Posts by Old Handle 1602 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2011
When they started calling it "Windows 8" style UI, I suggested that they had done this to make it harder clearly refer to that most failtastic part of the OS specifically. Obviously they realized naming it the same as the OS itself was too confusing, so they had to come up with another generic sounding name, and they did. So now if you criticize it you sound like a luddite. Clever, but it can easily be subverting with quotation marks. Nice, try Microsoft. Your "Modern" UI is still utterly unsuitable for a PC.
Well, I'm not normally a fan of all this big-government stuff but I got rear-ended probably no more than half an hour after reading this article, so I'm thinking maybe this is actually a good idea.
Nobody was hurt, and a messed up bumper is about all the damage, but it sure wasn't a fun experience.
I wonder if they thought be "unnaming" the worst aspect of Windows 8 they would make it harder to criticize. If you say "Metro is a poor UI for desktops" people know exactly what you mean. If you say "The Windows 8 style UI is not good for a desktop", it just sounds like "I don't like Windows 8".
The Hobbit was, if I'm not mistaken, a shorter book than each of the three LotR books. How can it be that one fairly short book needs the same number of movies to tell the story as three longer books? Now I realize film adaptations typically cut out quite a bit of the source material but maybe there's a good reason for that. I have my doubts that there's really enough content in The Hobbit to make three interesting movies.
If they really wanted to delete it, telling the government was the last thing they should have done. Clearly it would only cause more delays. Having it spread around to more people is also the last thing anybody who's data got slurped would want. They should have deleted the instant they discovered it. And that goes for the initial batch of slurped data too.
Maybe very specific types traffic management can be justified. And court orders, OK, not much they can do about that. But last I heard, using the IWF blacklist was voluntary. So they're apparently trying to tell us the voluntarily blocking certain pages is consistent with offering "full and open" internet. What a complete and utter sham.
While the fixed sounds good on the surface, to me it sounds like something very wrong is happening. It sounds like they're designing the browser behave differently for specific sites. How does Firefox know what a "sensitive" site looks like anyway? The "automatically encrypts google" thing sounds similar (unless they're just talking about when you search from the toolbar).
I partly agree, in theory, but when a company gets as big as Visa, to the point where they can virtually crush another company just be refusing to do business with it, then I think regulators need to keep a close eye on it. It's the flip side of "to big to fail". Second, I don't for a moment believe the decision to stop processing WikiLeaks' payment happened without form form state meddling in the first place.
Someone who is misfortunate enough to use Steam correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that you can only transfer new, unplayed games to other steam accounts. I have heard some people work around this by installing every game in a separate account so they can simply transfer the whole account to someone else.
Although I completely understand why people don't trust one country (particularly mine, to be honest) to control the internet, it strikes me as nothing short of miraculous that the internet has remained relatively free and democratic for this long. So the the gamble that any change would be for the better rather than worse seems like a risky one.
Because they don't actually care about any of that, they just do whatever they think is best for their corporate image, i.e. ensuring plenty of users and advertisers keep on coming. Kind of like when Amazon briefly stocked that pro pedophile ebook. At first they said "free speech!", but when people threatened to boycott they changed their tune really really fast.
Not that I have any sympathy for the neo-nazi viewpoint, but it does show how flimsy "freedom" is in the hands of an entity that only exists for profit.
While this is an appealing idea, Nigerian scam emails are almost unique in that they actually ask for a reply. If everybody got in the habit answering those it would actually mess them up. But your typical penis pill pusher wouldn't notice a thing as they probably use throw-away counts, fake return addresses, or similar techniques.
If this means they stop loading down games with DRM I'm all for it, in theory at least. I realize the free-to-play model is subject to abuses, but it can be done right too. For instance, I've been playing a quirky online RPG called Kingdom of Loathing, where you can "donate" $10 to get some kind of cool item, a different one each month. But the game is perfectly enjoyable without such items, and if you want one that bad, it's also possible to buy one off another player who donated with virtual money earned in the game. That game does have the advantage that is isn't directly competitive though, it would no doubt be harder to keep things fair in competitive game that used similar system.
