigate the leftmost column with Power, Settings, File Explorer, and the user icon.
Most of the changes to the Explorer user interface since the advent of Windows 8 have been severely regressive unless you use a touchscreen with no other input devices, a use case for a typical computer which is a niche specialty rather than the norm. It's nice not to worry about fat-fingering on a tablet, but when the thing isn't in "Tablet Mode" or some sort of option that enables a subset to that effect, it should not have the huge UI elements needed by the grossly inferior input device that is a touchscreen.
Microsoft has gone insane. They've taken their already-flat design and ironed the crap out of it. Hey assholes, when I hit the Windows key on my keyboard, why can't I hit the up arrow to get to the power button or settings cog anymore? Why don't you have hotkeys for the folder icon views like I used to get with ALT, V, and the view's corresponding letter key? Stop fucking with the "ooh shiny" user interface stuff until you fix the really basic stuff that you broke. It would also be super nice to have some of the fundamental UI design best practices brought back in from the streets where Microsoft chucked it and the baby and the bath water.
Also, has anyone noticed that a huge number of Microsoft Support forum posts are "solved" by someone with an Indian-looking name going "Kindly try a 'clean boot'. Kindly try System Restore. Kindly let us know if that fixes it." Then a huge pile of people go "NO, that generic reply didn't fix it and I have the same problem!" and the MS helpers go dead silent and absolutely no one at Microsoft gives a damn?
At least with "archaic" Windows 7 nearly every problem has a discoverable solution at this point. The way that Windows 10 problems have been handled by Microsoft under Satya Nadella indicates that they really don't care about delivering a decent product anymore. They were never even close to perfect but they at least had a few really sharp people on staff that both gave a shit and had the power to help or fix problems. Now it's the best company that H1B can cheap out!
I put it on a phone to check it out and the biggest problem I noticed is that any attempt I made to post something would either have an enormous delay before posting or would never post at all. If you're going to offer a communications platform, it's stupid obvious that you have to have functional communications. Contrast with Whisper which generally posts everything within a minute (unless their inexplicable censorship filter decides to temp-ban you for ten minutes because you said something they don't like) and it's really easy to see why the platform is failing.
The idiocy of the public as a collective group will unfortunately always be with us. The idiocy of the US voting system can at least be changed. We'll always have shitty and stupid people around no matter how hard we work to educate them. Well...er, eugenics, maybe? But then who'll clean the toilets?
Trump and Clinton are the consequences of the terrible first past the post voting system more than anything else. That is what needs to be fixed in politics; it always devolves into a battle between two contenders, neither of which are wanted by the majority of the population, but all other choices go away because they have no chance of winning in FPTP voting.
Services like Facebook are so huge that they constitute the de facto"public square" of the Internet. As such, I think that all "public place" rules (such as the protections of the First Amendment) should be forced upon them. Non-participation in a site as huge as Facebook makes you a non-participant in modern society. Unfortunately, this also means that participation in digital society is heavily controlled by whoever controls Facebook, and if they disagree with you or don't like you for any reason, they can eject you from a big part of participation in modern society with no consequences.
Of course, the loud objections will be "They're a private company! Forcing them to abide by these rules is government overreach! How they operate should be entirely their choice!" To those people I would say that if you choose to operate a large social networking website, you've chosen to spend your time and money operating a public square. If you want to be free to arbitrarily eject people from society or force people to adhere to your notions of what the world should look like, don't choose to be the digital public square in the first place.
It's sort of like ISPs being designated as common carriers: anyone is free to build a business that revolves around information passing, but you are not free to arbitrarily control what information may be passed (thereby restricting the freedoms of others) without serious consequences.
The problem with "worker choice" is that it is limited to what potential employers are offering them. In a "healthy" economic situation, supply and demand are well-balanced and the notion of making a choice works fine for either side. However, we're currently in a situation where a large pool of workers are competing for a significantly smaller pool of employer job offerings. Employers are able to dictate highly unfavorable terms to all potential workers because if Alice and Bob won't accept their terms, equally qualified Charlie probably will, so Alice and Bob must either accept those terms from someone to obtain gainful employment or stick to their principles and slowly go bankrupt and end up on welfare.
