It is amazing that we have developed as a civilization in the days before all this privacy-busting data collection.
But how have we developed? When was the last thing you heard anything positive about new software? The number one complaint is that the vendors don't seem to know how users actually use the software and thus make stupid changes. This goes back a good 10+ years now.
Now they introduce telemetry to actually find out how users use software and the users lose their shit.
Everything else is unnecessary and simply bloatware.
Yes precisely as evidenced by... a very active extension ecosystem. Wait what?
Sorry but the list for a decent browser is far longer than that. We argue about fine details here all the time. Your list barely scratches the surface.
I'm wondering if this is controllable from the OS itself in a clear way. From what I've seen (or rather not seen) there's no settings on the device to control the Google's "Where is my phone" function.
Even now the only function I can find to control this is Samsung specific. They rolled their own version of this for some reason.
Sounds like a case of go buy whatever current LTO tape drive, dump all your stuff to tape once a week, and go store/rotate the tapes in a safe deposit box at the bank.
For the cost of a current LTO solution you can buy 3 or 4 of those 10TB archive HDDs and not need to deal with an entirely new concept for the home use (tape backup) as well.
What if the owncloud server dies, and your busy/on vacation/ etc and it goes a few weeks before you can get over to your friends to rebuild it and fix it etc... now your operating with just the copy on your local pc. And are vulnerable to theft, fire, hardware failure... etc.
What if dropbox goes down?
Actually your what-if scenario strikes close to home. I was in Australia 2 weeks ago while my server motherboard shat itself (only just got the library up and running again 20min ago).
What I actually did was upload any changed files to dropbox as a backup while I was in transit. I didn't need to rely on it, and I didn't upload anywhere near my whole library, but effectively the emergency backup plan was quite similar to what you proposed.
Mind you the "risk" you are talking about was a week or two of in transit data. My proposal included backups, not just relying on the owncloud itself. Even if my laptop was stolen and my own-cloud server caught fire (rather than just motherboard failure) there was still the backup I store at work.
Having been the victim of a company (Tesla) modifying a product after purchase to remove functionality that I specifically paid for
What functionality did you specifically pay for, and did they advertise that functionality as working exactly as you thought it did at the time. If you're talking about the restrictions they placed on autopilot, then you paid for something that was not advertised in the way you thought you remember it.
Where are they getting these used laptop batteries that still have life in them?
They aren't. They are getting used laptop battery cells that still have life in them. Most laptop batteries will typically be dead when only one cell has crapped itself. Charge and discharge test each individual cell and dispose of the faulty one.
But this seems to be a really, really bad idea. Just on the face of it.
My friend cut himself sharpening his knife the other day. On the face of it, pretty much everything seems like a bad idea if you have no idea what you're doing.
Considering the odds of being in a terrorist attack are incredibly low, and yet you apparently know two people who were in them or nearby. I call bullshit.
Nearby is not just spatially but also temporal.
Two? I actually know about 5. Another colleague of mine was in Brussels in a cafe opposite the train station which was bombed. A good friend of mine was at a Christmas market in Berlin on the 18th (one day out, and a market 2km away, but since I didn't know the exact details at the time it becomes irrelevant). I myself was contacted by my family while I was in Paris due to the "terrorist attack" at Place d'Italie. Turns out it wasn't an attack, just an electrical transformer that had gone up, and it was my local metro station while I was there on work.
Basically you need a statics lesson. There's a good chapter in one of my stats books "Why coincidences are certain." Take the number of possible people you know, with the number of possible ways they could die in groups, add an uncertainty of a day or two, and a few km around an area and I bet you that you know more than 1 person who you weren't certain if they were affected as well. Plus I live in a country surrounded by countries constantly having terror attacks, and we europeans get around. I actually have friends who live in nearly every city affected by the past few years worth of attacks, including small ones like Nice.
Also - you can just as easily message people without using Facebook.
Yeah I can. But carriers often throttle spam messages like that or don't deliver them. Plus why would I selectively send messages out to people without knowing if they are interested in my status or not? You do realise the concept of a bulletin board style one-to-many communication systems predate not only Facebook, but also predate electricity right? There's a reason these services exist.
You're just playing idiotic semantic games by trying to substitute "anxiety" for "fear" and trying to pretend the latter is different while demonstrating that you treat them as equivalent.
No. "Fear" in the context of terrorism has a very specific meaning. The fear of the terrorist. The fear to the personal self. Anxiety due to not knowing status of someone is not a fear. I don't* fear that someone may be dead, but I'm anxious to know if they are alive. Calling it semantics is just a failure of understanding of language.
*unless they own me lots of money.:-)
Except for something large scale
Interesting qualification given that this is generally what the feature has been used for.
