Menus are passe. Nowadays you're supposed to just search for everything! Want to start Word? You don't need to just click on an icon, you need to select a search box and then type "word" to find it. Want to see what software is installed on that PC? You don't need to know that, just search for what you want!
Will it be too little too late? Under the hood Win 8 is really not that much different from Win 7. Probably better. If you can keep corporate desktop users from having to screw around with Metro ever and make it look like Win 7 corporate use may pickup.
I'm doubtful. Metro isn't going to work for corporate desktop users, and MS seems intent on forcing Metro on users one way or another because they think they'll learn to love it and then go buy Windows Phones and Surface tablets. Sure, there's 3rd-party programs you can get to help avoid Metro, but corporate IT departments never add stuff like that to their "standard build".
I realize that you have not met me but I use Win 8.1 everyday at work and love it (took a while to get used too bout the same as Win7 did from XP)
Oh please. Win7 was not different at all from WinXP; to the casual user, Win7 just looks like a re-skin of XP, except now the task bar shows tasks differently (using big icons instead of small icons with text), and there's a little area on the right with indicators/controls for things like WiFi, battery, etc. Overall, the usage is almost the same.
Win8 is a complete sea-change from Win7/XP, at least until you can find the desktop, and even then you're still going right back to Metro any time you bring up the "start" menu.
There's companies working on alternative software/firmware for auto infotainment systems? I seriously doubt that. There's companies developing these systems specifically for the automakers of course (Ford and GM don't actually design and build their own infotainment/navigation systems, they get stuff like that from suppliers), but these places aren't going to make alternative software; why would they? And why would the automakers want alternative software for systems they've already bought and installed in cars which they've sold?
The only people interested in reverse-engineering existing, installed systems are going to be technically-inclined end-users, or people interested in selling to those end-users.
And I'm not sure I follow the logic of your 1st generation theory. When new features are added that might limit a user, that is the time when they are most often made to be optionally switched off. A manufacturer releasing child locks as a new feature wouldn't want to risk losing sales of the car to people people without kids, if it got a reputation for being awkward to get out of.
Yes, I'm sure you're right, at least for times past (which is when child locks came out). These days, it seems like the opposite is true: companies now want to force you into doing things a particular way and want to remove all choice and configurability. Just look at all the new UIs these days.
Also, NASA worked pretty well back during the Apollo days, before the military came in with their idiotic requirements that led to the overpriced debacle that was the Space Shuttle (and even there, NASA worked fairly well with the requirements they were given). They're still doing great science now, even though their budget is tiny.
That's about all I can think of. Basically, the more autonomous and separated the agency is from any politicians, the better it works. If it's directly managed by politicians, it's going to be a total clusterfuck.
And yes, you can try to get an older car and keep it running, but how much time do you have on your hands for that kind of project? After a while, lots of things start to fall apart on a car and it becomes more and more of a chore to keep it in good shape, and when something fails when you're on the way to work, that seriously affects your livelihood (and costs a bunch of money in towing). And what if you don't have a garage to do all this maintenance and repair work in? Lots of people live in apartments, and garages are expensive luxuries.
No, you don't need to buy a new car to avoid a maintenance nightmare; there's lots of good cars that are 5-10 years old and still run really well. (I'm in the market for one of these myself very soon, so I've been looking at these factors: used vs. new, etc.). Yes, you can buy a ~2003 or ~2007-model car and probably not have to worry about being tracked this way. But eventually that 10-year old car is going to be 15+ years old, and will be falling apart, and you'll want to get something a little newer, and now the good used cars will be the ones from today, which all have tracking systems, so all you've done is delayed the issue.
Choosing another option only makes sense if the other options are actually different.
Because not tracking everything is out of the question for some reason.
It is if all the producers have conspired together, or independently come to the same conclusion, that they want to track you.
No, of course not. Someone else here pointed out that Australia is a big provider of tantalum.
