The funny thing about item B is that, unless driven on public roads, those off-road toys are exempt from EPA regulations anyway. Because it's not exactly unheard of to completely destroy your off-road toys while using them off road, you should be hauling them to your favorite "playground" on a trailer, at which point the EPA can't say shit about you running it with no exhaust manifold at all, should you choose to; let alone any other modifications you might want to make.
Exactly this. I'd also like to add that competition won't kill first-party repair, or even replacement sales. This is true because many people (in some markets, most people) won't trust a 3rd party repair and some, still, won't trust any repair and will buy a new device even when the old one can be fixed.
Any one who needs proof of this need only look at the auto industry and see that dealer service departments still exist. Try and schedule an appointment at a dealer service center and you'll quickly find that they're always busy. Always. Despite charging much more than 3rd party repair centers.
Anyone still not convinced can look at Apple's own service center, the Genius Bar. Good luck getting a same-day appointment; and that's despite the very strong 3rd party repair market for Apple devices. A market that already exists and hasn't killed Apple's own repair services isn't going to kill Apple's repair services if it exists... because... it already exists and hasn't killed them...
And even at that, all the techs I know (more than a handful) would be willing to pay for the information, so it's not even that they're asking for it for free. Right now, Apple makes nothing on an independent repair shop's work; they don't get a device sale, they don't get parts sales, they don't get repair fees, they get nada. If they sold schematics, tools, and parts -- all of which these techs are getting their hands on regardless -- they'd get money from that. It would be a net win all around.
Designed to break? Every single time I've heard of one being damaged it's due to negligence or ignorance.
This.
So. Much. THIS!
I am not gentle with my phones. I used to have quite a temper and I've put phones through walls and windows (I'm not that guy anymore, haven't been for a decade and a half); yeah, that was before smartphones but, while I no longer throw my phones, I don't baby them either. I use them. Heavily. In real-life situations. I use my phone as a work light and to peer into hard-to-see areas when working on my car, I use my phone around water all the time, I toss it onto the table, desk, or counter when I'm done with it.
My phones get dropped. Sometimes when I'm walking, in which case it's prone to "landing" on my foot during a froward step and being sent across the floor. I've had phones fall out of my pocket atop 16ft ladders on to concrete floors. Hell, I had one fall out of my pocket getting into the car and get driven over twice, once when I backed out, and again when I pulled back into the parking spot when I realized it wasn't in my pocket and thought I had left it inside. It was in a puddle when this happened.
I don't buy ruggedized phones and I don't use cases.
Number of phones I've broken in 17 years of phone ownership: 0
I don't know WTF these people do with their devices...
Funny, trying to get to the recovery menu on my S8+ I inadvertently managed to get to a ROM flashing utility of some sort, complete with a warning that flashing a non-Samsung OS could void my warranty. Apparently it's not as locked down as some of their older models.
This is offtopic and I'll accept appropriate moderation for it but... every time I see your sig I spend the next few minutes trying to correlate head injuries with raises I've received. Every time... I conclude that you're right.
You're considering the wrong issue. It's not about what visitors might transmit over those networks (which don't appear to be for visitor use in the first place), but the records stored within. There is literally no way a VPN is relevant here.
I believe they didn't connect to the networks they say they didn't connect to (note that they don't mention any contents of those networks); I also believe they purposely didn't mention the level of security on the networks they did connect to.
Those could have had no security, appearing as free public wi-fi, or they could have been properly secured. In the former case, no law was broken; in the latter, there is no way to prove they weren't secured after this article ran.
First they won't even replace a broken $300 laptop, so spending $5k to set up WSUS is a no-go... now they're using $20k workstations and $5k wouldn't even be a drop in the bucket...
Can you pick one side of your mouth to talk out of, please?
Really? (W)SUS didn't come out until 2005. Last I recall, XP was released in 2001.
My mistake, I did misread. It came out in March 2005, which I read as March 2003. Either way, the same system of test, add-to-image, deploy-image that was used prior to XP should have been maintained until WSUS, and should have been kept in instances where WSUS wasn't used. As far as I know, it was kept anywhere that had competent IT.
I said companies remained on XP. Nothing about XP's own take up could be inferred from that statement.
You are not the only source for that information; I was in the industry back then and I remember how slow the move from NT4 and 2K was. It was a hair faster than the move from 98, which companies which didn't need a true multi-user environment were just getting around to installing over 95 around the time XP came out.
At any rate, good to see you finally cite a source.
And with Win10, Enterprise or not, you will be forced to accept all updates within a 9-12 month window. I'm too lazy to look it up again for precision. It is no longer your choice. You will upgrade, soon or sooner.
I can't find anything pointing to that so, really, if you could be so kind as to look it up and provide a link, that'd be great. Otherwise, well, I'm having a really hard time trusting your "facts" when I can't verify them; I have sources for what I say, and I provide them when I make my more unbelievable claims, but I see none from you. Without some indication that your "facts" are anything more than conjecture, there's not a whole lot of point continuing this conversation.
If somebody broke into my home and stole my computer, I would be more unhappy because they stole my computer and not because now they can hack it (they can just pull the HDD out and connect it to another PC or boot my PC from a live CD if they want to access the data).
Why, when full disk encryption is so easy?