I do empathise. I feel sadness that you and your "we" are living lives of anxiety.
You not having anxiety when a friend / family member is known to be in the mediate vicinity of a terrorist attack shows that you do in fact not empathise at all.
Ouch. I hate when that happens! Just stop fucking with my software already!
I never did try Picasa. What am I missing?
Feature wise not much. To be honest I'm probably the one missing something since I never used ACDsee or Picasa for any of their cataloguing or editing functions. I was using them mostly as image viewers. My requirements for those were simple:
1. Light weight. 2. Have zoom to fit, zoom to 100% as quick options. (continuous zoom is a bonus) 3. Interpolation other than nearest neighbour when zooming. 4. Support automatic conversion of the image colour to the monitor profile (I have a wide gamut monitor so if this isn't done colours look hyper saturated) 5. Easy scrolling and switching between images.
- ACDSee split their light weight viewer out from their main viewer. The main viewer fails on 1. The lightweight viewer fails on 3 and 4. - Windows Picture viewer (windows 7) fails 2 and 4 - Windows Picture viewer (windows 10) fails on 5 since it relies on integration of the explorer to decide what images to display next. e.g. I click on a downloaded jpg in Chrome's download window and I can't scroll between any other pictures even thought there's more in the downloads folder. It also fails on 1 since MS is trying to turn it into a social networking application cum movie player. (I kid you not one of the insider previews renamed the Photo Viewer to "Story Remix" whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean). It also is slow to scroll. - Irfanview sort of failed on 4 because it was unable to automatically read the monitor profile and it needed to be set manually in the settings, so on my laptop which I sometimes plug into my monitor it would have the colours incorrect unless I change it at every dock.
But really something that has grown on me is Picasa's no nonesense auto-fading interface http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AB3p... and simple keystroke navigation. pgup/down zooms fit/100%/400%, up/down arrows are stepless zoom. left right previous / next. Defaults to fullscreen but hitting enter makes it windowed. esc key exits. moving the mouse to the bottom exposes a scrollbar of images in the folder as well as control buttons for the keyboard impaired.
When dealing with large collections and video the last thing that you really want to deal with is the slow backup / restore process to the Cloud when something goes wrong. The Cloud is not really a good option for backups IMO.
If you have a public facing IP and a satisfactory enough upload then home-hosting sounds like a decent solution. A small Linux / Unix box like a FreeNAS or something similar running Seafile or OwnCloud can provide you a cloud server. Clients are available for every OS and even mobile devices for remote access. And for actual backups, an Archive HDD like the 8-10TB models on the market should suffice. Leave that at work, at a friend's house or in a deposit box.
This gives you: - cross platform - no cost - in your house very fast access to the "cloud" (remote access speed will depend on not being in Australia an hampered with shithouse internet) - your own in control backup strategy - your own in control deleted file retention strategy - the ability to share content easily as with all other services - security of being your own small self and thus a less likely target than a big provider
But the very fact that the maker of your product can now KILL IT via remote software? How is this NOT a major strike against this company?
Probably because it's not true and media reporting is going down the shitter making everyone angry for no reason.
The DJI drones frequently need to check for updates to the no-fly zones or they don't take off. Updates are mandatory and this will be pushed like every other one. Aside that it is in the media this is just situation normal for owners of DJI drones (which need mobile phones to fly anyway).
or if I'm assaulted and have a broken nose, a black eye and blood on my face, will the "facial recognition" still unlock my phone and let me call the cops?
As one of my friend's Facebook updates last week comically showed, at least on a Surface Pro, no, blood on your face does not let you unlock the screen:-)
However, what kind of phone do you have that requires you to unlock in order to make an emergency call? I don't think I've seen one like that before.
But it's hard to believe. Apple sold ApplePay to banks and card companies based on the security of their fingerprint scanner.
And those same companies have not problem dealing with Android on basic NFC, rolling their own apps some of which don't even require the phone to be unlocked to use.
Security didn't come into it, it just made for some good marketing to a population which was freaking out at the concept of anything more "secure" than drawing a funny line on a receipt.
Slashdot Mirror
Sony is the market leader in this generation of consoles
Yes they are, but when you consider the PC as something people also use to play games then Microsoft happily makes up the gap.
It is amazing that we have developed as a civilization in the days before all this privacy-busting data collection.
But how have we developed? When was the last thing you heard anything positive about new software? The number one complaint is that the vendors don't seem to know how users actually use the software and thus make stupid changes. This goes back a good 10+ years now.
Now they introduce telemetry to actually find out how users use software and the users lose their shit.
How did we develop? Poorly!
Everything else is unnecessary and simply bloatware.
Yes precisely as evidenced by ... a very active extension ecosystem. Wait what?
