I just bought a couple of his books last week, knowing he wouldn't be around much longer. I haven't had time to fully read them yet (I'm maybe a hundred and fifty pages into Consider Phlebas) but from what I've read so far, the world is now a poorer place for having lost Mr. Banks.

Replying to cancel out an incorrect moderation. I did not want to set this as troll.

Guess what series I was reading when I came up with my current handle.

McCaffrey's books helped me get a jumpstart on literacy way back when. G'bye, Anne. Thanks for all the books.

Parent post gave me a laugh, since Nineteen Eighty-Four was in fact one of the first things to be remote-killed.

Browsers exploding in fury when self-signed certs show up is a design decision to protect stupid users from themselves. Otherwise, Joe Sixpack is going to start blindly 'trusting' every self-signed cert he sees just to get the dialog box/popup whatever out of the way, just like he already blindly clicks 'ok' when faced with those fake antivirus popups.

Perhaps phones should have a 'wipe non-volatile memory if SIM is removed/replaced' option in the future.

Several posts on the WoW general forums and MMO-Champion's article on the subject raise a valid and somewhat chilling point: while forum trolls are likely to be driven away, removing some of the noise from actual discussions, actual contributing posters are going to be shying away from the new forum system as well. People who would otherwise be helpful, share knowledge about class and game mechanics or even info about interface-modding are going to disappear entirely from the forums because they do not want to be compelled to show their real name to all.

I'm not sure if the loss of signal will be worth the loss of noise here.

Drivers.

People aren't taking the time to learn the meaning of the 'available' memory stat in the Task Manager.

Based on my experience, it's usually very close to the total you get when adding 'free' memory and 'cached' memory together.

'Available' in this case means that, as parent suggests, Windows will free it for use as soon as it's needed.

Hey, don't blame us. The article you referenced (link fixed) pegs the domino effect as starting from within Ohio.

That's like them not supporting 68k chips past OS 8.1. Technology moves on, and after a while it won't make sense to support the oldest models anymore.

I can hardly consider the logos or branding on any OS I've used so far to actually be intrusive or advertising. I mean, (in the case of non-free OSes) you've already bought the darn thing, right? Right now they're more just like a reminder about what OS you're using.

Why the hell are consoles serving ads? I never had much desire to pick up a PS3/X360, but what little there was just plummeted.