I was under the impression that the TV also recognized (or at least attempted to recognize) more than just "channel up" and "volume down" as well. It is a "smart TV" that runs apps similar to the ones running on phones (like web browsers, VOD like netflix, that provide search capability).
In fact, I think I might be more likely to need voice search on a TV than on a phone, considering the TV has a worse typing interface (A remote with buttons not designed for typing words) and a smartphone has lots of R&D money poured into it's touchscreen/keyboard interface.
I don't know how well smart TV voice recognition works in reality (I think I own a dumb TV), but I could certainly use a voice recognition on the level of google or apple smartphones if it means I don't have to type "game of thrones" using the arrows on my remote to control a cursor on an on-screen keyboard.
So the company makes a scapegoat out of one guy and that's what you consider accountability? Even if they somehow managed to recoup every cent that was paid to this person (salary, bonuses, etc), that just gives Lenovo more money, in addition to a scapegoat.
It's not like that money would go to customers who were harmed by this malware.
I think you're lucky if superfish is the worst thing in a Lenovo laptop. I work for the defense industry and we are not allowed to use Lenovo laptops because of the possibility that there is malware in the hardware (e.g. like the NSA malware discovered in the harddrive firmware of some computers).
Those sorts of things are really hard to detect, and I don't think the Chinese government is morally opposed to doing such a thing. I'm not saying they are doing this. I am just saying that if they aren't, it's because it's too hard to pull off (for now).
Not that there isn't potentially malware in American made computers, but presumably if there is, it was put their by our own government rather than a foreign one...
It won't happen, not because they are a corporation. It won't happen because they are in China. If I was criminally charged in a Chinese court, I don't think I would bother showing up.
Our reputation is everything and our products are ultimately how we have our reputation.
This is like Putin saying "Equal rights for gay people are everything". Either you are lying, or you are extremely incompetent.
It's really easy to have a reputation of not putting bloat/spy/ad/malware on your computers. You actually don't have to do *anything* to achieve this reputation. It requires effort to ruin it. Just like it requires effort to harass gay people.
Every company's primary goal is maximizing profit. The only difference is between strategy. Some companies try to maximize profits by cutting their own costs by being efficient and making a superior product that customers actually want. Some companies try to maximize profits by bribing politicians to pass laws hindering their competitors. Some companies try to maximize profits by tricking people (e.g. tricking them into buying products that are not as good as advertized).
If the trust that you had violated was your trust that a corporation valued profit over you, then it's time to stop being a consumer and to start farming in your back yard.
Asking a corporation to value it's customers more than profit is like asking you to value a corporation more than your children. Neither party should be under the false pretense of the other having unconditional loyalty. This is a mutually beneficial business arrangement that is ended the second either side realizes it is no longer beneficial to them.
What I am getting at is that the problem is not that they placed profit above you. Every corporation (even the good ones) do that. The problem is that they tricked you. "Good" companies don't trick people, not because the don't value profit above all else, but because unlike Lenovo, they actually do care about their reputation (as a means to profit).
Or at least neighbors and spouses that offer the option to pay them a little extra money (e.g. $10) to have them not sleep with each other. That seems like a good deal for everyone involved.
At this point I would be satisfied with having the option to pay a little more to *not* get all the extra bloatware on my computer. Surely there is some amount of money that the manufacturers like Lenovo get for putting that shit on their computers. What difference does it make to them if they get this money through bloatware vendors or the customer?
In the past I would probably gladly reinstall windows myself and save the $10 (or whatever it is), except that now they don't make that easy either, because often their windows reinstall discs have the same bloatware on them. You can't just install some random windows ISO and use your own product key. Even if the ISO is legitimate, it may not be a version that accepts your product key.
Just let me pay the price, or at least see what that price is.