All I'm doing is making the point that it's much easier to boycott some items than others. Diamonds are easy: no one actually needs them for anything, unless you buy that bullshit that DeBeers tries to convince everyone about diamond engagement rings. But materials used for technological purposes are a little different, and harder to work around.. Now, someone else here has pointed out that tantalum capacitors aren't as necessary now as they used to be with ceramics and solid-electrolyte electrolytics seriously challenging them (and outperforming them in some ways apparently), so maybe we don't really need tantalum that much any more, I dunno. But China has a big record of human rights abuses too, but good luck not buying anything made there. Diamonds I can easily swear off. Tantalum, maybe I don't need that any more, I'm not sure. But stuff made in China? Sorry, it's pretty hard to live without that since it's very difficult now to find things that aren't made there, and for many classes of products, that's all the choice you have.
Ok, but then who should we buy from? This dumbass VP obviously spilled the beans, but doesn't every car company do the same thing these days? Or do they? Is it just higher-end cars, and certain brands like Ford, which install GPS tracking on all their cars, or are they all doing it now? Honestly, I don't know. While there are a lot of cars now with touchscreens and built-in nav systems, there's still lots of lower-end cars which don't have any of that stuff and are still pretty basic. Do they have hidden GPS systems too?
What I'd like to know is: how are they getting this data back to Ford? Doing this would likely require a cellular connection. Telcos aren't in the business of giving out free cellular connections; if I want to put a cellular card in my laptop, for instance, so I can access the internet without needing a nearby public-access WiFi hotspot, I have to pay a monthly fee (probably $30/month) for the data service. Do Ford cars require you to pay a monthly fee for cellular service now? Or has Ford negotiated a deal with one of the carriers to allow indefinite-duration cellular service for their cars?
Finally, what would happen if you were to disable the cellular link? It can't be that hard to do.
All very difficult to do. Every built-in nav system is likely different (esp. carmaker to carmaker, less so model-to-model, but still they surely have different "generations" of their built-in nav systems), and the information on how to get access to that system and reflash it is all proprietary and secret. You'd need a lot of documentation, or a lot of time to reverse-engineer it, and there's always the danger of "bricking" it like with any such community project. But bricking your car's built-in nav system (which might also be integrated with the HVAC system, radio, etc.) would be a big problem, unlike bricking some $50 consumer router from Netgear or Linksys because you want to port OpenWRT or DD-WRT to it. So you're not going to find a lot of people interested in taking on that project as a volunteer, unlike the alternative-firmware projects for various inexpensive consumer items.
Replacing the nav with an aftermarket model isn't trivial either, since it'd have to fit into the same space. Just do a google search and look for systems that replace factory systems for any car; good luck. You probably won't find much, or it'll be some weird system from Taiwan for well over $500 with documentation in Mandarin. Worse, many cars today integrate the nav system with the HVAC and radio, as I said above. You're not going to find some open-source aftermarket system to replace that. It'd be cool if someone took that on as an open-source project like OpenWRT, but again, there's so many different cars out there, and the consequences for screwing up are high, so it really isn't all that feasible.
What planet do you live on? What other large sites out there allow users to post videos? YouTube is easily, by far, the largest site of its type.
GMail doesn't seem market dominant, but I'd be willing to look at numbers if you have them relative to Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Outlook.com
Here again you seem to be out of touch with reality, but maybe not so much as with the YouTube comment above. Hotmail has been going down for ages, ever since the MS takeover and conversion to "Live", though maybe they're doing a little better now with outlook.com but I kinda doubt it, and Yahoo's been going down the toilet for years now too. I don't have any hard data, but I definitely see far more people with Gmail addresses than the other two.
There aren't really any great options when it comes to phones. You can get an Android phone, which is inexpensive but has Google's tentacles in it, or you can get an iPhone which is expensive as hell and forces you to stay confined to Apple's walled garden and their One True Way of doing everything and fuels a company which now seems have taken the crown of most evil corporation (in the tech sector) away from MS, or you can get a Windows Phone which is ugly, forces you to do everything in MS's One True Way of doing everything, and fuels what is now the second most evil corporation in the tech sector.
AFAICT, the best option is probably going to be getting an Android phone, and then reflashing it with one of those alternative firmwares like CyanogenMod which doesn't have everything linked to Google.
