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Not by coincidence. Iceweasel *was* just the ESR release rebranded for debian stable.

Anyhow, I use the past tense.

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Sorry, the normal user is really only three steps above an ape banging rocks together.

Windows learned this a long time ago and dumb down the interface as well as hid all the underlying stuff. Linux is just late to the party. It is still Linux, sure the user interface is dumbed down to the point for a monkey could operate it.

As to 2 years old, I chose it because it was not the most recent article. Recently chrome books hit 51% market share in the education market and that is what all the current stuff is about.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
http://www.techtimes.com/artic...

You just appear butt hurt because your tech toy is making inroads to mainstream usage. Keep playing with your Linux distros, the average user wants simple and Linux, with the help of google and others, are providing it. You dont like Chromebook, or android? Then dont run it. Just remember, Linux is the kernel and anything with a Linux kernel is "Linux" it may be be GNU Linux, it may not be a desk top, but it is still Linux whether you like it or not.

Anybody want to drop a fortune on an 8K monitor only to have it ruined by a shoddy cable? Anyone? Bueller?

Or, just don't buy cheap knockoffs that completely disregard the spec (as with most things).

Anybody want to drop a fortune on an 8K monitor only to have it ruined by a shoddy cable? Anyone? Bueller?

Are you an idiot? Vulkan is AMD for christs sake. It comes from Mantle.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...

So yeah, MS will be FORCED to use Nvidia to run AMD.

Unlike Microsoft, Canonical actually listened to its users. Unity 8 will have the Amazon thing as opt-in instead of opt-out.

Besides which, there are other Linux options out there besides Ubuntu, and there are other desktop options besides Unity.

Opt-out is the standard excuse of spammers, scammers, and assorted miscreants.

Did you miss a link? I didn't find the article referred to.

It's been my experience (as well as Phoronix) that the proprietary Nvidia drivers have had the same performance on Linux and Windows, to within as little as doesn't matter, for many, many years now. And I haven't really heard anyone that's experienced otherwise? No tweaking necessary

But maybe you're comparing the free and open Nvidia drivers against the windows closed ones? There's no comparison there, no argument. I'm talking about the Nvidia blob for linux. Which is basically the same source as their windows one, they have a unified driver architechture.

The problem with Android is the variation in hardware means not all features in the OS are possible in a specific model. You can try these steps.

Looks exactly the same to me.

Patent law has become degenerate. It no longer has any real application to its original intent of protecting innovators. It is now simply another market where any notion can be ligated for the benefit of wealthy commercial interests. My favorite example, a patent for "*" to mean "any characters", i.e. a wild card for search, was issued in 2011.

http://www.pcworld.com/article... Didn't Acer have this last year? According to web articles covering the Acer piece, Microsoft filed for a patent at almost the same time that Acer went public with actual product [or, at least, prototypes]. There simply isn't enough innovation in Microsoft's claim to warrant a patent.

Telemetry functions become malware at the point when even if you disable them they stay operational. It has then effectively become malicious software because it deceives the user. Many big tech companies still do this even if you explicitly say no . This worries me.

When did Apple use TPM? The only Apple hardware that even shipped with TPM was the Intel transistion development kits but the chip was never used.

Long ago someone countered my claim of the TPM chip, to give a clue of what one looked like I Googled TPM chip then viewed the images, an Apple computer and it's TPM chip was the one I provided.

I did came across this in answer to your question:
"A great many enterprise-class laptops manufactured in the last two to three years shipped with embedded TPM chips; Apple's Macs are a key exception, as none since 2006 include a TPM chip." http://www.pcworld.com/article...

This has been debunked.

Ah, the drive-by "debunker". A poster whose first sentence is authoritative (always uses the word "debunked") and will put an end to all the rabble and their conspiracy theories.

There is no keylogger.

These are not the droids you're looking for, huh? Not only did you authoritatively state my conspiracy theory was debunked without any link or reference, you also refute the subject without any references. This tells me that the statement is usually pretty bunked!

If you have a packet capture that says otherwise, feel free to correct everyone that bothered to look into it.

