* Posts by Updraft102

1740 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2015

Ubuntu 23.04 welcomes three more flavors, but hamburger menus leave a bad taste

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Re: Ubuntu Cinnamon is better looking than Kubuntu

How a given DE looks out of the box is not a big concern of mine. I am not going to leave it like that, so while it would be nice to reduce the configuration burden on me by having sensible defaults, the main concern is still whether I can use the given UI options to get the UI into a configuration I like at all (without having to open up a text editor). Only KDE has gotten me close to that point.

I don't care about "bling," and I have all that stuff turned off. I like my UI rather plain, but in a very specific way. I am one of those who consider Windows 2k to be pretty much the ideal UI, and as such it is my basic blueprint when configuring a new Linux install. It's not about eye candy, but about the way information and UI elements are laid out and positioned. One very topical example would be a complete lack of hamburger menus. The horizontal menu bar has yet to be bested in terms of usability and information scent, and I insist upon it. The hamburger is not good enough, and neither is the Microsoftian Ribbon.

KDE gets me closer to being able to achieve my desired setup without opening a text editor than any other DE I tried. There are no transparency effects, wobbly windows, or any other "wacky" effects.

In the world of DEs, to me, there are two: KDE, and everything else. Windows is included in the latter.

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"In the opinion of this jaded old vulture, the entire hamburger menu idea was a bad one in the first place, and they should have stayed on mobile phones – not that they're good UI even there."

A Proven fact.

No more feature updates for Windows 10 – current version is final

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Re: "The Last Version of WIndows"

Yeah... the article author hints that it may have been a misunderstanding, as that is what Microsoft much later claimed as they attempted to retcon their original lore, but it was not a misunderstanding. A MS spokesperson claimed it was the last version ever, a statement that went viral and was widely cited by the computing public for years, and for all that time, MS did not contradict or amend it. That makes this the official stated policy of Microsoft for all those years.

Back in the early days of Windows as a Disservice, the support roadmap only listed the support period for the currently existing builds. Each new build was essentially a new version of Windows, with "Windows 10" serving as a platform name more than a specific product within that platform. I remember this, as I was regularly referring people to that page on microsoft.com when I was arguing against WaaS. Each time I cited the policy that I knew quite well (having mentioned it many times), I would go back and check the page to make sure my understanding was still correct... and one day, a conventional Windows roadmap was there, listing a 2025 EOL date for Windows 10 as a whole, rather than just listing the EOL dates for various feature releases.

They have tried to explain away the "last version ever" as one "rogue" employee posting on the company blog, but that does not cut it. If the company did not retract the statement, it stands as a statement from Microsoft, and the "you misunderstood" bit does not work when for years they had no EOL date for Windows 10 listed (which is what you would expect if 10 was "the last Windows ever."

Sick of GNOME, Snap and Flatpak? You might like Linux Lite, but beware rough edges

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"That's a legitimate choice: kernel 5.15 is a LTS kernel and it's still getting updated, whereas 5.19 reached its end of life back in October."

They are both being updated. Kernel 5.19 reached the end of its updates on the mainline, but Ubuntu (like most distros) does not ship the pure mainline version in any of their releases anyway. The Ubuntu-ized version of 5.19 is still current, with the latest update being one month ago (five months after October).

Google halts purge of legacy ad blockers and other Chrome Extensions, again

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"Basically, the existing extension platform, referred to as Manifest V2, was easily abused and allowed developers to create extensions that hogged resources interfered with Google's surveillance capitalism business model.

Edinburgh Uni finds extra £8M for vendors after troubled ERP go-live

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I was not aware erotic role play was so popular!

Lenovo Thinkpad X13s: The stealth Arm-powered laptop

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16:10 != 1920x1080

Privacy fail: Pictures cropped, redacted by Google Pixel phones can be recovered

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Surely no person would be so foolish, in this day and age, to run any Google-branded anything... would they?

Microsoft and GM deal means your next car might talk, lie, gaslight and manipulate you

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Re: The Inexorable March of Progress

Many gen-Xers do that.

