Original pre-microsoft Skype was not AS bloaty. It ran on my underpowered PC at the time with no issues.

Several patches/versions/whatever after Ms gutted the p2p aspect and centralized the servers, it slowed waaaaaay the hell down.

Make of that anecdotal evidence what you will.

LOL

Ten years ago I would have just blocked the MAC address.

Agreed, that’s critical. That said, I periodically subscribe to all of those, and all of the ones I’ve tried in the last year on Firefox on Debian, have worked perfectly. If there’s any left that still don’t, I haven’t tried/encountered them.

That’s great news and it gives me a lot of hope.

You raise some great points though. The average user isn’t going to use workarounds or alternatives, so we should focus on actually solving the problem instead of saying use this instead.

These kinds of things are the first things that come to mind when people start going all “Linux is ready for $blah” because while I can figure out how to deal with these issues, they’re invariably the first things I get phone calls from my non-IT-career friends about when they switch to Linux.

Windows changes insane amounts of interface whatnot on the regular, users can usually figure THAT out, finally, no matter what OS they’re using.

It’s the stuff that just works out of the box on windows or Mac but doesn’t on Linux that’s at issue, and it’s what will continue to halt widespread adoption at the casual user level, unfortunately.

The ability to stream media from legit paid sources. (Netflix, Comcast, max, disneyplus, prime, I don’t know where the list is currently, but anything that bitches about user agent.)

TPM.

The ability to play multiplayer games that rely on anti-cheat ( seriously, make Linux a hit with the fortnite crowd and the upcoming generation will think of windows as boomerware )

The ability to use an HDMI cable at full speed. (It’s the leading A/V cable standard and the only one some people understand. )

Then there’s the stuff I’m unsure of the current status of but that I know was a problem once upon a time: Online banking, online doctor stuff, encrypted emails from mainstream providers, you know, anything that could qualify as “every day stuff” that works out of the box on windows and yet sometimes requires complicated (for grandma) setup on Linux.

Failed Fact Checks

None in the Last 5 years

I want to marry this rag.

Some of it is about the "Why"s.

Netflix nearly stamped out piracy for a while there by being a vastly more attractive alternative. Between them and Hulu, and to a lesser extent prime(at the time) if it was streaming, you could watch it somewhere at a reasonable price for a marginally reasonable viewing experience that was at least as good as most TPB downloads.

Then the IP owners got greedier and decided to strike out on their own with the “everyone has a streaming service” model, which would be GREAT if they largely shared content, but they don’t.

The greed continues, not in order to adequately compensate creators, but to make a few handfuls of people not just rich but filthy rich. Every action they take suddenly becomes more penny pinching for more greed. At this point lots of the CONTENT CREATORS wish they had a better choice (how often do they say ‘please watch it this way, that’s just how they rank stuff, sorry’?)

Why is it the opposite with AI?

Because in comparison with stuff like streaming video or music platforms, AI is BARELY pretending to offer a functional service in exchange for the greed that’s behind all of the money they’re trying to force it to make for them.

And that’s just for one side of the debate.

Why isn’t the fact that AI is largely garnering the same responses even from DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED GROUPS telling you something about how bad of an idea it is in it’s current incarnation?

if the vice president wins in November.Most Read from BloombergWorld’s Second Tallest Tower Spurs Debate About Who Needs ItThe Plan for the World’s Most Ambitious Skyscraper RenovationMadrid to Ban E-Sc

What is this, a bot post with an imperfect scraper behind it?

Pronounced like “hope” without the “h”, it is indeed a local (Midwestern U.S.) "expression.

It is, mostly, a “shorthand apology”.

“Ope, just gonna squeeze right past you and grab the ranch” (dressing) or “Ope, grab the butter while you’re up whydoncha?”, or “Ope, I spose it’s about that time.”

In the context of that sticker, it’s more like a “sorry, not sorry” but less intense and more polite.

Yeah, I actually MISS intros on shows that don’t have them. I forget when in the 2000’s or 2010’s they started that, but it aggravated me almost as much as the cutback from 20+ episodes a season to fewer.

I ALWAYS skip enterprise, I never skip the others.

I get that they were trying for something different, I can even appreciate using a folksy ballad that doesn’t have all is the “formality” of classical music the same way Starfleet of the time doesn’t have all the formality of later treks. I even personally find it to be a cool idea on paper, but for some reason it just didn’t land with me.

It’s jarring when it SHOULDN’T be. Even the closing credits get a "WhoOoAawhatthefuuuuOh."reaction out of me every time the music starts. Like, it takes until almost the fourth note on the credits before I go "oh yeah, they do this.