To some extent this strategy of simply labeling, as in differentiating regular from "conflict" or "blood" sources, sort of worked out ok for diamonds. Not completely, of course, but it absolutely helps.
There's a bit of a difference between blood diamonds and blood capacitors. You don't actually need diamonds for anything. Industrial diamonds (which you actually use for useful purposes) are cheap and easy to get, since they're incredibly small (basically diamond dust). The larger ones have no practical uses; they're only used for jewelry. So if you want to avoid fueling tribal warlords, it's easy: you don't buy diamonds, and instead buy something else like cubic zirconia, Swarovski crystals, or other gemstones like sapphires, rubies, emeralds, etc. (many of which are now artificially-created anyway).
Tantalum isn't used for jewelry, it's used for capacitors. Not only that, it's used for extremely high-performance capacitors. So you could stop using it, and switch to other types of capacitors, but you're probably going to suffer for it somehow, because AFAIK nothing else can match the volumetric efficiency of tantalum at this time. You could switch to standard electrolytics, but those don't really fit into smartphones and iPads. You could switch to multilayer ceramics, but those probably won't give you the required capacitance, so you'll have to use lots of them, so your smartphone will need to be 50% larger.
It's the same problem we have with oil; we can't easily switch to something else, or do without, without severely affecting our technology and quality-of-life, so we fuel conflicts in certain parts of the world which happen to be rich in that natural resource.
That's like 20 years out of date. QBZ-95 is hardly an AK clone at this point, for example.
Wow, that QBZ-95 is very impressive-looking from the Wikipedia article. Looks much more advanced than the US military's standard rifles: bullpup design, 4-position selector (so you get both full-auto and 3-round-burst) and it looks like they put a lot of thought into making it more controllable during full-auto fire. Too bad we can't be as innovative as the Chinese....
At least as far as all the military contracts go, the requirement is that the winner manufactures them in the USA. So M9, M249, M27 IAR, M4A1 etc are all made in US, even though the plants are owned by Beretta, FN etc.
Yes of course; the Chinese do something very similar, forcing companies to progressively move all production and know-how to China until they no longer need the vendor company at all. The US obviously doesn't quite go that far, since they never design their own guns or shed the foreign vendor company in favor of domestic companies.
FAL is very much outdated
Sorry, another error of mine: I meant "FN", the company itself, not a specific gun. FN makes the P90 and F2000 (if I'm getting my model numbers right), both very modern weapons.
Sorry, you're correct. I was thinking of some other bullpup rifle, whose name escapes me now, which is used by much of Britain's military. I think the Steyr is actually used in Australia, as well as Austria of course. (A quick look at the Wikipedia page for the AUG confirms it's used in Australia plus lots of other places.)
While looking at the Wiki page, I noticed another thing I'll use to bash the AR-15 so loved by Americans: it's not ambidextrous. The Steyr AUG is, as well as FAL's rifles, and probably many others. What kind of POS rifle can't be fired by left-handed users? Maybe that was acceptable in 1960, but these days there's just no excuse for that.
1 more thing. You've gotta be quite the sack of crap to not clean your own carpets. For the price of a cleaning you can just buy a cleaner. Fuckin idiots.
Most people don't have their own steam equipment. A serious steam-cleaning service has to have a whole van to hold that, and run a hose from the van into the house; it's not something that can be made portable. A water-based cleaner you can buy at Walmart, which you're probably thinking of, will not clean a carpet the way steam-cleaning does. I don't know if the company in question is a steam-cleaning service, but if you're going to hire a service to clean carpets, make sure to use a steam-cleaning service.
Is that true on all cars, even way back when the feature was new (probably the 80s)? I wouldn't be surprised if some first generation cars didn't offer that option.
Slashdot Mirror
Menus are passe. Nowadays you're supposed to just search for everything! Want to start Word? You don't need to just click on an icon, you need to select a search box and then type "word" to find it. Want to see what software is installed on that PC? You don't need to know that, just search for what you want!
Will it be too little too late? Under the hood Win 8 is really not that much different from Win 7. Probably better. If you can keep corporate desktop users from having to screw around with Metro ever and make it look like Win 7 corporate use may pickup.
