In theory, although as has already been said it's absolutely massive, so much so that my older machines won't even run it.
Last time I used it it was also flakey, horrible, every single update made it worse to use, and last I heard it didn't run properly on Linux (although that may have been sorted out now, I don't know, I gave up on it).
I basically try to forget it exists, as everyone should.
Although not the most wonderful software in the world, Hangouts (neé Gtalk/Gchat/GoogleVoice) just works, and everybody with an Android phone (most people I know) has it as standard.
Add to the mix the fact that Boeing has railed against Airbuses flight envelope protection software since it was launched in 1988 with the A320, insisting that Boeing pilots have final say at all times under Boeings ethos. And then they go and add this, without telling pilots....
Yes, this to me is the biggest surprise and irony about the whole thing. Having spent years lurking on the PPRuNe pilots' forum, watching smug Boeing lovers loudly proclaiming how they'd never fly an Airbus because Boeing doesn't have all that automated protection stuff (that to be fair, can catch you out in incredibly rare circumstances, much rarer than two fatals in five months though)... well if it weren't for the several hundred dead people the schadenfreude would be glorious.
...but I'm extremely pissed off about the forthcoming death of Hangouts.
Once upon a time we has MSN Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Google Talk/Chat/Voice to name but three. Now all gone (or about to go).
Surely somebody can supply a text and occasional voice/video chat program that will work on Windows, Linux, iOS & Android? In a world this big is that too much to ask? Apparently so, unless someone can tell me better...
Absolutely. Like many others here, it was the "real name" policy, and especially Google nuking years'-worth of your old emails if you failed it, that absolutely killed G+ stone-dead at birth for me and everybody I knew. Nobody wanted to touch it with a bargepole after those first reports of punitive data loss came out.
They had a golden window of opportunity to kill Facebook at a time when everybody hated it, and they completely and utterly botched it.
(I wrote more about this on here three years ago, as did many others, but tbh the above is a better, less waffly, summary.)
In the entire history of microsoft have they EVER made anything better over time, or did it just get more invasive more overhead and less intuitive with ads and spying sprinkled in for good measure?
Let me see...
MS-DOS 4.0 to 5.0 was a massive improvement.
Word 6.0 to Word 97 - at last, it would print the individual pages you actually wanted, and editing tables no longer crashed it!
Win ME / NT 4.0 to Win XP was an improvement (yes, even over the latter).
But since then? Not so much. Not at all, really. All been downhill since then and I can only agree with you after that.
When EE in the UK closed down all the old Freeserve accounts last year, some of them (including mine) going back nearly 20 years, there was no such option. I had to move my entire "real world" emails (banking, bills, credit cards, various insurances, tax, local authorities, shopping, etc.) elsewhere, having to notify around 40 different entities of the change as well as moving all my old emails over.
To be honest I had been surprised that the service had remained free for so long, and I'd been expecting the inevitable "we now need to charge you £4.99/month" email for years.
What I didn't expect was closure, given that at one time this was the most popular non-ISP email service in the UK. A complete and utter pain that has ensured I will never use an EE service ever again.
About the only good thing you can say about it is they did give a LOT of notice... around four months or so. But even so... well you can tell I'm still butthurt!
Brilliant post. I'm the same age as you and used to be a software developer in a high-value industry. Our UIs always stayed broadly the same and only ever changed or added features in response to customer demand, not because some jumped-up marketing twat thought it would be a good idea to change it. Never took away features ever, why would we do that? Buried one once under an Advanced menu when we realised that too many novice users were accidentally screwing shit up with it, but never removed it.
Like you, this modern trend for changing everything all the time for no good reason is driving me insane, almost literally in fact. In the past five years I've lost (or had rendered unusable) my favourite OS, three of my favourite email programs (and the email address I'd had for 17 years), three chat applications (have lost touch with so many people), my favourite music player, several excellent and much-missed websites and doubtless more if I could be bothered to remember. The online world feels like it's shrinking, not expanding.
