Apparently not this time. Part of the problem here is that a different mechanism is being used, not the regular Windows Update/WSUS/etc. that you're probably using for deployment if you're in a managed environment, and so whatever settings normally apply for deploying updates on your infrastructure are being bypassed in favour of contacting Microsoft directly anyway.
Maybe it's a hint about what you're supposed to do with PCs once the update has been installed -- push them down a flight of stairs and watch the results for entertainment?
If they're using a similar name and logo then that is probably trademark infringement, passing off, or the like, and as such would probably be against the law in most places in the West. If it's a registered trademark, that would surely be the case.
If they're producing a similar product but without any implication that it comes from the OP's business, those restrictions wouldn't apply. Other things being equal, that's just plain ordinary competition.
If there are other IP rights involved -- most likely patents or some sort of design right, depending on where you are -- then those might be infringed. However, these sorts of legal rights tend to need a more expensive and time-consuming registration process to acquire, so unless OP has done that, this area probably isn't going to offer much help.
I never experienced the "slowness" that some people seem to have seen in older versions, and I haven't noticed any perceptible speed-ups since 57 either.
FF can't win. People complained (and still do) about "bloat" in the browser. The logical conclusion from the whining masses is that the "bloat" should be stripped-out. But then a feature is stripped out, and another set of people say "OH, NO, not THAT feature, I meant all the other features that I don't use".
That's a little unfair. I saw a lot of people complaining about bloat that wasn't really related to the core browsing functionality and could just as well have been handled through add-ons. I'm not sure that in my entire life I've ever seen a Firefox user complain that its flexibility as an actual web browser was a bad thing or that the ability to configure everyday things like cookies should be nerfed.
It seems to me that Firefox has, and has always had, a clear way to "win": It needs to be the trustworthy, reliable, highly customisable browser that made it attractive, and then focus on quality of implementation as an actual web browser instead of all the peripheral junk.
Unfortunately, they seem to be doing almost everything but that. They gave up huge amounts of customisation with 57, and I am still irritated every time I have to use it by so many little things that are worse than they were before as a direct result, while literally nothing has improved perceptibly for me. It's also been flaky since 57 and just plain broken since 58 in several ways, making a mockery of the claims about the architecture changes improving speed and reliability. I must be the unluckiest person on the planet given how many people seem to defend that change every time the subject comes up!
Most recent Linux one was a Dell Developer Edition. We were a bit wary after hearing a few horror stories, so we only picked up one of that model initially, but we've had no noticeable problems with the hardware after the first few months other than the infamous over-sensitive touchpad, which is arguably a matter of personal taste.
Our main gripe with the system as a whole is that their chosen distro is Ubuntu, which has an upgrade system that is possibly even worse than the ones in Windows. It's caused one problem after another since literally the first update after unpacking. There doesn't seem to be any sort of co-ordination between the GUI update tool and apt in terms of what it wants to install/update, but dumping the GUI tool entirely and just using apt seems to be much better. We'll probably dump Ubuntu and try a more professional distro on this laptop before we buy any more.
Why is Linux only a viable alternative for you, now?
Short version: Far more important things (for us) are now either online or client-server, and far less important things (for us) rely on native applications that are only available on the Windows platform. For those that remain, we stocked up on Windows 7 machines while we still could.
Bonus answer: Linux's hardware support and ease of configuration more generally are in a different league today to where they were 10 years ago. For example, we can buy a laptop pre-installed with Linux today and have a reasonable chance that it will work properly both out of the box and throughout its normal working lifetime, with minimal overheads configuring/managing it.
Well, you joke, but we haven't bought a new Windows machine since 7 was no longer available, and we're now using non-Windows platforms for our new machines instead of going anywhere near Windows 10. So for us, it literally is the year of Linux on the desktop. Turns out that for development work it's probably better anyway, and for all the online stuff a browser or email client on Linux is kinda like a browser or email client on Windows.
The only "distracted driving" accident I've been in was when the guy behind me didn't realize that I was stopping at a yellow light and slammed into me from behind.
