I used to work in a warehouse that shipped medical supplies to hospitals. Crushed boxes were everywhere, to the point where box edges were folded over on themselves and you often had to yank them apart with all your might. Damages were the norm, and they got shipped. The attitude there was, if the customer didn't like the condition of the supplies they received, they could send them back. Yes, it was indeed a clusterfuck of busted items, and filthy to boot.
To be fair, many of the manufacturers packaged items in flimsy cardstock rather than real boxes. It was very, very easy to damage items, no matter how careful you were, as just the humidity of the summer air was enough to warp the boxes and cause them to soften. To me, it seemed like everything in the industry from the ground up was built for failure. Maybe it was just the medical supply business, but QA all around was wretched.
Plus, this had to be done while maintaining at least 84% of your productivity goal or you were sacked, which wouldn't have been bad if the 100% was unattainable and we weren't working 12-14 hour days (my record was 15.5 hours). There was no incentive to be careful when putting away or picking. There was no time, and no chance to fix someone else's screw-ups. I was eventually warned that my numbers were below 84% and I had two weeks to get my productivity to 100% or I would get the sack. I elected to quit, instead. I couldn't bring myself to literally throw boxes around to meet my quota.
It's not a job that should be done by people. The time pressure alone guarantees that the job won't be done properly and damages will be astronomical.
It's not always so clear and simple, as from within the browser itself, Firefox isn't always honest about how its features work.
My favorite example is the offline content feature checkbox that reads, "Tell me when a website asks to store data for offline use". In fact, if you enable that checkbox, the browser will only alert you if the web site wants to store an excessive amount of data in a single request. A special, separate config setting must be changed to "actually" alert you of any data stored. Even with this checkbox enabled, the browser would happily save offline data without notifying me, often with web pages storing in excess of 20MB of data. So, the browser will tell you when data it stored... unless it won't.
Documented or not, doing sneaky stuff in the background is just the norm these days.
I've noticed that many web sites I visit no longer work correctly with Firefox. Using Pale Moon is like browsing with a 6+ month old version of Firefox, which is even worse. Chrome has such a large (and still growing) market share that more and more web developers appear to be using Chrome's proprietary scripting capabilities. I have three web browsers on my machine, starting with Pale Moon and then switching until the web site I want to visit actually fucking works.
At least in the old days, if you were using IE6, pages would render with graphic bugs and overlapping sections, at worst. Use Pale Moon, and many web sites won't even display at all, to say nothing of dynamic loading problems. This has nothing to do with Pale Moon and Firefox being terrible browsers. It's that browsers based on Blink have such high market share, that all that hoopla a few years ago about "standards compliance" no longer matters. Web developers don't care.
I for one do not want to live in a monoculture where every web browser is based on Blink, and the web is effectively controlled by the world's largest advertising company. I don't want Mozilla to die, even if they are completely hell-bent on committing suicide. If the Firefox community can't beat sense into Mozilla, somebody has to find a way.
If it's true the EULA is a copyright agreement and not a true contract, would it apply to the installation of the software, and not just the usage? It may be a legal problem to install the OS first and then make people accept/deny the EULA just to regain control of their computer. I think if MS was forced to to present the EULA first before installation, there would be fewer problems with "accidental" upgrades.
Given how many horror stories I've heard of the rollback feature not working, and people needing to use their PC in a hurry, I'd imagine there are a lot of people who just accepted the Win10 upgrade because they felt they had no choice or refusing it would cause their PC to blow up. I know I sure as hell wouldn't trust a rollback procedure, especially after an update to Win10 on my dad's media center ended up automatically deleting a bunch of applications with no warning.
What if the software you want isn't in your distro repository? The binary compatibility issue is my #1 problem with Linux, has been for a very long time, and it's something that no Linux fan wants to address. Until that's resolved, Linux isn't going mainstream -- period.
But I do submit that the number of cases in which the claim is made that the job can't get done on Linux is more a function of not wanting to, rather than not being able to.
Power users don't understand this, but everyone else does. No matter how many times Linux people insist that a distro is perfectly usable by normal people, it's totally inevitable that you'll have to drop to a shell prompt sooner or later to install something or get it working. Any time that happens, it's a function of "not being able to."