The intent of loading this tool was to help enhance our users’ shopping experience. The feedback from users was that it wasn’t useful, and that’s why we turned it off. Our reputation is everything and our products are ultimately how we have our reputation
This really starts to make sense in the sense that Lenovo has 2 sets of products and 2 sets of users. Regular people are users of their computer products, and advertisers are users of their malware products to advertize to those computer users.
Add the government, laws, and lawyers to the mix. That should fix the problem/s
Have you seen the people that make the laws in this country? They are definitely dumber than the people that came up with this terrible software. And they are way fucking lazier. They will just have corporations write the laws for them so they don't have to do it, and have their interns read it so they don't have to do that either, and then they will just vote the way that their party wants them to, (unless someone wants to bribe them with more money than their own party is willing to give them), so they can keep their "job" (i.e. the thing that gives them money for selling power).
NSA secret spying software discovered by Russian researchers
Doesn't have "hard drive" in the title. It's a classic example of misdirection, focusing people on the nationality of the researchers that discovered the software, rather than the real issues. You should be ashamed for being part of the coverup!
I bought at the end of 2010, so I also enjoyed an abnormal property value increase in the last 4 years (although my increase was probably closer to a 35% increase in value), but that's not normal. A 150% increase is really abnormal, even given the recent past.
And also, you don't just count the $800 per month difference, you also need to count the 20% (or whatever % down payment). My mortgage is actually probably a little less expensive than what it would cost to rent my house, but the difference is in the 20% down payment.
After 4 years I have not paid down much of my principle. Had I invested all my money in the stock market over the last 4 years, I would have doubled my investment. If I rented my old apartment during that time period and put the extra $1000 per month into my index fund I think I would be pretty close to being in the same financial position. There are tax breaks for owning a house but there is also property tax and maintenance which nearly even out.
It was nice living in a big house over the last 4 years instead of a small apartment. So it was still a better decision, but like I said, I think these are special circumstances. I knew there was a housing market collapse, and I knew I wanted to get the most expensive house I could afford. I would probably not do that today.
Of course, businesses are in business to be as risky as they can get away with. Businesses that don't take risks don't remain in business
I was referring not to the banks being as risky as what was legally and politically possible, since they were not the ones paying for that risk. Normal businesses take risks that they reap the rewards and pay the consequences for, which provides a natural self check on the level of risk.
Buying a house is fucking expensive. If you took the difference in cost (between renting and buying the same property), and put that in an index fund, there is a pretty good chance that you will have a bigger pile of cash saved up after 15 or 30 years than what you would have from selling your house at the end of your loan.
The big difference is that buying a house forces you to invest that extra money. That investment may or may not be a better investment than the stock market.
Buying a house even when it is a bad investment (i.e. loses money) leaves you better off during retirement than someone who spent all their money before retirement (depending on the value you place on the memories of spending all that money).
Rent is for suckers if rent is high compared to mortgage prices and there are no better investments to be made with the difference cost between renting and owning.
In a market where the housing market is inflated (e.g. one where lots of people are buying investment properties, and a lot of properties are being built to handle the demand), those real estate investors need to compete harder for less renters and rent prices drop.
In this situation, not renting is for suckers. This was the situation before the housing bubble burst. Even if you already owned your house, the best thing to do would have been to sell and become a renter. Once the bubble burst, house prices dropped. Renting may have still been a decent option given the supply of housing compared to the demand, but buying was probably an even better option if you could get the money to do it. (i.e. there was no better investment than real estate).
The main reason the banks are profiting from on houses is because they have essentially socialized the risk of their investment while keeping the profits private. The reason for interest on loans is to overcome the opportunity cost of lending the money to a borrower in addition to the risk of default. Under a "normal" system, the 2008 housing crisis should have caused all the banks holding the loans to go under. The threat of this happening is what is supposed to prevent the banks from making risky investments in the first place.
But as it turns out, the actual risk to banks was much lower than it would have seemed, due to the bailouts. So in fact the banks don't have much risk in lending money if they are just going to get bailed out when shit hits the fan.
