CharlotteTheHarlot

The Alleged Competition ... Ubuntu 13.10 review: The Linux OS of the future remains a year away ( Ars Technica 2013-10-17 ) Canonical Ubuntu 13.10 Now Available ( Tom's Hardware 2013-10-20 ) Canonical doing their best AMD/Intel impersonation? You would think that with the current circumstances in Windows with Microsoft handicapping itself to unimaginable proportions, that Canonical and other Linux distributions might be capitalizing on this, pardon the pun, window of opportunity, and making dramatic steps to attract Windows users and the OEMs that install Windows at the factory. But you would be wrong. Most comments are "meh", from users that barely noticed any changes. I'm not even interested enough to download it yet, though I will later, just to keep a live CD around for fooling with. It's reminiscent of AMD and Intel with the similar reaction from CPU purchasers for the last three ticks and tocks as Intel has been sleeping with respect to performance largely thanks to lack of competition from AMD, and also having been distracted by the "mobile transition". CPU enthusiasts are stunned by the lack of improvement here and see the CPU as frozen in time. Microsoft and Intel are both taking a breather ( over two years off! ) while their non-competitors AMD and Linux flounder along aimlessly. Something else too, I was reminded by this paragraph in the article ... Now if I were Canonical or even just a Linux aficionado I would take a note of all the recent high profile spying revelations of the past few months and turn the tables after taking that beating on "privacy" issues over Ubuntu and Amazon. I would be searching the articles last year looking for hypocrites that slammed Ubuntu/Amazon and then checking what they had to say this past summer. That link there goes to an article at Ars Technica called "EFF calls Ubuntus Amazon search result feature a major privacy problem". I would guess that much hypocrisy would be found at NeoWin too. And The Verge. You will probably find perfectly contrasting opinions from countless big mouthes attacking this Ubuntu "privacy problem" who then turned around on a dime offering excuses when Microsoft was exposed as the Federal government's FIRST collaborator. I suspect that Linux fans could locate much information on this subject, if they were so inclined. Or, they can stay sleeping. Interesting Security Bulletin ... Destructive malware "CryptoLocker" on the loose - here's what to do ( Naked Security 2013-10-12 ) CryptoLocker ransomware - see how it works, learn about prevention, cleanup and recovery ( Naked Security 2013-10-18 ) This is one malware I haven't come across yet. I've cleaned the FBI moneypaks but nothing involving encryption. This one would have to clearly be considered unfixable, i.e., data will be lost permanently, which would be an absolute first in my experience. Read the 2nd article for a description of how it physically accomplishes the hijack. Make sure your clients have offline backups because the trojan seeks out all connected storage on all devices and encrypts documents wherever they are. Remember: a connected backup is no backup at all. The irony of course is that there is one outfit besides the hijacker who can decrypt this data. Yep, the spooks with backdoors to widely used ciphers, and the ability to bruteforce them using taxpayer funded supercomputers. But sorry to say those resources are not available to us taxpayers, we're on our own. EDIT: typo

Adding to the Cloud and Connection issues ... IE11 forces Google.com into compatibility mode; Microsoft provides comment, fix ( NeoWin 2013-10-19 ) ~sigh~ Another incident with MSIE messing up again. Couldn't really care less myself, but I figure others might want to know. And this one is truly barf-worthy ... Member Reviews: Windows 8.1 - Desktop lovers rejoice ( NeoWin 2013-10-20 ) What a load of crap. It sounds like an audition for a Microsoft position. And it's insulting. "Beloved Start Button"! WTF does that even mean? Do they seriously believe it is a missing button that has everyone up in arms? And sticking a button back in the same place that kicks you into Metro? What a disaster. Look, I understand that it is most likely a child here, perhaps 12 or 14 years old, and that makes reacting to these comments somewhat icky, but someone's gotta do it since it seems their parents have failed at the simple task of giving their kids a brain and teaching them how to use it. Unfortunately this level of intelligence is pretty close to the overall mean for the fanboy contingent. If NeoWin and The Verge commenters represented the world then Humanity is doomed. Or at least the Windows portion of it. Save us from the sheeple. Here's another alternate button they could have used ... EDIT: clarity

