In fairness, with enough resources, Vista didn't suck nearly as bad as people said it did.. I ran it on a quad core machine with 8GB of RAM until a year ago, and it was just fine.
But Microsoft has gone from "Vista sucks and Windows 8 was kind of annoying" to "actively not trustworthy" in this -- this is saying "we don't give a crap about what you are willing to let us do, we're going to do it anyway".
Sorry, but, no way this is anything but Microsoft deciding they'll get your data no matter your opinion.
Microsoft has pretty clearly telegraphed they don't give a shit about what the people who own the machines want, and they're going to do whatever the fuck they want.
That Microsoft is doing this is surprising in no way to me.
Microsoft simply can't be trusted to not just do what they please here.
Well, sure.. that's likely. Probable I'd even say... with the caveat they specifically selected the one which I'd hate the most.;-)
It just boggles the mind, it used to present as a nice, neat table, which conveyed all information succinctly in one screen, in a way not unlike how an accountant would present it.
Now I have to look all over the place scroll, and click twice as many things, and search among a bunch of clutter and pastel colors. Like that makes sense or adds to the usefulness.
Over 20 years ago a friend said HTML had set back user interface design by 20 years... the astounding thing is, every few years it keeps making them worse.
Because I see the trend to add a half an inch of space around everything to make a layout suitable for... well, I don't know what actually. Not reading, that's for sure.
My bank recently changed the layout of their web pages... I used to be able to see all of my accounts on one screen. And suddenly I have to scroll the damned page to read the exact same amount of information on a 23" monitor.
I think "webmasters" just continue to have no fucking idea about readability and functionality, and instead just do what all the other idiots are doing.
Just an endless series of things in which all pieces of text get so much personal space as to be absurd.
They're all taking plays out of the same book, I just can't figure out what the hell it's supposed to be making better... well, I strongly suspect it's everyone optimizing for tablets and not caring how shitty it looks on everything else.
Well, it's the more generalized problem of Melted Pizza Cheese.
That freshly delivered pie will strip all the flesh from the roof of your mouth, and you should probably leave it to sit for a few minutes. You won't, but you should.
Cheese forms a super-heated semi-fluid capable of delivering FAR more heat than its thermal mass should allow.
You could cauterize wounds with fresh melted cheese from pizza.
So many of them are utterly outright fraudulent I have no sympathy for any of them.
The Microsoft Support? The air duct cleaning? Rachael from cardholder services? That cruise I supposedly won? The people calling to say I owe tax money or will go to court? That opinion poll I have no way of knowing is real?
Sorry, all of these things means I simply can't expend the time to give a shit about the feelings of some random telemarketer, since I have no way of knowing (or caring) if they're yet another fraudulent asshole, or just some poor schmuck trying to earn a living.
If I have a business relationship with you, send it to me via mail, in an official company envelope on official company paper... if I don't have a business relationship with you I'm not prepared to invest any energy in pretending I don't assume you're running a scam.
So, I can't spend the effort to feel sorry for the honest ones, because they've been drowned out in a sea of lying bastards.
Feeling sorry for them is simply no longer possible.
Please, you won't get an energy independent world. You'll have patent holders demanding $1 trillion dollars to power your country. And the distribution companies. And of course the competing distribution companies people will open up to allow for false competition and preventing a natural monopoly.
It's a nice idea, but if you think the world is suddenly going to become a place with unlimited free power, you're sorely missing how badly the corporations will fight to stop that from ever happening.
I mean, that would be communism, and communism would be evil.
Don't get me wrong, this is completely awesome. I just don't think it would ever be allowed to undercut a model in which a series of middlemen charge you their cut to deliver something which they get for free.
You don't maintain shareholder value giving stuff away for free, and it's ALL about shareholder value.
And there's way too many entities who will want to get their beak wet to think you'll see much different than you see now.
The bot is designed not just to reroute the callers, but to frustrate them and waste their time, as well.
