Zune, once you got to firmware versions that supported "apps" at all (third-gen for the handheld media players, out-of-the-box for the Zune HD) and Windows RT both allow(ed, in Zune's case) sideloading for free. Of course, both were also supposed to lock you into a restricted sandbox, but that was easily bypassed on Zunes (which ran CE and thus had no proper ACLs / user accounts) and RT at least allows running built-in stuff (including scripting engines) as Admin, and also allows changing permissions on securable objects to enable apps to access them. iOS has nothing on either of those for user-in-control points (and that's before you get into the jailbreaking scene on RT, which is much better than on iOS and basically turns RT devices into standard Windows PCs that run ARM programs instead of x86 ones; there's a list of open-source desktop apps that have been recompiled over on xda-developers.com, and most.NET apps run completely unmodified).
Windows Phone, on the other hand... well, they made sideloading available for free a few months ago, but they limit it to two sideloaded apps at a time (even paid developer accounts only get that limit raised to ten, which was the original limit at release when the dev account cost $100 instead of the $20 it does now). All apps must be sandboxed, and they don't even allow (non-oem) developers to use very many of the let-my-sandbox-access-this-thing capabilities (for example, you can get access to the user's music library, but only through a restrictive API that retrieves media files and data from a higher-privileged out-of-process component instead of giving direct access to the Music folders, and there's no way to access the user's Documents at all). There's people working on breaking those restrictions, of course, but much like the iOS jailbreaks it's a game of cat and mouse where updating to the latest version can mean losing your increased access. On the other hand, WP7 explicitly allowed rolling back to earlier OS versions, and the tools to do this for WP8 are easily available even if not part of the standard distribution.
... because hitting Start (or any of any of several ways to open the Start menu/screen, take your pick) and typing "virt" is harder? You know, that trick that has worked since Vista, and is *way* better for productivity than any amount of browsing through anything at all?
They actually underestimated Surface Pro sales and had supply line problems for a while, but Surface RT definitely didn't sell as well as hoped.
That said, even Surface RT supports mouse-and-keyboard input (either through the Touch or Type Covers, through Bluetooth, or through USB) so while touch-through-RDP does work well enough, it's not necessarily reasonable to assume that somebody trying to do remote admin from a Surface (or one of the many other Win8 tablets and handful of other Windows RT tablets) *would* be using touch. On the other hand, I can remote in from my phone too, in which case I'm almost certainly using touch...
Also Symbian, WebOS, and Maemo, the last being a pretty direct ancestor of Sailfish.
Today there's Windows Phone (NT in the case of WP8), still Blackberry, Firefox OS (Boot To Gecko), Ubuntu Touch (or whatever they call their mobile offering, I forget), and of course Sailfish.
The odds that any particular one is going to overtake either (much less both) of the big two isn't great, but it's not zero either. Technology marches on. What we think of as "modern" smartphones are less than ten years old, and the oldest thing you could reasonably call a smartphone is only about twice as long as that. There have been several upsets in that time. The industry is young yet.
The so-called "type to launch" feature (actually just the Start search tool) has been present since Vista. If you're using any version of Windows since then, and you ever expand the All Programs menu, you are frankly being a hidebound fool. Even when you know where the item you want to open is, Start search is way faster; I can launch a program before the Start menu *or* the Start screen finish their relevant animations, and mine is a very fast computer. If you *don't* know exactly where you're looking - that is, if you need to actually read item names - Search is absurdly faster. For one thing, it simultaneously searches on shortcut name, executable/document/whatever name, and description, so you have a far better chance of finding what you're looking for even if you aren't sure what it's called. For another thing, it's near-instant (much faster than the menu expansion times using the mouse).
My only gripe with Start in Win8 is that they segregated the result categories of the search (into "Apps", "Settings", "Files") so it now takes extra clicks to move between them. This is stupid, and in 8.1 they reverted it to the Vista/Win7 behavior where all categories are shown at once, and the top item (even if it isn't in the top category) is selected by default.
Unless you have some kind of keyboard use impairment or are on a pure-touchscreen device, using anything *except* the search tool in the Start menu (much less the Start screen) is a stupid way to waste your time and productivity.
Sigh. Shut *UP* you idiot, and stop calling people "a fucking dick" when you don't know what you're talking about. You can download the entire game as a disk-free installer from Blizzard directly. That applies to everything since about WC2 (Battle.Net Edition is still available in their online store I think). WC1 was already fully installable (no disk required), if you had the requisite 90-ish megs back in the 90s...