Just re-installed Win7 on my laptop a couple days ago after upgrading to a new SSD.
It's been running for 12 hours just to perform a check for updates, with TrustedInstaller.exe and wuauserv both using 100% of my CPU time the whole way. I still haven't gotten to the point where I can download those updates.
Windows 7 is really fast... until you apply all those updates. Then it becomes a pig. It was nice until Microsoft fucked it up.
More or less, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of them dropping the headphone jack, since there are clear advantages to it, but my misgivings feel very similar to the ones I had when floppies went away or as we've started to see optical media disappear. It's a bit painful at the time, and there are things that are lost in the process, but by and large, the changes are for the better in the end.
Better... how? Are the phones just not thin enough? Apple can save themselves another 2 cents? You have the amazing privilege to pay, say, an extra $20 for a new headset or dongle you didn't need before? You can't use your old stuff with the new hardware because reasons? The rest of the industry gets the message and decides to remove useful stuff because the cool kids are doing it?
You know, ever since smart phones entered the market, most of the cool stuff I enjoy has been ripped off the market and useful features have been stripped away because "I don't need it." Fuck companies that think of every excuse to constantly remove mature features for our own good, and then charge us even more money for the convenience.
Case in point, Firefox just updated a couple days ago, and it told me that some of my extensions have been disabled since they aren't signed. I can override that for now, but in the upcoming v46, signing will be enforced. Guess what? I'm not updating to v46. Fuck that noise.
The easy way to deal with this is to use subst command to assign the offending folder to a drive letter. You can then delete the files (now with a shorter path) from the virtual drive.
In the pwd of a command prompt or the address bar of an Explorer window, type "subst x: \". Then once the files are deleted, type "subst x:/d"
Given the idiotic changes to Google and YouTube that have broken just about everything including the "Back" button, it doesn't surprise me that the next step is to break hypertext links.
Funny how it was just a few years ago the world was screaming bloody murder over standards compliance.
I'm waiting for the day that they try to block non-app store installs.
What scares me even more, is the thought that MS may be the last corporate entity to do this. Apple will probably go exclusively iOS shortly, and Google will almost certainly try to bring Android/ChromeOS to the desktop.
Yay, I was waiting for this. Blame the user. It's not like anything else besides anti-virus could lock up a PC unexpectedly, such as TrustedInstaller.exe.
I'd like to know why this company designed such critical software to be run on a multi-function PC or tablet. We've had decades to figure out this doesn't work.
Just yesterday, I had a problem with FileZilla automatically downloading an update into my Downloads folder and happily popping up a dialog box asking me to install it. The trouble is, since forever I've set the setting "Check for FileZilla updates automatically" to "Never". When I checked my Downloads folder (which I otherwise never use), there were 6 different versions of the updater in the folder. Apparently, the software will check for and download updates anyway, even if it won't automatically install them.
I'm glad Microsoft is taking at least some flak, but it's an industry-wide problem. MS certainly won't bow to pressure if nobody else has to.
There is a wealth of information on the Internet about how to deal with these messages
Does that include clicking, "No, I don't want to upgrade" and checking the box that says, "Don't ask me again?"
It should not require unofficial knowledge or 3rd party software like GWX Control Panel to keep your PC from nagging you, especially since using Windows in a business environment is a known use case, and has been for a long time.
Next you'll be saying that if TrustedInstaller.exe is using 100% of my CPU time for 15 hours straight (on a fresh install of Win7 of all things), it's my fault for not configuring my machine correctly.
The big deal for me is that since version 2.0 or so, Firefox has had major memory management issues, mostly pauses that last for several seconds at a time, and they have only gotten worse. Using Firefox's built-in profiler, the culprit of the pauses and sluggish performance is due to non-incremental garbage collection when the browser is using a lot of memory, almost all of which is used by the Javascript heap. This persists even when there's no plugins or extensions installed, and is worse on some web sites than others. I browse DeviantArt a lot -- 5 minutes on that site quickly pushes Firefox memory usage beyond 1.5GB, and reduces it to a pile of goo.
Palemoon doesn't have these performance problems. I use Firefox for development, and Palemoon for surfing.
It would be nice if the Firefox developers would stop ignoring complaints about this problem and stop constantly blaming plugins. Everybody knows it's not due to plugins or extensions.
