The criticisms that people have of this site are ridiculous. People can be a little worrisome.

[Zerimas]

I doubt that there is any such correlation. Having been in the bowels of elite social science departments, first as a grad student and then briefly as a person involved in the process of making grants to academics, I tend to believe that there are people on the political left and right who endeavor to proportion their beliefs to the evidence.

Another data point running against your theory: There was an enthusiastic member here who briefly used an obscure fascist (not Nazi, just fascist) symbol as his avatar. I reported it, and Amir and Thomas swiftly took action. I'm not sure if that member is still around.

It is just a vague "feeling" I get (I'm being hypocrite here since that is a very unscientific assertion). I feel like a lot of them a very anti-scientific, and view measurements and science as some kind of "authority" that needs to be rebelled against. I've seen similar attitudes among libertarians, an-caps, cryptocurrency enthusiasts, et cetera. Then again, I suppose a of "progressives" are somewhat similar (but go about it a little differently). I just happen to run into more of the former than the latter. I try to stay clear of both.

Fascist is probably the wrong term. I want to see if there is any correlation at all (hence the study) between views on audiophilia and more general moral and political values.

 

[Guermantes]

This thread has come precariously close to reductio ad Hitlerum . . . seems like Godwin's Law is in effect.

 

[Wombat]

Groupthink indicates core mindset. It is everywhere.

 

[Ron Texas]

Windows 10 is great although I am a bit upset about the latency problem in 1903. Microsoft is a very different company than what it was even 5 years ago. They are positioned to become the top "cloud" IT service provider, likely to steal Amazon's lunch in that sector.

Stop bickering and look at all the positive things that are happening.

 

[Zerimas]

This thread has come precariously close to reductio ad Hitlerum . . . seems like Godwin's Law is in effect.

If you want to see that just try and discuss anything on reddit. Godwin's Law has turned from an amusing observation into means of stifling debate. People invoke it as a means dismissing an argument regardless of merit (or lack thereof).

I wouldn't be surprised if someone called me a Nazi-apologist just for saying that.

 

[Thomas savage]

I was referring to the Amiristan part. I had not found the ugly China bashing to rise to the level of racism, but I had stopped reading before the word "dragon" appeared.

Yes, SBAF is all in all a rather bizarre and unpleasant place.

I'm quite confident that purr1n/Marv/Merv would not behave that way in my presence and especially not in @Sal1950's. I hope his employer and, if he has any, his offspring never become aware of SBAF.

It's real easy for forums to go ' bad ' , if the management get too caught up in the self affirming bubble and indulge too much in playing to simple human behavioural drivers you get folks behaving badly and quite unlike how they would in real life ( though that's just because they don't feel they could get away with it, online behaviour is a better reflection of us as a species imo) .

And I'd say the gap between these online behavioural anomalies and societal norms offline is and will continue to close quite rapidly.

As a forum I think it's easier for us in some respects , there's something of altruistic mission and enough of our core membership are fully signed up to that to avoid some of the idle indulgence you get elsewhere.

Not perfect though and big influxes of members the past year or so have presented a challenge to that. You can't start feeling too pleased with yourself and superior as really we're not and we are all governed both here and elsewhere by laws of human nature.

 

[Wombat]

It's real easy for forums to go ' bad ' , if the management get too caught up in the self affirming bubble and indulge too much in playing to simple human behavioural drivers you get folks behaving badly and quite unlike how they would in real life ( though that's just because they don't feel they could get away with it, online behaviour is a better reflection of us as a species imo) .

And I'd say the gap between these online behavioural anomalies and societal norms offline is and will continue to close quite rapidly.

As a forum I think it's easier for us in some respects , there's something of altruistic mission and enough of our core membership are fully signed up to that to avoid some of the idle indulgence you get elsewhere.

Not perfect though and big influxes of members the past year or so have presented a challenge to that. You you can't start feeling too pleased with yourself and superior as really we're not and we are all governed both here and elsewhere by laws of human nature.

I have noticed the challenge and the drift.

 

[Zerimas]

online behaviour is a better reflection of us as a species imo) .

If that's the case then there is no hope for humanity.

 

[Thomas savage]

If that's the case then there is no hope for humanity.

It will be ok , as long as the beer don't run out.

 

[Sal1950]

It will be ok , as long as the beer don't run out.

Not to worry, I always got the forums back. Worse comes to worse I'll roll out the quads.

 

[Soniclife]

online behaviour is a better reflection of us as a species imo

Very interesting thought.

 

[agtp]

I use Windows 10 on all of my machines. Reliability is very good but update by update, they are breaking features on my laptop. First thing was my hotkey for screen brightness not working starting last year. Now recently they are killing me by reducing the playback volume to levels where I can hardly hear my laptop speakers. Run the "troubleshooting" task and it fixes it so they surely know about this issue as there was no troubleshooting for sound before.

I run a ton of applications on my machine that don't run on anything but Windows so I cannot switch even if I wanted to.

Okay, thanks. Probably not much has changed. I switched after XP. Got tired of dealing with OS maintenance, security, drivers, etc. I still use Win7 and 10 on occasion, but not a big fan of either for home use.

Apple has made it really difficult to continue as a customer. Their crippled and overpriced hardware options are near impossible to justify. Maybe time for Linux.

 

[anmpr1]

Ah, now it makes sense. Probably the same person who created that wretched 'ribbon' for Office 2007? I still miss Office 2002- I knew where every function was, all via 'alt+ a letter' from the top drop downs.

