Hulu will *never* be a contender for me, as they insist on shoving advertisements in my face even if I pay for a premium subscription. I've experienced TV programming on demand and without commercial interruptions. I can't go back.
It's just the city of Seattle that's screwed up. The suburbs actually outside the city itself (where I live, and where MS is located) has FIOS broadly deployed. My understanding is that it has to do with Seattle's own rules - there's a huge amount of entrenched bureaucracy and crappy infrastructure in place that essentially prevents competitors from coming in and upgrading. Naturally, large businesses (like Amazon) can simply bypass the mess with commercial-grade connections. It's apparently just the consumers that have it bad.
"Important" tends to depend on the industry. For videogame programmers, I'd submit that Lua might be a candidate. While C++ reigns supreme for game engine and client code, and C# has become fairly common for tools programming, Lua has proven to be extremely popular as a plug-in scripting language, as it's free, lightweight, easy to embed in game clients, reasonably powerful for it's small size, and (being written in C) completely portable.
It's famously used by World of Warcraft, of course. At LucasArts, it replaced the SCUMM language in the Monkey Island games (note in the game the SCUMM bar was replaced by the Lua bar). It's also used by many other game developers, both prior and since.
That's because the Air Force likes "air-force" missions, meaning sexy fighters, massive bombers, and nuke-delivering missiles. Ground support roles aren't sexy, just practical. That being said, the A-10 is actually getting old, and could use a capable replacement. I have my doubts that the F-35 in this role, but at this point, I'm not sure what choice there is.
It's sort of ironic that the big push for the F-35 was a "less expensive, jack-of-all-trades" aircraft when it's pretty clear at this point that the plane is "way too expensive" and more of a "master-at-none" at this point. As far as I've seen, every time this sort of procurement strategy is tried, it's been an utter disaster (McNamera and his Tactical Fighter Experimental, which resulted in the unspectacular F-111). The only reason this *hasn't* been a complete disaster is because of the ungodly amount of money we've shoved into it, so instead of a technological disaster, it's simply turned into a financial disaster. Maybe we'll get a reasonable weapons system out of this eventually, but "cost-effective" has certainly been replaced by "too big to fail" at this point.
What we really need is to put some pressure on advertising companies to stop allowing anyone to run unvetted, arbitrary Javscript code in served advertisements. How stupidly dangerous is that? It's like using a flamethrower to take down a hornet's nest. Yes, it works, but it's a ridiculous amount of overkill, and can be insanely dangerous if pointed at the wrong target. It's in the advertising agencies own interest to clean up it's act. At some point, most people are going to figure out that it's simply too dangerous to run a web browser without noscript or an ad blocker.
Honestly, the only way I can think of putting enough pressure on them is for as many people as possible to install ad-blockers. Once they get the hint that they need to back down, they can come up with some more creative solutions. For instance, introduce a specialized tag in HTML that allows the display of a static image, embedded links, and some anonymous token to help count unique visitors, but NO JAVASCRIPT. It's the notion of running arbitrary script that's so insanely dangerous. Plus, a tag like this would help to ensure that ads don't misbehave, like popping up, animating, or playing audio or video.
Or, ad agencies can be more responsible and run curated ads, with only vetted Javascript in pre-packaged modules, rather than letting anyone execute code from anywhere in the world. There are solutions out there, but no agency wants to be the first to tie their own hands. Honestly, I don't care at this point. It's their fault it's come to this in the first place. Something's got to change.
There's something I've never figured out about this particular theory. All life, even some sort of "patient zero" alien life, had to arise from non-organic substances somewhere, right? If it can happen once, then it should be able to happen any number of times given a set of similar conditions. Given the size of the universe, and even our own galaxy, that's like to be a *lot* of places.
As such, why would anyone think it's more plausible for a chunk of life to hitch a ride on some piece of space debris, and then survive re-entry on a coincidentally habitable planet on which it can flourish... than for life to have sprung into existence here, where obviously conditions were optimal for it (or at least life as we know it)?
I have to wonder if the enthusiasm for this theory is partially based on the admittedly exciting prospect that we could be the descendants of exotic alien lifeforms rather than some homegrown slime mold.