Oh, I don't know... wasting their resources and annoying the hell out of them if you can sounds way cooler.
So much telemarketing is just spam these days, and the companies who rely on it bought exemptions so the same people in the same call centers could call us with both "real" bullshit as well as the fully scam bullshit. Between that and the laundry list of exemptions, it's not like do not call lists work.
If you can fuck up the business model and tie up their resources, maybe that will help get rid of more of it. And, really, where I live I have apparently called myself on numerous occasions with spam calls, despite me telling myself to stop doing that.
I doubt your caller id blocker can fix the problem of carefully crafted fake caller ID which looks like a local call.
What needs to happen is stop the stupid exemption for fake caller ID to allow corporations to use those call centers in the first place. If you don't have a real, verifiable caller ID, your call gets dropped in the system.
I don't care if your business model is having someone call me from Bangladesh... not my fucking problem.
Yeah, well, you'll excuse me if I don't think in a few years they'll be able to use copyright law, the DMCA/TPP, and EULAs to close that loophole.
Just like how the printer companies want you locked in as a revenue stream, you can bet your ass lawyers are standing by trying to figure out how.
And you can also bet politicians who are bought and paid for will deliver it to them. Because all signs point towards idiot politicians signing over everything to corporate interests to line their own fucking pockets.
Oh, get off your high horse... every damned bit of consumer electronics is moving in this same damned direction.
Microsoft is trying desperately to replicate the same thing, likely so is Samsung, and in some ways Google is too, and probably everybody else is too.
Here's a simple decision tree: if it's sold by a corporation, nobody gives a fuck about your rights, they care about their revenue stream.
And if Apple didn't implement some form of tamper protection for their devices people would freak over that... and law enforcement and phone thieves would just swap out parts and bypass all of your security.
So, pick one... Apple makes an insecure pile of crap, or Apple are teh evil draconian bastards. There's not a whole lot of middleground.
You don't own it, and you know you don't own it. You merely paid money for the right to use the hardware under the terms of their license.
Your ownership of these things ended some years ago as far as they're concerned.
This is no different from Microsoft deciding it's their computer, and they'll do whatever the fuck they want with it.
Consumers have more or less had the concept of ownership yanked out from underneath them, and had it replaced with a licensing agreement which the company can change at will.
They examine legal and ethical considerations for obtaining and sharing information and apply those behaviors to protect original ideas
There is is... the indoctrination aspect of this to ensure the kids are all fully compliant digital citizens. This shit is exactly what happens when you let corporations drive the curriculum.
This is just more bullshit control being exerted on our lives by asshole corporations.
I weep for humanity, because the next generation is being raised to be good little fucking corporate serfs. This is just forcing them to think "intellectual property" is anything other than an artificial construct to keep corporations rich.
I wish I could say I'm shocked, but this shit was never really about educating kids, this was always about controlling the damned message to serve corporate interests.
Awww, how quaint... you still think all of that applies in the modern world.
Governments have been trampling on that shit with increasing brazenness.
They don't give a crap about what you think your rights are, they've given themselves exemptions to those, lied to us and said they'd be used for limited things, and then started using them for everything else.
Every single government on the planet has decided it is far more important they be able to see everything we do than adhere to any laws which limit what they can do.
Oh, please, the US has been demanding this same kind of crap around the world since 2001.
This security stuff is now the keys to the kingdom, you can undermine sovereignty and violate laws in secret if you put on your fucking puppy dog face and says "because, security".
The US government is actively involved in doing the shit to the rest of the world, so don't look to us for any sympathy. Because an awful lot of Americans seem to think it's just fine when you do it to the rest of the world.
You're damned right this doesn't happen in a vacuum.
But if you think the US hasn't been demanding the ability to wiretap others, or just going ahead and doing it, you've been willfully ignorant to the last bunch of years.
Only now that it's happening to you, you're suddenly outraged.