Different ships and starting gear add a bit to the skill cap, but in general I agree with you. I beat the game in the Zoltan ship the very first time I tried; what a joke. On the other hand, I *still* haven't beaten it in the Engi alternate layout (the default layout was easy, and I think was my first win); one crew member (who isn't even any good at combat) is just not sufficient.
I actually never played Easy at all. It took me a while to make it to victory, but it's doable. Getting to the final boss wasn't even that hard, honestly, though it then took me a little while to figure out the right tactics to defeat it. It's entirely possible to reach the final boss with a ship fit that *cannot* beat it, which really sucks; there's usually nothing much in the way of opportunities for refit at that point.
My issue with this kind of randomness is that it reduces the skill depth of the game. Consider, for example, a variant where you could choose which crew member to send on a likely-suicidal mission. You'd have the same chance of somebody dying, but now there'd be a bigger incentive to have redundant crew. Or lacking that, you could choose which of your trained crewpeople, or what racial bonus, you least need.
Of course, what I'd also like to see is a smarter enemy. The AI's standard tactic of "fire at random as soon as each weapon charges" is ludicrously bad, and only the fact that you're often fighting ships much more powerful than yours can make the end-game battles any fun at all. Even then, there have been times when I wandered around blowing up rebel elite ships (the ones that drop no loot, that you get after they "catch" you) just because I could. A weapon pre-igniter and carefully sequenced fire can destroy such enemies easily.
Multi-ship combat would also be great. Potentially nigh-impossible, but great.
Multi-player, please? I want to duel my friends.
So many things this game could add or improve on...
In many ways MoO2 is still the best space-based 4x, and there's been stiff competition since. Not bad for a 16-bit game! There are some balance issues, but you can intentionally avoid those if you want to make the game harder...
Geneforge is great. Deep, well-developed storyline, good tactical gameplay, and huge worlds to play in. The early versions show their age somewhat, but the gameplay is addictive enough that I keep going back anyhow. There are five of them, and I haven't even completed the second yet...
For what it's worth, Heroes of Newerth (started as a DotA clone, still basically is aside from some heroes being replaced with S2 Games' own ones or re-worked a bit from base, and even fewer item differences) is completely free to play (there is no way to get any in-game advantage by paying) and has had a Linux client since beta (back in 2009). I prefer it over DotA2, although I play both (and played DotA Allstars from 05-09).
Nah, get the expos now. At the very least get Gods and Kings (should be cheap these days even if you missed the Humble Bundle). The sheer number of stupid things (like the 10-HP bar, that means you always take at least 10% damage even if you run over a barbarian warrior in modern tanks) things that were fixed are incredible.
Eve never had a "native" Linux port. For a while, you could download from them a copy of the Windows client custom-wrapped in Cedega (which you were supposed to only use for Eve, since CCP had to pay them for it). The Cedega wrapper was big, the performance and graphics were nothing special, and there weren't that many people using it. The real reason they dropped it, though, is that Wine (that thing Cedega was forked from to poduce a gaming-focused version, ha!) was actually doing better than Cedega at running the Windows client. For example, Wine could run the DX9 graphics update on Linux before the official Cedega-based client could.
Plenty of people still play Eve on Wine, and CCP has a semi-official guide to setting it up. They may no longer officially provide a Linux client, but Eve is still playable on Linux.
That's true of all the Civs (and honestly of most decent 4X games). I still play Alpha Centauri...
Star Conflict is a lot of fun to kill a bit of time in, too. Team-based space dogfighting. The physics are a bit wonky (of course), but the game itself plays very well.
Out of curiosity, any particular reasons you care to highlight as to why 4 and not 5? I've played both (and also 3), but it's been years since I played 4 and I've forgotten what each one did well or poorly. I'm pretty sure at least one of the earlier two versions didn't have the stupid research allocation system that 5 uses, and instead used a research queue like a sane game would... I really like SE5's tactical combat, though. Turn-based tactical fighting has too many limitations and too many ways to game the system.