I know it wasn't the the fault of whose who were having a civil discussion with me, but I'm not going to continue posting when it just results in me being mod-bombed for no rational reason.
I think the big difference is that there was a big rush to get on the web during the dot-com boom, and the established players actually didn't care AT ALL about revenue (as the old joke went). They just wanted presence of some sort. The problem was, no one really knew what you could actually do with the internet. Everyone just knew that it was important to get on board fast, and a gazillion e-prospectors showed up with all sorts of pie-in-the-cloud ideas that simply weren't sustainable.
Nowadays, the market and investors have a bit more experience. We still saw some seriously overvaluing (IMO), and now we've seen a correction, likely induced by a slump in the Chinese economy. That's actually a good thing, because long-term periods without the occasional correction tends to lead up to much larger corrections, even over-corrections or outright crashes.
I don't see this as any sort of a crash at all, just a more realistic outlook of where we probably should have been all along. We might even see a few additional corrections in the near future. How long have people been talking about the "tech bubble"? This really shouldn't have surprised anyone in the know. It was just a question of *when* it was going to happen.
Yeah, I do. Not because I implicitly trust Microsoft, but I don't believe it's possible for it to stay hidden, and I think they know that. Moreover, I simply don't see any good reason for them to nefariously snoop on people. I mean, they're going to have hundreds of millions of people that will choose not to opt-out of these sorts of services that keep all their data in Microsoft's cloud. Hell, Microsoft already has my credit card on file. What possible reason would they have to scan my computer and invade my privacy? It just makes no sense to me.
Interesting... so Rovio, the makers of Angry Birds, is laying another 260 employees. Let me put that in perspective for you: I've been in videogame development for the last several decades, working on games ranging from bargain-bin titles to well-known MMOs. I've worked at companies with a dozen employees, and nave *never* been at a company with more than a couple hundred total employees (excluding parent company).
I'm just trying to figure out exactly were they doing with all those people... Does it actually require dozens of people to create an Angry Birds game? I'm having a hard time figuring out what they actually *did* with so many people. They happened to strike gold with Angry Birds, and they must have deluded themselves into believing they could strike gold with each subsequent swing of the pickaxe. Oops, the world has moved on to Candy Crush.
If they wisely invested their incredible earnings, they could have created a much smaller company that would have nearly infinite financial backing to do whatever they wanted. Instead, they succumbed to the temptation to grow into a giant by pretending that they could release the same product an infinite number of times. Now the entire world has played and grown tired of Angry Birds, so there's nothing left to fall back on.
Microsoft stinks at communication, and has for a very long time. I think that explains a lot right there. I agree that MS could and should be much better at being better at communicating some of this stuff. That being said, I think they've been fairly up-front about what options are available for privacy. And if you actually care to read all 30 pages (or whatever) of their EULA, it's spelled out in pretty excruciating detail. Note that there have been some click-bait articles that have taken some of those details out of context as well.
As far as the recent flap about keyloggers, spyware... Almost all of that can be explained by context. Keep in mind that Windows 10 agreements now cover ALL devices, including tablets and mobile. Some of the "scarier" sounding language about keyloggers and learning what how you right can be attributed to on-screen keyboards which need to learn your writing style to create accurate predictive algorithms, and there's also a new component that automatically transcribes handwriting - again, it has to do this by watching how and what you're writing to tailor itself to your tendencies. If you want these capabilities to follow you from device to device (and I'd bet most people do), then it need to be synchronized by a cloud network. And as for MS recording input from webcams and microphones, or recording what you type... uh, yeah, no kidding. That's how Cortana works. Her "smarts" are relying a great deal on the indexed answers that the Bing search engine has stored, as well as some specialty knowledge that she's learned by scanning your personal data. And she can answer those questions from anywhere, because that information is stored in Microsoft's servers.
Telemetry updates for improving updates? Yep, easy to explain. According to Paul Thurrott (Windows Weekly podcast), Microsoft was actually offering Windows 10 updates *first* to those who had the most well-tested configurations. That is, all their PC hardware had certified drivers for Windows 10, so they were expected to have a trouble-free update. Updates were then rolled out to subsequently less well-tested configurations. How exactly do you think MS would be preparing for an in-place update like this of a billion computers worldwide with millions of unique configurations? Yeah, I'd think they were gathering some telemetry from users about hardware and drivers so they could test the most common configurations.