And in Windows XP days my user was the admin - there was no need to exploit privilege escalation bug if the program was bad. Now my user is still the admin, but UAC sometimes pops up asking for my approval.
Ok, so you don't care about security.
OTOH, if I opened a wrong email attachment, it could encrypt my data even if running as limited user (me) on a fully patched system (or Linux). So, on a single user computer it is kinda pointless ("The malware encrypted all my data, but at least the system files are unaffected, yay!").
Unless you run backups as an admin user; then, at least, it couldn't encrypt your backups without privilege escalation.
I would say that when telemetry and GWX came out, more people disabled updates if they wanted to avoid installing Windows 10.
Why do all of you idiots act like telemetry is something that's brand new? Not being able to turn it off is brand new, but it's nothing new at all and most of you have probably had it enabled this whole damn time. The best part? Many of you probably still have it enabled! Hell, most of you probably wanted it enabled and are just now starting to even care because you're losing the ability to turn it off any everyone is talking about it.
Microsoft's patch means running their (new) code on my computer. It may just do what is promised, but it may also flip some registry or group policy setting that disables telemetry (enterprise edition). I do not know either way, so I would be back to sniffing packets on my router looking for any communication between that PC and Microsoft.
On the other hand, I expect the manual workaround to work as promised, because I really doubt that Microsoft had the foresight to make uninstalling SMBv1 support also mess up the other settings.
Oh, you were talking about disabling SMB; you mentioned telemetry, so that's what I thought you were talking about. I was confused, as I was not aware that Microsoft ever released an official method (manual or via patch) to remove telemetry from Windows 10. Hell, it's still not clear until you read the last sentence of that paragraph, as you still talk about disabling telemetry.
You may be all over the place but, well hey, you're keeping the price of my Reynolds stock high. That is, unless you buy generic tinfoil.
If it will pay off so quickly, then that may mean the market value of the patent is more than I suggested.
You do realize that the proposal was for the FCC to buy and freely license the patent, right? I was merely suggesting that Apple would foot the bill. No longer having to pay $2B/year in royalties would, then, save them $2B/year. Your proposed price was $10B, which is 5 years of royalties.
Nowhere in that does Apple take ownership of or profit from the patents, they simply stop having to pay royalties to use them.
Qualcomm seems to want to be paid every time one of their chips changes hands: when the chip is sold to the manufacturer, when the phone containing the chip is shipped to the company that contracted the manufacturing company, again when the phone designer ships the phone to a store...
When the store sells the phone to the end user?
When the end user sells the phone on Craigslist or eBay, or trades it in to their carrier?
Legally, yes. In the real world, though, no. Consent through EULAs cannot be considered "active consent" by any reasonable definition.
You actively clicked the "Agree" button. If you didn't actively read what you were agreeing to, that's your own fault. Perhaps, if people actively refused to agree to shit that was onerously long and difficult to read, that shit would be made a lot shorter and in plain English. Companies care about market share and they won't change as long as we keep giving it to them. Take responsibility, say "NO!" to things you don't agree to, rather than lying and saying "I AGREE!", then trying to make it someone else's fault when the thing you claimed to agree to happens to you and you don't like it.
Fine. If Microsoft doesn't want to deal with people who think that clicking the "send crash report" button means that Microsoft will fix the crash, then do it in the background -- but let people disable the automatic reporting if they wish.
You misunderstand. These aren't people who think clicking the button means MS will fix the crashes, these are people who REFUSE TO CLICK THE BUTTON and bitch that MS never fixes the crashes. Go back and read what I wrote again, because you clearly missed something.
Well, yes, in the big picture, nothing about Windows is mandatory. Even using a computer at all is optional. But that argument is a bit disingenuous. I was talking about telemetry being mandatory if you're using consumer level Windows.
And what we have here is an informed market. We all know telemetry is there. Don't like it? Don't use it. You really do have a choice.
Just don't believe that Apple collects any less telemetry, or that you can disable all of it. They don't and you can't. You might know this if you ever read that EULA we were just talking about.
I don't recall early issues with WU, actually. I do recall being surprised that such a new system seemed to work quite well out of the box.
I thought that was obvious, as that's where WU on the client started?
One would think, but you seemed to be fixed on more recent events so I wanted to be sure.
WU always had the ability to do exactly what MS has completed with Win10, so disabling it way back then was the intelligent move for systems admins that needed to keep things running and avoid fire drills.
We actually agree on this point. Where it falls apart is that, while sysadmins would go back and eventually install updates after testing them, end users were disabling the updates, then not installing them later.
WSUS or no WSUS, sysadmins can still disable automatic updates on Win 10 Enterprise, so nothing changes for a company that has at least 5 computers and buys the right version of Windows (which is no more expensive, mind you; it gets cheaper in a volume license). The same actually applies to someone with a single computer, if they're willing to pay the 5 license minimum.
I've always been one to disable updates, myself. I've also always been one to manually install them. That is not the problem! The problem is when people do the first step, but not the second!
Again, we're not talking about sysadmins, here. We're talking about end users who really have no business managing their own updates.
In truth, MS systems can be semi-secure at least from the bot-net spewing bits if MS had a sensible configuration and firewall in place on their OS. Ideally you'd have a separate firewall between you and the internet, but not having one on system caused massive issues.
