Depending on the settings, our machine will also do much faster cycles. It looks like about an hour for the 30-40C washes, a bit more if you go hotter. However, its default for any given settings seems to be 2-3x longer than the fastest time-saving option. Those defaults are the "eco" options driven by the regulations we're talking about.
Well, I'm happy for you that your family, job and other commitments are so convenient and regular, but not everyone is in that position.
I don't know where you got this idea that I was talking about 4-5 loads per day from. That's a weekly load. The point is that we often have limited time available for household chores, and need to be efficient about using it. We have better things to do with our limited free time than interrupt it throughout an entire day to change washing around.
I suspect that having now all said they have no plans and such a change shouldn't be necessary, they'd have little defence if they tried this and the UK regulator then immediately told them not to.
What I actually do is leave the laundry for ages then do tons in one day on the quick wash cycle.
In my experience, that's what almost everyone does, except that with larger families "leave for ages" just means "want to put a normal week's worth of clothes through within a single free day at the weekend".
Forcing companies to provide very long term support for long outdated technologies will decidedly tilt the playing field in favor large players at the expense of small innovative companies.
There is certainly a risk there. That said, up to a point, I suspect mandatory transparency will improve a lot of these problems as much as hard standards.
I think of this increasingly like the mandatory health warnings we've had on cigarette packets for a long time. If the advertising or packaging for, say, a "smart" TV was allowed to list any third party services it integrated with but also had to state equally prominently how long those services were guaranteed to work for and what would happen to the relevant features of the TV if the services were updated or discontinued and whether and when any updates would be provided and whether those updates might also affect other behaviour rather than simply maintaining compatibility, and then had to give a further prominent disclosure of other owner-hostile behaviours like phoning home after spying on you, and then had to give a further prominent disclosure about any security risks such as included sensors and networking capabilities and the track record of the manufacturer in terms of keeping their devices secure and the minimum amount of time that security updates would be provided for and what would happen to the device when they stopped... Well, you get the idea.
I do think there has to be room for mandatory minimum standards and levels of support, but ideally as a last resort. The first problem is that people today buy expensive things with wildly inaccurate expectations that are often tacitly accepted or even actively encouraged by the manufacturers and vendors of those things.
They compare the relative energy usage of the appliances.
...under conditions that will apply to almost no-one, because people have jobs and families and other major commitments, and they can't wait 3-4 hours for every load of washing to complete.
There must be more to that story than you're saying. Software companies can't just unilaterally update their EULAs after you've already bought a permanent copy of their product. At best, it would have no legal weight at all, and they'd look like idiots for trying, and it's hard to believe that the big ones like Microsoft are that naive.
FYI, the major UK mobile networks have stated that they don't have current plans to increase the roaming charges again post-Brexit. Given the commercial connections between them and their counterparts elsewhere in the EU and with an obvious PR disaster waiting for anyone who tried it first, that position seems unlikely to change any time soon either.
But it doesn't solve the problem, of the violation, and it just shifts where they go.
That's a common criticism, but I think it misses some important points. For one thing, the damage caused by copyright infringement is related to the scale of the infringement. When everyone used to copy cassette tapes and swap them at school, it was time-consuming to make those copies and they didn't spread very fast. In the online era, one popular source can rapidly distribute an infringing work to many more people. Moreover, those popular sources are often monetising their behaviour. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that they should bear some additional responsibility in light of their additional influence.
Someone who is willing to give away an infringing work from their own personal site can still do so, and they won't then be subject to DMCA takedown notices in the same way... but they will also be paying the bills for hosting, which will quickly limit how much distribution actually happens in most cases, and they will be personally liable for damages when the infringement lawsuit arrives.
Indeed. There is absolutely no reason they couldn't have provided this through Windows Update on Windows 7 if they wanted to. It's just the usual abuse of their customers from Microsoft ever since they started going all control-freak-spyware-y.
There are monthly, non-cumulative updates available with only the security updates, if you download them directly from the Microsoft Update Catalog and install them manually with the wusa command line tool. Go to https://www.catalog.update.mic... and search for (as an example) KB3212642.
Only if you've stopped installing updates entirely or been exceptionally diligent.
It's true that Microsoft make it unnecessarily difficult to install just the security patches on 7 for non-enterprise users, but at least it is possible via an official channel. That's more than you can say of 10.
Yes. For home use, I'm already wary of devices like Chromecasts that want network access but have uncertain internal behaviour. I'm not a big believer in IoT hype, as I think a lot of these devices are solutions in search of problems, but some of them are actually useful. However, I'm coming around to the idea that we should isolate most home devices the same way we would isolate untrusted equipment at the office, with nothing but themselves and an Internet connection.
That is true, but you can get monthly cumulative updates that only include the security fixes. They don't make it easy (those updates aren't distributed via the normal Windows Update mechanism) but at least the possibility exists.
