Posts by theOtherJT 1334 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jun 2013
There have been a couple of x86 phones released - Lenovo K900 was one, I think.
I doubt it'd be easy to install anything but the supplied OS mind.
Edit:
Apparently the Asus Zenfone 6 is x86 as well, and that's much more recent.
No, really... why? I don't see anything to differentiate this from the default one other than in terms of window-dressing.
I'd understand it if they'd made it sort of like the WinPho UI - that's actually different, and if you like that sort of thing you might want one, but I don't see the point of this at all.
The backup system was affected by the attack and thus all the backups were encrypted by the same ransomware as everything else.
Ok, but what the hell was holding the backups? I get that the article said ransomware is becoming increasingly sophisticated, but how sophisticated are we really talking about here?
My nightly backups go to a large ZFS array running on a BSD box. I'm reluctant to believe they're going to have any joy infecting that.
The weekly's go offsite to a huge disk repository running some kind of scale out filesystem on Linux (I'll be honest, they won't let me on site with them, so I don't really know what's in there) and from there the monthly's are laid down on 3 tapes which are stored in 3 different safe locations.
I'm fairly certain whatever this is isn't getting to any of that either.
The only way I can see this happening is if the "backup" is just a NTFS shared folder on an unloved and unpatched Windows box - which might be sufficient to protect a home user from the little things like "My hard disk failed" but isn't appropriate for a business situation, where valuable data is involved surely?
It's not you, this is exactly the point.
The argument that "all packets must be treated equally" is a nice one in some kind of infinite bandwidth utopia, and one I'm sure some people have made, but it's not really the important one.
The argument is about treading the knife edge where an ISP is required to appropriately QoS packets that they get where they're going in a timely fashion when required, VS charging to do so in order to disadvantage potential competitors.
In other words, It's fine to prioritise Skype traffic over email traffic because that has to be delivered on time to maintain a video stream, the email can get there when it gets there. That's not breaching net neutrality, that's just doing their job.
It's NOT fine to prioritise Skype traffic over Facetime traffic* because Microsoft have paid you to and Apple haven't. This is a violation of net neutrality because it's an abuse of the ISP's position in the market.
*Arbitrary example - I'm not suggesting that either Apple or Microsoft do this, although for all I know they might.
What Steam is doing is to somewhat increase the number of Linux games, usually with worse performance and less features than the Windows versions, especially lying about whether games work with controller support.
I've actually seen far better perf for Source engine stuff on Linux with OpenGL than on Windows with DirectX. Other games seem to be more of a toss up. Borderlands seems to be about a wash, no real improvement either way. Terraria (hardly a graphical powerhouse) runs a bit less well on Linux, but it looks like the Linux port is pretty much just a baked in wine anyway - probably to be expected of a game that was originally written in XNA.
Anyway, I'm not a die-hard Linux fan - it's horses for courses as far as I'm concerned - but given how far Steam has pulled the Linux gaming platform in such a short time I'm far from disappointed, I'm actually very impressed. No, it's not a like for like match for Windows, but then the Windows version of Steam has nearly a decade's worth of head start, so I wouldn't really expect parity this early on.
I used to have a dell phone like that.*
It was a pain in the ass to type on. If they've gone to all the trouble of including a little sliding keyboard - which I'm all for! - why not make it open in the more useful direction? Or have they gone the current route of making the thing so enormous that if they did that you wouldn't be able to reach anything in the TGV YHB columns with your thumbs?
*Back before they ruined Windows Phone :(
Or wasn't that considered terribly important?
With no sights and a barrel length of what, an inch? I see that hitting something sort of "over there... ish" When you add in the fact that the people it's marketed to are likely not to have the steadiest of hands I foresee the words "Innocent bystander" turning up a lot in news reports related to this thing should they actually sell any...
Not sure why someone would downvote that.
