They ripped out the ridiculous traffic-ticket cameras that were scattered liberally around Phoenix? That is -excellent- news. I'm driving there again next month, and those things were a sad joke. I hated driving around there, but I decided (ironically related to the nominal topic of this thread) that driving is still more convenient than flying there these days.
If that's actually true, and doesn't cause any crazier side-effects (like, ones that destabilize the OS), I fully predict within a few weeks of Win8 officially being released, someone will create an app to bypass it, which would move that dll, hide the real taskbar, then create its own taskbar. And we'd all just run that alongside Classic Shell and everything else.
Side-note: most of the hits you get when you try to google for illegal media of that variety, are usually fake sites that either want you to pay (most likely for nothing anyway, even if you did), or are just making money off ad hits. And when you do get a file-locker site, most of the time it's expired. So screw them anyway, they mostly deserve to be downranked in listings.
If I just search for the name of a song or something, chances are I -am- looking for a legitimate source like youtube. If I want a torrent, I'll just append "torrent" to the end of the search. Or, you know, search on a dedicated torrent-searching site instead of google, cause that often works better anyway.
Ok. You cannot even compare the Mac OS interface of that era to Win95. Yes, it was better than doing everything from the CLI (which does have its place, but its place is not everywhere), but while I didn't ever have much exposure to NeXT, I did have exposure to Mac OSes of that era, and they were... not so user-friendly. Not to mention prone to crashing, even by comparison to Win95. At least the computers I interacted with at school were. (To be fair, in 1984, I wasn't asking much of anything, that being when I was born. But I do remember the Mac OS computers at my elementary school, some of which were even fairly new at the time.)
Alright, that's fair enough. I suppose you can't call it innovation if you're just taking an interface design that was good but previously unseen by the average person, and fixing that. I've never actually -used- NeXTstep; I'd heard of it, but didn't, and don't, know much about it. Wasn't sure I'd even ever seen it. (I just looked it up, and indeed, I do now have vague memories from that era of having seen computers at the local university running an OS that looked like that, and thinking it looked way nicer than anything I had access to at the time.) You win.
-Why- are we supposed to "adapt and change"? I'm quite happy adapting to new interfaces that are provably more intuitive or faster or more powerful than the interfaces they replaced. There is no frelling reason on earth that we should be expected to adapt to new interfaces solely because the company in question felt that they needed to look like they were accomplishing something, even if their new interface is less useful than the old one. (Rather, as IT people, I feel it's our duty, when companies pull that crap, to find or create workarounds so people can get back to using the system the way they would like to.)
First attempt at innovation? Even if you're only talking OSes... Windows 95 was a -fantastic- OS for its day. I remember the first time I used Win95, I was like, dang, how did we get by before we had this? I'm not even joking. I feel like, computer-wise, Win95 was a game-changer, like the internet, smart phones, flash drives, etc. Was it completely unlike anything we'd ever seen? No, it was WIMP-driven like any other GUI. It was just way -better-. Then 98 came out and I was excited. That... was the last time a Windows OS really had me looking forward to its release.
Win 8, on the other hand, is a joke. And saying if you don't like it, don't upgrade, is also a joke: it's roughly equivalent to "if you don't like what your country is doing, leave". I'm not going to leave the US just because I don't like some of the things my government does (though I don't), and I'm not going to quit my job just because IT says if I want a new computer I need to accept whatever crap OS their base image has installed. Win7 may be more stable than XP, but I fought as long as I could to keep it off my computers anyway, cause the UI is crap (though it's still way better than 8's monstrosity). Eventually, though, I lost that battle. I'm running 7 now.
Really? Being able to say "I want to live in Long Beach, stop frelling giving me apartments for rent 3 cities over" is a frill? Craigslist sucks royal donkey balls for searching for apartments; I would know, I recently tried using it for that. There are loads of posts that don't even say where the apartment is. That should be pretty much mandatory if you're posting an apartment for rent.
If it were just the sensation, and didn't actually cause your hand to be burned or shocked or whatever... I bet you'd have a new untapped market for that. An... adult market, let's say.
I went to a specialized and rather rigorous science/tech college for undergrad, in which I took introductory classes in linear algebra, multivariable calculus and differential equations. It's rather depressing that I haven't really used a single bit of any of it since graduating (or even, for the most part, in any of my post-everyone-takes-these classes), but indeed, I haven't. But I imagine if I were doing anything particularly engineering-like, or anything having to deal directly with any sort of physics (which would include game development, as well as many sorts of graphics or audio manipulation), I would.