*WHAT* war? The "global war on terrorism"? That's a moronic concept to be fed to morons, nothing more. You can't make war on an idea, or a goal, or a type of activity. The very idea is nonsense, but it's used to justify things like killing innocents (as if *that* is OK in wartime either; any other military commander who targeted and blew up a wedding full of civilians would be tried for war crimes, and don't try to pretend that they weren't targeting the civilians; as the linked article says, "it is impossible to fire a drone on a convoy of five dozen people or so with \"near certainty\" that no innocents will be killed"). You are a disgusting blight on the human race, literally no better than the terrorists, if you attempt to justify such atrocities.
You can try to suppress an idea, much like the Obama administration has suppressed the idea that government transparency is vital to a free nation. Or the idea that the US is an "evil" nation which butchers Muslims (we aren't doing much to suppress that one...).
You can work against a goal. For example, the goal of terrorism is to terrorize, and through terror, weaken or destroy your opponent. I refuse to be a coward who gives up my dignity, privacy, and freedom out of terror at what the terrorists might do if I don't. That's what they want, after all; the destruction of our way of life.
You can enact preventative measures against people undertaking certain activities. For example, don't want terrorists forcing their way into airplane cockpits? Reinforce the doors, and change policies around dealing with hijackers. Sure, no preventative measure is going to be perfect (although, to bring this back on topic a bit, you can do a pretty damn good job of avoiding the risk that some whistleblower will talk about you torturing people or wiretapping everybody if you don't *do* those things...) but you can do an excellent job without resorting to tactics which have any chance of murdering large groups of innocents...
I'm not saying war is never justified. I'm saying this isn't war. It's state-sponsored terrorism (excuse me, "extrajudicial killing of non-military personnel"). There's no enemy we can fight with troops and drones, no government or military commander we can call upon to surrender. It's just killing people, possibly some of whom were planning to kill some of us. It's certainly not defensive; unless a strike like that one terrorizes (oh hey, that word again) the locals too much to do anything, there are probably a lot more potential terrorists in that town than there were when the supposed target of that drone strike was there...
I can trust comcast to act in their self interest -- which is shaping traffic in a way that generates the least number of angry customers
If you honestly believe this, then you fall somewhere between ignorant and idiot. Comcast doesn't have many happy customers. They are multiple-year-holders of the distrinction of being America's most-despised company. However, what they *do* have a bunch of monopolies. Entire regions - large ones, all over the country - where they are the only game in town for low-latency, high-bandwidth Internet service (and I don't mean "run a game streaming service" levels of high-bandwidth-low-latency; more like "be able to play games online, including downloading their patches in under a day"). They have absolutely no incentive to keep those people happy; it's their way or the highway. Creating a competing startup isn't even an option; Comcast controls all the fiber and cable. All that Comcast have is an incentive to do is gouge their locked-in customers for every cent they can right up to the point that those people would rather put up with dial-up.
You want to give them *more* tools to do this with? You sound like you work for them!
Wow, FUD much? You're either trolling or you haven't got the foggiest clue what you're talking about. I'll give you the benefit of a doubt...
Part of the entire point of "Modern" apps is that they *can not* run in the background. Unless they are explicitly designed to enable one of the handful of background execution options in the WinRT API, an app gets suspended when you switch out of it (ALT+Tab, launch a different app, whatever). It uses no CPU and no I/O in this state, and the RAM it's parked on will be reclaimed if a foreground app needs it. Any app that actually *is* executing in the background will show up in all the usual places (left sidebar app switcher, Al+Tab, Task Manager, etc.) and, unlike most such apps, won't be listed as "Suspended" in Task Manager.
Now, with that said, apps can ask the OS to do a few background things on the app's behalf. One of those is update its "Live Tile" on the start screen, which the OS will periodically check for if you have enabled tile updates for that app and pinned it to the Start screen (unpinned apps don't have tiles to update, so it won't check). Another way is push notifications (like on a phone). These need to be explicitly enabled, and can be disabled from the App-specific Settings charm. They also use quite trivial amounts of data and CPU time, but it's non-zero. Finally, an app can ask the OS to download data for it in the background. The app needs to be run to set this up - it won't happen with pre-installed apps, for example - and this background download will only run when the machine is plugged in and idle.
It's worth noting that Server doesn't come with any of these apps installed (just the standard suite of desktop utilities). You'd know that, if you'd ever used Server 2012...
As for data usage, Win8 is actually the first version of Windows to give you control over that. You can limit or disable all background data usage when on a metered connection, tell it to warn you when you approach certain usage thresholds on that connection, and so on. This is actually a huge improvement over Win7 (which still has plenty of auto-running Windows Services that can use data in the background - you don't need "apps" for that, as any vaguely competent computer user would know - and which you have no easy way to control).