It's like saying "The finance department is the most important part of the business! Without the finance department, none of the staff would get their paycheques, none of the orders for our product would get processed, and none of our suppliers would get paid!"
I mean, sure, you're going to notice pretty fucking quickly if finance all pack up and go on strike, but that doesn't change the fact that they are there to facilitate the normal function of the business rather than to BE the business.
So, this is that "Perpetual development" we keep hearing so much about.
Possibly I'm showing my age here, but I'm pretty sure that in the past releasing things with lots of missing features and bugs in them and then patching them after the fact was called a "Beta" program, and not something to be done as a matter of course to all your paying customers.
To just go back to defining it in terms of water/temperature/volume - seeing as we already have nice clean definitions for temperature and volume? I mean, that's the nice thing about the metric system. The units relate to one another.
Either you stop breaking the law or you cease trading.
Yes, but when the business is big enough the line between law and "corporate practice" can get remarkably blurry. There's going to be a lot of very large businesses who are extremely worried that this might harm their bottom line, and as such they'll be pushing to get the law changed to minimise the damage, and whose law do they think they'll have a better chance of changing? The EU's or the Americans?
Yeah, this is where I see this falling over badly - Human drivers are bad at this as it is.
Case in point: On Sunday Oxford City Council, in its infinite wisdom, closed one of the major arterial roads into the city so that there could be a half marathon run along it. They diverted the traffic onto a small residential side street that runs parallel to this road. This street, also in their infinite wisdom, they filled with single-lane constriction points every 150 yards or so in order to "Slow traffic" a few years back. As it's residential, people are also permitted to park on it for most of its length.
Imagine what happens when a queue of traffic going in one direction hits a queue of traffic trying to go in the other direction on a road like that. All it takes is for one person to pull out into that little constriction without there being room for them to leave it again on the other side and the whole thing locks solid.
I was stuck in this for two hours, and had to get out of my car several times and go direct traffic - and I was by no means the only one doing that - because people kept trying to move into spaces that were gone by the time they got there.* The only way out was for chains of people - sometimes 10 cars long - to back up.
Now, in a perfect world with only driverless cars then this presumably would be preventable because they could all negotiate with one another and you wouldn't get that one dick head in an XC90 that decided everything was taking too long and repeatedly tried to force his stupid oversized piece of crap into places where anyone with eyesight could tell it wasn't going to fit and nearly taking people's mirrors off!**
The answer "That problem will go away once driverless cars are in the majority" or "Driverless cars will use telemetry from other cars" isn't good enough. It's like the bit where you open the box with the number 4 wrench (included in the box!) Until there is some critical mass of the things out there feeding one another data it just won't work.
Don't think I'm against the technology, but this is a hard problem, and there's a lot of handwaving when it's raised. Until someone has a very clear plan about how to get from where we are now to where we want to be, it's going to be hard to sell the things.
*And if the people organizing this wonderful public disruption had any brains they'd have seen this coming and sent some traffic police down there to do this professionally, but predictably, they didn't.
**Sorry, that's a rant, but that one guy was probably responsible for 45 wasted minutes on what should have been a 10 minute drive home
I think you've missed the point I'm making here.
Zimmermann here seems to be perplexed why people won't pay him for his phone when it clearly provides something they want, and that he (and his team) have obviously put a lot of valuable effort into creating it.
Now, I applaud his work, and I do value it - but I still object to paying for the product. I object, not because the product is bad (I presume - I don't have one, so I can't say for sure) or that I don't think the people who produced it deserve to be compensated for their work. I object to the fact that the product exists at all. It shouldn't be required.
I don't want to have to buy back my privacy. I want it to be treated as a basic right which will be protected by the state I live in - just like Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. I expect the state to protect me from people who might try and take those things from me. I expect them to protect my privacy with the same level of dedication, not actively work to subvert it.
Consumers have this weird notion that they want all of this privacy, but they don't want to pay for it.