But what about the employers that aren't assholes? Well, that'd be nice, but we're on the dark side of capitalism now; all employers that are pursuing the almighty dollar during a huge glut of available labor will trend towards being assholes, otherwise they're not going to be able to compete.
The argument that "the worker can choose" in the current economic climate is akin to offering someone meals with cyanide, hemlock, arsenic, or they can opt not to eat any of those meals and die of slow starvation...but hey, "they had a choice! It was their choice!"
Notice the "current" in "current events." There's nothing to be done about Powell today; the matter could be re-opened, but complaints about that needed to happen when it was a current issue. Hillary's email server issue is a current issue and Hillary wants to be the president of the entire country while Powell is out of the picture. Stop pretending the two issues should carry the same weight today just because the person you like is the one who's currently under the microscope. Shifting the focus to Powell is an attempt at distraction.
If you do some quick math, you'll see that cheap 25GB (really 23.2GB) BD-R 50-packs have a significantly lower cost per gigabyte than any hard drive. When you realize that you need TWO hard drives instead of one due to the many ways a hard drive can fail unexpectedly and lose everything (even when that drive is an "on the shelf" "cold storage" unit) then the advantages become even greater.
As long as you choose a good quality large capacity CD wallet, put the discs in it properly, and store it in a dry climate-controlled area and are gentle with the CD wallet, the discs practically last forever. For large amounts of infrequently accessed data and for regular backups, it's hard to beat the BD-R discs.
Of course, the big disadvantage is that Blu-ray drives are rare and you essentially have to buy your own if you want one, but that's a simple one-time investment in an external desktop-sized burner which can be plugged into any computer you own now or in the future.
You're probably going to love knowing that this video where attorneys explain in detail the process of avoiding hiring American workers is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Win10 licenses are tied to the motherboard and if Win10 is installed on that hardware it will automatically retrieve a digital entitlement from Microsoft once you're connected to the Internet and activate.
This discussion reminded me of this now nine-year-old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers."
A 50-pack of 23.2 GiB BD-R discs can be had for about $30. That's 1160 GiB capacity for $30 = $0.026 per GiB. The cheapest (capacity-wise) 7200 RPM 3TB (2.79 GiB) hard drives are $0.030 per GiB, plus you need at least two drives to keep that data safe against drive failure, whereas even a cheap non-M-DISC BD-R stored properly will last for many years. 25GB BD-R media is by far the best storage value at this time, even if you assume that a single hard drive will be just fine. Of course, no BD-R will ever be as convenient, as large, or as fast as a hard drive, so that value comes with some compromises that can be rather inconvenient.
If the 3.5mm jack is "too big" then replace it with the smaller standard 2.5mm jack. We can easily get adapters for 2.5mm to 3.5mm. Whining about jack size inside the phone doesn't hold water here. The decision to drop the jack is a money grab plus an ecosystem lock-in attempt, plain and simple. Fuck Apple for pulling this garbage.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, copying Apple, who is notorious and under a lot of fire for still not releasing a single Mac with a touchscreen. Copying THAT for your "touch-friendly OS." They're really smart up there in Redmond. Do I really need to place a sarcasm tag by that?
There will always be some people resistant to change because they have to learn how to do something a little differently. The thing is that the Windows 95 Start menu was objectively superior to Program Manager. No UI can be perfect but Start forced some useful hierarchy onto Program Manager's groups and placed really important stuff like Control Panel or the Run box front and center so they couldn't get lost in some minimized Program Manager or deleted from Program Manager by a careless novice user.
The problem people have with the loss of the traditional Start menu in 8.x/10 is that the most important fundamental benefits of Start were thrown out again. The Start screen in 8.x completely discards a layered hierarchy in favor of a two-level "pinned OR absolutely every shortcut in the entire Start shortcut pile" and in 10 the replacement "Start menu" crams the hierarchical stuff into one thin column in favor of searching for everything or (once again) "pinning a tile" instead. It's a half-hearted bone thrown to people who wanted the utility of Start back to shut them up. In the Anniversary Update they REMOVED the ability to use a keyboard to navigate the leftmost column with Power, Settings, File Explorer, and the user icon.