Big deal. Stop watching the content. It's hardly important
I agree that the content is hardly important.
I disagree that corporations being given such vast power over our lives to protect their own interests at our expense isn't a big deal.
Because it fundamentally tilts the playing field such that corporations have far more influence over our lives and the law than we do, and it entrenches in law that corporations have internationally recognized rights which go well beyond those of thee and me.
It puts governments on the hook to actually be subservient to corporations, and allow those corporations to influence how things work more so than those governments.
Ignore the content for a moment, and look at what that treaty is REALLY doing.
Saying "and nothing of value will be lost" means you have no idea of what is really being lost here. Because once we cede those rights to corporate interests, we will never get them back, and forever be under their thumbs.
Well, and just as important to remember... people have no interest in having their cell phone or internet browser be politicized to this level. It's annoying.
People just don't give a damn. It's hard to save some energy to care about real things instead of getting dragged into some bullshit screed about how Android doesn't embody the Open Source Spirit.
The problem is a lot of open source advocates ratchet it up to extreme levels, which are not unlike the crazy guy on the street corner telling us the end is night... at a certain point, it just becomes melodramatic and irrelevant noise.
Equating open source zeal with some of the really scary stuff happening in the world is a little loopy, and mostly comes off like someone off their meds.
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness, with enough resources, Vista didn't suck nearly as bad as people said it did .. I ran it on a quad core machine with 8GB of RAM until a year ago, and it was just fine.
But Microsoft has gone from "Vista sucks and Windows 8 was kind of annoying" to "actively not trustworthy" in this -- this is saying "we don't give a crap about what you are willing to let us do, we're going to do it anyway".
Sorry, but, no way this is anything but Microsoft deciding they'll get your data no matter your opinion.
Is anybody surprised by this?
Microsoft has pretty clearly telegraphed they don't give a shit about what the people who own the machines want, and they're going to do whatever the fuck they want.
That Microsoft is doing this is surprising in no way to me.
Microsoft simply can't be trusted to not just do what they please here.
Holy alliteration Batman!!
We need more of that.
I read that as "slow is the new fast" ... Introducing the new Puntium, now 16% slower.
You laugh now.
This seems to be part of the editorial tone being established by the new owners.
Well, sure .. that's likely. Probable I'd even say ... with the caveat they specifically selected the one which I'd hate the most. ;-)
It just boggles the mind, it used to present as a nice, neat table, which conveyed all information succinctly in one screen, in a way not unlike how an accountant would present it.
Now I have to look all over the place scroll, and click twice as many things, and search among a bunch of clutter and pastel colors. Like that makes sense or adds to the usefulness.
Over 20 years ago a friend said HTML had set back user interface design by 20 years ... the astounding thing is, every few years it keeps making them worse.
Did we mention the whitespace?
Because I see the trend to add a half an inch of space around everything to make a layout suitable for ... well, I don't know what actually. Not reading, that's for sure.
My bank recently changed the layout of their web pages ... I used to be able to see all of my accounts on one screen. And suddenly I have to scroll the damned page to read the exact same amount of information on a 23" monitor.
I think "webmasters" just continue to have no fucking idea about readability and functionality, and instead just do what all the other idiots are doing.
Just an endless series of things in which all pieces of text get so much personal space as to be absurd.
They're all taking plays out of the same book, I just can't figure out what the hell it's supposed to be making better ... well, I strongly suspect it's everyone optimizing for tablets and not caring how shitty it looks on everything else.
LOL ... wait ... but ... but ... the Sun. For the love of god, man ... The Sun.
Now, something we can build and control and get perpetual free energy? Well, I'm less convinced of that.
Well, it's the more generalized problem of Melted Pizza Cheese.
That freshly delivered pie will strip all the flesh from the roof of your mouth, and you should probably leave it to sit for a few minutes. You won't, but you should.