Yeah, but I also have this weird notion that I don't want dog shit in my dinner, but I don't expect to pay to have it removed, I expect it not to be there in the first place.
Privacy isn't something that we should have to pay for. It's something we should expect to get for free because what privacy is is a lack of something. It's the absence of intrusion. The invasion of our privacy, that's something that's being done to us against our will and it grates somewhat to have to pay to push back against it.
It's like paying for a private security company to guard your house because the nation you live in is a bit of a shit hole and the police aren't any good - only in this case it's probably people working for the nation you live in you're trying to keep out, which makes it doubly stupid. Having to pay for privacy is the sign of a broken system, and whilst I might have to accept that's the way it is at the moment, I certainly don't have to like it.
and more importantly, who will be conducting them? Is this going to be more "Here you go regulatory body. We've tested our new cars and they're all jolly good! No need to check them yourselves!" like the current lot is?
I'm certainly not opposed to stricter emissions rules - especially with regards to the kind of sooty crap that makes it so unpleasant to breathe in city traffic these days - but they are going to have to think quite carefully about how these tests are devised or they'll just end up being either more meaningless advertising numbers that don't relate to reality, or - possibly worse - political numbers that aren't POSSIBLE to relate to reality.
I'd be perfectly happy with that assuming they implement PROPER multi-user support where user environments are effectively isolated from one another - none of this "roaming profiles" nonsense where your files get shotgunned all over the filesystem.
TBH tho, I'm thinking more of a situation where work pays for my phone and my desktop as the same device. I already have to carry a work phone, so that would be pretty tempting. Dual-sim it and if they can do decent isolation like I said above, then that would be great, I can stop carrying two phones around.
On the other hand, the idea of Microsoft successfully designing a system that doesn't require root to perform basic software installs and is capable of keeping userdata somewhere where ONLY that user can read it seems... hopeful, to say the least.
Look, I love the idea of having a phone in my pocket that when I walk into my office negotiates with the monitors, mouse and keyboard in there and starts acting like a desktop.
I love the idea of that same phone doing that same trick when I get home and being a media centre.
I really love the idea of it being able to do it when I get in the car, and provide all the smarts for my sat-nav, and my stereo.
That all sounds fantastic.
But it doesn't bloody work, does it? They've gotten carried away and tried to do all this before it was in any way ready. Baby steps, Microsoft. Baby. Fucking. Steps. "One Windows" is only useful to me when it _is_ ONE Windows. Same code, same device, all uses. You're not there. You're not even nearly there. What we have now is "One Windows, but only 60% of the time" which is just really annoying because to get that 60% of the time, you've made all the rest of the time a little bit less good than it was before.
And all that is before we start getting into the "Trust" issue. How many different programming paradigms have Microsoft wanted us to use over the last decade? I've lost count. Just when you think you're getting the hang of whatever the language/IDE du jour is, they bloody change it, and you know what? You know what we all see coming? Intel. That's what.
We pour a ton of effort into getting code to work nicely on ARM Windows, which I don't know _anyone_ who really believes that'll be as easy as "Take existing code, press the 'ARM' button in visual studio compiler" for anything but the most trivial cases, and in another 3 or 4 years we'll be looking at X86 in mobile devices.
The power efficiency gains Intel has pulled off in the last decade are seriously impressive, and I for one am absolutely certain that when it comes to making perfect cross compatibility across their software, and simply changing their hardware supplier once it becomes economically viable to do so, Microsoft will prefer to change supplier, and we'll all get left in the lurch again.
Soo... they've cleaned up the scroll bars. That's... nice, I guess. The old ones were a bit annoying, but I so rarely actually see a GUI on any of my Linux boxen I never really cared.
Anyone had any really solid experience with how the 15.x releases behave under the hood compared to the 14.x ones? The migration to systemd, for example - What did it break? What did it fix (I mean - it must have improved _something_ right?) Are there any other major changes lurking under the surface ready to bite you when you try and migrate?
