Well, has it changed much. I read the summary above, and it was 100% gibberish. Honestly I understood nothing of what it said. Buzzwords and bullshit. All I know is that there's probably a new version. So, what's the difference between having no MS stories versus having unintelligible MS stories?

Problem is, at least on Windows and occasionally on Mac, is that they no longer tell you what the updates are in a clear and concise manner. If I see that there are 24 Windows 8.x updates, they all say something like "Fixes Windows Issues in 64-bit Systems" with a "click here to get more info" button that sends me to the web. It is very tedious to do that for every single update that's listed. In the past there was a bit more detail, so I could tell if the update actually affected me or not.

They're trying to get the user into the mindset of "do what we tell you, stop asking annoying questions."

The devs aren't at fault, unless the management and designers are abdicating their responsibility. Only in open source do the bottom line grunts get to actually inflict their own poor ideas on the world, except that in many of those cases the devs actually do good work because the *use* the products they're creating. The unusable interfaces are often coming from people detached from the product (ie, product managers) who think that simpler is better, or that fewer options means fewer decisions means fewer headaches.

Pretending to be am armchair expert who is still struggling to understand ad hominem attacks just makes you look like an complete tool but then what can you expect from an Anonymous Coward. /sarcasm Clearly the rest of us are doing it wrong.

Exactly. I was going to say the frequency of updates of your OS probably is inversely proportional depending on the seriousness of the work you're doing on it.

Updating from daily builds? Hobby OS.

Upgrading to new OS immediately after release? Thanks for finding all those zero-day exploits and rare bugs for the rest of us when we eventually upgrade.

Applying ONLY critical patches, and even then only when thoroughly vetted? You're using your computer to do actual work, and can't afford downtime.

*facepalm* Damn, I'm typically fairly careful about spelling and grammar, and then I screw up like that in a submission.

Sigh... at least I'm consistent in my screwups, huh?

Because it sounds complex and not entirely legal (it might be legal but it sounds like it might be illegal).

The vast majority of users are going to be using their real credit card.

I'm not even sure every guy who knows how to use a bank account and a computer fully understands how credit cards work. I think you need to seriously recalibrate your opinion of what typical people are capable of.

> I use clang as well because I develop on a mac

Sadly clang doesn't support OpenMP yet ... so still using GCC 5.x on OSX 10.9

Ugh. Visual Studio 2015 requires Windows 8.1. No thanks.

* https://www.visualstudio.com/e...

Here is the list of bugs fixed in

* GCC 5.2 compiler issues
* MSVC 2015 compiler issues

Additional MSVC 2015 bug fixes ...

* MSVC 2015 Features
* MSVC 2015 (C++11/14/17)
* MSVC 2015 STL part 1
* MSVC 2015 STL part 2

The speed of light also comes into play in the Fermi Paradox. It's quite possible that for a billion years there's been a vast galactic scale civilization in the universe emitting copious amounts of readily-identifiable radiation. But if that galaxy is more than a billion light years away, it would be physically impossible for us to see them.

There's lots of things about the universe that would make it hard for advanced lifeforms to spot each other unless they're close.

And I fully agree about our own solar system (although I personally think Mars is a terrible place to look and Europa is overrated). There's so many "worlds" in our solar system with fluids (including water, although I wouldn't be so bold as to say that it's a requirement for all life) and energy sources to harness. Organic chemicals seem very common too, even complex ones.

Of all of the bodies in the solar system, I think Enceladus has the best potential payoff in terms of "dollars vs. chance of finding evidence of life". Namely because you don't even have to land on it to do a sample return (but if you do want to land on it for better sample collection, it takes little energy to take off again). And because it emits its internal sea straight up into space. And its internal sea has interesting properties - namely, it's a hyperbasic sea caused by serpentinization of its rocky core, which is a process that also releases hydrogen, giving a potential fuel source to hydrogen-metabolizing life.

That said, my dream mission is still a Titan sample collection/return mission using an RTG-powered rotary nacelle craft to fly in hops all across the planet over the course of a year, recharging its flight batteries overnight on the surface and taking small samples from every potential terrain - dune fields, rivers, the various seas, cryovolcanoes, etc. It would then re-dock with its ascent stage (single solid stage similar to a small Pegasus stage), lift the ascent stage out of the atmosphere (to reduce drag) and as fast as possible until it's drained its flight batteries (which would happen quickly with the added load), ditch all unneeded weight and fire the ascent stage to re-dock with the ion-powered orbiter that got it there. The orbiter, having spent the past year skimming the outer layers of Titan's atmosphere for return propellant that doubles as an atmospheric sample return, would then return to Earth, possibly skimming Enceladus's plumes and Saturn's atmosphere on the way for more sample returns.

No question that would be a flagship mission, though, requiring two RTGs and three stages. An Enceladus-only return could probably be done on Discovery or New Frontiers budget (probably the latter).

It's a serious point. Our own radio signals are probably indistinguishable from background noise from Alpha Centauri, and they're actually reducing with time, not increasing.

Rather than than looking for "stray radio communication" (you really think an advanced society is going to lose lots of energy to stray communications?), we should either be striving for extreme optical / UV resolution (satellite-based interferometer telescope) so that we can spatially resolve surface spectra on extrasolar planets in our area to look for signs of life; and in general look for signs of energy release that might be associated with interstellar travel, such as antimatter annihilation, directed thrust, solar sail reflection, etc.

IMHO.

They don't usually reduce graphical quality unless absolutely necessary to get a reasonable frame rate. Most of the optimizations involve hand optimized shaders, or even just hints to the shader compiler built into the driver. Shaders are compiled to a high level bytecode a bit like Java, and then that is compiled into GPU native code, so there are opportunities for optimization.

There can also be removal of checks that are confirmed not needed for a particular game, tweaks to GPU memory management code etc.

Or know when to call it a day and end the relationship mutually, before it gets bad enough to warrant a divorce.