Shouldn't you be thanking Microsoft for that?

The Seventeenth Amend disagrees... unfortunately.

Why. Because you miss the days of monopolies and trusts openly buying U.S. Senate seats on the floors of statehouses?

You're conflating a war that turned out to have bad intelligence

You're going to put on those clown shoes in public? After whining about 20 year old Clinton Chronicle horseshit, you're going through a marthathon session of Twister to excuse the Bush Administration's constant, bald-faced lying on Iraq?

Really?

Well, thanks for making it clear you're as much of a drooling, brain dead partisan tribalist as an Obamabot who spent years railing against the Patriot Act only to snooze when Obama pushed the far more odious NDAA into law.

Could you guys all move out to Political Hack Island and fight it out, leaving the rest of us in peace?

Ok, DC-DC converters do have a legitimate place in battery powered systems. You want a blue or white LED in your flashlight without resorting to an expensive cell chemistry or 3ish alkalines in series? Well, DC-DC converter it is. You(for some reason) have an antique filament-bulb flashlight and you don't want it to spend the last chunk of its life putting out relatively useless IR because the filament temperature is too low for visible light? A DC-DC converter will fully flatten the batteries faster(because of its own losses, and because current draw has to increase as voltage droops in order to maintain the same power output); but at least the entire lifespan will be spent putting out usable light.

However, there's a problem here: Most even vaguely well designed widgets already tolerate some amount of voltage variation. Especially because NiCd and NiMH rechargeables are only good for ~1.2v(maybe 1.3-1.4 hot off the charger, for a few moments), alkalines for ~1.5; but with well known droop as they are exhausted or if discharge current is too high; and lithium primary cells in AAA or AA packages are up around 1.7, with less droop; you simply can't build a consumer widget that is too picky about battery voltage. If you do, you'll be flooded with unhappy and confused customers and probably lots of expensive returns.

This seems to constrain the useful market for this product to a very narrow, rather weird, niche: Anything that already tolerates voltage droop well will see very limited benefit. Anything with very low power draw will also see very limited benefit, because even badly depleted batteries slump as discharge current increases. Devices with very high power draw might see a benefit; because they will drive the battery to slump most quickly(and, according to the discharge curves for most alkalines, very high currents will cause substantial slump well before the capacity is exhausted); but the DC-DC converter will need even higher discharge current in order to keep power output constant as voltage drops, which will exacerbate the voltage slump, and likely hit the wall where the effective internal resistance of the battery is high enough that it simply won't deliver any more current.

So what actually gains? Devices that are maldesigned enough to brown out with even modest voltage droop; but also sufficiently low drain that the draw of the converter will remain within the battery's 'best-case' discharge cycle; but not so low drain that the (modest; but nonzero) losses in the DC-DC converter increase the overall drain by a substantial amount.

Anyone have a device or devices in mind?

I've already told you that the NAS calls it a "settled fact"

So? They also claimed in the 70's that global cooling was an established fact. If you want to try to refute that, fine, I'll take up the time to dig up my copy of their statement. [Jane Q. Public, 2015-06-03]

Go ahead.

That is true. I wasn't really expecting a happy story to come out of a brewing battle between a fanatical horde of brutal slavers and a theoretically well intentioned but feckless and corrupt 'democracy' waging a logistically and morally questionable campaign of occupation; but they really squeezed you in that, despite your substantial power in the late game(both as a combatant, and with the support of the boomers and so on); you never appear to have even the option of forcing any of the factions to accept some other outcome than the one it originally demanded; and they all pretty much demand that you stab a bunch of the others in the back for no terribly compelling reason, or just tear everything down and read that Freeside is still a failed state.

On the other hand, part of why that failure was felt so keenly is that getting an ending required fucking over factions and people you cared about, for somewhat dodgy reasons, and without the chance to attempt to broker a more favorable outcome. In FO3, Bethesda put in a few 'Big Moral Choice' moments; but they don't have much of an impact because they ring so hollow: "Hey, you are restarting the big purifier machine! Want to betray your parent's life's work and commit mass murder for no obvious benefit because the enclave computer told you to? Please choose Yes/no." "Good work on breaking through the Enclave defenses and gaining access to the satellite targeting system. Do you want to blow up the base of the enemy that has been dogging you for most of the game, or suddenly turn on the Brotherhood for absolutely no personal reward or coherent reason and blow their base into a smoking crater instead?"

The choices you make surrounding vault 101 are the closest they get to actually affecting or bittersweet outcomes, with success meaning saving a home that is no longer yours and so on; but the other choices, while present, are pretty much a bunch of 'so, do you want to carry on helping your buddies, or just fuck them over because of cartoonish evil?'

NV really crimped your ability to either shape the outcome, despite your importance, or to just maintain the status quo and wander off into the desert; but, while went overboard on the "That's terrible; but apparently the plot won't advance until I do somebody's hatchet job..." they at least avoid the "I've just been offered a 'moral choice' where one of the outcomes is unremittingly bad and doesn't even bother to tempt me in some way" issue.

Apparently the driver still exists, it just doesn't ship with the default OS image anymore, and the OS will have to grab it from Windows update. Pretty much the same thing that they do to older printer models and other hardware from time to time.

MS is fairly conservative about actually murdering driver support that they've previously provided(firewire got the axe pretty hard; but most of the casualties are in drivers that only the vendor ever supplied, especially in XP->7 or 32->64 bit); but they've wanted to get the 'size of a windows install' down for a while now(it makes Windows tablets look a bit silly, when the OS uses more space than the lower end Android and iOS tablets have); and the safety of assuming that the customer has an internet connection is probably greater now than ever.

