I have to disagree. Windows 8 seemed to assume that you had been using Windows long enough to know that to launch a program you had to click on the bottom left of the screen [on the start button], and to search for a program you could start typing [in the search box], and thot you would still know to do that even with the visual elements removed. If you weren't familiar with Windows, you'd be hopelessly lost*. As an experienced Windows user I actually didn't mind the Windows 8 interface as much as a lot of people did, but it certainly seemed like it assumed you were coming into it with a bit of Windows tribal knowledge.
*One of my favorite things to do during the initial Windows 8 preview releases was to challenge experienced Windows users to open Notepad without using the keyboard. The results were usually entertaining and sometimes hilarious.
Webcams were pretty niche until USB finally took off which was in 1998. I've got a few very old webcams. None of them work in Windows after XP, some didn't make it past 98/ME. Linux support is spotty. Several of them used propriety image compression techniques which were never fully reverse-engineered, so while Linux can see them, you can't really pull an image off of them, or if you can only a few low resolution modes work. The only one that really works in Linux as well as it did in Windows is an old Logitech Quickcam, though the last time I had it plugged in the plastic lens had clouded to the point where the image was almost useless. To be honest, I'm not even sure why I still have all these webcams.
It's kind of crazy for equipment like this to run Windows in the first place, as I've dealt with stuff like this and it's pretty clear that Microsoft doesn't care one bit about niche use cases like this. Probably the best solution would be not allow the PC on the network at all so it can't patch itself, though I'm not convinced that Windows 10 won't complain after a while if it's can't call home.
Fun fact: Many of those equipment manufacturers are technically in violation of Microsoft's licensing one way or another, assuming the computer loaded with Windows was provided as part of the purchase of the equipment. Like I say, Microsoft doesn't seem to care.
The other way that Microsoft helped kill off the netbook was to make Windows 7 Starter very cheap, but in order to qualify the Netbook must not exceed certain specifications (otherwise, it was then considered a laptop by Microsoft and would require a more expensive Windows 7 Home license). That's why the Netbooks all had very similar specifications no matter who made them, and also why it seemed like they were stuck in a time warp where the hardware didn't seem to change at all for several years.
Of course, the Linux netbooks didn't have these restrictions, but since the manufacturers idea of the Linux netbook was to take the Windows one but load Linux on it instead, they basically all ended up hobbled by the same restrictions as the Windows netbooks.
Don't forget that the original release of XP would run pretty well on a Pentium III with 256MB of ram, which was a pretty typical computer when XP came out. It really amazes me how much of a dog XP became later in life, where you really needed a dual core with 2GB before it would run acceptably.
That doesn't prove much of anything. Google always seems to return a huge pile of "results" for any search. Most are completely useless and have nothing to do with what I was searching for. And somewhere buried in that huge pile of useless crap I'll find the same few, at least somewhat relevant pages that Bing (or DuckDuckGo) would have turned up. I'm not sure what your searches are actually about, but I bet you'll find a most of of the Google results don't contain all three of those terms, with many only containing one of the terms, and even pages that have none of those terms(!).
I've found the opposite. Now whenever I use Google I'm amazed at just how bad the results often are. That's actually the big reason I stopped using Google in the first place. Now some of it is not really Google's fault (people doing SEO mostly only try to game Google's results) but a lot of it is Google's fault (Google searching for what it thinks I want to search for, not what I actually searched for). This is the most obvious when DuckDuckGo doesn't return many results for a search, so I try Google which returns a huge pile of results which turn out to have nothing really to do with what I actually searched for.
As far as Bing is concerned, I've not found it to be a whole lot better than Google, but certainly no worse. Some of the features (maps, image search) are considerably better and more useful than Google's.
So, if, say AT&T, sees a high volume of short duration calls originating from carrier X... sure, they can shut down that carrier, but what if that carrier had legit customers as well? Not only that, carrier X is paying AT&T per minute rates for calls terminating on AT&T's network.
yes, carrier X could shut down the customer... but they would only be shooting themselves in the foot because they would be giving up a good chunk of revenue. VoIP carriers are mostly small/medium sized businesses. In addition, short duration calls are more expensive than "conversational" calls (to recoup the cost) and carrier X knows that their high volume customer will just move to another VoIP carrier if they drop the customer.
This is exactly how you stop it. If carrier X has some customer that starts making a large number of robocalls, and carrier X doesn't drop them, you slap carrier X with a huge fine. If working at the carrier level isn't effective (like if the carriers are outside of US jurisdiction), then you start slapping AT&T with huge fines when they don't drop VOIP carriers that harbor robocallers. If you make it bad business to let the robocallers do their thing, then the problem will stop, and the shady VOIP providers will either have to shape up or go out of business. Really, it's pretty pathetic that the FTC hasn't gone after these companies that allow the whole situation to persist in the first place, because doing this kind of thing is their job.