I haven't even had to use anything from the second half of my high school algebra class. Though, programming is all -about- everything from the -first- half of high school algebra... (i.e. arithmetic done on variables.;))
I've had to use some basic geometry/trig all of once in the past 5 years of coding, and that was on an image manipulation question.
Back when I was really much of a gamer, because needing to have a cd (for that's what games came on at that time) in my drive to play a game pissed me off to no end (especially because it usually meant it was swapping things off the cd periodically, too, which was slow), I just made iso rips of my games, then mounted them to a virtual drive when I wanted to play one. Granted, I put all those isos onto an external, and only copied ones I was actively playing onto my primary drive, but still.
I have more than a hundred gigs just of music, and it's quite nice having all of -that- on my primary drive. If my laptop could've supported a SSD, a larger HDD and a dvd-r drive, I probably would've gotten all three. Sadly, it only had space for two, so I chose the 500 gig hdd and a dvd-r, and I'm not sad about that decision.
You mean except for all of the other torrents that existed in other more actually private private trackers? And probably also public trackers.
I'm not arguing with your main point (New Doctor Who is exactly how I got introduced to the wonderful world of illegally stealing tv shows too), but Demonoid wasn't the only place you could go (I've only ever used it for a few things.)
At least if you get crazy good at Starcraft and the Starcraft bubble dies, you can probably translate some of those skills into Starcraft 2, or some other RTS. At 40, what are you going to do if you spent your whole youthhood as a football star? (Alright, probably retire on your giant piles of cash, but then, you could probably say the same thing about Korean Starcraft stars, too.)
OSC was pretty crazy even in his youth, though I will admit it's gotten worse. Still, if you buy books used, the money doesn't actually end up with the author, which is usually a bad thing, but in this case...
Yes we are. There's a reason for it. It's called "because they're tasty". I have no problem with eating lab-grown meat if it tastes the same and has the same consistency of naturally-grown meat, and isn't full of strange chemicals of dubious healthfulness, but people eat meat for the same reason they generally eat anything else - because they enjoy it. I certainly do.
Raw food is a different thing, too. Heck, I knew a couple crazy raw food people in college, and they were perfectly happy eating sashimi. I like eating some things raw, but I prefer eating other things cooked. Again, variety: good. Why limit yourself?
How many humans do you know who can successfully make bread from scratch using all ingredients they grew and harvested themselves? Heck, I could probably learn to hunt and eat small way faster and better than I could learn to grow and bake bread. I wouldn't catch the animals with my bare hands and eat them raw with my bare teeth, but then, I wouldn't harvest wheat with my bare hands and eat it raw with my bare teeth, either.
Fun fact: proto-humans ate meat. There's a reason we call them "hunter-gatherers". They generally used tools, though, because that's what we do.
Cause, screw them, is why. I like the content, and I want to consume it, but I don't like the people who distribute the content or the way they're distributing it (which are different from the people actually creating it), so screw them. If I could give the creators some money directly, maybe I would.
Analogy: if I could walk into a local restaurant I like, buy a dish, scan it into a 3d scanner and then make a copy of the scan and eat the dish anytime I wanted for the cost of the components... I wouldn't do it. I like supporting them. But if I could walk into a restaurant that had good food but overpriced their food hilariously, maybe I would. Meanwhile, sometimes for some reason I just feel like eating crap like Del Taco or something. If I could scan and print Del Taco, I'd do it without hesitation (then again, if I had a magical machine like that, I'd probably not waste it on Del Taco.)
Um. To your first statement, no it isn't. I call myself a (weak) atheist, but while this "study" does sound like a steaming pile of BS, you certainly could -not- call there being "no god" a "fact", unless you want to argue on purely semantic grounds (I define a God to be something outside nature, by definition nothing is outside nature, therefore even if something has nigh-unlimited powers, they're still not Gods). We have no evidence to support the existence of any mysterious, hidden omnipotent beings, and a lot of evidence to support such a being's nonexistence, but the whole "absence of evidence"/"evidence of absence" thing does work both ways, strictly speaking.
True that nobody forces you to upgrade, but it's possible, even likely, that in with the silly pointless UI fiddling-about they've been doing, are also actual bugfixes and potentially new features you might want. So saying nobody forces you to upgrade is kind of like saying "if you don't like what the government is doing, why don't you just leave?"