Sounds more like you just look better with a beard.
I've had the opposite problem. Due to horrible acne that persists in middle age even with medical treatment, I decided to grow a beard so my skin could heal. I kept it well trimmed and did still shave my neck, and I thought it looked pretty good. I noticed a very sudden change in how strangers treated me, notably, like I was dumb and a bum. After a month of that kind of harassment, I shaved it all off. Things went back to normal. Apparently, my acne and swollen, ingrown hairs are more tolerable to other people than my facial hair.
Interestingly enough, I cleaned bathrooms decades ago while I had an after-school job, and quickly realized that women's bathrooms are, by far, dirtier than the men's. They were cleaned and stocked far more often as a result.
Just yesterday, I finally made Pale Moon my default browser, because I can no longer deal with Firefox's massive memory hogging (without even any plugins or extensions active) which cause constant multi-second freezes due to the horrible garbage collector. If you close all tabs and point the last open window to "about:blank" and your browser is still using 2GB of memory, something is clearly wrong.
Firefox usage is certainly going down for technical reasons... most of which have been around for 10 years and only continue to get worse due to negligence. But, hey, another UI redesign, stripping out even more useful features, constantly blaming the very extensions that helped make the browser popular, and an extra serving of denial should clear that up.
I remember when Linux was a thing on netbooks, where Windows compatibility wasn't an issue and vendors were glad to use a cheap OS rather than pay the MS tax.
The Linux community had a hard time accepting why customers kept returning Linux-based netbooks: they didn't work properly and people didn't like them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd like to see you browse the web when every page looks like this:
<!DOCTYPE HTML>
<head>
<script type="text/javascript" src="bootstrap.js"></script>
</head>
<body></body>
</html>
I used to work in a warehouse that shipped medical supplies to hospitals. Crushed boxes were everywhere, to the point where box edges were folded over on themselves and you often had to yank them apart with all your might. Damages were the norm, and they got shipped. The attitude there was, if the customer didn't like the condition of the supplies they received, they could send them back. Yes, it was indeed a clusterfuck of busted items, and filthy to boot.
To be fair, many of the manufacturers packaged items in flimsy cardstock rather than real boxes. It was very, very easy to damage items, no matter how careful you were, as just the humidity of the summer air was enough to warp the boxes and cause them to soften. To me, it seemed like everything in the industry from the ground up was built for failure. Maybe it was just the medical supply business, but QA all around was wretched.
Plus, this had to be done while maintaining at least 84% of your productivity goal or you were sacked, which wouldn't have been bad if the 100% was unattainable and we weren't working 12-14 hour days (my record was 15.5 hours). There was no incentive to be careful when putting away or picking. There was no time, and no chance to fix someone else's screw-ups. I was eventually warned that my numbers were below 84% and I had two weeks to get my productivity to 100% or I would get the sack. I elected to quit, instead. I couldn't bring myself to literally throw boxes around to meet my quota.
It's not a job that should be done by people. The time pressure alone guarantees that the job won't be done properly and damages will be astronomical.
I was under the impression that all software already worked that way. No warranty, so you can use it until you can't.
Hence, I don't buy "online only" games and avoid DRM whenever possible. Indie games have been a godsend for my entertainment needs.
It's not always so clear and simple, as from within the browser itself, Firefox isn't always honest about how its features work.
My favorite example is the offline content feature checkbox that reads, "Tell me when a website asks to store data for offline use". In fact, if you enable that checkbox, the browser will only alert you if the web site wants to store an excessive amount of data in a single request. A special, separate config setting must be changed to "actually" alert you of any data stored. Even with this checkbox enabled, the browser would happily save offline data without notifying me, often with web pages storing in excess of 20MB of data. So, the browser will tell you when data it stored... unless it won't.
Documented or not, doing sneaky stuff in the background is just the norm these days.
I've noticed that many web sites I visit no longer work correctly with Firefox. Using Pale Moon is like browsing with a 6+ month old version of Firefox, which is even worse. Chrome has such a large (and still growing) market share that more and more web developers appear to be using Chrome's proprietary scripting capabilities. I have three web browsers on my machine, starting with Pale Moon and then switching until the web site I want to visit actually fucking works.