Most of the changes to the Explorer user interface since the advent of Windows 8 have been severely regressive unless you use a touchscreen with no other input devices, a use case for a typical computer which is a niche specialty rather than the norm. It's nice not to worry about fat-fingering on a tablet, but when the thing isn't in "Tablet Mode" or some sort of option that enables a subset to that effect, it should not have the huge UI elements needed by the grossly inferior input device that is a touchscreen.
Well played, sir, well played.
Microsoft has gone insane. They've taken their already-flat design and ironed the crap out of it. Hey assholes, when I hit the Windows key on my keyboard, why can't I hit the up arrow to get to the power button or settings cog anymore? Why don't you have hotkeys for the folder icon views like I used to get with ALT, V, and the view's corresponding letter key? Stop fucking with the "ooh shiny" user interface stuff until you fix the really basic stuff that you broke. It would also be super nice to have some of the fundamental UI design best practices brought back in from the streets where Microsoft chucked it and the baby and the bath water.
Also, has anyone noticed that a huge number of Microsoft Support forum posts are "solved" by someone with an Indian-looking name going "Kindly try a 'clean boot'. Kindly try System Restore. Kindly let us know if that fixes it." Then a huge pile of people go "NO, that generic reply didn't fix it and I have the same problem!" and the MS helpers go dead silent and absolutely no one at Microsoft gives a damn?
At least with "archaic" Windows 7 nearly every problem has a discoverable solution at this point. The way that Windows 10 problems have been handled by Microsoft under Satya Nadella indicates that they really don't care about delivering a decent product anymore. They were never even close to perfect but they at least had a few really sharp people on staff that both gave a shit and had the power to help or fix problems. Now it's the best company that H1B can cheap out!
It's funny that the article talks about GPS-based "geo-fences" used to block use in schools. Kids just install a fake GPS app and keep going.
I put it on a phone to check it out and the biggest problem I noticed is that any attempt I made to post something would either have an enormous delay before posting or would never post at all. If you're going to offer a communications platform, it's stupid obvious that you have to have functional communications. Contrast with Whisper which generally posts everything within a minute (unless their inexplicable censorship filter decides to temp-ban you for ten minutes because you said something they don't like) and it's really easy to see why the platform is failing.
8.8.8.8 is Google DNS. 4.2.2.3 is Level3 DNS. 4.4.4.4 is a brain fart. *poot*
The idiocy of the public as a collective group will unfortunately always be with us. The idiocy of the US voting system can at least be changed. We'll always have shitty and stupid people around no matter how hard we work to educate them. Well...er, eugenics, maybe? But then who'll clean the toilets?
Trump and Clinton are the consequences of the terrible first past the post voting system more than anything else. That is what needs to be fixed in politics; it always devolves into a battle between two contenders, neither of which are wanted by the majority of the population, but all other choices go away because they have no chance of winning in FPTP voting.
Services like Facebook are so huge that they constitute the de facto "public square" of the Internet. As such, I think that all "public place" rules (such as the protections of the First Amendment) should be forced upon them. Non-participation in a site as huge as Facebook makes you a non-participant in modern society. Unfortunately, this also means that participation in digital society is heavily controlled by whoever controls Facebook, and if they disagree with you or don't like you for any reason, they can eject you from a big part of participation in modern society with no consequences.
Of course, the loud objections will be "They're a private company! Forcing them to abide by these rules is government overreach! How they operate should be entirely their choice!" To those people I would say that if you choose to operate a large social networking website, you've chosen to spend your time and money operating a public square. If you want to be free to arbitrarily eject people from society or force people to adhere to your notions of what the world should look like, don't choose to be the digital public square in the first place.
It's sort of like ISPs being designated as common carriers: anyone is free to build a business that revolves around information passing, but you are not free to arbitrarily control what information may be passed (thereby restricting the freedoms of others) without serious consequences.
The problem with "worker choice" is that it is limited to what potential employers are offering them. In a "healthy" economic situation, supply and demand are well-balanced and the notion of making a choice works fine for either side. However, we're currently in a situation where a large pool of workers are competing for a significantly smaller pool of employer job offerings. Employers are able to dictate highly unfavorable terms to all potential workers because if Alice and Bob won't accept their terms, equally qualified Charlie probably will, so Alice and Bob must either accept those terms from someone to obtain gainful employment or stick to their principles and slowly go bankrupt and end up on welfare.
