I have always wondered why a Windows computer will CONSTANTLY access the Hard Drive, even when it is ostensibly at Idle, with no Applications running (except Explorer.exe). THAT'S the kind of stuff that is super-creepy to me, and it has been going on for YEARS.
No need to wonder. You can use a utility like Process Monitor to see what's going on. But then, this is on a PC without all these newfangled "security enclaves" so it's not hard to figure out what's what. Can't do that easily on a phone.
Interestingly, I also noticed recently that my PC hard drive goes almost constantly as well, but it does this when looking at the machine's firmware screen. I have no idea if this is normal behavior of the hard drive controller or if the firmware is doing some hidden stuff in the background, but I do know for a fact that Windows is not always responsible for hard drive activity. It may be the drive firmware doing some weird stuff on its own.
Sorry; but it CANNOT be hidden for any appreciable length of time. There are PLENTY of nerds with nothing better to do than to let their phone sit for a day or two and watch the WiFi traffic OUT of the Device. SOMEbody would have spotted this behavior with iOS devices by now. Period.
I'd like to believe that, but there's more than one CPU in most phones (and PCs) these days, and they work independently of the OS. Just getting the OS source or monitoring it is not enough -- you have to have access to all the firmware and ROM in the chips to know exactly what's going on, and all of that stuff is encrypted in hardware. It's not like the old days where only the main CPU and OS kernel were in total control. Case in point, people are still trying to figure out exactly how Intel ME works, even though it's been around for many years.
The introduction of rabbits and foxes into Australia is a textbook case of the devastating effects of invasive species. Bonus points for the fact it was done on purpose by hunters, strictly for sport.
Context and intent actually matter in court cases. You can't copyright a number, but you can copyright something that can be represented by an otherwise huge, random number.
Consider yourself lucky. If it was possible to claim a copyright on such a tiny program, you'd likely get sued by someone else who already wrote it before. 8)
It's already pretty well known that phones send tons of data. People have attached them to firewalls and can clearly see how much crap is going out every second. The problem is that there's so many packets going to so many different IPs for so many different purposes and it's all encrypted. It happens constantly even when the device is idle. My Win 7 PC does the same, despite all my attempts to shut off any telemetry and useless services. Is the device spying or is it just doing "normal maintenance"?
More importantly is that data doesn't have to be sent in realtime. Any spying can simply be stored in a queue and uploaded on a schedule. You can't associate transmission of data with a specific action or command in that case.
I hate it with a passion, but massive amounts of traffic is just the norm these days, and it's here to stay. Judging a device based on the quantity of data sent, or even when data is sent, is not feasible.
Not that it's my business what people like and how they choose to spend their money... but I get a kick out of all the people who bitch about the new MacBooks being garbage compared to the old ones, but they still run out to dealers to buy them by the truckload.
The problems you are listing are Windows problems and not Linux problems.
Ah, yes, the old delusion that if you're not popular, it's always someone else's fault.
GNU/Linux has been around for more than 25 years, and it's still nothing more than a blip on the radar. Android is much newer than Linux and has exploded in popularity, to the point where it has almost wiped out Linux on embedded devices (to say nothing about mobile).
In the past, machines couldn't think. They just followed a predefined set of instructions. AI is the breakthrough that allows machines to think and adapt, properties that humans have had a monopoly for millennia. You seriously think that won't change anything?
Keep in mind that most businesses don't care about quality, they care about ROI. Even if AI is a hard problem to solve and doesn't do as good a job as a real person, it only needs to be cheap enough to earn a ROI. Don't assume AI has to be Einstein quality to fully replace a workforce. There's a point where anything is "good enough" if it's cheap.
My biggest problem with this move is their insistence on using dynamic HTML loading. The video window loads and starts playing immediately, which is nice, but the sidebar and page styling gets loaded dynamically, so the recommended thumbnails tend to overlap and obscure the video until the whole page loads. It would be nice if the player could better cache the dimensions of the video to make sure the page layout doesn't have to be scaled multiple times and cause everything to go haywire and jump all over the place.
But then, obscuring content is the way the web works these days. I'm pissed that annotations are still on by default and the video controls overlay the video.
I agree 100%, and it's really surprising how many people will go out of their way to justify the terrible design of the car (as Rei below testifies).
Alas, you have to understand that Tesla really has to stand out from the competition and appear to be on the cutting edge so they can keep that investor money rolling in. If they made a conventional interior, they would be considered bland and uninspired. Luxury cars and supercars always have the worst control layouts. They're supposed to impress, not be practical daily drivers.
I don't wish for Tesla to die, but I sure do hope they stay in the luxury market and aren't too influential in the long run. I'm already fed up with horrible UI/UX in today's computers, I don't need my next car to suffer the same stupid fashion trends -- including DRM, forced updates, endless patches, network connectivity for no damn reason, etc.
