Even if you "turn off" Cortana, it's still running in the background.
Yes and no. Yes, there absolutely is a process called Cortana running in the background. But its not still listening to your microphone, etc. Its providing backend services for stuff like location services.
What's in a name?
In theory Microsoft should have broken the functionality into two separate modules. "Cortana Personal Assistant" and "Cortana Services". Where the former is JUST the voice-mic-UI stuff; and the latter does all the other stuff -- the search functionality, location services, and provides the hooks that other apps connect to to add their "cortana" functionality, should you ever turn Cortana back on.... of course people like your self would still freak about "Cortana Services" running even after the "Cortana Personal Assistant" went away so instead of calling it "Cortana Services" it should be called "wcmi_support" or something suitably innocuous. Then when you looked at the process list, nothing would be *called* cortana and you'd now be happy.
Although nothing changed at all except the name of a process.
Sometimes I think Microsoft should rename the Task Scheduler from "Schedule" to "Clippy" and "svchost" to "systemd" just for the fireworks display.
Is it worth doing the free upgrade and then downgrading?
IMO Yes.
Will I be able to upgrade to W10 indefinitely
According to Microsoft yes. (at least on that hardware)
on the off chance that they (or the community) fix up all the problems and snooping
The community more or less already has, depending on your level of paranoia.
Spybot Anti-Beacon
And there are several other tools out there too.
And for what its worth, unless you are disabling all updates and/or manually vetting every update to your win7/8 box the snooping is still a problem.
For most people, whether you are on 7 or 10 you are probably best served with an anti-telemetry tool as the least hassle way of dealing with this. And since its the same issue and solution whether you are on 7 or 10 then you can choose to run 7 or 10 based on other criteria.
I don't think you would get the full effect of just reading the transcript.
Yes. In some cases watching the video helps. If you'd actually read my post, you'd realize that i not only acknowledged that, but suggested that a much better presentation of that sort of material might be text interspersed with short video clips.
Bingo. If its NOT entertainment, I'd rather not watch it at all, and just read a transcript.
The only reason I fast forward video is that it has shitty information density, and 99.9% of all video is extremely poorly bookmarked to facilitate you getting to the part you want.
For example, youtube... you find an album, and then there are usually time code links to each track.
All instructional, walkthru, tutorial, informational, educational etc videos should have that list:
0:00 - pointless intro 0:15 - i introduce myself for far too long 1:35 - i introduce the topic for far too long 2:54 - i chatter about something and irrelevant 3:05 - this is what you came to see 3:17 - i chatter about my other videos 5:02 - something else random 5:20 - pointless outtro
Then i can click on the 5th link, watch 20 seconds and move on. Better still would be a transcript under each section, so if I get what i need from skimming the transcript, I don't even need to watch the video.
Better still, lose the rest of video elements entirely, and replace with a brief text. And only have the 20 second clip that I might need.
I think Windows is your problem, and maybe your ISP.
Its definitely not the ISP. Its not even windows itself; other software works fine. Steam/Kodi, when i use a browser to watch a show like Colbert, etc.
Even netflix in a browser doesn't have these issues. And Netflix on other platforms I have is fine too. (android, wiiu, etc)
And my brother in laws netflix app shows exactly the same issues.
It is JUST the netflix windows 10 'modern' app that is a pile of crap. Its just a crappy buggy app; and it surprises me that its that crappy and buggy given how well it works pretty much everywhere else.
Isn't this basically the same as suing winter because people gamble on hockey
Not really. Valve has been on a lot of people's radar already for how some of its F2P marketplaces are operating. (Team Fortress, DOTA, and CS:GO in particular.)
A 2nd part of the issue is that the major Casino's are unregulated, allow minors to play, (and accusations that its rigged by its owners etc.) So these sites are operating illegally; and quite probably corrupt.
There's a reasonable argument to bad that Valve has an obligation to prevent such sites from tying into its APIs etc.
There is also a reasonable argument to be made that Valve is endorsing it by allowing such things as this:
For example:
CS:GO Lounge "A community based around the trading of CS:GO items "
"trading" lulz... right, "trading"... the discussion has a nice forum post pinned for everyone:
This isn't on some 3rd party site. This is right on the steam forums, in a Steam Group. You can arguably suggest that its not steams problem to stop 3rd parties from betting... but this stuff is right on Steam. They probably do need to take some ownership of the issue if they are letting it make itself that comfortable right on steam itself.