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Re: The Inexorable March of Progress

The man that became Michael Knight was not a billionaire. He was the guy they picked to be their operative, that's all. He was officially dead in his former life, if I remember correctly. Been a long time.

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I would not tolerate a car that had any kind of connectivity with the outside world/internet. That would have to be disabled! The car needs to be airgapped, and have no data logging capacity, nor any sensors that could capture information that is not needed for the immediate operation of the vehicle.

My vehicle's ECU can sense vehicle speed, engine RPM, mass airflow rate, air temp, coolant temp, barometric pressure, EGR valve position, throttle position, exhaust gas oxygen... I think that's it. I may be forgetting one or two, but if so, they are all related to the task of operating the engine. It has no idea about anything else. Its job is only to determine the fuel injector duty cycle, spark advance, and intake air bypass to control the idle. Oh, and at WOT, it turns off the A/C compressor. Nothing more, nothing less.

To me this is the best of all worlds... electronic enough to get better gas mileage and have better driveability than a carbed car, but primitive enough that it can't be used to datamine me.

How to get the latest Linux kernel on your Ubuntu box

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"At least one Ubuntu remix, Tuxedo OS, already has it."

KDE Neon also.

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No need for PPAs or third party tools

Just use the OEM kernel in the regular Ubuntu (updates) repo. No need to add any PPA or use any third party installer (though I do use Mainline for testing sometimes too, nothing wrong with it!).

Look for linux-oem-22.04c in the Jammy repo. The Ubuntu OEM kernel is what my Dell XPS 13 "Developer's Edition" came with preinstalled (though with focal). It's just an Ubuntu kernel (with the usual Ubuntu modifications, AFAIK) based on a newer mainline kernel, perhaps with some vendor-specific modules (for various vendors) added by Ubuntu before the modules are able to be upstreamed. If you are not using a device that matches those modules, they are irrelevant to you anyway, and what you are left with is a newer Ubuntu kernel.

Ford seeks patent for cars that ditch you if payments missed

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Re: What about the buyers?

"But it's frightening the amount of data that Ford (and I guess the other manufacturers) collect and store about you."

Not mine. It has no data logging except for two digit trouble codes, and you have to have access to the underhood connector to read them. The car has no GPS receiver, so it has no idea where it is, and it has no other sensors that are unrelated to engine stuff that would have any use to data-slurping spy companies. There is no means to flash the firmware, with the model number of the ECU having exactly one program (different programs would mean different models), and the ECU has been using the same program for over 30 years and a quarter million miles (original unrebuilt engine, still works very well!). And it truly is only an ECU... it controls only the injector pulse timing and duty cycle, the spark advance, the idle air bypass, and that's it.

I don't need or want any more than this. There are certainly some nice things about newer cars, but messing up the ideal balance my car now has between EFI drivability and old-car autonomy from Skynet would not be something I would take lightly. I'd have to have some mitigations against that stuff.

"My only hope is that it has a 2G or 3G SIM card as those systems are getting shut down within the next year or so."

If it has one of those, could you not just remove it? Or better yet, remove the connection to the antenna. Full airgap.

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Re: What about the buyers?

If the car's behavior can be changed by a simple firmware update, one that requires in-person access to its OBD II port, that's bad enough. The car could be updated without your knowledge or consent any time you have it in for servicing.

If the car's behavior can be changed by an OTA firmware update, where it could be done while the car is at home in your garage, without you even knowing about it, that's much worse.

If someone other than me has the technical ability (whether or not they choose to use it being a separate issue) to change the behavior of an item I own without me giving the go-ahead order (for that update specifically, not just in the "you agreed to the EULA, and it says we can do anything we want" sense), then I am not interested in that item.

Microsoft begs you not to ditch Edge on Google's own Chrome download page

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Re: When a product is better, people will naturally switch to it

It actually wasn't better. The tape run times were too short, and Sony's licensing was too onerous. VHS was the better product. It's a common trope that Betamax was the better product that lost, but it wasn't.