Only in America is it illegal to put lead in our electronics, which when disposed will likely end up going to China for "recycling", but when it comes to guns, we'll happily skip the middleman and dump lead pellets directly into our own backyard.
I'm pretty sure environmental damage isn't terribly selective. You're simply rationalizing that if you kill off 80% of the wildlife in an area in the sake of progress, it's no big deal, because only that one, bitty, insignificant endangered species will be killed off first.
The second part is some in the gaming public's stupid over-reaction to things like this.
To be fair, people are fed up with companies lying about products and getting away with it. No Man's Sky is a perfect example, specifically because it did sell very well, and from what I can tell, the outrage still didn't result in any significant legal action.
Death threats and the like obviously cross the line, but in the face of companies still making money after pulling stunts like this, public outrage is about the only option. It's not right to just brush it off as a bunch of whiny fanboys with too much free time. There's a breaking point, and other companies from game companies, media empires, and banks, should all pay attention.
Oh, and it's worth noting that the game had substantial bugs and performance problems on launch that took ages to fix. It's not like missing features and overhyped gameplay were its only flaws. It crashed constantly and was practically broken. You can't justify crap like that with spin.
As much as I agree with your summary that the Linux community is perfectly comfortable where they are and don't want to cater to "illiterates", there's a big difference between people who don't NEED to learn all the details of using a computer, and people who don't WANT to learn. That kind of condescending attitude among FOSS communities is the main reason why Windows remains dominant, and various forks of Linux/BSD haven't fared much better than the more widely recognized GNU/Linux/XWindows flavors.
I'm a power user and I love to learn new things, but in the 15 years I've been trying to switch to Linux, it's always driven me crazy, because there's just so many stupid, unnecessary things you need to learn (especially when the package managers don't do their damn job). It's not that I don't want to learn, I just don't appreciate having to waste so much time learning idiotic quirks that shouldn't be an issue in the first place. The Linux community should stop living in denial, spend less time being toxic and whining about "dumbing down" the system, and... you know, actually fix all the broken shit.
Well, yeah, but pretty much by definition any rating system embedded into a web page is self-cencorship and strictly voluntary. If your intentions are not direct and up front, then no standard will help.
It would still be nice if there was one, even if there were only 3-5 possible settings. Leave it to the regulators to endlessly debate how many zillions of categories would be needed for a "proper" rating system (which is fine, as we all know it would always be too complicated to be implemented, let alone enforced).
Outside of the luxury market, that's still largely the case. Even the "mainstream" Model 3 is selling for almost twice its projected price, and Tesla still wants to make more expensive luxury versions so they don't have to sell at a loss.
Middle-class electric cars are still not a profitable market. Tesla can survive on the wow factor among the BMW/Mercedes crowd, but they won't magically overtake a mature, trillion-dollar industry with 120 years of experience.
As someone who distributes porn on the Internet, I've always been frustrated by the lack of a standardized rating mechanism, so that it will only be displayed when people actually want to see it, and content won't be accidentally cached by search engines. Few people believe that the ancient "rating" meta tag means anything to search engines, though I do use that just in case.
It would be nice to work on that first before crying about porn being too easily accessible.
Anyone who's used a computer for 20 years could tell Microsoft that Notepad is useful, yet abysmally out of date.
They needed their spyware to collect telemetry for years before they would acknowledge what people have been talking about for decades. Sounds perfectly reasonable that they don't give a crap about the quality of the product or what their customers think, and it's all about fine-tuning the marketing and exploitation strategy.
Telemetry fucking sucks. If you NEED it to know what your customers want, you're either not paying attention or you don't care. Microsoft is too large and profitable to fall into the 1st category.
Am I the only one who actually read the archived web site and figured their talking points were pretty benign and reasonable? I mean, RISC-V isn't even a full spec at the moment and is still a work in progress.
Like most things I've come across in the open-source world, RISC-V is a bunch of good ideas, but ARM has proven, working implementations of their own ISA. From a business perspective, it's not outlandish to boast about that. If ARM were tearing apart the concepts behind RISC-V, then that would be a different story.
As The Register's analysis wasn't actually very thorough, let alone insightful, I'd suggest looking at the original criticism before letting loose the nerdrage.
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I loved the days when you didn't need special permission to run any OS you wanted.
Reminds me of the Goiânia accident
I have always wondered why a Windows computer will CONSTANTLY access the Hard Drive, even when it is ostensibly at Idle, with no Applications running (except Explorer.exe). THAT'S the kind of stuff that is super-creepy to me, and it has been going on for YEARS.