Well, then, I guess it's a good thing one has been included since XP SP2. Mind you, it didn't really get good until Vista, but it was there. It's really a non-issue wince Vista, though, as one has been included, with a "deny by default" configuration, since Vista.
Ideally you'd have a separate firewall between you and the internet, but not having one on system caused massive issues.
Well, yeah, the same can be said of any OS, though, if no firewall is enabled. In fact, hardware firewalls should really be the norm (even cheap routers include basic firewall functions now), especially in the face of Intel's AMT exploits, which are OS-agnostic; even the best software firewall won't stop that from being exploited as the ME grabs the packets and the OS never even sees them.
I'm sure you recall the study that dropping a new XP system without an external firewall on the internet to update it via WU would infect it before it could even start downloading?
Actually, no, I didn't know any study was necessary. Blaster was so bad a friend of mine ended up having to reinstall 4 times to get the patch before infection occurred. I was there, watching and laughing the whole time.
Also running all processes at System was another problem, directly with XP and still an issue with W10, although it's a touch more difficult to execute an overflow as System.
Was, was, was, was, was. All I hear from you is a stream of "was". Really, only system services run as System anymore; it's something they started fixing with Vista and it's taken some time to get all the software vendors on board with running their applications as the user, but we're finally there. If it's still an issue on your Win 10 system, talk to the app vendor who hasn't been keeping up; Microsoft made it a pain in the ass to keep following the old and insecure model and that's really all they can do without everyone bitching about how they broke that one mission critical application.
I wasn't aware we were only discussing Win10, or even just post 2k3.
Prior to Windows 10 you could disable automatic updates entirely and manually select which updates to install. Absent WSUS, which we were only without for a year and a half, the procedure followed by competent IT staff was to disable automatic updates in the standard images applied to end user workstations and manually apply those updates (to the images, not to the workstations individually) after testing. Roll out the new images over the weekend and, since user profiles and documents are stored on the network (remember, competent IT staff), everyone comes in Monday to find working and updates computers.
Since most people in business are running flavors of XP through W7 that I've been aware of (yes, at least 3 Fortune 100 companies I personally know of were running XP as recently as 2 years ago) and only recently moved to W7.
So you're saying most companies don't upgrade to the newest OS right away? They typically wait two years or longer (that's been my experience, at least; and you're demonstrating that they often wait much longer) as the software they run on a daily basis doesn't support the new OS right away? So, you mean, by the time most businesses would have upgraded to XP, WSUS was out and this whole back-and-forth is largely pointless?
Got it.
At least 2 have had issues with upgrades, in one case taking down 30% of the company's computers for about 2 days. This is with dedicated IT support teams in place, and they still can't get it right. At least they only rolled it out to portions of the company at a time.
I stipulated competent IT teams, not just dedicated.
You're living in MS fairytale land. I can assure you that small businesses don't as a rule run WSUS, nor have IT folks that deal with it.
Does that mean they can't? I mean, if all of this is really a concern and there is a solution available, why can't they utilize that solution?
They generally contract with a low-bid support firm that sends some random clown over when called to "support" them. The going rate is under $60/hr for what the SMB considers no more than helpdesk support. And they complain about it.
Sounds like they need more than they're paying for. Poor management exhibiting incompetent decision making that ends up costing the company more than it saves in terms of downtime incurred by not having someone on staff. That's not Microsoft's fault; I've seen it happen in all Mac offices as well.
These are under 100 people shops.
Then they should have an AD to manage logins, at the very least. It costs less to pay someone to click a few buttons to add and remove accounts on a central server than it costs to have them walk across the building to do the same thing. Bonus if they install even a low-end SAN solution and store user profiles and documents on it; then they don't even have to reimage machines when someone leaves the company. These are things that should be considered once a company reaches about 20-25 workstation users and should certainly be in place by 50.
If they had that (and you can pay the $60/hr places to install and maintain it, by the way), they'd be set. Again, outsourcing IT doesn't eliminate the incompetence, it simply shifts it from the IT department to the manager or exec who decided to outsource to the low bidder and ignore IT infrastructure as a whole. An, again, this happens in all Mac shops as well, so no, it's not Microsoft's fault.
If anything, Microsoft makes it easier to get it right by offering the tools to do so as part of their server OS and actively trying to educate IT workers about those tools. Apple, on the other hand, killed off the server version of OS X and never bothered migrating the management tools; those are just gone
Microsoft is the cause why a lot of end users disable updates. There is/was a setting to only install security patches and not install the rest. Microsoft then made telemetry and Windows10 appear as security patches so they would get installed.
So you're saying that end users began disabling updates on Windows XP in 2001 because of something Microsoft did with Windows 10 in 2015?
Nah. Don't think so.
Before Windows 10 was released, end users spent 14 years making it clear they can not be trusted to keep their systems up to date with patches for critical vulnerabilities, so we've now all lost the ability to decide for ourselves. Even in the face of the option to only install critical (security) updates, people entirely disabled them, then never went back and manually applied patches which truly were critical, consistently enough over the course of a decade and a half that the end result was a mass of shit-spewing bot nests (which then formed shit-spewing botnets) and the general idea that Windows was inherently insecure, when the reality is that a patched Windows system is no more or less secure than any other fully patched system and, with those security patches regularly installed, the shit-spewing botnet problem would largely not exist.