At least in the old days, if you were using IE6, pages would render with graphic bugs and overlapping sections, at worst. Use Pale Moon, and many web sites won't even display at all, to say nothing of dynamic loading problems. This has nothing to do with Pale Moon and Firefox being terrible browsers. It's that browsers based on Blink have such high market share, that all that hoopla a few years ago about "standards compliance" no longer matters. Web developers don't care.
I for one do not want to live in a monoculture where every web browser is based on Blink, and the web is effectively controlled by the world's largest advertising company. I don't want Mozilla to die, even if they are completely hell-bent on committing suicide. If the Firefox community can't beat sense into Mozilla, somebody has to find a way.
If it's true the EULA is a copyright agreement and not a true contract, would it apply to the installation of the software, and not just the usage? It may be a legal problem to install the OS first and then make people accept/deny the EULA just to regain control of their computer. I think if MS was forced to to present the EULA first before installation, there would be fewer problems with "accidental" upgrades.
Given how many horror stories I've heard of the rollback feature not working, and people needing to use their PC in a hurry, I'd imagine there are a lot of people who just accepted the Win10 upgrade because they felt they had no choice or refusing it would cause their PC to blow up. I know I sure as hell wouldn't trust a rollback procedure, especially after an update to Win10 on my dad's media center ended up automatically deleting a bunch of applications with no warning.
What if the software you want isn't in your distro repository? The binary compatibility issue is my #1 problem with Linux, has been for a very long time, and it's something that no Linux fan wants to address. Until that's resolved, Linux isn't going mainstream -- period.
But I do submit that the number of cases in which the claim is made that the job can't get done on Linux is more a function of not wanting to, rather than not being able to.
Power users don't understand this, but everyone else does. No matter how many times Linux people insist that a distro is perfectly usable by normal people, it's totally inevitable that you'll have to drop to a shell prompt sooner or later to install something or get it working. Any time that happens, it's a function of "not being able to."
Just re-installed Win7 on my laptop a couple days ago after upgrading to a new SSD.
It's been running for 12 hours just to perform a check for updates, with TrustedInstaller.exe and wuauserv both using 100% of my CPU time the whole way. I still haven't gotten to the point where I can download those updates.
Windows 7 is really fast... until you apply all those updates. Then it becomes a pig. It was nice until Microsoft fucked it up.
More or less, I'm uncomfortable with the idea of them dropping the headphone jack, since there are clear advantages to it, but my misgivings feel very similar to the ones I had when floppies went away or as we've started to see optical media disappear. It's a bit painful at the time, and there are things that are lost in the process, but by and large, the changes are for the better in the end.
Better... how? Are the phones just not thin enough? Apple can save themselves another 2 cents? You have the amazing privilege to pay, say, an extra $20 for a new headset or dongle you didn't need before? You can't use your old stuff with the new hardware because reasons? The rest of the industry gets the message and decides to remove useful stuff because the cool kids are doing it?
You know, ever since smart phones entered the market, most of the cool stuff I enjoy has been ripped off the market and useful features have been stripped away because "I don't need it." Fuck companies that think of every excuse to constantly remove mature features for our own good, and then charge us even more money for the convenience.
Case in point, Firefox just updated a couple days ago, and it told me that some of my extensions have been disabled since they aren't signed. I can override that for now, but in the upcoming v46, signing will be enforced. Guess what? I'm not updating to v46. Fuck that noise.
The easy way to deal with this is to use subst command to assign the offending folder to a drive letter. You can then delete the files (now with a shorter path) from the virtual drive.
In the pwd of a command prompt or the address bar of an Explorer window, type "subst x: \". Then once the files are deleted, type "subst x: /d"
"You may have been the victim of piracy"
"Customers can choose to accept or decline the Windows 10 upgrade." (so it must be the customer's fault)
Whoa... wait. Since when is there a "decline" option?
These people made Google+. I wouldn't be surprised if they did think, but don't give a shit.
More realistically, $1,200+/yr with 2 year contract.
These are the same people who lost everything on their PC because they couldn't afford to buy a 32GB thumb drive to backup their $500 laptop.
