Oh thank the heavens.... POP3 is so terrible that I'd actually rather be shoehorned into something proprietary but near-universally supported. I really do hope that support for it starts disappearing, because I just want to smack anyone who thinks that suggesting "We support POP" is a good answer to the "How do I get email on device or application X" question.

And I don't have a computer or an internet connection, so we should all get together and

"Bitch/whine/cry. Metro sucks, I don't have a touchscreen, Valve hates Windows, I'll never use it, cry cry cry."

That should be all the evidence you need. After all, if all these people are complaining about it as though Microsoft unloaded a dump truck full of Legos onto their bathroom floors, it must be terrible!

Windows has been a fairly lean, ever-evolving piece of tech for quite some time now, starting with Windows 2000. Any time anything changes, you'll find a subset of vocal assholes that'll go out of their way to flip their shit whenever given the chance (rumor has it that New Coke was actually better), and I personally just find it to be fucking annoying. They'll eventually shut up when the next thing to bitch about comes along.

I've used every iteration of Windows for pretty much its entire lifecycle as a flagship OS since Windows ME. They all worked just fine. XP was great. Vista was great. 7 was great. And Windows 8... Yup. Great.

There are things about every single iteration of the product that are improvements and drawbacks from previous versions. I could list them and whine like a bitch on the internet all day, but instead I just read up on how the new stuff works, learn how to use it effectively, and enjoy being more informed than the average, whiny troll.

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but it'll never get any better. People will never like what they don't understand, but it's very easy to read a single description and mock or hate something forever. Take the time to educate yourself of the differences in the old vs. the new. Actually justify your own opinions, and simply enjoy the fact that your opinion will be worth more than that of just about all the trolls put together.

I get the concept. I'm saying that the sales tactics and the excuses that are used for why everything is a big pile of lies and bullshit don't hold water. Unlike the pool. Furthermore, the fact that these practices are in place gives some implication that transfer-based fees and caps solve is one of instantaneous capacity---otherwise the carriers would be happy to make things unlimited again, but there's not enough capacity for it!---and that's a complete lie.

It's a profit-driven adjustment to the status quo designed to fuck over consumers everywhere, and has us paying attention to all the wrong things when it comes to our data connections. It doesn't matter how fast it "can" be. It matters whether or not I can actually use it for what I bought it for---the bandwidth---without being billed to absurdity for using it.

I'll bust out the calculator:

• ((25 Mbps) * 1 month) / (1 gigabyte) = 8025.34
• 8025.34 GB * $10 per GB = $80253

Okay, so at the "standard" $10/GB rate, it's an amazingly affordable eighty thousand dollars per month to actually get what I thought I had for $50. Great. But that's LTE! Cellular is expensive because of spectrum/costs/blah blah blah. What about a wired line? I think that's $10 per 100 GB, or $802 per month. Gotta love DSL. It's cheap!

These usage fees are obviously outrageous when you look at them, and it's no different from the wholesale fleecing of the public that was SMS pricing until... well shit, the cellular companies still break it off in you for SMS. They don't let you pay for a limited quantity anymore. It's all or nothing.

Of course. But that's not the point!

Of all the ways one could address consumer demand for a solution to a problem---bandwidth is limited---they've taken the absolute most indirect and cheapest route to address the problem. The keep the solution because it's so profitable (huge ROI because it's low cost), in spite of the fact that it doesn't actually solve the damned problem. We've seen this before: you're holding it wrong.

Companies' transfer caps treat the customer like an asshole: they sell you on the bandwidth, and then turn right back around and pretend that you're only paying for the privilege of a connection. Actually sending data across it at anything near a significant percentage of its rated speed is gonna cost you more. A lot more.* Better pull back on the using of what you thought you were paying for: An always-on internet connection with a[n ideally] 25Mbps speed.

Bandwidth and transfer are the same damn thing, and when you equalize the units, it's pretty obvious that you're getting screwed.