Sick of smudges on your car's enormo touchscreen? GM patents potential cure

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How about solving it by not having a touchscreen in a car at all?

If you can't operate it by feel, replace it with something that can.

Startup Mycroft AI declares it will fight 'patent troll' tooth and nail after its Linux voice-assistant attracts lawsuit

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Verbot!

I had one of those. Seldom worked.

China to stop certifying fax machines, ISDN and frame relay kit

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I would not willingly give up my POTS land line. I don't want to downgrade to cellular for that.

Scientists conclude cats only have three personalities after YouTube clip binge

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Why I eyes ya.

It's been 230 years since British pirates robbed the US of the metric system

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"A more down-to-earth example came in 1983 with the Air Canada "Gimli Glider" incident, where pilots of a Boeing 767 underestimated the amount of fuel they needed,,,"

The ground crew member was not aware that the fuel order was in kilograms on the new 767, as everything had been done in pounds from the very beginnings of aviation. He added the amount of fuel in pounds instead of the requested kg. Had Boeing not switched to metric measures for the 757 and 767s, the fuel order would have been in pounds like he was used to, and there would have been no issue. That seems to be an argument for sticking with what is familiar and established, because accidents happen when there is ambiguity in units. Can't disagree there <g>

FWIW, in aviation, altitudes are in feet, distances in nautical miles, and speeds in knots (nautical mph). This is the international standard.

The US didn't "lose" its manufacturing base because we use the imperial system. It's because we (like the rest of the first world) gave it up and outsourced everything to Asia, where it is much cheaper to make things. We are perfectly capable of using metric units if the customer wants that. American cars use metric fasteners these days, I am told. Our system of weights and measures is total non-factor there.

"With Celsius water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100 at ground level, compared to 32 and 212 for Fahrenheit. "

And?

Fahrenheit is not based on water. So what?

Once you know the constants, it doesn't matter if they are 212 or 100... the point is, you know them.

There are a lot more substances out there in the world than water. All of them will have boiling and melting points that do not line up evenly with lots of zeroes.

Kelvins don't line up so perfectly with water either. 273.15 K freezing, 373.15 K boiling.

Gonna run System Restore in Windows 11? Microsoft says some of its apps won't

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I never found System Restore to be all that reliable in my Windows days. I used their EFS, encrypting file system, and it gave system restore all kinds of fits.

If you want to see an example of a reliable system restore utility, try Timeshift in Linux. It is a frontend for rsync or btrfs, modeled after Apple Time Machine, and it just works fantastically well... the way I had wished System Restore worked back in the dark ages of MS.

Microsoft axes 10,000, already breaking bad news to staff

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Re: Microsoft will lay off 10,000 people, is already notifying some today

That would be difficult to do, which I guess is why they need to "raise the bar." If they do that, they may just be able to get the quality even lower.

Nearly 300 MSI motherboards will run any old code in Secure Boot, no questions asked

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These are boards intended for system builders, who tend to be enthusiasts that want secure boot off anyway.

This setting is equivalent to secure boot in audit mode on some branded PCs, like Dells. It is a bit of a dirty trick to change someone's setting when you're just doing an update, but that shouldn't bother the people running Windows anymore. Should be used to it by now!

The biggest thing is that people who think they have a handle on their security picture actually won't. Once they know of the issue, they can fix it.

I was reasonable to ask to WFH in early days of COVID, says fired engineer

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It may have been reasonable to ask, but if the answer is no, you can't just pretend that it was 'yes' and go on as if it was.

Unix is dead. Long live Unix!

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Re: Are you ok?

Or, arguably, it became untrue when the definition of Unix changed to no longer be derived from the original Unix code, which presumably was the definition Mr. Torvalds was using at the time he said Linux was not Unix.

Of course U2 is one of Bill Gates' favorite bands

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Re: Is/Are

U2 is a band. That is singular.

U2 are not plural!