Of course! Unless I can decipher the mounds of binary uploads Windows 10 provides to MS and show where the data is uploaded, I'm a liar. Then why hasn't PCWorld been sued for libel?

Intellectual property.

Of a keyboard. Yeah, ok.

This has been debunked.

Ah, the drive-by "debunker". A poster whose first sentence is authoritative (always uses the word "debunked") and will put an end to all the rabble and their conspiracy theories.

There is no keylogger.

These are not the droids you're looking for, huh? Not only did you authoritatively state my conspiracy theory was debunked without any link or reference, you also refute the subject without any references. This tells me that the statement is usually pretty bunked!

If you have a packet capture that says otherwise, feel free to correct everyone that bothered to look into it.

Of course! Unless I can decipher the mounds of binary uploads Windows 10 provides to MS and show where the data is uploaded, I'm a liar. Then why hasn't PCWorld been sued for libel?

Intellectual property.

Of a keyboard. Yeah, ok.

Not even the DirectX 12 carrot is earning them the market share they want.

you need for the BIOS to be a read-only thing that can only be written from another computer. Yes, it can be rather inconvenient to have to have a removable BIOS stick, but it would be simple to recover from this by just removing the stick and re-writing it on another machine. http://www.pcworld.com/article... Having a read-only BIOS is great against hacking also. It also makes bios upgrades safer. You just have two sticks and always keep your old one as a backup.

do you really think third party app support for Mac OS X is better than for Windows?

Like all the people that buy Apple, yes. In quality if not quantity.

The gap on reliability is bigger than you say, e.g.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
And the perception of reliability is bigger even than the reality.

And security is certainly a reason. Mac has a reputation for not getting viruses.

Recent news suggests that Microsoft is about to cram their current Windows 10 phones full of bloatware in order to make up for their horrible market share decline. TripAdvisor is going to be the first ad implemented: http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Sucks for those WP fans that tried to be loyal and support their chosen platform, but Microsoft ain't never gonna change from their old ways.

I am sorry, but if it was fixed in few days, it was not found in few days. This bug existed for many versions of OpenSSL before being finally discovered. That's not quite true to say it was discovered in days.

Microsoft had a flaw in Windows that lasted for almost 20 years before being fixed, and they also had one that took 17 years to fix, and another one that took 15 years to fix. There are many, many more with shorter lifespans but are just as severe in terms of how much they compromise. Heartbleed was in use for 2, being introduced in March 2012 and fixed April 2014.

My point here is that open source software has a better track record for security, and you don't seem to be really disputing that.

They are a criminal conspiracy that engage in unauthorised computer access, counterfeiting and click fraud.

Counterfeiting - Ads masquerading as download buttons leading to Click Fraud

They should face RICO charges.

These types of worms also rely on social engineering to convince the user to click on the link and run the malware.

So, not a worm, but a trojan, which iOS also has.

It's an established fact that Google already does this for child pornography. This became public back in 2014. So it's not much of a stretch to move into scanning for this. Some would call it a "slippery slope", but that's the world we find ourselves in.

I thought laptop CPUs were likely to be soldered down rather than socketed. This article states that some still are this way, especially a MacBook, an Ultrabook, or a netbook. And even on those laptops with a socketed CPU, this forum post states that finding new CPUs compatible with the motherboard or new motherboards compatible with the form factor is difficult. What am I thinking of?

Short on currency? http://www.pcworld.com/article...
wait till they get better at this !

Thus you have Motorola chargers that won't charge a Sanyo phone, LG phones that won't charge from generic chargers, etc. (Names used for example only.)

That's a valid issue but a temporary one. Even now, USB 3.1 is pretty much standardizing charging. There was a recent PC World article testing this. Interesting read

USB-C charging: Universal or bust! We plug in every device we have to chase the dream Four devices and five chargers tell us just how close we are.

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article...

It's just a generic form-letter email that would have been sent to an auto-generated list of any number of systems integrators and anyone else that might possibly respond. That's how the bloatware that gets included in Windows PCs ends up on there, it could be describing SymantecNortonLenovoToshibaHuluNetflixCyberlinkDellSkype7ZipAccuweatherRealTek SuperEssentialClickOnMe.

