I'd guess that "gray nondescript blurs" is inaccurate. It sounds more like prosopagnosia is when someone's "coprocessor" that quickly maps faces to memories of people doesn't work so well. It doesn't mean they can't see the face or the features on it, or even try and pattern-match normally as you would an apple or an orange.

I wouldn't be surprised if this eventually gets filed as an autism spectrum disorder. To me this sounds like just another "people skill" that normal thinkers take for granted that some might lack.

I know mine's not very good. I almost never say hi to people by name because it takes me longer than it should to identify, and be sure I'm right about, who I'm speaking to. Meanwhile I've had people that I barely know, and not seen in decades recognize me. I don't have distinctive features at all. Obviously I'm missing something they have.

OK, but you can install the 32 bit version of Windows 10, and still load the GWBASIC.EXE compiled in 1986 on a current operating system.

Microsoft did away with 16 bit compatibility layer in the 64 bit OS, but as others have pointed out, VMs and things like DosBox make it not a big loss.

Mac users seem more accustomed to having old software getting obsoleted into oblivion. I don't even know how I'd go about running some PPC-era app now if it wasn't open-sourced or modernized. They had Rosetta on early Intel OSX builds. It only lasted from 10.4 through 10.6, I think about 3 years.

BMW cars with CarPlay capability still retains BMW's existing smartphone interface. If you don't subscribe to CarPlay you can still use bluetooth integration or connect the phone via USB and get playlists, album art, siri with the steering wheel, etc.

I'm guessing it will play out a bit like the TiVo on DirecTV situation. By the time they had worked out the TiVo HD DVR solution, the "native" DVR was feature-rich enough few could justify the cost premium. And that's not saying that TiVo wasn't better, it just wasn't better enough to justify a premium fee. I suspect BMW customers will see the same thing here. What is CarPlay really buying that they can't do with the normal BMW interface?

I still think it's a shitty move too, though. I really loathe subscription models.

I don't think a 10% refund covers it. Depending on how cutting edge your processor was when you bought it, you may have paid a pretty steep premium to get an extra 10% performance vs lower speed processors. If you look through the chart, small performance differences can have huge costs associated with them.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/h...

Yep this. It's just never gone to/from anywhere that I wanted to go efficiently enough to bother. I find the free tram from Luxor/Excalibur/Mandalay Bay tram far more useful. If it could get me from say Wynn/Encore/Venetian to City Center/Aria I'd probably use it a lot.

Amazon is convenient, especially when coupled with fast, free Prime shipping. I'll often pay a small amount more for something marked "Amazon Prime" because I know I'll receive it within a day or two. I know it's not going to end up UPS ground from somewhere across the country that gets here a week later. It's also comfortable because I know they have a good, hassle free return policy. Key being a small amount, it doesn't take long for me to verify that I'm not over-paying for something by a significant amount.

Getting gouged at brick and mortar stores for things like USB or HDMI cables is a lot of what drove me to using Amazon as my primary store in the first place.

The X has a larger, presumably better (OLED) screen in a smaller package. The screen is a pretty important part of your smartphone experience. Not something I'd write off as a "fashion statement".

A friend of mine has the Samsung Note8. Having a screen like that really is something to be excited about.

Apple is far from the only "Mp3 media player company" that required some sort of music manager to update the library. It used to drive me nuts too, because I just wanted to drag and drop my MP3s and go.

But, judging from all of the cars that I've driven that support USB memory sticks or SD card media, I grudgingly must admit they were probably right in requiring that a database be kept up to date by an update tool rather than by the player itself. I've yet to see even a modern car "flat file" MP3 player that doesn't suck in some way or another, be it poor playlist management, folder file limits, slow startup times as it scans for changes, slow searching, missing support of gapless audio, etc.

Then, when people ask how to get their large library to work well, the answer is almost always to connect an iPod to the USB port. As clunky and quirky as iTunes is, it has had years and years of experience dealing with the storage of a digital music library. There's usually a way to do almost anything you can think of, even changing the EQ of specific songs. It has a script interface that you can use for automation. I use it to pull in a long audio source and break it up into gapless chunks, and add to a playlist with a specific order that I can skip through.

The "all in one" tool they refer to is very much like a jailbreaking tool. It lets you pick from a list of popular hacks, and makes it easy to install.