Bestiality is shagging animals, zoophilia is loving animals. So "bestiality zoophiles", though strangely constructed and partly redundant, would presumably refer to people who shag animals withing the context of a loving relationship. The animals would also be adults, and consenting (at least in the non-legally-loaded sense of the word), so there you go.
But given the large number of possible human/animal combinations, I think it's probably simpler if they just plop two icons side-by-side and call that good enough.
I'm just skeptical of any subscription based encryption service. Encryption/decryption should happen solely on the local device, under absolutely no control from the server, so what exactly am I getting for my $20 a month? Delivery? So at best I'm apparently getting charged extra for something my cellular plan already includes, and at worst the encryption is being done in some horribly insecure way.
To be fair there aren't a whole lot of details yet, so I'm not saying for sure I think it's a scam, but similar sounding products have often turned out to be.
Scratch currently has what they call "Broadcasts" which can be used similar to procedures. The next version will have proper procedures.
In any case, I can understand why someone would look at Scratch and see it as dumbed down, but I don't think that's entirely fair. Obviously it's not suitable for low level programing, but that's no the goal. What it does do is make it possible for someone with zero experience to start making programs that actually do something interesting in one day.
Though personally, if I were designing a beginner's programing course, unless it was specifically for young children, I wouldn't use Scratch. But I sure wouldn't use TurboPascal either. That's too far removed from the kind of software most people use in real life nowadays. The most important thing, IMHO is that people can see right away that they can really create something useful, and without being some kind of geek hacker god.
If anything, it helps the trolls and bullies. People who create an account with malicious intent will always use fake names, but innocent people who naively go along with that policy open themselves up for particularly frightening types of abuse.
If they could summon and dismiss buttons on the screen at will, and without messing up the display, that would indeed be very impressive, and probably even useful. But I'm suspicious that all we're seeing is a very crude mock-up that can't do anything close to that. Notice how the buttons always appear and disappear all at once, as if they can't even be controlled individually. I suspect its something embarrassingly simple like a single rigid plastic frame with holes covered by a membrane and oil behind it. Okay, raising buttons in an all-or-noting fashion in predefined positions could still be useful, I guess. But the final flaw, is that the buttons would be visible even when unraised, making it unsuitable for displaying any other type of content there. So basically, you might as well just use physical keys.
Of course it's possible they've got something way better than that, but why wouldn't they show off its full abilities then?
I hope this won't come off as mindless MS bashing, but I'm not sure this is a really good idea. I'm worried that advertisers will see this as a reason to simply ignore the Do Not Track header. They will argue that because it's on by default, some people who do want their "service" may overlook it and unwittingly be excluded. For whatever tiny fraction of the population that is, this is no doubt true. And since IE is bundled with computers, Microsoft is in an especially poor position to argue the point. If it was say Opera, they could easily say that since the feature was publicized, by choosing that browser, people had already made their intentions clear.
Of course out-in tracking would be the ideal, but I'm just not sure trying to force the issue this way is a good move strategically, at least at this stage. And I have to admit it makes me suspect MS is doing this more to look like they care than because they think it's the best way to protect people's privacy.
I somewhat agree. I mean I have no illusion that this case would have been dealt with as swiftly and harshly if the target were a random schmuck like me, but it wasn't innocent "to see if I can" hacking, or even a simple "for the lulz" kind of prank. It sounds like there may have even been a financial motivation.
Still, a year seems excessive. But I think most sentences are really.
Well, only about Aero looking cheesy. On the visual appearance of Metro, a little conflicted. It does look nice and crisp, but also kind of harsh. Of course there are serious usability problems that that outweigh the good or bad or the aesthetic, so I won't be using it anyway.
I wonder what skin they'll be using for traditional desktop applications in Win8. The could probably turn the 95/98 style skin into something very Metro-y with very little effort if the wanted.
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