You are surely right of course. But i don't even think it would matter if they did let us download mp4. Nothing on netflix isn't readily available on torrents anyway.
People use netflix because its (relatively*) convenient; and for the satisfaction of doing the right thing to pay a reasonable fee for the delivery of ad free content.
If you could download mp4 videos I doubt many netflix subscribers would over it, and it would probably attract more subscribers than they already have.
* - relatively as in "I can't beleive what a total clusterfuck the windows 10 netflix app is." It used to work with my remote... now it doesn't. I can't set it to full screen until it starts streaming; it drops out of full screen when the show is own so i have to re-full screen it for the next thing i watch.
It takes like a minute or two more often than not to start a stream. (Unless i kill the app out right, relaunch it, and then it starts the stream immediately half the time.) And its the only media player on my HTPC that doesn't do audio initialization properly, so it usually takes 5-10 seconds once the stream starts before audio starts playing. (due to HDMI handshaking i think) because if I stop the stream, go back ot the menu and and start it up again its fine. But why couldn't 'start the audio' handshake whenever its the foreground app? Or when its initializing before it starts streaming? Or wait for the handshake before it start playing (is that possible?) in any case everything else on my HTPC from steam to Kodi to VLC starts audio immediately when i hit play.
The UI is also pretty terrible for managing what you want to watch in feature, re-watching things you've seen, and just finding new things to watch; and the UI changes randomly from month to month.
I will say they at least got rid of a major video stutter that was afflicting it several months ago. (where the video would pause, audio would continue, then video would "fast forward" catch up to the adio a second or three later). So despite all its irritations its at least watchable again.:)
For local transport between machines when the network is down, we have USB (flashdrives / external hard drives) as pretty much a universal solution.
And for the use case you describe... we have pretty ubiquitous email, and services like dropbox etc.
But in 1999 of course the internet wasn't nearly so ubiquitous or acceptable as a method of moving data to another.
I would agree Apple had definitely correctly predicted the future would be the network, but they pulled the floppy out before that future had quite arrived.
No, because TLAs believe only the good guys (TM) can leverage backdoors.
It may be what they tell the public, and the PR tools that stand in front of congress etc might even beleive it but I'm skeptical anyone actually in charge of securing the same TLA's shit from attacks has remotely the same opinion.
If I worked for the CIA or NSA or FBI or DHS securing their networks from attack, I certainly wouldn't be in favor of a backdoor, *especially* one that was in the hands of one of the other (lesser!) TLAs... that I would naturally have professional contempt for.:)
For me, i could get away with 3 devices (just) but the desktop version appears to be a chrome application.
I don't really know much about "chrome applications"
I don't really want chrome in the first place. I definitely don't want a messaging app running in a broser tab or window if i can avoid it. If it gets its own task bar icon, and its own notification settings and it works with chromium etc etc it might be ok...???
Rather curious how the best app for end-to-end security is missing - namely Telegram.
Telegram has 2 modes. Secure ("secret conversations") and Default (essentially insecure; because messages are stored on their server)
The default trades features for security, namely that of of synchronization between all client devices, without regard for whether they are on or off or anything else at the time the message sent. Its a feature i value, and its a reason i use telegram.
But it IS at odds with security; and its something I'd like to see addressed. Although it would be a substantial rework of the protocol, and it would take a lot more storage space on the store and forward server since each message would need to be stored separately for each receiving device I think.
There has been some other criticisms of how telegram handles secret conversations (which are properly end to end encrypted -- and lose out on the sync to all devices as a result) but I've never gotten specifics on what the criticism is exactly or whether or not it is valid.
That's partially true. When they removed the floppy drive from desktop machines, they basically didn't exist, but you could also buy an external floppy drive if you needed one, and on a desktop, that wasn't a big deal.
The decision by Apple to make it an optional part instead of a standard part would have been far more sensible and consumer friendly. Then it would have been up to the user whether they wanted it or not.
External was an opportunity to really gouge on price by 3rd parties, and it added unwanted clutter for a seldom used device that would have been far more convenient to have just had the usual slot for on the desktop.
