You get half a page of tiles when you open the start menu (the other half being the actual start menu you're looking for.)
Remove all the stupid default tiles and put in the programs you like to have easy access to and its actually quite handy -- the win10 tiles are nowhere near the cumbersome and ugly mess that the win8 start "menu" was.
Yep. Chrome informed me that it was time to complete disable the Adobe auto-updater.
FYI: Create a dword called bUpdate in \HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockDown.. set it to 0 to completely disable updates or 1 to only disable the auto-updates and leave the manual checking available in the menu.
Of course who knows how long before they decide to change or just flat out ignore that entry. But it works for now.
And running decades worth of business software that isn't available or easy to port to Linux or Mac.
And frankly most people don't give enough shits to go through the hoops of setting up Linux and then Wine just so they can run something that they could have plugged in and ran without any hassle on the pre-installed OS that came with their computer.
It does all of this, though it'll eventually force the issue with regard to your second point if you tell it to postpone too many times.
Look at your windows update configuration. Chances are you have your active hours set to something dumb.
My biggest issue with windows update is that it happily kills unsaved work. It really shouldn't force a reboot if its unable to close any program that has a visible UI window until the user has had a chance to deal with it, given that a large majority of the time the reason a program doesn't close on request is because its waiting for a "Save? Yes/no/cancel" response.
Of course someone would immediately come up with a program that just sits there popping up UI dialogs explicitly designed to prevent update reboots but its not like people who are willing to go to those extremes can't just disable the WU service anyway.
Actually he's probably talking about the service release 1 install. That one was a monster and took forever, and yeah if you didn't do it right away there was usually additional post-SP updates waiting for you. It was also a staggered rollout over a month or more so if you were at the end of the rollout, there was almost certainly a handful of additional updates waiting for you.
Most updates are not that bad though. That one was just flat out big.
The reason its so hard to get rid of ISIS is because we don't particularly like the concept of civilian casualties and they use that to their advantage (set up their command centers in schools or highly populated areas or whatnot that we're unwilling to destroy.)
If we gave up on that ethic, ISIS would be gone in a week -- we'd just bomb the hell out of half of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else we consider to be ISIS strongholds and the problem would be solved.
15% of our current population is about 1 billion people. We had 1 billion people by around 1800. There had been plenty of wars by that point, over resources or otherwise.
Estimates suggest under 70 million people around the time of Rome's collapse. That's ~1% of our current population. And we still fought over land and resources.
Basically, as long as there's two humans within shouting distance of each other, we'll find some resource, even a relatively useless one, that's limited enough to justify fighting over it. We just love conflict, historically speaking.
(Numbers from the "World population" Wikipedia article but still, its accurate enough for my point.)
And all that said, "well-off" is definitely a relative term. Sure we might have lots of available land but unless the survivors have a lot of farming knowledge, that land is going to be fairly useless until we re-develop the technology. All of us folk who sit around on our computers and buy all our food from the grocery store are going to have some serious issues when the power grid is offline. We'd all have to learn, very quickly, how to live like it was 1800 again. Or die in the attempt.
Our interest is unambiguously in *not* allowing warming to happen
That's unfortunately not true, and why there's still so much misinformation out there. There's a lot of very powerful people whose interest is very unambiguously "make more money than any person could ever possibly need, regardless of the consequences." And they are doing everything they can dream up to retain the status quo even if its likely to be the end of us all sooner or later.
Its the Devil's farts! He's given up trying to drag us all down to hell and is now trying to turn the entire Earth into his domain! Armageddon is coming if we don't hurry up and stop Abbadogenic Global Warming!
Likely not a whole lot. Couple days of a dev's salary to find and fix the problem. Sounds like its being included in an already-planned update to Safari so there shouldn't be much if anything in the way of extra distribution costs.
CR may have charged a consulting fee if it took the people on their side more than a couple emails but that wouldn't add up to significant amounts either -- at least not when scaled against the depths of Apple's pockets.
From how I read it, CR released the report.. Apple went "wtf that's not right" and then asked CR to help them solve a problem. This sounds like fairly standard debugging practices to me -- discover a problem, figure out how to duplicate it, and then fix it.
The fact that it was CR that ran into the problem rather than some random guy on the internet posting a rant on Reddit is just luck and maybe makes for a "fun" story for conspiracy nuts, but it doesn't indicate that either party did anything that they shouldn't have done or was being shady or misrepresenting facts or anything like that.
Sure CR added an update to their original report but didn't try to redact the problem out of existence. It seems to me to have been handled completely appropriately by both parties.
In new buildings, wiring frequently is added. There's a whole lot of not-new buildings still out there though.
I don't know about PoE. I was under the impression that it went the other way around (power runs over cat5 rather than IP over standard power wiring.)