One of the more interesting hacks available is enabling Android Auto support. Mazda is using a system called OpenCar.

These "exploits" that get you access are really simple ones. Mazda obviously didn't consider them to be of big concern, they've been around for quite a while. Then of course the security zealots come in and ruin all the fun. :)

Will be more interesting to see if the Mazda dealers try to force this update on you. I imagine people will want to update anyway, there are still some really glaring bugs in their infotainment system (maps crashing, spurious restarting of USB playlists, etc).

> In other words: use virtualization without the user knowing or caring that virtualization is even being used.

Yes, but read the use cases people are citing carefully. The typical reason people legitimately cling to 16 bit software is often due to some legacy software that has an unusual dependency on direct communication with hardware. The VM abstraction will likely break things the same way emulation does.

Yes you do need a system wide change. And when you make that change, Windows will put a "Test mode" watermark on your desktop. No, the unsigned driver will not work when you turn it back on.

Sudo isn't an apt comparison as it's not an access rights issue. I think MS considers it a security feature, that they really don't want defeated. It's somewhat understandable as vendors commonly provided unsigned 32 bit drivers, and users would just ignore the big red warning pop ups,

> because you can always buy newer devices to run the same software, all app data is migrated.

If iOS 11 stops running 32 bit apps, then no, you can't. To use a silly example, I had an old game called 3-Tuple that was pulled from the App Store after someone claimed it was IP infringement. This app has moved along fine from device to device. Once iOS 11 hits - the app is defunct, never to be run again, at least until someone makes a 32 bit IOS emulator.

> You can if you jailbreak it which you absolutely can for any 32-bit IOS device.

Not really. I have lots of old iOS devices, many of which I really wish I hadn't loaded the "latest" iOS versions. I use them as iPods. I would swear that some of the "last" available iOS versions have "planned obsolescence" memory leaks/performance problems baked into them. Since I didn't keep the SHSH blobs I'm out of luck loading a more desirable iOS version. The whole shsh blob thing might be an outdated notion too now, I stopped jailbreaking a long time ago.

>You give this grad sweeping statement of this being the only time specific binaries have been left to age. But there are very probably other niche platforms for which no simulators exist. Even for iOS some simulators do exist... so I'm not even sure that is correct.

Quite true. Just because there is no emulator now, doesn't mean there won't be. They're adding new emulators for obscure hardware to MAME/MESS all the time. But I suppose some of the point is - with the relatively high degree of security around iOS, if the hacking community isn't archiving off the apps in an unencrypted format somewhere, they are in fact very likely to be lost forever. The good news is that we probably don't care about the vast majority of it. :)

The original Core Duo MacBook runs Windows 10 x86 (32-bit) quite nicely (for an 11 year old machine), assuming you've put in the maximum 2GB of Ram and a decently fast HDD . It was Core Duo not Core2Duo though, so no 64 bit, not that you need it in 2GB anyway. I have one still "in service" at my mom's house when she needs to print something out or if I need to Remote Desktop into my home PC real quick.

Windows or linux is the best path forward for old Macs. Once Apple obsoletes the machine for new OS updates, it quickly becomes a boat anchor in their ecosystem. For example, newer versions of iTunes won't load on old OSes, which means you then can't use that machine to sync a newer iPhone. Or even be able to run recent versions of Chrome. But load Windows 7-10 on the same machine, and then the latest Windows version of iTunes can be installed, no problem, and it the machine will be able to live out its real useful lifespan.

It was particularly annoying when Apple stopped supporting my old first gen Mac Pro. With an upgraded video card, that machine still performed about on par with the current Mac mini (of course, with more power consumption), but the only way to use modern Mac OSes was through an EFI hack.

> I think it's safe to ask...does anyone really still use a Safari on the desktop?

I do as my default, mainly because of iCloud Keychain and having my passwords synced across my iDevices. If something isn't working I pull up Chrome. I haven't found a good solution to export iCloud Keychain into google's sync.

The only real complaint I have with Safari is that its authentication mechanism sometimes gets stuck, particularly with Hotmail.

> Painstakingly archiving every detail of life really makes for a shitty life.

That's exactly what I think whenever I go to a concert, and see people trying to record the performance. Like they're ever going to watch that shaky, horrible video with shitty audio. Meanwhile they're missing the live performance they paid so dearly to go see.