I don't see anything wrong with states having higher standards than the feds. It does not nullify or override the federal requirements. Cars meeting the higher standards would automatically meet the federal standards.
Some say that this means the automakers have to make two types of cars, but that's ludicrous, make one type that works in California and the other states that adopted the same rules, and that car will work in all the states. Or, the automakers could just decide not to sell in California, problem solved.
That's the thing, with a VM you can try it out and see if it works. No need to upgrade and find out you don't like it them jump through hoops to try to downgrade again (probably full disk mirroring would work but a VM is so much simpler).
Some linux systems are able to do an upgrade of all components except the kernel without upgrading. Including upgrading the C runtime library that most utilities rely on. Add a copy of new libraries, upgrade and restart services so that they now use the new libraries, rinse and repeat. Then if you do want to upgrade the kernel it's just a quick reboot.
As for choosing positive things to say about Windows 10, I can only think of one and that's their linux-in-windows capability. Now there are things I like in Windows 8.1 and things I hate, but I can't think of anything in Windows 10 that I would want except that one thing. It's really hard to focus on the good things when the bad things are so numerous in comparison.
Ok, here are my suggestions for Microsoft's business practices.
- Break apart the updates. Separate important security updates from the useless fluff. If you have to make an update *mandatory* then only do so for the security updates. - Separate your advertising from the updates. - Fix bugs before you add new features. - Treat your customers with respect. Maybe I should have listed that as the first and only item...
If you look at it objectively, Windows was a major supplier of malware with their GWX updates and forced upgrades to Windows 10. Their GWX updates acted like malware in all ways - it was unwanted, it tried to hide itself, it tried to fool the users into running it, and it took considerable time to clean up after it. When Microsoft is being hostile to its paying customers, is it any wonder that the customers treat it as untrustworthy?
If Microsoft kept its frequent updates to only dealing with security, then that would be great. Instead it takes these opportunities to add unncessary features, changes to UI, and such, all of which add to the lengthy update time. Do you forget the lengthy period of time during which Microsoft regularly included the Get-Windows-10 advertising as part of its "important patches"? You can't just turn around and forgive them for that when there's been no apology or apparent change of heart. We'll be nice to Microsoft when Microsoft is nice to its paying customers.
You don't technically avoid paying sales taxes, the majority of states still require you to pay sales tax. Sure, you may be avoiding this by not adding it on your tax forms, but don't confuse that with there being no legal requirement to pay the sales tax.
Microsoft almost admitted as such once when they suggested that Enterprisers users have the ability to wait see what happens for Home and Pro users when updates come out.
Walt Disney is dead (or at least frozen). It's time to let the 1928 copyright on an 8 minute short expire. This doesn't mean they've lost copyright on every Mickey Mouse cartoon. They've got enough newer movies and cartoons that they won't become bankrupt. It's idiocy to keep going on this way.
It's not even as good, though they have improved a bit. Origiinally you had to pay the $99 up front to get their streaming service, which effectively limited their customers to existing prime members ("omg, it's free because I already paid!"). Though later I heard they made it month to month. My brother stopped using their video because everything he wanted to see required an additional payment. So now I the only advantage they have left is that they have some exclusives that you can't get on other services. If this service hadn't been tied to Prime, I don't think it would have gotten off the ground.
If the local stores don't have a good deal, then I won't buy the item. The problem with buying everything you ever need in life from Amazon means you don't have that little nudge that says "you don't need a turnip twaddler". Especially when you feel you need over $35 in order to qualify for free shipping, you have internal pressure to buy something you didn't thnk you needed 10 minutes earlier.
Of course you'd have to use it heavily. If you spend $100 to get free shipping, then common sense means you need to be enough stuff so that the $100 breaks even. It's not for the casual customers. The problem is making sure that you don't spend so much on stuff you don't need or can get more cheaply elsewhere that you lose money in the end.
I do see prime members that aren't just heavy users, they're also making it a lifestyle and proselytizing. Afterall, if you've sunk in so much money then you have to justify it to yourself and your friends. "OMG, these are the best paper towels ever, and it was free shipping!"
Why in the hell would anyone need Sunday delivery, if they weren't a shut-in living in a trailer in the desert with no friends? If you need your insulin delivered on Sunday then it's life or death but you could get a clue and keep extra on hand. When I see healthy selfentitled hipsters tout this advantage I worry about the imminent collapse of civilization. Stand up, walk outside, and make use of the local stores.
