That would clear the way for them to send you more ads for things you'd be more likely to buy. Good thinking!

Agreed. The world will be happy to sell to us as long as we have money to spend, but they won't make the mistake of depending on us again. You can see it in the discourse if you pay even the scantest bit of attention to non-US news sources.

I, for one, absolutely shocked that the market rejected cameras from companies that unironically file patents like US8246454B2. Can't imagine any possible reason people might have objections to things like that.

I'm fairly certain that's the old Debian-based SteamOS from their initial attempt at "Steam Machines"

As far as I can tell, the most common use case for Paint is to take a picture or a map and annotate it with text and some basic shapes. 3D Paint seems to have a "but who is this for" problem. People who just want to draw quick squares and text on things were fine with Paint. (As you said, debugged and slightly improved. Paint's ability to scale photos is atrocious.) People who want to do more will probably find a program that does what they need rather than use the little toy 3D rendering/image editing program that comes with the OS.

I wonder if they asked for payment in gift cards.

Agreed. I've found voice recognitions on phones to be pretty solid, but there are very few things where if I've already got my phone out I'm going to find it more convenient to use the voice assistant. Shouting awkwardly at a cheap SoC in a bespoke plastic shell that's tucked away on a bookshelf in the corner of a room isn't a great user experience.

It also seems like there's a complete mismatch between how companies want people to use voice assistants and how people actually use them. It's always "turn on the ___ room lights" or "play some music" or "set a timer" or "give me information about ___" and stuff like that. (Usually shouted multiple times until the device picks it up correctly.) I have never heard anyone ask their voice assistant to buy them something

Not to say it doesn't happen, of course. It just doesn't seem like there's a multi-billion dollar revenue stream to tap into here.

Yup. Even the developers regarded level 29 as a kill screen since they didn't bother coding the level counter to work correctly past level 29.

Eh? The process for installing Windows hasn't really changed since Vista, though.

1. Select version and/or enter key.
2. Partition drive.
3. Installer unpacks the WIM file into your shiny new partition and installs the bootloader, then reboots system.
4. Windows sets itself up. Drivers present on the install media or available through Windows Update (if you have network access) get installed then it reboots again.
5. OOBE launches.

(And honestly, I'd take the Vista/7 OOBE over the 10/11 OOBE any day.)

I'd imagine the final version of the client that supports Windows 7 will continue working until they find some kind of horrifying security issue that requires breaking old clients to fix or until they add some new feature that isn't worth adding workarounds to keep old clients working. That's usually how it goes with this stuff.

In my case, they were timed exclusives. As it turns out, an exclusive period of one year doesn't work very well when it takes me two years to get a console.

(In my defense, I didn't know it was a timed exclusive at the time. If I had, I would have just waited it out anyway. Lesson learned, do better research.)

For me it's "But now all the games I wanted to play are also on Steam so there's no point."

Those plates are so awful to look at that I never once noticed that they had a website on them.

Then again, Maryland is one of those states that issues awful plates to get you to pay extra for a nice one.

Someone at Google probably realized that people wouldn't wear a device that beamed advertisements directly into their eyeballs 24/7 and they couldn't figure out another way to monetize it.