I can't speak for anyone else, but my small businesses were holding off on new PCs as much as possible during the Windows 8 era in the hope that 10 would fix the much-criticised UI issues. When 10 turned out to actually be worse because of all the privacy and update nonsense, and Microsoft appeared to be doubling down on that strategy, we started spending real money on trying out various alternative platforms.
I don't know how many other people or smaller businesses did something similar, but anecdotally the number is certainly more than zero among my personal contacts. So while new PCs might not have been driving Windows sales up, it's certainly true to some degree that recent versions of Windows have been pushing new PC sales down.
As much as we want to Hate on Windows 10... Microsoft Windows Sales have been tied to General PC Sales.
Maybe PC sales were lower in part because of waiting for and then disappointment with Windows 10. From the correlation alone, we can't tell.
Your fundamental point is valid, but it's pretty embarrassing for Microsoft that its shiny new flagship product still hasn't overtaken its tried-and-tested legacy product after all this time, even though they literally gave it away to any home user who wanted to upgrade (and apparently a few who didn't...) and stopped offering the alternatives so anyone buying those new computers can't choose the older version even if they'd prefer it.
There are some more legitimate grounds for trying to limit the resale market as well. Some high profile artists have been really cracking down on this in the UK recently, because it had reached the point where automated bots were just buying up all the tickets to gigs within moments of them becoming available and then the tickets were being sold on almost immediately but at much-inflated prices on the second hand market.
Everything is a goddamned app. And every fucking one of them primarily exists to scrape your personal information and sell it.
Mobile apps seem to be a two-sided race to the bottom. Users think anything, no matter how complicated or how much work is required to create it, should be a $2 app. Consequently, people with something serious to offer struggle to do it at a viable price point through mobile apps. There are some useful free apps provided in conjunction with something else: some exhibitions have really good tour guides as mobile apps now, for example, and there are some helpful journey planners and the like provided by governments and transport services. There are a very few decent apps that are relatively cheap to produce and mass-market, so they can afford margins measured in cents and make it up on volume. And then the other 95% is dominated by cheap, exploitative junk.
There are many millions of people who work independently, as freelancers, contractors, through their own small businesses, etc. Carrying one phone with two numbers instead of two phones would potentially be helpful to almost all of those people.
That cuts both ways, though: one useful thing about containers is that I can test new versions and security updates in relative safety on a separate container that is otherwise identical to production, prior to updating my main production containers.
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Depending on the settings, our machine will also do much faster cycles. It looks like about an hour for the 30-40C washes, a bit more if you go hotter. However, its default for any given settings seems to be 2-3x longer than the fastest time-saving option. Those defaults are the "eco" options driven by the regulations we're talking about.
Well, I'm happy for you that your family, job and other commitments are so convenient and regular, but not everyone is in that position.
I don't know where you got this idea that I was talking about 4-5 loads per day from. That's a weekly load. The point is that we often have limited time available for household chores, and need to be efficient about using it. We have better things to do with our limited free time than interrupt it throughout an entire day to change washing around.
I suspect that having now all said they have no plans and such a change shouldn't be necessary, they'd have little defence if they tried this and the UK regulator then immediately told them not to.
What I actually do is leave the laundry for ages then do tons in one day on the quick wash cycle.
In my experience, that's what almost everyone does, except that with larger families "leave for ages" just means "want to put a normal week's worth of clothes through within a single free day at the weekend".
How is a timer going to help me put 4-5 loads of my family's washing through the machine in a day, if each wash takes 3-4 hours?
Forcing companies to provide very long term support for long outdated technologies will decidedly tilt the playing field in favor large players at the expense of small innovative companies.
There is certainly a risk there. That said, up to a point, I suspect mandatory transparency will improve a lot of these problems as much as hard standards.
I think of this increasingly like the mandatory health warnings we've had on cigarette packets for a long time. If the advertising or packaging for, say, a "smart" TV was allowed to list any third party services it integrated with but also had to state equally prominently how long those services were guaranteed to work for and what would happen to the relevant features of the TV if the services were updated or discontinued and whether and when any updates would be provided and whether those updates might also affect other behaviour rather than simply maintaining compatibility, and then had to give a further prominent disclosure of other owner-hostile behaviours like phoning home after spying on you, and then had to give a further prominent disclosure about any security risks such as included sensors and networking capabilities and the track record of the manufacturer in terms of keeping their devices secure and the minimum amount of time that security updates would be provided for and what would happen to the device when they stopped... Well, you get the idea.
I do think there has to be room for mandatory minimum standards and levels of support, but ideally as a last resort. The first problem is that people today buy expensive things with wildly inaccurate expectations that are often tacitly accepted or even actively encouraged by the manufacturers and vendors of those things.
They compare the relative energy usage of the appliances.
...under conditions that will apply to almost no-one, because people have jobs and families and other major commitments, and they can't wait 3-4 hours for every load of washing to complete.
There must be more to that story than you're saying. Software companies can't just unilaterally update their EULAs after you've already bought a permanent copy of their product. At best, it would have no legal weight at all, and they'd look like idiots for trying, and it's hard to believe that the big ones like Microsoft are that naive.