No need to wonder. You can use a utility like Process Monitor to see what's going on. But then, this is on a PC without all these newfangled "security enclaves" so it's not hard to figure out what's what. Can't do that easily on a phone.
Interestingly, I also noticed recently that my PC hard drive goes almost constantly as well, but it does this when looking at the machine's firmware screen. I have no idea if this is normal behavior of the hard drive controller or if the firmware is doing some hidden stuff in the background, but I do know for a fact that Windows is not always responsible for hard drive activity. It may be the drive firmware doing some weird stuff on its own.
Sorry; but it CANNOT be hidden for any appreciable length of time. There are PLENTY of nerds with nothing better to do than to let their phone sit for a day or two and watch the WiFi traffic OUT of the Device. SOMEbody would have spotted this behavior with iOS devices by now. Period.
I'd like to believe that, but there's more than one CPU in most phones (and PCs) these days, and they work independently of the OS. Just getting the OS source or monitoring it is not enough -- you have to have access to all the firmware and ROM in the chips to know exactly what's going on, and all of that stuff is encrypted in hardware. It's not like the old days where only the main CPU and OS kernel were in total control. Case in point, people are still trying to figure out exactly how Intel ME works, even though it's been around for many years.
The introduction of rabbits and foxes into Australia is a textbook case of the devastating effects of invasive species. Bonus points for the fact it was done on purpose by hunters, strictly for sport.
Context and intent actually matter in court cases. You can't copyright a number, but you can copyright something that can be represented by an otherwise huge, random number.
Consider yourself lucky. If it was possible to claim a copyright on such a tiny program, you'd likely get sued by someone else who already wrote it before. 8)
It's already pretty well known that phones send tons of data. People have attached them to firewalls and can clearly see how much crap is going out every second. The problem is that there's so many packets going to so many different IPs for so many different purposes and it's all encrypted. It happens constantly even when the device is idle. My Win 7 PC does the same, despite all my attempts to shut off any telemetry and useless services. Is the device spying or is it just doing "normal maintenance"?
More importantly is that data doesn't have to be sent in realtime. Any spying can simply be stored in a queue and uploaded on a schedule. You can't associate transmission of data with a specific action or command in that case.
I hate it with a passion, but massive amounts of traffic is just the norm these days, and it's here to stay. Judging a device based on the quantity of data sent, or even when data is sent, is not feasible.
I have 3rd party cookies turned off, I have no Facebook account, and just now I found out I had some Facebook cookies stored.
I honestly feel more comfortable when a company doesn't have a privacy policy.
Try reading any privacy policy some time. All they do is itemize corporate exemptions so you know what privacy you don't have.
Not that it's my business what people like and how they choose to spend their money... but I get a kick out of all the people who bitch about the new MacBooks being garbage compared to the old ones, but they still run out to dealers to buy them by the truckload.
Model 3 margins are now positive - without any AWD and P in the mix.
I should hope so. They're selling at a much higher price than what they were advertising years ago.
The problems you are listing are Windows problems and not Linux problems.
Ah, yes, the old delusion that if you're not popular, it's always someone else's fault.
GNU/Linux has been around for more than 25 years, and it's still nothing more than a blip on the radar. Android is much newer than Linux and has exploded in popularity, to the point where it has almost wiped out Linux on embedded devices (to say nothing about mobile).
To be fair, things not working after waking up from sleep has been a problem for 20+ years. Windows... Mac... doesn't matter.
A crappy experience is just the accepted standard. No surprise Google isn't doing better than anyone else.
In the past, machines couldn't think. They just followed a predefined set of instructions. AI is the breakthrough that allows machines to think and adapt, properties that humans have had a monopoly for millennia. You seriously think that won't change anything?
Keep in mind that most businesses don't care about quality, they care about ROI. Even if AI is a hard problem to solve and doesn't do as good a job as a real person, it only needs to be cheap enough to earn a ROI. Don't assume AI has to be Einstein quality to fully replace a workforce. There's a point where anything is "good enough" if it's cheap.
My biggest problem with this move is their insistence on using dynamic HTML loading. The video window loads and starts playing immediately, which is nice, but the sidebar and page styling gets loaded dynamically, so the recommended thumbnails tend to overlap and obscure the video until the whole page loads. It would be nice if the player could better cache the dimensions of the video to make sure the page layout doesn't have to be scaled multiple times and cause everything to go haywire and jump all over the place.
But then, obscuring content is the way the web works these days. I'm pissed that annotations are still on by default and the video controls overlay the video.
I agree 100%, and it's really surprising how many people will go out of their way to justify the terrible design of the car (as Rei below testifies).
