They made great fidget toys.
They made great fidget toys.
I loved my slider as well. They made texting so much easier. I went from one of those to a blackberry bold.
I have been using custom start menus since the whole win8 full screen disaster. Every time I see the default win 10 or Win 11 menu I cringe. So much crap in the way.
Process optimization reaches a point of diminishing returns. Then if tweaked further it degrades the performance. Microsoft reached the close to the optimal OS design at Win7. It’s all been downhill since then.
The mobile OS systems are reaching the same point. Optimization has occured and most of the “new” additions degrade the user experience.
The one I see the most is:
“We avoided any semblance of rational experimental design and got significant results.”
I have been attempting to use Linux for 20 years now. It has found its niche used for me over the years. For example when my kids were toddlers they had a old machine that defaulted to PBSkids. Before that I used it to run a gaming server.
Currently I have a old laptop that I dual boot with win 10 and whatever Linux distro I feel like trying at the moment.
The win 10 on the laptop barely meets the minimum hardware requirements and takes 10 minutes to load.
I have tried a few different distros and always had a few issues with the setup. All sorts of different ones - screen orientation, WiFi connection, printer hell, keyboard layout etc. Takes me days to fix the bugs or give up.
Mint takes 2 minutes to load and so far is working seamlessly. It’s apt manager is the easiest I have used in a Linux distro. It found my network printer automatically. It runs smoother than windows 7 did on my laptop.
With Microsoft ending win 10 for the shitty win 11, I imagine many people are looking for alternatives. If Mint continues to work to make setup and usage easy, it will gain market share rapidly. It’s not all the way there yet, but it’s a hell of a lot better than before.
First off the 5:1:1 mix is too low in K and P. It needs to be in a ratio of 3:1:2 to 3:1:3.
Potassium is the major catalyst for all sorts of reactions. It is needed everywhere to do all sorts of things but it is never bound up. Without it the plant shuts down.
Dropping lower leaves is often a sign of Phosphate deficiency.
You’ll also need to make sure there is enough micronutrients like magnesium, iron, etc for the plant. It’s easy to miss these
Citrus plants are also very water sensitive. To wet and they get rot. Too dry and they drop their leaves.
To me it looks like they are too dry and not enough nutrients.
Why is basic math.
In a made up scenario let’s start with a dumb 50"ish TV. That cost them around $100 to build. Add in another $50 for shipping and distribution fees. It’s at the store for $150 cost. If they set the price at $400. There is $250 dollars of profit to share between the store and the manufacturer. The manufactuerer likely gets under $100.
Now for a smart TV the revenue stream looks different. First their costs only go up by a few dollars for adding the “smart” chips. So let’s say $155 cost. Then they collect revenue from the streaming providers to be supported by their smart TV say $30 per set. Then they collect the $20 per set per year in user data collected. So if they price the smart TV the same as the dumb one they generate $95 from the sale of the set.
So the profit from a dumb TV is $100 at he point of sale.
The profit from a smart TV is $225+ in a constant revenue stream over 5 years.
And this is why we see so much advertising for smart TV’s as being the best thing.
A long time ago I was the guinea pig/first user for a company developed system.
I often had my 1 year old at the time son with me when I worked on the weekend. He had a great time smashing buttons on the keyboard and randomly clicking the mouse on the test version. He found most of the bugs.
They were a bit more tricky than that I believe. They capped the user page at 3 years of search. So when you delete everything using those scripts it deletes the newer stuff but misses all the older ones. Then after the script runs it shows - no comments.
The heyday of the forums. For about 2 years the combination of Tapatalk and forums was awesome. Centralized interface with no ads, all the discussion.
Then they both gutted their functionality and spammed in the ads.
Go back and check again. They are actively restoring deleted comments. About once a month I log back on and delete another round. Usually another 10-15 “mysteriously” pop back up again.
They made it the default option for businesses that routinely buy computers with less local storage than their users need. Pretty much every company I have worked for.
They then pushed it out hard into the consumer market when SSD came out and the average storage space on lower end models dropped by 75%.
I see why they did it, how they did it was in usual Microsoft fashion, idiotic.
It’s sort of their pattern.
Introduce new changes.
Screw it up royalty.
Fix the features that are salvageable and revert most of the remaining except: Double down on the shitty ones that they think will make them more money.
Rinse and Repeat
Forums were awesome until the ads took over. Then apps like Tapatalk made reading them easier. Then Tapatalk went to shit and power users migrated to reddit (mainly for the easy to use wepage and awesome independent apps.).
Then reddit shit the bed so now Lemmy is filling the gaps.
Windows 11 adoption to business customers is really bad. Most of the adoption to 11 has been from people purchasing new home computers and being stuck with 11 (I have two win 11 computers now).
Since the bulk of Microsoft’s revenue comes from business customers, they have a huge impact on decisions.
At this point the only decision Microsoft can make is to write off win 11 as a failue. Resuming feature upgrades to win 10 makes business sense.
Get the tape measure out and start keeping track.
Mine is a cutting from a plant my grandmother started in the 1950’s. I have had it most of my life. I still measure every new leaf.
I have priced out Airbnb vs. hotels quite a few times over the past few years at my spouses request. I have never stayed at any of them as they have always been much more expensive for shittier accomodations. It simply doesn’t make any sense to me.
This past christmas, renting 2 hotel rooms at a nice hotel was cheaper than the worst dive of an Airbnb near my in-laws.
Much easier to just raise business taxes by enough to pay for free education at all levels.
Tax based upon the average education level required for the job in the industry. This would change them all to a skills based hiring system overnight.
I am waiting for the same thing. The amount of shit you have to disable, block, or unistall on android is getting ridiculous. It’s getting really old.
Most of the new “features” that either apple or google add anymore are absolute trash. I am constantly having to go through the settings and disable shit.
The stock android is so full of non-romovable crap that a launcher is required anymore.
It’s the same for windows, win11 is only usable with a launcher like startallback.
Pointing out significant flaws that are holding the systems adoption rate back is never popular. Most of them are very techy and don’t have a clue what the average user needs. It’s a great way to get them all riled up.
I spent a few years as a process flow and bug finder for some programmers building a proprietary internal system. Then I trained non-tech savvy people on how to use the system. One of the most difficult jobs I have ever done. Bridging the gap between the two of them was brutal.
They also need to remove the limited liability from companies for intentional illegal activities.
illegal business practices should be charged to the people involved instead of the company. The executives who made the decision to break the law lose personal assets.
Otherwise the shitheads just pass the company losses onto the employees: no raises, hiring freezes, layoffs, reduction in benefits, etc…