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Showing content with the highest reputation on 20/03/20 in Posts

  1. Wanna bet ads won't suffer the same decrease in quality (or quantity, for that matter)?
    13 points
  2. Are they going to reduce their price too?
    7 points
  3. Microsoft teases new Windows 10 Start Menu in its success video

    Personally I still like some tiles. Mail, calendar, Todo and weather in particular, others I am less concerned about and usually switch off.
    5 points
  4. They don't get to self-classify. If they aren't on an official list, they aren't essential.
    5 points
  5. Typical EU. Coming up with a solution to a non existing problem. What happened with evidence-based policy-making? Yes, it would have made sense if the infrastructure was indeed under strain, but that's not the case! My ISP actually doubled the volume! Reducing bit rates is a win-win for providers - lower cost and social responsibility at the same time.
    5 points
  6. what ever happens ... I hope that live tiles are kept.
    3 points
  7. well fu. will I have to torrent Picard to enjoy it in full quality tonight?
    3 points
  8. Microsoft teases new Windows 10 Start Menu in its success video

    "after which the new app icons are seen replacing the older squared icons in the app list on the start menu." Well, no - the older icons aren't really squared, they're outlines I guess. There's nothing particularly squared about the Settings icon or whatever. Some are more square than others. But yeah, new icons are coming, as we've seen with Weather, Mail, Calander, etc. The *tiles* are becoming transparent, like they used to be on Windows Mobile, which is very cool. Like this: https://imgur.com/JqPKYNI
    3 points
  9. Microsoft teases new Windows 10 Start Menu in its success video

    Why do they need a year to update the interface ? They are so slow with these changes, consistency is down the bin.
    3 points
  10. > Plays on a difficult setting > Complains that it's difficult.
    3 points
  11. So much better!! It almost look professional!! 😉
    3 points
  12. Time to quarantine some demons!
    3 points
  13. I was under the impression this was to reduce load on ISPs rather than Netflix.
    3 points
  14. 4K was already a price hike, and now they are admitting they can't even deliver HD at capacity, mmkay. More passing the blame and responsibility to the consumer must be the new norm for companies.
    3 points
  15. Paradox announces Sunset Harbor expansion for Cities: Skylines 

    It’s still a good game. “Looking outdated” has nothing to do with the quality/value/entertainment you get from playing an older game.
    3 points
  16. Makes no odds to me, I have a third party start menu, so I never see the windows 10 one.
    2 points
  17. what ever happens ... I hope that live tiles are kept. Yes, if anything it's a shame more tiles are not "live".
    2 points
  18. Microsoft teases new Windows 10 Start Menu in its success video

    It looks really good to me but it doesn’t fit any use case for me, I never use the start menu unless indexing is messed up.
    2 points
  19. Not to be a jerk about it, but really? Is streaming/downloading Picard in full quality really more important than someone being able to earn their paycheck? I've been working from home for years, and I am still working home from now. But I don't (just) live to work, and part of my fun is to steam stuff in the evening. It's 2020 and by now it should be normal that people work from home and streaming video should be normal. It the responsibility of the governments and the ISPs to make it work. I'm paying my ISP, and I'm paying a lot of taxes, so yes, I should be able to expect great streaming quality in the evening.
    2 points
  20. You might be thinking of Windows Phone. Windows 8 didn't have unified colored tiles. Windows 10 introduced acctent colors for tiles, like Windows Phone. No I'm not thinking of Windows phone. I'm thinking of 8.0. Yes some of the store apps had their own colours but that still applies here with this WIndows 10 update. 8.1 introduced coloured tiles for win32 apps.
    2 points
  21. funny enough - they just had a B2G2 sale for used games under $10. i ended up buying 10 games. came out to like $6/ea. but most of their used games are ridiculously priced... like you said, theyre only $5-10 cheaper than new. there are plenty of other avenues to get cheaper games. hell, even Amazon sells them for $45 new when gamestop is $60.
    2 points
  22. gamestop has been struggling financially for some time now. they cant close up or they'll never reopen!
    2 points
  23. YouTube to switch EU streams to SD quality to reduce network load

    240p, we meet again.
    2 points
  24. It looks like you'll still be able to switch it to HD if you want since they only say that it's now SD "by default". Non-issue really since most people just won't notice or care. For those that do, you should still be able to enable HD anyway.
    2 points
  25. YouTube to switch EU streams to SD quality to reduce network load

    Guess it's time for Europe to use VPN to overcome those restrictions...
    2 points
  26. YouTube to switch EU streams to SD quality to reduce network load

