There is no reason why applications which choose to implement both types of interfaces can't do so. There's also no reason why users should be limited to one type of interface or the other. Both things coexist completely peacefully on Android. You can connect a mouse to your tablet (or even phone) and treat it like a desktop system with shitty storage (practically all phones, it takes a lot of power to have fast storage.)

The primary use case for tablet computers in olden times was data entry and acquisition, for example the military used their magnesium-case gridpads to do inventory.

Curious what Mac you're using? I'm getting a new personal laptop somewhat soon, and the M5 chips look really nice. How much RAM do you have? I've currently got an M1 mini with 8GB of RAM that works pretty well but it tends to start bogging down when using containers and having a bunch of youtube tabs open. I'm not sure how much of the Apple Tax on memory I need/want to spend.

Yeah I used to have the MSDN subscription where you'd get binders full of CDs every quarter.

Visual Studio Community is free though for non-commercial use, and commercial use as long as you're under a certain annual revenue (Something like $1.5 million I think?). I'm sure the volume licensing that most shops use is far less than $500/month.

VS26 is surprisingly good. There is a ton of AI crap in it, but you can completely turn it all off. VS26 runs noticeably better on my machine than VS22 did, I've been using the preview version for a while now without issue in my day job. Like I mentioned though, we're migrating away from Windows altogether now that .Net runs well in Linux and there are good cross-platform IDEs available.

It's different now though. The alternating good/bad Windows releases used to be the core of the system was good or bad. Windows 11 is pretty good though. What's made it bad is shitty choices that Microsoft is making trying to squeeze money out of users. Ideas like their Recall AI crap they keep rolling out. Overwriting system settings with every update. Why do I have ads on my "Professional" edition for xbox crap? Why in the ever loving fuck does the built-in solitaire game now require a recurring subscription if I don't want to watch ads between games? I don't want to use OneDrive or Edge, stop prompting me about them.

And yeah, there's plenty of easy workarounds to almost all of these issues, but the point is that they keep making these decisions and pushing them on users. The Windows system itself isn't horrible these days, it's the management decisions that are killing it. A new version of Windows won't fix that.

One of the old school Windows developers posted a pretty good video on this the other day. He makes some good points, and honestly if they followed his ideas, Windows would be much better for developers and power users. But I don't see them doing that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Not a fan of Microsoft, but Visual Studio has made a ton of improvements over the past few years, including this release.

Unfortunately they've fucked Windows so badly recently, and JetBrains has made their IDE free for non-commercial use (And far cheaper for commercial licenses than MSDN) that myself and a ton of other .Net devs are moving off of Windows completely and won't be getting to use this new version.

Mod parent Funny, but I hain't got my own Funny as of this replyin'.

Okay, so that was a weak joke, but there actually is a feature I want and the wizards of Slashdot must know where it's hiding, right?

I want to clean up the wasted storage. I know there are are (at least) two classes of photos that could be mined for text and the original images could be tossed. Mostly save the most prominent phone numbers, and the geodata, and perhaps some of the larger words, but rest is not worth saving. Save it to a spreadsheet or portable database? Not sure how many such images there are, but the savings would be at least 99% in my data.

More difficult and a real challenge for AI would be figuring out what's least interesting in the remaining stuff and either tossing it or moving it somewhere else, perhaps with lower accessibility. Obviously this side should focus on the largest stuff.

Oh yeah. About the original story summarized for Slashdot: What I REALLY want for Christmas is less AI slop, not more ways to make it. But the increasingly EVIL google has to show the shareholders bigger profits from more, More, MORE AI, how and NOW.

The biggest problem with Apple for users probably isn't any of their anticompetitive shit, but rather their bifurcated OS. Software which could be sold on both platforms is commonly only on one or the other. Tablets have enough screen and enough power to do real PC jobs but are prohibited from doing them because Apple wants to sell you both an iPad and a Macintosh. Android-based tablets can run emulators to get around these problems, or run full apps which can run on ARM Linux in Termux or another solution. TBF Google seems to have Apple envy and is aiming to lock down their systems more and not less so maybe they will throw away this advantage.

*sigh*

s/quite machine/quite mature/

Reminds me of another theory: Maybe they (the company selling whatever) get some kind of free insurance on payment if you use a credit card?

Sounds interesting but I doubt it's available here and also sounds like it has gaming elements to repel me.

No checking accounts here. It displays the Visa logo and I just use it in exactly the same way as I used my old "local" credit card. That was from a different network than Mastercard or Visa and I think I may have once or twice had some trouble with international purchases, but pretty sure I encountered no problems with the "Visa-branded" debit card, even for international stuff. Until last month, when I hit the "credit card only" wall. I had also received a couple of "free" credit cards over the years, at least one under the MasterCard brand, but I never used them and just cancelled them because of the risk of changes with new charges.

I forgot to mention regarding the grocery store games that I rarely use a fifth grocery store, which is actually the closest one, because I don't like their loyalty card game. Also, I might have implied that I was using the cards of all four stores, but actually I'm only playing with three of their cards. However I buy more stuff from that fourth store than the closest fifth one... The store I use most is the one that seems to be most consistent with the best prices--and the fewest weird sales.

YAC for "Yet Another Cryptocoin" but the real joke is with DIY iris scanning for the masses. Were this thing to catch on, where would it end?

"First they came for proving your identity for international currency transfers that might be money laundering, then they came for iris scanning before you can get a soft drink out of the vending machine..."

Oh, yes. Almost forgot to say fsck the cryptocoin. EVERY cryptocoin. OF course it's already too late because the cryptocurrency has already fscked us.

By the way I've abandoned the solution space of trying to prove any identity is actually human. My last failed fantasy involved interactive timelines created with personalized trivia quizzes exchanged between the human participants in the events of the shared timelines. The idea was to create networks of identities with anchor points on real human beings. Can't recall detecting any interest or comprehension or even any questions. But after the usual pondering I see two fatal problems. One is that AIs will be able to break into the networks by stealing the identities of actual human beings, either by captured the identities of deceased people or by working between networks. For example, I am no longer on Facebook or in the cesspool formerly known as Twitter (and it is even possible that my personal information was deleted as promised), but if I became validated on some other network, perhaps the new social website Jimmy Wales is working on (currently called "Trust Cafe"), then that information could be tapped and used to create fake identities on the websites I don't use, and then those fake identities could be used to validate any number of fake identities.

However the bigger problem is that there are plenty of people who are already more stupid than the current AIs. The human beings are not getting any smarter (and actually I've seen too much evidence they are getting more stupid over time) while the AIs are rapidly seeming more and more intelligent.

"Any test you can pass, AI can pass better" with apologies to "Anything you can do, AI can do better" with apologies to the ancient musical and derivative movie with "Anything you can do, I can do better". AI can do anything better than me?

And just think how much funnier this joke could have been if I asked an AI to "help polish" it. But I'm standing on my human fingers and I type again fsck the AIs even as I contemplate my next succumbence to the the temptations. And there it was! I had to websearch the spelling of the (rare) noun form and the AI jumped in to "help".

OMG, I'm so stealing that ;)