Even if it can be run over existing power cables (of who knows what age/quality) though there's still the issue of it not being anywhere near common enough for device manufacturers to include in the box, and people having to set it up themselves has those more-cost and more-effort issues again -- maybe a lot lower than rewiring their house but as long as its non-zero, its still a huge barrier against general acceptance.
lets their food spoil, and they die of food poisoning
Somehow this hypothetical fridge is complicated enough that your grandparents manage to cook and eat rotten food without noticing the smell or look of it? That's one hell of an impressive feat!
A TV that won't even let Dad change channels until he connects to a hotspot and logs into his Microsoft account
This one is probably already true, sadly enough.
Nobody wants or needs this crap!
They might not need it, but they sure as hell want it and that's good enough to drive sales.
Weird. Guess it depends where you are. I see hardly any.. maybe 1 in 10 or so, not counting things like coffee shops and other business-run hotspots (which are usually "open" in that anyone can connect, but requires you to punch an agree button before it'll let you connect to the internet.)
Of course where I live, both of our major ISPs provide wifi routers with serialized default passwords (ie: different for each unit,) so the only people with open wifi are people who explicitly want to allow strangers on their network (or the occasional person who has a really really old router,) which isn't very many.
I suppose in places where the ISPs don't provide security by default, the situation would likely be different. But I'd blame that on the ISPs more than the consumers -- ISPs should know (and do) better while Grandma Ester really shouldn't be required to think about these things just to visit some quilting websites.
We shouldn't waste our time fighting against the future -- its coming whether you like it or not, because it IS awesome, or at least has the potential to be.
What we should be doing is fighting to make sure that when the future comes, its not a shit show. Convince these companies that securing their devices and protecting our privacy are actually important things to consider when they build the software that operates these devices.
Unfortunately we have too many people trying to do the former and too few bothering with the latter.
DDoSers don't need to lobby anybody. Smart devices sell well so companies keep making them, and there's no impetus for making them secure so of course they aren't. LG and others are quite happy to cut corners all on their own.
I don't want a smart TV
You and statistically close to nobody else. People love their fancy new toys, and don't know or care about the implications until they personally get burned in a serious manner.
Trouble with that is most people don't have cat5 running everywhere, nor do they want to have even more cables and cords draped all over the place.
Wifi is easy and common. Nobody's going to care enough to build a non-wifi device at this point. The threat of a drive-by hacking just isn't big enough to matter across the scale of the population.
Network-originated attacks are the real concern. Its a reasonably small concern right now since most people are still behind an IPv4 NAT and those devices aren't addressable to anyone who isn't already inside your network. Its going to become a bigger and bigger problem as IPv6 rollouts keep expanding though and suddenly every device in the world is globally addressable. Then we'll have to start dealing with actual firewalls and all the hassle that comes with that -- and have to do so in a way that can be essentially transparent to the technically illiterate and "just works."
That's probably not a big deal. Consumer APs will likely be improved to match the demand long before the demand hits most people, and existing APs that suck too much can just be called "incompatible" and users forced to upgrade. We're a long way from 40+ wireless devices in your average household though. We're maybe pushing 20ish even in situations where roommates share an internet connection but each have their own set of game systems and whatever.
What's more concerning is if they all start sending video feeds (even periodic still images if the period isn't long enough.) That could start eating into bandwidth pretty hard if manufacturers design devices as if they were the only thing on the network (not entirely unlikely I'm afraid.)
I don't think he was serious about the permits. I think he was making a joke about possible future regulation (because apparently "has a computer" seems to work just as well for dystopian future jokes as well as it does for patent applications.)
Going that far would probably be too much, and its not really necessary anyway since most devices break down within 5 years anyway which if you think about it, could be considered a "subscription" that you have to renew every half decade.
Not to mention things like payment plans which essentially are monthly subscriptions except when it expires, your fridge is repossessed rather than disabled.
After all, it's not like LG makes decisions by polling current customers.
Actually they probably do. Market research and focus groups and the such are frequently used to judge consumer reactions to new products. They're not going to drop millions into R&D on a product nobody wants.
Slashdot is a bit of an echo chamber with regards to such developments since most of the user base is reasonably technically literate and understand (or at least can guess, often extrapolating to unlikely extremes..) where privacy and security implications lie in products like these.
The wider populace doesn't necessarily have those views and its almost certain LG did indeed show the "you can check your milk from your cell phone" feature to a room full of people pulled off the street who all went "oooooh shiny!"
Slashdot Mirror
You get half a page of tiles when you open the start menu (the other half being the actual start menu you're looking for.)
Remove all the stupid default tiles and put in the programs you like to have easy access to and its actually quite handy -- the win10 tiles are nowhere near the cumbersome and ugly mess that the win8 start "menu" was.
