Actually you can always revert to an earlier edition. The 30 days limit if for the easy one-click revert. After that though you can do a clean install.
The OS life cycle model was good. The SaS model is stupid no matter what the product. It's stupid for Firefox and Chrome, especially with their breakneck speed. At least with those other products you are given a CHOICE. It's our computer, we paid for the software, we must have a choice instead of being dictated to by a company that cares nothing for us except how to get into our wallets.
With the Windows 10 model you MUST accept all security updates, you can't even defer them for very long even with a Pro edition, and we know for a fact now that Windows is perfectly willing to subvert their security updates and use them to provide trivial and unwanted features (seriously ads served up via a security update, that's just insanely stupid). Other updates can not be refused except for a temporary deferral (a few months for Pro, maybe a few hours or days for Home). You are never given a choice to pick and choose which updates to apply, you get all or none.
Agreed. I had GWX already, but I took the extra step of asking it to disable windows upgrades. Which means that if I do want to upgrade I have to do a bit of extra work again to enable it, maybe giving me pause to reconsider. MS is up to something probably, or probably they've gone off the deep end. There was hope that they were cleaning up the mess after Windows 8 and they did a lot of improvements. But MS also has a dual personality, where one identity is trying to make a good operating system while the other identity seems to be psychotic and trying to undermine the customer at every turn.
I'm on 8.1. I do like it better than 7. But I do want to get that newer start button (I do not like classic shell), virtual desktops, better command prompt, etc. Eventually support will end (2023?) and then I'll be stuck paying the high price for the Pro edition. If they had kept the current Windows 7/8 style of Windows Update I'd have upgraded already. But I don't want the forced updates with no recourse except a temporary deferral.
I really only use my PC for three things now. Browsing, games, yearly taxes. Browsing I can do anywhere. Taxes require mac or windows as none support linux or run smoothly under wine, and online options are extremely limited. Games are the big headache though, I've got stuff for all versions of windows plus dos, and many will not run very well under wine, if I move to a console I lose everything, VMs currently won't run them well, etc.
Linux on the other hand has gotten tremendously complex since I last used it seriously. Administration is baffling, if you use xubuntu or kubuntu instead of stock ubuntu then half of the online help about how to solve problems won't work (still can never get virtual xubuntu to sync time with my work mac). Updates more confusing than Windows and require more micromanaging. Every time I turn around the UI and method of administration has completely changed and I'm always having to relearn things. Just overall it's a helluva lot of work to use Linux compared to Linux 10 or 20 years ago.
The ballot box does have a lot of power. The frustration that many feel is that the ballot box is also used by political opponents. The voters may be misguided and keep voting in morons to the state legislature. However the alternative should never be to discard democracy and institute one's own personal political utopia against the will of the people.
So the means to fight the misguided voter is with education (the soap box).
I really don't understand some of these posters who think it's better to have no broadband than to allow the municipal democratically elected government to provide such a service. It's hatred of government so blind that it can't recognize when a government is actually doing what the people want.
A lot of this is once faction of libertarian thinking. Not all of it, there are some very good and smart libertarians out there. But there is a faction that is focused almost totally on maximizing corporate profits and who find libertarianism as the closest political ally.
Ie, the Koch brothers are interested in no government interference in their business (very libertarian) but at the same time are not concerned much one way or the other about government interference in social freedoms. It's extremely hard to call those brothers libertarian, because libertarianism is about less government interference in both fiscal AND social freedoms. Yet David Koch ran for vice president as a Libertarian candidate against Ronald Reagan. We just have so few political parties in the US that each party finds some very strange bedfellows.
So yes there are some people very dedicated to maximizing corporate profits who are able to phrase it all as a political ideology.
The USPS is a good example of a well run government agency. It completely funds itself. It has private sector competition as well. And yet the anti-government loons are still dedicated to having it dismantled.
For those who hate government for being too big, the military is a great example. Over 50% of the US budget is for the military. The next largest slice is only about 6.5%. The military budget dwarfs that of other first world countries. And yet we have presidential candidates who seem to think our military is too puny, and legislators intent on removing government waste never look at that elephant in the pantry. If we really do want to be fiscally conservative we should start by shrinking the military. It is striking how so many of those small government advocates do not want to touch the military.
And the US has tried outsourcing military duties to private contractors. Did not work out so well. Blackwater for example (which has renamed itself a couple of times to try and escape the shame).
If the will of the people, decided by a legal and fair vote, is to have municipal broadband then that should take precedence no matter what the corporate leaders or ideologues think. If you despise government then you can take it away from yourself only as long as you don't manage to take it away from others who want it. Whether or not a municipal broadband is a mistake, it is still a democratic mistake that they have the right to make.