I'm doubtful. Metro isn't going to work for corporate desktop users, and MS seems intent on forcing Metro on users one way or another because they think they'll learn to love it and then go buy Windows Phones and Surface tablets. Sure, there's 3rd-party programs you can get to help avoid Metro, but corporate IT departments never add stuff like that to their "standard build".
3rd-party add-ons don't count. Corporate users can't use them. If it isn't built into Windows, it might as well not exist.
I realize that you have not met me but I use Win 8.1 everyday at work and love it (took a while to get used too bout the same as Win7 did from XP)
Oh please. Win7 was not different at all from WinXP; to the casual user, Win7 just looks like a re-skin of XP, except now the task bar shows tasks differently (using big icons instead of small icons with text), and there's a little area on the right with indicators/controls for things like WiFi, battery, etc. Overall, the usage is almost the same.
Win8 is a complete sea-change from Win7/XP, at least until you can find the desktop, and even then you're still going right back to Metro any time you bring up the "start" menu.
There's companies working on alternative software/firmware for auto infotainment systems? I seriously doubt that. There's companies developing these systems specifically for the automakers of course (Ford and GM don't actually design and build their own infotainment/navigation systems, they get stuff like that from suppliers), but these places aren't going to make alternative software; why would they? And why would the automakers want alternative software for systems they've already bought and installed in cars which they've sold?
The only people interested in reverse-engineering existing, installed systems are going to be technically-inclined end-users, or people interested in selling to those end-users.
And I'm not sure I follow the logic of your 1st generation theory. When new features are added that might limit a user, that is the time when they are most often made to be optionally switched off. A manufacturer releasing child locks as a new feature wouldn't want to risk losing sales of the car to people people without kids, if it got a reputation for being awkward to get out of.
Yes, I'm sure you're right, at least for times past (which is when child locks came out). These days, it seems like the opposite is true: companies now want to force you into doing things a particular way and want to remove all choice and configurability. Just look at all the new UIs these days.
The USPS works fairly well actually.
Also, NASA worked pretty well back during the Apollo days, before the military came in with their idiotic requirements that led to the overpriced debacle that was the Space Shuttle (and even there, NASA worked fairly well with the requirements they were given). They're still doing great science now, even though their budget is tiny.
That's about all I can think of. Basically, the more autonomous and separated the agency is from any politicians, the better it works. If it's directly managed by politicians, it's going to be a total clusterfuck.
No, other peoples' children. This is Slashdot, remember, the home of single basement-dwelling neckbeards.
Good luck building your own car.
And yes, you can try to get an older car and keep it running, but how much time do you have on your hands for that kind of project? After a while, lots of things start to fall apart on a car and it becomes more and more of a chore to keep it in good shape, and when something fails when you're on the way to work, that seriously affects your livelihood (and costs a bunch of money in towing). And what if you don't have a garage to do all this maintenance and repair work in? Lots of people live in apartments, and garages are expensive luxuries.
No, you don't need to buy a new car to avoid a maintenance nightmare; there's lots of good cars that are 5-10 years old and still run really well. (I'm in the market for one of these myself very soon, so I've been looking at these factors: used vs. new, etc.). Yes, you can buy a ~2003 or ~2007-model car and probably not have to worry about being tracked this way. But eventually that 10-year old car is going to be 15+ years old, and will be falling apart, and you'll want to get something a little newer, and now the good used cars will be the ones from today, which all have tracking systems, so all you've done is delayed the issue.
Choosing another option only makes sense if the other options are actually different.
Because not tracking everything is out of the question for some reason.
It is if all the producers have conspired together, or independently come to the same conclusion, that they want to track you.
No, of course not. Someone else here pointed out that Australia is a big provider of tantalum.