Yesterday was a bad day for CloudTards in general and MicroZealots in particular ... Windows RT 8.1 pulled from the Windows Store ( NeoWin 2013-10-19 ) Windows RT 8.1 Update Removed from Microsoft Store ( Maximum PC 2013-10-19 ) Microsoft pulls Windows 8.1 update for Surface RT following BSOD reports ( TechSpot 2013-10-20 ) Here's a bit from TechSpot ... I wonder how they know it is "limited"? That implies they somehow know the amount of bad updates. It is superfluous wording that smells of crisis management. All they needed to say was "affecting some users". But then again, since this is Windows RT ( thus far ) I guess you can say "limited" number of users accurately Some Windows 8.1 users don't have any reset or refresh options, but there's a solution ( NeoWin 2013-10-19 ) Note that at this point some of the sheeple are starting to wake up and realize that this "live" updating strategy is a bad idea, and it always was which is why we have always used offline service packs. So now sheeple are looking for a way to get the ISO and avoid the possible bricking of their computer. That leads to the next story ... Here is how to get the Windows 8.1 ISO and create a USB install stick ( NeoWin 2013-10-20 ) A workaround to avoid that latest Windows version update fiasco. It involves tricking Microsoft to give you the upgrade files to burn an ISO and avoid letting it ( try to ) auto-install. These workaround solutions are absolutely necessary for the NuMicrosoft distribution model of live updating and turning physical media into a legacy concept. In fact, killing physical media is now a sacrament for MicroZealots as demonstrated by Dot MetroTard himself in the earlier link above. Which shows just how easy it is to shear a sheep. Microsoft throws out some nebulous excuse like "to curb privacy" and sheeple like Dot MetroTard parrot that excuse to others. Enablers are like that, no independent thinking required, no logical reasoning skills available for problem solving. But most importantly, it's for your own good! Too bad if you brick your device. Take one for the team fanboy. In the thread ( just above ) about tricking Microsoft to get the Windows 8.1 Blew media, Dot MetroTard has this to say ... As I said, no critical thinking required. At the core of this phony "piracy" problem is the false premise that downloading distribution media means piracy. But how can that be true? For going on 13 years now such piracy has been impossible since it was solved by selling keys and requiring activation. No-one is asking for keys here. The child must be too young to remember the battles over activation and now we get to see him make believe they never even occurred and that we don't fully understand all the issues involved here. We are to accept the "to curb piracy" crap once again and move along, this time not only accepting keys + activation, but now throwing out physical media altogether. That's a devolvement of the original activation fiasco which was bad enough all by itself. Microsoft and fanboy zealots like Dot MetroTard will not be happy until all computing is billed-by-the-bit and we are charged-by-the-click. Songs will be paid-by-the-second. Electricity will be priced-by-the-electron. Light priced-by-the-photon. It's a brave new world. Meanwhile, all these poor slobs are struggling to get a usable physical copy of the Windows setup files in order to upgrade their paid for Windows 8.0. Imagine the scene at their homes right now as they maneuver through Microsoft Tiles with its extra unnecessary abstraction obfuscating the file system further than ever before, to line up the quasi-ISO files and get it burned to disc. Now that's what I call Karma. I will bet that most MetroTards cannot accomplish this task, obtaining the files, locating them on disk, burning them or setting up a flashdrive without error and then installing the update without issue. This is precisely what ISO files were developed to avoid! EDIT: clarity

So let's say I'm hip and have eagerly joined the ranks of the cloud, thinking I'm helping to bring in the future. I'm preparing a crucial analysis spreadsheet, or I'm putting together a complex price estimate for a customer, or I'm on a deadline to submit a magazine article. Not quite ready for submission yet to my boss/customer/editor, there's some work yet to do -- and then all of a sudden the Internet goes down "for several hours" and I can't get to my critical document. I must wait until the 'Net goes back up and only then get to finish up what I was doing and send it. As a result, my company misses an investment opportunity, or I lose the bid with my customer, or my editor cancels the article. What's the cloud service going to do for me in that case, huh? Maybe give me a prorata reimbursement out of the monthly subscription for the time the service was down? Big whoop. Note that this hazard is in addition to the danger of the Internet going down just when you need to send that file. In cloud computing, because you are dependent on the Internet 100% of the time, the probability of an ill-timed harmful failure of this type increases exponentially. ¡Viva Windows 8 and the Brave New World of computing that it's helping to bring about! I noticed that myself. I was wondering what screwed up so many forums yesterday ( but NOT here at MSFN for once ). I assigned a sound to play on "failure" events in Opera and was hearing countless klaxxons for half the sites I tried to load. It seemed to hammer Facebook and Google APIs severely so every page that used their stuff and that traveled through a certain part of the Internet was crippled. DNS errors also popped up. MSFN was fine though. Decent interview but as expected NeoWin didn't demonstrate enough integrity to put a link to Tihiy's site or to here at MSFN. Jorge, you may want to add this to the Start Menu thread! Good idea, I'll do that -- thanks! BTW, doesn't Stardock own a piece of Neowin? Maybe that's the reason why they didn't put in a link to Tihiy's project. No, I don't think that's the case. They do operate independent of Stardock. Rather, it is journalism fail 101, and they do it a lot. Also note the next interview also mentioned above with Classic Shell. You might want to mention that one too. Maybe I should add THIS one to the Start Button thread!! Use it for whatever you want! And that goes for everyone else, and for all the images I make.