As for data usage, that's all stuff you can set up wen installing Windows, or on first boot, or by going back and changing settings later. As it has been, since approximately forever. Yeah, there are a few new options (although "report to MS every time I open an app" is not one of them, what kind of idiot are you to think it would be?) and of course apps may send their own usage data back (just as any piece of software has been able to do since the invention of the Internet) but the OS allows pretty good tuning of what data is sent to MS.
Win8 runs faster than Win7 because a bunch of effort was put into reducing its CPU usage for use on tablets and other low-end hardware. Win8 uses less RAM than Win7 because of the same effort, which also yielded such cool features as "page combining" to reduce usage further still. Win8 also actually runs *less* stuff in the background by default than Win7 does. The reason this is possible "given the concerns above" is because your concerns are bullshit, and if you had bothered to do any actual research, you'd know this.
The mouse cursor changing to a grabbing-hand icon isn't a big enough clue for you? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the fact that there's a reason to move the mouse to the top of the screen is itself discoverable, but once you do it's pretty obvious that you can grab it...
Also, not sure what the GP is on about with Alt-F4. I've never had that not work...
There is a reason that during both installation and initial out-of-box setup, it explains those gesture to you on a loop for like 10 minutes while the setup happens in the background...
Have you actually tried Win8 / 8.1 / Server 2012 / 2012 R2? One of the big areas they improved was multi-monitor support.
Also, while I acknowledge that it's stupid that Windows doesn't come with virtual desktops by default, there are plenty of third-party solutions that implement them just fine. Most are free and several are open-source.
Wow, mods are either on crack or simply technical illiterates today...
That search box is not, and never was, necessary. From Windows Vista through Windows 8.1, you can just start typing after you open Start (I usually use the keyboard to open it so I don't need the mouse at all for program launching) and your search will happen immediately. Clicking on the box is a complete waste of effort.
(Also, for the record, on Win8 / Server 2012 you can get to the search box explicitly using a few keyboard shortcuts - one for each of "apps", "settings", and "files" - or by using the Search "charm" on the right of the screen. Not that you need to do this, but you *can*.)
And what if I don't "manually" visit it, but instead somebody posts an image to some forum I read, and the image source is the domain in question? It doesn't even matter that there's no web server running there; my browser will still attempt the lookup (*it* doesn't know there's nothing listening on 80) and therefore my DNS resolver will still cache the result. Boom, I am a "confirmed" cheater, despite never having used the tool in question at all.
Except, there are legal protections in place for whistleblowers. To take a different example, shooting your neighbor would be a serious crime. Shooting the neighbor who broke into your house and is now raping your wife while choking her to death would be perfectly legal. You'd still wind up in court over it, most likely, but you would have legal justification for your actions which would override the general-case laws.
Unfortunately, unlike our hypothetical defender of home and family, Snowden wouldn't have the benefit of being tried by people who don't have a stake in the matter. It would be like being tried by a court run by said neighbor's similarly raping-and-murdering brother, who has dirt on everybody in town and has been known to make "enemy combatants" (excuse me, "obstinate jurors") vanish off to prison themselves...
Care to name what Snowden's alternatives were? He tried going internally, was told to ignore it. He could have gone up the chain of command, to... who, exactly? The entire executive branch, right up to literally the most powerful single person in the US government, has expressed support for the NSA's actions. How do you go over the head of the (supposedly) democratically elected government? You tell the people who cast the votes. Now, if you can come up with some way that Snowden could have only told voting-age citizens of the USA about what he'd discovered, without telling anybody else, I'll concede he had other options. Or maybe you can come up with some other actual option that wouldn't have gotten him either stonewalled or arrested on trumped-up charges. Unlike you, I'm willing to consider the possibility that there are other options. Unfortunately for you, you have yet to provide a single scrap of evidence for your claims (though you've ignored plenty of other peoples' evidence, moving the goalposts when necessary) so I doubt this is a reasonable option. The whole "other alternatives" thing has already been discussed.
