On some dimensions, such as hardware support, broad features, and cost, Apple is definitely behind. On other dimensions, such as privacy and security, Apple is solid, and Microsoft is a bag of congealed liquid. What do you value? Remember Linux and BSDs are options too.
Basically, if you need a program that only chose to support Windows, you'll need to find some way to run that program- perhaps a dedicated Windows box is even necessary. But you wouldn't want to do your emails and stuff on that.
> I'm still waiting for actual evidence that what is collected and sent is somehow nefarious.
Why?
The last few years have seen the justification of several things that were considered "tin foil hat" before. The odds of every single undesirable corporate or government happening being exposed right now seems very low- there's almost assuredly more strange stuff going on.
"Trust now, hope we didn't fuck up" is a terrible strategy. Most importantly, having all your keystrokes, contacts, emails, envelope information about contacts, etc., pushed up for ANY reason is a bad idea. The thing that makes it most suspicious is how very very hard it is to opt out of this stuff.
"trust but verify" would be ok if we had a way to verify. We don't. We should NOT trust Microsoft.
Why is the DEFAULT option to USE a feature that doesn't even work? Not only is the experimental code in the baseline for some reason, not only is it nonfunctional (and therefore not testable), but it's ENABLED BY DEFAULT?
No, the settings should be maintained by a physical switch in a certain position. Like if you want it to be 68 degrees, you move a metal switch to the 68. What is the thermostat set to? Oh, 68. Not "uh, the API returns 68, but not if the RAM got toggled with rowhammer and sometimes the input listener gets locked up". Good grief.
Taking a simple mechanical switch (that can easily be diagnosed, replaced, or even repaired should it fail) and replacing it with THE WHOLE INTERNET is fucking dumb. Could we stop calling these things "smart X", when the "smart" just means "can now be broken in a whole shit lot more ways"?
Of course, this doesn't even replace the physical parts, which can still break. You just now have issues with the wifi, the router, the firmware on the router, the latest backdoor into the router, the problem SSL had five years ago but you can't update, some issue with an app store, whatever javascript zero days will be discovered in 2018, etc.
I mean, it's not a common thing or anything, but it is a bit frustrating. In the US they've long handled this with a click through screen that says you give consent to monitoring blah blah.
You can kinda home brew open source stuff into Apple now. It's a start, and it may be aimed at the government licking its chops over regulating the "fully closed" business model. If pressed, you can bet iphones will go to much more general purpose capabilities long before they'll consider towing the tyrant line.
I have several problems with the gnome-tweak-tool.
First: The devs just randomly delete stuff, and for a long time there was no tweak tool. Now that there is one, it's not really official in the way you'd ideally like. This means that in order to get BASIC functionality, you have to go dick around with the tweak tool. Given that most UIs are functional without a bunch of shenanigans, screw that.
Second: Settings in the tool aren't guaranteed to be supported forever, and there's no amazing way that I know of to save the settings and walk them with you. This means that when you sit down to work, your first concern is ensuring that gnome tweak tool can run, and then running it to get common sense things.
Third: Simply being made to feel that you are deviant for wanting Linux behavior on Linux leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It's nice that people are able to put back a semblance of functionality, but until all that shit is in the fucking control panel, screw that. Frankly, even after- I just don't even remotely trust the Gnome devs to have my interest in mind, so I'll stick to UIs whose designers seem to be on a human wavelength.
Please link me to some solid takedowns of GNOME. GNOME 3 drove me away from Linux for quite awhile, and I'm only back on my main box now because I switched to XFCE. It may not do every single thing, but I know that I won't update one day and lose just like, every single fucking button.
>>Does it remember the new size and position when you close it? > Isn't that the application's responsibility?
Just like calculating which disk cylinder and head you should write your data to, it sure becomes the application's responsibility if the OS doesn't do it.
I saw this summary somewhere a few days ago, and was like "whatever I don't use Blackberry and don't trust them anyway".
Then it hits here, and immediately posts point out that these are third party modifications on Blackberries that are getting cracked. That seems an important detail- the clickbait headline had just meshed with my worldview, so I was assuming this was a problem with Blackberry based on the headline.
Granted, I didn't read TFA when it was in summary before. But the fact that this really means that the third party modifications are imperfect is not really hinted at. Like "Police can read all iphone data" and it applies to a safe that police can break into that was advertised as being police-proof for some reason.
Windows 95 was obviously Windows 4, Windows 98 was Windows 5, and Windows ME was Windows 6. Windows NT was NT 4, then Windows 2000 was NT 5.
At this point, we had Windows ME, the latest and worst version of the old DOS -> Windows lineage, and we had Windows 2000 as NT 5, the last and final version of the server-only NT stuff.
Microsoft then essentially merged the two lines in 2001. This was Windows XP, and it's 5.1 internally- basically they added support for the old Windows->DOS line. This got everyone on an NT version finally.