An overwhelming body of evidence says that if you're doing the things you described then you are significantly worse as a driver than you otherwise would be. Your reactions are slower than they otherwise would be. Your judgement is impaired. You do make mistakes.
Now, maybe so far other drivers have been able to compensate for your mistakes, taking avoiding action to prevent an accident, or waiting patiently behind you when you were slow off the mark, or leaving extra space to accommodate your panic braking. Maybe because you weren't paying attention you didn't even realise this was happening all the time. But it does happen all the time, with better drivers compensating to some extent for the worse ones, and unfortunately it breeds a false sense of security in those who "don't have a problem".
Well, no, because if you want access to it then you have to accept our terms of business and pay us first. Even if you didn't, you still have to follow the law or accept the potential consequences of breaking it.
Fortunately for the rest of humanity, people like you don't actually own the Internet or have any right or ability to tell the rest of us how we may or may not use it. You're just someone shouting from the top of a cliff about something you don't like, and you're welcome to ignore those of us making use of the Internet to do that thing and go about your business having a nice day, just as we're free to ignore your shouting.
Great rant. Economically impractical, and much of it was a straw man talking about freely available pictures when the context was video streams (many of which are indeed paywalled), but great rant.
For future reference, if you want to know why people ripping content don't just get to win this one, ask yourself who is doing the work and contributing the value in this picture and who is contributing literally nothing in your world view, and that's your answer.
Also, at the risk of bringing stupid things like direct experience of actually doing this stuff into the conversation, the vast majority of our customers are honest, perhaps because we do in fact offer our content at a reasonable price that represents good value to them. The few who aren't cause highly disproportionate trouble, and not only does that very much hurt those of us creating the content and running the infrastructure, it also directly hurts our honest customers because we really do have significantly less time left over to make more for them to enjoy. And in case you didn't realise, those few dishonest ones are the people you're defending here.
In this case, I'm afraid the "backwards ways" are yours. Welcome to the 21st century, where creative industries are big, the Internet is the dominant communications channel, the Web is no longer a small and informal collection of hobbyist content, and being online no longer puts you effectively above the law.
I get that some people liked the way things used to be. I get why, too. But the world moves on, and the idea that multi-billion dollar businesses aren't going to protect their legal rights because some kid repeats "Information wants to be free" often enough is unrealistic.
I don't like going after people who try to rip the original content that my people spent time and money making. It's not why we do what we do. But equally, we're not going to sit back and let someone rip us off because they wish for a world where copyright didn't exist, and neither are all the other people whose mortgages depend on being paid for their work.
Indeed. When the observable behaviour of your legitimate software is becoming indistinguishable from the observable behaviour of malware, at some point you have to look in the mirror and say maybe you're the problem.
No, it doesn't. That one was the loaded test, and it also doesn't present its timings very clearly, but if you read it carefully (particularly the conclusion, which mentions this explicitly) the taxi is said to be faster than the Uber.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are essentially web sites where JavaScript and some relatively modern browser APIs are used to store parts of the site locally on the device after it's been downloaded. This allows the site to "load" again later even if the user is offline or has a bad connection, to cache some data on the client side, to store pending data ready to be uploaded automatically when a good connection is available again, etc. You can also do things like adding an icon to load the site to your home screen on a mobile device. In essence, you can create something that is really a web site, but enhanced to work more like a native app.
Android/Chrome has supported most of the relevant technologies for quite a while and pretty much all of them in recent versions. Apparently Edge is getting there now too. iOS/Safari is a long way behind.
Sources using exactly the search terms I gave you before
There are literally three different comparisons mentioned on just the first couple of pages, dating from 2006, 2013, and 2017. In the two directly comparable races (travelling between the same destinations and starting at the same time) the taxi was significantly faster. The third appears to have been comparing the journeys starting at different times, so not a fair test, but the taxi still apparently beat the Uber despite the latter having the advantage in start time.
The first hit there is a study comparing several different London journeys over a period of days, with the taxi also being significantly faster than the Uber on average.