On mobile devices (laptops), Apple continued to make floppy disks available up through the Wallstreet (until '99)
Which didn't do you much good if you need to transfer files to or from a desktop without one.
The student/school use case was really the big one that I recall. Both grade school and university; especially as they held onto technology longer. And the only reliable way to get your essay etc onto or off of a mac at the school labs was floppy disk. You weren't getting on the school network. And they were usually using older gear...stuff like PowerMac 7100 or Powermac 8600 or even Centris 610 were still widely deployed in 2000. And having those co-exist with the "new" iMacs was just greif. The old machines lacked USB ports so no flash drives. The CD drives weren't writeable (on most models).
Meanwhile the new macs floppy drives, and scsi ports so even your external hard drives didnt work. And in school environments the networks were locked down, or in many cases non-existent.
The 8600 discontinued in 1998. The iMac launched in 1998.
Apple had simply moved too quickly.
It's one thing for it to be a strain to move files between computers separated by a decade, but no common file transfer technology between two units separated by mere months except networking? In an era where most people didn't have networks, when dialup was still king.
It was replaced by CDs, DVDs and at a later time USB-sticks. There is no actual need for floppy disks and therefore FDDs are obsolete.
Yes and no. Yes they were inadequate, but the replacements weren't quite ready when apple pulled the plug on them.
The floppy disk use case was still to get small files between two computers -- homework / basic documents / etc.
The 'network' wasn't always available.
CD/DVDs weren't generally writeable, and re/writeable disks were a bit of a pain; with +R -R +RW -RW, open and closed... I had Mac G5 that as I recall could only read one of +R or -R. It was years before everything could read everything.
Zip drives were a thing for a bit, but they were never ubiquitous.
USB sticks eventually truly replaced floppies, but they weren't ubiquitous either for several years yet.
Apple was right to remove the floppy, but they removed it a year or two too soon. It created a stretch where getting files around was a PITA.
PCs on the other hand held onto them a few years too long.
I agree with the rest of your post. Apple is just being irritating.
A service like carbonite or crashplan etc absolutely is a backup, and it is online.
The Tao of Backup fails to consider and manage risk.
The novice said: "I will save my working files, but not my system and application files, as they can be always be reinstalled from their distribution disks."
The master made no reply.
The next day, the novice's disk crashed. Three days later, the novice was still reinstalling software.
I'd say the novice made the right decision. For the average user. The cost of losing 2 days productivity is far cheaper than what the master proposes having in place just to avoid losing 2 days productivity.
Its not really a win if you spend $10,000 to gracefully avoid a $1000 loss.
Precisely, i think 'our' generation had a rather unique circumstance. Computers were 'rare' and 'new' and changing rapidly, so our parents were likely to be less knowledgeable about them than the kids were.
The insistence of my dad to invade my privacy contributed in no small way to making me the security expert I am today.
I don't doubt it. That clearly applied to you. But if it were generally true, any child that had a snoopy parent would be a network security expert. And that doesn't pass any credibility test. And from my own experience with my kids, they just don't have a deep interest in it.
If I were to monitor my kids, and they were to find out, I'm confident they'd adapt by just avoiding networks and devices I have control over in the future rather than try to engage in cat and mouse on our own network.
Kids will find a way -- I agree with you there. But I don't think they'll all become IT security experts in the process. Some will perhaps, but not as a rule.
From experience (you being similar to my dad) I can tell you with some credibility is that all you will accomplish is that your kids will not only circumvent your attempt to sniff through their privacy
You were likely more technically savvy than your parents.
That doesn't generally apply to parents here, especially to a new generation of kids who just use the internet as a tool.
The internet isn't really new anymore, and the adults here grew up with it and know it inside and out. Protocols and ports, routing and switches, and operating systems etc, etc...and the theory behind how it works. And the kids, unless that is their passion... like it was ours... don't know anything about it.
The point isn't that its on when the system is off. The point is what it can do to the host system when its on. It can read RAM. It can communicate over the network. Its completely beyond the control or purview of the host operating system.
What does it monitor when the computer's actually on? Talk to Intel.
The point being that if it can be exploited, then its at the mercy of hackers. So you can run OpenBSD or whatever you like, and if the ME is exploitable someone can remotely connect to your system, keylog it, rootkit it, read out the contents of ram...