Windows Vista was Windows 6, Windows 7 was Windows 7 (the NT version falls out of sync here), Windows 8 was Windows 8, and Windows 10 is Windows 9.
The "avoid even windows versions" generally remains good. The old path, 3.X (good), 95 (shady), 98 (good), ME (terrible) had it as a nice rule of thumb, and the new stuff starting with XP (good), Vista (crappy), 7 (the best Windows to date), 8 (awful)...
So we were all expecting 10 to be good. And if it wasn't some botnet keylogger bullshit, maybe it would be. But it's good they gave it an even number so we know to duck.
Actually, Apple users DON'T tolerate it. You can trivially and easily turn off automatic updates on Apple, and they don't push patches with godawful numbers to dick around in the godawful registry to unset the godawful hex values you painstakingly set.
On Apple you tell it not to update and it doesn't.
Also even if Apple DID suck in this way, it's not a reason for Microsoft to suck in this way.
You missed the one where it will try to update you to a "subversion" of Windows 10, which will have a few arbitrary features disabled until you pay to upgrade. Then they can continue to do the same thing, but taking you to an even worse version of Windows.
At this point, you can expect every version of Windows to be worse than before, so this goes along with that trend too.
The only solution is to disable all updates in Windows 7 and 8. Then, at your leisure, you can reference which kb numbers are safe to bring over, and manually choose them (a giant pain).
But whatever, Microsoft is clearly willing to wrestle you very hard on this. It's obviously not in your best interest. People compare this to Apple, but if you tell your phone not to get an update, it fucking WON'T.
We need an addon that replaces the following six words after a Trump mention with "Trump".
Ex: Person accuses Trump of pandering to racists, general intolerance, and fascism Becomes: Person accuses Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump, Trump Trump, and fascism
The performance hit for overwriting 4 gigs (or usually less) of RAM on *process or thread shutdown* shouldn't be that onerous... should it? I could be missing something about when it frees it.
Slashdot Mirror
On some dimensions, such as hardware support, broad features, and cost, Apple is definitely behind. On other dimensions, such as privacy and security, Apple is solid, and Microsoft is a bag of congealed liquid. What do you value? Remember Linux and BSDs are options too.
Basically, if you need a program that only chose to support Windows, you'll need to find some way to run that program- perhaps a dedicated Windows box is even necessary. But you wouldn't want to do your emails and stuff on that.
> I'm still waiting for actual evidence that what is collected and sent is somehow nefarious.
Why?
The last few years have seen the justification of several things that were considered "tin foil hat" before. The odds of every single undesirable corporate or government happening being exposed right now seems very low- there's almost assuredly more strange stuff going on.
"Trust now, hope we didn't fuck up" is a terrible strategy. Most importantly, having all your keystrokes, contacts, emails, envelope information about contacts, etc., pushed up for ANY reason is a bad idea. The thing that makes it most suspicious is how very very hard it is to opt out of this stuff.
"trust but verify" would be ok if we had a way to verify. We don't. We should NOT trust Microsoft.
Also, Tide Pods look delicious!
Hey shills, come here! Right here! Call this guy "old". It's 2016, after all. When you don't have an argument, an ad hominem will do nicely!
Why is the DEFAULT option to USE a feature that doesn't even work? Not only is the experimental code in the baseline for some reason, not only is it nonfunctional (and therefore not testable), but it's ENABLED BY DEFAULT?
Bug, or someone's feature?
No, the settings should be maintained by a physical switch in a certain position. Like if you want it to be 68 degrees, you move a metal switch to the 68. What is the thermostat set to? Oh, 68. Not "uh, the API returns 68, but not if the RAM got toggled with rowhammer and sometimes the input listener gets locked up". Good grief.
Taking a simple mechanical switch (that can easily be diagnosed, replaced, or even repaired should it fail) and replacing it with THE WHOLE INTERNET is fucking dumb. Could we stop calling these things "smart X", when the "smart" just means "can now be broken in a whole shit lot more ways"?
Of course, this doesn't even replace the physical parts, which can still break. You just now have issues with the wifi, the router, the firmware on the router, the latest backdoor into the router, the problem SSL had five years ago but you can't update, some issue with an app store, whatever javascript zero days will be discovered in 2018, etc.
Fucking noise.
"No personal electronics beyond this point"
I mean, it's not a common thing or anything, but it is a bit frustrating. In the US they've long handled this with a click through screen that says you give consent to monitoring blah blah.
You can kinda home brew open source stuff into Apple now. It's a start, and it may be aimed at the government licking its chops over regulating the "fully closed" business model. If pressed, you can bet iphones will go to much more general purpose capabilities long before they'll consider towing the tyrant line.
I have several problems with the gnome-tweak-tool.
First: The devs just randomly delete stuff, and for a long time there was no tweak tool. Now that there is one, it's not really official in the way you'd ideally like. This means that in order to get BASIC functionality, you have to go dick around with the tweak tool. Given that most UIs are functional without a bunch of shenanigans, screw that.