* Since we know how bandwidth works, this, too, is pure profit (or close to it, when peering fees are considered).

That's the obnoxious thing. See, they sell you a connection; let's use an LTE-Wifi puck as an example. They say "speeds up to 25 Megabits per second," then they turn right around and give you a completely different number but disguise or attempt to justify it as a different metric altogether, such as "5 Gigabytes per month."

Those are both measurements of bandwidth. All they did was move the scale. So let's even out the units:

• (5 gigabytes) / (1 month) == 1.99368468 KBps
• (25 megabits per second) / (1 kilobyte per second) == 3200 KBps

However:

• 3200 KBps != 1.993 KBps
• Conclusion: Someone's lying.

When you attempt to solve a problem with bandwidth by restricting transfer, all you do is alter the actual bandwidth that someone is paying for, while simultaneously shoving into the customer's hands an extremely effective method for automatically increasing their bill. This creates massive incentive to never use the service at all, which increases the quality of service for those that do use it, and generates significantly more profit than increasing capacity to compensate for actual usage. As a bonus, since the service is faster, it's easier for the less conscious to run up their own bills. Win-fucking-win-fucking-win. For everyone except the customer.

It's just fucking wrong. Transfer caps are an artificial construct that do not actually address the problem. While they can work in theory, the fact that networks slow down in spite of the fact that they exist goes to show that they're a titanic pile of bullshit. They comically generate the money needed to address the actual problem with the service but they will stay around forever. Because fuck the customer.

Its function truly is piracy, but it has a lot of utility in legitimate scenarios.

That said, it's on my phone so that I can downgrade, and so that I can try apps that don't have a free version. I've wasted too much money on apps that I literally had to buy before figuring out they don't work right or don't fit the bill for what I want.

Returns on iOS are non-trivial.

But that's exactly the logic that's gotten us into the steaming pile of shit that is the selection from which we have to choose today when purchasing a laptop!

Not that you're wrong, but they say history repeats itself.

I concur.

If you really need a number pad on a laptop, just get one of these.

Real bad luck.

Desk phones and SIP clients out for 2.5 hours for me. Calls rolled over at the provider level like they were supposed to though. Didn't think I'd have to put that to the test so soon.

The server qualifies for the free tier, and that's probably why it just went straight unresponsive for two hours. Maybe I should upgrade to a slightly larger paid/reserved instance and..... Wait, I smell conspiracy.

Woot. I win today.

Well, no, of course you won't.

What I'm imagining will happen here is that the software will have the capability long before the hardware does. There was a long period of time where a mouse was an optional item for a desktop computer. Economy of scale may make the same true of the touchscreen. Only time will tell, of course.

If you've got an iPad, try Splashtop's Windowns 8 remote access app. It hooks into Windows 8 through a HID driver, and gives an excellent idea of what the interface is supposed to be like.

If it took you 20 minutes to load WinPE 4, which the installer is built from, then I'd go so far as to say you've got bigger problems than not liking the interface. I can't say I've tried it, but I'm pretty sure you can flat-boot (no RAM Disk) WinPE 4 with less than 100 MB of RAM. You can count the services that start up on your fingers.

Metro apps aren't very good with a keyboard and mouse. Try them with a touchscreen. For everything else it facilitates, like find-as-you-type, command execution, and so on, it's close enough to the functionality of its predecessors' Start menus that you shouldn't have a problem using it. Yes, everything is in a totally different spot on the screen, but it's not exactly difficult to figure out. For everything else, just stick to the desktop.

I wish I could use 5 GHz all the time for my iPad, but for some reason, the brick wall on the outside of my house prevents me from getting a signal from a router that--while on the other side of said wall--is only about 12 feet away.

The 2.4 GHz works just fine though....

Then again... I seem to recall reading that the iPad 3 had a super shitty wireless implementation... either the antenna, or the radio... not sure. But that definitely sounds right, considering my issues/