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Comment How many slots? (Score 1) 40

Low profile? What does that mean, exactly? How many slots does it take up? I am infuriated by all of the marketing hype that describes every single aspect and every single dimension EXCEPT the height of the card. Yeah, length is important. But SO IS THE HEIGHT!! Nearly all of the GPUs nowadays take up more than two slots. But they never, ever, EVER list the dimension in millimeters. Just nonsense like "2.5 slots". What is going on with this?

Comment TLA (Score 3) 150

ARGH. God I hate TLAs. Undefined three letter acronyms... what the hell? Who writes this stuff? And who is it for? All of the uber nerds in the world in a giant circle jerk? I thought for sure this was referring to neurolinguistic programming, but that didn't make any sense. Define your terms unless you don't care to communicate with anyone outside your little club of shibboleth-slinging jargon monsters.

Comment It's a mistake (Score 1) 98

It's a mistake for developers to write their own documentation. For a small company or open source project, there may be no choice. But for commercial software, technical writers USED to have jobs for a reason. Developers are victims of the curse of knowledge. They don't usually have the skill sets required for education and good writing. But now, companies have laid off their tech writers. It's all part of a greater arrogance that has crept into the industry... the assumption is that the design is SO GOOD that users can instantly comprehend all possible functions by merely glancing at the screen. But that assumption is a bullshit rationalization; the real motive is to cut costs by getting rid of technical writers as a profession. It's a parallel development to the crisis in journalism. Now everyone is a writer, regardless if they know what they are doing or not. Trained and skillful writing is no longer valued at all.

Comment Much bigger problem: Start Menu (Score 1) 490

Hey, this is annoying. It sucks to have bloatware installed automagically. But what is much worse? The fact that I can't organize the Start Menu anymore. All of the bloatware Windows Store Apps such as "Mixed Reality Portal" are at the top level of an alphabetical list. I can't put them in a subfolder labeled "Crap" ... or, as I label it in the Apple domain, "iCrap"

Comment Institutionalized ageism (Score 1) 169

Ageism is embedded and institutionalized, completely pervasive in the tech industry. I just turned 50 and thank my lucky stars that I have work. I'm thinking about studying math and programming to accomplish my own creative projects, and maybe someday write an app or two, but I have no illusions about every being hired. It's just not going to happen. It's like frickin' Logan's Run out there.

Comment Hypocrisy (Score 1) 88

Wait, so YouTube, owned by Google, is defaulted to auto-play. Chrome, also owned by Google, is defaulted to block auto-play. Is it not incredibly obvious that Google is conflicted as to whether it should exploit users via auto-play, or cater to their needs by blocking said auto-play?

This is what happens when companies get too big. There are a thousand tentacles, none of which know what the others are doing. They might as well be separate companies... so they really should be separate companies.

Comment Disable Windows Update (Score 1) 249

It's so simple, just disable the Windows Update service. Turn it back on when you want to check for updates. This works on all versions, including Windows 10 Home. I don't understand why NO journalist has EVER mentioned this. Oh, wait, I know... because tech journalists are totally ignorant of the technology they are covering.

Also, check the Task Scheduler for fascist update programs like AMD Updater, which AFAIK cannot be disabled any other way.

Comment Windows (Score 1) 226

The general purpose PC is still the best media appliance available. I also use Windows with a wireless mouse and keyboard. It's just way less hassle than anything else. I can set up the library the way I want it, using *GASP* a folder tree. Zero time wasted scrolling through brain-dead UIs. No ads or posters in my face. No mangling of song orders, etc. due to bad or missing metadata. There is a wide variety of media players from which to choose. Updates and codecs are easy to install. And also kind of important: my files are files, period, and the space they consume is a known value. There is no database other than the folder tree. PLEX, for one, eats positively criminal amounts of disk space for its library database.

Comment unfortunate article (Score 1) 485

"Star Trek" is fertile ground for cultural and political commentary. It's unfortunate that Sandefur's article is not an analysis of Star Trek, but rather a thinly-veiled polemic. Sandefur's own political views constitute the bulk of the article, in which he mounts a shallow emotional appeal against progressive political values. He cherry-picks specific fictional events from Star Trek to illustrate a right-wing narrative about how American society has allegedly deteriorated. For example, seemingly unaware of the astronomical irony of his word choice, Sandefur characterizes the idea that the Federation might learn something from low-tech sustainable farming as "reactionary" and "inhuman". The banner of the Claremont Institute website reads "Recovering the American Idea". I guess this means going back to a simpler time, when no one questioned the authority of Captain Kirk, who surely rose to his position of authority by virtue of impeccable morality and strength of character.

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