We've been dealing with that particular problem for as long as we have precisely because users chose not to install updates, and have made that choice for far longer than Windows 10 had been out.
If Microsoft made it possible to only install security patches
I like where this is going; we might see eye-to-eye on this after all...
(and chose which ones,
Oh, so close. The problem, here, is that when you can choose which updates to install, you can choose to install no updates, which is what people have been doing since 2001 when they were first given the option, which is why we can no longer make that choice.
I may not need a patch that protects my computer from a local user)
Right, because nobody every breaks into buildings and messes with (or steals) computers. You may be the only intended user of a system, but that doesn't stop someone else from gaining access. There is also the possibility of a trusted software vendor getting hacked and their application ending up with some code that exploits that "local user" vulnerability you didn't patch. You use that software regularly, you install the bad update, you run the application... you are the local user and now you've been exploited. Guess you needed that patch, after all.
and preferable made it so that not every patch required a reboot,
So many patches don't, actually. It just seems like they all do because there's usually (but not always) one that does in every update set.
I think more people would update their OS.
History has shown us otherwise.
I chose to uninstall the protocol from my Windows 10 computer (Microsoft published workaround) instead of installing the patch because I do not trust the patch to not re-enable telemetry on my PC.
Link, please? Actually, nevermind, I'm calling bullshit either way. You don't trust Microsoft's patch to do the job, but you trust their manual procedures? And you trust that no part of the system will act to protect the services you've removed? You do realize that Windows has had system file protection (and automatic repair and restoration of said files) since Windows 7, right?
You're thinking tube amps; that, or the distortion that is dynamic range compression, which is universally over-applied to CD and MP3 masters, but nearly always missing from vinyl.
signals you cant even see on a scope or repeatedly detect by any means
Do you mean frequencies between 20KHz and 60KHz, which even the lowest-bandwidth scopes can easily pick up? Or are you referring to the artificially lowered peak volumes and artificially amplified low volumes (this is distortion, mind you) commonly referred to as dynamic range compression, which is also easily visible on the crappiest of scopes?
If you're referring to the minuscule differences between a digital recording of an LP (at a sufficient sample rate and bit depth), well, I allude to that in my post, which you clearly didn't read.
just wtf you think they master those new vinyls with
Quite often 24-bit 192KHz digital sources with much less (if any at all) dynamic range compression than is applied to your typical 16-bit 44.1KHz sampled CD or MP3 master. It's stupid but people think louder automatically means better, so audio quality goes out the windows and CDs and MP3s sell.
I covered this in the last 2 paragraphs; you know, the ones I said to skip to if you don't buy into the actual science behind it. Clearly, you didn't read my entire post; you must have also skipped the bit at the end as well.
Deep! You meant Switch Mode Power Supply... I was thinking as I wrote that, most microcontrollers aren't multi-core and the few that are don't have AMP support. That said, quartz watches actually clock at 32.768KHz and yes, you can hear the cheap ones processing as the switching inside the microcontroller that runs the LCD happens at, on average, half that rate, so my interpretation still holds up.
Run a switch mode power supply over 80% of its rated capacity (less if it's extremely shit quality) and you'll hear it hiss, too, as it switches off less frequently to keep up with demand. You can get a decent whine out of one with a loosely-wound coil not held down with sealastic.
Not a whole lot of anything. They're also not open-air transducers like a high quality tweeter, and my microphone doesn't seem to pick them up like it can pick up a 20-47KHz tone out of my tweeters. It does fall off pretty quick above 47KHz, but that's neither here nor there.
But, boy, when one of them is being pushed too hard (or nearing the end of its life) you can literally hear the data flowing through it. Put fresh batteries in a dollar store watch and hold it to your ear; if you're not suffering high-range hearing loss, you'll immediately know what I'm talking about.
Incidentally, some people actually can hear slightly above 20KHz if the amplitude is high enough; my wife and I both can. I can pick up around 23KHz with the input and master faders on my panel both at about 80% and my amplifier sitting at around 15% (where I leave it). A year ago, I could hear up to 23.7KHz at those same levels. I'm sure I could still hear that, or higher, at louder volumes, but I have cats and don't wish to damage their hearing (or my own) with such loud sounds. My wife won't let me do an absolute limit test on her, but she does complain from the other room when I do 20-40KHz sweeps (usually when the cats won't leave me alone), though she couldn't hear anything at the top end of the last absolute limit test I gave myself, which I stopped at 23.25KHz; a frequency I could make out above the ambient noise from my office fridge, which had kicked on during the test.
I'll be sure to let you know when my hearing degrades enough that a 48KHz sample rate and headphones that start falling off at 16KHz are sufficient for me, if I remember a decade or two from now.
Absolutely not wrong. Perhaps you can't, but those frequencies absolutely will vibrate the hairs on your arms, legs, and neck. I'm sure you stopped reading right there in order to post your ignorance, or you'd have maybe learned something.
Note that ultrasound in open air behaves differently than, for example, therapeutic or diagnostic ultrasound, which is transmitted at extremely low amplitude and via direct contact.
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The funny thing about item B is that, unless driven on public roads, those off-road toys are exempt from EPA regulations anyway. Because it's not exactly unheard of to completely destroy your off-road toys while using them off road, you should be hauling them to your favorite "playground" on a trailer, at which point the EPA can't say shit about you running it with no exhaust manifold at all, should you choose to; let alone any other modifications you might want to make.