Strangely enough that BMW / Intel controller doesn't look half bad. Appeals to power users I would think. The 2nd one could have been produced by Microsoft but still may be too complicated and redundant for the sheeple.

Arts and crafts peak, and once they do, they go downhill. [...] Dittos. And the acceleration we see now is from a smaller world, ironically because of computers and instant communication. [...] RE: Above ... Totally coincidental, but National Geographic TV has been running a show about factory mass production from Henry Ford to the present and spends some time talking about JIT and related concepts. I swear I hadn't seen that show before writing that post above. They have a decidedly Nu-Corporate bias in the episode, spinning it to mean that it's all great for the workers and of course profits. What's missing is the reality and that is that there is far more to it than simple JIT efficiency. As rolled out by big corporations it's a massive effort to cut costs and no mention of the customers or quality is to be found. Certainly there could be a happy medium, but no company that answers to Wall Street these days is gonna search for it. Also, JIT and some of the concepts attributed to Deming literally means no inventory kept on hand, little to no redundancy, and of course an extremely tight timeline on the factory floor. The downside which I have seen with my own eyes is that any kinks in the supply or manufacturing chain can be catastrophic to the entire production. It is voluntarily flying by the seat of your pants. A good analogy IMHO would be keeping just enough food and water and eating exactly enough calories and drinking just enough to stay alive every day thereby leaving yourself open to a big problem in a snowstorm or if the car dies. Or, putting just enough fuel in the airplane and removing every mechanical and electrical redundancy to reduce weight and costs. I can assure you that this concept will never fly ( ). In a sense, Microsoft Tiles and many of their latest strategies are an outgrowth of this consumerization and pandering to the masses at the expense of all else. We even hear it right from the mouthes if the fanboys with their explanations that the Start Menu was redundant. EDIT: clarity, typo

More things for the iTards to chew on, not to mention the MicroZealots ... Security research firm says Apple can read your iMessages ( TechSpot 2013-10-18 ) iMessage May Not Be as Secure as Apple Claims ( Tom's Hardware 2013-10-18 ) Apple denies claims that it can or will read users' iMessages ( NeoWin 2013-10-18 ) That's gonna leave a mark. I guess the hardest thing to determine going forward is which companies are really trying to fight the spooks and preserve privacy, and which are just blowing smoke, issuing weasel-worded statements that admit nothing and deny everything. I'm pretty much convinced that Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, and Google are all willing collaborators and probably the most evil in that exact order ( given all the articles we've seen here since summer ). Google Stock Tops $1,000 Mark for First Time ( Maximum PC 2013-10-18 ) Well this should reinvorgate the Google-envy up in Redmond and down in Cupertino. I guess well see another round of dumbing down products and angering their core supporters in a vain effort to participate in a race they already lost. Aside from chair-throwing there isn't too much more damage that Microsoft can do to itself at this point, though I'll bet they'll sure try.

I read this story in the print version of USA Today yesterday on page-3. Long and high profile piece going after iOS 7 and Jony Ive, and absolutely parallel to many of the Windows 8 criticisms ... Apple loses some of its magic touch with iOS 7 ( USA Today 2013-10-17 ) All I can say is BINGO. Unlike most tech press, this thing will get seen by Wall Street and boardrooms. Though it has nothing to do with us and Windows, it is good nonetheless because it might grease the skids for some similar articles about Microsoft in the major media ( in fact they'll likely feel obligated to bash them now, or will do it because of pressure from iTards ). Microsoft might get a chuckle from reading this piece about their "hated enemy", but they also must be worrying that their worse disaster with the childish Playskool Microsoft Tiles GUI will be called out next. Naturally the iTard fanboys immediately pounce, attacking it from every angle here ... USA Today prints contemptuous trashing of Apple's latest iOS 7 release ( Apple Insider 2013-10-18 ) Not gonna quote them though. They're crybaby fanboy enablers who need to man up and call out these dumb moves before it's too late. And if they hated that USA Today article they're really gonna hate this graphic I made ... EDIT: typos

No, that CANNOT cause a different size detection. jaclaz Not a different size, unless you mean "no size". We need to see the pictures to know what's happening though.

Aluminum and bottle glass are also viable. Iron and PET can break even when done right. The rest are urban legends. Yep, you're absolutely right. I forgot those. I also didn't mention that coin cell batteries and smoke alarms and volatile liquids and construction materials still DO NOT go to the normal dump here. They are strictly hazardous waste still. We started with the orange-top recycle containers here a few years ago at every house, in them goes paper and plastic and lightweight recycle junk. It sits side-by-side the identical, normal garbage containers headed for landfill. So that's four separate collections they run at huge cost to us. Weekly garbage, weekly recycle, bi-weekly dump we can drop off ( electronics included ), and 4 times a year hazardous drop-off.

Yeah, I also couldn't find any controls to "expand all". :angrym: Maybe you need to sign up first? I don't know.