Its fundamentally incompatible with a secure system; to have a 'black box' OS that can do anything it wants and may have all kinds of weaknesses and exploits and then have that piggy-backing on the host systems network interface.
On servers, where its relegated to a dedicated wired port... and the people running them are running the management over separate secure networks... it makes sense.
But the coprocessor is still physically there; and the prom space for firmware still writaeble, so the potential for a root-kit to infect the space still exists.
Although at least remote exploit is unlikely; we're now at least talking about a local root privileges exploit to get the new infected firmware loaded; same as any other rootkit... although given it infects the ME firmware, you'd have to re-flash to get rid of it; assuming you managed to detect it.
Mass shootings are frequent occurrences in the US because the US is big
Amazing, huh? Norway has about 1/60th the population of the US, so mass shootings should happen at 1/60th the rate.
The only thing amazing is that you wrote that not realizing how idiotic it makes you look.
What you've done here called lying with statistics. For Norway, its basically a one off event; but it happened to be a big one, and it happened to fall into a narrow date range they were looking at. Its a statistical outlier, and it's plain dishonest to count it like that.
For example, the US is about 10x the population of Canada. Therefore if 1 person per decade spontaneously combusts in the states, we'd expect it to happen 1 in 100 years in Canada everything else being assumed equal right?
So... lets get some data...
1905 - 1 in the US 1916 - 1 in the US 1924 - 1 in the US... 2002 - 1 in the US 2015 - 1 in the US; and finally 1 in Canada
Now lets make a chart looking at the last 10 years: 2006-2016 what do we see:
1 in the US, and 1 in Canada
OMG, the rate is the SAME! Holy shit balls... Canada has the same rate of human spontaneously exploding as the US! Now lets calculate that per capita...
US : 1 in 300,000,000; Canada 1 in 30,000,000
Amazing huh! Canada has 10x the rate of exploding peeps the US does!
Now, tell me you do see the how absolutely retarded that argument is?
That's the same argument you and that website just made about Norway.
Norway is a statistical outlier, because it had exactly one mass shooting, but it was large; and it distorts the data, and that was amplified by selecting the date range it happened to occur in. For example, try expanding the date range from 2009-2013 to 1970-2013... how many mass shootings will Norway rack up if you do that? Meanwhhile the US just keeps piling them on.. 24 from 2000-2008 (adding another ~114 victims); 42 more mass shootings in the 90s adding another ~155 victims. 32 more mass shootings in the 80s...etc..
The Norway figure isn't going to budge, while the US is going to steadily climb the ranks; as more data adds up.
Gun control has never been shown to have any significant effect on either homicide rates or mass shootings.
Well... except in Australia.
homicide rates
"The chances of being murdered by a gun in Australia plunged to 0.15 per 100,000 people in 2014 from 0.54 per 100,000 people in 1996, a decline of 72 percent, a Reuters analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed."
or mass shootings
"It was the April 28, 1996, shooting deaths by a lone gunman of 35 people in and around a cafe at a historic former prison colony in Tasmania that prompted the government to buy back or confiscate a million firearms and make it harder to buy new ones.
Not saying Australia is a solid argument for gun control but you are going to have to pull your head out of your ass and make a cogent argument why it isn't instead of just pretending its not real.
Slashdot Mirror
Even if you "turn off" Cortana, it's still running in the background.
Yes and no. Yes, there absolutely is a process called Cortana running in the background. But its not still listening to your microphone, etc. Its providing backend services for stuff like location services.
What's in a name?
In theory Microsoft should have broken the functionality into two separate modules. "Cortana Personal Assistant" and "Cortana Services". Where the former is JUST the voice-mic-UI stuff; and the latter does all the other stuff -- the search functionality, location services, and provides the hooks that other apps connect to to add their "cortana" functionality, should you ever turn Cortana back on. ... of course people like your self would still freak about "Cortana Services" running even after the "Cortana Personal Assistant" went away so instead of calling it "Cortana Services" it should be called "wcmi_support" or something suitably innocuous. Then when you looked at the process list, nothing would be *called* cortana and you'd now be happy.
Although nothing changed at all except the name of a process.