As a result it's actually got to the point where I'm starting to withdraw from techy stuff altogether... not bought any gadgets in years and my presence on and usage of the internet is becoming rarer and rarer and thinner and thinner on the ground. Am slowly shutting my accounts down one by one as I go, before they do it for me.
From a 15-year-old hacking together 6502 code on a Commodore PET, to this. I guess I got old.
I'd almost given up with Pidgin because out of my original four (Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk/Hangouts) only the latter was left; last time I looked they didn't have a plugin for the new Yahoo, and the Skype support needed you to load the official client (which rather defeated the object, since I'm RAM-limited) -- now it looks as if it doesn't.
I can see I'll have to install the new version and give those new plugins a try.
The deliberate and malicious balkanisation of chat protocols -- which at one point around ten years ago looked as if they were all going to coalesce into one glorious unified system -- is something that really really annoys me. God knows how many people I've lost touch with over the years because of it.
If you just set your phone to play music and don't need to skip tracks, then headphone connection is fine. Similarly, if it's in your pocket, or even on the seat next to you you should be fine.
That's what I thought, thank you. Although it does seem that perhaps Plod wouldn't like it anyway, so am glad I don't need to do it any more now I have a connectable stereo in the car.
And yes, this was only something I used to do on long-distance motorway trips, almost never urban driving, precisely because of the possibility of losing some extra spatial awareness (even though, as has been pointed out, you can legally drive deaf and some people deafen themselves with pounding stereos anyway). I also used a pair of "leaky" disc-shaped earbuds that sat just inside your ear, rather than the more modern full-in ear-plug style ones. Wouldn't have liked to do it in those.
...as when I used to do long-distance journeys a few years ago, I always listened to music & podcasts on my phone via headphones, with the phone in my top pocket, set up with a playlist at the start of the journey. From the written advice given at the time, I've always believed this to be legal until now. Was my understanding faulty in the first place, or has this now changed?
You can use your phone to listen to music and podcasts but only if your phone is in a hands-free holder or connected by Bluetooth.
What if it's in a hands-free holder with a headphone lead coming out of it? (Hope not, that would be silly as it might get in the way...)
Or, playing Devil's Advocate, what if it was in my top pocket, but connected only by Bluetooth?
I was literally just researching some films in the discussion boards. When you're looking up obscure films, the decade and a half of expertise that is buried in the comments and stories that people have — often by family members and friends of the cast and crew— are invaluable. :: :: Let's not be dramatic. This is not the burning of the library of Alexandria, but it's a unique resource and as someone said above, there's nothing close to a replacement in site. And if there was, there'd be no reason to go to it because it doesn't link from anything, or to anything.
They could at least zip up the archives and post them to the torrents for posterity. On the basis of killing off the comments, in my estimation, they've cut out a huge reason for me to visit their site.
Absolutely agreed. I couldn't have put it better. This is terrible news. Yeah, sure there was quite a bit of crap there (with some films, a LOT of crap), but I've learnt some real gems from those forum threads. Funnily enough I've been meaning to finally sign up to them lately, as I've been watching a lot more films recently. Oh well...
I do worry just how much info will be lost though.
Because the tests don't require your device to operate in an RF environment. They require not to be permanently damaged, and not permanently damage downstream devices.
In order of likelyhood I'm going to go with: 1. Your company produce critical equipment, not a toy computer monitor. 2. Your company produced equipment that interfaced to other equipment which it could potentially damage. 3. Your company cared, something that died towards the end of the dot.com era.
4. It was a UK company that primarily had to comply with European CE certification which, as an AC above said, DOES mandate immunity to interference as well as generating it (until now, I wasn't aware that FCC was only one way for most gear). Also, as has been said, it's very difficult to do one direction without the other.
Plus a bit of 2, and me getting UL mixed up with FCC (thanks for the info, btw, you and a couple of other posters) because I never had to worry about how we got certificated in America. All I knew is that it had to pass European EMC regs to get the CE mark, and that translated to the equivalent thing across the pond; someone else did the actual paperwork.:-)
As a sidenote, I remember working on another project for another company back in the 80s, long before EMC regulations came in, which still had to be tested quite violently for fault-tolerance. It was a petrol filling (gas) station EPOS system, and the UK's Weights and Measures Authority would only approve our then-revolutionary direct connection to the pump-controller (in order to pass the value of the fuel transaction across, rather than it being manually retyped by the cashier) if we could prove that we wouldn't lose the transaction en route no matter what.