Given the idiotic changes to Google and YouTube that have broken just about everything including the "Back" button, it doesn't surprise me that the next step is to break hypertext links.
Funny how it was just a few years ago the world was screaming bloody murder over standards compliance.
I'm waiting for the day that they try to block non-app store installs.
What scares me even more, is the thought that MS may be the last corporate entity to do this. Apple will probably go exclusively iOS shortly, and Google will almost certainly try to bring Android/ChromeOS to the desktop.
Yay, I was waiting for this. Blame the user. It's not like anything else besides anti-virus could lock up a PC unexpectedly, such as TrustedInstaller.exe.
I'd like to know why this company designed such critical software to be run on a multi-function PC or tablet. We've had decades to figure out this doesn't work.
Pushy updates in general are just mainstream.
Just yesterday, I had a problem with FileZilla automatically downloading an update into my Downloads folder and happily popping up a dialog box asking me to install it. The trouble is, since forever I've set the setting "Check for FileZilla updates automatically" to "Never". When I checked my Downloads folder (which I otherwise never use), there were 6 different versions of the updater in the folder. Apparently, the software will check for and download updates anyway, even if it won't automatically install them.
I'm glad Microsoft is taking at least some flak, but it's an industry-wide problem. MS certainly won't bow to pressure if nobody else has to.
There is a wealth of information on the Internet about how to deal with these messages
Does that include clicking, "No, I don't want to upgrade" and checking the box that says, "Don't ask me again?"
It should not require unofficial knowledge or 3rd party software like GWX Control Panel to keep your PC from nagging you, especially since using Windows in a business environment is a known use case, and has been for a long time.
Next you'll be saying that if TrustedInstaller.exe is using 100% of my CPU time for 15 hours straight (on a fresh install of Win7 of all things), it's my fault for not configuring my machine correctly.
The big deal for me is that since version 2.0 or so, Firefox has had major memory management issues, mostly pauses that last for several seconds at a time, and they have only gotten worse. Using Firefox's built-in profiler, the culprit of the pauses and sluggish performance is due to non-incremental garbage collection when the browser is using a lot of memory, almost all of which is used by the Javascript heap. This persists even when there's no plugins or extensions installed, and is worse on some web sites than others. I browse DeviantArt a lot -- 5 minutes on that site quickly pushes Firefox memory usage beyond 1.5GB, and reduces it to a pile of goo.
Palemoon doesn't have these performance problems. I use Firefox for development, and Palemoon for surfing.
It would be nice if the Firefox developers would stop ignoring complaints about this problem and stop constantly blaming plugins. Everybody knows it's not due to plugins or extensions.
Sounds more like you just look better with a beard.
I've had the opposite problem. Due to horrible acne that persists in middle age even with medical treatment, I decided to grow a beard so my skin could heal. I kept it well trimmed and did still shave my neck, and I thought it looked pretty good. I noticed a very sudden change in how strangers treated me, notably, like I was dumb and a bum. After a month of that kind of harassment, I shaved it all off. Things went back to normal. Apparently, my acne and swollen, ingrown hairs are more tolerable to other people than my facial hair.
Article: "Microsoft revealed at Build that it was planning to make Cortana a more central part of Windows 10"
Even less interested in 10 than before.
Interestingly enough, I cleaned bathrooms decades ago while I had an after-school job, and quickly realized that women's bathrooms are, by far, dirtier than the men's. They were cleaned and stocked far more often as a result.
Just yesterday, I finally made Pale Moon my default browser, because I can no longer deal with Firefox's massive memory hogging (without even any plugins or extensions active) which cause constant multi-second freezes due to the horrible garbage collector. If you close all tabs and point the last open window to "about:blank" and your browser is still using 2GB of memory, something is clearly wrong.
Firefox usage is certainly going down for technical reasons... most of which have been around for 10 years and only continue to get worse due to negligence. But, hey, another UI redesign, stripping out even more useful features, constantly blaming the very extensions that helped make the browser popular, and an extra serving of denial should clear that up.
I remember when Linux was a thing on netbooks, where Windows compatibility wasn't an issue and vendors were glad to use a cheap OS rather than pay the MS tax.
The Linux community had a hard time accepting why customers kept returning Linux-based netbooks: they didn't work properly and people didn't like them.