I certainly do have a love-hate relationship with Firefox. I think it's still the best around, but that it used to be better in a lot of ways. And the removal of minor versions -is- a major annoyance, because they still haven't managed to fix the thing wherein plugins work perfectly fine, but aren't being updated, so every 6 weeks complain that they aren't compatible until you go poke about at stuff. That problem always existed, but at least it used to only happen once a year. (Really, they should just fix that issue. I know they've claimed to, too bad they didn't really.)
Meanwhile, the Android fragmentation "issue" is also totally a real issue, that pisses me off way more. I have a device, I bought it only a couple years ago. At the time, it had Android 1.5 on it, which was a bit obsolete, but we were promised it'd get updates. Which it did, all the way to Android 1.6, then it stopped. Hardly -any- Android developers write apps for Android less-than-2.0 these days. Fun fact? The company in question is still actively selling this device, and it's still stuck at 1.6. How is that -not- an issue?
I first heard the joke used regarding the 2004 Presidential elections, but it applies here too. The movie being Alien vs. Predator, and the tag being "Whoever wins... we lose."
I wasn't even around for those days, but somehow I still know that it's an old slashdot meme. I believe for some reason she's also supposed to be petrified?
Just because you don't use Windows systems, doesn't mean that nobody does, or even that nobody of your age or demographic does. Cause most people do. Just because you don't develop for Windows doesn't mean that nobody develops for Windows - unless by "for real", you're invoking the No True Scotsman trope, defining developer as inherently "someone who doesn't develop for Windows", which would be rather unhelpful.
Loads of people still program for Windows, and until a year or so ago I didn't see that changing ever. Now, though... Windows 8 feels like the beginning of the next disaster. I haven't heard too many people in my demographic saying they like the idea, and it's such a paradigm shift, UI-wise and development-wise, that we're going to be forced to support it anyway for those clueless users you mentioned (who accept everything MS says as gospel, or more likely, whose IT departments force them to), so that'll be fun.
No offense, though, but while the Linux kernel might be grand, all the UIs I've tried are still stuck in the dark ages. So it's not like there's really much alternative, other than just "don't 'upgrade'". Which only goes so far.
Slashdot Mirror
They ripped out the ridiculous traffic-ticket cameras that were scattered liberally around Phoenix? That is -excellent- news. I'm driving there again next month, and those things were a sad joke. I hated driving around there, but I decided (ironically related to the nominal topic of this thread) that driving is still more convenient than flying there these days.
If that's actually true, and doesn't cause any crazier side-effects (like, ones that destabilize the OS), I fully predict within a few weeks of Win8 officially being released, someone will create an app to bypass it, which would move that dll, hide the real taskbar, then create its own taskbar. And we'd all just run that alongside Classic Shell and everything else.
Side-note: most of the hits you get when you try to google for illegal media of that variety, are usually fake sites that either want you to pay (most likely for nothing anyway, even if you did), or are just making money off ad hits. And when you do get a file-locker site, most of the time it's expired. So screw them anyway, they mostly deserve to be downranked in listings.
If I just search for the name of a song or something, chances are I -am- looking for a legitimate source like youtube. If I want a torrent, I'll just append "torrent" to the end of the search. Or, you know, search on a dedicated torrent-searching site instead of google, cause that often works better anyway.
Ok. You cannot even compare the Mac OS interface of that era to Win95. Yes, it was better than doing everything from the CLI (which does have its place, but its place is not everywhere), but while I didn't ever have much exposure to NeXT, I did have exposure to Mac OSes of that era, and they were... not so user-friendly. Not to mention prone to crashing, even by comparison to Win95. At least the computers I interacted with at school were. (To be fair, in 1984, I wasn't asking much of anything, that being when I was born. But I do remember the Mac OS computers at my elementary school, some of which were even fairly new at the time.)
Alright, that's fair enough. I suppose you can't call it innovation if you're just taking an interface design that was good but previously unseen by the average person, and fixing that. I've never actually -used- NeXTstep; I'd heard of it, but didn't, and don't, know much about it. Wasn't sure I'd even ever seen it. (I just looked it up, and indeed, I do now have vague memories from that era of having seen computers at the local university running an OS that looked like that, and thinking it looked way nicer than anything I had access to at the time.) You win.
-Why- are we supposed to "adapt and change"? I'm quite happy adapting to new interfaces that are provably more intuitive or faster or more powerful than the interfaces they replaced. There is no frelling reason on earth that we should be expected to adapt to new interfaces solely because the company in question felt that they needed to look like they were accomplishing something, even if their new interface is less useful than the old one. (Rather, as IT people, I feel it's our duty, when companies pull that crap, to find or create workarounds so people can get back to using the system the way they would like to.)