Linux Foundation, IBM, Cisco and others back ‘Inclusive Naming Initiative’ to change nasty tech terms

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Master Password

Mozilla renamed the "master password" to the "primary password," but they then captioned the button for the "primary password" with "Formerly known as the master password," since, you know, it was an established term and people needed to know what the heck a "primary password" was. The term "master password" is still there on the settings page!

You know, you would think these software devs have run out of actual software-related issues if they are worrying about stuff like this. Words have many meanings depending on context... and in the context of a "blacklist," no one is thinking that it means black people, or a black tie event, or being in the black financially. Nor does a whitelist evoke the white flag of surrender or "whitebread" (meaning exceptionally unremarkable and boring). The connotations work in the other direction too!

Context matters. How many perfectly good words are we suppose to banish from the language because one of the meanings of the word can be interpreted in a way that references history we wish had not happened? Wouldn't it be better to reclaim those words than to abandon them to the more negative bits of our memories?

NASA overspent $15m on Oracle software because it was afraid an audit could cost more

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Re: Wow!

The rest of us should take advice from Joshua.

"A strange game.

The only winning move is not to play."

Version 5 of the Endless OS enters testing

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"Apt, like every other conventional package manager, has no "undo" function. You can't go back to where you were."

Well, no, not with Apt. For "undo" of some kind of mishap, you use something like Timeshift (which is integrated with the Mint updater, so if you use that distro, it makes it really easy). In the unlikely event of an update mishap, it's very quick and easy to undo to before the update. It's just a frontend for rsync or btrfs, but it works well.

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Re: Looks like Windows 11

Can you please let Mozilla know all of this? They need to read this, I think.

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There is no such thing as a "dated" UI element or a "modern" one. There's only "it works" or "it doesn'r work." Fashion should not play a role here. The reason the "dated" taskbar has stuck around so long in Windows is that it works.

The Windows 11 version is only really different in that it moves the start button to the center where it violates Fitts law and moves around to make it harder to find,.. both moves in the wrong direction. Once you fix those errors, it's like the one in Windows 10... but that one can be configured with small icons to be a single-high bar rather than a double-high, which I have read cannot be done with 11. Step in the wrong direction again.

There is no need for dual bars, top and bottom. Widescreen displays already have limited vertical space, so why not waste more of it using two bars to do the work that one can do?

This is the end, Windows 7 and 8 friends: Microsoft drops support this week

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Re: Linux obviously!

I installed Linux in a dual-boot setup alongside Windows 7 in 2015 on my main PC, after the first Win 10 feature update came along. I had foolishly expected MS to listen to criticism and improve the product as they had with previous Windows versions, but with "Threshold 2," aka 1511, I saw that none of the egregious issues I had with 10 had been fixed (because they were not bugs, they were features... that benefit Microsoft).

I even upgraded to 8.1 when I realized that I could de-stupidize it to a very large degree. The idea was to get more time to gradually move to a full Linux setup. Turns out, though, that I did not need it. One day I realized I had not booted Windows in several weeks, and that I had no real need for it anymore. It had happened, almost without me being aware of it.

I kept Windows on for a while, on that and on my laptops, but in time I removed it from each of them, as it was just taking up space.

For those rare times that I do need Windows, and WINE/Proton will not do, I have Windows in a VM. Keeping in its little cage tames it... it can try to hold my PC hostage with update demands or the like, but I can just shut it down from the VM software, giving it no choice, and starting from the same snapshot again the next time I need it. It's kinda cute, trying to control my PC, when it's not even really a PC it is running on.

The only time I have needed bare-metal Windows since then is when the PC manufacturer releases some firmware update for one of the devices within the unit. I've had a couple of touchpad updates, and even one LCD panel update (to address a flicker that the Dell XPS 9310 used to have when on battery power). For that I used "Win2USB" to create a Windows to Go installation using a consumer Win 10 ISO (normally Windows to Go is an enterprise feature). I have an external USB 3.2 housing for a NVMe SSD, and I have a bunch of spare (small) SSDs that I can use for that. Boot Windows, do the update, get on with life in non-Windows-land.

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Re: Windows 10 is not a problem

Win 7 was extended only for people who bought the extended support.