All I'm doing is making the point that it's much easier to boycott some items than others. Diamonds are easy: no one actually needs them for anything, unless you buy that bullshit that DeBeers tries to convince everyone about diamond engagement rings. But materials used for technological purposes are a little different, and harder to work around.. Now, someone else here has pointed out that tantalum capacitors aren't as necessary now as they used to be with ceramics and solid-electrolyte electrolytics seriously challenging them (and outperforming them in some ways apparently), so maybe we don't really need tantalum that much any more, I dunno. But China has a big record of human rights abuses too, but good luck not buying anything made there. Diamonds I can easily swear off. Tantalum, maybe I don't need that any more, I'm not sure. But stuff made in China? Sorry, it's pretty hard to live without that since it's very difficult now to find things that aren't made there, and for many classes of products, that's all the choice you have.
No, why? I honestly don't know anything about it.
This is fine for avoiding Ford's intrusiveness, but now you're giving Google access to all your travel data.
Don't buy ford.
Ok, but then who should we buy from? This dumbass VP obviously spilled the beans, but doesn't every car company do the same thing these days? Or do they? Is it just higher-end cars, and certain brands like Ford, which install GPS tracking on all their cars, or are they all doing it now? Honestly, I don't know. While there are a lot of cars now with touchscreens and built-in nav systems, there's still lots of lower-end cars which don't have any of that stuff and are still pretty basic. Do they have hidden GPS systems too?
What I'd like to know is: how are they getting this data back to Ford? Doing this would likely require a cellular connection. Telcos aren't in the business of giving out free cellular connections; if I want to put a cellular card in my laptop, for instance, so I can access the internet without needing a nearby public-access WiFi hotspot, I have to pay a monthly fee (probably $30/month) for the data service. Do Ford cars require you to pay a monthly fee for cellular service now? Or has Ford negotiated a deal with one of the carriers to allow indefinite-duration cellular service for their cars?
Finally, what would happen if you were to disable the cellular link? It can't be that hard to do.
All very difficult to do. Every built-in nav system is likely different (esp. carmaker to carmaker, less so model-to-model, but still they surely have different "generations" of their built-in nav systems), and the information on how to get access to that system and reflash it is all proprietary and secret. You'd need a lot of documentation, or a lot of time to reverse-engineer it, and there's always the danger of "bricking" it like with any such community project. But bricking your car's built-in nav system (which might also be integrated with the HVAC system, radio, etc.) would be a big problem, unlike bricking some $50 consumer router from Netgear or Linksys because you want to port OpenWRT or DD-WRT to it. So you're not going to find a lot of people interested in taking on that project as a volunteer, unlike the alternative-firmware projects for various inexpensive consumer items.
Replacing the nav with an aftermarket model isn't trivial either, since it'd have to fit into the same space. Just do a google search and look for systems that replace factory systems for any car; good luck. You probably won't find much, or it'll be some weird system from Taiwan for well over $500 with documentation in Mandarin. Worse, many cars today integrate the nav system with the HVAC and radio, as I said above. You're not going to find some open-source aftermarket system to replace that. It'd be cool if someone took that on as an open-source project like OpenWRT, but again, there's so many different cars out there, and the consequences for screwing up are high, so it really isn't all that feasible.
YouTube doesn't seem market dominant
What planet do you live on? What other large sites out there allow users to post videos? YouTube is easily, by far, the largest site of its type.
GMail doesn't seem market dominant, but I'd be willing to look at numbers if you have them relative to Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail/Outlook.com
Here again you seem to be out of touch with reality, but maybe not so much as with the YouTube comment above. Hotmail has been going down for ages, ever since the MS takeover and conversion to "Live", though maybe they're doing a little better now with outlook.com but I kinda doubt it, and Yahoo's been going down the toilet for years now too. I don't have any hard data, but I definitely see far more people with Gmail addresses than the other two.
Yeah, like a search engine that produces porn pics, no matter what search term you enter.
We already have that. It's called "Bing".
Ever wonder where the "Bing" name came from? Remember Wayne's World? Rhymes with "schwing!"
There aren't really any great options when it comes to phones. You can get an Android phone, which is inexpensive but has Google's tentacles in it, or you can get an iPhone which is expensive as hell and forces you to stay confined to Apple's walled garden and their One True Way of doing everything and fuels a company which now seems have taken the crown of most evil corporation (in the tech sector) away from MS, or you can get a Windows Phone which is ugly, forces you to do everything in MS's One True Way of doing everything, and fuels what is now the second most evil corporation in the tech sector.