To that end we had to prove that the transaction would still survive the trip down the wiring even if - amongst other things - the equipment was being continuously zapped with a 4kV spark on and around all of its surfaces. Every so often, a guy from W&M would come along with his piece of meaty test kit and spend an afternoon zapping our gear while making fake petrol transactions. Hilariously, our equipment WAS actually allowed to die, just provided it didn't corrupt or swallow the transaction while it did so. In fact, due to careful design and a fuck-of-a-lot of earthing, it survived every time. Always a bit of a nail-biter though, and quite spectacular to watch.
That had nothing to do with the later EMC regs however, although of course the principles were somewhat similar.
How on earth did this ever pass EMC testing (or the UL equivalent)?!
The company I worked for spent a small fortune modifying all our designs back in 1999 to be immune to external RF interference (and likewise to generate none) in order to pass those tests, how the hell could something like this happen in this day and age?
"If you disrupted traffic data for example, to tell everybody that all the roads south of the river are closed, so everybody would go north of the river..."
And for London black cabbies, nothing of value was lost.
Slashdot Mirror
No video chat
And there you said it.
However since I don't often use video, it is one of the future options I'm considering. But then what do I do when I *do* want to use video?
Doesn't Skype meet those requirements?
In theory, although as has already been said it's absolutely massive, so much so that my older machines won't even run it.
Last time I used it it was also flakey, horrible, every single update made it worse to use, and last I heard it didn't run properly on Linux (although that may have been sorted out now, I don't know, I gave up on it).
I basically try to forget it exists, as everyone should.
Although not the most wonderful software in the world, Hangouts (neé Gtalk/Gchat/GoogleVoice) just works, and everybody with an Android phone (most people I know) has it as standard.
Add on top of this Vanilla Sunday...
I prefer BDSM Saturdays myself...
(Good post otherwise, though.)
Add to the mix the fact that Boeing has railed against Airbuses flight envelope protection software since it was launched in 1988 with the A320, insisting that Boeing pilots have final say at all times under Boeings ethos. And then they go and add this, without telling pilots....
Yes, this to me is the biggest surprise and irony about the whole thing. Having spent years lurking on the PPRuNe pilots' forum, watching smug Boeing lovers loudly proclaiming how they'd never fly an Airbus because Boeing doesn't have all that automated protection stuff (that to be fair, can catch you out in incredibly rare circumstances, much rarer than two fatals in five months though)... well if it weren't for the several hundred dead people the schadenfreude would be glorious.
...but I'm extremely pissed off about the forthcoming death of Hangouts.
Once upon a time we has MSN Messenger, Yahoo Instant Messenger, Google Talk/Chat/Voice to name but three. Now all gone (or about to go).
Surely somebody can supply a text and occasional voice/video chat program that will work on Windows, Linux, iOS & Android? In a world this big is that too much to ask? Apparently so, unless someone can tell me better...
[Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition.]
Hilarious that it did that whilst letting the ASCII-art swastikas above through unmolested!
Absolutely. Like many others here, it was the "real name" policy, and especially Google nuking years'-worth of your old emails if you failed it, that absolutely killed G+ stone-dead at birth for me and everybody I knew. Nobody wanted to touch it with a bargepole after those first reports of punitive data loss came out.
They had a golden window of opportunity to kill Facebook at a time when everybody hated it, and they completely and utterly botched it.
(I wrote more about this on here three years ago, as did many others, but tbh the above is a better, less waffly, summary.)
Same here. Came to post the exact same thing. Most disquieting; when did THAT happen?
What if the granny's only 32? (Or 37 if your local age of consent is 18?)
Great-grannies are safer.
