just disable windows update entirely, take a good clean backup of your system, use linux for real browsing and put windows beyhind a trusted hardware (box) firewall, not letting it get out (whitelist only, level access).
I disabled win updates almost a year ago, back when the ftdi driver was broken (on purpose) by the colluding MS and ftdi corps. after that, I fully disabled the MS update service, purged all unsafe updates and went thru the services list to turn anything that even looks odd, off.
windows update is now a roulette wheel. I hate that and won't tolerate it. if I have to restore from a backup, at least that's not a big problem and I know I won't get any more 'surprises' from MS.
windows is unsafe to be on a public network. not even sure its good to have on a captive private lan, either. but certainly, leaving windows on a public net connection is just asking for abuse.
funny- its now MS that abuses its own userbase. the hackers are now less of a worry to many of us.
yeah, 'saving state' is such an old and outdated concept. I mean, why would we want to checkpoint the status of lots of open files, open browser windows, edits that are not ready to be commited or saved but you don't want to close the file, either. even the cursor position is important to be saved; its all part of 'state'.
but go ahead an argue that saving your status is worthless. in fact, maybe you like to just be forced to logoff and reboot every few hours? hmmm? sound good to you?
I used plastic zip-ties the last time I traveled to europe (well over 10 yrs ago). brand new luggage, too.
fucking bastards used tin snips and cut THRU my zipper in order to remove the plastic wire-tie I used. expensive luggage, ruined, and there was no lock to cut, only some wire ties that I used to keep the bag 'safe' while in my posession (I could also tell if it was opened since I used a bright color of wire tie).
did not matter, the bag was cut open, I lost a power supply for my camera storage device (PSD, back in the day we used those..) and got a note in my bad saying 'we opened it'. yeah, like I didn't know.
no way to get them to pay for their damage either.
I would EASILY see how a more unhinged person than me would flip his lid and go al postal on anyone who did this to them. and I would not cry a tear if any TSA or related person was harmed because they fucked with a passenger's stuff or rights. if a TSA person was bleeding and needing help, I'd step over the body while walking away.
Where to begin. The battery life is garbage even on the lowest dim. When charging the apps are fumbly at best. Home key sticks a lot. When the phone gets hot it will randomly send your pics and crazy text to random people. You can get the apps by back loading Google play but it's tedious. I would only recommend this phone to my ex wife in hopes that it would prevent her from ever calling me again.
ok, I did lol at this one.
sounds like a disaster. glad I never even considered one.
I was in the process of a multi-month (sigh) email dialog with an amazon (labs) recruiter; before the big article, things were coming along and there was interest from him (and his group) in me. after the layoff/reorg/article, a few weeks went by and nothing.
then, an email saying that they are 'regrouping' and would I like to apply for an android oriented job instead of the hw/fw job that I was more interested in. I gave him a good earfull about how amazon has no business (literally and figuratively) being in the android space, no one buys it, its a failure and fwiw, I have no background or interest in the race-to-the-bottom known as 'apps development' or even the o/s itself. hardware, sure, I'd be into it, but the android stuff at amazon is just a non-starter and everyone knows it.
of course, once I leveled with him, I don't expect to ever hear back from him again. in fact, he may even be RIF'd for all I know.
but I do know that amazon has to exit the android biz and spend its money elsewhere. they have a lot of power in the brand name (amazon) but android is just not the place for them, imho.
(I was actually pushing some new hardware ideas on a totally non-phone CES concept; and initially the recruiter was excited about it; but now I'm not hearing from him at all. I guess amazon really has fundamental problems that are more than just skin deep...)
Yep, I know I'd want a guy who's voluntarily played Russian Roulette to occupy the presidency.
two reasons:
1) he's not a pansy
2) he does not scare easily
being somewhat serious, for a moment, we have 'leaders' who continue to play the "be afraid! all the fucking time!" card. they now govern by fear and we lose rights more and more as those jerks continue to screw us over for their own good.
I'd like to have someone in office say 'life is hard, its unsafe by definition and by nature and we are not going to legislate you into a 100% safe society.'
not saying HE would be the guy, but someone who takes a few risks is more trustable, to me, than some think-of-the-children perl-clutcher. (oops, I mean pearl.)
2012 is a 'long time ago'? and a device built and sold 3 years ago is now 'long in the tooth'?
you guys who think that you should go thru electronics like you go thru sneakers, I think your priorities are ALL FUCKED UP.
lets also add the vendors in there, who design things that, to the audience, at least, only has a useful interesting lifespan of 3 years.
I have pc's that I built 20 yrs ago that still work and can still be useful. certainly I have laptops that I bought 5 yrs ago that are fine and even 10 yr old laptops can be useful. they don't stop functioning, they dont 'slow down'. that's nonsense!
you guys have been programmed to:
do {
buy();
use();
dispose(); } while (1);
and this cycle that you participate in also encourages the vendors to not care about the gear they sold, causing this feedback-loop go to run-away.