If the federal government has too broad a reach then some people will applaud when the state government manages to asserts its independence. Yet those very same people prove themselves to be self serving hypocrites when they slap down the local governments in favor of a state government that has too broad a reach.
The worship of a corporation or ideology gets in the way of seeing the picture objectively. There is no way to compete with monopolies on your own, a new corporation isn't going to break their stranglehold. Government help is very often necessary to balance the power of corporations.
The municipalities were the ones who granted the monopolies to the big cable companies in the first place so it's only fair that the municipalities be allowed to undo their mistakes without interference by corrupt state legislators.
Never let your fear of government allow you to surrender yourself to corporations since you'll end up with a plutocratic government in the end.
The accusations of being unpatriotic are the most disturbing parts of the whole thing to me. It smacks too much of totalitarian states. Don't bother with what's right or wrong, just do your patriotic duty and we will be the ones to tell you what that patriotic duty is when the time comes. There is no legal document in our national archives that defines what patriotism is or which requires patriotism. That the government has resorted to this is disconcerting.
I was on a case that was somewhat opposite. The prosecutor just did a really lousy job. Workman's comp fraud case and needed to show that the defendant had made money, was not actually injured, and intended to defraud. Prosecutor only managed to prove the first part and seemed to rely on a feeling that "of course he's guilty" without bringing any useful evidence. We were actually caught by surprise when the prosecutor finished their side of the case so quickly. The public defender was good and actually managed to provide a defense. A reversal of stereotypes in a way.
The would be a win for an intelligence agency (ie, spies). It would not be a win for law enforcement agencies as none of the evidence they acquire this way could be used in court, and they would be unable to share these techniques with other law enforcement agencies (ie, the idiot DA in New York).
Agreed. The BBC, New York Times, and Newsweek are all large enough to handle advertising themselves. They're much larger than the average clueless blogger hoping to earn enough money from ads to quit his day job.
It's not a catch-22. The problem is that they insist on maximizing profits. So instead of serving up their own advertising like a responsible corporation they farm this job out to whichever ad agency provides the best monetization. The simple way to control what ads are presented on your web site is to choose the ads yourself. It's how television, radio, and print media all work.
The web sites are intentionally going with a third party service to load up the ads. They pretend to keep their hands clean this way. If some company wants to have their own website then they should do the full work of it themselves rather than outsource the advertising side of their business to disreputable services. A print magazine does not send out it's content to a third party to insert randomized ads instead it has the advertising as part of its business, so a web site should be able to do the same thing.
Huge waste of bandwidth. That's a large problem with ads is that the amount of information and processing to serve up the ads is often greater than the actual content that the user wanted. If someone is on dialup this would be a horrible option to have.
Another problem is that this is deceptive. You're telling the ad agency that you saw the ad when you didn't, money changes hands, etc. Then the web site learns that this ad service is making it some extra money so it keeps the ad service, drops its plans to have curated ads, and is content in the false notion that everyone loves it and its third party malware provider. It's better to extend the middle finger and be honest that you're blocking ads and send the message to the web sites that you do not approve of the advertising from third party leeches.
I grew up in a small rural town. To me, suburbs and urban decay are identical. I'd rather have the tract home than any home in a city where homeless people sleep on my doorstep. You can bike in Redwood City, and the cyclists are less aggressive and self entitled there as well. People in San Francisco commute *to* Redwood city, making the biking a non-issue except on weekends. San Francisco is not walkable unless you're close to work or only stay within your neighborhood (and the neighborhoods there are competitive with each other, there is more infighting within the city with groups who should cooperate than competition with other cities). Human habitation is low because of the crime, pollution, and cost of living. If you want a soul you won't find it in the city, but that may just be my bias towards open space instead of concrete.
I agree, transportation could be better outside of the urban core. It could be better inside the city too (my condolences if you have to rely on muni).
Banks add a other element. Bank debit card, plus PIN, plus promise to reimburse you if you can it wasn't you who took out the money. That is, it's cheaper for them to reimburse than to implement better security.
Allowing a company to store your credit card details is already a very bad idea. It's convenient though. But security and convenience do not coexist peacefully.
Except that it's more like replacing a secure mechanism with a less secure one that's more convenient. The problem they're trying to solve is to make it easier to get a low level of security for people who think passwords are too confusing.
Slashdot Mirror
In Microsoft's case I think what we have is a mixture of utter stupidity and psychotic malice. A perfect storm.
Actually you can always revert to an earlier edition. The 30 days limit if for the easy one-click revert. After that though you can do a clean install.