Cheese forms a super-heated semi-fluid capable of delivering FAR more heat than its thermal mass should allow.
You could cauterize wounds with fresh melted cheese from pizza.
Yeah, well I'm taking my AFQ, combining it with my DFQ, and I'm going to EFQ the FFQ out of here.
Take that.
Yes, they need a job ... boo hoo.
So many of them are utterly outright fraudulent I have no sympathy for any of them.
The Microsoft Support? The air duct cleaning? Rachael from cardholder services? That cruise I supposedly won? The people calling to say I owe tax money or will go to court? That opinion poll I have no way of knowing is real?
Sorry, all of these things means I simply can't expend the time to give a shit about the feelings of some random telemarketer, since I have no way of knowing (or caring) if they're yet another fraudulent asshole, or just some poor schmuck trying to earn a living.
If I have a business relationship with you, send it to me via mail, in an official company envelope on official company paper ... if I don't have a business relationship with you I'm not prepared to invest any energy in pretending I don't assume you're running a scam.
So, I can't spend the effort to feel sorry for the honest ones, because they've been drowned out in a sea of lying bastards.
Feeling sorry for them is simply no longer possible.
No, "more accurate" would be correct ... an exact temperature would be "precise".
That's kinda-precise-ish in a vague hand-wavy kind of way. Kind of the opposite of "precise".
"around 80 million degrees Celsius, to be precise" is sure as hell NOT precise.
That could be +- 5 million degrees and still be "around".
Please, you won't get an energy independent world. You'll have patent holders demanding $1 trillion dollars to power your country. And the distribution companies. And of course the competing distribution companies people will open up to allow for false competition and preventing a natural monopoly.
It's a nice idea, but if you think the world is suddenly going to become a place with unlimited free power, you're sorely missing how badly the corporations will fight to stop that from ever happening.
I mean, that would be communism, and communism would be evil.
Don't get me wrong, this is completely awesome. I just don't think it would ever be allowed to undercut a model in which a series of middlemen charge you their cut to deliver something which they get for free.
You don't maintain shareholder value giving stuff away for free, and it's ALL about shareholder value.
And there's way too many entities who will want to get their beak wet to think you'll see much different than you see now.
Oh, I don't know ... wasting their resources and annoying the hell out of them if you can sounds way cooler.
So much telemarketing is just spam these days, and the companies who rely on it bought exemptions so the same people in the same call centers could call us with both "real" bullshit as well as the fully scam bullshit. Between that and the laundry list of exemptions, it's not like do not call lists work.
If you can fuck up the business model and tie up their resources, maybe that will help get rid of more of it. And, really, where I live I have apparently called myself on numerous occasions with spam calls, despite me telling myself to stop doing that.
I doubt your caller id blocker can fix the problem of carefully crafted fake caller ID which looks like a local call.
What needs to happen is stop the stupid exemption for fake caller ID to allow corporations to use those call centers in the first place. If you don't have a real, verifiable caller ID, your call gets dropped in the system.
I don't care if your business model is having someone call me from Bangladesh ... not my fucking problem.
Sorry, what definition of precise are we using here?
I'll be glad when we get through this shakedown period of falling editorial quality by ... well, by timothy, actually.
Yeah, well, you'll excuse me if I don't think in a few years they'll be able to use copyright law, the DMCA/TPP, and EULAs to close that loophole.
Just like how the printer companies want you locked in as a revenue stream, you can bet your ass lawyers are standing by trying to figure out how.
And you can also bet politicians who are bought and paid for will deliver it to them. Because all signs point towards idiot politicians signing over everything to corporate interests to line their own fucking pockets.
Laws to protect consumers? No fucking way.
Oh, get off your high horse ... every damned bit of consumer electronics is moving in this same damned direction.
Microsoft is trying desperately to replicate the same thing, likely so is Samsung, and in some ways Google is too, and probably everybody else is too.