Sorry but the list for a decent browser is far longer than that. We argue about fine details here all the time. Your list barely scratches the surface.
Mozilla collects too much data. This is the number three complaint right behind:
Why are there so many bugs in Firefox?
Why does Mozilla not listen to me?
I'm wondering if this is controllable from the OS itself in a clear way. From what I've seen (or rather not seen) there's no settings on the device to control the Google's "Where is my phone" function.
Even now the only function I can find to control this is Samsung specific. They rolled their own version of this for some reason.
Sounds like a case of go buy whatever current LTO tape drive, dump all your stuff to tape once a week, and go store/rotate the tapes in a safe deposit box at the bank.
For the cost of a current LTO solution you can buy 3 or 4 of those 10TB archive HDDs and not need to deal with an entirely new concept for the home use (tape backup) as well.
The questioner only has a small amount of data to back up.
What is it with people and not reading today. Let me once again reply to someone by simply quoting something:
Fine for a little phone, but not for the several TB worth of video I have shot over the years.
What if the owncloud server dies, and your busy/on vacation/ etc and it goes a few weeks before you can get over to your friends to rebuild it and fix it etc... now your operating with just the copy on your local pc. And are vulnerable to theft, fire, hardware failure... etc.
What if dropbox goes down?
Actually your what-if scenario strikes close to home. I was in Australia 2 weeks ago while my server motherboard shat itself (only just got the library up and running again 20min ago).
What I actually did was upload any changed files to dropbox as a backup while I was in transit. I didn't need to rely on it, and I didn't upload anywhere near my whole library, but effectively the emergency backup plan was quite similar to what you proposed.
Mind you the "risk" you are talking about was a week or two of in transit data. My proposal included backups, not just relying on the owncloud itself. Even if my laptop was stolen and my own-cloud server caught fire (rather than just motherboard failure) there was still the backup I store at work.
your backup isn't sufficiently separated for your primary.
Let me quote myself:
Leave that at work, at a friend's house or in a deposit box.
Do you even comma man?
Having been the victim of a company (Tesla) modifying a product after purchase to remove functionality that I specifically paid for
What functionality did you specifically pay for, and did they advertise that functionality as working exactly as you thought it did at the time. If you're talking about the restrictions they placed on autopilot, then you paid for something that was not advertised in the way you thought you remember it.
Where are they getting these used laptop batteries that still have life in them?
They aren't. They are getting used laptop battery cells that still have life in them. Most laptop batteries will typically be dead when only one cell has crapped itself.
Charge and discharge test each individual cell and dispose of the faulty one.
But this seems to be a really, really bad idea. Just on the face of it.
My friend cut himself sharpening his knife the other day. On the face of it, pretty much everything seems like a bad idea if you have no idea what you're doing.
Considering the odds of being in a terrorist attack are incredibly low, and yet you apparently know two people who were in them or nearby. I call bullshit.
Nearby is not just spatially but also temporal.
Two? I actually know about 5. Another colleague of mine was in Brussels in a cafe opposite the train station which was bombed. A good friend of mine was at a Christmas market in Berlin on the 18th (one day out, and a market 2km away, but since I didn't know the exact details at the time it becomes irrelevant). I myself was contacted by my family while I was in Paris due to the "terrorist attack" at Place d'Italie. Turns out it wasn't an attack, just an electrical transformer that had gone up, and it was my local metro station while I was there on work.
Basically you need a statics lesson. There's a good chapter in one of my stats books "Why coincidences are certain." Take the number of possible people you know, with the number of possible ways they could die in groups, add an uncertainty of a day or two, and a few km around an area and I bet you that you know more than 1 person who you weren't certain if they were affected as well. Plus I live in a country surrounded by countries constantly having terror attacks, and we europeans get around. I actually have friends who live in nearly every city affected by the past few years worth of attacks, including small ones like Nice.
Also - you can just as easily message people without using Facebook.
Yeah I can. But carriers often throttle spam messages like that or don't deliver them. Plus why would I selectively send messages out to people without knowing if they are interested in my status or not? You do realise the concept of a bulletin board style one-to-many communication systems predate not only Facebook, but also predate electricity right? There's a reason these services exist.
You're just playing idiotic semantic games by trying to substitute "anxiety" for "fear" and trying to pretend the latter is different while demonstrating that you treat them as equivalent.
No. "Fear" in the context of terrorism has a very specific meaning. The fear of the terrorist. The fear to the personal self.
Anxiety due to not knowing status of someone is not a fear. I don't* fear that someone may be dead, but I'm anxious to know if they are alive. Calling it semantics is just a failure of understanding of language.
*unless they own me lots of money. :-)
Except for something large scale
Interesting qualification given that this is generally what the feature has been used for.