In any case there's already a malware-installer "EXE file that installs a desktop shortcut, that when clicked redirects users to a specific website" for the Raspberry Pi.

When MS shuts off SHA-1 on July 1st, Windows 10 will still be free.

For one more month. I remember reading that Microsoft announced that the offer to upgrade compatible PCs with valid a Windows 7 or 8.1 license to Windows 10 without charge would be available only for the first year after the release of Windows 10. This year ends on July 29, 2016: "After the first year, upgrades will be paid via boxed product and VL Upgrades.”

Firefox for Windows being only 32-bit

They were also running 64-bit Firefox on Windows (see the first chart). It wasn't released in time for their benchmark, but Firefox 43 is out and has 64-bit builds available for Windows.

... clearly none of you have even tested a build of win10 because you are still whining about non-existent issues.

As someone who has a Windows 10 box, I'll agree that it's not a dream OS for stability, but it still has a large number of issues that people keep hammering. Not convinced? Here are a few articles about Windows 10 data collection from PC Mag and ComputerWorld. How to regain some privacy at Polygon and Techtimes. Finally, that Microsoft doesn't see (or care) about the privacy risk for all this data collection. Nor have they explained what is being collected, for what purpose, how it is being stored, and who has access to it. I had to add rules to my home router to block traffic to MS's servers, something I doubt the typical user would do.

On top of that, there's plenty of issues even with games. MS took down GFWL in favor of their store. However, older GFWL games will install the old software automatically, and give you some interesting crashes (SSF4:AE and SFxTekken both crashed miserably and forced a reboot). Other games require reinstallation or reacquiring of assets through Steam (Saints Row 4 is one). Some are unable to play fullscreen (Xeodrifter is one example). Some will simply only run when the planets are aligned (DmC: Devil May Cry starts as a service for some stupid reason... I rarely get the actual game).

Dude, you can install Linux, and then Steam for Linux, on a Chromebook.

Ain't no kid learning after that.

Here's a list of some common devices. A stereo receiver can end up costing you $40, but a desktop computer is more likely to be $7 a year (turned off, in standby mode).

Plus, isn't it true that corporate gmail DOESN'T do this type of scanning? I thought I had read that, or maybe it was only the educational version.

Found more info, yes, Apps for Education is exempt, users may be minors and that is a touchy legal thing. As well as Government, which also has legal issues. However consumers, fair game.
http://www.pcworld.com/article...

A good deal except for that AMD's Linux drivers are pretty bad. Link.

> If linux had those features to begin with, there'd be a lot more disabling. So your point is moot.

What features, the spying?

The only actual features in my post are remote file sharing (which you 100% can do with Linux) and remote voice recognition / assist, which, if present, would be something that wouldn't be snuck into the active state.

If it honestly was just turning off One Drive, not using a Microsoft Account, and disabling Cortana, then I would actually be fine with it. But instead, YOU STILL CAN'T TURN IT OFF. Look at the rest of my post- NOTHING in there is a "feature" that benefits ANY GODDAMNED USER. It's just spy garbage.

What feature is this?

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Who does a keylogger benefit?

So no, there are no features that come with all the services you have to disable, and all the spypacks you have to wusa away. Just noise and loss of privacy for no benefit to any user, any where, at any time.

But you know that, that's why you posted AC.

> A keylogger????

Yes!!!!

You need at least two steps to remove the keylogger....

First,,,, use these easy GUI steps to turn off the above board keylogging stuff::::

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

Second,,,, you will want to also get rid of the keylogger service (((( this continues to run and remotely log your data,,,, sending it to microsoft ))))

https://www.reddit.com/r/Windo...

Hope that helps,,,, quad punctuation man.

Imagine requiring Dell's permission to install a new version of Windows.

Given how things are going lately, you might not have to wait too much longer for that to be a reality. All that's left for them to implement, is a mandatory lockout instead of an "optional" one.

So the first version only generated 110v while the second generated 220v, is this because of the different USA/Europe markets?