I guess the landfill owners are happy; but I can't see this style of consumerism really being a good thing, to be honest. if your gear is 'worn out and useless' in 3 years, did you really NEED that gear in the first place; and in the 2nd place, what kind of purchasing decision are you making that throws out the cost of an expensive bit of kit in such a short period of time?
some people seriously do not know the value of money. throwing away (and then rebuying) another 3 year device - sigh.... this upsets so many of us. its like you all are being played and enjoy the process OF being played.
dave and the eevblog have come a long way, haven't they? they are now THEY site for the subject matter at hand. dave must really be enjoying his luck; and it was a lot of luck - its a great site and all, but he's not all that unusual or exceptional; many of us in the field have the background and experience he has. but his site really took off (and I don't have a problem with that, I spend a lot of time there, too) and now the bloke's fairly well known and his site is the top one in its field.
and of course, more than half the value of the site is the people that hang out there. he really has attracted a very high quality audience. lots of good info and sharing there.
and so, yeah, the batterizer thing was what came to mind when I first saw this slash article. knew someone would bring the eevblog incident up, right quick;)
yeah, like the government has fought for the rights of the worker over BigCorp in the last 20 years. yeah, right. dream on!
companies don't care about you. government (US) does not care about you. we have no unions in our field and so we have zero power. where it really matters, we have no one to speak for us.
do you guys think this has gone on long enough? and if not, what will it take to finally convince you that we need collective bargaining, just to level the playing field?
I understand. but 'the bay area' DOES mean san francisco area. like it or not, this is the label and the fact that you didn't know that - well - you know it now.
I spent time in the boston area and its also a 'bay area'. so is maryland. but 'the bay area' is silicon valley. I did not make the name up; don't freak out at me for using a standard name that you happened to not be aware of.
I was in the $140k range for a number of years; then the downward slope hit and the 'new range' seems to be around $120k, if you are lucky. for a short bit I was hitting over $160k as a contractor but when bossman finds a way to outsource you, that's it - you're done.
that may seem like a lot of money, but for bay area middle aged professionals who live in a house, its not at all a lot of money! and going from 150 down to 120 is a HUGE step backward, let me tell you; especially when your healthcare is omitted, you have no sick time or vacation time and there WILL be big gaps between your gigs since companies actively avoid hiring locals unless they are absolutely forced to.
at least I'm not at HP where folks are being told they must leave HP, join some other company at half their pay and lose all seniority and benefits. man, the companies are outright declaring war on the middle class worker. if it has not hit you or someone you know, it will. don't be smug about your situation, as the greed and hunger for more power WILL find you and your job will be at risk like so many of the rest of us.
we can hang together or we can hang separately. yes, I'm pro-union even though I know that our own kind (software) won't ever man-up to admitting that we need help in balancing the power base against the corporations.
sigh. our lives do suck. and its NOT getting better, guys, its getting worse each year. open-office, why did you have to mention that?;( I see nothing BUT that, in the bay area, and I frown each time I see it.
damn.
this field is broken. some people have it well, but the majority are taken for a ride, played as chumps and they don't realize it until its too late.
it most certainly IS factory-style work here in the bay area.
95% h1b, from 2 countries (guess which; neither is US). all are under 40. most are under 35 yrs old.
as soon as you grow and get experience, you have eaten the forbidden fruit and you know how you should NOT be treated. at that point, they dispose of you and from then on, you will have nothing but 'short stays' if you are even lucky enough to get short term contracts.
tech work is mostly just unskilled labor, banging out bullshit code, full of bugs to never be fixed and replaced with some new buggy shit. lather rince repeat.
I was at sun right before oracle killed them and in engineering, it was all tower sun workstations. sunblade this and netra that (for those doing netra work).
and at sgi, we had o2's and octanes.
at DEC, we had decstations and vaxstations.
I liked it when there was computer diversity like that. I really do miss using real unix boxes instead of (sigh) windows windows windows! in the corp world, you only get to pick win or apple, now.
Slashdot Mirror
mastercharge and bank americard?
how did they miss the big two?
how odd!
eagle runs on linux. I've heard rumors that there are hacked versions of eagle for linux..
kicad is getting a lot of attention and its free.
just disable windows update entirely, take a good clean backup of your system, use linux for real browsing and put windows beyhind a trusted hardware (box) firewall, not letting it get out (whitelist only, level access).