In this scenario, where you are essentially gambling with someone else's money (i.e. the tax payers), but get to keep the profits, the best move is to be as risky as you are able to get away with. In this light, the risky behavior of the banks makes a lot more sense.
Ethernet does not correct errors. Ethernet is a protocol (layer 1 and 2 of the OSI model) that provides error detection, but not correction.
IP (layer 3) also only provides error detection.
When you get to the transport layer (layer 4) is when you start getting error correction most commonly in the form of TCP, but other transport layer protocols like UDP do not provide error correction.
Many application layer protocols provide some form of error correction if their underlying protocols do not.
The cables themselves can absolutely introduce more or less errors depending on factors like quality and length, it is just that networking protocols used by modern digital computers *can* mitigate the damage as long as enough good data gets through, but it's not because of "ethernet". If anything it's because of "TCP" which can be used on pretty much any type of cable (or even wirelessly). The reliability of communication is dependent on the protocol not on the type of wire it goes through.
Didn't the banks already run away with a bunch of money, and then just convinced legislators to bail them out? And I think only 1 person went to jail along with a few fines that were dwarfed by the profits they made? And to top it all off, nothing about our system has really even changed. Banks are still too big to fail. They have no incentive not to pull the same bullshit again.
What's ironic about all these bitcoin scams is that they rely on a technology that removes the need for a middleman (e.g. a bank) to make transactions, the scams always involve people leaving their money in a 3rd party bitcoin bank rather than in a personal bitcoin wallet.
It's like people have bought into the idea of putting their money in safes, but when the "neighborhood safe inspector" comes door to door asking for the combinations to their safes, they don't realize that the whole point of a safe is that you ware not supposed to tell other people the combination.
Slashdot Mirror
You can "broadcast" over a network using IP multicast. This is not what pandora is doing. Pandora is doing unicast.
I was under the impression that the TV also recognized (or at least attempted to recognize) more than just "channel up" and "volume down" as well. It is a "smart TV" that runs apps similar to the ones running on phones (like web browsers, VOD like netflix, that provide search capability).
In fact, I think I might be more likely to need voice search on a TV than on a phone, considering the TV has a worse typing interface (A remote with buttons not designed for typing words) and a smartphone has lots of R&D money poured into it's touchscreen/keyboard interface.
I don't know how well smart TV voice recognition works in reality (I think I own a dumb TV), but I could certainly use a voice recognition on the level of google or apple smartphones if it means I don't have to type "game of thrones" using the arrows on my remote to control a cursor on an on-screen keyboard.
So the company makes a scapegoat out of one guy and that's what you consider accountability? Even if they somehow managed to recoup every cent that was paid to this person (salary, bonuses, etc), that just gives Lenovo more money, in addition to a scapegoat.
It's not like that money would go to customers who were harmed by this malware.
I think you're lucky if superfish is the worst thing in a Lenovo laptop. I work for the defense industry and we are not allowed to use Lenovo laptops because of the possibility that there is malware in the hardware (e.g. like the NSA malware discovered in the harddrive firmware of some computers).
Those sorts of things are really hard to detect, and I don't think the Chinese government is morally opposed to doing such a thing. I'm not saying they are doing this. I am just saying that if they aren't, it's because it's too hard to pull off (for now).
Not that there isn't potentially malware in American made computers, but presumably if there is, it was put their by our own government rather than a foreign one...
It won't happen, not because they are a corporation. It won't happen because they are in China. If I was criminally charged in a Chinese court, I don't think I would bother showing up.
How much money do you think Lenovo makes from putting all this bloatware on your computer?
Our reputation is everything and our products are ultimately how we have our reputation.
This is like Putin saying "Equal rights for gay people are everything". Either you are lying, or you are extremely incompetent.
It's really easy to have a reputation of not putting bloat/spy/ad/malware on your computers. You actually don't have to do *anything* to achieve this reputation. It requires effort to ruin it. Just like it requires effort to harass gay people.