Follow the money. Set up some investigators with fake identities. When they get an illegal robocall, they play along, using the fake identity (credit card, SSN, whatever) until they have enough information to uncover who the scammers are. Then you shut them down and throw them into jail. Maybe they don't have a US presence that you can go after, but you investigate who sold them their connectivity into the phone system, who provides their merchant accounts, who sold them their contact lists, who they actually work for, etc. Anything under US jurisdiction that can be made to stick results in large fines and/or jail time. Most of these robocall scams must either have a US presence, or at least have some kind of relationship with US companies in order to do what they are doing. It's really shocking to me that the FTC won't actually do anything about it, because once a few of these operations are shut down with consequences to those involved, the others will fold pretty quick.
The only reason I could see for decommissioning it would be that it costs more in upkeep and maintenance than it provides in income from selling the energy. If the only thing that made it "profitable" was the tax subsidies and depreciation write-off then it likely never actually made any money in the first place.
Still, I do have to wonder if it was actually bought up cheap by someone and is still standing.
I'd suggest looking at IceCat (formerly IceWeasel). Given that the whole reason the browser exists is because of the not-free-enough license for the Firefox trademark and artwork, I'm sure they'll also strip out any binary blob DRM schemes.
The original Sony Walkman featured two headphone jacks. It didn't prove to be very popular and it wasn't carried forward. Of course, that was also 35 years ago.
Hitler's real big military blunder was attacking Russia and trying to fight a war on two fronts. Granted, it's hard to know if things would have turned out differently if he didn't attack Russia, but in retrospect is wasn't a good move.
Probably pretty well. One of the reasons why PDF is such a security mess (other than Adobe) is because it has such a huge attack surface. There's tons of features, many of which are seldom used, that allows PDF to do almost anything (well, actually a lot of that is Adobe's fault, actually). Remove support for all of those features and you're going to have a much more secure program that will still work for 99%+ of PDF files out there.
That's assuming said switch actually physically turns off the device, and just doesn't switch a digital line that tells the driver to tell the wireless chipset to take a nap. I've seen a few Linux laptops where the wireless disable switch did nothing, because the driver didn't know or care about it.
If you had done this study in the late 1700s, they would have said that we were at the limits for how many people the world could support, too.
Actually, probably the opposite. Back then things like the forests of North America were considered so vast that the supply of lumber and wood would be inexhaustible. Which it was, until the forests were all chopped down, of course.
The other thing to consider is that bringing a desalination plant online takes time. If you need the water now, as in people are dying of thirst, suddenly taking it by force may not seem as crazy.
Chrome installs a couple of services on Windows that run all the time and will keep updating Chrome even if you never use it. Those services aren't specific to Chrome, you'll get them if you install Google Earth and probably Google Talk too.
You can try stopping those services, but I've found that launching Google Earth will often turn them on again (can't say anything about Chrome or Talk because Earth is the only Google program I have).
No, but tons of other software comes bundled with Chrome. Including Flash Player itself, though I think only if you download it from IE. Chrome is exactly the kind of unwanted software Google is talking about.
I don't have Google's shovelware installed on my computer, but going to https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ in IE yields an offer to install both Chrome (and make it my default browser) as well as Google Toolbar. Going to that same URL in Pale Moon or Firefox I get the McAfee offer.
It's notable because it really represents the end of an era. The SS United States is really the last of its kind, as it wasn't long after it was built that airplanes took over the role of transporting passengers across the Atlantic, which pretty ended any advancements in ocean-going passenger liners(*). That's why it still holds records, some of which will likely never be broken, and why many people consider the ship to be special as it represents the peak of ocean liners.
With that said, the current state of the ship is pretty sad. It's been out of service for almost 50 years, and as far as I'm concerned if something isn't going to be done with it, maybe it's time to let it go. Otherwise, it's just going sit around and continue to decay.
(*) That's not to say the SS United States is the last passenger liner built. The most recent is the RMS Queen Mary II built in 2004. But modern ocean liners serve a different role than ships like the SS United States. and thus are built with different goals in mind.
I'm fairly certain that while Microsoft would love to make all the pirates pay for Windows, they're too scared that if they push too hard the pirates will instead switch to Linux. At the end of the day, Microsoft would much rather have people run pirated Windows than Linux.
That will allow you to store the files, download, and share them, but you have the problem that to actually watch them, you're going decrypt them at some point.
Though maybe in a few years after secure boot is mandatory, and unauthorized OSes are banned from connecting to the internet, we'll be forced to download our media so encrypted, then sneaker-net it over to our old computers to decrypt and watch them.