    Wait WHAT?
    2 points
  27. That first image looks way better than the default kaleidoscope of colors the current start menu has.
    2 points
  28. As mentioned by other posters, the general idea here is on an average day Netflix usage takes up 30-50% of all traffic on the Internet. As now more users are being "forced" to stay home, this may then go up higher. As lots of users are also now working from home doing WebEx, Skype, Zoom or even just more WhatsApp calls plus more Instagram, etc. the total usage may cause issues for some users and/or ISPs. The idea here is if Netflix bitrate 15Mbps UHD is dropped to 14Mbps for example... This alone when multipled by 1000x connections would save bandwidth on the infrastructure which then allow more users to be able to use communication apps without issues. Break it down to a single household instead, if you pay for 50Mbps internet and all 3 kids are watching 15Mbps shows, means you may have ~5mbps to view that news clip or make that important WebEx call and not have buffering and other quality of service issues. Now yeah not exactly a perfect example but this could be the problem the EU (read, not Netflix) is trying to prevent. As we can't expect people not to stream during this crisis, the next best thing is to try and reduce how much it affects the networks.
    2 points
  29. Uninformed comments like this really prove the need for a downvote button. The bitrate reduction was done because EU lawmakers publicly asked Netflix to do it in order to ease bandwidth usage.. Wait a minute... You want the downvote button to downvote the admin? 😂
    2 points
  30. Uninformed comments like this really prove the need for a downvote button. The bitrate reduction was done because EU lawmakers publicly asked Netflix to do it in order to ease bandwidth usage..
    2 points
  31. To be fair, when the 'dip' happened it was because NVidia couldn't deliver the necessary DX10 features to equal the XB360 DX Superset. DX10 was similar to DX11 for Vista, and sadly NVidia's 8800 GPUs didn't support a large chunk of features. Thus Microsoft was forced to yank back DX10 features, with it doing little more than low level performance along with unified shaders and RAM sharing. It wasn't until DX11 that Microsoft was able to create parity between PC DX and XBox360 DX. This created a void during the good XB360 years, with teams having to keep two development projects or a poorly optimized version for PC. So the Win7 being 'good' had a lot to do with gaming catching up to console on the PC - mainly because NVidia's hardware in the late 00s was crap. Coming into the WP and Windows 8 era - gaming was leading Microsoft's vision, as many of the 'One' concepts of generationally adaptable versions was designed around this time. Thus XBox One games running well on PCs, and vise versa - with titles scaling up and down well. I don't like or hate AMD or NVidia in this context, but there are time each of these companies have done some horrible crap that kept the entire industry back. NVidia was a big problem in trying to create GPU hardware based on the new technologies from the XB360. AMD had an advantage, as MS gave them back the general reference design that directly applied to their hardware. (Although AMD ignored it for a couple of years, assume the anti-XB360 hype meant its GPU changes were irrelevant. Ironically the entire GPU industry is now based around the XB360 GPU changes and design.)
    2 points
  32. Paradox announces Sunset Harbor expansion for Cities: Skylines 

    It’s still a good game. “Looking outdated” has nothing to do with the quality/value/entertainment you get from playing an older game. And I'd argue that no, the game does not look outdated. We've long since gone past the point when the average graphics quality of most games improves along with the year-by-year hardware upgrades. These days it mostly depends on what kind of budget the development studio has.
    2 points
  33. Paradox announces Sunset Harbor expansion for Cities: Skylines 

    It might look outdated, but it is not when it comes to gameplay and simulation, nothing can match it.
    2 points
  34. Hello, That is a really good deal for a branded 18W USB Type-C charger. Ordered! Regards, Aryeh Goretsky
    1 point
  35. Microsoft teases new Windows 10 Start Menu in its success video

    Start bill board...Explorer looks like a 1993 rendition and so does the menu. I think they really need to hire some real designers. People who understand geometry and colour.
    1 point
  36. Beta will be Beta. Edgium uses the Chromium naming scheme. 4 channels. Stable/retail, Beta, Dev and Canary You mean the Beta isn't the same as the stable version? I installed Edge from a link here at Neowin that was supposed to be for the Stable version although it was called Beta in that article. Edit: I just did a search for Edge Chromium stable and installed it. Appears I had the correct stable version anyway. 80.0.361.69 Beta has little blue "Beta" on its logo Cool! Did have stable version then. Should've thought about that little ribbon thing across the logo! Duh!! you probably installed one of the leaked "stable" builds when they were just testing the channel. At first they just had the beta build in there but you were still technically on the stable branch so it likely updated to the real stable build on its own once that officially released. That's possible although it was a link from here I got the stable version from. Can't say as I remember ever seeing that Beta ribbon on it. I do remember seeing the Dev ribbon on it when I had that installed. At least I know which version I'm using now!! Thanks yeah we reported on the leak so I'm guessing that's when you grabbed it Wasn't from a leaked report though. It was from the Jan 15th article on it's official release. Just had myself confused, imagine that, with all the different channels of there are.
    1 point
  37. Microsoft teases new Windows 10 Start Menu in its success video

