Motorola, while it was owned by Google, was actually quite good. The Moto g and the Moto x line were started in that era. The original Moto x was one of the best looking phones I’ve ever used.
Steam - you need Steam account (also applies to Valve Index then)
iPhone - you need Apple account
Android phones - you need Google account
Oculus before - you needed an Oculus account
The short time during which they required a Facebook account (i.e. an account linked to an unrelated service) was a fuck-up, but they have since reversed that decision. Now it’s just a separate standalone VR-related account.
If anything, that is still better than the current Google/Apple situation with their accounts, which link together a bunch of unrelated services (photos, email, payments, storage sync, etc.) in an inseparable way.
You don’t actually need an account to use an android phone with Aurora and fdroid And the index is just a headset, you don’t need steam to use it, valve doesn’t do walled gardens AFAIK
Sorry to break it to you bruh, but if Facebook owns the IP, they’re harvesting and monetizing the account data, end of.
This includes all of the subsidiaries like Instagram and WhatsApp as well.
Let’s also not forget that illegal activity exposes user data in addition to greed, and just the fact that your data is in yet another pot increases your risk. Also yes all corporations are greedy and evil but they’re definitely not all equal in how bad they are, and FB is one of the worst
Are you willing to compromise on all of these intrusions into your life? Many people are, but I’m not one.
Ok, so Facebook knows I have a VR headset and bought some games, and they’re using that information in targeted advertising (as much as things like EU law allows them where I live)? Quite frankly, I don’t care - this doesn’t really affect me in any practical sense - and again, thanks to existing laws, I can actually opt out from a large part of it.
From a practical standpoint, I would have a much bigger problem with a situation that exists with Google, where some people had access to their email and other services disabled, because some stupid bot classified their comments in YouTube livestream as spam with basically no recourse until the story blew up in tech news (gamerant.com/markiplier-stream-ban-lock-users-out…). The root of the issue there is that those accounts just shouldn’t be linked, and what you do on YouTube shouldn’t affect your access to your own email etc.
You may argue that this is simply down to the fact that Facebook doesn’t have a strong enough market position to get away with such practices, and that they would do it too if they could, but as it stand today, the giants like Google or Apple are far worse. (And with most of these problems, as well as other monopolistic practices of tech giants, regulation can be a large part of the solution.)
Miami Fruit is expensive but they haven’t committed any crimes against humanity that I’m aware of. They had lots of varieties last time I ordered but it’s been a while.
Someone below me posted a big video on that. Other than that it takes two seconds to Google. He has a history of saying extremely reactionary things (advocating for a straight pride parade, saying feminism is a disease, being transgender is just a mental illness etc.) And then walking it back which is weird that it happens over and over again. He also unironically believed in Qanon.
Maybe not an outright fascist bigot but however his social system and brain works, it leads him to fall face first over and over into extreme right wing reactionary takes.
I just saw a Jaguar that actually looked pretty nice. I hadn’t seen a decent Jaguar since Ford bought them out. So I guess Tata did something right in allowing some style back rather than them just looking like a Ford. But I can’t vouch for the rest of the car, just that it looked nice, which is something the original Jaguars always had going for them. That unique style.
The original is one of my all time favorite car styles. The post-Ford version just looked like a Ford with a mutated Jag frontend stuck on it. The rear shape and lights especially made it literally feel like a Ford sedan ran up the ass of an XJS and the face of the Jag is making an oh shit face. You couldn’t tell it was a Jag at all from the rear or sides.
Ah OK I was mistaken and under the impression that it was originally created under Ford ownership, but it actually stems from the British Leyland era.
However the XJR-15 and XJ220 were under Ford, and look sensational. (Although most of the development was probably done while Jag was still independent).
One could make the argument for Disney buying Marvel. They made some great movies. They had also then had enough cash to buy back X-Men, etc and bring everything back in under Marvel Studios. Not a big fan of Marvel stuff lately, but everything up through Endgame was great, especially for a comic nerd like myself.
Some stuff hasn’t resonated well but there’s still some that’s been great. Loki, She Hulk, Guardians Xmas, Guardians 3, BP2. I am excited for The Marvels. Shang Chi was meh the first time but on a rewatch after watching some of this other stuff I got more of the connections and enjoyed it more.
True! I enjoyed Loki. Ms Marvel was OK. Shang Chi was fun. Generally though, I feel that things have gotten really watered down and the quality has taken a nosedive. I haven’t bothered watching the new Thor or Ant-Man. The Marvels looks great, but I’m not holding my breath. I’m really really hoping that Fantastic 4 is good, and done properly this time (especially Doom).
Quantumania got a bad rap, but I actually enjoyed it. It was pretty CG heavy and that detracted from it a bit, but it was still fun and an interesting episode to start what ever season we’re up to now.
I apparently go against the flow. I didn’t like Avengers: Endgame (I only watched it to find out what happens) and, while we’re at it, I didn’t like Rogue One either.
I fucking despise Rogue One and would rather sit through Jar-Jar Binks singing Bohemian Rhapsody through the duration of the entire song than to have to sit and watch that monstrosity of a movie again.