Exactly this. I'd also like to add that competition won't kill first-party repair, or even replacement sales. This is true because many people (in some markets, most people) won't trust a 3rd party repair and some, still, won't trust any repair and will buy a new device even when the old one can be fixed.
Any one who needs proof of this need only look at the auto industry and see that dealer service departments still exist. Try and schedule an appointment at a dealer service center and you'll quickly find that they're always busy. Always. Despite charging much more than 3rd party repair centers.
Anyone still not convinced can look at Apple's own service center, the Genius Bar. Good luck getting a same-day appointment; and that's despite the very strong 3rd party repair market for Apple devices. A market that already exists and hasn't killed Apple's own repair services isn't going to kill Apple's repair services if it exists... because... it already exists and hasn't killed them...
And even at that, all the techs I know (more than a handful) would be willing to pay for the information, so it's not even that they're asking for it for free. Right now, Apple makes nothing on an independent repair shop's work; they don't get a device sale, they don't get parts sales, they don't get repair fees, they get nada. If they sold schematics, tools, and parts -- all of which these techs are getting their hands on regardless -- they'd get money from that. It would be a net win all around.
Designed to break? Every single time I've heard of one being damaged it's due to negligence or ignorance.
This.
So. Much. THIS!
I am not gentle with my phones. I used to have quite a temper and I've put phones through walls and windows (I'm not that guy anymore, haven't been for a decade and a half); yeah, that was before smartphones but, while I no longer throw my phones, I don't baby them either. I use them. Heavily. In real-life situations. I use my phone as a work light and to peer into hard-to-see areas when working on my car, I use my phone around water all the time, I toss it onto the table, desk, or counter when I'm done with it.
My phones get dropped. Sometimes when I'm walking, in which case it's prone to "landing" on my foot during a froward step and being sent across the floor. I've had phones fall out of my pocket atop 16ft ladders on to concrete floors. Hell, I had one fall out of my pocket getting into the car and get driven over twice, once when I backed out, and again when I pulled back into the parking spot when I realized it wasn't in my pocket and thought I had left it inside. It was in a puddle when this happened.
I don't buy ruggedized phones and I don't use cases.
Number of phones I've broken in 17 years of phone ownership: 0
I don't know WTF these people do with their devices...
Funny, trying to get to the recovery menu on my S8+ I inadvertently managed to get to a ROM flashing utility of some sort, complete with a warning that flashing a non-Samsung OS could void my warranty. Apparently it's not as locked down as some of their older models.
This is offtopic and I'll accept appropriate moderation for it but... every time I see your sig I spend the next few minutes trying to correlate head injuries with raises I've received. Every time... I conclude that you're right.
You're considering the wrong issue. It's not about what visitors might transmit over those networks (which don't appear to be for visitor use in the first place), but the records stored within. There is literally no way a VPN is relevant here.
I believe they didn't connect to the networks they say they didn't connect to (note that they don't mention any contents of those networks); I also believe they purposely didn't mention the level of security on the networks they did connect to.
Those could have had no security, appearing as free public wi-fi, or they could have been properly secured. In the former case, no law was broken; in the latter, there is no way to prove they weren't secured after this article ran.
Consider who often visits such resorts... and who owns the ones discussed in this article.
First they won't even replace a broken $300 laptop, so spending $5k to set up WSUS is a no-go... now they're using $20k workstations and $5k wouldn't even be a drop in the bucket...
Can you pick one side of your mouth to talk out of, please?
Really? (W)SUS didn't come out until 2005. Last I recall, XP was released in 2001.
My mistake, I did misread. It came out in March 2005, which I read as March 2003. Either way, the same system of test, add-to-image, deploy-image that was used prior to XP should have been maintained until WSUS, and should have been kept in instances where WSUS wasn't used. As far as I know, it was kept anywhere that had competent IT.
I said companies remained on XP. Nothing about XP's own take up could be inferred from that statement.
You are not the only source for that information; I was in the industry back then and I remember how slow the move from NT4 and 2K was. It was a hair faster than the move from 98, which companies which didn't need a true multi-user environment were just getting around to installing over 95 around the time XP came out.
At any rate, good to see you finally cite a source.
And with Win10, Enterprise or not, you will be forced to accept all updates within a 9-12 month window. I'm too lazy to look it up again for precision. It is no longer your choice. You will upgrade, soon or sooner.
I can't find anything pointing to that so, really, if you could be so kind as to look it up and provide a link, that'd be great. Otherwise, well, I'm having a really hard time trusting your "facts" when I can't verify them; I have sources for what I say, and I provide them when I make my more unbelievable claims, but I see none from you. Without some indication that your "facts" are anything more than conjecture, there's not a whole lot of point continuing this conversation.
If somebody broke into my home and stole my computer, I would be more unhappy because they stole my computer and not because now they can hack it (they can just pull the HDD out and connect it to another PC or boot my PC from a live CD if they want to access the data).
Why, when full disk encryption is so easy?
And in Windows XP days my user was the admin - there was no need to exploit privilege escalation bug if the program was bad. Now my user is still the admin, but UAC sometimes pops up asking for my approval.