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Re: Windows 10 is not a problem

That's out of the box. If you can get it to update with that small bit of storage, it will use up that 10 pretty quickly. Lots of Chromebook-spec laptops with 32 GB of eMMC storage with Windows 10, and they can't update right out of the box (depending on what "feature update" looms at the time of purchase).

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Re: 2023 is the year of the Linux desktop /s

No. You'll find that the OOBE for any distro (other than Arch) includes quite a bit more than that.

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Re: I'm OK with Chrome no longer being supported

My scanner worked as soon as Linux was installed. In Windows, I had to install the driver for this and several other things, but Linux had them all configured the first time I booted it.

Corporations start testing Windows 11 in bigger numbers. Good luck

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Stick it in a VM... much easier for those rare times you need Windows. Anything USB can be passed through directly to the virtual Windows with no bother.

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People loved 95 when it came out. It was a sensation... lining up around the block to buy their copy the first day it was available. It was the first version of Windows that seemed like it really had a reason to be.

I hated the goofy Luna theme on XP... and it took me a couple of minutes to figure out that I could go to the performance settings and disable theming (and not much longer than that to see that I could just disable the theming service). No need to hate it because you don't like the default theme when it is easy to change.

I loathed 10 when I first saw it in June 2015, and that was when I began the move to Linux. Seven years later, I still hate 10, and still would not use it. Haven't tried 11, but from what I read, it's at the very least just as bad as 10, so I will pass on that too. Of course, even if MS lost its mind and made a decent Windows now, I still would not have much use for it.

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Re: it's the GUI, stupid

"I get why they do this - more options complicate the code and make it buggier, harder to test comprehensively and generally harder to maintain."

That is the excuse for every lopped-off feature in any program now. Why not take it to its logical extreme, and delete all the features, and have zero lines of code? It is the ultimate in ease of maintenance. Not very useful, but in the modern era when it is all about making life easier on the maintainers, that's a small price to pay, innit?

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Re: it's the GUI, stupid

"Have you ever considered the possibility that the new system is actually more logical, "

Sure... having a mobile-oriented Settings "app" on a desktop PC that has some of the settings in it, with the rest of them being in the desktop-oriented Control Panel, is *perfectly* logical. Having a half and half UI that is equally unfit for mobiles (which MS abandoned years ago, though you would never know it from their UI!) and for desktops, rather than one designed specifically for the platform upon which it is used, is the height of logic.

Having the thing full of ads, telemetry that can't be fully turned off (even on enterprise editions, where it still blabs about things MS considers "security" issues), and updates you can't control all that much are icing on the cake.

It used to be that when you plugged in a new device for which it does not have a driver, Windows would search for one on the spot from Windows Update if you asked it to. Now it just sends you to Windows Update, where you may or may not get a driver you need, and oh yes, while waiting to see, let's just go ahead and install every other update MS wants you to have too. Hope you weren't planning on using that new thing anytime in the immediate future!

Windows 10 did not start as crap and end up good. It started as crap, is crap now, and will go EOL as crap. Windows 11 started as even crappier, and it will end as crap too. It's Microsoft policy... Windows is crap, by design, and people will use it because MS spent 30 years trying to make sure they have no other choice.

Windows 9x would not work for modern workloads not because its GUI is inadequate, but because the kernel level stuff is a quarter century out of date. The GUI is perfectly fine... it would have evolved over time as the technical underpinnings did the same, but the basic paradigm would be the same.

I have my current desktop set up pretty much as it was with XP. From the moment I first ran XP to the last eleven years on, I had the theming service disabled and the 95-style cascading menu enabled, returning the appearance to Win2k.

My daily driver desktop is more like Win2k than it is like the Win 10 desktop. It has menu bars, title bars, status bars, no ribbon, and a denser layout than the touch oriented bits of 10. The application ("Start") menu has cascading flyouts for the various categories, very much like the one in 95/2k. The System Settings menu is a dead ringer for the old Control Panel, and there is no additional settings "app." It's what the classic UI would have evolved into if MS did not try to reinvent the wheel every so often (the current iteration of which being square like the wheels on a Canadian car in South Park). And it's far and away better than anything Microsoft has made in the last decade.