Epic, just epic! Yes it is! I love these that you pointed out. ... That one comment gave me an idea ... The Start Button Returns!

Physical scratches I would think. They are smoothed over by on-the-fly error correction during playback, but a good ripper will be far more stringent and even though it retries it will fail by design so that data is not corrupted.. I have been doing the same thing, digitizing opticals onto HDDs. I keep a low-power microscope handy and have learned to spot the scratches and dings that my ripper chokes on ( and note it is the same sectors on a bad disc even when trying in a different drive ). I can often fix bad discs by polishing the defects, and only the defects ( and forget spinning cleaners that clean the whole thing). I try alcohol first, and then a thin clear plastic polish second. Note: wiping is NOT done in circular motion, but straight from edge to center or vice versa. The sectors are on a circular track much like a vinyl album so you want to NOT wipe "with the grain". What is actually happening by polishing is that the plastic layer which has a ding or scratch ( a recess ) is "lowered" slightly to match the recess, and the recess itself is partly filled to "raise" it slightly to match the normal surface. This operation decreases the shadow the sharp angles of a scratch produce, reducing the loss of reflected light back to the lens. More polishing means more equalization between the height of the normal plastic and the depth of the hole. Note that none of this has anything to do with the dye layer well below the plastic covering. If a scratch goes that deep you cannot polish it out. If it was critical data to be recovered you would have to look into a polymer liquid to fill it to reduce the shadow. Of course we're talking about visible scratches. I have never yet found a bad optical disc, pressed or burned, that I couldn't locate the hole under a microscope. In my case, if there are no visible scratches or holes, then there are no problems. But there can be other things that cause random errors NOT in the same sector each time you try to rip it. Canned air to blow out the disc drive is very helpful, especially if you are popping discs in and out for days on end. I've done over a thousand audio and hundreds of data CDROMs. Cleaning hair and dust off the disc before inserting it is also critical. Canned air every so often on the drive. Lastly, I have a lot of computers setup side by side when I do this so I can get an assembly line going. Trying the disc on different drives is a good debug step because there are differences between them. This will pinpoint whether it is a physical defect ( shows in same sector number across different computers ) or a random dust/hair incident.

No surprise to me. Look up ATM scamming. Clever thieves build false attachments to accept your card and record your PIN. The machine doesn't work so you just move to another one and think nothing of it. Later the thief collects the attachment and no-one realizes it was ever there. Then they have a collection of PINs and card stripe information to use at their leisure. That is quite a bit of expert and elaborate handiwork done elsewhere without an ATM to practice on. So with everyday computers it is far easier for them to trial and error on actual computers they have. EDIT: typo

That law came and went here. At first no electronics could go to the dump, they were brought to hazardous waste ( resource recovery ) site. Then they would shred them, shake and bake and save the precious metals. Then they discovered that site could not come close to breaking even ( it takes lots of energy to recycle anything more complicated than paper ). Now the electronics go to the dump again, but I have noticed they are separating them out from typical junk that is headed for a landfill or deep ocean. So they are most likely cherry picking for limited resource recovery efforts at that plant rather than keeping it running 24/7/365 and losing money all day long. What you want to do is make a friend at the dump and work out a plan so you can grab discarded desktops and do your own recovery.

We don't know enough to skip to some software to fix the partitions. Also note that the OS only sees what the BIOS passes along, so it is too early to even look at Windows at all. Your problem almost certainly lies below Windows. Photos would speed up the solution ... * The physical HDD label * The physical HDD jumper block * The BIOS screen showing all HDD drives * The BIOS page for that specific HDD ( select and press ENTER ) * Dell Service tag Supply those and the answer will be evident shortly. It is possible for a sticker mixup, though I never saw one myself. More likely is that the HDD has a capacity clip jumper incorrectly set. IBM and Hitachi drives always seem to have these, at least IDE models. Other possibilities, BUT ONLY AFTER determining if the drive is jumpered correctly include ... - Someone manually set the HDD settings in the BIOS. Changing it to AUTO and pressing ENTER to redetect should fix this. - Cabling is another candidate, misusing a cable-select cable and jumper, or using a normal cable with the jumper on cable-select, or jumpering for master and installing on slave ( cable middle connector ), or jumpering it for slave and installing it on master ( cable end connector ). Blue end of cable not on the motherboard is also possible to mess up the auto-detect. Not fully inserting the IDE connectors can also cause a problem. And then there is the possibility of bent pins in the connector on the HDD or motherboard. - The CMOS component of the BIOS could be bad, clearing it via jumper or battery might fix it. ( NOT YET ) - The BIOS is corrupt, maybe from a bad flash leading to scrambled tables making it incapable of autodetecting. Reflashing could fix that. ( NOT YET ) All of this must occur before looking at the partitioning because aside from dropping this disk into another computer, you cannot reliably trust what partitions you think you have when looking from THAT computer, until the jumpering and BIOS are working in tandem. EDIT: typo