So, no, I don't buy into the hysteria. Are there legitimate concerns about some of this stuff? Sure, absolutely. But I'm not going to jump to oddball conclusions that, at this point at least, are pure speculation. If you apply a bit of common sense, there are perfectly rational explanations for everything we've seen so far.
Well, don't worry. This is pretty much guaranteed to happen with each new release of Windows. Also, the article isn't as hysterical as the headline makes it out to be. I think it's a good thing for people to be made away of all the privacy controls and their implications.
There are some serious and legitimate privacy concerns, but nearly every single privacy invasive feature can be turned off, and that's really important. What's the downside? There are some features that rely on the ability to talk to Microsoft servers and read various personal data, like e-mail, calendars, and contacts. A personal digital assistant like Cortana needs to know a LOT about you to be effective. Another one is cloud synchronization - obviously, if you want your various PCs and devices to be synchronized automatically, personal data will need to be stored in Microsoft servers so they can be transferred between your machines. Whether you consider those "privacy invading" or "neat new features" (or both) largely depends on your perspective.
We've heard reports about a few services still communicating with MS servers. This isn't exactly a huge concern to me, as I'd expect a few things like activation and updates to still talk to MS. There may be a few other things that slip through the cracks (like start menu tiles still refreshing even though they're all removed), but it doesn't have the feel of anything malicious to me. Others may choose to believe the worst, of course.
One of the big issues for me is the forced updates, because that has serious implications regarding stability (I've personally had to roll back a seriously bugged Nvidia driver until it was fixed many months later). We've already seen problems with this, so it's not really a theoretical concern. I've heard Microsoft may be backing down a bit, acknowledging that people need to be able to block known bad updates / drivers, and have released a standalone tool that can do this. My bet is that this will later be integrated into Windows myself, but at least it's possible now.
I'm not a big believer in conspiracy theories about MS scanning your drive and sending your personal data away. What's the motivation? Plenty of people will gladly opt in (or more accurately, choose not to opt-out) just to get the convenience of automatic cloud backups, synchronization, and an intelligent digital assistant. They're not going to care about the minority of people that are privacy-concerned enough to shut off all those features. They stand to lose FAR more in lawsuits, lost consumer confidence, and political probes than whatever they might gain from it.
Have you noticed that all those examples of "helping" their customers are examples of purchasing goods and services? Why don't they call it what it is: an intelligent advertising agent.
It is literally a circular network connected to one CPU and a bunch of dumb nodes. Each node has a network ID. They can pass messages and only the nodes that are listening for it will get it. High bandwidth data bus for it. Why is that so complex?
Anything can be made to sound easy by describing the overall concept in a few sentences. Devices are built in the real world, not on a whiteboard, and here in real world, the devil is in the details.
I suppose it depends entirely on whether you run a consumer-facing website or not. I was initially thinking about this from the perspective of companies that run such sites, in which case it doesn't make a lot of sense. However, if you're in an entirely corporate-oriented company who typically doesn't deal directly with the general public, it probably makes some sense to do so. No client of yours is going to be running a TOR browser. IBM is among those types of companies, so I guess this advice makes sense from their perspective.
Here's an interesting question: Is IBM following their own advice? Can you reach their site though a TOR node?
You know, there's a completely different potential meaning between "IBM Tells Administrators to Block..." vs "IBM Tells Companies to Block..." I initially though IBM was discussing an internal policy, but they're advocating that OTHER companies simply block access to TOR nodes, in case it's not clear.
Still, blocking these nodes seems like a fairly weak approach to security, doesn't it? It's not like you can't disguise your movement by utilizing a botnet server. It's sort of like saying "we could improve our security by banning all incoming traffic from China and Russia". Well, sure, if you're willing to just block lots of legitimate users in the meantime. It would be far better to try to implement better technologies and policies that actually improve computer security, rather than feel-good measures like this.