Every company's primary goal is maximizing profit. The only difference is between strategy. Some companies try to maximize profits by cutting their own costs by being efficient and making a superior product that customers actually want. Some companies try to maximize profits by bribing politicians to pass laws hindering their competitors. Some companies try to maximize profits by tricking people (e.g. tricking them into buying products that are not as good as advertized).
If the trust that you had violated was your trust that a corporation valued profit over you, then it's time to stop being a consumer and to start farming in your back yard.
Asking a corporation to value it's customers more than profit is like asking you to value a corporation more than your children. Neither party should be under the false pretense of the other having unconditional loyalty. This is a mutually beneficial business arrangement that is ended the second either side realizes it is no longer beneficial to them.
What I am getting at is that the problem is not that they placed profit above you. Every corporation (even the good ones) do that. The problem is that they tricked you. "Good" companies don't trick people, not because the don't value profit above all else, but because unlike Lenovo, they actually do care about their reputation (as a means to profit).
Or at least neighbors and spouses that offer the option to pay them a little extra money (e.g. $10) to have them not sleep with each other. That seems like a good deal for everyone involved.
At this point I would be satisfied with having the option to pay a little more to *not* get all the extra bloatware on my computer. Surely there is some amount of money that the manufacturers like Lenovo get for putting that shit on their computers. What difference does it make to them if they get this money through bloatware vendors or the customer?
In the past I would probably gladly reinstall windows myself and save the $10 (or whatever it is), except that now they don't make that easy either, because often their windows reinstall discs have the same bloatware on them. You can't just install some random windows ISO and use your own product key. Even if the ISO is legitimate, it may not be a version that accepts your product key.
Just let me pay the price, or at least see what that price is.
The intent of loading this tool was to help enhance our users’ shopping experience. The feedback from users was that it wasn’t useful, and that’s why we turned it off. Our reputation is everything and our products are ultimately how we have our reputation
This really starts to make sense in the sense that Lenovo has 2 sets of products and 2 sets of users. Regular people are users of their computer products, and advertisers are users of their malware products to advertize to those computer users.
You can't please everyone.
Do you expect that your smartphone's voice recognition is all happening in the phone?
Apparently not as well as a giant server/datacenter. Speech analysis works better with larger data sets.
Add the government, laws, and lawyers to the mix. That should fix the problem /s
Have you seen the people that make the laws in this country? They are definitely dumber than the people that came up with this terrible software. And they are way fucking lazier. They will just have corporations write the laws for them so they don't have to do it, and have their interns read it so they don't have to do that either, and then they will just vote the way that their party wants them to, (unless someone wants to bribe them with more money than their own party is willing to give them), so they can keep their "job" (i.e. the thing that gives them money for selling power).
NSA secret spying software discovered by Russian researchers
Doesn't have "hard drive" in the title. It's a classic example of misdirection, focusing people on the nationality of the researchers that discovered the software, rather than the real issues. You should be ashamed for being part of the coverup!
Summaries don't contain *all* the words (that's what makes them summaries rather than articles). Even dumb Americans know that.
Opportunity cost. The comparison is not simply between buying and renting. The comparison is between buying and (renting + investing).
I bought at the end of 2010, so I also enjoyed an abnormal property value increase in the last 4 years (although my increase was probably closer to a 35% increase in value), but that's not normal. A 150% increase is really abnormal, even given the recent past.
And also, you don't just count the $800 per month difference, you also need to count the 20% (or whatever % down payment). My mortgage is actually probably a little less expensive than what it would cost to rent my house, but the difference is in the 20% down payment.
After 4 years I have not paid down much of my principle. Had I invested all my money in the stock market over the last 4 years, I would have doubled my investment. If I rented my old apartment during that time period and put the extra $1000 per month into my index fund I think I would be pretty close to being in the same financial position. There are tax breaks for owning a house but there is also property tax and maintenance which nearly even out.