The OS life cycle model was good. The SaS model is stupid no matter what the product. It's stupid for Firefox and Chrome, especially with their breakneck speed. At least with those other products you are given a CHOICE. It's our computer, we paid for the software, we must have a choice instead of being dictated to by a company that cares nothing for us except how to get into our wallets.
With the Windows 10 model you MUST accept all security updates, you can't even defer them for very long even with a Pro edition, and we know for a fact now that Windows is perfectly willing to subvert their security updates and use them to provide trivial and unwanted features (seriously ads served up via a security update, that's just insanely stupid). Other updates can not be refused except for a temporary deferral (a few months for Pro, maybe a few hours or days for Home). You are never given a choice to pick and choose which updates to apply, you get all or none.
Agreed. I had GWX already, but I took the extra step of asking it to disable windows upgrades. Which means that if I do want to upgrade I have to do a bit of extra work again to enable it, maybe giving me pause to reconsider. MS is up to something probably, or probably they've gone off the deep end. There was hope that they were cleaning up the mess after Windows 8 and they did a lot of improvements. But MS also has a dual personality, where one identity is trying to make a good operating system while the other identity seems to be psychotic and trying to undermine the customer at every turn.
I'm on 8.1. I do like it better than 7. But I do want to get that newer start button (I do not like classic shell), virtual desktops, better command prompt, etc. Eventually support will end (2023?) and then I'll be stuck paying the high price for the Pro edition. If they had kept the current Windows 7/8 style of Windows Update I'd have upgraded already. But I don't want the forced updates with no recourse except a temporary deferral.
I really only use my PC for three things now. Browsing, games, yearly taxes. Browsing I can do anywhere. Taxes require mac or windows as none support linux or run smoothly under wine, and online options are extremely limited. Games are the big headache though, I've got stuff for all versions of windows plus dos, and many will not run very well under wine, if I move to a console I lose everything, VMs currently won't run them well, etc.
Linux on the other hand has gotten tremendously complex since I last used it seriously. Administration is baffling, if you use xubuntu or kubuntu instead of stock ubuntu then half of the online help about how to solve problems won't work (still can never get virtual xubuntu to sync time with my work mac). Updates more confusing than Windows and require more micromanaging. Every time I turn around the UI and method of administration has completely changed and I'm always having to relearn things. Just overall it's a helluva lot of work to use Linux compared to Linux 10 or 20 years ago.
The ballot box does have a lot of power. The frustration that many feel is that the ballot box is also used by political opponents. The voters may be misguided and keep voting in morons to the state legislature. However the alternative should never be to discard democracy and institute one's own personal political utopia against the will of the people.
So the means to fight the misguided voter is with education (the soap box).
I really don't understand some of these posters who think it's better to have no broadband than to allow the municipal democratically elected government to provide such a service. It's hatred of government so blind that it can't recognize when a government is actually doing what the people want.
It is far easier to use the ballot box to change a government than to compete with a corporate monopoly by voting with your wallet.
From all outward appearance, corporations also exist only to grow and consume.
A lot of this is once faction of libertarian thinking. Not all of it, there are some very good and smart libertarians out there. But there is a faction that is focused almost totally on maximizing corporate profits and who find libertarianism as the closest political ally.
Ie, the Koch brothers are interested in no government interference in their business (very libertarian) but at the same time are not concerned much one way or the other about government interference in social freedoms. It's extremely hard to call those brothers libertarian, because libertarianism is about less government interference in both fiscal AND social freedoms. Yet David Koch ran for vice president as a Libertarian candidate against Ronald Reagan. We just have so few political parties in the US that each party finds some very strange bedfellows.
So yes there are some people very dedicated to maximizing corporate profits who are able to phrase it all as a political ideology.
The USPS is a good example of a well run government agency. It completely funds itself. It has private sector competition as well. And yet the anti-government loons are still dedicated to having it dismantled.
For those who hate government for being too big, the military is a great example. Over 50% of the US budget is for the military. The next largest slice is only about 6.5%. The military budget dwarfs that of other first world countries. And yet we have presidential candidates who seem to think our military is too puny, and legislators intent on removing government waste never look at that elephant in the pantry. If we really do want to be fiscally conservative we should start by shrinking the military. It is striking how so many of those small government advocates do not want to touch the military.
And the US has tried outsourcing military duties to private contractors. Did not work out so well. Blackwater for example (which has renamed itself a couple of times to try and escape the shame).
If the will of the people, decided by a legal and fair vote, is to have municipal broadband then that should take precedence no matter what the corporate leaders or ideologues think. If you despise government then you can take it away from yourself only as long as you don't manage to take it away from others who want it. Whether or not a municipal broadband is a mistake, it is still a democratic mistake that they have the right to make.
