TWIG 565: The Vile Little Puppet Man

Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…

What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!

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In regards to the social network discussion; I think we won’t see the scale and network effect of Facebook in any future social network.

As such, I no longer think of Facebook as a social network but more of a life-logging service.

Sure you may use other social networks when you’re younger; but once you start having major life events (engagement, marriage, children, deaths of loved ones etc), Facebook is the platform to reach all the family and friends to communicate and share these life events.

Rarely is there pressure to go through the giant wedding album at your newly married friends house the next time you visit because all their photos were up on Facebook for likes and flattering comments.

This is why I’m always a bit baffled with analysts fascination with what social networks young people are using and how they threaten Facebook’s future. In the end, due to the network effect, I just don’t think that matters.

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Leo, I agree that Desktop OS’s have become meaningless but Apple has grown their market share. I am surprised that Chromebooks are only 1% since they are owning the K-12 market. https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide

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Google are owning the lower and secondary education market in the USA. They don’t even sell their own Pixelbooks, here in Germany

The education system here is currently deciding what they will use and the discussion is between Windows and iPad.

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lol at “life-logging service”

Nailed it

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@ant_pruitt, you were mentioning the Apple tax, saying you can’t justify the cost of a Mac, and that reminded me of a comment of mine on another thread. I don’t know whether you’re on Windows or Linux or what, but in case you didn’t see my comment, I thought it might add to the discussion:

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I think a decade ago that would be true but really not so now. Apart from the initial bloatware (I DO NOT WANT CANDY CRUSH MICROSOFT!), I don’t have many issues with Windows 10 as a whole.

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My last Windows experience was Windows 7. Good to see they’re improved. My worst day was being on a deadline and needing to print something really fast, and it was just a simple web page I was printing, but it just took for-EH-verrrrrr. I didn’t know whether to blame Windows or the HP printer. I was already a Mac fan, though, so I was biased, I guess.

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We have over 250 users. We probably spend less than an hour a week supporting Windows, drivers etc. The rest of the time is spent making sure the infrastructure works out the individual applications.

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sooooo true! Time IS money! I will say that when I have a machine that’s pretty spec’d out, I don’t worry about time. The regular “consumer” win10 computers/laptops in my experience have been painfully slow. Totally feel ya on that.

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Well, you’re talking about performance, which is definitely a factor, but I’m also referring to the time required for you to do your own support. I see in this thread that things are different with Windows than they were when I last used it, so maybe Windows 10 isn’t so terrible - I wouldn’t know.

If they have or would solve the following, what I see as major issues, I’d actually consider a Windows 10 machine to replace my aging Mac:

  • The stupid multiple versions of Windows. Good gravy, whyyyyyy does Microsoft do this? How do I choose? Why do I have to choose? Why can’t it just be Windows 10? Not Windows 10 Home, Professional, Student, etc… Even if I choose the right one now, what if my circumstances change? I have to go get a different version of Windows?? Crazy. Each iteration of the Mac OS is for everyone.
  • The many different places to go to figure out how to change a setting. At least that’s how I remember XP and Windows 7 - settings were not well organized - it was quite the mess. On the Mac, settings aren’t so complicated, and if I’m not sure where to change a setting, there’s a search box in the settings panel.
  • Searching the hard drive always took way too long in Windows - I hope that by now there’s a search-as-you-type feature.
  • The inane popups (e.g. the Candy Crush popup @andrewmelder mentioned) - I could not, not, not ever tolerate adware or malware on any computer I fork over $$$ for. No way. But did someone say there’s a way to remove that crap? If so, is it difficult?
  • The way driver updates for internal components aren’t maintained - that’s all left up to the user. Or is that also improved now?
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hahahahaha! I definitely agree with you on most of this. I always thought the best way to go was a pro version, but apparently the flavors are just selling points for people to not overpay for stuff they’ll never use. Apparently, maybe (shrugs). I don’t experience those weird popups on my OS and quite frankly, i don’t know why. I’ve seen Mr. Laporte get 'em on his machine as “notifications” during a TWiG pre-show. Definitely annoying. I don’t know why I don’t get 'em. Glad I don’t.

But yeah, in most of my use cases, I never really see the OS. I just see my apps. That’s a good thing, IMO.

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Windows make sense for certain professional categories, but they are buggy, insecure and spy on you. In that sense it’s cheaper in the same sense Facebook is free. You are the product not windows.

I have to use Windows at work and it kills my productivity.

My OS of choice is Linux but quite often you do not find support for various peripherals or you need a specific tool that does not exist for the platform. Things are improving but still…

Macs are a middle ground. There is wide corporate acceptance and support, pro tools, all the dev tools you can wish for, they don’t spy on you but they are expensive.

Life is a matter of compromises there is no magic solution.

Having said the above about windows, I do support their effort to create a more robust and safe os. They also seem to realise that having a Unix subsystem build in will make it a viable platform for many developers.
I believe that in the end the users will see the benefit of the competition between the platforms.

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No idea, I’ve been saying for years that they should just use the one version, at least on the consumer side. Make Professional the standard version and have done with it.

But for the average user, it doesn’t make any difference. Unless it is a company PC, they don’t need to worry about which version they are running.