I disabled win updates almost a year ago, back when the ftdi driver was broken (on purpose) by the colluding MS and ftdi corps. after that, I fully disabled the MS update service, purged all unsafe updates and went thru the services list to turn anything that even looks odd, off.
windows update is now a roulette wheel. I hate that and won't tolerate it. if I have to restore from a backup, at least that's not a big problem and I know I won't get any more 'surprises' from MS.
windows is unsafe to be on a public network. not even sure its good to have on a captive private lan, either. but certainly, leaving windows on a public net connection is just asking for abuse.
funny- its now MS that abuses its own userbase. the hackers are now less of a worry to many of us.
yeah, 'saving state' is such an old and outdated concept. I mean, why would we want to checkpoint the status of lots of open files, open browser windows, edits that are not ready to be commited or saved but you don't want to close the file, either. even the cursor position is important to be saved; its all part of 'state'.
but go ahead an argue that saving your status is worthless. in fact, maybe you like to just be forced to logoff and reboot every few hours? hmmm? sound good to you?
oblig:
"me outsource you long-time."
you mean, its NOT about copy-on-write?
and, all along, I must have misunderst7!^u';Y63j(%4LLAMA)&mhYk_&
I used plastic zip-ties the last time I traveled to europe (well over 10 yrs ago). brand new luggage, too.
fucking bastards used tin snips and cut THRU my zipper in order to remove the plastic wire-tie I used. expensive luggage, ruined, and there was no lock to cut, only some wire ties that I used to keep the bag 'safe' while in my posession (I could also tell if it was opened since I used a bright color of wire tie).
did not matter, the bag was cut open, I lost a power supply for my camera storage device (PSD, back in the day we used those..) and got a note in my bad saying 'we opened it'. yeah, like I didn't know.
no way to get them to pay for their damage either.
I would EASILY see how a more unhinged person than me would flip his lid and go al postal on anyone who did this to them. and I would not cry a tear if any TSA or related person was harmed because they fucked with a passenger's stuff or rights. if a TSA person was bleeding and needing help, I'd step over the body while walking away.
those people are lower than shark shit.
one review on amazon about the fire phone:
Where to begin. The battery life is garbage even on the lowest dim. When charging the apps are fumbly at best. Home key sticks a lot. When the phone gets hot it will randomly send your pics and crazy text to random people. You can get the apps by back loading Google play but it's tedious. I would only recommend this phone to my ex wife in hopes that it would prevent her from ever calling me again.
ok, I did lol at this one.
sounds like a disaster. glad I never even considered one.
I was in the process of a multi-month (sigh) email dialog with an amazon (labs) recruiter; before the big article, things were coming along and there was interest from him (and his group) in me. after the layoff/reorg/article, a few weeks went by and nothing.
then, an email saying that they are 'regrouping' and would I like to apply for an android oriented job instead of the hw/fw job that I was more interested in. I gave him a good earfull about how amazon has no business (literally and figuratively) being in the android space, no one buys it, its a failure and fwiw, I have no background or interest in the race-to-the-bottom known as 'apps development' or even the o/s itself. hardware, sure, I'd be into it, but the android stuff at amazon is just a non-starter and everyone knows it.
of course, once I leveled with him, I don't expect to ever hear back from him again. in fact, he may even be RIF'd for all I know.
but I do know that amazon has to exit the android biz and spend its money elsewhere. they have a lot of power in the brand name (amazon) but android is just not the place for them, imho.
(I was actually pushing some new hardware ideas on a totally non-phone CES concept; and initially the recruiter was excited about it; but now I'm not hearing from him at all. I guess amazon really has fundamental problems that are more than just skin deep...)
Yep, I know I'd want a guy who's voluntarily played Russian Roulette to occupy the presidency.
two reasons:
1) he's not a pansy
2) he does not scare easily
being somewhat serious, for a moment, we have 'leaders' who continue to play the "be afraid! all the fucking time!" card. they now govern by fear and we lose rights more and more as those jerks continue to screw us over for their own good.
I'd like to have someone in office say 'life is hard, its unsafe by definition and by nature and we are not going to legislate you into a 100% safe society.'
not saying HE would be the guy, but someone who takes a few risks is more trustable, to me, than some think-of-the-children perl-clutcher. (oops, I mean pearl.)
do I really have to go for the obvious joke?
ok. you forced me.
the reason we do not want him to be president is: once he's installed, he'll be impossible to be removed!
What kind of data does Linux Mint with Cinnamon send?
dunno, maybe christmas greetings?
we don't buy sony here.
I thought everyone knew that.
sony is on the 'do not buy from' list.
hang on.
2012 is a 'long time ago'? and a device built and sold 3 years ago is now 'long in the tooth'?
you guys who think that you should go thru electronics like you go thru sneakers, I think your priorities are ALL FUCKED UP.
lets also add the vendors in there, who design things that, to the audience, at least, only has a useful interesting lifespan of 3 years.