I use a third party backup. Windows first started with whole system image backup into a proprietary format, then went with just backing up 'Library' into a different proprietary format, etc. 'Library' backup is stupid, none of my critical files are there and Library files are small enough I can manually copy the whole thing to a usb stick. The Windows 8.1 backup certainly isn't very good, and I don't think they've improved it much in Windows 10 or they would have marketed this loudly as a great leap forward for mankind. The third party backup I use writes files into a zip format. So it's relatively easy to extract things again even if you lose the backup program or have upgraded Windows to a version that refuses to recognize the older Windows backup format. I don't back up regularly though, it's not a work computer and I'm not changing tons of files that I can't recover.
The "how frequently should it back up" is problematic too. I do not keep external backup drives plugged in all the time. I don't even keep my computer powered on, it is physically powered off a lot. So scheduling backup for 2am every thursday won't work. And because these Windows backups are so slow that I don't want an automatic backup when I'm playing a game or such (more disruptive than a full virus scan).
Time Machine is fast. The time it takes to figure out which files to backup on my work Mac is fast, much faster than any equivalent I've seen on Windows. When I didn't take my laptop with me to meetings much, I would just leave the backup drive plugged in all the time and forget about it. But now that I'm mobile I just remember to plug it in every few days or when I want to make sure my changes are saved. You don't need to configure it, though you can if you want to exclude files and directories. While it's backing up I don't even notice it, there's no noticeable system slowdown. The backups are in a normal volume with normal directories and files. I can restore files by just copying them if I want, or use the Time Machine UI, or write a script to search backups, etc.
What I am hoping is that companies learn valuable lessons from this. Such as "you don't have a captive market", "customers can only take so much pain", "beware of raising prices without raising value", and so forth.
I had gotten a router that wasn't one of the cheap things. The cheap built in wifi from u-verse was terrible, it only did 2.4GHz which meant I collided with all the neighbors and trying to stream to my TV was bad. I knew I could put Linux on the new router if I needed too, but I stuck with the default OS for awhile. It was pretty terrible, it would start stuttering at times only to get going a minute later (I suspect some headaches with DHCP lease expiring but I never found a configuration). And this was an above average router.
So then I went and put Tomato on it and it was like night versus day. Streaming was fast, and smooth, even with only 12MBps and the router beind on a different floor. Then all the nice features came into play, like seeing how much data I was actually using that day to watch TV, adding in some adblock, and so forth.
Ya, that'll work great over DSL. Seriously, backing everything up to the cloud even on moderately good broadband would take forever, never mind people with slower internet connections who aren't the power users to figure out other ways to back up the system.
At work for awhile they kept pushing a cloud backup server (it's like they never even heard about security when think up stuff like this). After a week it still hadn't finished backing up my laptop, and later even incremental backups would take a few days (could never get that thing to stop trying to backup my vmware images). Later one of the users needed to do a major restore and the damn thing wanted him to select manually the files to restore. Eventually I uninstalled it (root access) and went back to my encrypted harddisk that I plug in a few times a week to let Time Machine do its magic.
This does sound a lot like a certain type of Linux user that always claims to do something better with a few scripts and poking at/proc, all while claiming it's "simple". Yes, if you're a power user, go ahead (I do use linux). But sometimes it's nice to just plug something in and have it work. So I'm going to go visit my mom in a few weeks, and one of those chores will be to backup her windows computer again, and I wish it were as easy as backing up my Mac at work.
Time Machine on OSX is awesome, nothing on Windows comes close (never mind the habit of Microsoft to change backup formats on every major release). And that's with just an external plugin harddrive. The wireless harddrive is an option for those who just want to keep doing backups just as simply without plugging stuff in.
It uses hardlinks to present a full copy of all your files in a normal volume. This makes handling incremental backups trivial, and you can restore files from the command line easily, and with their UI you can quickly move back and forth through hundreds of snapshots. No need to remember to do a backup or to schedule them for a certain time of day and the like, or to clean out older backups you don't need anymore.
Really, this is the way all backups should be done.
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I don't see anything wrong with states having higher standards than the feds. It does not nullify or override the federal requirements. Cars meeting the higher standards would automatically meet the federal standards.
Some say that this means the automakers have to make two types of cars, but that's ludicrous, make one type that works in California and the other states that adopted the same rules, and that car will work in all the states. Or, the automakers could just decide not to sell in California, problem solved.