Oh, and let's not forget that the government's very first reaction to the disclosures was denial and an attempt to destroy his credibility. They never showed even the slightest interest in determining the truth, much less in determining whether Snowden deserved protection as a whistleblower. Those are only the actions of the guilty, and their guilt absolves Snowden of his wrongdoing in revealing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Zune, once you got to firmware versions that supported "apps" at all (third-gen for the handheld media players, out-of-the-box for the Zune HD) and Windows RT both allow(ed, in Zune's case) sideloading for free. Of course, both were also supposed to lock you into a restricted sandbox, but that was easily bypassed on Zunes (which ran CE and thus had no proper ACLs / user accounts) and RT at least allows running built-in stuff (including scripting engines) as Admin, and also allows changing permissions on securable objects to enable apps to access them. iOS has nothing on either of those for user-in-control points (and that's before you get into the jailbreaking scene on RT, which is much better than on iOS and basically turns RT devices into standard Windows PCs that run ARM programs instead of x86 ones; there's a list of open-source desktop apps that have been recompiled over on xda-developers.com, and most .NET apps run completely unmodified).
Windows Phone, on the other hand... well, they made sideloading available for free a few months ago, but they limit it to two sideloaded apps at a time (even paid developer accounts only get that limit raised to ten, which was the original limit at release when the dev account cost $100 instead of the $20 it does now). All apps must be sandboxed, and they don't even allow (non-oem) developers to use very many of the let-my-sandbox-access-this-thing capabilities (for example, you can get access to the user's music library, but only through a restrictive API that retrieves media files and data from a higher-privileged out-of-process component instead of giving direct access to the Music folders, and there's no way to access the user's Documents at all). There's people working on breaking those restrictions, of course, but much like the iOS jailbreaks it's a game of cat and mouse where updating to the latest version can mean losing your increased access. On the other hand, WP7 explicitly allowed rolling back to earlier OS versions, and the tools to do this for WP8 are easily available even if not part of the standard distribution.
... because hitting Start (or any of any of several ways to open the Start menu/screen, take your pick) and typing "virt" is harder? You know, that trick that has worked since Vista, and is *way* better for productivity than any amount of browsing through anything at all?
They actually underestimated Surface Pro sales and had supply line problems for a while, but Surface RT definitely didn't sell as well as hoped.
That said, even Surface RT supports mouse-and-keyboard input (either through the Touch or Type Covers, through Bluetooth, or through USB) so while touch-through-RDP does work well enough, it's not necessarily reasonable to assume that somebody trying to do remote admin from a Surface (or one of the many other Win8 tablets and handful of other Windows RT tablets) *would* be using touch. On the other hand, I can remote in from my phone too, in which case I'm almost certainly using touch...
Also Symbian, WebOS, and Maemo, the last being a pretty direct ancestor of Sailfish.
Today there's Windows Phone (NT in the case of WP8), still Blackberry, Firefox OS (Boot To Gecko), Ubuntu Touch (or whatever they call their mobile offering, I forget), and of course Sailfish.
The odds that any particular one is going to overtake either (much less both) of the big two isn't great, but it's not zero either. Technology marches on. What we think of as "modern" smartphones are less than ten years old, and the oldest thing you could reasonably call a smartphone is only about twice as long as that. There have been several upsets in that time. The industry is young yet.
The so-called "type to launch" feature (actually just the Start search tool) has been present since Vista. If you're using any version of Windows since then, and you ever expand the All Programs menu, you are frankly being a hidebound fool. Even when you know where the item you want to open is, Start search is way faster; I can launch a program before the Start menu *or* the Start screen finish their relevant animations, and mine is a very fast computer. If you *don't* know exactly where you're looking - that is, if you need to actually read item names - Search is absurdly faster. For one thing, it simultaneously searches on shortcut name, executable/document/whatever name, and description, so you have a far better chance of finding what you're looking for even if you aren't sure what it's called. For another thing, it's near-instant (much faster than the menu expansion times using the mouse).
My only gripe with Start in Win8 is that they segregated the result categories of the search (into "Apps", "Settings", "Files") so it now takes extra clicks to move between them. This is stupid, and in 8.1 they reverted it to the Vista/Win7 behavior where all categories are shown at once, and the top item (even if it isn't in the top category) is selected by default.
Unless you have some kind of keyboard use impairment or are on a pure-touchscreen device, using anything *except* the search tool in the Start menu (much less the Start screen) is a stupid way to waste your time and productivity.