For starters: eliminate dependence on old, out-of-data, vulnerable web based technologies. There are many corporate customers who still must use specific VULNERABLE versions of the Java plug-in, for instance. Oh, wait though... that would cost money! Nevermind, just block the TOR nodes, ok?
But these AT&T hotspots are intended for AT&T's paying customers. They're not free hotspots for freeloaders.
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion given that it sounded like it was an open wifi spot in an airport. There was no mention that this was a paid access point, like with the Boingo partnership a few years ago. The article calls it "free", but it actually required paid access, so apparently there's some confusion on PC Mag's part as to what the word "free" means.
My guess? Few customers bothered with the paid access plans, so they're trying to figure out other ways of monetizing those hotspots, and some genius MBA thought this plan up after typing "How to monetize your network" into Google search.
If AT&T isn't up for offering free wifi hotspots to non-customers, that's their business. I just don't approve of this particular advertising practice. It's actually exposing the user to more risk of malware (albeit a small one), but more critically, it sets a terrible precedent.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lawsuit occurs the first time malware is injected onto a user's machine though one of these advertisements. If this keeps happening, it's really only a matter of time.
I think Comcast tried this same thing earlier, and temporarily backed off when people noticed them doing this and complained about it. Advertisements are bad enough, but you can sort of understand the desire of a website operator to want to pay for bandwidth. It's downright slimy when ads are simply injected in content someone doesn't own at all.
By "laptop-like devices", I think you mean "notebooks", right? Because those are pretty distinct categories.
Anyhow, I do think that makes some sense. Chromebooks (notebooks) are less expensive, and some users are more comfortable with doing *everything* online, and probably less committed to a particular OS. Nowadays, you really don't need to use any local software if you don't quite want to, so long as you're mostly just doing e-mail, browsing, social media, simple documents creation, and so on.
Are there any good articles about that? The stuff I have read has made me leery of Windows 10.
Here's an Ars Technica article about it. I think it covers most of the issues people are concerned about. I'm moderately concerned about these issues myself, but on the other hand, I do need to keep current for development work.
Also, you could try setting up VirtualBox on one of your Windows machines, and running Linux inside the VirtualBox. The virtual hardware inside VirtualBox is well-understood by Linux, so you should be able to stop worrying about hardware and focus on learning your way around Linux and doing stuff with it.
Yep, already did that. Tried out Mint Cinnamon, and really liked it - clean, professional looking, intuitive. I was doing some contract work, so didn't want to mess with my personal dev machine. Now that I'm done for the moment, I'm a bit more free to consider updating my machine for dual-boot use. I need full access to GPU hardware to get real work done.
Any particular reason you'd recommend MATE over Cinnamon, incidentally?
It wouldn't be a true Linux thread if we didn't have some unrealistic "Year of Linux on the desktop" optimism. Windows 10 is looking to be fairly popular at this point, and contrary to a lot of concerns, you can actually turn off all of the privacy-intrusive features.
My Linux experience has historically been to attempt to install and use some Linux distro every five years or so, only to be rebuffed by some serious issue, after which I spend half a day trying to hunt down a solution, then give up and re-install Windows. My last attempt (Ubuntu) was a few years ago on an older Dell XPS laptop, and the mouse cursor moved so fast it was completely unusable, even at the lowest speed settings.
I'll be trying again soon, perhaps with Linux Mint this time. I'm getting somewhat close to finishing up the Mac port of my game engine, and would like to have a Linux port as well. I'm familiar with a few basic Unix commands, and I've been learning a bit more on my Mac, so hopefully it won't take too long for me to get up to speed.
In fairness, nowhere does Comcast actually say "entire US" exactly. They word it as their "whole US footprint", presumable meaning every region or market they currently service. That was the headline writer's wording.
Still, at $300 a month, I can't see too many people signing up for this. Even so, I think it's a good thing that they're investing in infrastructure. Today's premium products are tomorrow's commodities.
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Hulu will *never* be a contender for me, as they insist on shoving advertisements in my face even if I pay for a premium subscription. I've experienced TV programming on demand and without commercial interruptions. I can't go back.