Thank goodness, someone has still some common sense, and more than that some good sense of humour : http://krebsonsecurity.com/2013/10/adobe-to-announce-source-code-customer-data-breach/ jaclaz There are just so many questions every time this happens ... What idi0t put private data and source code on public facing servers? Who was the cloud or storage provider? Who managed the "network" and provided security? Now that everyone has been hacked and pilfered, isn't it time to chart the information so the public can determine who is reliable and who is useless on the backend? For example plot all these big hacks and look for Oracle or Microsoft Azure or Symantec or IBM or whatever or whoever pops up most often. That's vital information. Maybe no one company will be the common denominator, I don't know. But maybe one is. The real crime here is that they blackout this hard information completely and send you an email telling you to watch for unexplained charges and offering a year of identity theft protection. And something else ... I'll bet what's happening is that they are obligated to NOT disclose their hosting and security providers. I'll bet it is line #1 in the service contract. Self-serving EULA's and NDA's in contracts are among the most evil of concepts we have seen recently because they protect failures from being identified and corrected, and punished accordingly.

Microsoft to host Windows 8.1 'Ask Me Anything' session on Reddit today ( TechSpot 2013-10-17 ) Microsoft to hold a Reddit AMA and more to promote Windows 8.1 today ( NeoWin 2013-10-17 ) Windows 8.1 Reddit AMA session reveals development secrets like ... Katy Perry? ( NeoWin 2013-10-17 ) TechSpot and NeoWin articles discussing a Reddit session with Microsoft Engineers fielding questions, already completed ... Hi! We're Windows 8.1 engineers. Ask us anything! ( Reddit 2013-10-17 ) Well most of you already know exactly how well this would go. In fact the NeoKids commented about this very thing, calling Microsoft crazy for talking to the public, calling it a cesspool. It's over now but there is much comedy value in that thread. It will take days to read it. The Softies only answered a few questions here and there and you might even feel sorry for them a bit since they are most likely not the evil decision makers, however they are most likely all-in on this Playskool madness. Mostly though, there is comedy gold. The Redditors knew that they weren't really going to be answered so most just decided to go for broke. First off, one answer from a Softie to a serious question about purposely hiding the local account option when installing ... I literally had to read that answer twice to fully grasp that the engineers are overwhelmed by a form of Stockholm Syndrome sprinkled with fantasy rationalizations about users actually enjoying the pain they inflict. They're sadists and the customers are masochists, simple as that. I guess that makes their job very efficient indeed. Now for the fun ( just the tip of the iceberg, trust me ) ... I spit out coffee too many times to count If you need a laugh, expand your way through all the nested comments. Humor is good for the soul.

Facebook Advertisers Get More of Your Data ( Tom's Hardware 2013-10-17 ) Lots more in the linked article including the hoops needed to disengage the spyware. That word, spyware is truly appropriate now. This is government approved spyware on multiple levels. They are literally getting you coming and going now. The spooks get you at their leisure and Facebook gives the advertising cabal carte blanche access to you wherever you are, even outside of Facebook. I can't wait to see the next step after this! It's a brave new world. Interview: We chat with the creator of Classic Shell 4.0 ( NeoWin 2013-10-17 ) This is a shorter interview compared to the one with Tihiy published yesterday. Ivo answers their loaded question nicely, "What do you think of Microsoft's decision to put in a Start button, but not a full Start menu, in Windows 8.1?" ... And once again NeoWin fails to use the minimum expected journalistic integrity to even display a single link back to Classic Shell or any of the sites where Ivo and XPclient frequent. EDIT: spacing

