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And yet you still cried a bit. :)

Still not enough cooking shows OTA IMO YMMV.

My butt is like a series of tubes? Yikes.

That's indeed one of the things that annoys players: a game advertising itself as free to play, but not actually being playable in a practical sense unless you pay. In the shareware games it was completely impossible to progress beyond the first episode unless you paid, but you were told that before you started to play.

I think the difference between shareware and freemium is that shareware is up front about it's model. Most freemium games advertise them as being free, with the payment as a hidden gotcha (and very nagging).

Bladerunner would be a pretty awesome dystopia too, except for the homicidal replicants. Los Angeles could use a facelift anyway.

Never saw any need for it. Distracting, usually at least partially (and more often almost totally) obscured. I used to use a simple tiling pattern that sort of resembled leather, but in the end just switched to a plain greyish-blue that I switch to a neutral ~18% grey when I'm editing images or videos.

The Apogee/ID shareware model from the 90's was also a kind of freemium: episode 1 is free, episode 2 and 3 are sold. The problem is not in having a free/paid combination, the problem is greed. Game development costs money, so there should be money coming in or the development can't continue. But in some companies bringing in money becomes more important than making a game and the game play suffers as a result.

I agree with the patching problem: the nice thing about consoles used to be that you could just pop in a cartridge or disc and start playing, without having to worry about system specs, drivers, hard disk space etc. Nowadays game discs are just a workaround for people having slow net connections, because you can't play from the disc anymore: you have to install the game and then patch it.

The patching is mostly a problem with the AAA titles though: indie titles tend to be much smaller in size and scope, if only because of smaller budgets. They also tend to be released when the developer considers the game ready, instead of at a time set by upper management. Since I get most of my games from Humble Bundle and Kickstarter nowadays, I mostly know the patching problem from friends who do own recent consoles.

About online harassment: yes, that's a problem, but in 1994 there was hardly any online gaming except for MUDs. I'm not convinced that gamers from 1994 would have been kinder to each other if the masses had been online then.

Don't forget that you can make it yourself. Plenty of stuff I found from random sources and downloaded straight to my "wallpapers" folder.

Does anyone know any cross-platform wallpaper switchers that aren't filled with crapware?

Dagnabbit, I skimmed the options too quickly and voted "Bladerunner" because I didn't see the "1984" option. Obviously, it's 1984 and yes, we are very nearly there as a whole, and either currently are or have been there in parts (thinking N.Korea, the former E.Germany (which I had a chance to visit while it was still very much DDR)).

You can actually just search for "wallpapers" and then filter the results with google's advanced search features to only show you images with the exact resolution you set.

Sky Captain would be awesome though: all that retro chic, robots with tentacles, Angelina Jolie with an eye patch and a hovering airstrip near a secret island with an underwater passageway to an island mecca of lost creatures? That's way more interesting than me in front of this Win7 box at the office, slowly watching my soul decay...

... so, dead.

Surely we can agree there are people with varying levels of addiction? Cigarettes are the same - some people have an occasional smoke, others reach for the cigs as soon as their eyes are open in the morning. I've got an aunt who has smoked since she was 16, so going on 60 years now. Amazing she's still alive, is all I can say.

Gaming can be addictiveness.

Lenovo now owns Iomega http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1693

Right, because we live in an all-or-nothing world, and moderation doesn't exist.

1984, we are almost there. In the long run a terminator scenario doesn't seem too unlikely either

If you are just looking for high resolution wallpapers, try a google search for "high resolution desktop wallpapers" .
The first hit is wallpaperswide.com and I actually like that site.
But since that is so easy to find, maybe you are looking for something special?

I got out of gaming in 2005. I haven't bought a game since (or game console). Life is much better.

Gaming is not much different than being an alcoholic. I know so many youth now that do nothing but game. They barely pass through school. They have no time to put any thought into a career path. And when they finally graduate they are perfectly happy with working at taco bell (or not working at all) and spending 80% of their time in front of the TV 'gaming'. Finally when they are 30, they realized that they have wasted most of their life. I was in the same boat once, but I managed to give it all up and go back to school for a degree in CS. I have also effectively banned all games from my household, with one exception, you can play the game if you are the one that made it. At least then you will have accomplished something somewhat productive. "Gaming" is a blood sucking time waster.

The default background I have is the company logo with a fairly simplistic pattern. It looks fine. I usually have applications open so only really see it when starting/shutting down the computer.

Am surprised that a PAN, WAN or LAN wasn't mentioned. Soon we will all be walking 'personal area network's and lots of devices (the internet of things) will be able to sense what is around them and respond. Looks like some parts of sci fi movies, Minority Report for a start, will be just another part of life.

Thanks, thought you'd never ask! Let me just get the truck ...

stored in MY butt, no?

That's an interesting comment. I have a fondness for them too, sort of, but for no really well-justified reason. That was back when IOMEGA was a pretty darned good company, making good things. I've still got a CD burner from IOMEGA that is well made, solid, durable, and doing a great job burning CDs (quietly and reliably) and it's about 10 years old now! I later bought a DVD burner from another company and the thing is flimsy, loud, and cheap-feeling. I was kind of sad when IOMEGA pulled the plug. Or did they get bought out by somebody? I forget now.

