Posts by JohnFen

Re: I don't get it

Although a minority, lots of people haven't let go of it -- when I see it, it's usually people who hate Edge but don't want to bother investigating third-party browsers. IE is acceptable to them and is the path of least resistance.

Re: BTW if you need a cross-platform GUI development solution

> you still want the underlying engine to be the same so the application layer can share as much code as possible.

True, although I'd say "as much as practical," not "as much as possible," I also really think that the user experience should not be sacrificed in order to achieve this. All of the methods I've seen in this direction so far (with WIn8+ being the poster child for this) have sacrificed the user experience.

If saving on production costs makes things worse for the user, then those savings should be skipped.

> up until now, that "pesky" Windows 7 has always given people a much better alternative.

I think it still does, to be honest.

Re: Hey Microsoft: Just drop wordpad FFS

Yes, I use WordPad too. Not often, but a few times a month. LibreOffice and Word are both huge applications that consume lots of resources and take a long time to start. When I want to do something relatively simple, they're serious overkill.

Re: Except...

If I clicked on one of those and it dropped my into the Play store to do the rating, I'd be sorely tempted to give it a bad rating because of the nag alone.

But I'm not really quite that mean. Instead, when I see one of those I just immediately uninstall the app (I run rooted, so I can uninstall anything I want).

Re: Where did it all go wrong?

> people forget that this is the price they pay (paid) for free sh*t and complain bitterly.

I think people start complaining not because they forget, but because the price gets increased to an unacceptable level later.

Re: To be fair...

> Just like I understand local radio plays ads to get some income, that doesn't mean I don't immediately switch to another radio station until (at least) the ads have finished.

You're more generous than I! Advertising is why I don't listen to the radio or watch television.

Re: M$ should have enough money to not need ads

Businesses are different, but there are many humans that understand that there's an optimal level of wealth, and having more than that makes you less happy.

Re: On loathing ads

> If simple non-targeted ads, say, in the form of text-based billboards, could be incorporated into webpages and apps, then I wouldn't object to them.

In webpages? I could tolerate that, as long as they're not bringing any tracking along with them. In apps or operating systems? No way would I tolerate that, period.

Re: Your toothbrush is broken

I use the old manual ones. No need for power at all! I think it's the superior solution.

> it becomes a de-facto standard by virtue of sheer volume of sales.

This is what irritates me about Apple. So many of their design decisions are things that I actively don't want (if I did, then I'd use Apple devices), but they end up polluting all the competing products anyway.

Devices that use USB-C should always have at least two of them. I know they don't, but they absolutely should.

Re: What problem are they trying to fix?

> I wonder , are all these TVs failing

I don't know -- but I do know that people in my area have been putting these things out on their curb for collection often enough that many of my friends have been picking them up. They are almost always not operating correctly, but almost always because the electrolytic capacitors have failed. A few dollars worth of new capacitors and an afternoon with a soldering iron gets them working as good as new.

Re: I know I'm weird

I'm sure that I'll find out. It's inevitable that I'll eventually be unable to avoid USB-C. However, literally everybody that I personally know has had problems (occassionally, serious problems) because of the cable confusion.

I suspect that I'll have to start doing what we used to have to do in the bad ol' days -- label all cables and dedicate them to certain devices/uses.

Re: What's wrong with a round power connector?

And don't forget the two possible polarities for each voltage!

> IANAElectricalEngineer, but given that most high voltage transmission lines are DC anyway, surely it would be more efficient to not convert to AC outside of a town and then back to DC in every device.

It's complicated.

HVDC is used for long-haul transmission lines because it's more efficient and there isn't the need to do a lot of converting between voltages. But it has to be high voltage to work -- at lower voltages, the losses would be too large and you'd need to use much thicker cables.

When you're near consumers of electricity, though, you need to convert those voltages to something more reasonable that your customers can use (and not all of them use the same voltage -- you have to account for industrial uses too). It is far, far more efficient to shift voltages up and down with AC vs DC.

The current system of using HVDC for long-haul transmission, and converting to AC when you're near customers actually using the electricity, is pretty much the most efficient way to do it. Power companies and grid operators have a very strong economic incentive for maximizing this efficiency.

Re: Good start

This was absolutely possible with the last car that I owned. I did it roadside (well, in the parking lot of the auto parts store) in about 3 minutes without tools.

Re: Usb-c isn’t really standard

Oh, USB-C is a standard, all right. It's just a bad standard.

I hope not, out of environmental concerns. Wireless charging wastes a lot of electricity.

Re: "there will not be a Windows 11"

> You expect to never have to upgrade your PC hardware?

PS hardware became more than good enough to meet my needs a long time ago. While I wouldn't say that I'd never have to upgrade, the need to do so is pretty low and infrequent.

> there is a much larger market for refurbished systems

Indeed. I purchased 10 PCs last year. 7 of those were refurbished PCs I got from my local electronics recycler.

Re: Not just open source

> This could apply to any software project.

I suppose it could, but I've been in this industry for 30 years or so, and I've rarely encountered this sort of problem outside of the OSS community, and even there, it's only become a real issue over the last 10 years or so.