>is difficult/impossible to install without tying up a Microsoft Account
Gamers probably already have a Microsoft account as its required for games like Minecraft or services like Gamepass. A Microsoft account is needed for Windows Hello to function.
>has ads baked in
Do you have an example. I think it's more likely the user installed malware if ads are showing up unexpectedly. Gamers are more likely to install malware like this and Windows's security is not good enough to stop it especially when gamers use admin accounts and disable uac.
>is trying to force feed everyone Copilot when most people just don't care
How is it being forced? I haven't seen it on my machine. I assume people who don't care could just ignore it or disable the feature if they don't want it. Being able to look up help for games using Copilot seems like a feature that gamers may find valuable.
>comes preinstalled with bloat
Bloat is subjective. Actual performance issues caused by unneeded things running while in games would be. The mere existence of unused pteinstalled applications doesn't necessarily cause problems to gamers.
> Gamers probably already have a Microsoft account as its required for games like Minecraft or services like Gamepass. A Microsoft account is needed for Windows Hello to function.
If I want to use these things let me opt in.
> Do you have an example [of ads]
There are hundreds or thousands of articles on the subject. Here's one.
If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.
When people have taken the time to write debloating scripts it's fair to say some people think it's bloated.
This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.
>Here's one.
An app store recommendation is not an ad. The OS is helping the user find content that they may be looking for. It isn't an ad surface where companies are bidding to show up for keywords. The word ad is used by the article to stir drama and drive clicks.
>If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.
But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
I'm sorry if I seem completely out of the loop as I haven't used windows at all for at least a decade at this point.
> This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.
Opt-out security is the better model to have but I don't see how security features require a microsoft account to function. This isn't the case on any other operating system as security is not bound to having an account for some external service. Rather this seems like an artificial limitation that microsoft has created to push other microsoft services on the user as someone that only uses windows to play steam games that don't use a microsoft account have no use for one regardless if they use windows or not.
Can you point to a particualr security feature that would stop functioning and that needs to have an account and that couldn't use a hardware security key for 2FA (if 2FA is a requirement)?
> But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient unless the app store is so complex that it's practically unusable for the majority. The majority are also capable of using phones to install games, netflix, and other applications without having to be tech savy to do so.
Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store (usually the elderly) either have family that help them set things up or simply aren't your customers as they don't own computers.
>Can you point to a particualr security feature that would stop functioning and that needs to have an account and that couldn't use a hardware security key for 2FA (if 2FA is a requirement)?
No, as the security key can provide the identity instead of the Microsoft account.
>Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient
If you want to provide a good user experience you shouldn't stop at sufficient.
>Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store
It's not about a binary yes or no. It's about making it easier to accomplish what users want to do.
Pray tell then, what do you do your computing on? I get those prompts for features the manufacturer thinks I might want to use (but don't) on my Android phones, my iPads, the YouTube app, Firefox, and pretty much everywhere else.
Finding relevant ads is a search and recommendation problem, but not all search and recommendations are done for ads. In this case there is a search over popular apps in the store as opposed to an search through an ad inventory.
Reducing costs in Xbox and development partners, the state of the Xbox games submission (and the SDK... as a game engine developer it is the worst and the buggiest of all three major consoles), and finally all the communication and the investment in (crappy) AI from Microsoft and the large reduction of investment in gaming from them.
I know this comes from the Microsoft management side, and not from the devs.
When something is a default, it's not by choice. So people play on Windows because they have a computer running Windows, not because it's made for that.
The Stelo. 2 for $99. Oddly, it shipped from Amazon but Amazon doesn't sell them.
The app is subpar on iOS, but if you give Apple's Health app permission, you can get more data in there. Graphs that have absolute numbers. I think they reason their app doesn't give absolute values (for historical values, they give the current value only), is because it's not a calibrated device. It can't be used to control an insulin pump, for that reason.
No, this was a one-time thing for me, to work out how food impacts my blood sugar. I've used 1 of the 2 I bought, and I plan to use the other in 3-4 months, to see how I react then, after 6+ months with low sugar intake.
I just completed two weeks with Lingo by Abbott. It was decent. I wish it had better integration of the data with Apple Health, but I liked the Lingo score as a way of "gamifying" it and the UX overall was decently done.
> there is no other animal out there who […] developed some kind of societal system to expands its own resources beyond what's available in the wild.
The trouble with this sort of quasi-dualistic general statement in my experience is it doesn’t hold up well to scrutiny by domain experts. Another way of looking at this is that humans have shaped their “wild” environment to their advantage which is something many animals do. The trouble is in defining wild here - your point rests heavily on a definition along the lines of “shaped entirely by non-human forces” which is a circular argument. For example (and I’m no expert) but think of dam making by beavers and whether the resulting pools which expand their habitat and food are “wild”?
I’d agree with you that there is a qualitative difference between say industrial society and the rest of the animal world, but it’s not easy to nail down that difference in a way which doesn’t wind up excluding much of human history.