We'll be heading to 16.04 from 14.04 in what's a relatively short timespan now, and the [odd-number].10 version is where we start hunting for things that are going to fuck us next May.
...is the question I want answered. I mean, are we talking someone else's beard here, or is this a twofor where you get to "improve" your beard and get rid of that unsightly back hair?
Failing that, can they transplant the annoying hair on my face that I don't want to fill in for the hair rapidly evacuating the top of my head that I do?
Can you not enforce this through creative use of firewall rules or GPO?
Sadly, no, we can't. Well, we could, but when we tried it caused a whole ton of people to throw a fit and force us to back down. These things can generate "reports"* and frequently contained within the data they're drawing from when they generate these "reports" are links to random other websites that have to be trawled and included.
The whole thing is a fucking mess.
*Hideous ugly bundles of raw HTML banged inside a zip file
In offices like ours all around the country - and I would imagine the world.
We have a pair of "web" apps that we need to run. They cost a fortune, there's no timetable for replacing them, and because they were written by complete cowboys in the first place they don't work on anything other than IE, so we're stuck with it.
We've tried to convince our users that IE should be used ONLY for access to these apps, and that they should use Chrome or Firefox for web browsing, but given the technical knowledge of most of our users (possibly somewhere in the root -1 area) it just doesn't go in.
What gets worse though is the once awesome email client on Windows Phone (yeah, I did say that) has been neutered and turned into an Accompli-look-alike as well.
See, this is what I mean. There's no bloody excuse for this. It's just shoddy management being allowed to ruin things that worked in order to chase today's fad design language.
I just don't get the impression that MS know what they're doing at the moment.
Skype. RDP. Exchange - why are these all not glowing perfect examples of why WindowsPhone is better than any other mobile OS? There's just no excuse for that. It's Microsoft's platform. They're Microsoft's products. If they'd had any brains they'd have made sure that these things worked absolutely flawlessly before they released the last version of WinPho, but they didn't. I'm starting to wonder if they've forgotten how.
If you can't get your own products working on your own platform, then why should anyone else bother?
You went and did it, didn't you?
I suppose I see why, but damnit guys, I wanted a phone WITHOUT Android on it. I _hate_ Android.
/sigh. First WebOS sinks, then Microsoft ruin WinPho, and now this... I'm fed up with feeding my life to the bloody chocolate factory, you were my last hope!
"Bosch should never have written cheatware in the first place... Give me any good reason why you need such software in testing?"
You need it because otherwise the car would have a massive panic and try and turn itself off.
The engine management / stability control / abs etc. are all linked these days. Imagine a situation where the car is on a road and the front wheels are turning, the back wheels are stationary, and the air intake pressure has dropped through the floor. It's clearly having some kind of MASSIVE accident, and the safety systems built into the thing are going to freak out and try and cut the engine off.
As I understand it BOSCH wrote this stuff so that in that situation the ECU goes "No, it's ok, you're on a test rig. Don't engage the ABS. Don't kill the engine. You should enact the following changes to the engine management to make up for the change in manifold pressure in order to keep running normally."
They then supplied VW with a note to the effect that since it was now going to have to handle things like preferred combustion temperature and fuel air mix according to some pre-set rules rather than relying on the sensor data on the rest of the engine, you need to tune those rules very carefully to give an accurate representation of what the car would do if it was actually on a road.
At that point someone went "Hmmmm... so what you're saying is that when the car detects that it's on a test rig, we can program the engine to run whatever emissions and power profile we want? Interesting..." and the rest is history.
"Under the safe harbor framework, America promises to do exactly that, and respect Europeans' privacy. That agreement is being renegotiated as you read this."
Yeah, and I wish I believed that would change anything.
You remember the other week there was a most amusing story about a pig's head? Boy, didn't that go away fast! No one wanted anyone printing anything about that, no sir, because no one wanted anyone asking awkward questions about what they might have been getting up to during their misspent youth. So it went away.