Sigh. Shut *UP* you idiot, and stop calling people "a fucking dick" when you don't know what you're talking about. You can download the entire game as a disk-free installer from Blizzard directly. That applies to everything since about WC2 (Battle.Net Edition is still available in their online store I think). WC1 was already fully installable (no disk required), if you had the requisite 90-ish megs back in the 90s...
Different ships and starting gear add a bit to the skill cap, but in general I agree with you. I beat the game in the Zoltan ship the very first time I tried; what a joke. On the other hand, I *still* haven't beaten it in the Engi alternate layout (the default layout was easy, and I think was my first win); one crew member (who isn't even any good at combat) is just not sufficient.
I actually never played Easy at all. It took me a while to make it to victory, but it's doable. Getting to the final boss wasn't even that hard, honestly, though it then took me a little while to figure out the right tactics to defeat it. It's entirely possible to reach the final boss with a ship fit that *cannot* beat it, which really sucks; there's usually nothing much in the way of opportunities for refit at that point.
My issue with this kind of randomness is that it reduces the skill depth of the game. Consider, for example, a variant where you could choose which crew member to send on a likely-suicidal mission. You'd have the same chance of somebody dying, but now there'd be a bigger incentive to have redundant crew. Or lacking that, you could choose which of your trained crewpeople, or what racial bonus, you least need.
Of course, what I'd also like to see is a smarter enemy. The AI's standard tactic of "fire at random as soon as each weapon charges" is ludicrously bad, and only the fact that you're often fighting ships much more powerful than yours can make the end-game battles any fun at all. Even then, there have been times when I wandered around blowing up rebel elite ships (the ones that drop no loot, that you get after they "catch" you) just because I could. A weapon pre-igniter and carefully sequenced fire can destroy such enemies easily.
Multi-ship combat would also be great. Potentially nigh-impossible, but great.
Multi-player, please? I want to duel my friends.
So many things this game could add or improve on...
In many ways MoO2 is still the best space-based 4x, and there's been stiff competition since. Not bad for a 16-bit game! There are some balance issues, but you can intentionally avoid those if you want to make the game harder...
Geneforge is great. Deep, well-developed storyline, good tactical gameplay, and huge worlds to play in. The early versions show their age somewhat, but the gameplay is addictive enough that I keep going back anyhow. There are five of them, and I haven't even completed the second yet...
For what it's worth, Heroes of Newerth (started as a DotA clone, still basically is aside from some heroes being replaced with S2 Games' own ones or re-worked a bit from base, and even fewer item differences) is completely free to play (there is no way to get any in-game advantage by paying) and has had a Linux client since beta (back in 2009). I prefer it over DotA2, although I play both (and played DotA Allstars from 05-09).
Nah, get the expos now. At the very least get Gods and Kings (should be cheap these days even if you missed the Humble Bundle). The sheer number of stupid things (like the 10-HP bar, that means you always take at least 10% damage even if you run over a barbarian warrior in modern tanks) things that were fixed are incredible.
Eve never had a "native" Linux port. For a while, you could download from them a copy of the Windows client custom-wrapped in Cedega (which you were supposed to only use for Eve, since CCP had to pay them for it). The Cedega wrapper was big, the performance and graphics were nothing special, and there weren't that many people using it. The real reason they dropped it, though, is that Wine (that thing Cedega was forked from to poduce a gaming-focused version, ha!) was actually doing better than Cedega at running the Windows client. For example, Wine could run the DX9 graphics update on Linux before the official Cedega-based client could.
Plenty of people still play Eve on Wine, and CCP has a semi-official guide to setting it up. They may no longer officially provide a Linux client, but Eve is still playable on Linux.
That's true of all the Civs (and honestly of most decent 4X games). I still play Alpha Centauri...
Star Conflict is a lot of fun to kill a bit of time in, too. Team-based space dogfighting. The physics are a bit wonky (of course), but the game itself plays very well.
Out of curiosity, any particular reasons you care to highlight as to why 4 and not 5? I've played both (and also 3), but it's been years since I played 4 and I've forgotten what each one did well or poorly. I'm pretty sure at least one of the earlier two versions didn't have the stupid research allocation system that 5 uses, and instead used a research queue like a sane game would... I really like SE5's tactical combat, though. Turn-based tactical fighting has too many limitations and too many ways to game the system.