The transition to the new Settings is broken. On about a third of the PCs, the settings just don’t work (administrators don’t have enough privileges to use them!) and you have to drop back to the Control Panel. But, once the PC is set up and running, the settings is an area 95% of users will never need to go into.

Not something I’ve experienced. It has always been fast - assuming you are searching the “user” part of the disk. Depending on the amount of data, it can take a day or so to index everything in the background, but once indexed, it is pretty fast. But, again, I use it very rarely - maybe a couple of times a month, at most.

I’ve not seen pop-ups from Candy Crush and co. I do find it bad that they are installed by default, especially on a business machine, but they are removed in about 5 seconds.

The drivers are generally pre-installed and they are automatically updated, either through the operating system with normal updates or, the likes of Dell and Lenovo include a utility that poles their servers every now and then and when updates are available, it offers to install them.

For most people, drivers are pre-installed when you buy the PC and they remain either not updated or they are automatically updated when the OS gets updated. The exception is probably still printers, for the average user.

Most things these days just plug in and work. We have just rolled out USB headsets and cameras, plug them in and start using them. The same for keyboard and mice.

Windows is a long way from perfect, as is macOS. But we really have very little to do, supporting Windows directly. It is more often the infrastructure (site-to-site VPN, internet provider or such stuff that causes applications to stop working, because they can’t see the server). We spend comparatively little time actually dealing with any Windows problems.

For work, the biggest plus point for Windows is that “it just works” and doesn’t really get in the way, and that the software works on it. Nearly all our corporate software is Windows only, no Linux or macOS versions available. About the only thing that does work on macOS, is ironically MS Office.

(E.g. Alcatel CTI software, ERP software, DMS software, PLC management software, industrial label printing software, corporate reporting tools, maintenance software, industrial scales software. For all of them, the manufacturer offers Windows versions and that it. And in some cases, old Windows versions, some software still requires Windows 7, IE and ActiveX support and you can’t throw out a multi-million Euro production line, just because the software only runs on Windows XP or Windows 7. The only thing you can do is isolate them on their own private network segment, with no access to the rest of the back office network or the Internet.)

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Thank you for this wealth of info!

Ok I assumed @andrewmelder was referring to a popup - I didn’t think of pre-installed bloatware. It’s good to know that it’s easy to just remove it.

That sounds almost on par with Mac OS, then. On the Mac, most printers are also updated. With my printer, the Mac would probably update it if I let it, but it’s easy to just check the screen every now and then and let it update itself, so it stays more up to date than if I let Apple do it.

I know what made me think of the driver thing - driver issues just happen with custom built computers, right? If you build your own computer, it’s up to you to keep the drivers up to date for each component. Yeah?

Most of my issues are actually Adobe issues. (Thanks, Adobe :roll_eyes:)

But that about the settings still being broken - that would be the killer for me. Here in my one-person design shop, I’m my own support team, and I have to spend more time designing than fixing my setup. So I expect my next computer will be on Apple Silicon. I’m so eager to find out more about Apple’s next hardware generation! :smiley:

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On my self-build, I downloaded and installed the drivers. Some of them get delivered via Windows Update, the rest I check once or twice a year, if there are new security issues announced with the board (E.g. Spectre, Heartbleed etc.). If there are no crashes and no security updates, I don’t update the drivers.

I probably spend about an hour a year on supporting my home Windows devices. Apart from new releases of Windows 10, they don’t really need much looking after. The updates are downloaded once a month and a pop-up informs me that they have been installed and that the PC will re-boot “out of hours”.

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What was the last word Leo said with his hands cupped over the mic?

There is a free add-on from Microsoft that is meant to be similar to MacOS “Spotlight”. It’s part of the new Windows PowerToys:

If you want arbitrary file searching, aside from whatever is built into Windows, there are a number of useful 3rd party tools:
Everything from VoidTools builds an index and maintains it by watching for changes to the system (when new files are created/deleted) I played with it, it was insanely fast, but I didn’t like the fact that I couldn’t control what got indexed and what didn’t.

I bought a Windows File Manager replacement called Directory Opus (which I first used on the Amiga several decades ago.) It has a number of useful searching abilities, including filename wild cards and searching content inside of files, but it doesn’t maintain an index, so it would be slow if you didn’t have a rough idea of where to start. It also works great against network stores like my NAS.

I am sure there are many other options… but this may well go against what you like about the Mac… it comes with one option so you don’t need to pick something different or better.

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I really enjoyed your explanation of Facebook @andrewmelder. I have Instagram, Twitter, Google+(Till they killed it), & Mastadon accounts. I even have my own personal website with a two custom domain names to link to it. I post things on my personal website because it’s there and its very personal. But if I want to reach the maximum number of people I post to Facebook.

Facebook to me is the ultimate social network. I keep up with my my church, watch our services on live when I’m out of town and can’t be there. It’s where I network with Burn Camp I volunteer with in the summer. It’s the quickest way for any of us to share events and because it’s a closed and private group, we are able to post our zoom programming on their with easy links to Join. (Password included) Our burn camp uses a variety of other services and we use a standard password to make it easier for the parents in the network to access shared resources (Pictures and videos of children) but protects the content from the outside world.

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You know, it is 12/14/2020, and I am still going back to laugh at Leo doing the Amazon Dash Wand voice…

Amazon Kills the Dash Wand - YouTube

And @ant_pruitt and his perfectly timed “BANE” comment?

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