That's the thing, with a VM you can try it out and see if it works. No need to upgrade and find out you don't like it them jump through hoops to try to downgrade again (probably full disk mirroring would work but a VM is so much simpler).
Some linux systems are able to do an upgrade of all components except the kernel without upgrading. Including upgrading the C runtime library that most utilities rely on. Add a copy of new libraries, upgrade and restart services so that they now use the new libraries, rinse and repeat. Then if you do want to upgrade the kernel it's just a quick reboot.
As for choosing positive things to say about Windows 10, I can only think of one and that's their linux-in-windows capability. Now there are things I like in Windows 8.1 and things I hate, but I can't think of anything in Windows 10 that I would want except that one thing. It's really hard to focus on the good things when the bad things are so numerous in comparison.
Ok, here are my suggestions for Microsoft's business practices.
- Break apart the updates. Separate important security updates from the useless fluff. If you have to make an update *mandatory* then only do so for the security updates.
- Separate your advertising from the updates.
- Fix bugs before you add new features.
- Treat your customers with respect. Maybe I should have listed that as the first and only item...
Linux bugs tend to get fixed over time. Microsoft bugs tend to be labelled as features.
If you look at it objectively, Windows was a major supplier of malware with their GWX updates and forced upgrades to Windows 10. Their GWX updates acted like malware in all ways - it was unwanted, it tried to hide itself, it tried to fool the users into running it, and it took considerable time to clean up after it. When Microsoft is being hostile to its paying customers, is it any wonder that the customers treat it as untrustworthy?
If Microsoft kept its frequent updates to only dealing with security, then that would be great. Instead it takes these opportunities to add unncessary features, changes to UI, and such, all of which add to the lengthy update time. Do you forget the lengthy period of time during which Microsoft regularly included the Get-Windows-10 advertising as part of its "important patches"? You can't just turn around and forgive them for that when there's been no apology or apparent change of heart. We'll be nice to Microsoft when Microsoft is nice to its paying customers.
You don't technically avoid paying sales taxes, the majority of states still require you to pay sales tax. Sure, you may be avoiding this by not adding it on your tax forms, but don't confuse that with there being no legal requirement to pay the sales tax.
How did society flourish before there was Amazon and Sunday delivery?
I have had someone in an MMO raid crash, then about 40 minutes later came back and said that the system insisted on updating itself after rebooting.
Free as in "Windows is free to crash without notice whenever it feels like"?
Microsoft almost admitted as such once when they suggested that Enterprisers users have the ability to wait see what happens for Home and Pro users when updates come out.
Any deal where we have to pay what we owe is a bad deal!
Walt Disney is dead (or at least frozen). It's time to let the 1928 copyright on an 8 minute short expire. This doesn't mean they've lost copyright on every Mickey Mouse cartoon. They've got enough newer movies and cartoons that they won't become bankrupt. It's idiocy to keep going on this way.
It's not even as good, though they have improved a bit. Origiinally you had to pay the $99 up front to get their streaming service, which effectively limited their customers to existing prime members ("omg, it's free because I already paid!"). Though later I heard they made it month to month. My brother stopped using their video because everything he wanted to see required an additional payment. So now I the only advantage they have left is that they have some exclusives that you can't get on other services. If this service hadn't been tied to Prime, I don't think it would have gotten off the ground.
If the local stores don't have a good deal, then I won't buy the item. The problem with buying everything you ever need in life from Amazon means you don't have that little nudge that says "you don't need a turnip twaddler". Especially when you feel you need over $35 in order to qualify for free shipping, you have internal pressure to buy something you didn't thnk you needed 10 minutes earlier.
Of course you'd have to use it heavily. If you spend $100 to get free shipping, then common sense means you need to be enough stuff so that the $100 breaks even. It's not for the casual customers. The problem is making sure that you don't spend so much on stuff you don't need or can get more cheaply elsewhere that you lose money in the end.
I do see prime members that aren't just heavy users, they're also making it a lifestyle and proselytizing. Afterall, if you've sunk in so much money then you have to justify it to yourself and your friends. "OMG, these are the best paper towels ever, and it was free shipping!"