But what about the employers that aren't assholes? Well, that'd be nice, but we're on the dark side of capitalism now; all employers that are pursuing the almighty dollar during a huge glut of available labor will trend towards being assholes, otherwise they're not going to be able to compete.
The argument that "the worker can choose" in the current economic climate is akin to offering someone meals with cyanide, hemlock, arsenic, or they can opt not to eat any of those meals and die of slow starvation...but hey, "they had a choice! It was their choice!"
Notice the "current" in "current events." There's nothing to be done about Powell today; the matter could be re-opened, but complaints about that needed to happen when it was a current issue. Hillary's email server issue is a current issue and Hillary wants to be the president of the entire country while Powell is out of the picture. Stop pretending the two issues should carry the same weight today just because the person you like is the one who's currently under the microscope. Shifting the focus to Powell is an attempt at distraction.
If you do some quick math, you'll see that cheap 25GB (really 23.2GB) BD-R 50-packs have a significantly lower cost per gigabyte than any hard drive. When you realize that you need TWO hard drives instead of one due to the many ways a hard drive can fail unexpectedly and lose everything (even when that drive is an "on the shelf" "cold storage" unit) then the advantages become even greater.
As long as you choose a good quality large capacity CD wallet, put the discs in it properly, and store it in a dry climate-controlled area and are gentle with the CD wallet, the discs practically last forever. For large amounts of infrequently accessed data and for regular backups, it's hard to beat the BD-R discs.
Of course, the big disadvantage is that Blu-ray drives are rare and you essentially have to buy your own if you want one, but that's a simple one-time investment in an external desktop-sized burner which can be plugged into any computer you own now or in the future.
So it's okay to commit a crime because someone else got away with doing so before you did? Understood.
An unfortunate waste of a bunch of perfectly good disks from which the old data is irretrievable after a simple zero fill.
That is bad information that's been circulating for decades, from back when that was not really bad information. It originates from a paper by Peter Gutmann during a time when hard drives didn't do the insane signal processing they do today. One zero pass on a drive is sufficient today. This was brought up on Slashdot ten years ago.
The myth that women don't have agency and aren't capable adults needs to die.
It is a choice to have children and the full consequences of doing so aren't a secret.
It is a choice to listen to people who try to tell you what you can and cannot do in your own future.
It is a choice to ask for a lower pay raise when you ask for a raise, as it is a choice to not seek a new job if your company doesn't appreciate you.
The last statement doesn't make any sense without more context.
The kind of behavior you describe sounds like it deserves BOFH level tactics to counter.
You're probably going to love knowing that this video where attorneys explain in detail the process of avoiding hiring American workers is on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Strongly second Tab Mix Plus. The features it adds are extremely helpful.
Win10 licenses are tied to the motherboard and if Win10 is installed on that hardware it will automatically retrieve a digital entitlement from Microsoft once you're connected to the Internet and activate.
Start - services.msc - Windows Update - properties - "Disabled". Turn it back on when you actually want updates. So basically, leave it off.
This discussion reminded me of this now nine-year-old video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... "Immigration attorneys from Cohen & Grigsby explains how they assist employers in running classified ads with the goal of NOT finding any qualified applicants, and the steps they go through to disqualify even the most qualified Americans in order to secure green cards for H-1b workers."
A 50-pack of 23.2 GiB BD-R discs can be had for about $30. That's 1160 GiB capacity for $30 = $0.026 per GiB. The cheapest (capacity-wise) 7200 RPM 3TB (2.79 GiB) hard drives are $0.030 per GiB, plus you need at least two drives to keep that data safe against drive failure, whereas even a cheap non-M-DISC BD-R stored properly will last for many years. 25GB BD-R media is by far the best storage value at this time, even if you assume that a single hard drive will be just fine. Of course, no BD-R will ever be as convenient, as large, or as fast as a hard drive, so that value comes with some compromises that can be rather inconvenient.
If the 3.5mm jack is "too big" then replace it with the smaller standard 2.5mm jack. We can easily get adapters for 2.5mm to 3.5mm. Whining about jack size inside the phone doesn't hold water here. The decision to drop the jack is a money grab plus an ecosystem lock-in attempt, plain and simple. Fuck Apple for pulling this garbage.