No doubt someone somewhere has run an experiment that had the opposite outcome, but the overall the Knowledge is looking favourable even in recent comparisons.
If you really want to have an intelligent and informative discussion, maybe consider using less swearing and negativity, and more following up on the information people gave you. Not everyone is wasting their time posting stuff they made up on the Internet and lying to you for no apparent reason.
Working out intricate routes through back streets where you might be turning every few metres to get clear of the main flow of traffic is tricky enough at the best of times. Trying to do it with satnav instructions is all but impossible, because the directions are so often mistimed or ambiguous. Trying to do it with someone back at base somehow reading directions or otherwise feeding the information to your vehicle seems like the worst of all worlds.
Every major satnav brand has had products with real-time traffic information for years, at least in the UK where we're talking about.
I don't know why people keep bringing up apps, Google Maps and Waze, as if they're somehow in a different class to other in-car devices. They have no magic, and IME they're not particularly any better in the inner city areas that other systems don't handle well.
I literally just posted search terms that work. If you can't manage to put those into Google and then follow the obviously named links on the first results page to the obvious video sites, I'm afraid no-one can help you.
We've tried using Google Maps on my wife's phone while I'm driving, plenty of times. It's just as bad in inner cities as the built-in things or the standalone satnavs like TomTom.
Also, why do so many people apparently believe London cabbies somehow can't use all the same technologies as everyone else, in addition to their expert knowledge of the central area? It's not as if they're mutually exclusive.
I don't know what you were searching for, but several searches I tried using terms like London, black cab and satnav turned up several of the older ones immediately. There was another one on TV much more recently that had the same outcome, but I'm afraid I can't remember which programme it was so it's hard to find that one.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently not this time. Part of the problem here is that a different mechanism is being used, not the regular Windows Update/WSUS/etc. that you're probably using for deployment if you're in a managed environment, and so whatever settings normally apply for deploying updates on your infrastructure are being bypassed in favour of contacting Microsoft directly anyway.
Maybe it's a hint about what you're supposed to do with PCs once the update has been installed -- push them down a flight of stairs and watch the results for entertainment?
Don't worry, "pre-trained machine learning" is probably a euphemism for if-statements, so it's unlikely that either will be necessary.
If they're using a similar name and logo then that is probably trademark infringement, passing off, or the like, and as such would probably be against the law in most places in the West. If it's a registered trademark, that would surely be the case.
If they're producing a similar product but without any implication that it comes from the OP's business, those restrictions wouldn't apply. Other things being equal, that's just plain ordinary competition.
If there are other IP rights involved -- most likely patents or some sort of design right, depending on where you are -- then those might be infringed. However, these sorts of legal rights tend to need a more expensive and time-consuming registration process to acquire, so unless OP has done that, this area probably isn't going to offer much help.
Even Mozilla employees don't use Firefox:
I head up Firefox marketing, but I use Chrome every day.
That's misrepresenting what was written. The author actually says they use both Firefox and Chrome.
I never experienced the "slowness" that some people seem to have seen in older versions, and I haven't noticed any perceptible speed-ups since 57 either.
FF can't win. People complained (and still do) about "bloat" in the browser. The logical conclusion from the whining masses is that the "bloat" should be stripped-out. But then a feature is stripped out, and another set of people say "OH, NO, not THAT feature, I meant all the other features that I don't use".
That's a little unfair. I saw a lot of people complaining about bloat that wasn't really related to the core browsing functionality and could just as well have been handled through add-ons. I'm not sure that in my entire life I've ever seen a Firefox user complain that its flexibility as an actual web browser was a bad thing or that the ability to configure everyday things like cookies should be nerfed.
It seems to me that Firefox has, and has always had, a clear way to "win": It needs to be the trustworthy, reliable, highly customisable browser that made it attractive, and then focus on quality of implementation as an actual web browser instead of all the peripheral junk.