No my lazy simpleton friend. A quick Google search would have cleared this up very quickly. The search terms I used were "usb killer 110 volts". This is highly esoteric and counterintuitive, I know, but one day you'll catch on.

Note: if you can post a stupid question to Slashdot, you should be able to reach google.com. If there is ever a rare network failure causing you to be able to reach slashdot.org but not google.com, I would love to see credible documentation of an such event.

I don't think there's an validity for an argument that applies examples from history at a time when we are going through unprecedented technological changes. We are still at a relatively early stage of the digital error, and we are barely at the start of a new era in robotics.

His whole argument seems to extend from an age old egotism that nothing can replace the human mind.

Well I think he's totally wrong.

In the case of driving cars, the process can be replaced with a relatively simple autonoma i.e. don't run into anything.

The human mind is often so bored with this simple task that it finds other things to distract itself with, and that's how accidents occur most of the time i.e. whilst driving, people simply forget to drive the car.

If anything Googles program has proven that automated systems can make driving safer than human controlled systems

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

To me this guy seems to be making a statement which is purely opinion based, with no real technological or scientific methodology behind it and he is making this statement purely to gain publicity for himself

> I bought a half dozen of the RPi kits when they came out and I've only unboxed one. I played with it and did exactly nothing of value with it. I keep meaning to pick it up and learn more but I can't actually think of anything I'd want to do with it or with the rest of them.

--There are *lots* of things you can do with a PI that are pretty neat. If you already know Linux, you can just leave the board up and running 24/7 with minimal power expense.

--I chose to implement my Squid server on a Cubieboard instead, but you can do basically the same with a PI.

--Some links to get you started:

https://communities.vmware.com...
^^ This is a complete drop-in Squid Vmware appliance that I created. Once you get a Linux distribution installed on the PI, you can install the Squid package on it as well and copy the config files over.

http://www.squid-cache.org/

http://www.instructables.com/i...

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

http://www.itpro.co.uk/mobile/...

http://www.digitaltrends.com/c...

--Your local LUG (Linux User Group) should be able to help you get started and maybe give you some ideas on what to do with the board(s). HTH

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

--I recommend you designate a Saturday (or whatever day is $convenient) and resolve to do something with at least one Pi board. Feel free to email me with progress reports ;-)

It's funny how Microsoft proponents primary excuse for the abundance of viruses affecting Windows versus other OS's was due to it's formidable market share.

We're now in the completely opposite situation on mobile platforms, and both Android/Linux (google play) and IOS (apple store) have FAR larger market share, and also address the "fake apps" faster and more thoroughly.

Not sure what you are comparing here, but the amount of malware and security problems on mobile platforms closely follow marketshare on mobile platforms. There is a ton of malware and security issues with Android/Linux (one of the lastest), less with iOS and even less with Windows Phone (despite Slashdot posting the one fake app story, this is happening at much larger scale with Android and iOS (fx this.

The safest platform currently if you go by amount/lack of malware is Windows RT on ARM.

And since you call it Android/Linux, it is actually interesting that Linux can have so much malware, ongoing serious security issues and so much "blue screen of death" type crashes (userland apps crashing the whole OS kernel on regular basis) that Android/Linux has.

What's the excuse now?

PS: I'd also question the market share figures. Even if they were perfect, there's still the fuzzy definition of "desktop". I also doubt the number can be accurately reported, due to the way linux is distributed. All that said, 1.7%, while it looks like a small number, should actually prove its significance when one considers similar numbers and their impact - such as Windows Phone, which is considered to be doing poorly, but is still taken seriously.

The point of the joke comparison was that we continue saying that there is a lot of Linux desktop users out there. And it is, but far less than Windows Phone users, and that we consider having laughable few users. Just an interesting way of interpreting numbers.

Did you actually hack the registry or apply a .reg file someone else already figured out
(patched)?

I applied a hack as suggested elsewhere. I'm a retired IT guy and I'm pretty good, but not good enough to hack the registry on my own.

--

Here's the hack.

it's easy to see where people get the idea that the App Store should be safe.