Here's a simple decision tree: if it's sold by a corporation, nobody gives a fuck about your rights, they care about their revenue stream.
And if Apple didn't implement some form of tamper protection for their devices people would freak over that ... and law enforcement and phone thieves would just swap out parts and bypass all of your security.
So, pick one ... Apple makes an insecure pile of crap, or Apple are teh evil draconian bastards. There's not a whole lot of middleground.
People are always going to whine about either.
You don't own it, and you know you don't own it. You merely paid money for the right to use the hardware under the terms of their license.
Your ownership of these things ended some years ago as far as they're concerned.
This is no different from Microsoft deciding it's their computer, and they'll do whatever the fuck they want with it.
Consumers have more or less had the concept of ownership yanked out from underneath them, and had it replaced with a licensing agreement which the company can change at will.
First ... you poor bastard.
Second ... exactly my point.
There is is ... the indoctrination aspect of this to ensure the kids are all fully compliant digital citizens. This shit is exactly what happens when you let corporations drive the curriculum.
This is just more bullshit control being exerted on our lives by asshole corporations.
I weep for humanity, because the next generation is being raised to be good little fucking corporate serfs. This is just forcing them to think "intellectual property" is anything other than an artificial construct to keep corporations rich.
I wish I could say I'm shocked, but this shit was never really about educating kids, this was always about controlling the damned message to serve corporate interests.
The scary thing is I believe a lot of people likely still use it because that's all they can get.
Viable still applies if it's being sold, and lot of people are on it.
According to this (which is from 2013), 18% of American internet usage was on DSL.
I don't think "viable" means what you think it means. Used by tons of people and still actively sold ... well, it's outdated, but it's still viable.
Awww, how quaint ... you still think all of that applies in the modern world.
Governments have been trampling on that shit with increasing brazenness.
They don't give a crap about what you think your rights are, they've given themselves exemptions to those, lied to us and said they'd be used for limited things, and then started using them for everything else.
Every single government on the planet has decided it is far more important they be able to see everything we do than adhere to any laws which limit what they can do.
Oh, please, the US has been demanding this same kind of crap around the world since 2001.
This security stuff is now the keys to the kingdom, you can undermine sovereignty and violate laws in secret if you put on your fucking puppy dog face and says "because, security".
The US government is actively involved in doing the shit to the rest of the world, so don't look to us for any sympathy. Because an awful lot of Americans seem to think it's just fine when you do it to the rest of the world.
You're damned right this doesn't happen in a vacuum.
But if you think the US hasn't been demanding the ability to wiretap others, or just going ahead and doing it, you've been willfully ignorant to the last bunch of years.
Only now that it's happening to you, you're suddenly outraged.
I agree that the content is hardly important.
I disagree that corporations being given such vast power over our lives to protect their own interests at our expense isn't a big deal.
Because it fundamentally tilts the playing field such that corporations have far more influence over our lives and the law than we do, and it entrenches in law that corporations have internationally recognized rights which go well beyond those of thee and me.
It puts governments on the hook to actually be subservient to corporations, and allow those corporations to influence how things work more so than those governments.
Ignore the content for a moment, and look at what that treaty is REALLY doing.
Saying "and nothing of value will be lost" means you have no idea of what is really being lost here. Because once we cede those rights to corporate interests, we will never get them back, and forever be under their thumbs.
Well, and just as important to remember ... people have no interest in having their cell phone or internet browser be politicized to this level. It's annoying.
People just don't give a damn. It's hard to save some energy to care about real things instead of getting dragged into some bullshit screed about how Android doesn't embody the Open Source Spirit.
The problem is a lot of open source advocates ratchet it up to extreme levels, which are not unlike the crazy guy on the street corner telling us the end is night ... at a certain point, it just becomes melodramatic and irrelevant noise.
Equating open source zeal with some of the really scary stuff happening in the world is a little loopy, and mostly comes off like someone off their meds.