Sometimes I think Microsoft should rename the Task Scheduler from "Schedule" to "Clippy" and "svchost" to "systemd" just for the fireworks display.
Is it worth doing the free upgrade and then downgrading?
IMO Yes.
Will I be able to upgrade to W10 indefinitely
According to Microsoft yes. (at least on that hardware)
on the off chance that they (or the community) fix up all the problems and snooping
The community more or less already has, depending on your level of paranoia.
Spybot Anti-Beacon
And there are several other tools out there too.
And for what its worth, unless you are disabling all updates and/or manually vetting every update to your win7/8 box the snooping is still a problem.
For most people, whether you are on 7 or 10 you are probably best served with an anti-telemetry tool as the least hassle way of dealing with this. And since its the same issue and solution whether you are on 7 or 10 then you can choose to run 7 or 10 based on other criteria.
"The weakness primarily lies in the absence of X-Rays and deterrent technology on approach. "
No. Adding xrays just moves where people will be lined up.
I don't think you would get the full effect of just reading the transcript.
Yes. In some cases watching the video helps. If you'd actually read my post, you'd realize that i not only acknowledged that, but suggested that a much better presentation of that sort of material might be text interspersed with short video clips.
Not all videos are about entertainment.
Bingo. If its NOT entertainment, I'd rather not watch it at all, and just read a transcript.
The only reason I fast forward video is that it has shitty information density, and 99.9% of all video is extremely poorly bookmarked to facilitate you getting to the part you want.
For example, youtube... you find an album, and then there are usually time code links to each track.
All instructional, walkthru, tutorial, informational, educational etc videos should have that list:
0:00 - pointless intro
0:15 - i introduce myself for far too long
1:35 - i introduce the topic for far too long
2:54 - i chatter about something and irrelevant
3:05 - this is what you came to see
3:17 - i chatter about my other videos
5:02 - something else random
5:20 - pointless outtro
Then i can click on the 5th link, watch 20 seconds and move on. Better still would be a transcript under each section, so if I get what i need from skimming the transcript, I don't even need to watch the video.
Better still, lose the rest of video elements entirely, and replace with a brief text. And only have the 20 second clip that I might need.
I think Windows is your problem, and maybe your ISP.
Its definitely not the ISP.
Its not even windows itself; other software works fine. Steam/Kodi, when i use a browser to watch a show like Colbert, etc.
Even netflix in a browser doesn't have these issues.
And Netflix on other platforms I have is fine too. (android, wiiu, etc)
And my brother in laws netflix app shows exactly the same issues.
It is JUST the netflix windows 10 'modern' app that is a pile of crap. Its just a crappy buggy app; and it surprises me that its that crappy and buggy given how well it works pretty much everywhere else.
Isn't this basically the same as suing winter because people gamble on hockey
Not really. Valve has been on a lot of people's radar already for how some of its F2P marketplaces are operating. (Team Fortress, DOTA, and CS:GO in particular.)
http://wccftech.com/problem-un...
A 2nd part of the issue is that the major Casino's are unregulated, allow minors to play, (and accusations that its rigged by its owners etc.) So these sites are operating illegally; and quite probably corrupt.
There's a reasonable argument to bad that Valve has an obligation to prevent such sites from tying into its APIs etc.
There is also a reasonable argument to be made that Valve is endorsing it by allowing such things as this:
For example:
CS:GO Lounge
"A community based around the trading of CS:GO items "
"trading" lulz... right, "trading"... the discussion has a nice forum post pinned for everyone:
Bets: the all-in-one guide
http://steamcommunity.com/grou...
or this, a "hey kids, if you got scammed its on you" and then signs off with safe betting.
http://steamcommunity.com/grou...
This isn't on some 3rd party site. This is right on the steam forums, in a Steam Group. You can arguably suggest that its not steams problem to stop 3rd parties from betting... but this stuff is right on Steam. They probably do need to take some ownership of the issue if they are letting it make itself that comfortable right on steam itself.
You are surely right of course. But i don't even think it would matter if they did let us download mp4. Nothing on netflix isn't readily available on torrents anyway.
People use netflix because its (relatively*) convenient; and for the satisfaction of doing the right thing to pay a reasonable fee for the delivery of ad free content.