And, by and far, it is safe. By the same metric, so is the Play Store.

Frankly, I think there is a Vas Deferens between THIS and THIS.

Oh, and BTW, XCodeGhost DOESN'T seem to affect the U.S. App Store, only China.

No Evidence?

Really?

No evidence at all?

What would you consider evidence?

That’s why the news from Bitdefender researchers is so alarming. They discovered sophisticated CAPTCHA-bypassing Android malware in Google Play apps.

from http://www.itbusinessedge.com/...

if you want your computer to NOT talk to MS, then yes, I'd agree that should be an option, with the understanding that you'll lose a lot of function of Windows due to things like OneDrive, Cortana, live tiles, etc. not working without it.

There's a big difference between Windows communicating with application service providers that the user has made an explicit choice to trust (OneDrive, Cortana, and publishers of live tiles) and the browser's phishing filter sending every URL you visit to an organization that works closely with the MPAA.

Well, they are a for profit business, I can't fault them for that.

The problem is that each PC manufacturer is also "a for profit business," and many PC manufacturers have made a business decision not to cooperate with operating system businesses other than Microsoft.

This reminds me of my Mother, who is happy with her old feature flip phone and doesn't want to change.

I too use a flip phone, mostly because smartphones still cost much more per month to operate.

Citations or screenshots please. I have Win10 on three PCs I use all the time and have not seen any of the bs you're talking about.

Is three citations enough? Or do you require more?

http://www.pcworld.com/article...

http://www.howtogeek.com/22632...

http://www.addictivetips.com/w...

I was looking at this recently; this should turn off and block much of it:

Turn off CEIP, Uninstall updates, and then hide telemetry updates to prevent re-install:
http://www.pcworld.com/article...
Note: my "CEIP" setting was opted-out, but I still received two of those updates. So the "you don't get these updates if you're not in CEIP" assertions are incorrect, at least in my case.

Turn off CEIP reporting services:
https://pubs.vmware.com/view-5...

I kept having that "Update Windows 10" (GWXUX) service crash, so I turned it off using the registry update at the end of this article, leaving myself the opportunity to reverse the process and upgrade later if desired:
http://www.howtogeek.com/21885...

If you want to block windows 10 telemetry using a quick and dirty private DNS server, along with ad and malware blocking, install dnsmasq on a computer (maybe a raspberry pi if you're going for cheap, I'm using a VM on a test bed computer in bridged mode for this experiment):
https://www.linux.com/learn/tu... ...and block using an amalgamation of HOSTS files from here:
https://github.com/StevenBlack...

It's a python script that gets a few HOSTS files on the net and de-duplicates them into a mega crap-blocker list. The resulting list includes tens of thousands of DNS lookups that will be blocked at the perimeter of your network, so it could cause some web pages or software to break they depend on sites blocked by these lists. You can prepare you own windows 10 specific HOSTS file using entries from http://someonewhocares.org/hos... and those listed in articles about this issue if you feel paranoid. Windows can side-step your hosts file, but not your DNS server!

Stating the obvious: you'll want to leave the quick and dirty DNS behind your firewall/router, not expose it to the Internet.

Ironically enough, I just clicked that link and the "how to" video at the top right of the linked page autoplays...

Did you see the following paragraph from that page?

On New Year’s Day, I told you how to block videos that play automatically when you visit a Web page. In fact, if such a video is starting to play right aboutnow, you may want to revisit that article.

Exactly. Autoplay of HTML5 video is a real pain, and one of the more noxious ways modern advertisers try to shove their content down our throats. Modern advertising really is the haunt of sociopaths.

There are ways to stop autoplay for Chrome and Firefox.

It's free at McDonald's. Has been for years, much to my annoyance as a paying AT&T customer. [citation]

TFA was very short on detail, so I went looking for more. Unfortunately, there seems not to be much more out there - everyone is reporting on the same short-on-detail presentation. Here's a few which seemed to me to have something to add:
kitguru has more pictures
pcworld has pictures of actual silicon (not that it has any visible detail)
digitaltrends has some interesting commentary (last two paragraphs).