Good riddance, I suppose. It didn't matter.
This does matter.
But it'll still go away because "renegotiation" has a nasty tendency to mean "necessary theatre to maintain the status quo whilst placating the proles" when everyone at the table has their own pig... sorry, I mean "spying" story to keep quiet. None of the big EU powers are going to put a stop to this, because they're all in the same boat. We know damn well that everyone's spying on everyone else and everything is "legal" just so long as no one asks any questions.
"As soon as folk start talking about compression or de-dupe, they are up to something, and that something is usually a lie."
Absolutely.
"Our product is just as fast as our competitors, and provides the same storage* but only half the cost"
and the * always says "Compressed capacity" which is nonsense if your data is already compressed.
You can get FANTASTIC read/write speed out of big spinning rust ZFS arrays with compression on - I know, we do - but only if what you have is cleanly compressible and doesn't arrive down the network at a speed where you overflow the ability of the server to compress it in time to get it onto the platters in an orderly fashion before the next TXG commit.
A lot, actually.
I have a lot to hide.
I utterly reject this notion that just because my private life isn't criminal that somehow gives people the right to know about it.
Who I have sex with - or not.
What political parties I'm a member of - or not.
What charitable organizations I support - or not.
What religion I'm a member of - or not.
These are all non-criminal behaviours that I feel I have every bloody right to hide from public scrutiny. It's no one's damn business! I don't _care_ if any of those things being public knowledge won't do me any harm, that's not the god damned point!
I never understood why IPv6 didn't just work like this:
(00-FF).(00-FF).C0.A8.00.FE
where any address that only supplied 4 octets would be assumed to have sent 00.00 for the first 2. I mean, how hard is that? You're not going to run that out any time soon and everyone can keep the ones they already have. You could even leave it in decimal notation if you like, it really wouldn't matter any.
It's always seemed to me that IPv6 is determined to solve a bunch of problems we don't have by adding new ones we don't want, which is why no one wants to touch it.
But being filament bulbs, they don't last long.
Does anyone actually have any concrete numbers to back that up? I'm not saying I disagree - maybe I just don't remember very well - but I spent most of the first 20 years of my life without there being such a thing as energy saving bulbs, and I really don't remember having to change them all that often.
I reckon I can count on one hand the number of filament bulbs that have actually failed on me - and at 50p a bulb it wasn't exactly a big deal when they did.
I would be amazed if it wasn't _every_ car manufacturer.
We all know the "quoted" figures are nonsense. No one has ever achieved even close to the MPG or CO2 figures that are in the brochure.
Assuming that they can only quote that nonsense because at some point they were able to "prove" that those figures were achievable, it must have been because they knew the exact conditions of the test and rigged the ECUs to compensate for it.
That's as maybe, but it's still a hack. The old WinPho 7 interface basically never required you to do this, because they very sensibly put all the buttons along the bottom of the screen.
It's like big_D said about the old ... versus the new ≡ menu button placement. I still can't for the life of me work out why they decided to move stuff that by any usability metric was better off where it was.
I wish that was true. Once something becomes "Business critical" you're stuck with it regardless of how bad it is.
We have genuine known problems with $SOFTWARE_A which, if patched, would bork $SOFTWARE_B. We (IT) have brought these problems up with every possible level of management, and the answer has always been "$SOFTWARE_B has to run or we shut down. You are not allowed to fix this." and the problem in $SOFTWARE_A goes unfixed.
Never mind the fact that we know for a fact that what we're doing is dangerous and insecure, never mind that we've demonstrated proof of concept for how someone could utterly fuck us via these vulnerabilities and it's only that no one knows we have them that is keeping us "safe".
Once you have an immovable object somewhere in the chain anything, no matter how awful, will be permitted to make sure that that immovable object stays where it is.