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"I'm not a huge fan of the return to the Windows 2000 "flat" style UI controls personally..."

Windows 2000 never had flat controls. It had skeuomorphic simulated 3d controls... the opposite of flat.

Dell said to be planning purge of Chinese chips from products by 2024

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There are chips that weren't made in China?

Next-gen Qi2 wireless charging spec seeded by Apple

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Re: 15W charging is "too slow"?

I would like one that fits in my pocket like my 2000s phone (that I used until 2020).

Too big to live, too loved to die: Big Tech's billion dollar curse of the free

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Can't be monetized?

"Amazon is burning billions on Alexa because voice assistants need massive infrastructure but can't be monetized."

Monthly subscription fee, like any other service that requires massive infrastructure.That's the way they've been doing it for ages.

Windows 11 still not winning the OS popularity contest

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Win ME had the Windows 2000 UI, which to me is the high water mark as far as Windows versions go. I always turned off the theming service in XP back in the day, along with all the other settings, to bring it back.

Eat up, Windows 11 users – this is your last non-security preview update for the year

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Re: WINDOWS 11 is NOT ready for main streams use....

Sorry Microsoft BUT Win11 is a failure.

So was Windows 10. Widely despised, enough to where there was a group of "Never 10" people who did all they could to block the "up"grade.

Microsoft faffed around with different knobs and levers to give people the impression of having more control, even though the things they wanted, the things that led them to declare they would never accept 10 were still not present.

More and more, people gave in. They told themselves that 10 had improved enough to retract their "never 10" vows, but if you look at the reasons they gave for why they were avoiding 10, it becomes quite clear that most of these things have not improved, and in some cases they have gotten worse (like the eventual push toward mandatory Microsoft accounts). It's still full of ads, monetization, telemetry, updates you don't control, and the UI is still a confused mess of half-PC and half-phone that does not suit either of them particularly well.

So now 10 is somehow "good" despite all the things that people hated about it still being key "features," and Windows 11 has taken the title as the latest iteration of The Worst Windows Ever. It's just like Windows 10 was seven years ago. MS knows they can steadily grind away at people's resolve and let their monopoly do the work for them.

Eventually, people will tire of resisting, and they will tell themselves that 11 has gotten so much better (though the stream of relatively meaningless improvements that smooth out the rough edges MS deliberately created so they could "fix" them) that it is now worth using, and they will accept the turd once again, with their expectations of what an OS should do for (not to) its users lowered commensurately (again).

If people don't get the point, MS will introduce an even worse Windows 12. It will be so awful that people who try it out will run back to the "good" Windows 11, and they will convince themselves that the relative goodness of 11 means that it actually is good in an absolute sense, and they will again give in and accept garbage.

The cycle keeps repeating.

If Apple's environmental rhetoric is meaningful, Macs and iPads should converge

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Trying to chase that elusive "one OS to rule them all" has been less than a roaring success on Windows. They have the monopoly power to shove their inferior crap down everyone's throat, but that's another issue.

It's tempting to see a mobile device (which primarily or exclusively uses a touchscreen for input) and a traditional "desktop" PC (meaning any device that primarily or exclusively uses a mouse and keyboard for input, including regular laptops) as being nearly the same thing, but it hasn't worked in practice.

The Windows UIs since 8 have tried to split the difference, and they have failed. Both of them are a weird admixture of a regular Windows Win32 UI (often using the same dialogs that have been in use for many years) and a touch UI. Some things require the Win32 UI, which does not lend itself to touch use, and others require the mobile UI, which does not lend itself well to mouse and keyboard use. MS has been gradually moving things from the desktop-oriented Control Panel to the mobile-oriented Settings for years, but there are still a number of things for which the Win32 version is necessary, like the Device Manager.