It's just the city of Seattle that's screwed up. The suburbs actually outside the city itself (where I live, and where MS is located) has FIOS broadly deployed. My understanding is that it has to do with Seattle's own rules - there's a huge amount of entrenched bureaucracy and crappy infrastructure in place that essentially prevents competitors from coming in and upgrading. Naturally, large businesses (like Amazon) can simply bypass the mess with commercial-grade connections. It's apparently just the consumers that have it bad.
"Important" tends to depend on the industry. For videogame programmers, I'd submit that Lua might be a candidate. While C++ reigns supreme for game engine and client code, and C# has become fairly common for tools programming, Lua has proven to be extremely popular as a plug-in scripting language, as it's free, lightweight, easy to embed in game clients, reasonably powerful for it's small size, and (being written in C) completely portable.
It's famously used by World of Warcraft, of course. At LucasArts, it replaced the SCUMM language in the Monkey Island games (note in the game the SCUMM bar was replaced by the Lua bar). It's also used by many other game developers, both prior and since.
Maybe... "inlimited"?
That's because the Air Force likes "air-force" missions, meaning sexy fighters, massive bombers, and nuke-delivering missiles. Ground support roles aren't sexy, just practical. That being said, the A-10 is actually getting old, and could use a capable replacement. I have my doubts that the F-35 in this role, but at this point, I'm not sure what choice there is.
It's sort of ironic that the big push for the F-35 was a "less expensive, jack-of-all-trades" aircraft when it's pretty clear at this point that the plane is "way too expensive" and more of a "master-at-none" at this point. As far as I've seen, every time this sort of procurement strategy is tried, it's been an utter disaster (McNamera and his Tactical Fighter Experimental, which resulted in the unspectacular F-111). The only reason this *hasn't* been a complete disaster is because of the ungodly amount of money we've shoved into it, so instead of a technological disaster, it's simply turned into a financial disaster. Maybe we'll get a reasonable weapons system out of this eventually, but "cost-effective" has certainly been replaced by "too big to fail" at this point.
Outed for what, paying for affairs they didn't have?
I'm pretty sure most married women would take a fairly dim view of their husband actively trying to have an affair, even if it didn't happen.
What we really need is to put some pressure on advertising companies to stop allowing anyone to run unvetted, arbitrary Javscript code in served advertisements. How stupidly dangerous is that? It's like using a flamethrower to take down a hornet's nest. Yes, it works, but it's a ridiculous amount of overkill, and can be insanely dangerous if pointed at the wrong target. It's in the advertising agencies own interest to clean up it's act. At some point, most people are going to figure out that it's simply too dangerous to run a web browser without noscript or an ad blocker.
Honestly, the only way I can think of putting enough pressure on them is for as many people as possible to install ad-blockers. Once they get the hint that they need to back down, they can come up with some more creative solutions. For instance, introduce a specialized tag in HTML that allows the display of a static image, embedded links, and some anonymous token to help count unique visitors, but NO JAVASCRIPT. It's the notion of running arbitrary script that's so insanely dangerous. Plus, a tag like this would help to ensure that ads don't misbehave, like popping up, animating, or playing audio or video.
Or, ad agencies can be more responsible and run curated ads, with only vetted Javascript in pre-packaged modules, rather than letting anyone execute code from anywhere in the world. There are solutions out there, but no agency wants to be the first to tie their own hands. Honestly, I don't care at this point. It's their fault it's come to this in the first place. Something's got to change.
There's something I've never figured out about this particular theory. All life, even some sort of "patient zero" alien life, had to arise from non-organic substances somewhere, right? If it can happen once, then it should be able to happen any number of times given a set of similar conditions. Given the size of the universe, and even our own galaxy, that's like to be a *lot* of places.
As such, why would anyone think it's more plausible for a chunk of life to hitch a ride on some piece of space debris, and then survive re-entry on a coincidentally habitable planet on which it can flourish... than for life to have sprung into existence here, where obviously conditions were optimal for it (or at least life as we know it)?
I have to wonder if the enthusiasm for this theory is partially based on the admittedly exciting prospect that we could be the descendants of exotic alien lifeforms rather than some homegrown slime mold.