Ok, so you don't care about security.
OTOH, if I opened a wrong email attachment, it could encrypt my data even if running as limited user (me) on a fully patched system (or Linux). So, on a single user computer it is kinda pointless ("The malware encrypted all my data, but at least the system files are unaffected, yay!").
Unless you run backups as an admin user; then, at least, it couldn't encrypt your backups without privilege escalation.
I would say that when telemetry and GWX came out, more people disabled updates if they wanted to avoid installing Windows 10.
Why do all of you idiots act like telemetry is something that's brand new? Not being able to turn it off is brand new, but it's nothing new at all and most of you have probably had it enabled this whole damn time. The best part? Many of you probably still have it enabled! Hell, most of you probably wanted it enabled and are just now starting to even care because you're losing the ability to turn it off any everyone is talking about it.
Microsoft's patch means running their (new) code on my computer. It may just do what is promised, but it may also flip some registry or group policy setting that disables telemetry (enterprise edition). I do not know either way, so I would be back to sniffing packets on my router looking for any communication between that PC and Microsoft. On the other hand, I expect the manual workaround to work as promised, because I really doubt that Microsoft had the foresight to make uninstalling SMBv1 support also mess up the other settings.
Oh, you were talking about disabling SMB; you mentioned telemetry, so that's what I thought you were talking about. I was confused, as I was not aware that Microsoft ever released an official method (manual or via patch) to remove telemetry from Windows 10. Hell, it's still not clear until you read the last sentence of that paragraph, as you still talk about disabling telemetry.
You may be all over the place but, well hey, you're keeping the price of my Reynolds stock high. That is, unless you buy generic tinfoil.
If it will pay off so quickly, then that may mean the market value of the patent is more than I suggested.
You do realize that the proposal was for the FCC to buy and freely license the patent, right? I was merely suggesting that Apple would foot the bill. No longer having to pay $2B/year in royalties would, then, save them $2B/year. Your proposed price was $10B, which is 5 years of royalties.
Nowhere in that does Apple take ownership of or profit from the patents, they simply stop having to pay royalties to use them.
I'm sure Apple would foot the bill just out of spite for Qualcomm's bullshit. It would also pay off in 5 years, minimum.
Qualcomm seems to want to be paid every time one of their chips changes hands: when the chip is sold to the manufacturer, when the phone containing the chip is shipped to the company that contracted the manufacturing company, again when the phone designer ships the phone to a store...
When the store sells the phone to the end user?
When the end user sells the phone on Craigslist or eBay, or trades it in to their carrier?
Where does it stop?
I hope Apple and Foxconn absolutely crush them.
Legally, yes. In the real world, though, no. Consent through EULAs cannot be considered "active consent" by any reasonable definition.
You actively clicked the "Agree" button. If you didn't actively read what you were agreeing to, that's your own fault. Perhaps, if people actively refused to agree to shit that was onerously long and difficult to read, that shit would be made a lot shorter and in plain English. Companies care about market share and they won't change as long as we keep giving it to them. Take responsibility, say "NO!" to things you don't agree to, rather than lying and saying "I AGREE!", then trying to make it someone else's fault when the thing you claimed to agree to happens to you and you don't like it.
Fine. If Microsoft doesn't want to deal with people who think that clicking the "send crash report" button means that Microsoft will fix the crash, then do it in the background -- but let people disable the automatic reporting if they wish.
You misunderstand. These aren't people who think clicking the button means MS will fix the crashes, these are people who REFUSE TO CLICK THE BUTTON and bitch that MS never fixes the crashes. Go back and read what I wrote again, because you clearly missed something.
Well, yes, in the big picture, nothing about Windows is mandatory. Even using a computer at all is optional. But that argument is a bit disingenuous. I was talking about telemetry being mandatory if you're using consumer level Windows.
And what we have here is an informed market. We all know telemetry is there. Don't like it? Don't use it. You really do have a choice.
Just don't believe that Apple collects any less telemetry, or that you can disable all of it. They don't and you can't. You might know this if you ever read that EULA we were just talking about.
I'm talking XP for this one.
I don't recall early issues with WU, actually. I do recall being surprised that such a new system seemed to work quite well out of the box.
I thought that was obvious, as that's where WU on the client started?
One would think, but you seemed to be fixed on more recent events so I wanted to be sure.
WU always had the ability to do exactly what MS has completed with Win10, so disabling it way back then was the intelligent move for systems admins that needed to keep things running and avoid fire drills.
We actually agree on this point. Where it falls apart is that, while sysadmins would go back and eventually install updates after testing them, end users were disabling the updates, then not installing them later.
WSUS or no WSUS, sysadmins can still disable automatic updates on Win 10 Enterprise, so nothing changes for a company that has at least 5 computers and buys the right version of Windows (which is no more expensive, mind you; it gets cheaper in a volume license). The same actually applies to someone with a single computer, if they're willing to pay the 5 license minimum.
I've always been one to disable updates, myself. I've also always been one to manually install them. That is not the problem! The problem is when people do the first step, but not the second!
Again, we're not talking about sysadmins, here. We're talking about end users who really have no business managing their own updates.
In truth, MS systems can be semi-secure at least from the bot-net spewing bits if MS had a sensible configuration and firewall in place on their OS. Ideally you'd have a separate firewall between you and the internet, but not having one on system caused massive issues.