What I would do is give the user the option of plugging in a mouse for the complicated initial set up and for navigating the menus of rarely used functions. Would also come in handy for smart TVs I suppose.
As for the remote, I'd make it simple and easy to operate by touch without having to look at it. 99% of the time I'm only using a handful of buttons anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree. Windows 8 seemed to assume that you had been using Windows long enough to know that to launch a program you had to click on the bottom left of the screen [on the start button], and to search for a program you could start typing [in the search box], and thot you would still know to do that even with the visual elements removed. If you weren't familiar with Windows, you'd be hopelessly lost*. As an experienced Windows user I actually didn't mind the Windows 8 interface as much as a lot of people did, but it certainly seemed like it assumed you were coming into it with a bit of Windows tribal knowledge.
*One of my favorite things to do during the initial Windows 8 preview releases was to challenge experienced Windows users to open Notepad without using the keyboard. The results were usually entertaining and sometimes hilarious.
Webcams were pretty niche until USB finally took off which was in 1998. I've got a few very old webcams. None of them work in Windows after XP, some didn't make it past 98/ME. Linux support is spotty. Several of them used propriety image compression techniques which were never fully reverse-engineered, so while Linux can see them, you can't really pull an image off of them, or if you can only a few low resolution modes work. The only one that really works in Linux as well as it did in Windows is an old Logitech Quickcam, though the last time I had it plugged in the plastic lens had clouded to the point where the image was almost useless. To be honest, I'm not even sure why I still have all these webcams.
Yes, exactly this.
It's kind of crazy for equipment like this to run Windows in the first place, as I've dealt with stuff like this and it's pretty clear that Microsoft doesn't care one bit about niche use cases like this. Probably the best solution would be not allow the PC on the network at all so it can't patch itself, though I'm not convinced that Windows 10 won't complain after a while if it's can't call home.
Fun fact: Many of those equipment manufacturers are technically in violation of Microsoft's licensing one way or another, assuming the computer loaded with Windows was provided as part of the purchase of the equipment. Like I say, Microsoft doesn't seem to care.
The other way that Microsoft helped kill off the netbook was to make Windows 7 Starter very cheap, but in order to qualify the Netbook must not exceed certain specifications (otherwise, it was then considered a laptop by Microsoft and would require a more expensive Windows 7 Home license). That's why the Netbooks all had very similar specifications no matter who made them, and also why it seemed like they were stuck in a time warp where the hardware didn't seem to change at all for several years.
Of course, the Linux netbooks didn't have these restrictions, but since the manufacturers idea of the Linux netbook was to take the Windows one but load Linux on it instead, they basically all ended up hobbled by the same restrictions as the Windows netbooks.
Don't forget that the original release of XP would run pretty well on a Pentium III with 256MB of ram, which was a pretty typical computer when XP came out. It really amazes me how much of a dog XP became later in life, where you really needed a dual core with 2GB before it would run acceptably.
That doesn't prove much of anything. Google always seems to return a huge pile of "results" for any search. Most are completely useless and have nothing to do with what I was searching for. And somewhere buried in that huge pile of useless crap I'll find the same few, at least somewhat relevant pages that Bing (or DuckDuckGo) would have turned up. I'm not sure what your searches are actually about, but I bet you'll find a most of of the Google results don't contain all three of those terms, with many only containing one of the terms, and even pages that have none of those terms(!).
I've found the opposite. Now whenever I use Google I'm amazed at just how bad the results often are. That's actually the big reason I stopped using Google in the first place. Now some of it is not really Google's fault (people doing SEO mostly only try to game Google's results) but a lot of it is Google's fault (Google searching for what it thinks I want to search for, not what I actually searched for). This is the most obvious when DuckDuckGo doesn't return many results for a search, so I try Google which returns a huge pile of results which turn out to have nothing really to do with what I actually searched for.
As far as Bing is concerned, I've not found it to be a whole lot better than Google, but certainly no worse. Some of the features (maps, image search) are considerably better and more useful than Google's.
This is exactly how you stop it. If carrier X has some customer that starts making a large number of robocalls, and carrier X doesn't drop them, you slap carrier X with a huge fine. If working at the carrier level isn't effective (like if the carriers are outside of US jurisdiction), then you start slapping AT&T with huge fines when they don't drop VOIP carriers that harbor robocallers. If you make it bad business to let the robocallers do their thing, then the problem will stop, and the shady VOIP providers will either have to shape up or go out of business. Really, it's pretty pathetic that the FTC hasn't gone after these companies that allow the whole situation to persist in the first place, because doing this kind of thing is their job.