*WHAT* war? The "global war on terrorism"? That's a moronic concept to be fed to morons, nothing more. You can't make war on an idea, or a goal, or a type of activity. The very idea is nonsense, but it's used to justify things like killing innocents (as if *that* is OK in wartime either; any other military commander who targeted and blew up a wedding full of civilians would be tried for war crimes, and don't try to pretend that they weren't targeting the civilians; as the linked article says, "it is impossible to fire a drone on a convoy of five dozen people or so with \"near certainty\" that no innocents will be killed"). You are a disgusting blight on the human race, literally no better than the terrorists, if you attempt to justify such atrocities.
You can try to suppress an idea, much like the Obama administration has suppressed the idea that government transparency is vital to a free nation. Or the idea that the US is an "evil" nation which butchers Muslims (we aren't doing much to suppress that one...).
You can work against a goal. For example, the goal of terrorism is to terrorize, and through terror, weaken or destroy your opponent. I refuse to be a coward who gives up my dignity, privacy, and freedom out of terror at what the terrorists might do if I don't. That's what they want, after all; the destruction of our way of life.
You can enact preventative measures against people undertaking certain activities. For example, don't want terrorists forcing their way into airplane cockpits? Reinforce the doors, and change policies around dealing with hijackers. Sure, no preventative measure is going to be perfect (although, to bring this back on topic a bit, you can do a pretty damn good job of avoiding the risk that some whistleblower will talk about you torturing people or wiretapping everybody if you don't *do* those things...) but you can do an excellent job without resorting to tactics which have any chance of murdering large groups of innocents...
I'm not saying war is never justified. I'm saying this isn't war. It's state-sponsored terrorism (excuse me, "extrajudicial killing of non-military personnel"). There's no enemy we can fight with troops and drones, no government or military commander we can call upon to surrender. It's just killing people, possibly some of whom were planning to kill some of us. It's certainly not defensive; unless a strike like that one terrorizes (oh hey, that word again) the locals too much to do anything, there are probably a lot more potential terrorists in that town than there were when the supposed target of that drone strike was there...
If you honestly believe this, then you fall somewhere between ignorant and idiot. Comcast doesn't have many happy customers. They are multiple-year-holders of the distrinction of being America's most-despised company. However, what they *do* have a bunch of monopolies. Entire regions - large ones, all over the country - where they are the only game in town for low-latency, high-bandwidth Internet service (and I don't mean "run a game streaming service" levels of high-bandwidth-low-latency; more like "be able to play games online, including downloading their patches in under a day"). They have absolutely no incentive to keep those people happy; it's their way or the highway. Creating a competing startup isn't even an option; Comcast controls all the fiber and cable. All that Comcast have is an incentive to do is gouge their locked-in customers for every cent they can right up to the point that those people would rather put up with dial-up.
You want to give them *more* tools to do this with? You sound like you work for them!
Wow, FUD much? You're either trolling or you haven't got the foggiest clue what you're talking about. I'll give you the benefit of a doubt...
Part of the entire point of "Modern" apps is that they *can not* run in the background. Unless they are explicitly designed to enable one of the handful of background execution options in the WinRT API, an app gets suspended when you switch out of it (ALT+Tab, launch a different app, whatever). It uses no CPU and no I/O in this state, and the RAM it's parked on will be reclaimed if a foreground app needs it. Any app that actually *is* executing in the background will show up in all the usual places (left sidebar app switcher, Al+Tab, Task Manager, etc.) and, unlike most such apps, won't be listed as "Suspended" in Task Manager.
Now, with that said, apps can ask the OS to do a few background things on the app's behalf. One of those is update its "Live Tile" on the start screen, which the OS will periodically check for if you have enabled tile updates for that app and pinned it to the Start screen (unpinned apps don't have tiles to update, so it won't check). Another way is push notifications (like on a phone). These need to be explicitly enabled, and can be disabled from the App-specific Settings charm. They also use quite trivial amounts of data and CPU time, but it's non-zero. Finally, an app can ask the OS to download data for it in the background. The app needs to be run to set this up - it won't happen with pre-installed apps, for example - and this background download will only run when the machine is plugged in and idle.
It's worth noting that Server doesn't come with any of these apps installed (just the standard suite of desktop utilities). You'd know that, if you'd ever used Server 2012...
As for data usage, Win8 is actually the first version of Windows to give you control over that. You can limit or disable all background data usage when on a metered connection, tell it to warn you when you approach certain usage thresholds on that connection, and so on. This is actually a huge improvement over Win7 (which still has plenty of auto-running Windows Services that can use data in the background - you don't need "apps" for that, as any vaguely competent computer user would know - and which you have no easy way to control).