AFAICT, the best option is probably going to be getting an Android phone, and then reflashing it with one of those alternative firmwares like CyanogenMod which doesn't have everything linked to Google.
To some extent this strategy of simply labeling, as in differentiating regular from "conflict" or "blood" sources, sort of worked out ok for diamonds. Not completely, of course, but it absolutely helps.
There's a bit of a difference between blood diamonds and blood capacitors. You don't actually need diamonds for anything. Industrial diamonds (which you actually use for useful purposes) are cheap and easy to get, since they're incredibly small (basically diamond dust). The larger ones have no practical uses; they're only used for jewelry. So if you want to avoid fueling tribal warlords, it's easy: you don't buy diamonds, and instead buy something else like cubic zirconia, Swarovski crystals, or other gemstones like sapphires, rubies, emeralds, etc. (many of which are now artificially-created anyway).
Tantalum isn't used for jewelry, it's used for capacitors. Not only that, it's used for extremely high-performance capacitors. So you could stop using it, and switch to other types of capacitors, but you're probably going to suffer for it somehow, because AFAIK nothing else can match the volumetric efficiency of tantalum at this time. You could switch to standard electrolytics, but those don't really fit into smartphones and iPads. You could switch to multilayer ceramics, but those probably won't give you the required capacitance, so you'll have to use lots of them, so your smartphone will need to be 50% larger.
It's the same problem we have with oil; we can't easily switch to something else, or do without, without severely affecting our technology and quality-of-life, so we fuel conflicts in certain parts of the world which happen to be rich in that natural resource.
Yep, that seems pretty shameful really.
That's like 20 years out of date. QBZ-95 is hardly an AK clone at this point, for example.
Wow, that QBZ-95 is very impressive-looking from the Wikipedia article. Looks much more advanced than the US military's standard rifles: bullpup design, 4-position selector (so you get both full-auto and 3-round-burst) and it looks like they put a lot of thought into making it more controllable during full-auto fire. Too bad we can't be as innovative as the Chinese....
At least as far as all the military contracts go, the requirement is that the winner manufactures them in the USA. So M9, M249, M27 IAR, M4A1 etc are all made in US, even though the plants are owned by Beretta, FN etc.
Yes of course; the Chinese do something very similar, forcing companies to progressively move all production and know-how to China until they no longer need the vendor company at all. The US obviously doesn't quite go that far, since they never design their own guns or shed the foreign vendor company in favor of domestic companies.
FAL is very much outdated
Sorry, another error of mine: I meant "FN", the company itself, not a specific gun. FN makes the P90 and F2000 (if I'm getting my model numbers right), both very modern weapons.
Sorry, you're correct. I was thinking of some other bullpup rifle, whose name escapes me now, which is used by much of Britain's military. I think the Steyr is actually used in Australia, as well as Austria of course. (A quick look at the Wikipedia page for the AUG confirms it's used in Australia plus lots of other places.)
While looking at the Wiki page, I noticed another thing I'll use to bash the AR-15 so loved by Americans: it's not ambidextrous. The Steyr AUG is, as well as FAL's rifles, and probably many others. What kind of POS rifle can't be fired by left-handed users? Maybe that was acceptable in 1960, but these days there's just no excuse for that.
1 more thing. You've gotta be quite the sack of crap to not clean your own carpets. For the price of a cleaning you can just buy a cleaner. Fuckin idiots.
Most people don't have their own steam equipment. A serious steam-cleaning service has to have a whole van to hold that, and run a hose from the van into the house; it's not something that can be made portable. A water-based cleaner you can buy at Walmart, which you're probably thinking of, will not clean a carpet the way steam-cleaning does. I don't know if the company in question is a steam-cleaning service, but if you're going to hire a service to clean carpets, make sure to use a steam-cleaning service.
Is that true on all cars, even way back when the feature was new (probably the 80s)? I wouldn't be surprised if some first generation cars didn't offer that option.