I don't find it at all implausible that Windows As A Service could become a prerequisite for some cruddy piece of 3rd party software that we HAVE to run, and as a dependency we HAVE to run WAAS regardless of what it may or may not be doing without our knowledge or permission.
Time to decide indeed.
I'm worried that the decision is going to be "Productivity trumps privacy" in basically every workplace and people do tend to just stick to what they know.
For what it's worth tho, I have finally gotten pissed off enough to switch to Linux as my primary OS - ok, it's only been a few weeks, but I've not missed Windows at any point so far.
I agree that this applies to any law, but surely the purpose of a law is to encourage behavior we want and discourage behavior we don't want. Moreover, when we create laws I think we acknowledge that with concept that the "punishment fits the crime".
Obviously some laws will be broken by some people, and the effort we put into enforcing them, and the severity of the punishment we assign reflects how likely we think the law is to be flouted and how important it is that it not be.
Copyright law is one that's obviously frequently flouted, but we know that trying to strictly enforce it is a hiding to nothing. It doesn't work. Trying to ramp up the punishment by imposing utterly ridiculous fines as a deterrent also doesn't work - and not for lack of trying.
I used the word "Route" loosely, which probably wasn't the best idea given that so many people on here do know how to use it strictly. I meant more along the lines of the old Irish* joke - How do I get to Dublin? Ach, you can't get there from here - where the "here" becomes the relevant point.
From where you are right now, there's no nice clean route to get to where you want to be because the first stop is going to be your ISP who will deliberately sabotage any attempt by you to go where they've been told to stop you. So we make all the the ISPs block the IP of the offending site/service at their end, and get the DNS providers to hijack requests for it to send you to the "Who's a naughty boy then?" page - this is already widely done.
...and is already widely pointless, since you just proxy around it. So if we want to stop that then we need to start trying to prevent proxying. And then we need to snoop on all the SSH tunnels to places that aren't on our christmas card list that people might try and use to escape from the copy-protection garden.
It all gets very complicated and I don't see it taking too long before it becomes a massive problem to implement without doing massive collateral damage and not worth all the bother - which brings me back to enforcing the law.
It'd be insane to deal with the fact that almost everyone speeds on the motorway by closing all the roads or by taking everyone's driving licences away. The roads are there for a reason - people need them. We can put cameras up and fine people enough to bankrupt them I suppose, which would probably put an end to speeding pretty quickly, but only after quite a lot of people were caught and ruined. You could probably argue that they knew the law and therefore deserved it, but the total loss of productivity for bankrupting everyone doing 80 instead of 70 wouldn't be worth it - and if it turned out that producing and maintaining that network of cameras cost more than the losses due to speeding** then that too would be a silly thing to bother doing.
What I'm saying is that if we're going to try and "strictly enforce" copyright law, we're going to fail, and fail in a way that is worse than not enforcing it at all. That doesn't necessarily generalize to all illegal activity on the internet because the effort required to achieve an useful reduction is relative to the scale of the problem - and copyright infringement is a really BIG problem at the moment - at least in terms of the number of people doing it.
* Also heard version of this attributed to Australian, Scottish and Welsh - but I reckon it stands.
** Doubly controversial - sometimes speeding leads to accidents in which people die, and loss of life is occasionally marked as one of those "infinitely bad, no dollar value can apply" type issues.
Forget Youtube for a moment. Sure it's the dominant player, sure it's the 800lb gorilla, but think more generally for a second. Lets suppose we succeed in forcing Google to take things down, and make sure that they never come back up again on its service. Then what?
Google loses traffic, advertisers go elsewhere and someone else starts a video sharing service hosting all that tasty content. The only reason they wouldn't is if they were subject to the same laws, but then all we have is a case where we can legislate all the TakeDown=>StayDown we like and it just means TakeDown=>ComeBackUpInRussia*
As long as there's somewhere that's prepared to host this stuff, then it comes back up, end of. That's how the internet works. It doesn't care about political or geographical boundaries. Anyone can attach a machine to it and put what the hell they like on there.