First attempt at innovation? Even if you're only talking OSes... Windows 95 was a -fantastic- OS for its day. I remember the first time I used Win95, I was like, dang, how did we get by before we had this? I'm not even joking. I feel like, computer-wise, Win95 was a game-changer, like the internet, smart phones, flash drives, etc. Was it completely unlike anything we'd ever seen? No, it was WIMP-driven like any other GUI. It was just way -better-. Then 98 came out and I was excited. That... was the last time a Windows OS really had me looking forward to its release.
Win 8, on the other hand, is a joke. And saying if you don't like it, don't upgrade, is also a joke: it's roughly equivalent to "if you don't like what your country is doing, leave". I'm not going to leave the US just because I don't like some of the things my government does (though I don't), and I'm not going to quit my job just because IT says if I want a new computer I need to accept whatever crap OS their base image has installed. Win7 may be more stable than XP, but I fought as long as I could to keep it off my computers anyway, cause the UI is crap (though it's still way better than 8's monstrosity). Eventually, though, I lost that battle. I'm running 7 now.
What is my favorite number? e, or maybe i, or 2pi. Bet nobody's going to guess -those-. (At least not until now.)
Really? Being able to say "I want to live in Long Beach, stop frelling giving me apartments for rent 3 cities over" is a frill? Craigslist sucks royal donkey balls for searching for apartments; I would know, I recently tried using it for that. There are loads of posts that don't even say where the apartment is. That should be pretty much mandatory if you're posting an apartment for rent.
If it were just the sensation, and didn't actually cause your hand to be burned or shocked or whatever... I bet you'd have a new untapped market for that. An... adult market, let's say.
I went to a specialized and rather rigorous science/tech college for undergrad, in which I took introductory classes in linear algebra, multivariable calculus and differential equations. It's rather depressing that I haven't really used a single bit of any of it since graduating (or even, for the most part, in any of my post-everyone-takes-these classes), but indeed, I haven't. But I imagine if I were doing anything particularly engineering-like, or anything having to deal directly with any sort of physics (which would include game development, as well as many sorts of graphics or audio manipulation), I would.
I haven't even had to use anything from the second half of my high school algebra class. Though, programming is all -about- everything from the -first- half of high school algebra... (i.e. arithmetic done on variables. ;))
I've had to use some basic geometry/trig all of once in the past 5 years of coding, and that was on an image manipulation question.
Back when I was really much of a gamer, because needing to have a cd (for that's what games came on at that time) in my drive to play a game pissed me off to no end (especially because it usually meant it was swapping things off the cd periodically, too, which was slow), I just made iso rips of my games, then mounted them to a virtual drive when I wanted to play one. Granted, I put all those isos onto an external, and only copied ones I was actively playing onto my primary drive, but still.
I have more than a hundred gigs just of music, and it's quite nice having all of -that- on my primary drive. If my laptop could've supported a SSD, a larger HDD and a dvd-r drive, I probably would've gotten all three. Sadly, it only had space for two, so I chose the 500 gig hdd and a dvd-r, and I'm not sad about that decision.
I was just imagining Final Fantasy themed coffee drinks, a la these, only coffee. I was disappoint.
You mean except for all of the other torrents that existed in other more actually private private trackers? And probably also public trackers.
I'm not arguing with your main point (New Doctor Who is exactly how I got introduced to the wonderful world of illegally stealing tv shows too), but Demonoid wasn't the only place you could go (I've only ever used it for a few things.)
/s/Starcraft/Football/
At least if you get crazy good at Starcraft and the Starcraft bubble dies, you can probably translate some of those skills into Starcraft 2, or some other RTS. At 40, what are you going to do if you spent your whole youthhood as a football star? (Alright, probably retire on your giant piles of cash, but then, you could probably say the same thing about Korean Starcraft stars, too.)
OSC was pretty crazy even in his youth, though I will admit it's gotten worse. Still, if you buy books used, the money doesn't actually end up with the author, which is usually a bad thing, but in this case...
Yes we are. There's a reason for it. It's called "because they're tasty". I have no problem with eating lab-grown meat if it tastes the same and has the same consistency of naturally-grown meat, and isn't full of strange chemicals of dubious healthfulness, but people eat meat for the same reason they generally eat anything else - because they enjoy it. I certainly do.