Anyway, that's the thing about the zipdrives too. Those zip disks were much more solid-feeling than the 3.5" floppy disks that they helped retire. Solid little things. I was writing a book at the time and used a zip drive to do a daily backup of the manuscript. The whole thing fit perfectly on one zip, which I stored offsite.

I was an early adopter of Zip drives. They weren't terrible devices, although they did have problems, largely stemming - I think - from quality control issues down the line. They gained a bad reputation because of this but in most cases Zip drives were quite decent.

Of course, looking back we wonder how we ever managed. Putting aside the reliability issues, Zip's now-laughable 1MB/s transfer rate, 100MB storage and price of $10/disk seem too slow, too small and far, far too expensive. But it has to be remembered that - when released - most computers had hard-drives measuring in only hundreds of megabytes, and the primary method of data-transfer was still floppy disks. CD-ROM burners cost thousands of dollars and flash-drives were just a gleam in some mad inventor's eye. As a replacement for the notoriously unreliable 1.44" floppy drive, the Zip drive was a god-send. Even when CD-burners started coming into the market, Zip retained its usefulness; for a long time, it was faster to write to Zip than to optical, and it had the advantage in that you could erase and re-write to the media as many times as needed. But Zip was never really designed to compete with optical; it was intended as a replacement for the floppy and - in my eyes - it served its purpose admirably.

Eventually I too gave up my Zip drives (just as I gave up cassette tapes, floppies and CD-Rs); technology marched on and better alternatives became available. But I still look fondly on my little blue drives.

I agree. It depersonalizes the costs of waging war - makes it into a video game, and a damned expensive one, at that. There was a good article making the rounds at Reddit not long ago where they are trying to personalize it by making a huge picture visible to a drone 'pilot' of some kid who got killed by another drone - make the pilot really think about it.

That said, since I've got kids, I'm glad the robots can go kill each other now. Leave my kids at home, thankyouverymuch.

The problem with things like drones and robots is they make war too easy to wage. When you don't have to worry about the political fallout of your young returning in body bags, it's much easier to start a war. This is already happening with the drone attacks.

I dunno about good guys and bad guys, but it's certainly true Russia and China do a hell of a lot of spying. You don't hear about Ugandan spies much because regardless of how well the country is doing as a nation, they just don't have many/any spies. Russia and China meanwhile, are putting money and effort into their spying divisions (and in Russia's case, that spectacularly good looking redheaded spy), and it's probably bearing fruit. I don't think it's about reminding everyone China/Russia are the bad guys. It's about reminding everyone China/Russia have spies.

I can't be sure, but I always thought this was a slam on Slashdot. When they first rolled out their mobile site, this is exactly what they did. I got asked "want to go to the mobile site?" on every goddamned link ... very annoying.

I cut it 4 tears ago, and it is amazing. I don't care about cable tv. I will not go back. I don't care if they even start to offer a-la-carte. They've lost me for good.

With all the spy and antispy stories lately they have to tell us a success story again and make sure we know China and Russia are the bad guys... yawn

My vote is for Sleipnir
Just disable the gestures, and add a Custom Button >Close Current Tab :)

If I have a decent web browser why do I need specific apps? At least the browser does not broadcast my imei and contact list
How exactly can you block ads from a native app? Without root plus firewall that is

That nails it.. so many sites plaster a message about their app every. single. time. Just so frustrating. Perhaps they are trying to get people to install their app through sheer frustration?

ROFL

.. long live not reading the article?

Try this then .. other obligatory xkcd .. http://xkcd.com/1174/ ;op

Oblig xkcd, even though TFA already includes this xkcd? :P

Thanks. Should be good now.

I prefer replacing "Cloud" with "extra-judicial servers", but some would argue that's just high definition web browsing ..

The skeevy Google tracking prevented me from falling in love with the Nexus 7 (and from using any stand-alone Google products on my computer). I really wanted to love it. It's a nice piece of kit, but I felt so icky-sticky with how very much Google was getting its fingers all over me that I returned it within a week. That was my first and, so far, only Android experience (I'm still cheesed off at myself that I wasn't clever enough to set up a throw-away Google account before trying it out). We're getting an Acer C720 on Tuesday and I'm planning on immediately putting some flavor of linux on it.

On the Firefox memory issue, I just read that a major contributing culprit could be my won't-live-without-it Adblock extension . The linked post explains briefly why that's the case, but also points out:

Of course, it should also be noted that Firefox (and Chrome, let's not leave anyone out) can also be a pretty big memory hog on its own without any extensions.

I'm hearing a lot of hatred over the new interface. My comments are:
1. if the only 'innovating' you are doing is aping someone else's UI, you are in a bad place. Nobody won by copying the other.
2. essentially the same comment, but: considering how many ways there are to improve browsers, is the widget set the only thing you could find to fix?