Second: Settings in the tool aren't guaranteed to be supported forever, and there's no amazing way that I know of to save the settings and walk them with you. This means that when you sit down to work, your first concern is ensuring that gnome tweak tool can run, and then running it to get common sense things.
Third: Simply being made to feel that you are deviant for wanting Linux behavior on Linux leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
It's nice that people are able to put back a semblance of functionality, but until all that shit is in the fucking control panel, screw that. Frankly, even after- I just don't even remotely trust the Gnome devs to have my interest in mind, so I'll stick to UIs whose designers seem to be on a human wavelength.
Please link me to some solid takedowns of GNOME. GNOME 3 drove me away from Linux for quite awhile, and I'm only back on my main box now because I switched to XFCE. It may not do every single thing, but I know that I won't update one day and lose just like, every single fucking button.
> I'm sure other people like GNOME.
If that was true you would have met one IRL, at least once.
>>Does it remember the new size and position when you close it?
> Isn't that the application's responsibility?
Just like calculating which disk cylinder and head you should write your data to, it sure becomes the application's responsibility if the OS doesn't do it.
GTK isn't GNOME at all. Why is GTK ruined?
I saw this summary somewhere a few days ago, and was like "whatever I don't use Blackberry and don't trust them anyway".
Then it hits here, and immediately posts point out that these are third party modifications on Blackberries that are getting cracked. That seems an important detail- the clickbait headline had just meshed with my worldview, so I was assuming this was a problem with Blackberry based on the headline.
Granted, I didn't read TFA when it was in summary before. But the fact that this really means that the third party modifications are imperfect is not really hinted at. Like "Police can read all iphone data" and it applies to a safe that police can break into that was advertised as being police-proof for some reason.
Mod some of those guys up pls.
> Well, how about eggs, sausage and Trump? Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump. TRUMP BUFFER OVERFLOW#@^$#%
We need range checking I think...
No, the version string has "NT" for a reason.
Windows 95 was obviously Windows 4, Windows 98 was Windows 5, and Windows ME was Windows 6.
Windows NT was NT 4, then Windows 2000 was NT 5.
At this point, we had Windows ME, the latest and worst version of the old DOS -> Windows lineage, and we had Windows 2000 as NT 5, the last and final version of the server-only NT stuff.
Microsoft then essentially merged the two lines in 2001. This was Windows XP, and it's 5.1 internally- basically they added support for the old Windows->DOS line. This got everyone on an NT version finally.
Windows Vista was Windows 6, Windows 7 was Windows 7 (the NT version falls out of sync here), Windows 8 was Windows 8, and Windows 10 is Windows 9.
The "avoid even windows versions" generally remains good. The old path, 3.X (good), 95 (shady), 98 (good), ME (terrible) had it as a nice rule of thumb, and the new stuff starting with XP (good), Vista (crappy), 7 (the best Windows to date), 8 (awful)...
So we were all expecting 10 to be good. And if it wasn't some botnet keylogger bullshit, maybe it would be. But it's good they gave it an even number so we know to duck.
Does Apple really have more bugs than Microsoft? And google maps is still available, it's just not the pack-in.
Fixing Apple drama is really easy. Fixing Microsoft drama is literally impossible.
Actually, Apple users DON'T tolerate it. You can trivially and easily turn off automatic updates on Apple, and they don't push patches with godawful numbers to dick around in the godawful registry to unset the godawful hex values you painstakingly set.
On Apple you tell it not to update and it doesn't.
Also even if Apple DID suck in this way, it's not a reason for Microsoft to suck in this way.
> I don't see a problem with adapting at all.
Getting keylogged is not adaptation.
Windows 8 is a poor UI, but a decent OS. It doesn't have the keylogger in the EULA, so they really want to get you on the version with that.
You missed the one where it will try to update you to a "subversion" of Windows 10, which will have a few arbitrary features disabled until you pay to upgrade. Then they can continue to do the same thing, but taking you to an even worse version of Windows.
At this point, you can expect every version of Windows to be worse than before, so this goes along with that trend too.
DISABLE ALL UPDATES
The only solution is to disable all updates in Windows 7 and 8. Then, at your leisure, you can reference which kb numbers are safe to bring over, and manually choose them (a giant pain).
But whatever, Microsoft is clearly willing to wrestle you very hard on this. It's obviously not in your best interest. People compare this to Apple, but if you tell your phone not to get an update, it fucking WON'T.
This is overtly hostile.
We need an addon that replaces the following six words after a Trump mention with "Trump".
Ex: Person accuses Trump of pandering to racists, general intolerance, and fascism
Becomes: Person accuses Trump Trump Trump Trump Trump, Trump Trump, and fascism
The performance hit for overwriting 4 gigs (or usually less) of RAM on *process or thread shutdown* shouldn't be that onerous... should it? I could be missing something about when it frees it.