If we really don't like that, then we have to start talking about "breaking the internet" again, and deliberately making things that are technically working as designed unroutable - which is rather a slippery slope to go standing on.
So, really we're asking:
"Is it worth breaking rights-holders business model, potentially to the point of driving them out of business entirely, in order to preserve the operation of the internet as designed?"
For what it's worth I think that's a good trade, but as a raging anti-censorship all-speech-should-be-free-speech and damn the consequences type I imagine there's lots of perfectly sensible people who won't agree with me. That said, I don't think it's terribly controversial to suggest that when there's really no legal recourse (because there's no possible way to enforce it internationally) then we're back looking at technical recourse such as blacklisting - and those have a bit of a habit of being abused, so this needs to be taken both very seriously and very carefully.
* Or elsewhere, for that matter.
I've met a couple of Apple ones over my years doing IT support, but only via email and on the RT system. They become regular people when you go and talk to them about whatever their problem is in person. I think it's an extension of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory
Windows Phone feels so much like an unmanaged project - first in a good way, then in a bad way.
It's like Phone 7 started out as one of those skunkworks jobs that springs fully formed from the minds of a very small group of people. Yes, it had quite a lot of rough edges and didn't feel quite "finished" but you could see what they were going for, and what they were going for was GOOD. All it needs is a few point updates to get to 7.3.11.23.1 or whatever arcane number it ends up at and it'll be brilliant.
But no. Someone had to try and "manage" it.
PHB style.
"Can you just add this?"
"Android has that, we should have that."
"Apple did this - why aren't we doing this? We should do this."
So by the time Phone 8 came along it had all gotten into a bit of a mess, and in the best traditions of drive-by management, having completely ruined it whoever was supposedly running the show then fucks off and leaves it in the lurch. All the engineers working on it become annoyed with each other, because their teams have been instructed to pull in different directions and everyone's had a bit of a falling out, and so what do we get?
Windows (phone) 10.
Phone 10 really does feel like it's been abandoned by it's parents and with no one in charge any more everyone went and did their own thing. Some of them set off on a "We'll keep doing the last thing we were told to" trajectory, some of them on a "Thank god that's over, I want to try new things" sort of path, and some more on "Well, let's just put it back the way it was" and now we get an even BIGGER mess. Not only is it totally incoherent, but it's also started to get worryingly buggy because it's been messed around with in too many different directions at once and a whole bunch of "doesn't play well with others" has happened to various bits of the UI.
I hope you're happy, Microsoft.
You had a great product, and you blew it.
So, I own 2 vehicles: a small sports car, and a motorbike. If I had somewhere to keep it I'd have a large estate car too - and that one, I'd really like it if that could drive for me, that would be very handy, because large estates are not as a rule interesting to drive, and you go places in them that don't involve a lot of exciting roads. To the super market perhaps. Or IKEA.
I get the appeal of a self driving car, really, I do. I'm just afraid with all the safety legislation, emissions regulations, sky high insurance prices and every other horrible thing that seems to come with motor vehicle ownership in the 21st century I'm going to get forced to have one eventually, whether I want one or not, and in very short order the motorbike and the pretty little drop-top are going to get taken away.
Everyone wants the world to be safe, so I can't even really blame all the people involved in whatever collective decisions ultimately lead to the demise of the vehicle you drive yourself, but it feels like should that day ever come we'll have taken a little bit of joy out of the world. One more tiny step along the road to a world where everyone's perfectly safe but no one is having any fun.
See this interview with Gabe Newel.
In the sphere of digital leisure delivery (seems to me that games and books should probably work in about the same way) you get perfectly elastic pricing until you REALLY drop the price, then something a bit weird happens.
Valve were in the perfect position to work this out seeing as they owned both the original product and the delivery channel so they could experiment to their hearts content.