The two form factors have different expectations about what a user can do, though the OS and UI "designers" have increasingly fouled this up with their attempts at convergence.

On my Dell XPS 13 laptop running OpenSUSE Tumbleweed that I am using to write this, I have Firefox set up with a bunch of small icons for various addons. The icons are on the small side if I was going to try to use them with a touch interface even on my 13.4 inch display, let alone the smaller screens on most tablets and all phones. They're easy to hit with a mouse pointer, though, since the point and click events are distinct, and I can see exactly where the pointer is pointing before I trigger the click. The OS/DE (KDE Plasma) helpfully highlights the element when I am pointing at it so I can quickly tell when I am on target. It makes hitting small buttons very fast and easy.

On a touchscreen, you lose sight of the element just before the tap event because now your finger's in the way, and it is a one-stage shot, with no feedback that you're on the right element before the tap is initated. This means that the UI elements have to be much larger, which affects the entire way the UI is designed, not to mention the various applications within.

On a mobile UI, the writer of a given app (or the OS itself) cannot assume the user has a two-stage pointing device that has hover effects to convey useful information or to let that user know which UI element will receive the click event. Most will assume the opposite, since the touchscreen is primary on these devices, and so the oversize UI elements without hover effects will be the norm. Simply adding a mouse pointer (and an input device to drive it) does not turn the UI into a credible mouse-based setup.

The "use the touch UI and just add a mouse pointer" is more or less what Microsoft did with the bits of Windows 8.x and 10 that are mobile oriented... you still have the big UI elements that inefficiently use screen space and don't use the hover effects to their full advantage. When a window is maximized, you still will often have large amounts of wasted (white) space because that UI was designed around a mobile device that does not have a large screen. There's often quite a bit more drilling down to find the option you want, and more UI elements hidden behind things like the infamous hamburger button.

The hamburger button is a UI disaster. It's also nearly ubiquitous, as it has been one of the primary adaptations to the limitations imposed by a touchscreen handheld device. There's a hamburger on the web page I am using right now!

What options are available to me within that menu? There's no way to know at a glance; I won't find out until I click on it. With a web site designed for a real computer, a small menubar could give me the categories of the various options, giving me good information scent about what options or functions are available to me as a user, allowing me to go directly to any one of them if that's what I need to do.

But that hamburger tells me nothing.

I've got plenty of space for a more useful UI, but this site (like so many others) has chosen to make the crippled mobile version the standard for everyone, so all that screen space is wasted. I get all of the downside of the mobile UI even though I am not using a mobile device with so many limitations.

At least it is just a web site and not an entire OS full of applications that make that same compromise for me.

Tim Cook was asked years ago about convergence between Macs and iDevices, and he (to his credit) noted that doing that would necessitate compromises that would result in an inferior experience on one or the other, or both, and that the goal was to make the best Mac available and the best iPad available and leave it at that.

After having seen what a UI disaster Windows has become since Microsoft has tried to chase that dragon, I had to admit Cook had a point, and I am not an Apple fan. I'm used to Apple being the source of the /facepalm moments, like "you're holding it wrong," bendgate, glued-in batteries, the butterfly keyboard, "bravely" getting rid of headphone ports, and so on, but this was one point where they got it right.

Europe to have 2 of the 4 most powerful supercomputers as Leonardo comes online

Updraft102 Silver badge

Re: The only real question...

Aw, ya beat me. Only I was gonna say "Crysis."

Nvidia faces lawsuit for melting RTX 4090 cables as AMD has a laugh

Updraft102 Silver badge

"AMD best be careful tossing stones in silicon houses, considering that electric vehicle maker Tesla had to recall nearly 130,000 of its cars earlier this year due to overheating Ryzen processors used in the infotainment system."

Because AMD designed the cooling system in the Tesla?

It was yet another Tesla screwup. The cooling system in the infotainment center was inappropriately turned off during "preconditioning" of the battery in preparation for, or during, a fast charge. That has nothing at all to do with AMD or any AMD design-- that's all Tesla. By contrast, this overheating connector is an nVidia design through-and-through.