Slashdot Mirror
Apple CEO Tim Cook: "Microsoft Surface Book Tries Too Hard To Do Too Much" (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Apple CEO Tim Cook isn't making any friends on the PC side of the aisle this week. Cook took to the interview circuit this week to heavily promote the release of the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro and didn't waste any time kicking some dirt in the eyes of PC consumers around the world. When questioned on his thoughts about PCs, Cook wondered, "I think if you're looking at a PC, why would you buy a PC anymore? No really, why would you buy one?" Many would take issue with those comments. But we'll leave those comments behind, because Cook decided to set his targets on the current darling of the PC community — the Microsoft Surface Book. Even though Cook says that his company's relationship with Microsoft is "really good," he went on to say that the Surface Book "tries too hard to do too much" and that "it's trying to be a tablet and a notebook and it really succeeds at being neither." It will be interesting to see Mr. Cook's reaction as sales figures for the device roll in post holiday shopping season.
when Apple just got on with it a made good products. Now they need to spread FUD about a competing product ?
I've got a Surface Pro 3 - it's a great laptop replacement and the tablet form factor is handy for some situations and the fact that it runs standard Windows software makes it a great device. Unless your work consists of surfing the web and sending the odd email, why would anyone want an iPad Pro ?
It's good luck to be superstitious
but the Penny Arcade folks made a good point about the new surface: it's not powerful enough to drive that ultra high res display w/o input lag. If you're just mousing with a stylus you won't notice, but their artist noticed the lag right away. Yeah, he could drop res, but that means not running in the panels native res. He was using a Surface Pro 1 on the road, might still be.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.
You have hard evidence of that claim, right?
By the way, are you that naive to think the sainted Tim Cook and his Apples are not "spying" on you? Wake up numbnutz.
Hard evidence: look at the view counts of all the pages on the Internet that list all of the 100+ domains you need to block from your router to turn off the Windows 10 spying. Even if *every single view* was an individual person that went ahead and followed the directions religiously, that would still be less than 1% of all Windows 10 rollouts.
Don't get me wrong, I am no Apple fan. I proselytize for Linux. But if the choice is either Windows 10 or OS X, I would advocate for the latter, because the spying in OS X can be turned off without fighting the OS tooth and nail.
You need Windows 10 Enterprise to turn off the spying. For Win10 Pro, you still need to block all of the domains from your router.
Inferior machines? My middle of the road MacBook is far faster than anything I had when I was a musician and we charted quite a bit on machines that are obsolete. Years ago, I was a hobbiest PC builder -- we could afford to buy machines prebuilt, but I loved trying to get just a little more processor time out of the box. From a music perspective, I ended up having the fastest spec'd machine for one of the bigger softsynth companies (Native Instuments) and after benchmarking it, the company asked to borrow the machine for a week so they could check the benchmarks themselves.
At the time, it was said we'd never need more. Again, I have a middle of the road macbook...it puts my custom built machine to shame. I have the full line of Native Instruments Komplete running on it without any issue. I have Premier on my machine. It works far better than anything I had in the past when I was a creative professional.
What is the point? Apple sold 6 million of these inferior machines in the last quarter that are far better than anything I'll ever need to be creative. I have a few PCs in my rackmount still, but I don't even bother anymore because my laptop is good enough. For the record, one of my rackmounts in a hackintosh -- I wanted all the PCI type slots and everything else I was use to in older machine. The fact is, I never use anything inside. I just plug in with either Thunderbolt or USB3. USB3 is good enough for 90% of what I do.
The point is that if you can't be creative with these inferior machines, you are doing something wrong. And fucking shit...I don't care if it is Mac or Windows or Linux...the operative systems and software and hardware are all good enough that the only people that complain that they can't be creative are idiots that shouldn't be in the industry, or probably just not as creative or smart as they think they are.
Adding 100+ domains to your router's firewall is only "trivial to mitigate" for geeks. >99% of Windows 10 users are being spied on, even if they think they turned the settings off.
You don't need to do that, you just need to run one of the many third-party utilities that kill the spyware. Updates may one day add more spyware, of course, but 99% of user install malware willingly anyhow, so it's hardly worse than what their used to - just run some sort of cleanup every so often.
Windows 10 bypasses the firewall and hosts file to phone home, so unless that third-party utility is altering your router's settings, then I'm not sure what it's supposed to do. Are they confirmed (via packet sniffing) to actually work?
Honestly, you could do worse...
I've been using a Surface 3 for a while now, which might still be relevant to the new stuff:
* It's a perfectly good lightweight touchscreen Windows laptop, solidly built it a bit pricey for the specs.
* It's a poor tablet for normal home tablet use without the keyboard, because Windows software especially games just expects a keyboard, and the onscreen keyboard lacks important keys like "Escape". (Plus there's not a single consistent right-click gesture.)