No, here's how you stop it:
Follow the money. Set up some investigators with fake identities. When they get an illegal robocall, they play along, using the fake identity (credit card, SSN, whatever) until they have enough information to uncover who the scammers are. Then you shut them down and throw them into jail. Maybe they don't have a US presence that you can go after, but you investigate who sold them their connectivity into the phone system, who provides their merchant accounts, who sold them their contact lists, who they actually work for, etc. Anything under US jurisdiction that can be made to stick results in large fines and/or jail time. Most of these robocall scams must either have a US presence, or at least have some kind of relationship with US companies in order to do what they are doing. It's really shocking to me that the FTC won't actually do anything about it, because once a few of these operations are shut down with consequences to those involved, the others will fold pretty quick.
The only reason I could see for decommissioning it would be that it costs more in upkeep and maintenance than it provides in income from selling the energy. If the only thing that made it "profitable" was the tax subsidies and depreciation write-off then it likely never actually made any money in the first place.
Still, I do have to wonder if it was actually bought up cheap by someone and is still standing.
I'd suggest looking at IceCat (formerly IceWeasel). Given that the whole reason the browser exists is because of the not-free-enough license for the Firefox trademark and artwork, I'm sure they'll also strip out any binary blob DRM schemes.
The original Sony Walkman featured two headphone jacks. It didn't prove to be very popular and it wasn't carried forward. Of course, that was also 35 years ago.
Hitler's real big military blunder was attacking Russia and trying to fight a war on two fronts. Granted, it's hard to know if things would have turned out differently if he didn't attack Russia, but in retrospect is wasn't a good move.
Probably pretty well. One of the reasons why PDF is such a security mess (other than Adobe) is because it has such a huge attack surface. There's tons of features, many of which are seldom used, that allows PDF to do almost anything (well, actually a lot of that is Adobe's fault, actually). Remove support for all of those features and you're going to have a much more secure program that will still work for 99%+ of PDF files out there.
That's assuming said switch actually physically turns off the device, and just doesn't switch a digital line that tells the driver to tell the wireless chipset to take a nap. I've seen a few Linux laptops where the wireless disable switch did nothing, because the driver didn't know or care about it.
Actually, probably the opposite. Back then things like the forests of North America were considered so vast that the supply of lumber and wood would be inexhaustible. Which it was, until the forests were all chopped down, of course.
The other thing to consider is that bringing a desalination plant online takes time. If you need the water now, as in people are dying of thirst, suddenly taking it by force may not seem as crazy.
Chrome installs a couple of services on Windows that run all the time and will keep updating Chrome even if you never use it. Those services aren't specific to Chrome, you'll get them if you install Google Earth and probably Google Talk too.
You can try stopping those services, but I've found that launching Google Earth will often turn them on again (can't say anything about Chrome or Talk because Earth is the only Google program I have).
No, but tons of other software comes bundled with Chrome. Including Flash Player itself, though I think only if you download it from IE. Chrome is exactly the kind of unwanted software Google is talking about.
I don't have Google's shovelware installed on my computer, but going to https://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ in IE yields an offer to install both Chrome (and make it my default browser) as well as Google Toolbar. Going to that same URL in Pale Moon or Firefox I get the McAfee offer.
It's notable because it really represents the end of an era. The SS United States is really the last of its kind, as it wasn't long after it was built that airplanes took over the role of transporting passengers across the Atlantic, which pretty ended any advancements in ocean-going passenger liners(*). That's why it still holds records, some of which will likely never be broken, and why many people consider the ship to be special as it represents the peak of ocean liners.
With that said, the current state of the ship is pretty sad. It's been out of service for almost 50 years, and as far as I'm concerned if something isn't going to be done with it, maybe it's time to let it go. Otherwise, it's just going sit around and continue to decay.
(*) That's not to say the SS United States is the last passenger liner built. The most recent is the RMS Queen Mary II built in 2004. But modern ocean liners serve a different role than ships like the SS United States. and thus are built with different goals in mind.
I'm fairly certain that while Microsoft would love to make all the pirates pay for Windows, they're too scared that if they push too hard the pirates will instead switch to Linux. At the end of the day, Microsoft would much rather have people run pirated Windows than Linux.
That will allow you to store the files, download, and share them, but you have the problem that to actually watch them, you're going decrypt them at some point.
Though maybe in a few years after secure boot is mandatory, and unauthorized OSes are banned from connecting to the internet, we'll be forced to download our media so encrypted, then sneaker-net it over to our old computers to decrypt and watch them.
What I would do is give the user the option of plugging in a mouse for the complicated initial set up and for navigating the menus of rarely used functions. Would also come in handy for smart TVs I suppose.
As for the remote, I'd make it simple and easy to operate by touch without having to look at it. 99% of the time I'm only using a handful of buttons anyway.
They even make them with remotes, seems like the perfect solution to me:
https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=8202
Disclaimer: I have no experience with that product and it's from Monoprice so it could be a pile of crap.