As for data usage, that's all stuff you can set up wen installing Windows, or on first boot, or by going back and changing settings later. As it has been, since approximately forever. Yeah, there are a few new options (although "report to MS every time I open an app" is not one of them, what kind of idiot are you to think it would be?) and of course apps may send their own usage data back (just as any piece of software has been able to do since the invention of the Internet) but the OS allows pretty good tuning of what data is sent to MS.
Win8 runs faster than Win7 because a bunch of effort was put into reducing its CPU usage for use on tablets and other low-end hardware. Win8 uses less RAM than Win7 because of the same effort, which also yielded such cool features as "page combining" to reduce usage further still. Win8 also actually runs *less* stuff in the background by default than Win7 does. The reason this is possible "given the concerns above" is because your concerns are bullshit, and if you had bothered to do any actual research, you'd know this.
The mouse cursor changing to a grabbing-hand icon isn't a big enough clue for you? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the fact that there's a reason to move the mouse to the top of the screen is itself discoverable, but once you do it's pretty obvious that you can grab it...
Also, not sure what the GP is on about with Alt-F4. I've never had that not work...
There is a reason that during both installation and initial out-of-box setup, it explains those gesture to you on a loop for like 10 minutes while the setup happens in the background...
Have you actually tried Win8 / 8.1 / Server 2012 / 2012 R2? One of the big areas they improved was multi-monitor support.
Also, while I acknowledge that it's stupid that Windows doesn't come with virtual desktops by default, there are plenty of third-party solutions that implement them just fine. Most are free and several are open-source.
Wow, mods are either on crack or simply technical illiterates today...
That search box is not, and never was, necessary. From Windows Vista through Windows 8.1, you can just start typing after you open Start (I usually use the keyboard to open it so I don't need the mouse at all for program launching) and your search will happen immediately. Clicking on the box is a complete waste of effort.
(Also, for the record, on Win8 / Server 2012 you can get to the search box explicitly using a few keyboard shortcuts - one for each of "apps", "settings", and "files" - or by using the Search "charm" on the right of the screen. Not that you need to do this, but you *can*.)
And what if I don't "manually" visit it, but instead somebody posts an image to some forum I read, and the image source is the domain in question? It doesn't even matter that there's no web server running there; my browser will still attempt the lookup (*it* doesn't know there's nothing listening on 80) and therefore my DNS resolver will still cache the result. Boom, I am a "confirmed" cheater, despite never having used the tool in question at all.
Except, there are legal protections in place for whistleblowers. To take a different example, shooting your neighbor would be a serious crime. Shooting the neighbor who broke into your house and is now raping your wife while choking her to death would be perfectly legal. You'd still wind up in court over it, most likely, but you would have legal justification for your actions which would override the general-case laws.
Unfortunately, unlike our hypothetical defender of home and family, Snowden wouldn't have the benefit of being tried by people who don't have a stake in the matter. It would be like being tried by a court run by said neighbor's similarly raping-and-murdering brother, who has dirt on everybody in town and has been known to make "enemy combatants" (excuse me, "obstinate jurors") vanish off to prison themselves...
Care to name what Snowden's alternatives were? He tried going internally, was told to ignore it. He could have gone up the chain of command, to... who, exactly? The entire executive branch, right up to literally the most powerful single person in the US government, has expressed support for the NSA's actions. How do you go over the head of the (supposedly) democratically elected government? You tell the people who cast the votes. Now, if you can come up with some way that Snowden could have only told voting-age citizens of the USA about what he'd discovered, without telling anybody else, I'll concede he had other options. Or maybe you can come up with some other actual option that wouldn't have gotten him either stonewalled or arrested on trumped-up charges. Unlike you, I'm willing to consider the possibility that there are other options. Unfortunately for you, you have yet to provide a single scrap of evidence for your claims (though you've ignored plenty of other peoples' evidence, moving the goalposts when necessary) so I doubt this is a reasonable option. The whole "other alternatives" thing has already been discussed.
Oh, and let's not forget that the government's very first reaction to the disclosures was denial and an attempt to destroy his credibility. They never showed even the slightest interest in determining the truth, much less in determining whether Snowden deserved protection as a whistleblower. Those are only the actions of the guilty, and their guilt absolves Snowden of his wrongdoing in revealing it.