I know it wasn't the the fault of whose who were having a civil discussion with me, but I'm not going to continue posting when it just results in me being mod-bombed for no rational reason.
I think the big difference is that there was a big rush to get on the web during the dot-com boom, and the established players actually didn't care AT ALL about revenue (as the old joke went). They just wanted presence of some sort. The problem was, no one really knew what you could actually do with the internet. Everyone just knew that it was important to get on board fast, and a gazillion e-prospectors showed up with all sorts of pie-in-the-cloud ideas that simply weren't sustainable.
Nowadays, the market and investors have a bit more experience. We still saw some seriously overvaluing (IMO), and now we've seen a correction, likely induced by a slump in the Chinese economy. That's actually a good thing, because long-term periods without the occasional correction tends to lead up to much larger corrections, even over-corrections or outright crashes.
I don't see this as any sort of a crash at all, just a more realistic outlook of where we probably should have been all along. We might even see a few additional corrections in the near future. How long have people been talking about the "tech bubble"? This really shouldn't have surprised anyone in the know. It was just a question of *when* it was going to happen.
Yeah, I do. Not because I implicitly trust Microsoft, but I don't believe it's possible for it to stay hidden, and I think they know that. Moreover, I simply don't see any good reason for them to nefariously snoop on people. I mean, they're going to have hundreds of millions of people that will choose not to opt-out of these sorts of services that keep all their data in Microsoft's cloud. Hell, Microsoft already has my credit card on file. What possible reason would they have to scan my computer and invade my privacy? It just makes no sense to me.
Interesting... so Rovio, the makers of Angry Birds, is laying another 260 employees. Let me put that in perspective for you: I've been in videogame development for the last several decades, working on games ranging from bargain-bin titles to well-known MMOs. I've worked at companies with a dozen employees, and nave *never* been at a company with more than a couple hundred total employees (excluding parent company).
I'm just trying to figure out exactly were they doing with all those people... Does it actually require dozens of people to create an Angry Birds game? I'm having a hard time figuring out what they actually *did* with so many people. They happened to strike gold with Angry Birds, and they must have deluded themselves into believing they could strike gold with each subsequent swing of the pickaxe. Oops, the world has moved on to Candy Crush.
If they wisely invested their incredible earnings, they could have created a much smaller company that would have nearly infinite financial backing to do whatever they wanted. Instead, they succumbed to the temptation to grow into a giant by pretending that they could release the same product an infinite number of times. Now the entire world has played and grown tired of Angry Birds, so there's nothing left to fall back on.
Microsoft stinks at communication, and has for a very long time. I think that explains a lot right there. I agree that MS could and should be much better at being better at communicating some of this stuff. That being said, I think they've been fairly up-front about what options are available for privacy. And if you actually care to read all 30 pages (or whatever) of their EULA, it's spelled out in pretty excruciating detail. Note that there have been some click-bait articles that have taken some of those details out of context as well.
As far as the recent flap about keyloggers, spyware... Almost all of that can be explained by context. Keep in mind that Windows 10 agreements now cover ALL devices, including tablets and mobile. Some of the "scarier" sounding language about keyloggers and learning what how you right can be attributed to on-screen keyboards which need to learn your writing style to create accurate predictive algorithms, and there's also a new component that automatically transcribes handwriting - again, it has to do this by watching how and what you're writing to tailor itself to your tendencies. If you want these capabilities to follow you from device to device (and I'd bet most people do), then it need to be synchronized by a cloud network. And as for MS recording input from webcams and microphones, or recording what you type... uh, yeah, no kidding. That's how Cortana works. Her "smarts" are relying a great deal on the indexed answers that the Bing search engine has stored, as well as some specialty knowledge that she's learned by scanning your personal data. And she can answer those questions from anywhere, because that information is stored in Microsoft's servers.