The actual playback application gets included because many users want out-of-box features, that one among them. The other incentive(and the one that makes the visible application comparatively trivial to include) is that OSes have a stronger incentive to include some sort of media framework that makes it relatively easy for people building applications for their platform to include media handling and allows those applications to benefit from additional capabilities provided by other media handling programs on the system without additional work to explicitly support them.

For Windows, that's Directshow and 'Media Foundation'. WMP is a relatively small(honestly fairly lousy) shell around the actual media framework. OSX does much the same thing with Quicktime, and the FOSS world has gstreamer and Phonon. These systems can get pretty hairy(XP with a couple of dodgy codec packs installed, in particular, frequently ended up in such bad shape that either installing VLC or nuking the system was the best way to get playback again); but when they work as intended, you get the very neat effect that anything that needs media handling can more or less automatically and more or less cleanly share the capabilities of other media handling software that might be on the system, without needing to do more than be able to accept some flavor of output for display.

If shilling this obvious isn't at -1, there's a serious problem with the moderation on this site.

Unless MS is really interested in turning the screws(in which case update handling will presumably interact with OS validation in some way intended to make it tricky to crack); the inability to defer updates will probably be a few registry keys that work equally well on any SKU; but don't have a UI anymore, and are intended to be manipulated with Group Policy in a domain environment.

Doesn't mean that it isn't a heavy handed move predicated on the assumption that consumers are idiot sheep who can't be trusted; but barring special effort it will probably require 10 minutes in regedit to do yourself.

This is also a fairly niche issue(given that most people shoving DVDs into computers either want them to Just Play, or want to rip the to some format that means never dealing with DVDs); but I'd assume that the MS codec that is being killed is a DirectShow filter; while everything in VLC's bag of tricks is specific to VLC(though some programs do specifically use VLC for various things).

In practice, the words 'DirectShow Filter Graph' typically mean that somebody just opened an industrial sized box of incomprehensible pain; but the theory is noble: it's Microsoft's stab at a modular media handling system that allows a given application to painlessly 'inherit' codecs, effects, demuxing steps, and assorted other operations provided by other software without having to be built with them in mind. If the application uses DirectShow, and there is a set of filters that will get you from the item you are attempting to play to the format the sink requires, things are supposed to work.

There are some atrocious complications(shitty 'codec packs' registering themselves as the most preferred codec for every possible situation, even ones they are horribly broken at, seemed to be a favorite), and much of the time the theoretical elegance of the system was excessive to the actual need, while the complexity was always lurking; but there probably are a few users who will find the announcement painful for this reason. VLC, ffmpeg, etc. are very good at what they do; but just as OSX-native applications expect Quicktime to handle media, and anything that isn't a quicktime plugin will remain isolated solely in the one playback program that it came with, Windows native applications expect Directshow, and if some piece of software is demanding a set of directshow filters that can take a DVD and do something useful, all the VLC in the world will not save them. Not VLC's problem; but one of the reasons why some users are going to be unhappy.

Yeah, everyone knows Google is a bastion of right-wing lobbying and giving. Why, you can just look at all their strictly traditional holiday search page images and their complete lack of focus on left-wing causes in their news releases, promotional materials and spending.

Good thing we have groups like these "investors" who are concerned not that they're making money, but that Google isn't contributing anything to any group which may in some way not agree with progressives to keep Google "correct" politically.

That's what surprised me so much about Skyrim: Fallout:NV had a fairly well fleshed out location based damage system, with both gameplay strategic implications and the pure gory amusement of taking limbs off.

Then they made a game set in a location where basically everyone carries a giant battleaxe or a huge sword all the time, and the only amputations are relatively rare decapitations that occur if and only if you have the right perk for your weapon type. Why?

No location would be immune from a potential fuckup; but The Institute, from its brief appearance in FO3, would be something I'd love to get to poke around in. Seeing a large, significant; but not Washington city post-nuclear-war, will also be interesting(Boston definitely does enough to earn a nuke in any likely superpower-scale missile exchange; but the distribution would be different from Washington, since federal infrastructure is quite limited and a lot of the defense contractors and such are outside the city, where space is cheaper).

I could also seriously consider delighting in the presence of a group of non-feral-but-deeply-unhinged ghouls who have gone from revolutionary war reenactment into full-scale holding-bunker-hill-with-muskets for reasons they no longer understand. Not a joke that could take too much beating; but if ghoul in a tricorn hat happened to attempt an authentic black powder musket kill on my vault dweller, I'd be delighted.

There is a legitimate argument to be made that 'Fallout' as in 'Old School Bioware RPG style; but with sardonic humor and the distinctive insanity of '50s civil-defense-and-suburbia taken to their logical extreme' did indeed die. The overhead, party-based, turn-based RPG, it is no more. Even Tactics, however tepidly it was received, was much closer to classic Fallout; and 'Van Beuren' died with Black Isle.

However, I'd agree that, while Bethesda didn't really understand the Fallout spirit(FO3 was a competent RPG and didn't do anything egregious in terms of fucking with canon; but it could have been transplanted into a non-fallout post-apocalypse without much modification), they did a fairly commendable job in reconciling the "the market wants first-person action RPGs" pressure with "Fallout is Not a first-person action RPG". It needed some refinement(the skills list, in particular, was much stronger in NV); but VATS was a surprisingly elegant compromise.

Obsidian understands the hell out of what makes Fallout Fallout, so NV was much more a 'Fallout' game, rather than just a 'post-apocalyptic game with fallout compatible canon', and they tightened up some of the v.1 mistakes from FO3's character and stat design. FO4 is, arguably, where we see if Bethesda has what it takes to establish a worthy 'east coast Fallout' aesthetic and gameworld(which needn't be the same as 'classic'; but can't just be another greyish post-nuclear shooter), or whether they did an adequate job of laying the foundations; but should really leave the game-building to Obsidian.