Arts and crafts peak, and once they do, they go downhill. Take literature: I would say it peaked in the 19th century around with Dostoyevsky, Hugo, Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy and went downhill from there. Sure, there were some great works in the 20th century, but they haven't reached the greatness of Brothers Karamazov etc. and the 21st century so far is an utter trash heap compared to the 19th. Music: You've said it yourself. And by the way, where's the new Ninth Symphony? That story is pretty similar as with literature here. And arts peak far sooner now: Movies, despite a far younger medium than the above, have already peaked, too. 70s and 80s (and many 90s) films wipe the floor with most newer productions. Even straight action films twenty-thirty years ago had a lot more heart and skill than today's "teal and orange" abortions. Computer games: The retro scene is thriving, and for very good reasons. Engineering: The dumberization in computing, the still unmatched designs and reliability of "classic cars", CRT monitors from 12 years ago often have STILL superior color representation than the newest flat displays (along with no ghosting and blurring), analog radios from the 20s can still work while the newest digital models die due to missing codecs and stuff, analog TV was able to withstand anything and produce a picture, while the newest digital TVs die once the signal becomes slightly distorted. There are examples galore here. Stuff turns to s*** a lot faster nowadays, and progress moves backwards quite a lot. Dittos. And the acceleration we see now is from a smaller world, ironically because of computers and instant communication. There is also an element of suicide in the form of teaching modern business to be centered around efficiency, low overhead, fast development, maximizing profit and other variations on that theme. I think I have mentioned how this trickled into the USA boardrooms in the 1980's with JIT just in time manufacturing and other things that we originally exported to Japan post-war to help them remake their economy and society. The next thing was them exporting transistor radios and then cars and finally exporting back that original mass production philosophy that our companies were eager to use to please Wall Street. The only problem with the hyper-assembly line concept and the targeting of the mass market is that quality is the first casualty. The second is safety. But quality is gone completely. There is no artistic integrity in this business model, its selling the most widgets made for the least cost of production for the highest price possible to the dumbest buyers they can find. There is some give and take on those four components, but the race is to the bottom and the most "successful" according to Wall Street analysts will exploit all four. Because of the modern world this recipe has spread faster and wider than ever before and I think it is literally Business 101 in schools. CNBC and our friendly analysts drill it into our heads every day. I wouldn't be surprised now to find some formerly fabulous artisan making handmade furniture in a cellar in Timbuktu jumping on the internet to learn ways to cut corners and reduce costs and get cheaper paint and, well you know the rest. It's wholesale corruption of our very psyche. Two great examples are cameras and monitors. The rapid changeover targeting the widest but least savvy demographic wiped out superior legacy equipment overnight. While you certainly can get a great camera like an expensive DSLR, 99% of them are still devolving ( even the basic point-shoot models are becoming rare thanks to cellphones ). There will be a huge hole in the preserved photographic record of the early 21st century. CRTs were definitely bulky and power hungry, but when I use one today I am quickly reminded how bad the consumer grade LCDs suck, in every way except size. Because of that consumerist detour we postponed the move into RGB style discrete LED displays and killed CRT dead in its tracks. I'm not complaining about their loss, I'm actually complaining about the detour taken for the sole purpose of swamping the world with mass produced crap, where quality has zero consideration. I originally saw this coming because of the way that the MP3 vs WAV file battle unfolded. We were using MP3 as early as 1994 for short online previews of CD releases. That was a good purpose for a lossy format. But then the AudioTards, perfect forerunners of MetroTards, decided to accept MP3 in lieu of a lossless original. These were easy marks for Apple and others to exploit because if you offered a CD or player holding one hour of tunes versus ten hours, stupidity will select quantity over quality every time. Note that I am not criticizing MP3 at all. I'm criticizing the 'Tards. MP3 can be configured to be less lossy and near lossless. But the "good enough" crowd of MetroTards, I mean AudioTards shaped the entire future here. Such mistakes are not possible when there are intelligent people available to kick them in their @sses out the door onto the street and hire someone else instead. Without that control, we end up with all that we see today, or most of it anyway. Hence this battle with Microsoft, who is doing exactly this and we spotted it back in early 2011 with even earlier warnings prior. It's patently transparent that this is their cynical plan. Microsoft's adults left the mother ship, leaving unintelligent and inexperienced fools in their place. Quality no longer drives the ship, instead it is merely petty jealousy of their hated competitors like Apple. The irony of copying Apple is apparently lost upon them, and their sycophants.

Xbox One won't support real names for online users at launch ( NeoWin 2013-10-17 ) That sounds like another Xbox backtrack to me. They intended to do away with gamers' anonymous nicks and move towards real names. But now that is on hold. Regardless, the sheeple better wake up. There are moves afoot everywhere to hijack the personal computer space. And Microsoft is knee-deep in it. NSA chief Keith Alexander expected to resign ( NeoWin 2013-10-17 ) ~sigh~ That's the old tried-and-true Washington two-step. Happens all the time. They get a high-profile lightning-rod to resign, hoping he will take a large chunk of the controversy with him, and thus short-circuiting the public discontent and disapproval ratings. Rarely works out according to plan though, except maybe in the media outlets who trump it up to no end. If the discontent is real, it won't make a difference. And it's kind of like what Microsoft is doing in many ways, especially the fraudulent Start Button which will receive lots of press from people not knowing what they are talking about ( Start Button returns! From where? The beta?! ). But the press will not be able to save the government this time, even if they wanted to. Nor will the tech press likely be able to lie convincingly enough about the Start Button to save Microsoft. People will rightly see this fraudulent button as a kick in their teeth.