Telemetry updates for improving updates? Yep, easy to explain. According to Paul Thurrott (Windows Weekly podcast), Microsoft was actually offering Windows 10 updates *first* to those who had the most well-tested configurations. That is, all their PC hardware had certified drivers for Windows 10, so they were expected to have a trouble-free update. Updates were then rolled out to subsequently less well-tested configurations. How exactly do you think MS would be preparing for an in-place update like this of a billion computers worldwide with millions of unique configurations? Yeah, I'd think they were gathering some telemetry from users about hardware and drivers so they could test the most common configurations.
So, no, I don't buy into the hysteria. Are there legitimate concerns about some of this stuff? Sure, absolutely. But I'm not going to jump to oddball conclusions that, at this point at least, are pure speculation. If you apply a bit of common sense, there are perfectly rational explanations for everything we've seen so far.
Well, don't worry. This is pretty much guaranteed to happen with each new release of Windows. Also, the article isn't as hysterical as the headline makes it out to be. I think it's a good thing for people to be made away of all the privacy controls and their implications.
There are some serious and legitimate privacy concerns, but nearly every single privacy invasive feature can be turned off, and that's really important. What's the downside? There are some features that rely on the ability to talk to Microsoft servers and read various personal data, like e-mail, calendars, and contacts. A personal digital assistant like Cortana needs to know a LOT about you to be effective. Another one is cloud synchronization - obviously, if you want your various PCs and devices to be synchronized automatically, personal data will need to be stored in Microsoft servers so they can be transferred between your machines. Whether you consider those "privacy invading" or "neat new features" (or both) largely depends on your perspective.
We've heard reports about a few services still communicating with MS servers. This isn't exactly a huge concern to me, as I'd expect a few things like activation and updates to still talk to MS. There may be a few other things that slip through the cracks (like start menu tiles still refreshing even though they're all removed), but it doesn't have the feel of anything malicious to me. Others may choose to believe the worst, of course.
One of the big issues for me is the forced updates, because that has serious implications regarding stability (I've personally had to roll back a seriously bugged Nvidia driver until it was fixed many months later). We've already seen problems with this, so it's not really a theoretical concern. I've heard Microsoft may be backing down a bit, acknowledging that people need to be able to block known bad updates / drivers, and have released a standalone tool that can do this. My bet is that this will later be integrated into Windows myself, but at least it's possible now.
I'm not a big believer in conspiracy theories about MS scanning your drive and sending your personal data away. What's the motivation? Plenty of people will gladly opt in (or more accurately, choose not to opt-out) just to get the convenience of automatic cloud backups, synchronization, and an intelligent digital assistant. They're not going to care about the minority of people that are privacy-concerned enough to shut off all those features. They stand to lose FAR more in lawsuits, lost consumer confidence, and political probes than whatever they might gain from it.
Have you noticed that all those examples of "helping" their customers are examples of purchasing goods and services? Why don't they call it what it is: an intelligent advertising agent.
It is literally a circular network connected to one CPU and a bunch of dumb nodes.
Each node has a network ID. They can pass messages and only the nodes that are listening for it will get it.
High bandwidth data bus for it.
Why is that so complex?
Anything can be made to sound easy by describing the overall concept in a few sentences. Devices are built in the real world, not on a whiteboard, and here in real world, the devil is in the details.
I suppose it depends entirely on whether you run a consumer-facing website or not. I was initially thinking about this from the perspective of companies that run such sites, in which case it doesn't make a lot of sense. However, if you're in an entirely corporate-oriented company who typically doesn't deal directly with the general public, it probably makes some sense to do so. No client of yours is going to be running a TOR browser. IBM is among those types of companies, so I guess this advice makes sense from their perspective.
Here's an interesting question: Is IBM following their own advice? Can you reach their site though a TOR node?
You know, there's a completely different potential meaning between "IBM Tells Administrators to Block..." vs "IBM Tells Companies to Block..." I initially though IBM was discussing an internal policy, but they're advocating that OTHER companies simply block access to TOR nodes, in case it's not clear.
Still, blocking these nodes seems like a fairly weak approach to security, doesn't it? It's not like you can't disguise your movement by utilizing a botnet server. It's sort of like saying "we could improve our security by banning all incoming traffic from China and Russia". Well, sure, if you're willing to just block lots of legitimate users in the meantime. It would be far better to try to implement better technologies and policies that actually improve computer security, rather than feel-good measures like this.