Unfortunately, they seem to be doing almost everything but that. They gave up huge amounts of customisation with 57, and I am still irritated every time I have to use it by so many little things that are worse than they were before as a direct result, while literally nothing has improved perceptibly for me. It's also been flaky since 57 and just plain broken since 58 in several ways, making a mockery of the claims about the architecture changes improving speed and reliability. I must be the unluckiest person on the planet given how many people seem to defend that change every time the subject comes up!
Most recent Linux one was a Dell Developer Edition. We were a bit wary after hearing a few horror stories, so we only picked up one of that model initially, but we've had no noticeable problems with the hardware after the first few months other than the infamous over-sensitive touchpad, which is arguably a matter of personal taste.
Our main gripe with the system as a whole is that their chosen distro is Ubuntu, which has an upgrade system that is possibly even worse than the ones in Windows. It's caused one problem after another since literally the first update after unpacking. There doesn't seem to be any sort of co-ordination between the GUI update tool and apt in terms of what it wants to install/update, but dumping the GUI tool entirely and just using apt seems to be much better. We'll probably dump Ubuntu and try a more professional distro on this laptop before we buy any more.
Why is Linux only a viable alternative for you, now?
Short version: Far more important things (for us) are now either online or client-server, and far less important things (for us) rely on native applications that are only available on the Windows platform. For those that remain, we stocked up on Windows 7 machines while we still could.
Bonus answer: Linux's hardware support and ease of configuration more generally are in a different league today to where they were 10 years ago. For example, we can buy a laptop pre-installed with Linux today and have a reasonable chance that it will work properly both out of the box and throughout its normal working lifetime, with minimal overheads configuring/managing it.
Well, you joke, but we haven't bought a new Windows machine since 7 was no longer available, and we're now using non-Windows platforms for our new machines instead of going anywhere near Windows 10. So for us, it literally is the year of Linux on the desktop. Turns out that for development work it's probably better anyway, and for all the online stuff a browser or email client on Linux is kinda like a browser or email client on Windows.
The only "distracted driving" accident I've been in was when the guy behind me didn't realize that I was stopping at a yellow light and slammed into me from behind.
An overwhelming body of evidence says that if you're doing the things you described then you are significantly worse as a driver than you otherwise would be. Your reactions are slower than they otherwise would be. Your judgement is impaired. You do make mistakes.
Now, maybe so far other drivers have been able to compensate for your mistakes, taking avoiding action to prevent an accident, or waiting patiently behind you when you were slow off the mark, or leaving extra space to accommodate your panic braking. Maybe because you weren't paying attention you didn't even realise this was happening all the time. But it does happen all the time, with better drivers compensating to some extent for the worse ones, and unfortunately it breeds a false sense of security in those who "don't have a problem".
If it's in the internet, you gave it away.
Well, no, because if you want access to it then you have to accept our terms of business and pay us first. Even if you didn't, you still have to follow the law or accept the potential consequences of breaking it.
Fortunately for the rest of humanity, people like you don't actually own the Internet or have any right or ability to tell the rest of us how we may or may not use it. You're just someone shouting from the top of a cliff about something you don't like, and you're welcome to ignore those of us making use of the Internet to do that thing and go about your business having a nice day, just as we're free to ignore your shouting.
Didn't cayenne8 literally just say that this is something they would like to see done more like Europe, where these things are restricted by law?
Great rant. Economically impractical, and much of it was a straw man talking about freely available pictures when the context was video streams (many of which are indeed paywalled), but great rant.
For future reference, if you want to know why people ripping content don't just get to win this one, ask yourself who is doing the work and contributing the value in this picture and who is contributing literally nothing in your world view, and that's your answer.
Also, at the risk of bringing stupid things like direct experience of actually doing this stuff into the conversation, the vast majority of our customers are honest, perhaps because we do in fact offer our content at a reasonable price that represents good value to them. The few who aren't cause highly disproportionate trouble, and not only does that very much hurt those of us creating the content and running the infrastructure, it also directly hurts our honest customers because we really do have significantly less time left over to make more for them to enjoy. And in case you didn't realise, those few dishonest ones are the people you're defending here.