I have pc's that I built 20 yrs ago that still work and can still be useful. certainly I have laptops that I bought 5 yrs ago that are fine and even 10 yr old laptops can be useful. they don't stop functioning, they dont 'slow down'. that's nonsense!
you guys have been programmed to:
do {
buy();
use();
dispose();
} while (1);
and this cycle that you participate in also encourages the vendors to not care about the gear they sold, causing this feedback-loop go to run-away.
I guess the landfill owners are happy; but I can't see this style of consumerism really being a good thing, to be honest. if your gear is 'worn out and useless' in 3 years, did you really NEED that gear in the first place; and in the 2nd place, what kind of purchasing decision are you making that throws out the cost of an expensive bit of kit in such a short period of time?
some people seriously do not know the value of money. throwing away (and then rebuying) another 3 year device - sigh.... this upsets so many of us. its like you all are being played and enjoy the process OF being played.
never heard of it.
I guess if they add 200 more, they could sign up that crazy elf-looking man as their mascot.
that was what first came to mind to me, too.
dave and the eevblog have come a long way, haven't they? they are now THEY site for the subject matter at hand. dave must really be enjoying his luck; and it was a lot of luck - its a great site and all, but he's not all that unusual or exceptional; many of us in the field have the background and experience he has. but his site really took off (and I don't have a problem with that, I spend a lot of time there, too) and now the bloke's fairly well known and his site is the top one in its field.
and of course, more than half the value of the site is the people that hang out there. he really has attracted a very high quality audience. lots of good info and sharing there.
and so, yeah, the batterizer thing was what came to mind when I first saw this slash article. knew someone would bring the eevblog incident up, right quick ;)
I bet they're all acute too....
to a certain degree, yes.
feminist legbeards
new band name. thanks!
(seriously, I never heard that phrase before.)
article about HP worker asking for help from the government: http://www.businessinsider.com...
yeah, like the government has fought for the rights of the worker over BigCorp in the last 20 years. yeah, right. dream on!
companies don't care about you. government (US) does not care about you. we have no unions in our field and so we have zero power. where it really matters, we have no one to speak for us.
do you guys think this has gone on long enough? and if not, what will it take to finally convince you that we need collective bargaining, just to level the playing field?
I understand. but 'the bay area' DOES mean san francisco area. like it or not, this is the label and the fact that you didn't know that - well - you know it now.
I spent time in the boston area and its also a 'bay area'. so is maryland. but 'the bay area' is silicon valley. I did not make the name up; don't freak out at me for using a standard name that you happened to not be aware of.
I was in the $140k range for a number of years; then the downward slope hit and the 'new range' seems to be around $120k, if you are lucky. for a short bit I was hitting over $160k as a contractor but when bossman finds a way to outsource you, that's it - you're done.
that may seem like a lot of money, but for bay area middle aged professionals who live in a house, its not at all a lot of money! and going from 150 down to 120 is a HUGE step backward, let me tell you; especially when your healthcare is omitted, you have no sick time or vacation time and there WILL be big gaps between your gigs since companies actively avoid hiring locals unless they are absolutely forced to.
at least I'm not at HP where folks are being told they must leave HP, join some other company at half their pay and lose all seniority and benefits. man, the companies are outright declaring war on the middle class worker. if it has not hit you or someone you know, it will. don't be smug about your situation, as the greed and hunger for more power WILL find you and your job will be at risk like so many of the rest of us.
we can hang together or we can hang separately. yes, I'm pro-union even though I know that our own kind (software) won't ever man-up to admitting that we need help in balancing the power base against the corporations.
you have it 100% right on all issues.
sigh. our lives do suck. and its NOT getting better, guys, its getting worse each year. open-office, why did you have to mention that? ;( I see nothing BUT that, in the bay area, and I frown each time I see it.
damn.
this field is broken. some people have it well, but the majority are taken for a ride, played as chumps and they don't realize it until its too late.
it most certainly IS factory-style work here in the bay area.
95% h1b, from 2 countries (guess which; neither is US). all are under 40. most are under 35 yrs old.
as soon as you grow and get experience, you have eaten the forbidden fruit and you know how you should NOT be treated. at that point, they dispose of you and from then on, you will have nothing but 'short stays' if you are even lucky enough to get short term contracts.
tech work is mostly just unskilled labor, banging out bullshit code, full of bugs to never be fixed and replaced with some new buggy shit. lather rince repeat.
I'm fed up.
so you are saying that popcorn time does not provide a vpn (or even instruct people that vpn is the key to safety; the right vpn, of course)?
macs at sun? when was that?
I was at sun right before oracle killed them and in engineering, it was all tower sun workstations. sunblade this and netra that (for those doing netra work).
and at sgi, we had o2's and octanes.
at DEC, we had decstations and vaxstations.
I liked it when there was computer diversity like that. I really do miss using real unix boxes instead of (sigh) windows windows windows! in the corp world, you only get to pick win or apple, now.