Rumor: Next big Windows update coming in spring 2015 ( NeoWin 2013-10-16 ) Ha! Who really believes that they will sit on this for another year and a half? There are so many variables now that nothing is certain. When this Service Pack fails to do anything except excite the fanboys, and then a possible external hire for CEO has a look at the real books and sees the sales figures they have been hiding and analyzes the cost benefit against outlays, well anything might happen. And another comment from a typical MetroTard trying to convince an adult that he's not using his screen real estate properly ... That's the latest meme too! They are saying 'what good is all that space if you don't use it?' Naturally that theory doesn't come up when talking about RAM or disk space though. Or CPU utilization. In fact, maybe they should start telling us the RAM hogging CPU killing antivirus programs are fantastic because all those resources would be going to waste otherwise. Kids these days. The fact that he cannot even fathom what multitasking is, and the utility of a collapsible Start Menu over the childish Playskool splat-everything-on-screen approach, well, it illustrates what we are up against. If these 'Tards were listened to by Triumph and Harley-Davidson, motorcycles would come with training wheels. Note, I said "would come with training wheels" NOT "would have training wheels optionally available". That is really the dominant characteristic of MetroTards which is directly comparable to children. Up until their teenage years ( if you're lucky, else it might be mid-twenties ) they have no real moral system, no empathy, in short its narcissism that burns away with age and experience. But Microsoft has chosen to cater to this small subset of the armpit of their user base. And that is how they have lost their Mojo. Chrome for Windows XP to Receive Support Until 2015 ( Tom's Hardware 2013-10-16 ) Chrome to support Windows XP until April 2015, one year after Microsoft ends XP support ( NeoWin 2013-10-16 ) Basically they're saying no worries, you'll keep getting your automatic updates for another year and a half ( if you're into that kinda thing, I'm not ). Now just imagine if at that point XP is still the number two operating system, and Windows 8.1 and 8.0 and Vista are three, four and five respectively. Then you will have two surreal situations at the same time ... {1} A company discontinuing "sales" of its product to the 2nd largest field of available customers. That would be like gasoline or tires not being sold for Fords but only GM's, as well as minor players like Dodge, Audi, Lamborghini ... {2} A company discontinuing "sales" of a product that it already developed and needs no new design changes since the platform, XP, is undergoing no such changes. Yeah, they make it sound like it costs money to "develop" for an old OS but that's a load of horsesh!t. That development was done long ago, and this end of the cycle is the sweet spot, all gain and no pain. It is what companies live for. It's the profit end of the product life-cycle. Yep, so that's the inexplicable world of planned obsolescence that Microsoft has pioneered. It has taken the thousands of years old concept of supply and demand and twisted it into a pretzel. Interview: We chat with the creator of StartIsBack+ ( NeoWin 2013-10-16 ) Decent interview but as expected NeoWin didn't demonstrate enough integrity to put a link to Tihiy's site or to here at MSFN. Jorge, you may want to add this to the Start Menu thread!

Samsung Galaxy S4 edges iPhone 5 in sales despite slump ( NeoWin 2013-10-16 ) NeoWin coverage of a report of Top 10 phone sellers via Counterpoint. Man, they must have spent a while writing that article at NeoWin to carefully avoiding any mention of Windows Phone at all. Notice the careful wording sidestepping the facts in every way when all they had to do was print this ... Top 10 models sold Globally in August 2013 01 Samsung Galaxy S4 International version 02 Apple iPhone 5-16GB 03 Apple iPhone 5-32GB 04 Nokia Asha 501 05 Samsung Galaxy Note II 06 Samsung Galaxy S III mini 07 Samsung Galaxy S III 08 Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini I9190 09 Nokia Asha 205 10 Nokia 105 There is no Windows Phone to be found in there, including all three Nokias. Note that Counterpoint has some kind of paywall to block the actual article statistics, this is some kind of extract. So where Windows Phone shows up we'll never know unless someone leaks the data. Is it in the Top 15? Top 25? Review: Windows 8.1 ( NeoWin 2013-10-16 ) Blah blah blah. Service Pack 1 aka Windows 8.1 Blew is here ( not to mention a inexplicable kernel bump from 6.2 to 6.3 ). In a rare moment of honesty the most infamous NeoWin editor states a truth about this service pack ... But the rest of it is pure MicroFluff, intent on convincing ignorant readers that this thing is anything but a minor service pack. Ah well. I hope they are ready for the backlash. Naturally the comments veer off into the philosophical, with one adult describing this ridiculous mobile GUI on large screens, with screencaps ... However, even that cannot penetrate the religious zealotry that drives sycophantic MicroZealots and MetroTards ... Hear that? Sign away your privacy to buy influence. Could Microsoft or any other company ask for more ripe fruit to pick as customers? And I expect he truly believes they would really consider telemetry that defeats their cynical business plans. There's a good little sheep. Now bleat for me ... ( original photo from here )