Because its unfair to Adobe if only Google and Microsoft are allowed to track your usage! You want to be fair don't you?
Yep. Chrome informed me that it was time to complete disable the Adobe auto-updater.
FYI: Create a dword called bUpdate in \HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat Reader\DC\FeatureLockDown.. set it to 0 to completely disable updates or 1 to only disable the auto-updates and leave the manual checking available in the menu.
Of course who knows how long before they decide to change or just flat out ignore that entry. But it works for now.
And running decades worth of business software that isn't available or easy to port to Linux or Mac.
And frankly most people don't give enough shits to go through the hoops of setting up Linux and then Wine just so they can run something that they could have plugged in and ran without any hassle on the pre-installed OS that came with their computer.
It does all of this, though it'll eventually force the issue with regard to your second point if you tell it to postpone too many times.
Look at your windows update configuration. Chances are you have your active hours set to something dumb.
My biggest issue with windows update is that it happily kills unsaved work. It really shouldn't force a reboot if its unable to close any program that has a visible UI window until the user has had a chance to deal with it, given that a large majority of the time the reason a program doesn't close on request is because its waiting for a "Save? Yes/no/cancel" response.
Of course someone would immediately come up with a program that just sits there popping up UI dialogs explicitly designed to prevent update reboots but its not like people who are willing to go to those extremes can't just disable the WU service anyway.
Actually he's probably talking about the service release 1 install. That one was a monster and took forever, and yeah if you didn't do it right away there was usually additional post-SP updates waiting for you. It was also a staggered rollout over a month or more so if you were at the end of the rollout, there was almost certainly a handful of additional updates waiting for you.
Most updates are not that bad though. That one was just flat out big.
The reason its so hard to get rid of ISIS is because we don't particularly like the concept of civilian casualties and they use that to their advantage (set up their command centers in schools or highly populated areas or whatnot that we're unwilling to destroy.)
If we gave up on that ethic, ISIS would be gone in a week -- we'd just bomb the hell out of half of Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and anywhere else we consider to be ISIS strongholds and the problem would be solved.
15% of our current population is about 1 billion people. We had 1 billion people by around 1800. There had been plenty of wars by that point, over resources or otherwise.
Estimates suggest under 70 million people around the time of Rome's collapse. That's ~1% of our current population. And we still fought over land and resources.
Basically, as long as there's two humans within shouting distance of each other, we'll find some resource, even a relatively useless one, that's limited enough to justify fighting over it. We just love conflict, historically speaking.
(Numbers from the "World population" Wikipedia article but still, its accurate enough for my point.)
And all that said, "well-off" is definitely a relative term. Sure we might have lots of available land but unless the survivors have a lot of farming knowledge, that land is going to be fairly useless until we re-develop the technology. All of us folk who sit around on our computers and buy all our food from the grocery store are going to have some serious issues when the power grid is offline. We'd all have to learn, very quickly, how to live like it was 1800 again. Or die in the attempt.
Our interest is unambiguously in *not* allowing warming to happen
That's unfortunately not true, and why there's still so much misinformation out there. There's a lot of very powerful people whose interest is very unambiguously "make more money than any person could ever possibly need, regardless of the consequences." And they are doing everything they can dream up to retain the status quo even if its likely to be the end of us all sooner or later.
Its the Devil's farts! He's given up trying to drag us all down to hell and is now trying to turn the entire Earth into his domain! Armageddon is coming if we don't hurry up and stop Abbadogenic Global Warming!
To be fair, that block of text with almost no punctuation or whitespace is somewhat difficult to comprehend..
Its not snowing where I am, so you're obviously wrong about everything!
Man that was a convincing argument.
Likely not a whole lot. Couple days of a dev's salary to find and fix the problem. Sounds like its being included in an already-planned update to Safari so there shouldn't be much if anything in the way of extra distribution costs.
CR may have charged a consulting fee if it took the people on their side more than a couple emails but that wouldn't add up to significant amounts either -- at least not when scaled against the depths of Apple's pockets.
They have updated it now to note that a fix has been produced and they're waiting to re-test with the fix (that part hasn't been done yet I guess.)
From how I read it, CR released the report.. Apple went "wtf that's not right" and then asked CR to help them solve a problem. This sounds like fairly standard debugging practices to me -- discover a problem, figure out how to duplicate it, and then fix it.
The fact that it was CR that ran into the problem rather than some random guy on the internet posting a rant on Reddit is just luck and maybe makes for a "fun" story for conspiracy nuts, but it doesn't indicate that either party did anything that they shouldn't have done or was being shady or misrepresenting facts or anything like that.
Sure CR added an update to their original report but didn't try to redact the problem out of existence. It seems to me to have been handled completely appropriately by both parties.
In new buildings, wiring frequently is added. There's a whole lot of not-new buildings still out there though.