Raw food is a different thing, too. Heck, I knew a couple crazy raw food people in college, and they were perfectly happy eating sashimi. I like eating some things raw, but I prefer eating other things cooked. Again, variety: good. Why limit yourself?
How many humans do you know who can successfully make bread from scratch using all ingredients they grew and harvested themselves? Heck, I could probably learn to hunt and eat small way faster and better than I could learn to grow and bake bread. I wouldn't catch the animals with my bare hands and eat them raw with my bare teeth, but then, I wouldn't harvest wheat with my bare hands and eat it raw with my bare teeth, either.
Fun fact: proto-humans ate meat. There's a reason we call them "hunter-gatherers". They generally used tools, though, because that's what we do.
Cause, screw them, is why. I like the content, and I want to consume it, but I don't like the people who distribute the content or the way they're distributing it (which are different from the people actually creating it), so screw them. If I could give the creators some money directly, maybe I would.
Analogy: if I could walk into a local restaurant I like, buy a dish, scan it into a 3d scanner and then make a copy of the scan and eat the dish anytime I wanted for the cost of the components... I wouldn't do it. I like supporting them. But if I could walk into a restaurant that had good food but overpriced their food hilariously, maybe I would. Meanwhile, sometimes for some reason I just feel like eating crap like Del Taco or something. If I could scan and print Del Taco, I'd do it without hesitation (then again, if I had a magical machine like that, I'd probably not waste it on Del Taco.)
Um. To your first statement, no it isn't. I call myself a (weak) atheist, but while this "study" does sound like a steaming pile of BS, you certainly could -not- call there being "no god" a "fact", unless you want to argue on purely semantic grounds (I define a God to be something outside nature, by definition nothing is outside nature, therefore even if something has nigh-unlimited powers, they're still not Gods). We have no evidence to support the existence of any mysterious, hidden omnipotent beings, and a lot of evidence to support such a being's nonexistence, but the whole "absence of evidence"/"evidence of absence" thing does work both ways, strictly speaking.
True that nobody forces you to upgrade, but it's possible, even likely, that in with the silly pointless UI fiddling-about they've been doing, are also actual bugfixes and potentially new features you might want. So saying nobody forces you to upgrade is kind of like saying "if you don't like what the government is doing, why don't you just leave?"
I certainly do have a love-hate relationship with Firefox. I think it's still the best around, but that it used to be better in a lot of ways. And the removal of minor versions -is- a major annoyance, because they still haven't managed to fix the thing wherein plugins work perfectly fine, but aren't being updated, so every 6 weeks complain that they aren't compatible until you go poke about at stuff. That problem always existed, but at least it used to only happen once a year. (Really, they should just fix that issue. I know they've claimed to, too bad they didn't really.)
Meanwhile, the Android fragmentation "issue" is also totally a real issue, that pisses me off way more. I have a device, I bought it only a couple years ago. At the time, it had Android 1.5 on it, which was a bit obsolete, but we were promised it'd get updates. Which it did, all the way to Android 1.6, then it stopped. Hardly -any- Android developers write apps for Android less-than-2.0 these days. Fun fact? The company in question is still actively selling this device, and it's still stuck at 1.6. How is that -not- an issue?
I first heard the joke used regarding the 2004 Presidential elections, but it applies here too. The movie being Alien vs. Predator, and the tag being "Whoever wins... we lose."
I wasn't even around for those days, but somehow I still know that it's an old slashdot meme. I believe for some reason she's also supposed to be petrified?
Just because you don't use Windows systems, doesn't mean that nobody does, or even that nobody of your age or demographic does. Cause most people do. Just because you don't develop for Windows doesn't mean that nobody develops for Windows - unless by "for real", you're invoking the No True Scotsman trope, defining developer as inherently "someone who doesn't develop for Windows", which would be rather unhelpful.
Loads of people still program for Windows, and until a year or so ago I didn't see that changing ever. Now, though... Windows 8 feels like the beginning of the next disaster. I haven't heard too many people in my demographic saying they like the idea, and it's such a paradigm shift, UI-wise and development-wise, that we're going to be forced to support it anyway for those clueless users you mentioned (who accept everything MS says as gospel, or more likely, whose IT departments force them to), so that'll be fun.
No offense, though, but while the Linux kernel might be grand, all the UIs I've tried are still stuck in the dark ages. So it's not like there's really much alternative, other than just "don't 'upgrade'". Which only goes so far.