In this case, I'm afraid the "backwards ways" are yours. Welcome to the 21st century, where creative industries are big, the Internet is the dominant communications channel, the Web is no longer a small and informal collection of hobbyist content, and being online no longer puts you effectively above the law.
I get that some people liked the way things used to be. I get why, too. But the world moves on, and the idea that multi-billion dollar businesses aren't going to protect their legal rights because some kid repeats "Information wants to be free" often enough is unrealistic.
I don't like going after people who try to rip the original content that my people spent time and money making. It's not why we do what we do. But equally, we're not going to sit back and let someone rip us off because they wish for a world where copyright didn't exist, and neither are all the other people whose mortgages depend on being paid for their work.
I also get to decide if video streams can be saved to disk for later viewing.
And then people complain about DRM schemes and EME using closed source components and not being well supported on unusual platforms...
Indeed. When the observable behaviour of your legitimate software is becoming indistinguishable from the observable behaviour of malware, at some point you have to look in the mirror and say maybe you're the problem.
No, it doesn't. That one was the loaded test, and it also doesn't present its timings very clearly, but if you read it carefully (particularly the conclusion, which mentions this explicitly) the taxi is said to be faster than the Uber.
Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are essentially web sites where JavaScript and some relatively modern browser APIs are used to store parts of the site locally on the device after it's been downloaded. This allows the site to "load" again later even if the user is offline or has a bad connection, to cache some data on the client side, to store pending data ready to be uploaded automatically when a good connection is available again, etc. You can also do things like adding an icon to load the site to your home screen on a mobile device. In essence, you can create something that is really a web site, but enhanced to work more like a native app.
Android/Chrome has supported most of the relevant technologies for quite a while and pretty much all of them in recent versions. Apparently Edge is getting there now too. iOS/Safari is a long way behind.
Sources using exactly the search terms I gave you before
There are literally three different comparisons mentioned on just the first couple of pages, dating from 2006, 2013, and 2017. In the two directly comparable races (travelling between the same destinations and starting at the same time) the taxi was significantly faster. The third appears to have been comparing the journeys starting at different times, so not a fair test, but the taxi still apparently beat the Uber despite the latter having the advantage in start time.
More sources
The first hit there is a study comparing several different London journeys over a period of days, with the taxi also being significantly faster than the Uber on average.
No doubt someone somewhere has run an experiment that had the opposite outcome, but the overall the Knowledge is looking favourable even in recent comparisons.
If you really want to have an intelligent and informative discussion, maybe consider using less swearing and negativity, and more following up on the information people gave you. Not everyone is wasting their time posting stuff they made up on the Internet and lying to you for no apparent reason.
Working out intricate routes through back streets where you might be turning every few metres to get clear of the main flow of traffic is tricky enough at the best of times. Trying to do it with satnav instructions is all but impossible, because the directions are so often mistimed or ambiguous. Trying to do it with someone back at base somehow reading directions or otherwise feeding the information to your vehicle seems like the worst of all worlds.
Every major satnav brand has had products with real-time traffic information for years, at least in the UK where we're talking about.
I don't know why people keep bringing up apps, Google Maps and Waze, as if they're somehow in a different class to other in-car devices. They have no magic, and IME they're not particularly any better in the inner city areas that other systems don't handle well.
I literally just posted search terms that work. If you can't manage to put those into Google and then follow the obviously named links on the first results page to the obvious video sites, I'm afraid no-one can help you.
We've tried using Google Maps on my wife's phone while I'm driving, plenty of times. It's just as bad in inner cities as the built-in things or the standalone satnavs like TomTom.
Also, why do so many people apparently believe London cabbies somehow can't use all the same technologies as everyone else, in addition to their expert knowledge of the central area? It's not as if they're mutually exclusive.
I don't know what you were searching for, but several searches I tried using terms like London, black cab and satnav turned up several of the older ones immediately. There was another one on TV much more recently that had the same outcome, but I'm afraid I can't remember which programme it was so it's hard to find that one.