I do not want to watch some poor girl get told off, put down, and kicked down by everyone else around her simply because she was a sacrificial lamb for the overarching plot and everyone else knew it but her. And that’s all Rogue One was.
I didn't dislike Krasinski in Dr Strange 2 but I wasn't fully sold on him. He was fine for a cameo, but I don't think he'd pull off the character in a lead role. Mr Fantastic - or at least my interpretation of him - has always been arrogant, aloof and disconnected. It's clear he thinks he's the smartest person in the room (because he is, and probably the planet), and he's not necessarily a cold person but it's obvious he focuses more on his work than on the people around him, even if he does care about them. Krasinski just never sold me on being the smartest person on the planet, not did he really nail the slightly disconnected aspect of the character, I feel.
It's perhaps a slightly weird suggestion, but I've always felt that Glenn Howerton (Dennis from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia) would be my ideal Mr Fantastic. He can absolutely pull of that arrogant, slightly narcissistic aspect of the character, but I feel like he can do it in a charismatic, likeable way. And he can definitely sell the idea that he's very intelligent. Plus he looks the part.
“Great” meaning great gigantic messes of nonsensical fanservice and a flood of movies and shows all tied to each other so if you miss one episode of Obscure Marvel Kerfuffle Re-re-revisited you’ll be lost.
Were you around when “The Secret War” series came out in the comics? The plot line ran through every single title in the Marvel catalog. Just keeping up with Spiderman required reading four issues. That strategy of story telling wasn’t invented by Disney.
As others have said, something being stupid in the past doesn’t excuse it being stupid now. And hey, I’d get it if we were still dealing with a couple movies a year, but now it’s a flood of content that nobody can keep up with unless Marvel is their only hobby.
Disney is literally racist, sexist, homophobic… Etc. You name it. They cave to China for money every time, even if it’s shrinking or even removing black people from their posters
My dude… the plot lines in comic books were so convoluted that the writers literally came up with an in canon catastrophe to clean up the timeline by collapsing countless alternate universes. Superhero movies being tied to each other and having a convulted mess of a plot that makes you feel lost if you miss “obscure marvel kerfluffle 3 wrath of the plot device” is very on brand for comics based media.
And that’s where comic books went to shit, too. Do kids these days really have no real arguments for anything besides citing even more bullshit to support their bullshit?
I enjoyed the story arc leading up to Endgame, but since then, they’ve filmed so much that I just feel like I can’t keep up. The last movie I watched was Multiverse of Madness where I spent about half the movie going “Huh, I feel like I’m missing stuff from the Wanda TV show”. I had never seen Spider-Man: No Way Home, either. And I guess there was a Loki show and a Marvel “What If” series, too?
Yep. That would require a subscription to disney plus, but I’m not really interested in doing that. It’s too much effort for the payoff.
What’s the payoff? Well, I watched Multiverse of Madness on a flight to see relatives last year. Out of the movies in the plane’s catalog, it was one of the more-interesting ones. So – the payoff is understanding a random in-flight movie a little better.
I might just steer clear of any Marvel movies next time.
Thats how it is to read a Marvel comic too. I love it. But it is not for everyone. And in comics there is too much to keep up so you just accept that you cant.
From what I heard, Geely bought them and just said “here’s a bunch of money, do whatever the fuck you want”, and they suddenly started making good stuff.
Geely did improve their quality and safety significantly by using Volvo’s engineering expertise so it is a win-win for both, and I hope they’ll revitalize Proton and Lotus the same way.
Ducati being bought by Audi. Maintenance intervals got better, instead of doing valve adjustments every 7500 miles. It did make the brand move away from dry clutch to a wet clutch, losing some of their iconic sounds (“I dunno man, should the engine sound like that when idling? Sounds like two metal wrenches hitting each other.”)
Perhaps 8 or 9 in my opinion - removing background clipboard access in 10 was a Huge defeature.
I jumped from 8 to 13 on my (new) personal devices, so I missed a lot of firsthand experience, but the clipboard thing still affected me by making apps like Google Translate worse.
13 does seem pretty nice in a lot of ways - notifications are even more capable than they were in 8, for example. But I do notice it being more restrictive in some ways too.
I’ve been feeling lately that Google has lost the plot. Material You is an ugly, inconsistent mess, usability is worse, and you can’t expect any feature to stick around because Google is so unreliable.
Android 11 was the last version that felt refined and stable. It was clean, usable, and organized.
I’m going to say 10 because I think 11 was when they first started making it difficult to move apps to SD card external storage and for me that was the beginning of the fuckery.
Honestly, it feels like Google lost the plot (for the most part) almost a decade ago. Android was really the only product that was consistently chugging along; most of their projects have been nothing but premature cancellations, even if the product was actually good (I’m looking at you, Inbox).
I’m currently really mad at them for setting up to cancel Google Podcasts just so they can move podcasts into YouTube Music.
Why do these companies keep having to consolidate functions into ever-more complex apps? What happened to the separation of function so that they do one thing really well instead of many things poorly?
What do you mean by this? What did Motorola Droid phones have to do with Google owning Android or Android being it’s own company back in like… 2003? The first Droid used Android as developed by Google in 2009. Google had aquired Android years prior to Droid being a thing. Most Android devices are not created by Google, even to this day.