In the entire history of microsoft have they EVER made anything better over time, or did it just get more invasive more overhead and less intuitive with ads and spying sprinkled in for good measure?
Let me see...
MS-DOS 4.0 to 5.0 was a massive improvement.
Word 6.0 to Word 97 - at last, it would print the individual pages you actually wanted, and editing tables no longer crashed it!
Win ME / NT 4.0 to Win XP was an improvement (yes, even over the latter).
But since then? Not so much. Not at all, really. All been downhill since then and I can only agree with you after that.
...the option to pay.
When EE in the UK closed down all the old Freeserve accounts last year, some of them (including mine) going back nearly 20 years, there was no such option. I had to move my entire "real world" emails (banking, bills, credit cards, various insurances, tax, local authorities, shopping, etc.) elsewhere, having to notify around 40 different entities of the change as well as moving all my old emails over.
To be honest I had been surprised that the service had remained free for so long, and I'd been expecting the inevitable "we now need to charge you £4.99/month" email for years.
What I didn't expect was closure, given that at one time this was the most popular non-ISP email service in the UK. A complete and utter pain that has ensured I will never use an EE service ever again.
About the only good thing you can say about it is they did give a LOT of notice... around four months or so. But even so... well you can tell I'm still butthurt!
Brilliant post. I'm the same age as you and used to be a software developer in a high-value industry. Our UIs always stayed broadly the same and only ever changed or added features in response to customer demand, not because some jumped-up marketing twat thought it would be a good idea to change it. Never took away features ever, why would we do that? Buried one once under an Advanced menu when we realised that too many novice users were accidentally screwing shit up with it, but never removed it.
Like you, this modern trend for changing everything all the time for no good reason is driving me insane, almost literally in fact. In the past five years I've lost (or had rendered unusable) my favourite OS, three of my favourite email programs (and the email address I'd had for 17 years), three chat applications (have lost touch with so many people), my favourite music player, several excellent and much-missed websites and doubtless more if I could be bothered to remember. The online world feels like it's shrinking, not expanding.
As a result it's actually got to the point where I'm starting to withdraw from techy stuff altogether... not bought any gadgets in years and my presence on and usage of the internet is becoming rarer and rarer and thinner and thinner on the ground. Am slowly shutting my accounts down one by one as I go, before they do it for me.
From a 15-year-old hacking together 6502 code on a Commodore PET, to this. I guess I got old.
Alt-` (or whatever your particular keyboard's key next to "1" is...
Just when I'd finally got used to the damn thing, after years of complaining about its early versions...
Thank you!
I'd almost given up with Pidgin because out of my original four (Facebook, MSN, Yahoo, Gtalk/Hangouts) only the latter was left; last time I looked they didn't have a plugin for the new Yahoo, and the Skype support needed you to load the official client (which rather defeated the object, since I'm RAM-limited) -- now it looks as if it doesn't.
I can see I'll have to install the new version and give those new plugins a try.
The deliberate and malicious balkanisation of chat protocols -- which at one point around ten years ago looked as if they were all going to coalesce into one glorious unified system -- is something that really really annoys me. God knows how many people I've lost touch with over the years because of it.
If you just set your phone to play music and don't need to skip tracks, then headphone connection is fine. Similarly, if it's in your pocket, or even on the seat next to you you should be fine.
That's what I thought, thank you. Although it does seem that perhaps Plod wouldn't like it anyway, so am glad I don't need to do it any more now I have a connectable stereo in the car.
And yes, this was only something I used to do on long-distance motorway trips, almost never urban driving, precisely because of the possibility of losing some extra spatial awareness (even though, as has been pointed out, you can legally drive deaf and some people deafen themselves with pounding stereos anyway). I also used a pair of "leaky" disc-shaped earbuds that sat just inside your ear, rather than the more modern full-in ear-plug style ones. Wouldn't have liked to do it in those.
...as when I used to do long-distance journeys a few years ago, I always listened to music & podcasts on my phone via headphones, with the phone in my top pocket, set up with a playlist at the start of the journey. From the written advice given at the time, I've always believed this to be legal until now. Was my understanding faulty in the first place, or has this now changed?
