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Comment Re:If you've been using Evernote for years... (Score 1) 33

No. I gave them money for years, then they kept raising the price unreasonably.

I'm now on Joplin, and host my own sync server, so I can sync across all my devices, and so can friends and family for their own notes - for free.

I mostly sync for the convenience... shopping lists, addresses, etc... even paying $37/year was a bit much, but then they tried to get $150/yr out of me for the same thing. Screw Evernote, and the redesign was insanely stupid, screwing up encryption and other stuff.

It started good and ended badly. The company deserves to go away forever.

Comment Pirates and Charity (Score 2) 71

Unity also claimed that pirates would be somehow "Detected" using their "Ad Service Fraud detection algorithms" which is complete bullshit. Simple logic and some knowledge of how applications work, and specifically game engines like Unity, there is no connection to tell the game engine phoning home that in install is a pirate copy. Worse, is the claim that "charity bundled games would be excluded" - utter nonsense. Nothing in the game would tell the engine if it was purchased on itch.io or as part of a HumbleBundle. It's the same binaries.

Even worse... they want to charge Unity-based games already published years ago under the same fee schedule. That is blatantly illegal.

John Riccitiello is up to his old tricks again, the same tricks that wrecked Electronic Arts, and the wrecking ball is already swinging on Unity.

Half their customers are gone, and the other half just haven't heard about the new price plans yet.

Comment I hate tiling and "autoarrangement" nonsense (Score 5, Insightful) 114

If we need anything, it's TABS.... For Windows, the best new innovation was the introduction of tabs to File Manager and Notepad.

When I put a window in focus, it's in focus. It's in front of things. The whole "flat UI" garbage makes things worse in that we no longer get shadows beneath the focused window, the titlebars are often left untouched (or just a slightly different pale shade). A good UI just needs to tell me where my current work is focused on, and in an age where we often have multiple monitors (I have a 3x4k monitor setup), it might be nice to have better visualization aids for finding my cursor, too.

I hear what you might be saying... "but... but... we are making drag-and-drop easier" - except NO, you aren't. If I have to drag something held in my cursor over a screen of real estate to get to another "tile" I'll probably lose it on a system doing an IO-freeze. Also, I want my windows because they show me EXACTLY the amount of information I want and need to see when I am using it. Tiles reduce my landscape, and make applications unusable at the volume I have open.

People can already tile their windows. Leave the rest of us alone and stop trying to remove our options.

Comment Re:Because US copyright is so bad (Score 1) 42

I see two problems:
1. No AI-generated work will ever be an exact copy of any other work, Generative AI doesn't work that way... models are not some giant store of graphics, it's just a collection of attributes and weights. The best an AI can hope to achieve is something like the worlds largest lossy archive.
2. Several authoritative agencies have already stated that AI work itself is not "copyrightable"

I can see forcing devs to do more than simply copy in the binaries they generate from Midjourney, but it seems far-reaching to kick somebody's game off because of this.

I guess we need to start running EXIF filters on our textures. AI holds a lot of promise, but this... this is strange and troubling.

Comment Re:Microsoft & cameras (Score 2) 45

Your anecdotal evidence is pretty shoddy. In FIRST Robotics, the HD3000 cameras were the go to for mounting on robots, and I use a couple of them on my 3D Printers through OctoPrint running on Raspberry Pis. The cameras are great, they just work. Microsoft has created some great hardware over the years, and honestly, I can't think of much hardware they've done that has even been slightly buggy, though Surface PCs certainly have a pretty big potential for issues.

Most of the replies to this question are pretty useless pile-ons. I get it, "Microsoft bad" - but not helpful, and worse for this discussion, no insightful, either.

The headline implies this is suddenly happening to ALL Surface Pro X systems, which implies something other than hardware or a simple software bug, but if this is just hardware failure, signs would point to whatever supplier Microsoft used for the camera. If my fingerprint reader hardware failed on my Motorola phone, is it the fault of the design, or the engineers who worked on it, or is it poor quality control of some second tier supplier?

Comment The UI isn't the pain point with Thunderbird (Score 1) 52

Fix the rules processing (we need a LOT of rules to deal with today's spam) and how it handles servers - in particular, better transparency into what it is doing to help debug those connections. My 12-core CPU shouldn't be brought to its knees every time it announces a new message coming in.

Comment Whelp... one way to get me to never give you money (Score 4, Insightful) 166

I guess I'm out. Making my experience painful just to buy a ticket? Yeah, I'd rather not. I have 50+in TVs all over my house (and decent sound systems), I don't need to find parking or fight traffic, and popcorn and candy is cheap from my own kitchen.

What's next? Call them "event tickets" and offer them exclusively through Ticketmaster? AMC seems to be deftly unable to read the room.

Comment Software has been running cars for many decades (Score 1) 107

Never heard of the Engine controller? Transmission controller? Key components have been controlled by software going back to the 70s. What seems to be changing is the complexity and more control is being given over to a glorified "central" controller. Most car manufacturers explicitly went out of their way to prevent this sort of thing.... keeping specific control units with specific purposes (like microservices are used by enterprises today) on their own high speed bus to communicate between them where needed, and providing a low-speed, low-priority bus to interface to things the driver (user) needed to interact with.

Companies like Tesla take shortcuts, integrating large parts of controller code into a central system, which is far less robust and prone to system-wide failure due to software bugs and even external threats (thanks to internet connectivity) for the expediency of quicker development and lazy solutions to inter-functional performance challenges.

It's this centralized control that is the shiny object that execs look at and see dollar signs as a way to exploit their customers with subscription services and maintenance reminders; the latter might not be a bad thing, but corporations are always quick to abuse them to maximize profits, rather than provide good service - and the former... is just terrible at all levels.

Comment Shades of Rakuten? (Score 2, Interesting) 24

After Buy.com got bought out and became Rakuten, people started noticing a few odd things about the site: 1. CC#s were being leaked to the internet shortly after using Rakuten to buy things with those credit cards...and 2. Rakuten (never acknowledging the problem) was actively encouraging customers to use credit cards over PayPal with discounts. What's more interesting is that even using "Virtual" CC# services, their credit cards were getting leaked... and it eventually came out that big vendors CAN and DO request the original credit card numbers and get them. In many suspected cases, the credit card was used for nothing else recently except the transaction with Rakuten - in at least one case, it was a brand new card, never used anywhere else - and in every case, false charges appeared within one or two days. So yes, I've used PayPal for quite a long time without issues. It's my primary debit card for daily brick and mortar purchases (using my bank account) - which is handy if that card IS compromised, because I have more options and I still have my original bank debit card for whatever I need until my new card comes in. I find it odd that Github is actively dumping PayPal without an explaination.

Comment Re:CEO needs a new yacht (Score 1) 19

It's dumber than that, even. Firing a ton of employees right now means that future hires - hires you NEED at some point - will see your mass firings as a huge red flag. Getting new talent to come aboard is now going to be impossible, and anybody remotely hirable in your current workforce (i.e. your best employees) have already dusted off their resumes and will get work elsewhere for better pay and more job security. This happened at HP (The EDS remnant part) when Meg Whitman started issuing all sorts of stupid directives and firing people left and right. Unity's CEO should be taking the full blame for any shortcomings that prevent them from keeping talent. He should either step down or give up his pay. The fact that he won't is a sad indication of how bad the rot is there at the top. It's a real shame, too, as the platform is great for developers, and needs that talent to get better.

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