For starters: eliminate dependence on old, out-of-data, vulnerable web based technologies. There are many corporate customers who still must use specific VULNERABLE versions of the Java plug-in, for instance. Oh, wait though... that would cost money! Nevermind, just block the TOR nodes, ok?
Perhaps "write a coherent plot" should have been on the list. Apparently his earlier works were not so horrible as the one I sampled.
But these AT&T hotspots are intended for AT&T's paying customers. They're not free hotspots for freeloaders.
I'm not sure how you come to that conclusion given that it sounded like it was an open wifi spot in an airport. There was no mention that this was a paid access point, like with the Boingo partnership a few years ago. The article calls it "free", but it actually required paid access, so apparently there's some confusion on PC Mag's part as to what the word "free" means.
My guess? Few customers bothered with the paid access plans, so they're trying to figure out other ways of monetizing those hotspots, and some genius MBA thought this plan up after typing "How to monetize your network" into Google search.
If AT&T isn't up for offering free wifi hotspots to non-customers, that's their business. I just don't approve of this particular advertising practice. It's actually exposing the user to more risk of malware (albeit a small one), but more critically, it sets a terrible precedent.
I wouldn't be surprised if a lawsuit occurs the first time malware is injected onto a user's machine though one of these advertisements. If this keeps happening, it's really only a matter of time.
I think Comcast tried this same thing earlier, and temporarily backed off when people noticed them doing this and complained about it. Advertisements are bad enough, but you can sort of understand the desire of a website operator to want to pay for bandwidth. It's downright slimy when ads are simply injected in content someone doesn't own at all.
By "laptop-like devices", I think you mean "notebooks", right? Because those are pretty distinct categories.
Anyhow, I do think that makes some sense. Chromebooks (notebooks) are less expensive, and some users are more comfortable with doing *everything* online, and probably less committed to a particular OS. Nowadays, you really don't need to use any local software if you don't quite want to, so long as you're mostly just doing e-mail, browsing, social media, simple documents creation, and so on.
Are there any good articles about that? The stuff I have read has made me leery of Windows 10.
Here's an Ars Technica article about it. I think it covers most of the issues people are concerned about. I'm moderately concerned about these issues myself, but on the other hand, I do need to keep current for development work.
Also, you could try setting up VirtualBox on one of your Windows machines, and running Linux inside the VirtualBox. The virtual hardware inside VirtualBox is well-understood by Linux, so you should be able to stop worrying about hardware and focus on learning your way around Linux and doing stuff with it.
Yep, already did that. Tried out Mint Cinnamon, and really liked it - clean, professional looking, intuitive. I was doing some contract work, so didn't want to mess with my personal dev machine. Now that I'm done for the moment, I'm a bit more free to consider updating my machine for dual-boot use. I need full access to GPU hardware to get real work done.
Any particular reason you'd recommend MATE over Cinnamon, incidentally?
It wouldn't be a true Linux thread if we didn't have some unrealistic "Year of Linux on the desktop" optimism. Windows 10 is looking to be fairly popular at this point, and contrary to a lot of concerns, you can actually turn off all of the privacy-intrusive features.
My Linux experience has historically been to attempt to install and use some Linux distro every five years or so, only to be rebuffed by some serious issue, after which I spend half a day trying to hunt down a solution, then give up and re-install Windows. My last attempt (Ubuntu) was a few years ago on an older Dell XPS laptop, and the mouse cursor moved so fast it was completely unusable, even at the lowest speed settings.
I'll be trying again soon, perhaps with Linux Mint this time. I'm getting somewhat close to finishing up the Mac port of my game engine, and would like to have a Linux port as well. I'm familiar with a few basic Unix commands, and I've been learning a bit more on my Mac, so hopefully it won't take too long for me to get up to speed.
In fairness, nowhere does Comcast actually say "entire US" exactly. They word it as their "whole US footprint", presumable meaning every region or market they currently service. That was the headline writer's wording.
Still, at $300 a month, I can't see too many people signing up for this. Even so, I think it's a good thing that they're investing in infrastructure. Today's premium products are tomorrow's commodities.