I didn’t realize that Google owned the company at that time. I don’t remember the advertisements blasting Google’s name like they tend to do now. I know that most Android phones aren’t made by Google, I was mistaken in thinking the Droid was a popular android device prior to acquisition
“droid” was actually a verizon brand, not motorola or google. any droid-branded phone was a verizon rebranding of a phone that was sold as something else outside the US.
but yeah, android never existed outside of google. Google bought out android before their first public release.
Nope. Jaguars were absolute trash before Ford bought them out back in the day, then got a lot more reliable (but arguably uglier, so as not to compete with Aston Martin) when built with Ford stuff. Tata purchased them semi-recently and they’ve gotten even better.
And now Azure DevOps has completely been forgotten about. I was setting up an web app in Azure and it gave me the option to do continuous integration from GitHub, but not Azure DevOps.
This one hurts. My team at work currently uses AzDO for our build pipeline. It works pretty well, making it easy to trace which build actually got deployed, plus which git branch and commit got built. The variable substitution feature is pretty slick for test vs. prod builds, too.
You can put together continuous integration with Github Actions, but from what I’ve seen so far, it seems so much more primitive :(
Interesting, sounds like merge queues can streamline some of the housekeeping around PRs. I’ll have to read up on them some more.
I wasn’t thinking about differences between Github and AzDops repos, only between GH actions and AZ pipelines. My team moved the code to Github a long time ago – AZ pipelines is perfectly happy having the code there.
Hmm, now I wonder if anyone keeps their code in AZ Repos and their CI stuff in Github Actions (probably not, it sounds absurd!)
Mixed feelings on this one; I think the jury is still out. I think I preferred GitHub being independent and focused on hosting source code and reviewing merge requests. But… I’m not sure if the product would’ve ended up any better without being under Microsoft.
Microsoft lately seems to take pretty hands off approaches and follow the “don’t fix what isn’t broken” rule well, which seems to be working for them.
They still behave like a monopoly. Microsoft owning everything is bad for tech even if they can throw money at it and make it “better.” I moved to codeberg.org and it’s been decent.
Yeah, I don’t think anyone’s denying that MS is a shitty company; we’re just talking about companies that have either improved, or haven’t gotten significantly worse, because some other company bought them out.
The company I work for got bought out and from my perspective things have only improved. From the perspective of the random customer who has the first thing go wrong in half a decade though? Those immediately blame the acquisition.
Not an apple fan really at all but buying that chip design company way back when seems to have been the right move. The M1 chip in my mbp is fantastic.
Even before that, Apple owes its very existence to an acquisition. Acquiring Next allowed them to abandon their dying OS and start anew with OS X, and brought back in founder Steve Jobs (who Apple had previously fired). With Steve Jobs at the helm, they made the computers cool again to buy some time before the iPod completely turned the company around.
A similar thing happened with Pixar/Disney, where post acquisition Disney Animation Studios started to work a lot more like Pixar. Interestingly, Steve Jobs was also CEO and majority shareholder at Pixar up until that acquisition.
They 100% have been selling ARM windows machines for years now, they just suck in comparison to x86
They did push for universal binaries, but no devs wanted to make the switch, I actually appreciate that Windows didn’t bork all prior applications unilaterally like Apple does with most of their OS releases (I work for a company that has a program with Linux/windows/macOS and I swear every single major macOS update breaks shit and Apple doesn’t give a fuck)
I don’t see the performance being comparable yet, at least in my experience the power of ARM is much more in its energy efficiency, it simply does not compete in actual real world power (at least yet)
Ultimately I think it comes down more to Apple vs Windows approaches, Apple controls every aspect of every official device running macOS, windows is much more free form with so many manufacturers and different configurations being possible.
I would never willingly purchase an Apple device for that reason, but I also like Linux, just too much of a gamer to constantly want to worry about compatability.
Can you not just install Windows 11 normally on an ARM processor? I would think it’d be included with a normal installer but idk for sure, do people even build custom ARM rigs?
Its sort of a give and take though still, you can’t really build a hackintosh without very specific parts so… The fact there is no “macOS for ARM” copy available at all makes the point somewhat moot no?
UWP still exists, Microsoft is like the only one still developing them though, there are a few others but it’s definitely not a focus for any devs outside of Microsoft that I’ve seen.
Though I do agree that Apple generally sticks to their decisions whether for better or for worse :p
Right gotcha, wasn’t aware there isn’t an installable windows for ARM specifically.
I know though, that’s kind of my point, the landscape and way in which windows works on way way more configurations compared to Mac (simply due to the differences we’ve both pointed out) makes it not quite a fair comparison, Apple controls all aspects of the hardware and ONLY their hardware (or choice of hardware) is made to work with it, so it’s much easier for them to develop and force people over to ARM or whatever specific system they’re pushing developers and users towards, whereas windows is much more backwards compatible and users/manufacturers/devs have a lot more options out there.
Similar to Android vs iOS, it’s a lot easier to tightly control and force certain things when you’re the arbiter of where people can install apps, what hardware it can run on, and every design aspect.
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