Well, then, I guess it's a good thing one has been included since XP SP2. Mind you, it didn't really get good until Vista, but it was there. It's really a non-issue wince Vista, though, as one has been included, with a "deny by default" configuration, since Vista.
Ideally you'd have a separate firewall between you and the internet, but not having one on system caused massive issues.
Well, yeah, the same can be said of any OS, though, if no firewall is enabled. In fact, hardware firewalls should really be the norm (even cheap routers include basic firewall functions now), especially in the face of Intel's AMT exploits, which are OS-agnostic; even the best software firewall won't stop that from being exploited as the ME grabs the packets and the OS never even sees them.
I'm sure you recall the study that dropping a new XP system without an external firewall on the internet to update it via WU would infect it before it could even start downloading?
Actually, no, I didn't know any study was necessary. Blaster was so bad a friend of mine ended up having to reinstall 4 times to get the patch before infection occurred. I was there, watching and laughing the whole time.
Also running all processes at System was another problem, directly with XP and still an issue with W10, although it's a touch more difficult to execute an overflow as System.
Was, was, was, was, was. All I hear from you is a stream of "was". Really, only system services run as System anymore; it's something they started fixing with Vista and it's taken some time to get all the software vendors on board with running their applications as the user, but we're finally there. If it's still an issue on your Win 10 system, talk to the app vendor who hasn't been keeping up; Microsoft made it a pain in the ass to keep following the old and insecure model and that's really all they can do without everyone bitching about how they broke that one mission critical application.
Yes, the problem dates
I wasn't aware we were only discussing Win10, or even just post 2k3.
Prior to Windows 10 you could disable automatic updates entirely and manually select which updates to install. Absent WSUS, which we were only without for a year and a half, the procedure followed by competent IT staff was to disable automatic updates in the standard images applied to end user workstations and manually apply those updates (to the images, not to the workstations individually) after testing. Roll out the new images over the weekend and, since user profiles and documents are stored on the network (remember, competent IT staff), everyone comes in Monday to find working and updates computers.
Since most people in business are running flavors of XP through W7 that I've been aware of (yes, at least 3 Fortune 100 companies I personally know of were running XP as recently as 2 years ago) and only recently moved to W7.
So you're saying most companies don't upgrade to the newest OS right away? They typically wait two years or longer (that's been my experience, at least; and you're demonstrating that they often wait much longer) as the software they run on a daily basis doesn't support the new OS right away? So, you mean, by the time most businesses would have upgraded to XP, WSUS was out and this whole back-and-forth is largely pointless?
Got it.
At least 2 have had issues with upgrades, in one case taking down 30% of the company's computers for about 2 days. This is with dedicated IT support teams in place, and they still can't get it right. At least they only rolled it out to portions of the company at a time.
I stipulated competent IT teams, not just dedicated.
You're living in MS fairytale land. I can assure you that small businesses don't as a rule run WSUS, nor have IT folks that deal with it.
Does that mean they can't? I mean, if all of this is really a concern and there is a solution available, why can't they utilize that solution?
They generally contract with a low-bid support firm that sends some random clown over when called to "support" them. The going rate is under $60/hr for what the SMB considers no more than helpdesk support. And they complain about it.
Sounds like they need more than they're paying for. Poor management exhibiting incompetent decision making that ends up costing the company more than it saves in terms of downtime incurred by not having someone on staff. That's not Microsoft's fault; I've seen it happen in all Mac offices as well.
These are under 100 people shops.
Then they should have an AD to manage logins, at the very least. It costs less to pay someone to click a few buttons to add and remove accounts on a central server than it costs to have them walk across the building to do the same thing. Bonus if they install even a low-end SAN solution and store user profiles and documents on it; then they don't even have to reimage machines when someone leaves the company. These are things that should be considered once a company reaches about 20-25 workstation users and should certainly be in place by 50.
If they had that (and you can pay the $60/hr places to install and maintain it, by the way), they'd be set. Again, outsourcing IT doesn't eliminate the incompetence, it simply shifts it from the IT department to the manager or exec who decided to outsource to the low bidder and ignore IT infrastructure as a whole. An, again, this happens in all Mac shops as well, so no, it's not Microsoft's fault.
If anything, Microsoft makes it easier to get it right by offering the tools to do so as part of their server OS and actively trying to educate IT workers about those tools. Apple, on the other hand, killed off the server version of OS X and never bothered migrating the management tools; those are just gone
Microsoft is the cause why a lot of end users disable updates. There is/was a setting to only install security patches and not install the rest. Microsoft then made telemetry and Windows10 appear as security patches so they would get installed.
So you're saying that end users began disabling updates on Windows XP in 2001 because of something Microsoft did with Windows 10 in 2015?
Nah. Don't think so.
Before Windows 10 was released, end users spent 14 years making it clear they can not be trusted to keep their systems up to date with patches for critical vulnerabilities, so we've now all lost the ability to decide for ourselves. Even in the face of the option to only install critical (security) updates, people entirely disabled them, then never went back and manually applied patches which truly were critical, consistently enough over the course of a decade and a half that the end result was a mass of shit-spewing bot nests (which then formed shit-spewing botnets) and the general idea that Windows was inherently insecure, when the reality is that a patched Windows system is no more or less secure than any other fully patched system and, with those security patches regularly installed, the shit-spewing botnet problem would largely not exist.
