18 hours ago, evildictait​or wrote

... and why you got all grumpy that Windows8 killed off the Desktop Gadgets introduced in Vista.

To be fair, Microsoft killed desktop gadgets and removed the website where you get gadgets while they were still selling an operating system (Windows 7) that listed it as a feature. They literally killed a feature that people had just paid for and didn't change the feature list while continuing to sell it.

When dealing with a large number of files, I will regularly see the dialog box sit there at "Calculating" for several minutes. This has been going on since Vista and is still present and I've observed it on every Vista, 7, and 8 installation on multiple brands of PCs. Anyone who says they haven't seen it is either lying or doesn't do any file operations with more than a dozen or so files.

8 hours ago, BitFlipper wrote

Here's a serious question...

Did anybody actually complain about the Windows 7 desktop?

Maybe I'm confused, but I vaguely remember Windows 7 being hugely popular, especially after Vista.

What I remember is that all of a sudden after Windows 8 came out, that apparently people had been complaining and up in arms for years about the existence of  windows with borders on them, buttons, title bars, and the evils of non-full screen apps.

I apparently missed all those complaints over the past two decades. If you believe all the stuff coming out of Microsoft and the Windows 8 fans, apparently non-full screen apps, close buttons, menu bars, and title bars were some intractable evil that people had been picketing in the streets over.

Apparently, everyone also hated the start menu with a burning passion, yet until Windows 8 came out, the only complaint I ever heard was the stupid "har har, you have to press start to shutdown."

1 day ago, PaoloM wrote

*snip*

Wow, talk about revisionist history... forgot how the first TWO releases of OSX couldn't even play a DVD? How the iPhone's app story for a full year was "write a web page"?

Sure, and remember how Windows XP was hacked to hell in back over a decade ago around the same time? 

We can play that game of comparing unsupported, not presently sold, and decades old software all day. As I said in my post, there is a belief that consumers nowadays will accept the same crap that computer geeks accepted over 10 years ago (which is when the products you just mentioned and Windows XP came out). My point is that when you take into account all of the bugs/issues with the current iterations of both OSX, Windows, (and Linux), iPad, Surface, (and Android), and iPhone, Windows Phone, (and Android), the bottom line is that Apple products generally don't need to have additional work done to them by the person who bought it to make them work as advertised or have glaring system level issues that prevent functionality or break during normal use (Windows Update prompting to restart the computer when TrustedInstaller is still in the background still only about half of the way through a patch in the middle of copying files, for example -- yes Windows update still breaks spontaneously, nearly in every case requiring a reinstall because PSS doesn't know what the error codes mean). 

A shitty app in an update? Big deal, that happens to OSX, iOS, Windows, Android, and everything else. Fundamental parts of Windows come out of the box broken, planned to be fixed in a service pack, get fixed in a service pack, and then break again in the exact same ways two entire releases later even though those parts haven't even changed.

Also -- the supported platform of a phone OS at the time of release being web apps is not a bug. And to my point -- that phone worked as advertised, right out of the box.

3 hours ago, Harlequin wrote

I just don't see the point in "tablets" that small. Phones are starting to creep past 5 inches already. I'm hoping to grab the Surface Pro this Friday, and this will be the smallest I would ever go for a tablet PC form factor. Maybe if I were to go smaller it would be a Kindle or something for reading...

I think putting quotes around 'tablets' was really the way to go, actually. I think at this point, what we call these things is slightly a bit off anyway. We're trying to call something which does more than make phone calls a phone by throwing the word 'smart' in front of it to make 'smartphone' -- and calling anything bigger a tablet, but now we have the form factors meeting up somewhere in the middle around 5-7". It's really all the same thing now except for one little thing -- the one thing that's left, other than size (which IMO is meaningless now), that really distinguishes a "phone" from a "tablet" --- the appearance of a line item on your bill that says "voice." 

What happens when we're all using Skype/Facetime/VoIP for all of our calls? Moving toward that trend, at some point, when we're all using VoIP to make a regular calls, the one remaining vestige of "voice service" will probably be the ability to make a reliable and instantly traceable 911 call. It won't be called voice service anymore since we'll all be using VoIP for our calls, we'd only be using their "voice" service for emergency services. So it'll end up being called "emergency services" on our bill.

So at that point, will we distinguish between a "phone" and a "tablet" based on whether you can call 911 on it?

I think we should just call them all PDAs with different sizes for different purposes, small, medium, large, grande, venti, whatever.

31 minutes ago, DeathBy​VisualStudio wrote

*snip*

Yeah nothing like releasing a beta as production... 

Yeah, and that's why we get into situations where "Vista was fine after service pack 1" .. but the thing is, no one cared and they waited for 7 because to them, "Vista sucked" because it came out of the box that way on computers that shouldn't have had a "made for Vista" sticker on them and selling "upgrade" retail boxes as if there were XP computers at the time capable of running it.

It's as if first impressions are not even a consideration when selling a product as well as the apparent belief that the general consumer nowadays will put up with the same crap computer geeks put up with ten years ago -- e.g. unfinished products being sold to them.