Why in the hell would anyone need Sunday delivery, if they weren't a shut-in living in a trailer in the desert with no friends? If you need your insulin delivered on Sunday then it's life or death but you could get a clue and keep extra on hand. When I see healthy selfentitled hipsters tout this advantage I worry about the imminent collapse of civilization. Stand up, walk outside, and make use of the local stores.
Well, I buy maybe $50/year from Amazon... So all those Amazon cultists trying to convert me by claiming I'll save money should go find another sucker.
I use a third party backup. Windows first started with whole system image backup into a proprietary format, then went with just backing up 'Library' into a different proprietary format, etc. 'Library' backup is stupid, none of my critical files are there and Library files are small enough I can manually copy the whole thing to a usb stick. The Windows 8.1 backup certainly isn't very good, and I don't think they've improved it much in Windows 10 or they would have marketed this loudly as a great leap forward for mankind. The third party backup I use writes files into a zip format. So it's relatively easy to extract things again even if you lose the backup program or have upgraded Windows to a version that refuses to recognize the older Windows backup format. I don't back up regularly though, it's not a work computer and I'm not changing tons of files that I can't recover.
The "how frequently should it back up" is problematic too. I do not keep external backup drives plugged in all the time. I don't even keep my computer powered on, it is physically powered off a lot. So scheduling backup for 2am every thursday won't work. And because these Windows backups are so slow that I don't want an automatic backup when I'm playing a game or such (more disruptive than a full virus scan).
Time Machine is fast. The time it takes to figure out which files to backup on my work Mac is fast, much faster than any equivalent I've seen on Windows. When I didn't take my laptop with me to meetings much, I would just leave the backup drive plugged in all the time and forget about it. But now that I'm mobile I just remember to plug it in every few days or when I want to make sure my changes are saved. You don't need to configure it, though you can if you want to exclude files and directories. While it's backing up I don't even notice it, there's no noticeable system slowdown. The backups are in a normal volume with normal directories and files. I can restore files by just copying them if I want, or use the Time Machine UI, or write a script to search backups, etc.
What I am hoping is that companies learn valuable lessons from this. Such as "you don't have a captive market", "customers can only take so much pain", "beware of raising prices without raising value", and so forth.
I had gotten a router that wasn't one of the cheap things. The cheap built in wifi from u-verse was terrible, it only did 2.4GHz which meant I collided with all the neighbors and trying to stream to my TV was bad. I knew I could put Linux on the new router if I needed too, but I stuck with the default OS for awhile. It was pretty terrible, it would start stuttering at times only to get going a minute later (I suspect some headaches with DHCP lease expiring but I never found a configuration). And this was an above average router.
So then I went and put Tomato on it and it was like night versus day. Streaming was fast, and smooth, even with only 12MBps and the router beind on a different floor. Then all the nice features came into play, like seeing how much data I was actually using that day to watch TV, adding in some adblock, and so forth.
Ya, that'll work great over DSL. Seriously, backing everything up to the cloud even on moderately good broadband would take forever, never mind people with slower internet connections who aren't the power users to figure out other ways to back up the system.
At work for awhile they kept pushing a cloud backup server (it's like they never even heard about security when think up stuff like this). After a week it still hadn't finished backing up my laptop, and later even incremental backups would take a few days (could never get that thing to stop trying to backup my vmware images). Later one of the users needed to do a major restore and the damn thing wanted him to select manually the files to restore. Eventually I uninstalled it (root access) and went back to my encrypted harddisk that I plug in a few times a week to let Time Machine do its magic.
This does sound a lot like a certain type of Linux user that always claims to do something better with a few scripts and poking at /proc, all while claiming it's "simple". Yes, if you're a power user, go ahead (I do use linux). But sometimes it's nice to just plug something in and have it work. So I'm going to go visit my mom in a few weeks, and one of those chores will be to backup her windows computer again, and I wish it were as easy as backing up my Mac at work.
Time Machine on OSX is awesome, nothing on Windows comes close (never mind the habit of Microsoft to change backup formats on every major release). And that's with just an external plugin harddrive. The wireless harddrive is an option for those who just want to keep doing backups just as simply without plugging stuff in.
It uses hardlinks to present a full copy of all your files in a normal volume. This makes handling incremental backups trivial, and you can restore files from the command line easily, and with their UI you can quickly move back and forth through hundreds of snapshots. No need to remember to do a backup or to schedule them for a certain time of day and the like, or to clean out older backups you don't need anymore.
Really, this is the way all backups should be done.