Sure it did. Tiles on Windows Phone were a big hit for a time. If anything, the problem on that side of things was that they didn’t commit and make sure the things that worked on the phone also worked on the “tablet” version.

Instead, they took the approach that "the developers will thank us for charging them an arm and a leg to learn and use the new APIs, like they always have, forgetting that developers often follow users, and almost every user was verbal about hating what MS had done, including Windows phone users who understood what had been promised then effectively bait-and-switched.

Microsoft’s way has just always been so inspiring, you know?

I never got into gnome. Was more of an XFCE guy for a time, enough-so to realize Gnome had “deprecated” anything I liked about GTK. I was more looking for a classic start menu style with minimal overhead, and XFCE gave me that, while most other DE’s wouldn’t let me do stuff that Windows 95 had been cool with.

Windows 8 had a “reason”(TabletPCs, and the success of Tiles on Windows Phone) for the changes made. The old UX was still there if you knew where to look and what settings to change; Some searching online could mostly have you back to what you wanted in under an hour. It was coded by humans, tested by humans, and consistently worked as intended.

Windows 11’s changes have no such saving-graces or anything resembling rational justification. They let their AI re-code a bunch of fundamental features, and particularly the UI/UX, from a low-level programming language to frameworks intended for fucking websites, just so they could say it was capable of doing-so. Along the way, they used AI to test the results and skimped on or ignored the results from testing done by humans.

How many times before has Microsoft publicly admitted one of their products is broken and promised to fix it? What does being technically solid have to do with UX? EVERYTHING.

… Windows 11 is far worse. 8 was solid compared to 11. 8 was a pain in the ass, but it mostly did what it was supposed-to.

Best result probably looks like Mars. Worst Venus. Either way, survival looks like trying to scrub the planet of any evidence you were ever there as you flee the solar-system in shame, or starting an Empire premised entirely on keeping others away from the home system, for fear of being outed. Maybe both.

IME, rentals had shit quality, unless you were one of the first few people to rent that movie. Still watchable, mind you, but the software for ripping back then would hang on the mildest errors.

My guess was that most of the high quality torrents back then were ripped by people who bought or stole New-in-box discs, or employees at stores that rented or sold them, and don’t forget Screeners.

If it had 5G, I might bother, aftter toying with it as-is to see if I could just live with it.

Otoh, the way their description reads, it wouldn’t surprise me if it also filters client traffic in hot-spot mode, which would be a bridge too far to me.

When Asahi started, the M1 chips were so good they might as well have been the only ARM-based-that-can-run-x86/x64-code-CPUs in-town. Last I checked, the M-series were still consistetly near the top of the stack of such chips, and look even better when you account for price.

Your argument works even better versus the Snapdragon X, but that’s Microsoft’s current fav, so … ?

Thanks for spelling-out the stupid for me. My brain was hung-up on the correct way to un-fuck logic I would rather not understand, for a moment. “Too stupid for words” came to mind, and the phrase just sorta … hung out, wasting time.

Any company that sent me this far-into the weeds for them ghosted me or replied with un-reasonable terms when I came up with something appropriate. Usually they replied with a whole boiler-plate they had on-hand, but apparently wanted to pretend it was a negotiation, until they didn’t. A couple times, the legal department on the other end got shitty with everyone and tried to act like their company had never and would never interact with a contractor who hadn’t already signed terms I found exploitative and walked-away from when they wouldn’t budge.

There are plenty of licenses out there that would work, but when you’re two-companies removed from the legal offices of the company with the ultimate say, its never as simple as trusting your friend. That said, my limitted experiences with similar situations never involved an insider I was close with, so I mean it when I say I wish you the best of luck.

You’re always gonna need to be ready or at least able to stop and ask yourself, were the favors that big, or did they just tell you they were? It’s the middle of the weekend and you’re fretting over this instead of spending your own time how you see fit or coding for profit.

A company that’s asking you to figure this stuff out for them isn’t necessarilly going to sign-off on anything too reasonable, but I’ll agree my advice was more suited for after that happens.

“My lawyer will need to talk to your legal department, he charges $xxx per hour…” If you think I’m being snarky, I’m really not. Your entitled client is hoping to force you to, or let you, do something stupid so they can hang you out to dry or wring you out for free or discount labor, maybe even a “small guy like you should be willing to pay us for the oportunity to do this work”.

I’m not saying to pretend you are a lawyer, I’m saying to get one, and if its all above-board, things will work-out. If it ends up a “missed opportunity”, then it was never really an opportunity in the first place.

Maybe I’m just cynical, but I’ve always made double or triple the $$-per-hour as a contractor than I have as a W2. Some “clients”, head-hunters, and would-be “lead-finding services” would try to interact with me as though being a contractor just meant I was jobless, which, maybe they would have been right, in a world where I had or made the time to interact with people set on wasting it like so…

Read that last sentence again; By entertaining their non-sense, their assumptions about how they can get-away with exploiting you become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Hire a lawyer or become one. You can be out some money paying the lawyer(which becomes overhead expense to factor-into what money the client should owe you, in beautiful black-and-white contract/invoice form that let’s you sleep at night), or you can be out time, near-infinite amounts of time, doing your client’s homework on-top-of the programming they ostensibly are paying you for. Everything you care about suffers in the second version, including your code quality.

Congress and Mexico not helping to kill or deport enough brown people from Central and South America? Kill them while they’re traversing Guatemala, or fishing peacefully in international waters!

I see you, fucking Nazi terrorists.

Shame on Guatemala. You don’t even share a border with Orange man!

No question about other countries’ actions was asked, answered or even mentioned in the article. I stand by my assertion that the headline was misleading garbage and should have been called-out in the post.

That’s a funny way to say “…doubt America and the West …”.

I mean, yes, but the point I was making is that most people don’t, and so demand doesn’t adjust to supply or pricing quite as-it-should. I’ve got a few more payments to make on the vehicles I have before EV’s become anything-like a feasible option for me.

I just refuse to budget more for fuel when its more expensive. Gimme an excuse to refuse to leave the house because I don’t have the fuel in my car to drive across town for whatever non-sense and still make it to work until pay-day, I’m going to take it.

“Encountered”? I was raised on that shit. I was bewildered the first time I encoundered a printed graphic sleeve, and learned that some people spent shelf space on tapes with only one movie each on them…

That one step is the one they were trying to avoid with the rest of this non-sense. You’re not going to make up the difference for others not doing the same, with this stuff, or telling others to do this stuff.

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