It was nice living in a big house over the last 4 years instead of a small apartment. So it was still a better decision, but like I said, I think these are special circumstances. I knew there was a housing market collapse, and I knew I wanted to get the most expensive house I could afford. I would probably not do that today.
Of course, businesses are in business to be as risky as they can get away with. Businesses that don't take risks don't remain in business
I was referring not to the banks being as risky as what was legally and politically possible, since they were not the ones paying for that risk. Normal businesses take risks that they reap the rewards and pay the consequences for, which provides a natural self check on the level of risk.
Buying a house is fucking expensive. If you took the difference in cost (between renting and buying the same property), and put that in an index fund, there is a pretty good chance that you will have a bigger pile of cash saved up after 15 or 30 years than what you would have from selling your house at the end of your loan.
The big difference is that buying a house forces you to invest that extra money. That investment may or may not be a better investment than the stock market.
Buying a house even when it is a bad investment (i.e. loses money) leaves you better off during retirement than someone who spent all their money before retirement (depending on the value you place on the memories of spending all that money).
Rent is for suckers if rent is high compared to mortgage prices and there are no better investments to be made with the difference cost between renting and owning.
In a market where the housing market is inflated (e.g. one where lots of people are buying investment properties, and a lot of properties are being built to handle the demand), those real estate investors need to compete harder for less renters and rent prices drop.
In this situation, not renting is for suckers. This was the situation before the housing bubble burst. Even if you already owned your house, the best thing to do would have been to sell and become a renter. Once the bubble burst, house prices dropped. Renting may have still been a decent option given the supply of housing compared to the demand, but buying was probably an even better option if you could get the money to do it. (i.e. there was no better investment than real estate).
The main reason the banks are profiting from on houses is because they have essentially socialized the risk of their investment while keeping the profits private. The reason for interest on loans is to overcome the opportunity cost of lending the money to a borrower in addition to the risk of default. Under a "normal" system, the 2008 housing crisis should have caused all the banks holding the loans to go under. The threat of this happening is what is supposed to prevent the banks from making risky investments in the first place.
But as it turns out, the actual risk to banks was much lower than it would have seemed, due to the bailouts. So in fact the banks don't have much risk in lending money if they are just going to get bailed out when shit hits the fan.
In this scenario, where you are essentially gambling with someone else's money (i.e. the tax payers), but get to keep the profits, the best move is to be as risky as you are able to get away with. In this light, the risky behavior of the banks makes a lot more sense.
Ethernet does not correct errors. Ethernet is a protocol (layer 1 and 2 of the OSI model) that provides error detection, but not correction.
IP (layer 3) also only provides error detection.
When you get to the transport layer (layer 4) is when you start getting error correction most commonly in the form of TCP, but other transport layer protocols like UDP do not provide error correction.
Many application layer protocols provide some form of error correction if their underlying protocols do not.
The cables themselves can absolutely introduce more or less errors depending on factors like quality and length, it is just that networking protocols used by modern digital computers *can* mitigate the damage as long as enough good data gets through, but it's not because of "ethernet". If anything it's because of "TCP" which can be used on pretty much any type of cable (or even wirelessly). The reliability of communication is dependent on the protocol not on the type of wire it goes through.
What do you think regular banking is? Do you think there are no electronic "slips of paper" with normal banks?
Didn't the banks already run away with a bunch of money, and then just convinced legislators to bail them out? And I think only 1 person went to jail along with a few fines that were dwarfed by the profits they made? And to top it all off, nothing about our system has really even changed. Banks are still too big to fail. They have no incentive not to pull the same bullshit again.
What's ironic about all these bitcoin scams is that they rely on a technology that removes the need for a middleman (e.g. a bank) to make transactions, the scams always involve people leaving their money in a 3rd party bitcoin bank rather than in a personal bitcoin wallet.
It's like people have bought into the idea of putting their money in safes, but when the "neighborhood safe inspector" comes door to door asking for the combinations to their safes, they don't realize that the whole point of a safe is that you ware not supposed to tell other people the combination.