What keeps me off Chrome is all the skeevy Google tracking. What keeps me on Chrome is this new Chromebook :( It's also a decent browser. But Google is increasingly creeping me out. Firefox should be scooping up disaffected Chrome users. But they're not, because increasingly Mozilla Foundation's browser really sucks balls. And I am so fed up with the constant plug-in is out of date stuff, or checking plug-ins on boot time, etc. Find a better architecture! And fix those memory leaks! You are the Titanic, guys!

I was pretty much forced to install the Classic Theme Restorer extension to get things back to what I consider useable. I don't know if it's the extension or simply v29, because I installed the extension immediately after updating, but Firefox has been quite crashy ever since. If it is the extension, then I'm kinda boned, because I don't much feel like using Firefox without it.

There seems to be a bug which appears related to such a change:

Notice: Undefined index: last_time in /var/pipedot/lib/tools/tools.php on line 768 error: sql [insert into story_history (sid, zid, time, last_time) values (?, ?, ?, ?)] arg [183, fatphil@pipedot.org, 1400437667, ] msg [SQLSTATE[23000]: Integrity constraint violation: 1048 Column 'last_time' cannot be null]

I don't know, that new interface is kind of breaking it for me. There's no firefox anymore: there's chrome and a chrome knockoff. I'm probably going to switch to something else.

I'm definitely in the market for something like that, so I'm checking it out. Funny how cloud backup systems are set to be commoditized within another year or so - tough business to be in! Here's the URL for anyone else shopping: http://seafile.com/en/home/

Actually, the folks at Adobe seem to have had their own heads up their own asses for so long now it's amazing their eyesight hasn't atrophied, like blind cavefish. I mean seriously, I'm having trouble thinking of a software company whose software is more user-hostile. I really hate their new, "streamlined" version of Acrobat Pro. The previous version had so much powerful functionality available via the menus. Now in the latest version that functionality has either been stripped out or buried so users can't find it. Either way, Adobe sucks.

It's the more incendiary headline, and that's what people like to use now. But read the article and you'll see both are true.

Thumbs up for LinkBubble, by the way. It doesn't do everything - it seems no browser does everything I like - but it's pretty damned useful on a smartphone and allows you to basically load webpages in the background while you, for example, keep reading things in your RSS reader. I'd like to recommend Opera mobile since Opera is my favorite desktop browser, but lately mine has been wonky on my Galaxy Note 3.

...but either way, the lion's share of that is what the "content providers" are charging the cable companies, who pass that cost on to the subscribers.

So despite whatever other perfectly valid reasons you might have for loathing, say Time-Warner Cable, for this you can mostly blame the company that no longer owns them, Time-Warner, along with Disney, NBC Universal (owned by Comcast), FOX, CBS, etc.

There will always be a need to have a basic method for accessing information.

Web browsers can degrade nicely. Standard HTML can be displayed and purposed by modern computers. A mobile device with a 7" screen is capable of showing web pages just as well as a laptop. The main difference is in the UI.

We still have a range of protocols and tools which could be described as being redundant or well past their use by date, yet we still use them. FTP, telnet, http (as opposed to https or spdy), vi/notepad, text passwords all have place. Nothing is going to be thrown away just because the new shiny way of doing things has come out. Some countries still use older technology like cassette tapes.

So, the answer is no. Web browsers are not dead on mobile phones. If recent improvements like HTML5 with native video support are any sort of indication then they definitely will not be going away soon.

Several times I lost everything, or close too. Lots of stuff is gone. So, now I store what I can everywhere.Personal files including scanned documents are copied into a truecrypt volume (with all paranoid options used) and uploaded to a free cloud storage. Dropbox is a good start for those looking for a direction. Only upload well protected encrypted files. If they want your data then they can damn well work for it.Other files are uploaded or copied to lots of different places around the web. Useful bits and pieces are put onto wikis and qa sites so I can find them again. Code and useful objects are attached in various online places. Most in duplicate locations so if I need anything I can get it all back.I buy an external hard drive every year, create encrypted files, copy everything across, then send it to a relative with a note asking them nicely to stick it in a secure dry safe place in their house. The drive is inside a plastic box with its power supply and cables. The box is sealed with duct tape then wrapped with three layers or 200um plastic plastic folded multiple times around the box. The outside is coated with a plastic sealer I picked up from the local hardware store for a final seal.Any files I have of 'community value' I make sure several people I know have copies of. Storage is cheap. For a couple of those I have purchased hard drives for them on the condition that quarter of the drive content is never deleted.I always have at least two computers in the house which are either portable or use an external drive with a working encrypted copy of my key files.Why? I will tell you. I have been robbed multiple times. A friend walked away with a laptop of mine with my files still on it. Several drives went missing from a closet. Many hard drive failures. Another friend borrowed a drive formatted it then returned it formatted. Devices have gone missing from places I have worked (stupid me for leaving anything electronic on my desk). House was once directly hit by lightening with most devices surviving but dying within a few months. Paranoid? Me? No. Paranoia is where you THINK they are out to get you.

Some are saying that MyGov will be the equivalent of the long since dead Australia Card