I do empathise. I feel sadness that you and your "we" are living lives of anxiety.
You not having anxiety when a friend / family member is known to be in the mediate vicinity of a terrorist attack shows that you do in fact not empathise at all.
Ouch. I hate when that happens! Just stop fucking with my software already!
I never did try Picasa. What am I missing?
Feature wise not much. To be honest I'm probably the one missing something since I never used ACDsee or Picasa for any of their cataloguing or editing functions. I was using them mostly as image viewers. My requirements for those were simple:
1. Light weight.
2. Have zoom to fit, zoom to 100% as quick options. (continuous zoom is a bonus)
3. Interpolation other than nearest neighbour when zooming.
4. Support automatic conversion of the image colour to the monitor profile (I have a wide gamut monitor so if this isn't done colours look hyper saturated)
5. Easy scrolling and switching between images.
- ACDSee split their light weight viewer out from their main viewer. The main viewer fails on 1. The lightweight viewer fails on 3 and 4.
- Windows Picture viewer (windows 7) fails 2 and 4
- Windows Picture viewer (windows 10) fails on 5 since it relies on integration of the explorer to decide what images to display next. e.g. I click on a downloaded jpg in Chrome's download window and I can't scroll between any other pictures even thought there's more in the downloads folder. It also fails on 1 since MS is trying to turn it into a social networking application cum movie player. (I kid you not one of the insider previews renamed the Photo Viewer to "Story Remix" whatever the fuck that is supposed to mean). It also is slow to scroll.
- Irfanview sort of failed on 4 because it was unable to automatically read the monitor profile and it needed to be set manually in the settings, so on my laptop which I sometimes plug into my monitor it would have the colours incorrect unless I change it at every dock.
But really something that has grown on me is Picasa's no nonesense auto-fading interface http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AB3p... and simple keystroke navigation. pgup/down zooms fit/100%/400%, up/down arrows are stepless zoom. left right previous / next. Defaults to fullscreen but hitting enter makes it windowed. esc key exits. moving the mouse to the bottom exposes a scrollbar of images in the folder as well as control buttons for the keyboard impaired.
Remote brick is not the same as a recognised requirement to update firmware periodically. Not even remotely (pun intended).
When dealing with large collections and video the last thing that you really want to deal with is the slow backup / restore process to the Cloud when something goes wrong. The Cloud is not really a good option for backups IMO.
If you have a public facing IP and a satisfactory enough upload then home-hosting sounds like a decent solution. A small Linux / Unix box like a FreeNAS or something similar running Seafile or OwnCloud can provide you a cloud server. Clients are available for every OS and even mobile devices for remote access. And for actual backups, an Archive HDD like the 8-10TB models on the market should suffice. Leave that at work, at a friend's house or in a deposit box.
This gives you:
- cross platform
- no cost
- in your house very fast access to the "cloud" (remote access speed will depend on not being in Australia an hampered with shithouse internet)
- your own in control backup strategy
- your own in control deleted file retention strategy
- the ability to share content easily as with all other services
- security of being your own small self and thus a less likely target than a big provider
That's why they said "as a cookie can be". Some people think every cookie tastes foul.
But the very fact that the maker of your product can now KILL IT via remote software? How is this NOT a major strike against this company?
Probably because it's not true and media reporting is going down the shitter making everyone angry for no reason.
The DJI drones frequently need to check for updates to the no-fly zones or they don't take off. Updates are mandatory and this will be pushed like every other one. Aside that it is in the media this is just situation normal for owners of DJI drones (which need mobile phones to fly anyway).
or if I'm assaulted and have a broken nose, a black eye and blood on my face, will the "facial recognition" still unlock my phone and let me call the cops?
As one of my friend's Facebook updates last week comically showed, at least on a Surface Pro, no, blood on your face does not let you unlock the screen :-)
However, what kind of phone do you have that requires you to unlock in order to make an emergency call? I don't think I've seen one like that before.
But it's hard to believe. Apple sold ApplePay to banks and card companies based on the security of their fingerprint scanner.
And those same companies have not problem dealing with Android on basic NFC, rolling their own apps some of which don't even require the phone to be unlocked to use.
Security didn't come into it, it just made for some good marketing to a population which was freaking out at the concept of anything more "secure" than drawing a funny line on a receipt.
now police wont even have to physical force you to unlock the phone they can just point it at you gg apple
Wait for the next iOS release feature: Sticking your tongue out while trying to unlock the phone wipes all facial recognition data.
Most trains will tend to slow down in the case of an emergency. The question is how quickly they slow down and what they hit whilst doing so.
The trick is not slowing down, it's detecting the emergency. Most trains don't do this very well at all.