* It's great tablet for special cases like taking notes with the stylus, or anything that there's actually an app store app for (for me, Kindle and Audible are important, and it's just fine there).
So, if I think of it as a lightweight laptop, also usable as a table for a few specific needs, I think it's great. But I won't be sitting on the couch playing games with it.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Turning off all the settings does absolutely nothing. Try it yourself. Turn all the settings on, open up a packet sniffer, and do something rudimentary like opening up the Windows Calculator. You'll see Windows suddenly contacting over 100 domains. Then turn all the telemetry settings off, put all the domains in your hosts file and firewall, disconnect your Microsoft account, perform an animistic ritual for good fortune--there will be almost no difference whatsoever in all of the phoning home that Windows 10 does.
I can almost be certain that Win 10 Enterprise does not turn off spying
3 of my business offices - one in Singapore, one in the States and one in Africa - we are running parallel experiments on Win 10
We have workstations running Win 10 Enterprises, turning off all the spying option - including the updates - and in the meantime we turned on the sniffers
For the past few months we have encountered _some_ abnormalities - even with all the spying options turned off, Win 10 Enterprise still 'phoned home' - and the data we captured so far are found to be encrypted, so we can't say for sure what kind of data Win 10 enterprise is sending back to its mothership
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I learned something today. Thank you!
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
iOS is a walled garden. OS X is not. It's basically an adapted BSD under the hood with Apple's custom OS X GUI and other services on top, and it has no more trouble installing third party software, accessing the underlying filesystems, or communicating with remote systems than a Windows system.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Ask and ye shall receive.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
* Only if you don't include the weight and battery life among those specs. As a computer, it's overpriced. As a *portable* computer, it's just about smack in the middle of the pack for its class, price-wise.
* Switch the touch keyboard to the "Standard" or full layout. It has the meta keys you are looking for. You may need to enable it. In Win10, the setting is at Settings -> Devices -> Typing -> "Add the standard keyboard layout as a touch keyboard option".
* In desktop apps (i.e. non-Store apps), tap-and-hold is always right-click. In Win8.x Windows Store apps, right-clicking brings up the app bar; you can also achieve this by swiping in to the screen from above or below.
* I generally avoid the app store stuff - for me, its limitations aren't worth it, even in a touch environment, and that's without even getting into the fact that it's a DRM system.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
This isn't 100 of them, but it's 57 known domains that need to be blocked.
vortex.data.microsoft.com
vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
redir.metaservices.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
df.telemetry.microsoft.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
services.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.ppe.telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net
telemetry.urs.microsoft.com
telemetry.appex.bing.net:443
settings-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
survey.watson.microsoft.com
watson.live.com
watson.microsoft.com
statsfe2.ws.microsoft.com
corpext.msitadfs.glbdns2.microsoft.com
compatexchange.cloudapp.net
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net
a-0001.a-msedge.net
statsfe2.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
sls.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
fe2.update.microsoft.com.akadns.net
diagnostics.support.microsoft.com
corp.sts.microsoft.com
statsfe1.ws.microsoft.com
pre.footprintpredict.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
feedback.windows.com
feedback.microsoft-hohm.com
feedback.search.microsoft.com
rad.msn.com
preview.msn.com
ad.doubleclick.net
ads.msn.com
ads1.msads.net
ads1.msn.com
a.ads1.msn.com
a.ads2.msn.com
adnexus.net
adnxs.com
az361816.vo.msecnd.net
az512334.vo.msecnd.net
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Did you read that article? Microsoft isn't doing anything bizarre or unheard of. It's the same stuff that's been happening for over a decade.
Misrepresenting the situation is not helping anyone.
Try it yourself.
I did. Windows 10 Pro, installed from the official ISO in a VM, all updates to date. Packet sniffer on the host machine. Turns out, you are full of shit.
When opening Windows Calculator with the default settings after installation I got hits on five domains. Not 100, just five, and three of those where when I opened the start menu and typed in "calc" (because it searches Bing by default).
Then I disabled all the telemetry etc. Opening the calculator now contacts exactly one domain. Not over 100, not the original 5, just one.
Finally I tried blocking those domains with the hosts file and it worked perfectly.
It's bad, but there is no reason to make shit up.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I service both operating systems, and I see just as many old Macs by proportion of ownership than old Windows systems - more, in fact, because so many Windows systems are the junky low-end PCs that wear out fast. OS X systems also tend to be updatable more times before the newest accompanying hardware undergoes some major change that prevents the upgrade from running on older systems. Because Windows machines are susceptible to the "snowflake syndrome" - many manufacturers of hardware, each with its own persnickety combination of Windows drivers required - users are much more reluctant to move to a new Windows release because it might not run on their individual snowflake.
The full list: https://github.com/WindowsLies...