FYI, the major UK mobile networks have stated that they don't have current plans to increase the roaming charges again post-Brexit. Given the commercial connections between them and their counterparts elsewhere in the EU and with an obvious PR disaster waiting for anyone who tried it first, that position seems unlikely to change any time soon either.
But it doesn't solve the problem, of the violation, and it just shifts where they go.
That's a common criticism, but I think it misses some important points. For one thing, the damage caused by copyright infringement is related to the scale of the infringement. When everyone used to copy cassette tapes and swap them at school, it was time-consuming to make those copies and they didn't spread very fast. In the online era, one popular source can rapidly distribute an infringing work to many more people. Moreover, those popular sources are often monetising their behaviour. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that they should bear some additional responsibility in light of their additional influence.
Someone who is willing to give away an infringing work from their own personal site can still do so, and they won't then be subject to DMCA takedown notices in the same way... but they will also be paying the bills for hosting, which will quickly limit how much distribution actually happens in most cases, and they will be personally liable for damages when the infringement lawsuit arrives.
Indeed. There is absolutely no reason they couldn't have provided this through Windows Update on Windows 7 if they wanted to. It's just the usual abuse of their customers from Microsoft ever since they started going all control-freak-spyware-y.
There are monthly, non-cumulative updates available with only the security updates, if you download them directly from the Microsoft Update Catalog and install them manually with the wusa command line tool. Go to https://www.catalog.update.mic... and search for (as an example) KB3212642.
Only if you've stopped installing updates entirely or been exceptionally diligent.
It's true that Microsoft make it unnecessarily difficult to install just the security patches on 7 for non-enterprise users, but at least it is possible via an official channel. That's more than you can say of 10.
Yes. For home use, I'm already wary of devices like Chromecasts that want network access but have uncertain internal behaviour. I'm not a big believer in IoT hype, as I think a lot of these devices are solutions in search of problems, but some of them are actually useful. However, I'm coming around to the idea that we should isolate most home devices the same way we would isolate untrusted equipment at the office, with nothing but themselves and an Internet connection.
That is true, but you can get monthly cumulative updates that only include the security fixes. They don't make it easy (those updates aren't distributed via the normal Windows Update mechanism) but at least the possibility exists.
That's a fair point, but at least with 7 you have the option.
I can't speak for anyone else, but my small businesses were holding off on new PCs as much as possible during the Windows 8 era in the hope that 10 would fix the much-criticised UI issues. When 10 turned out to actually be worse because of all the privacy and update nonsense, and Microsoft appeared to be doubling down on that strategy, we started spending real money on trying out various alternative platforms.
I don't know how many other people or smaller businesses did something similar, but anecdotally the number is certainly more than zero among my personal contacts. So while new PCs might not have been driving Windows sales up, it's certainly true to some degree that recent versions of Windows have been pushing new PC sales down.
Except for the few neck beards that hang around here, most people love Windows 10.
Of course they do. That's why there are still more Windows 7 users even several years after 10 launched.
As much as we want to Hate on Windows 10... Microsoft Windows Sales have been tied to General PC Sales.
Maybe PC sales were lower in part because of waiting for and then disappointment with Windows 10. From the correlation alone, we can't tell.
Your fundamental point is valid, but it's pretty embarrassing for Microsoft that its shiny new flagship product still hasn't overtaken its tried-and-tested legacy product after all this time, even though they literally gave it away to any home user who wanted to upgrade (and apparently a few who didn't...) and stopped offering the alternatives so anyone buying those new computers can't choose the older version even if they'd prefer it.
Mine hasn't. You see, in Windows 7, you can choose which updates you install...
There are some more legitimate grounds for trying to limit the resale market as well. Some high profile artists have been really cracking down on this in the UK recently, because it had reached the point where automated bots were just buying up all the tickets to gigs within moments of them becoming available and then the tickets were being sold on almost immediately but at much-inflated prices on the second hand market.
Everything is a goddamned app. And every fucking one of them primarily exists to scrape your personal information and sell it.
Mobile apps seem to be a two-sided race to the bottom. Users think anything, no matter how complicated or how much work is required to create it, should be a $2 app. Consequently, people with something serious to offer struggle to do it at a viable price point through mobile apps. There are some useful free apps provided in conjunction with something else: some exhibitions have really good tour guides as mobile apps now, for example, and there are some helpful journey planners and the like provided by governments and transport services. There are a very few decent apps that are relatively cheap to produce and mass-market, so they can afford margins measured in cents and make it up on volume. And then the other 95% is dominated by cheap, exploitative junk.
There are many millions of people who work independently, as freelancers, contractors, through their own small businesses, etc. Carrying one phone with two numbers instead of two phones would potentially be helpful to almost all of those people.
That cuts both ways, though: one useful thing about containers is that I can test new versions and security updates in relative safety on a separate container that is otherwise identical to production, prior to updating my main production containers.
chroot is to security as RAID is to backups.