    Personally, one of the things I really hated about Windows 10 was that cluster mess of tiles all over the start menu! Hope it gets totally blown away!! Hmm, I just noticed there aren't any tiles at all on wife's computer. No wonder it looks so good!
    1 point
  38. Not to be a jerk about it, but really? Is streaming/downloading Picard in full quality really more important than someone being able to earn their paycheck?
    1 point
  39. And that was how all the websites turned into plain text... 😲
    1 point
  40. Actually I would say they do have a vision and it's closer to being realised. If you look back over the historic vision videos all but the planner one couple of years back feature ambient AI augmenting tasks rather than an AI interface. That is very much what we are seeing now. I've heard references to "clippy 2.0" and that's not all bad. Moving AI into programs like excel can open some real workflow change possibilities. I am a market analyst, I identify trends, isolate and quantify the driving factors, then research and explain them before moving to forecast. Testing AI in excel I see real opportunities to speed up stages 1 and 2 and move more quickly into stage 3, which to be honest by customers will benefit more from. The vision was for Cortana to be everywhere, Windows Phone, Windows PC via search, in speakers and thermostats. You are talking about the most recent version of the 'vision'. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6cNdhOKwi0 Actually am looking at a far older one. This is the 2011. Take a look at 3:50 mark, you see that the Vision was of AI analysis being integrated into workflow. In fact the whole way through the video you see AI powered experiences but no sign of a blue ring. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-tFdreZB94 The 2015 video features a lot of AI powered functionality again it it is ubiquitous AI rather than a digital assistant. Both of these videos are obviously promotional videos however if you watch through both you can see a lot of real world technologies so it's not all fantasy and is a valid guide into what technologies the office productivity team are considering.
    1 point
  41. Not to be a doomsdayer, but our generations are used to having it all. We haven't been through world wars or serious downturns in the economy (70's oil crisis was probably the next biggest disruption). But COVID-19 could well bring that reality to us, and frankly that's not such a bad thing when everyone is all "but I deserve this because I don't care". We will possibly have to become frugal with our supplies and our money. It will be a shock to most of us. So now it's probably time to learn from our Boomer and older generations who have lived through some actual hardship. Not the hardship that was your internet going down for an hour, or YouTube and netflix not being in 4k.
    1 point
  42. YouTube to switch EU streams to SD quality to reduce network load

    Ok boomer
    1 point
  43. If they're not careful, their customers may realize that they can just buy all their games through online platforms such as the Microsoft Store, Playstation Store, Steam, Epic, etc. That might affect them when the world resumes normal operation. Though I guess if they're providing PC Hardware then they 'could' classify themselves as essential. Though Target and other stores might have a better argument for being an 'essential service' then.
    1 point
  44. Netflix to reduce streaming bit rates in Europe to ease network traffic

    Are they going to refund 4k users?
    1 point
  45. Netflix to reduce streaming bit rates in Europe to ease network traffic

    This sounds like an admission that Europe’s networking infrastructure is extremely fragile, especially at the last mile. Ehm... Europe has about 530M inhabitants, the US only 350M. Although we have much higher average broadband speeds (incl. the last mile, see: https://worldpopulationreview....internet-speeds-by-country) , I think it is fair that the quality of video networks is lowered these days as Europe is working from home these days. Giving priority to productivity above amusement is the way to go... Think of it!
    1 point
  46. As much as I get the desire for reduced costs, the reason this is happening is to reduce the overall usage, not just on ISP's (who are increasing their capacity), but also the general capacity of the entire network. I came here expecting frustrated comments. It has not disappointed! People need to realise all these measures are so everyone can use the internet, it's not just for those who can afford it. People demanding they have 4k netflix and crazy fast internet over this time are the nerd equivalent of toilet paper hoarders.
    1 point
  47. Get rid of the tiles for icons in the Start menu. It looks dumb now and it still looks dumb in the new UI, albeit marginally better with the colouring gone.
    1 point
  48. How about those ARM apps for surface pro x adobe?
    1 point
  49. Odd display issues with just working PC

    Umm, 3 times the charm?
    1 point
  50. Uninformed comments like this really prove the need for a downvote button. The bitrate reduction was done because EU lawmakers publicly asked Netflix to do it in order to ease bandwidth usage.. Wait a minute... You want the downvote button to downvote the admin? 😂 A stupid comment is a stupid comment, regardless of who makes it.
    1 point