That's just a general problem of defining intelligence. Humans are able to excel in many different areas. Bringing domain experts here is like looking at an elephant through a magnifying glass (yep, it's just a skin patch, nothing unique here).
You still do not adress the domestication of fire. This leads to cooking, pottery, metal work and technology at large. Other animals never ever reached that step.
(Note the Great Wall was built for a mundane reason - the Han people couldn't defeat the Mongols on horseback, but they could keep building walls until the horses could no longer enter. Byzantium/Constantinople also adopted that strategy, which worked for over 1,000 years until the Ottomans built the world's largest cannon and blasted holes in it.)
> For instance, I remember looking at a grocer's shop and the sign that said "Oranges", which looked very much like "Πορτοκάλια" in Greek.
And interestingly to extend this chain of connections I just read your comment and through my basic knowledge of the Greek alphabet gained through maths, and a rough proficiency in pronouncing Cyrillic I could spot that the word is very close to the Turkish “portakal” (I know a few words from spending some time there over the years).
The United Kingdom is made up of the island of Great Britain and a part of the island of Ireland (Northern Ireland). It also includes many other smaller islands
You're probably thinking of Great Britain by itself, which is the island containing the main parts of the countries of Scotland, England, and Wales.
While you're right that it is called that (by many), some people object to it:
> In Ireland, the term "British Isles" is controversial, and there are objections to its usage. The Government of Ireland does not officially recognise the term, and its embassy in London discourages its use. Britain and Ireland is used as an alternative description, and Atlantic Archipelago has also seen limited use in academia.
I'm Irish and I've always found the controversy a bit ridiculous; it's a classic example of Irish people's distaste for all things English being taken to a nonsensical extreme. You never hear Brits complaining about the Irish Sea being called such.
I don't know, given the Isle of Man is in the middle of it, maybe it should be The Manx Sea? If we don't want anyone to own it, maybe call it The Sea of Sodor?
A similar controversy exists in the Arab world about what to call the Persian Gulf, where the names "Arabian Gulf" or simply "The Gulf" are preferred. [1]
Amusingly (but perhaps not surprisingly), British imperialism briefly waded into this dispute as well:
> Following British attempts to control the seaway in the late 1830s, the Times Journal, published in London in 1840, referred to the Persian Gulf as the "Britain Sea", but this name was never used in any other context.
I guess that's reasonable, though it appears the name goes back to the 1st century, so the UK is named after the Isles, rather than the other way around?
Great Britain may have been named after one of the isles, but the controversy arises because the UK spans (part of, but not all of) the two main isles.
> Has anyone proposed a viable alternative?
I don't know what would count as "viable" if you reject "Britain and Ireland" and "Atlantic Archipelago".
> Great Britain may have been named after one of the isles
Great Britain is the largest island of the isles. The UK's full name is The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland; ie there's no political entity of Great Britain (and never has been).
No, I don’t think you can fairly say a country is an archipelago unless it’s solely composed of islands all of which are entirely the territory of that state.
> I know people who've kept Macs running for nearly a decade (e.g. 2011 Macbook Air)
It’s no longer my primary machine but my 2009 MBP is still running just fine (new memory and disk 5 years back, battery is a bit shagged at this stage) and I use it all the time for storing and casting media, light dev work, office apps etc.
Something you'll not be able to do with Apple Silicon hardware. I am interested in the longevity of the new devices, but they'll definitely age faster since the configuration you get today is it.
That's been the case since 2016, after that everything is soldered in, so you can't change anything.
And even before that in the 2012 iteration you could only change the SSD with the RAM still being soldered in.
So all in all - it's been almost 10 years since they've been aging faster.
The JVM that Java shop is using is likely written in C, which should make you question the straight equivalence you’re setting up. There is an operational difference between getting a native executable and having something that sits on top of Java (or any other managed platform).
Not sure what you mean by "managed platform". Java being written in C doesn't mean you need to know C to run Java. You hardly deal with any native code at all unless you write your own JNI interface or do some obscure tuning, which is pretty rare.
I don’t see how it does at all - the point isn’t C versus Java, it’s native versus managed. Any reasonably proficient team running managed services needs to know how to deal with native dependencies, but the reverse is not true.
not in my view, a person who knows neither java nor c. but i think the counterargument from the people in this thread would make would be something like:
i can write my C programs without ever thinking about java. it is irrelevant to me. however, C is very important for java since the JVM it is running on top of is written in C.
i think, personally, the outcome this type of thinking is that “therefore every java program is in fact just cruft on top of C” which personally as someone who does 80% of their job in SQL i am ill-equipped to object on java’s behalf.
You’ll note the word “likely” in my comment. And there’s nothing special about C in my argument - I was responding to a comment which used it as an example. The point is simply that one way or another any given team likely knows how to tune, monitor and/or diagnose issues in native bits - in fact even a Java focussed team likely has these skills. But the reverse is clearly not true.
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