I don't know about PoE. I was under the impression that it went the other way around (power runs over cat5 rather than IP over standard power wiring.)
Even if it can be run over existing power cables (of who knows what age/quality) though there's still the issue of it not being anywhere near common enough for device manufacturers to include in the box, and people having to set it up themselves has those more-cost and more-effort issues again -- maybe a lot lower than rewiring their house but as long as its non-zero, its still a huge barrier against general acceptance.
lets their food spoil, and they die of food poisoning
Somehow this hypothetical fridge is complicated enough that your grandparents manage to cook and eat rotten food without noticing the smell or look of it? That's one hell of an impressive feat!
A TV that won't even let Dad change channels until he connects to a hotspot and logs into his Microsoft account
This one is probably already true, sadly enough.
Nobody wants or needs this crap!
They might not need it, but they sure as hell want it and that's good enough to drive sales.
Weird. Guess it depends where you are. I see hardly any.. maybe 1 in 10 or so, not counting things like coffee shops and other business-run hotspots (which are usually "open" in that anyone can connect, but requires you to punch an agree button before it'll let you connect to the internet.)
Of course where I live, both of our major ISPs provide wifi routers with serialized default passwords (ie: different for each unit,) so the only people with open wifi are people who explicitly want to allow strangers on their network (or the occasional person who has a really really old router,) which isn't very many.
I suppose in places where the ISPs don't provide security by default, the situation would likely be different. But I'd blame that on the ISPs more than the consumers -- ISPs should know (and do) better while Grandma Ester really shouldn't be required to think about these things just to visit some quilting websites.
calls it a fucking awesome feature.
Whats not awesome about it?
We shouldn't waste our time fighting against the future -- its coming whether you like it or not, because it IS awesome, or at least has the potential to be.
What we should be doing is fighting to make sure that when the future comes, its not a shit show. Convince these companies that securing their devices and protecting our privacy are actually important things to consider when they build the software that operates these devices.
Unfortunately we have too many people trying to do the former and too few bothering with the latter.
a ton of pull with major manufacturers
DDoSers don't need to lobby anybody. Smart devices sell well so companies keep making them, and there's no impetus for making them secure so of course they aren't. LG and others are quite happy to cut corners all on their own.
I don't want a smart TV
You and statistically close to nobody else.
People love their fancy new toys, and don't know or care about the implications until they personally get burned in a serious manner.
Trouble with that is most people don't have cat5 running everywhere, nor do they want to have even more cables and cords draped all over the place.
Wifi is easy and common. Nobody's going to care enough to build a non-wifi device at this point. The threat of a drive-by hacking just isn't big enough to matter across the scale of the population.
Network-originated attacks are the real concern. Its a reasonably small concern right now since most people are still behind an IPv4 NAT and those devices aren't addressable to anyone who isn't already inside your network. Its going to become a bigger and bigger problem as IPv6 rollouts keep expanding though and suddenly every device in the world is globally addressable. Then we'll have to start dealing with actual firewalls and all the hassle that comes with that -- and have to do so in a way that can be essentially transparent to the technically illiterate and "just works."
That's probably not a big deal. Consumer APs will likely be improved to match the demand long before the demand hits most people, and existing APs that suck too much can just be called "incompatible" and users forced to upgrade. We're a long way from 40+ wireless devices in your average household though. We're maybe pushing 20ish even in situations where roommates share an internet connection but each have their own set of game systems and whatever.
What's more concerning is if they all start sending video feeds (even periodic still images if the period isn't long enough.) That could start eating into bandwidth pretty hard if manufacturers design devices as if they were the only thing on the network (not entirely unlikely I'm afraid.)
I don't think he was serious about the permits. I think he was making a joke about possible future regulation (because apparently "has a computer" seems to work just as well for dystopian future jokes as well as it does for patent applications.)
Or maybe he just lives in an insane jurisdiction.
Going that far would probably be too much, and its not really necessary anyway since most devices break down within 5 years anyway which if you think about it, could be considered a "subscription" that you have to renew every half decade.
Not to mention things like payment plans which essentially are monthly subscriptions except when it expires, your fridge is repossessed rather than disabled.
After all, it's not like LG makes decisions by polling current customers.
Actually they probably do. Market research and focus groups and the such are frequently used to judge consumer reactions to new products. They're not going to drop millions into R&D on a product nobody wants.
Slashdot is a bit of an echo chamber with regards to such developments since most of the user base is reasonably technically literate and understand (or at least can guess, often extrapolating to unlikely extremes..) where privacy and security implications lie in products like these.
The wider populace doesn't necessarily have those views and its almost certain LG did indeed show the "you can check your milk from your cell phone" feature to a room full of people pulled off the street who all went "oooooh shiny!"