It is the most misunderstood aspect of consumers of Apple products -- they don't buy them because they're sheep, they buy them because they appear and function like a finished product on the day they're released.

But back on topic -- I'm happy about Flash being included, as long as I can turn it off too. I whitelist flash-enabled sites in Chrome, so I only get Flash in browser when I deem it necessary.

7 hours ago, Bass wrote

@Craig_Matthews:

That has to do with Android's UI/threading model more than anything else. (Eg: in iOS, UI updates preempt all other threads. Which is not the case in Android. So UI updates can seem more sluggish, especially if there is a lot of stuff going on in the background).

I think the best out of the pack are the Samsung Galaxy devices (although, funnily, not the original Galaxy tab), as they seem to me to be the "least laggy" but it's still noticeable -- at least to me -- some say I'm too sensitive to those kinds of things though -shrug-

edit: corrected stupid spelling mistake.

5 hours ago, elmer wrote

*snip*

The time to have fought this was before negotiating a settlement, but having done so, they have an obligation to live up to their end of the settlement agreement.

Exactly this. The case against MS, IMO, was stupid, but Microsoft agreed to the settlement. I can't imagine Microsoft would be happy if a big company kept using a 120 day eval of Windows Server for years and said company said "oh, it was just a technical error." Microsoft would have the BSA shut them down.

However, this channel seems not to have all of the content -- for example there are only three episodes of The Defrag Show listed when I browse the content on my Roku.

I'd also be interested in a Channel 9 channel for Plex Media Server (plexapp.com) The Roku would pick this channel up too if you have Plex Media Server installed on a PC via the Plex channel on the Roku .. and the bonus would be that, in addition to Roku devices, it would make it available to any DLNA terminal in the house (provided a Plex Media Server is present with the C9 channel installed).

7 hours ago, itsnotabug wrote

my iphone didn't present me with an option either.

The iPhone has had a "browser ballot" built in for quite some time called the App Store and there are web browsers in it, both pay-for and free, and it's on every single phone.

That said, it was Opera's fault and not Microsoft's that no one wanted to use their browser, and Google & Mozilla's involvement in the situation by supporting Opera's position in the matter, which in no small part helped bring about the ballot screen, was complete BS since both companies had just finished bragging about how everyone was switching from IE to their browsers.

That said, a "technical" error that removed for seven months the browser ballot that MS agreed to is also BS, and they deserve to be punished. If they didn't want to comply, they shouldn't have agreed to the terms of the settlement.

2 hours ago, Jim Young wrote

Charter is my ISP and this has never happened to me. But I also have my own DNS server at home.

Then of course it's never happened to you.

One week later....

Opera: Waaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh No one's using Opera, and it's Microsoft's fault.
Google & Mozilla: YEAH!!! Because of IE being bundled NO ONE ON EARTH KNOWS ABOUT OTHER BROWSERS.

Works fine in Safari.
Works fine in Chrome for iOS
Problem occurs both on Chrome for Windows and Chrome for OSX

We went with the Crashplan Pro and chose the unlimited plan, pretty much the best pricing for a single SBS server small business --- what I was confused by earlier was their "choose the best plan" selection wizard becomes stupid apparently if you specify a quantity of "1" computer. So you get an outrageous comparison of "Should I pay $35/mo for 100GB or $7/mo for unlimited? Gee."

It was not until I realized that they really don't intend for you to ever put the number "1" in that text box that it made sense as the prices make more sense when you specify multiple computers.

As far as speed of initial upload goes, I was pretty much assuming it would take a month for this client's data, but I hadn't realized at the time she upgraded her Internet to a 25Mbps upload so her 700GB of data is only going to take a few days with the amount of BW I allocated to Crashplan. That's cool as hell.

The only one that seems reasonable is CrashplanPro for small business, but I'm really worried about the page where you select your plan ... what it basically boils down to is "Pay $7.49/month for unlimited, or pay thousands a month if you choose a capacity." Huh? 

I think the only online backup I'm going to be doing is telling my client to get a PC at her house with enough space and just run the CrashPlan software peer to peer, and it'll only cost the hardware and Windows 7 license.

$130 came out of my fingers because my brain was thinking about the whole package that includes my TV and phone. 

7 hours ago, blowdart wrote

*snip*

And another way is "Hey this door is unlocked, I'm going to go inside and help myself to anything I want. It's not my fault the owner didn't lock their door."

Yes, because a Wifi router broadcasting an unencrypted wireless signal with access to the Internet is exactly the same thing as leaving your front door unlocked. When the thread topic is about whether it's okay to enter an unlocked house, your point might have a place.

We get it. You're cheap and don't want to pay for your own connectivity.

I have no problem paying for my own connectivity, and I think it's a bit rude for you to make assumptions like that without any basis. I pay $130/month for high speed Internet access at my home just like everyone else and I pay $60/month for a phone that includes unlimited texts, voice, and data with the hotspot feature. I always have my own Internet access for every device in my bag, regardless of where I am.

I'm simply answering the question the thread brought up. Newsflash: one can have an opinion which finds no problem with using an open wifi router, yet still decide to pay for their own Internet access with their own money. One has nothing to do with the other.

edit: rewrote a little of the last two paragraphs for the slow people.