We've been dealing with that particular problem for as long as we have precisely because users chose not to install updates, and have made that choice for far longer than Windows 10 had been out.
If Microsoft made it possible to only install security patches
I like where this is going; we might see eye-to-eye on this after all...
(and chose which ones,
Oh, so close. The problem, here, is that when you can choose which updates to install, you can choose to install no updates, which is what people have been doing since 2001 when they were first given the option, which is why we can no longer make that choice.
I may not need a patch that protects my computer from a local user)
Right, because nobody every breaks into buildings and messes with (or steals) computers. You may be the only intended user of a system, but that doesn't stop someone else from gaining access. There is also the possibility of a trusted software vendor getting hacked and their application ending up with some code that exploits that "local user" vulnerability you didn't patch. You use that software regularly, you install the bad update, you run the application... you are the local user and now you've been exploited. Guess you needed that patch, after all.
and preferable made it so that not every patch required a reboot,
So many patches don't, actually. It just seems like they all do because there's usually (but not always) one that does in every update set.
I think more people would update their OS.
History has shown us otherwise.
I chose to uninstall the protocol from my Windows 10 computer (Microsoft published workaround) instead of installing the patch because I do not trust the patch to not re-enable telemetry on my PC.
Link, please? Actually, nevermind, I'm calling bullshit either way. You don't trust Microsoft's patch to do the job, but you trust their manual procedures? And you trust that no part of the system will act to protect the services you've removed? You do realize that Windows has had system file protection (and automatic repair and restoration of said files) since Windows 7, right?
distortion is nice
You're thinking tube amps; that, or the distortion that is dynamic range compression, which is universally over-applied to CD and MP3 masters, but nearly always missing from vinyl.
signals you cant even see on a scope or repeatedly detect by any means
Do you mean frequencies between 20KHz and 60KHz, which even the lowest-bandwidth scopes can easily pick up? Or are you referring to the artificially lowered peak volumes and artificially amplified low volumes (this is distortion, mind you) commonly referred to as dynamic range compression, which is also easily visible on the crappiest of scopes?
If you're referring to the minuscule differences between a digital recording of an LP (at a sufficient sample rate and bit depth), well, I allude to that in my post, which you clearly didn't read.
just wtf you think they master those new vinyls with
Quite often 24-bit 192KHz digital sources with much less (if any at all) dynamic range compression than is applied to your typical 16-bit 44.1KHz sampled CD or MP3 master. It's stupid but people think louder automatically means better, so audio quality goes out the windows and CDs and MP3s sell.
I covered this in the last 2 paragraphs; you know, the ones I said to skip to if you don't buy into the actual science behind it. Clearly, you didn't read my entire post; you must have also skipped the bit at the end as well.
SMP, not AMP... damn autocorrect...
Deep! You meant Switch Mode Power Supply... I was thinking as I wrote that, most microcontrollers aren't multi-core and the few that are don't have AMP support. That said, quartz watches actually clock at 32.768KHz and yes, you can hear the cheap ones processing as the switching inside the microcontroller that runs the LCD happens at, on average, half that rate, so my interpretation still holds up.
Run a switch mode power supply over 80% of its rated capacity (less if it's extremely shit quality) and you'll hear it hiss, too, as it switches off less frequently to keep up with demand. You can get a decent whine out of one with a loosely-wound coil not held down with sealastic.
Not a whole lot of anything. They're also not open-air transducers like a high quality tweeter, and my microphone doesn't seem to pick them up like it can pick up a 20-47KHz tone out of my tweeters. It does fall off pretty quick above 47KHz, but that's neither here nor there.
But, boy, when one of them is being pushed too hard (or nearing the end of its life) you can literally hear the data flowing through it. Put fresh batteries in a dollar store watch and hold it to your ear; if you're not suffering high-range hearing loss, you'll immediately know what I'm talking about.
Incidentally, some people actually can hear slightly above 20KHz if the amplitude is high enough; my wife and I both can. I can pick up around 23KHz with the input and master faders on my panel both at about 80% and my amplifier sitting at around 15% (where I leave it). A year ago, I could hear up to 23.7KHz at those same levels. I'm sure I could still hear that, or higher, at louder volumes, but I have cats and don't wish to damage their hearing (or my own) with such loud sounds. My wife won't let me do an absolute limit test on her, but she does complain from the other room when I do 20-40KHz sweeps (usually when the cats won't leave me alone), though she couldn't hear anything at the top end of the last absolute limit test I gave myself, which I stopped at 23.25KHz; a frequency I could make out above the ambient noise from my office fridge, which had kicked on during the test.
I'll be sure to let you know when my hearing degrades enough that a 48KHz sample rate and headphones that start falling off at 16KHz are sufficient for me, if I remember a decade or two from now.
Absolutely not wrong. Perhaps you can't, but those frequencies absolutely will vibrate the hairs on your arms, legs, and neck. I'm sure you stopped reading right there in order to post your ignorance, or you'd have maybe learned something.
Note that ultrasound in open air behaves differently than, for example, therapeutic or diagnostic ultrasound, which is transmitted at extremely low amplitude and via direct contact.