Is to search for what I actually ask for. Don't search for what you *thought* I meant. Don't search for all those synonyms unless I ask you to. Just. Search. For. What. I. Typed. In. Dammit.

I shouldn't have to force that by putting quotes around everything - it should be default, or at the very least a cookie.

And also ban boardreader.com and all these other crappy sites that overtake the real discussion search results with their ads and middle man tactics.
And those spam sites that somehow read your query and come back with "searching for {whatever I typed in}? Click here!"

Please and thank you, and I will stop with my increasing habit of resorting to Bing (though that suffers from some of these things too but seems marginally better) to get my work done.

I think it's a fracking nuisance

I recently said on another story's comments that brands are important because you can tell known good stuff from bad, but that some just abuse the fame of a brand (which got to where it was by being great) to produce overpriced crap.

The new Amiga is one of those cases.

Go on, how much will this Atom based netbook be... £1500? No thanks. Frankly, shove it.

Good points on both sides... the thing is, it's all about knowing *which* brand truly is quality, and which is cheap tat sold high just for the name.

You can't do this without some sort of brand/label.

What I think happens in a lot of cases is, a brand does become famous due to quality. But later in life they lower the quality and cash in on the fame.

Apple are increasingly doing this, but do still produce some great quality (such as the unibody MacBooks) which keep them there as the BMW of computing, for now.

I suspect Jobs was referring to Multitouch.

Don't know about others, but all this pinching and flicking and scrolling inertia etc seemed really clever to me at first when Apple did it. It seems incredibly obvious in hindsight of course...

I did thank you, and before you go swearing and shouting at me, consider that I addressed that assumption: the fact that it's an assumption and may not be the case is the entire point of my post.

No, I haven't chosen to provide evidence as it's a casual comment, not a submission to Wikipedia.

I would suggest that it's up to the person disagreeing with a comment to submit evidence to the contrary, should they insist upon a more academic approach.

Yeah yeah okay guys... I don't post enough on /. to remember to account for the site's high levels of pedantry. I'm making a casual comment on a news site here, not writing an article for Wikipedia, but here we go:

The general understanding by the non-pedantic is that when someone is said to be "dying" it means they have a terminal illness such as cancer* (the risk of which is greatly increased around 60/65 - source: http://info.cancerresearchuk.org/cancerstats/incidence/age/). To call age-related illness "dying" is exaggerating I guess, but only slightly as it's around the same age and the same sort of illness that I have in mind.

If you look at it technically (and quite pessimistically) then yes, we are dying from the moment we are born but very few people use the term in that manner.

Now, it's quite possible that the age of dramatically increased cancer risk (and similar) would increase along with our lifespan, but my comment was in context with the summary's comment of "That assumes that the life extension is all 'good years', and not a prolonged period of dementia and physical decline."

{*} In before "not all cancer is terminal": I mean cases where it has been diagnosed as terminal, and also cancer is just an example but a very common problem.

And I think we'd see a huge increase in suicides of the over-70s. 35-45 years of work drives a lot of people to despair already, doubling that would push them over the edge (it sure would with me)

That's before even considering that thought of the extra time just being spent dealing with age related illness. Nobody is going to want to spend 70 years (half their life!) basically dying.

Yes. SSD should be in its own category in the poll, really, not lumped in with hard drives and optical drives.

Apart from a full new system (which IMO doesn't belong in the poll as it's about upgrades) it's very easily the best upgrade I've done.

We've spent many many years concentrating on the general grunt of computing while neglecting latency - which to a user is *really* annoying - and even letting it go backwards (my old Amiga is more responsive than some modern systems in a lot of things - that's just sad. Yes it's a lot more basic, but so was the technology.)

Fitting an SSD was like a breath of fresh air, and wholeheartedly recommended. As long as it's a decent one, e.g. Intel.

It's a pain sometimes (some big shopping centres have some nice displays during certain times of the year!) but yeah, as it's private property they can ask you to stop taking photos or be escorted out. They can even, if they really wanted to (though it'd be bad for business) kick you out because they don't like your face.

Doesn't mean taking photos is illegal as such, just that if they don't allow it they have the right to boot you out.

Malls being private property and not some sort of public rights-exercising ground is a concept that some have still to learn (WHY ARE YOU CLOSED? I HAVE A RIGHT TO SHOP!) :)

Reasoning for being told not to take photos seems to vary, but when I was asked to put my camera away once - politely - the reason given was "the shops get a bit upset about their copyrighted logos", which is probably where the claims of illegality come in. And knowing how extremely touchy companies tend to be about their logos, it's not entirely surprising if it's the most popular reason that brought forth all this fuss to begin with.

It gets a little different, I believe, if you're taking pictures of the mall (including any outward facing shop windows) from the outside, as there you would be in a public area and they have chosen to display things in view of a public area. I've heard of photographers being asked to leave from in front of a shop on a public high street and, basically, being able to say no. Though I suspect depending on the side the policeman's on if they got involved, they could possibly think up some sort of public order offence.

Precisely why I switched to Chrome a few days ago too.

I understand, unlike some of the sister comments, that it's not the frequency of the updates themselves that is the problem (updates = security and progress. Security and progress = good) but the way it applies them. When I open an application, generally I want to do something with it. When I'm blocked from doing something with it while it updates itself, checks the addons, tells me about the addons and finally opens a window telling me about the changes I don't care about right now - it gets annoying. Especially with this new system of bringing out a new Firefox release every other week.

It may not seem much - a few seconds to update, a dialog here, a dialog there - but barriers (whether only delays, or things to click on) stopping users doing what they want to do really really irritate them - myself included, and I actually understand what it's saying (now think how annoying it is for the average Joe who doesn't know WTF it's on about and just wants to get to his Hotmail).

So many developers don't seem to grasp the "user just wants to use it and hates things getting in the way" concept.

So sound travels faster than light now too? :D /pedant

This.

As far as I can see nobody is being "forced" to do this. I don't see anything to back up the claims that they're preventing people in other countries from using their service until they've done some translation work for them, and I seriously doubt they're doing that.

So if people choose to, they can help out. They know what they're getting (nothing, except the satisfaction of sharing the fun), they're presumably individuals with their own minds who are capable of making their own decisions, so why does this matter to anyone?

Valve will see how effective it is soon enough (I'm thinking not very). If it actually works well, good for them.

Yes it will be interesting to see if they do any editing to work around this stuff.

Another example would be that they stuck bits of black cardboard over some of the rear consoles (behind Yar/Worf) in the early days to prevent reflections of the camera. You can actually see them quite often even in the DVD version. (I remember reading somewhere like Memory Alpha that Wil Wheaton kept telling them they'd show up if people were paying attention or technology improved and, indeed, they'd tell him to shut up)