I'm also glad you had nothing to do with the abomination that was Windows 8. They still haven't recovered. The last truly polished product was 7 and it's still a joy to use when I fire it up on an old machine.

The 'Ribbon' is one of the modern miracles of frustration. Before I retired I was able to snag the latest and greatest version of MS Office for, I think it was about five or six dollars on Microsoft's corporate licensing promotion. I guess it was kind of worth that. Outlook is still flaky as hell. I'm sure there's a new version of Office, by now. I'll use it for a while longer (supposed to give up my license since I am no longer with the organization), and then move on to Open Office, or whatever they are calling it now. Drop down tree menus are intuitive. The ribbon is a mess. Because of that, I don't even use most of the features, since I can't find them anymore, and don't want to waste the effort to locate them.

Win 8? I can just imagine Ballmer's org meeting on it. First, to loosen up, he goes into his 'Developers Developers Developers' monkey dance. Then, once he's sweating it out he begins: "Here's what we'll do. We'll buy this cell phone company that's going south, flood the smartphone market with Windows Mobile phones. Next, we'll turn our desktop OS into a touchscreen phone interface to mirror the phones. Once that works out for us, we'll be able to take over the world. By the way, is that Jobs guy dead, yet? OK... anyone here against that?" Silence in the room, with everyone thinking about their next smoke break. "Good. Then that's settled. And while you guys are at it, see what you can do to get our Zunes selling better. Can we make them brown?"

 

[anmpr1]

I use Windows 10 on all of my machines. Reliability is very good but update by update, they are breaking features on my laptop.

I find Win Tin Tin works OK on new hardware. I don't like the fact that it's always trying to sell me something, but that's to be expected. Like you, on an older machine I had problems. It worked fine with 7. And started to work OK on 10. But one day a 10 update caused failures. I reloaded 7, and all was fine. Gave it to a relative. Said, 'Screw it', and bought a new PC. With a new license. Which was probably what MS was thinking when they came up with their long term 10 plan.

Not much is different in PC land, but I can recommend a new, large capacity solid state drive for anyone with motherboard capability. My machine boots almost instantaneously, and programs load quickly. So I like that.

 

[anmpr1]

Maybe time for Linux.

I used Linux for a decade or so. Those were days where nothing worked well 'out of the box', and you had to do most updates in console mode, I think they called it runlevel 3, or something. It was kind of interesting, because you were learning something new: Bash shell commands, simple editors (nano, pico, but not Vim or Emacs). GUIs were pretty configurable and/or stable (KDE and the more simple Gnome). The system hardly ever crashed, and updates didn't take the whole thing down. Distros eventually became much more usable for the beginner and intermediate. But then came the 'new' KDE, and the 'improved' Gnome. Horrible. By then Windows was not crashing, they'd gotten that thing fixed, so I left Linux world. More of a matter of convenience for me, at my age. I suspect that today the more polished Linux distros are as easy to use as Windows. Especially if you connect via hard wired Ethernet. Wi-fi was sometimes a hassle, but I don't know how it is now. Mainly lack of driver support from manufacturers.

 

[Pluto]

I hope you were not involved in Win 8x. ...... I guess they thought the future was a phone interface to rule them all.

I think you are being hugely unfair with that comment. Windows 8.1 is, arguably, the most stable Windows option of all. It takes very little effort to make it look and feel much like Windows 7, but with the added maturity and stability that several years of improvements ‘under the hood’ can bring. Whatever supposed advantages are offered by Windows 10, it's policy of largely uncontrolled updates and even less controlled telemetry kills it for me.

Windows 8.1 is the great unappreciated compromise of the Windows family which works rather well for audio all the way from simple stereo playback to 32 track editing!

 

[anmpr1]

I think you are being hugely unfair with that comment. .

Unfair? Hugely unfair? I think I am being quite just. Where I worked, corporate IT refused to go with 8. Simply refused. But embraced 10 happily. And it was like that in most IT departments. That's why 8x is history. Even MS could not force the issue, and had to go back to the drawing board. Actually, I never encountered anyone who liked 8x on the desktop (not talking tablets). But I'm happy to learn that there are some. We need more happiness in the world.

Win 8 seems to me to fit in with other MS hits (or are they misses) like DOS 4, Bob, Vista. Look, I'm not a MS basher when they do good. I liked DOS 5 (for it's pretty efficient and easy to configure high memory features); I thought XP and 7 were OK for home use; and I didn't mind NT and 2000 for corporate clients. Win 9x had a nice user interface, but was pretty flaky in the stability department, so that was a mixed bag. And I think I am the only person on the planet who didn't mind and never had problems with Windows 98 Me. So I've got that going for me.

 

[JJB70]

On Microsoft I think that their line of consumer devices is excellent. I use a Surface Pro tablet as our home computer and have just been issued one for work use by my employer. I think they are excellent devices with a nice quality feel. The Surface Pro headphones were a remarkably good first effort at good noise cancelling headphones.

 

[Zerimas]

It will be ok , as long as the beer don't run out.

Until someone comes with some kind of somewhat valid means of objectively qualifying the taste of beer. Then we're in trouble.

On a side note I have no idea how to describe stuff like lambics, geuze and other sour beers. Usually my thoughts are something like "I kinda smells like a foot, but I like it for some reason". Not very helpful. It doesn't do much to convince other people to try the beer that's for sure.

 

[Soniclife]

On a side note I have no idea how to describe stuff like lambics, geuze and other sour beers

They taste like beer and cider got it on and had a fiesty bastard. What's not to love.