Seriously, there are STILL people out there using browsers without ad blockers?! Are they also still using IE 6?
Hint: If you are using Windows 95 or NT 3.51 then SeaMonkey 1.1.19 and Adblock 0.5 or Adblock Plus 1.0.2 do a great job.
There is just no excuse.
Say what you will, but the Windows 95/NT 4 Windows Explorer is the lightest weight, least cluttered, most consistent, and most sensible version of their user interface of all of them.
It pre-dates all the web "integration" madness so it is not tied to IE under the hood. It provides all the file management and desktop functionality anybody would really need, even in a modern computer.
The newest iteration of Windows has begun rolling out, and is buying positive reviews.
There, fixed that for you.
Does anybody besides the shills really think anybody not paid or threatened with leg breaking would give this a positive review?
But just watch as election time rolls around. Everyone will have forgotten about this mess, likely focusing on some new manufactured crisis. And even then it will still be a choice between Kang and Kodos.
You know, if you or I threatened to shut down the government we would instantly be thrown in Guantanamo or gunned down by capitol police. But somehow these terrorists that occupy the White House can get away with this nonsense and even expect us to praise them for coming to an "agreement" at the last minute?
The shelves will be able to track engagement, monitor how long customer's watch each ad...
Will they also track the frequency at which people "accidentally" smash these things?
But, if being tracked on a card bothers you so much, then simply get some people together and use the same card....
Because over time, especially if enough people do it, - and everyone should - they will make it harder, and harder, and even eventually illegal for you to do this.
And by shopping at places like this you are still saying it is OK for them to tack you and others, even if you have quietly fudged your data a bit.
Also don't be so sure that they will never have the techniques to see through your obfuscation.
"Grocer cards"? "Loyalty cards"? "Discount cards"? Let's call them what they are. TRACKING cards.
Sure, they may not turn the information over to your health insurance provider... yet. But they do use the cards to track purchases in aggregate. That is the entire reason for their existence.
Microsoft usually can see the train coming long before it arrives.
In my reading of its history, Microsoft has spent a good deal of its existence catching up with one train or another. Two notable examples: GUIs and the internet.
That is what it looks like in retrospect, but to put it metaphorically, Microsoft was already on a different train hoping it would take them where THEY wanted to go.
In the case of the Internet, they were on the train headed for making their proprietary MSN service the one true ultimate information service. I think they kind of hoped the Internet would just go away, but that didn't happen.
In the case of the GUI, they were already on the train of supporting and enhancing existing DOS software. It wasn't even entirely in their hands as they weren't the ones producing the hardware (How would you do a GUI when you were expected to support IBM monotext video cards?)
And now they are on they are on the tablet craze train, when outside of Apple, that is not where the rest of the world is going.
I'd say never. Why? Because driving on random roads and locations in varying conditions requires *intelligence*.
Most attempts at computer-driven cars so far basically just put cars on an electronic track and throw in a little bit of sensor data and pre-programmed logic.
Yes, 99.9% of driving is just dull "stay between the lines" but it's that
What happens when some crap falls off a truck and the sensors don't quite pick it up? What happens when someone runs out in the road in front of it? Can it tell the difference between a rectangular dark black flat piece of dangerous metal on the road and dark shadow from an overhead roadway sign? Would a computer even realize you might need to drive off the road in the event of an emergency or special circumstances? There are an almost infinite number of possibilities that you just can't pre-program in or plan for.
Throwing control back to the user probably wouldn't work well in practice, because once a car can drive itself sometimes, people will expect it to drive itself ALL the time.
And when something does go wrong, who will people sue? Right now it is the individual driver of the vehicle. I think car manufacturers would prefer to avoid the risk of being sued and leave responsibility where it is.
So what if someone creates a computer that is really intelligent enough to do that? Well, I'd suggest getting out of its way as it kills all humans.
In the modern context of computers "recycling" often means shipping to trash dumps in third world countries where they burn them down for gold.
Anything pre-VLSI can be truly recycled as parts or repaired to a functional condition in the right hands. Or even extended to do new things.
Unfortunately, since software doesn't contain gold or other valuable metals those always seem to wind up in the trash, yet can also be valuable to those operating vintage systems. (database software and manuals can go for quite a bit sometimes)
486 and Pentium 1 based systems frequently sell as retro gaming machines. There were a large number of games made for machines of this class that will not run or run acceptably on newer computers or emulators.
They also make good "tweener" systems for moving data in between newer and even older systems. They often have networking, CD drives, and USB but can handle 360k drives and ISA devices.
If anyone has "vintage" computers or software they want to know more about they should hop over to the Vintage Computing forum http://www.vintage-computer.com/vcforum/ . Just be upfront if your intent is to sell it.
There are lots of people interested in "retro" computing for various reasons. And it is not always nostalgia. Personally I like to lean about early machines and software that I never heard of or used before.
One aspect of it is history. Each machine has it's own story. For example the other day I saw a complete IBM 5150 original IBM PC on craigslist crammed next to all the entries for iPhones and Dells. It even had a huge monitor, printer and the software - some ledger accounting software - with it. You could tell that was not used for games or looking at pictures of cats. It served a real business purpose - the kind that people spent huge sums of money on, and was what helped bring about the personal computing revolution.
That's great, but that button doesn't display in my browser.
And just watch this new design go through mostly as-is just because some really high higher up thinks it looks cool. That's the problem with something owned by a company, can't leave well enough alone and got to screw it up to make it look "new".
Taco had it right back in 1997 when it was his personal blog.
It looks like a mess in SeaMonkey 1.1 and only slightly less so in Opera 10.10. Please keep in mind that there are some OSes that the geek crowd may wish to use but do not have more recent browsers. (BeOS/Haiku and OpenVMS come to mind).
Back when Slashdot worked in HTML 3 browsers, I used to love getting screen shots of different OSes and oddball browsers viewing Slashdot. So we now have to exclusively use Mac, Linux, or Windows on a supported version of Firefox/Chrome/Opera/IE? Guess I should be glad there is still some choice out there, but why make it so much harder?
The last person that quit or was fired will be held responsible for everything that goes wrong -- until the next person quits or is fired.
