Maybe, but as far as I can tell, they've never fixed the somewhat hilariously misplaced POIs near me. They appear to be untouched from when I first checked them back when iOS 6 was released. (Although I see that the power substation is now a Men's Wearhouse instead of a Nordstroms, so I guess something has been updated.)

The other Apple Maps issue is that they don't show the difference between "there's no traffic here" and "we don't collect data for this road" making their traffic reports entirely useless.

Combine the two, and no one I know with an iDevice bothers with Apple Maps for navigation, they stick with the Google Maps app. It's still better.

Sounds like your Windows 8.1 upgrade experience went more smoothly than mine.

In my case, the upgrade replaced the working graphics drivers with ones that - well, didn't. So as soon as 8.1 got to the point where it was supposed to display the log in screen, I instead got a nice black screen.

Fun fact: how do you boot to "safe mode" in Windows 8.*? Well, by holding down Shift when selecting "Shut down" from the Power menu. How do you do that when the OS won't actually boot? You don't.

Even better getting to the recovery options involves hoping and praying your keypress lands in the incredibly tiny window it bothers checking. I ended up just powering off the laptop during boot in order to make Windows consider it a "failed" boot because I never succeeded in triggering recovery mode using shift-F8.

Well, at least when it comes to Macs, yeah, probably. Macs aren't "officially supported" where I work. (Then why do I have a Mac? Because someone decided we should make an iOS app! Which required a Mac. So I got a Mac. And then the iOS app was canceled, because it was useless anyway. So now I have a Mac I need to keep updated to keep IT happy, because it isn't "officially supported.")

I disagree (clearly). A lot of people say that Windows 8 is worthless dreck, despite the fact that it in fact has a ton of actual improvements over Windows 7. Much like more recent OS X updates, those improvements are overshadowed by mind-numbingly stupid UI choices to the point where, as far as most users are concerned, Windows 8 is worthless dreck. Despite the clear technical improvements and useful new features.

Much like the OP when it comes to OS X updates. Yes, there are technical improvements. It's too bad about the UI...

Really? The slow iOS-ification of the OS doesn't count? Mavericks drops another set of iOS apps onto OS X that don't need to be there, and OS X has slowly been becoming more and more like iOS since Snow Leopard. I don't remember when they added their version of the Start Screen (Launchpad), but it's there, and you can't get rid of it. I'd say that counts.

IT forced all the Macs where I work to Mavericks. (One of the most painful upgrade processes I've ever had to go through, but I'm pretty sure that was on IT. I hope it was.) There's been no battery life improvement.

I do notice that trying to open the battery menu causes some system process to crash with 100% CPU usage, so that's a new - uh, thing. Not sure it was worth the upgrade, though...

Yeah, and Windows 8 has a ton of great tech improvements under the hood too. Yet I really can't blame anyone who'd rather stick with Windows 7 and miss out on the enhancements they'll never notice to avoid the UI changes they most certainly will.

I have no idea what you mean. Granted I haven't played WoW since vanilla, but in FFXIV, you level up via quests, gain rest XP by logging off at an inn^W"sanctuary," and the game doesn't "really" begin until you hit level 50. Almost exactly like WoW, except for the part where you have to level a second class up to level 15 in order to play your original class past level 30 and the fact that the cap is 50, not 60.

End game content is then annoying raids with strict loot lock-outs, making for a very slow gear progression grind.

Now I have to admit that I don't know what leveling in WoW is like today, but leveling in FFXIV is basically identical to what WoW did at launch. Except you can (well, are forced to, if we're honest) level multiple classes on the same character. But it's still basically "grind quests until level cap, then switch to a gear treadmill." Just like WoW. How is this different? I'm not seeing it.

Actually... yes. You do. Believe it or not.

There's a concept called "doorway amnesia" where you'll tend to "forget" what it was you're doing when your surroundings change entirely. It's why everyone has experienced walking into a room and then forgetting why they went there in the first place. By entirely replacing the desktop and changing your context, it makes it harder to remember why you opened the Start Screen in the first place.

The rest of the complaints have to do with it being slower to use than the start menu thanks in part to the transition animations. My personal annoyance is that not everything you have installed shows up there, instead they're hidden behind the down arrow. Yes, yes, you can "pin them to start" but after installing a new app, it always initially confuses me when I go looking for it and it isn't on the Start Screen.

Does Windows do the bilinear filtering thing that the Retinal MacBooks do? I saw one running in a store, and the way it handles non-DPI aware apps is bilinearly scaling it up. Made the entire thing look very blurry.

Yeah, that's what I thought too, but reading the article, I think they may actually have meant the Start Button. Apparently the idea is to make it look more like the round button it is in Windows 7.

Because that's clearly the problem.

Reading other articles on the update it's clear that there are some minor fixes to using Metro with a mouse (right clicking will bring up a traditional context menu instead of bringing it up on the bottom of the screen), but the Start Menu (you know, what people actually want back) still will not be returning.

You don't live near Boston, then. People were pretty much saying exactly that. I'd hate to think what the ancestors who started the American Revolution would think of the people who live here now...

Happily enough, Alexa offers a download of the top million domains. Even calculating the MD5 hash for every domain every time and doing a simple string comparison using node.js, it takes only a couple of seconds to run through every single entry in that table.

arth1's domain isn't in the top million list, though.

But still, there are plenty of sites in the top million list you may not want to share with Valve that you visit, like #83, pornhub.com, or #84, huffingtonpost.com.

I remember that. I still have D2 turned off and use the old Slashdot interface, because D2 is crap and the original version works better. (Ignoring the pagination bug they never fixed to try and force people to D2.) The beta site kills the traditional UI I still use. (To be fair, the beta site finally lets you filter by score and not just "interesting." Too bad you're not allowed to set that as a default.)

I remember when Gawker decided to Gawker-ify a bunch of their sites (essentially making them unreadable to a degree worse than the current Slashdot beta) and asked for feedback. I answered that if they went through with the change, I'd leave and never come back. They went through with the change. I left and have never been back.

If Slashdot goes through with the beta site, I'll leave and never come back. Apparently I won't be alone in that decision. I'm not sure what I'll replace it with, but I'm sure I'll find something. It wouldn't be the first time I've stopped reading a website because a redesign made it effectively unreadable.

I know. Simply because it's Gawker, I have to side with whoever the other guy is. It's Gawker, after all. Gawker is to journalism as Slashdot is to editing.

And not a moment too soon, I read somewhere that 3D printers are being used to print medical gear, can you imagine if your medical gear printed with a virus? You'd doom the human race to gray goo! It's good to think that we're safe from that, thanks to products like Norton Antivirus.

Of course, 3D prints will take twenty times as long, but it's a small price to pay for the peace of mind and ability to use a laptop as a space heater that Norton Antivirus provides.