Alas, you have to understand that Tesla really has to stand out from the competition and appear to be on the cutting edge so they can keep that investor money rolling in. If they made a conventional interior, they would be considered bland and uninspired. Luxury cars and supercars always have the worst control layouts. They're supposed to impress, not be practical daily drivers.
I don't wish for Tesla to die, but I sure do hope they stay in the luxury market and aren't too influential in the long run. I'm already fed up with horrible UI/UX in today's computers, I don't need my next car to suffer the same stupid fashion trends -- including DRM, forced updates, endless patches, network connectivity for no damn reason, etc.
Only in America is it illegal to put lead in our electronics, which when disposed will likely end up going to China for "recycling", but when it comes to guns, we'll happily skip the middleman and dump lead pellets directly into our own backyard.
I'm pretty sure environmental damage isn't terribly selective. You're simply rationalizing that if you kill off 80% of the wildlife in an area in the sake of progress, it's no big deal, because only that one, bitty, insignificant endangered species will be killed off first.
The second part is some in the gaming public's stupid over-reaction to things like this.
To be fair, people are fed up with companies lying about products and getting away with it. No Man's Sky is a perfect example, specifically because it did sell very well, and from what I can tell, the outrage still didn't result in any significant legal action.
Death threats and the like obviously cross the line, but in the face of companies still making money after pulling stunts like this, public outrage is about the only option. It's not right to just brush it off as a bunch of whiny fanboys with too much free time. There's a breaking point, and other companies from game companies, media empires, and banks, should all pay attention.
Oh, and it's worth noting that the game had substantial bugs and performance problems on launch that took ages to fix. It's not like missing features and overhyped gameplay were its only flaws. It crashed constantly and was practically broken. You can't justify crap like that with spin.
Auto autocomplete needs to die.
As much as I agree with your summary that the Linux community is perfectly comfortable where they are and don't want to cater to "illiterates", there's a big difference between people who don't NEED to learn all the details of using a computer, and people who don't WANT to learn. That kind of condescending attitude among FOSS communities is the main reason why Windows remains dominant, and various forks of Linux/BSD haven't fared much better than the more widely recognized GNU/Linux/XWindows flavors.
I'm a power user and I love to learn new things, but in the 15 years I've been trying to switch to Linux, it's always driven me crazy, because there's just so many stupid, unnecessary things you need to learn (especially when the package managers don't do their damn job). It's not that I don't want to learn, I just don't appreciate having to waste so much time learning idiotic quirks that shouldn't be an issue in the first place. The Linux community should stop living in denial, spend less time being toxic and whining about "dumbing down" the system, and... you know, actually fix all the broken shit.
Well, yeah, but pretty much by definition any rating system embedded into a web page is self-cencorship and strictly voluntary. If your intentions are not direct and up front, then no standard will help.
It would still be nice if there was one, even if there were only 3-5 possible settings. Leave it to the regulators to endlessly debate how many zillions of categories would be needed for a "proper" rating system (which is fine, as we all know it would always be too complicated to be implemented, let alone enforced).
Outside of the luxury market, that's still largely the case. Even the "mainstream" Model 3 is selling for almost twice its projected price, and Tesla still wants to make more expensive luxury versions so they don't have to sell at a loss.
Middle-class electric cars are still not a profitable market. Tesla can survive on the wow factor among the BMW/Mercedes crowd, but they won't magically overtake a mature, trillion-dollar industry with 120 years of experience.
As someone who distributes porn on the Internet, I've always been frustrated by the lack of a standardized rating mechanism, so that it will only be displayed when people actually want to see it, and content won't be accidentally cached by search engines. Few people believe that the ancient "rating" meta tag means anything to search engines, though I do use that just in case.
It would be nice to work on that first before crying about porn being too easily accessible.
Anyone who's used a computer for 20 years could tell Microsoft that Notepad is useful, yet abysmally out of date.
They needed their spyware to collect telemetry for years before they would acknowledge what people have been talking about for decades. Sounds perfectly reasonable that they don't give a crap about the quality of the product or what their customers think, and it's all about fine-tuning the marketing and exploitation strategy.
Telemetry fucking sucks. If you NEED it to know what your customers want, you're either not paying attention or you don't care. Microsoft is too large and profitable to fall into the 1st category.
Am I the only one who actually read the archived web site and figured their talking points were pretty benign and reasonable? I mean, RISC-V isn't even a full spec at the moment and is still a work in progress.
Like most things I've come across in the open-source world, RISC-V is a bunch of good ideas, but ARM has proven, working implementations of their own ISA. From a business perspective, it's not outlandish to boast about that. If ARM were tearing apart the concepts behind RISC-V, then that would be a different story.
As The Register's analysis wasn't actually very thorough, let alone insightful, I'd suggest looking at the original criticism before letting loose the nerdrage.