I still watch the credits, though.

The kicker there is … Nobody I know is going to think “wow, playback on this video sucks, I should disable my ad blocker”.

Like, it wouldn’t occur to ANYONE I know that a piece of software we consider necessary could be the problem, ESPECIALLY if everything else is working fine.

That’s not even number ten on the list of troubleshooting steps and most people don’t make it past one or two before giving up.

WTF were they thinking?

Fahhhhk, thank you.

I swear I remembered dog people from 2nd edition and was super confused when I started playing DDO and they were some kind of dragonkin. Then people who started with 3rd were telling me kobolds had always been lizards.

Somewhere my old 2nd edition books are still around in a box, but damned if I know where.

First Mojo, now Kinky.

:(

What? Where? What’s it called?

I’d recommend everyone download all of their amazon purchased mp3 music and back it up in a safe spot just in case, heh.

You know, if you’re a weirdo like me who still buys individual albums that way.

I think it’s a combination of all of the reasons you stated AND the sorting algorithm not being the same as some of us are used to on Reddit.

I’m still getting used to finding content I haven’t seen when I’m not toggled to “Subscribed”.

A way to mark something as “read” and not have it show back up for me unless I’ve posted in it would be handy, but as with all new paradigms, I’ll get used to this one eventually and likely wonder how I ever did things the “old way”.

Mosseri didn’t get into why he felt Android to be superior

This is disappointing, because I’d really like to hear what he has to say on the subject.

As an Android user in the U.S., I feel the exact opposite.

As an IT sysadmin doing mobile device management with BYOD in the workplace, iOS has a clear edge if you’re willing to pay for MDM products that handle it. The built-in options in Azure are…varied for both products. ( https://download.microsoft.com/download/e/6/2/e6233fdd-a956-4f77-93a5-1aa254ee2917/msft-intune-enrollment-options.pdf )

As a personal user, though, the sheer ridiculous amount of variety of the android kernel between different carriers and models on the current version alone is positively insane. It should be a beautiful bonus smorgasbord of consumer choice, but with all of the carriers rolling their own lockdowns, hobblings, and forced includes it’s a buyer’s nightmare of trying to find a device that doesn’t lock out the things you want while also letting you remove the things you DON’T want (preferably without needing adb to do so).

Separate text notification sounds for each contact? Not always!

Advanced SMS options? Totally inconsistent.

MAC Address randomization? Roll a d20 against the number of flagship models and carriers in your area. You’ll probably get it, but no guarantees.

Heaven forbid you want to do something that should be straightforward in today’s day and age like download your SMS History? Voicemails as audio files? Custom Do Not Disturb settings? Good luck.

Apple users have been sending text messages interchangeably between their phones and computers/tablets for years. I still recall the shock and awe when my android phone was getting a barrage of text messages from my boss because he could send them with the full keyboard on his laptop while I was one-finger-punching the touchscreen on my phone to reply.

A lot of this isn’t the direct fault of the android kernel itself, but it is a large portion of the default android user experience in the U.S. and as such it’s what I have to base my judgement of the android kernel ON.

Android should be the superior option, but at this point in time, I don’t think it is.

The problem isn’t the ads themselves.

The problem is that YouTube’s monetization setup encourages content creators to stretch, expand, tease out and otherwise bloat their content in order to achieve returns. It turns 20 seconds of hard data into 18 minutes of sawdust that you have to either sit through or sift through in order to get what amounts to three sentences worth of typed out information.

Sometimes content creators are kind and they label things and “separate” them into time indexed segments, but even then, I read much faster than they talk and every single one of them I’ve run into still rambles around in loops of opinion, sentiment, and anecdote while doing so.

It’s an absolutely awful last resort for getting simple answers to direct questions and it’s so very, very much worse than even WALLS of aimless text would be, because at least text can be ctrl-f’d.

Because they don’t care.

Not entirely true.

Some of us are still occasionally browsing parts of reddit because not every niche community has fully made the transition yet and said niche communities are the ONLY places to get relevant, timely information for those niches.

I know for me there are some decade+ old MMO communities that haven’t swapped over yet. Since many of the old wikis got shut down years ago when fandom, etc, took over everything, for some games the only choices are youtube and reddit. Personally, I hate youtube’s monetization forcing tiny bits of information to be strung out into 15-20+ minute videos more than I hate what the reddit team is doing, and I hate what’s happened to reddit a LOT.

The move is going to be an ongoing process for a while.

Labeling everyone with broad brush strokes misses some of the nuance of the situation, but I look forward to the day I no longer have to visit Reddit for the information I’m looking for.