If the federal government has too broad a reach then some people will applaud when the state government manages to asserts its independence. Yet those very same people prove themselves to be self serving hypocrites when they slap down the local governments in favor of a state government that has too broad a reach.
The worship of a corporation or ideology gets in the way of seeing the picture objectively. There is no way to compete with monopolies on your own, a new corporation isn't going to break their stranglehold. Government help is very often necessary to balance the power of corporations.
The municipalities were the ones who granted the monopolies to the big cable companies in the first place so it's only fair that the municipalities be allowed to undo their mistakes without interference by corrupt state legislators.
Never let your fear of government allow you to surrender yourself to corporations since you'll end up with a plutocratic government in the end.
The accusations of being unpatriotic are the most disturbing parts of the whole thing to me. It smacks too much of totalitarian states. Don't bother with what's right or wrong, just do your patriotic duty and we will be the ones to tell you what that patriotic duty is when the time comes. There is no legal document in our national archives that defines what patriotism is or which requires patriotism. That the government has resorted to this is disconcerting.
I was on a case that was somewhat opposite. The prosecutor just did a really lousy job. Workman's comp fraud case and needed to show that the defendant had made money, was not actually injured, and intended to defraud. Prosecutor only managed to prove the first part and seemed to rely on a feeling that "of course he's guilty" without bringing any useful evidence. We were actually caught by surprise when the prosecutor finished their side of the case so quickly. The public defender was good and actually managed to provide a defense. A reversal of stereotypes in a way.
Typically whenever the judge asks the attorneys to adjourn to chambers is when they do the measuring.
The trousers mostly just tried to muffle the sounds coming from the briefs.
The would be a win for an intelligence agency (ie, spies). It would not be a win for law enforcement agencies as none of the evidence they acquire this way could be used in court, and they would be unable to share these techniques with other law enforcement agencies (ie, the idiot DA in New York).
Agreed. The BBC, New York Times, and Newsweek are all large enough to handle advertising themselves. They're much larger than the average clueless blogger hoping to earn enough money from ads to quit his day job.
It's not a catch-22. The problem is that they insist on maximizing profits. So instead of serving up their own advertising like a responsible corporation they farm this job out to whichever ad agency provides the best monetization. The simple way to control what ads are presented on your web site is to choose the ads yourself. It's how television, radio, and print media all work.
The web sites are intentionally going with a third party service to load up the ads. They pretend to keep their hands clean this way. If some company wants to have their own website then they should do the full work of it themselves rather than outsource the advertising side of their business to disreputable services. A print magazine does not send out it's content to a third party to insert randomized ads instead it has the advertising as part of its business, so a web site should be able to do the same thing.
Huge waste of bandwidth. That's a large problem with ads is that the amount of information and processing to serve up the ads is often greater than the actual content that the user wanted. If someone is on dialup this would be a horrible option to have.
Another problem is that this is deceptive. You're telling the ad agency that you saw the ad when you didn't, money changes hands, etc. Then the web site learns that this ad service is making it some extra money so it keeps the ad service, drops its plans to have curated ads, and is content in the false notion that everyone loves it and its third party malware provider. It's better to extend the middle finger and be honest that you're blocking ads and send the message to the web sites that you do not approve of the advertising from third party leeches.
I grew up in a small rural town. To me, suburbs and urban decay are identical. I'd rather have the tract home than any home in a city where homeless people sleep on my doorstep. You can bike in Redwood City, and the cyclists are less aggressive and self entitled there as well. People in San Francisco commute *to* Redwood city, making the biking a non-issue except on weekends. San Francisco is not walkable unless you're close to work or only stay within your neighborhood (and the neighborhoods there are competitive with each other, there is more infighting within the city with groups who should cooperate than competition with other cities). Human habitation is low because of the crime, pollution, and cost of living. If you want a soul you won't find it in the city, but that may just be my bias towards open space instead of concrete.
I agree, transportation could be better outside of the urban core. It could be better inside the city too (my condolences if you have to rely on muni).
Banks add a other element. Bank debit card, plus PIN, plus promise to reimburse you if you can it wasn't you who took out the money. That is, it's cheaper for them to reimburse than to implement better security.
Allowing a company to store your credit card details is already a very bad idea. It's convenient though. But security and convenience do not coexist peacefully.
Except that it's more like replacing a secure mechanism with a less secure one that's more convenient. The problem they're trying to solve is to make it easier to get a low level of security for people who think passwords are too confusing.
Amazon says, "give us a twirl, love."
Isn't that how people churn stocks to increase the value? Wait, does that mean Wall Street is a scam too?
Makes you smarter than average.