What if it's in a hands-free holder with a headphone lead coming out of it? (Hope not, that would be silly as it might get in the way...)
Or, playing Devil's Advocate, what if it was in my top pocket, but connected only by Bluetooth?
Better wording required.
I was literally just researching some films in the discussion boards. When you're looking up obscure films, the decade and a half of expertise that is buried in the comments and stories that people have — often by family members and friends of the cast and crew— are invaluable.
::
::
Let's not be dramatic. This is not the burning of the library of Alexandria, but it's a unique resource and as someone said above, there's nothing close to a replacement in site. And if there was, there'd be no reason to go to it because it doesn't link from anything, or to anything.
They could at least zip up the archives and post them to the torrents for posterity. On the basis of killing off the comments, in my estimation, they've cut out a huge reason for me to visit their site.
Absolutely agreed. I couldn't have put it better. This is terrible news. Yeah, sure there was quite a bit of crap there (with some films, a LOT of crap), but I've learnt some real gems from those forum threads. Funnily enough I've been meaning to finally sign up to them lately, as I've been watching a lot more films recently. Oh well...
I do worry just how much info will be lost though.
(or the UL equivalent)?!
Because the tests don't require your device to operate in an RF environment. They require not to be permanently damaged, and not permanently damage downstream devices.
In order of likelyhood I'm going to go with:
1. Your company produce critical equipment, not a toy computer monitor.
2. Your company produced equipment that interfaced to other equipment which it could potentially damage.
3. Your company cared, something that died towards the end of the dot.com era.
4. It was a UK company that primarily had to comply with European CE certification which, as an AC above said, DOES mandate immunity to interference as well as generating it (until now, I wasn't aware that FCC was only one way for most gear). Also, as has been said, it's very difficult to do one direction without the other.
Plus a bit of 2, and me getting UL mixed up with FCC (thanks for the info, btw, you and a couple of other posters) because I never had to worry about how we got certificated in America. All I knew is that it had to pass European EMC regs to get the CE mark, and that translated to the equivalent thing across the pond; someone else did the actual paperwork. :-)
As a sidenote, I remember working on another project for another company back in the 80s, long before EMC regulations came in, which still had to be tested quite violently for fault-tolerance. It was a petrol filling (gas) station EPOS system, and the UK's Weights and Measures Authority would only approve our then-revolutionary direct connection to the pump-controller (in order to pass the value of the fuel transaction across, rather than it being manually retyped by the cashier) if we could prove that we wouldn't lose the transaction en route no matter what.
To that end we had to prove that the transaction would still survive the trip down the wiring even if - amongst other things - the equipment was being continuously zapped with a 4kV spark on and around all of its surfaces. Every so often, a guy from W&M would come along with his piece of meaty test kit and spend an afternoon zapping our gear while making fake petrol transactions. Hilariously, our equipment WAS actually allowed to die, just provided it didn't corrupt or swallow the transaction while it did so. In fact, due to careful design and a fuck-of-a-lot of earthing, it survived every time. Always a bit of a nail-biter though, and quite spectacular to watch.
That had nothing to do with the later EMC regs however, although of course the principles were somewhat similar.
How on earth did this ever pass EMC testing (or the UL equivalent)?!
The company I worked for spent a small fortune modifying all our designs back in 1999 to be immune to external RF interference (and likewise to generate none) in order to pass those tests, how the hell could something like this happen in this day and age?
Heh yes, the first thing I thought of when I saw that crazy mixing of units was "furlongs per fortnight". :-)
Thank you very much for the info! Didn't know that.
But does it reply "Wor-king" in a strange metallic voice, and then make teletype noises?
...only in reverse: odd numbers good, even numbers bad.
S5 - great
S6 - removed the SD card slot
S7 - put the SD card slot in again
S7 - removed the headphone jack...
"If you disrupted traffic data for example, to tell everybody that all the roads south of the river are closed, so everybody would go north of the river..."
And for London black cabbies, nothing of value was lost.