If she's right, then we need to either start getting used to Tiles, or start thinking about an alternative OS that's better suited to our needs and preferences. :angrym: --JorgeA Well I refuse to use operating systems for retards, on general principle. Being realistic, all available evidence indicates that Se7en is the last real Windows, and the last non-retarded OS from Microsoft. Thus considering alternatives is a necessity for me. I'd like very much if the think-tank of vast-knowledged people in this thread could enlighten the audience about alternatives, for the benefit of plain common long-time Windows users like here your servant. I'm beginning to feel like an orphan in need of a new home. Well we don't know what is going to be happening to hardware in the future, like if motherboards somehow go away or get locked-down or severely limited in availability. Or if CPU growth stays dead at 3.9 GHz. Maybe they get even more SoC ( kinda has been with Intel each cycle recently ). Hardware is easily the wildest variable and one can imagine any number of crazy things. Any existing operating system would be reasonably functional on new hardware if at least the chipset driver INFs were updated. I have said that "flipping" either Intel or AMD to say 'screw Microsoft' and provide chipset drivers for XP for new releases would result in the other company quickly following suit. That is probably the most fruitful line of attack. Besides, it's crazy for them to write drivers and INFs for Vista or 8 when XP has a larger base than them combined times three. Of course hanging on to old computers is a very productive plan too. I have working systems back to 1996 here and now, and would even have older ones if I had more room. Definitely collect and save anything from Core2 forward, about six or seven years old. They are very useful and people should be grabbing them en route to the dump. Bag 'em and tag em'. They should work fine out past 2020 and even beyond. Naturally it pays to collect CPUs ( lots of great deals ) and hard drives too. And video cards. And Windows discs. Whipping together PC's is easy, and fun. And possibly also very wise because by changing out all the parts just might keep the possibility of unique ident through hardware fingerprint minimized. ( BTW, I can't wait to see what happens next spring to XP activation servers, this should be extremely interesting if you change stuff and trigger WPA and the server doesn't respond. This was argued years ago and Microsoft avoided answering directly IIRC. If they pull a sleazy move letting XP systems die from WPA they will have a riot and possibly a legal fiasco on their hands). There are lots of unknowns though and lots of other ways to proceed. Maybe the whole VM thing will be much different. VMware might be superseded by something even better and easier and faster. Or if Intel ever gets their enthusiast act together and we see chips 5x or 10x as fast, running XP ( because of pre-9/11 ) or 7 in a thoroughly secure VM that leaks no information on a 20 GHz computer would even be more pleasant to use than today. I expect by that point, 10 years tops, that Windows itself will have collapsed like Blackberry seems to have now, and Android or some later variation of Linux will be ubiquitous on all form factors. Android is already coming to the desktop, and Microsoft will soon have to make a choice. Will they use their x86 expertise and make a workstation OS to keep that market or will they keep playing in the children's sandbox where they will lose every single time? Will Android or other operating systems target x86 chips? Will Intel and AMD even keep making x86? It's all unknown and all unimaginable really. And we have Microsoft to blame. They decided to launch a frontal assault at Russia in Winter ( mobile market ) and are leaving their flank undefended ( x86 ). They will lose on both fronts with their current strategy. So I'd say at least stockpile computers and parts. And software. That stuff is yours to do with as you wish. Yes they plan to change that and will try to shame everyone into going subscription services on anemic toys where you own nothing. Ignore the naysayers and enablers just begging for big brother and 1984. Screw the lot of 'em. In fact take advantage of their ignorance and relieve them of their big bulky desktops when they toss them due to peer pressure. We've seen this in so many fields, the consumerization-commercialization that ruins something. It has happened steadily in music with a rapid decent, a race to the bottom in the 80's, the 90's, 2000's. We watched it happen but also noticed that the classic stuff not only survives, but thrives. The Stones and many others are still touring while so much crap from the 90's and beyond is already collecting dust. Even in the studio and onstage we saw equipment evolve and devolve to electronic crap but hardcore Marshalls and many other tube amps, effects and guitars from 30-50 years ago are priceless. While everybody can make a mis-step, no-one is more expert at it than Microsoft. If they made cars they would cancel the Mustangs, Corvettes, Ferraris, Lambos and Carreras and make only economical flat Chevy Chevettes. If they made guitar amps they would have chucked out the massive selling 100-watt tube lines and went to electronic mini-techno-gadgets. If they were a record label, they would have fired The Beatles and Stones and Iron Maiden and Dream Theater ( and everyone else ) just keeping Madonna and Miley Cyrus. They are the Justin Bieber of operating systems now. The solution is to ridicule them and make them suffer and expedite their fail. Or just wait it out because what goes around comes around. EDIT: typo

I think that is the default in 12. No menu bar either. Totally lame skin. Having just made the switch to 12, I worked out the edits to the config file to restore full local skinning, including showing a specified folder of your own skins when you use Tools > Appearance. They show up in the "Themes" tab which used to be "Skins". If someone wants to know how, let me know. Naturally you will need to have usable skins ( ZIP files ) with the buttons and everything inside.. BTW, I haven't looked, but I've heard that the huge online selection of skins were removed and instead they have those theme things.