If you could download mp4 videos I doubt many netflix subscribers would over it, and it would probably attract more subscribers than they already have.
* - relatively as in "I can't beleive what a total clusterfuck the windows 10 netflix app is." It used to work with my remote... now it doesn't. I can't set it to full screen until it starts streaming; it drops out of full screen when the show is own so i have to re-full screen it for the next thing i watch.
It takes like a minute or two more often than not to start a stream. (Unless i kill the app out right, relaunch it, and then it starts the stream immediately half the time.) And its the only media player on my HTPC that doesn't do audio initialization properly, so it usually takes 5-10 seconds once the stream starts before audio starts playing. (due to HDMI handshaking i think) because if I stop the stream, go back ot the menu and and start it up again its fine. But why couldn't 'start the audio' handshake whenever its the foreground app? Or when its initializing before it starts streaming? Or wait for the handshake before it start playing (is that possible?) in any case everything else on my HTPC from steam to Kodi to VLC starts audio immediately when i hit play.
The UI is also pretty terrible for managing what you want to watch in feature, re-watching things you've seen, and just finding new things to watch; and the UI changes randomly from month to month.
I will say they at least got rid of a major video stutter that was afflicting it several months ago. (where the video would pause, audio would continue, then video would "fast forward" catch up to the adio a second or three later). So despite all its irritations its at least watchable again. :)
For local transport between machines when the network is down, we have USB (flashdrives / external hard drives) as pretty much a universal solution.
And for the use case you describe ... we have pretty ubiquitous email, and services like dropbox etc.
But in 1999 of course the internet wasn't nearly so ubiquitous or acceptable as a method of moving data to another.
I would agree Apple had definitely correctly predicted the future would be the network, but they pulled the floppy out before that future had quite arrived.
No, because TLAs believe only the good guys (TM) can leverage backdoors.
It may be what they tell the public, and the PR tools that stand in front of congress etc might even beleive it but I'm skeptical anyone actually in charge of securing the same TLA's shit from attacks has remotely the same opinion.
If I worked for the CIA or NSA or FBI or DHS securing their networks from attack, I certainly wouldn't be in favor of a backdoor, *especially* one that was in the hands of one of the other (lesser!) TLAs... that I would naturally have professional contempt for. :)
For me, i could get away with 3 devices (just) but the desktop version appears to be a chrome application.
I don't really know much about "chrome applications"
I don't really want chrome in the first place. I definitely don't want a messaging app running in a broser tab or window if i can avoid it. If it gets its own task bar icon, and its own notification settings and it works with chromium etc etc it might be ok...???
you are welcome to compile and install signal yourself; if you don't trust the app store download.
It raises the question why they bothered to mention Allo then though, as it also has no encryption on by default.
Rather curious how the best app for end-to-end security is missing - namely Telegram.
Telegram has 2 modes. Secure ("secret conversations") and
Default (essentially insecure; because messages are stored on their server)
The default trades features for security, namely that of of synchronization between all client devices, without regard for whether they are on or off or anything else at the time the message sent. Its a feature i value, and its a reason i use telegram.
But it IS at odds with security; and its something I'd like to see addressed. Although it would be a substantial rework of the protocol, and it would take a lot more storage space on the store and forward server since each message would need to be stored separately for each receiving device I think.
There has been some other criticisms of how telegram handles secret conversations (which are properly end to end encrypted -- and lose out on the sync to all devices as a result) but I've never gotten specifics on what the criticism is exactly or whether or not it is valid.
That's partially true. When they removed the floppy drive from desktop machines, they basically didn't exist, but you could also buy an external floppy drive if you needed one, and on a desktop, that wasn't a big deal.
The decision by Apple to make it an optional part instead of a standard part would have been far more sensible and consumer friendly. Then it would have been up to the user whether they wanted it or not.
External was an opportunity to really gouge on price by 3rd parties, and it added unwanted clutter for a seldom used device that would have been far more convenient to have just had the usual slot for on the desktop.
On mobile devices (laptops), Apple continued to make floppy disks available up through the Wallstreet (until '99)
Which didn't do you much good if you need to transfer files to or from a desktop without one.
The student/school use case was really the big one that I recall. Both grade school and university; especially as they held onto technology longer. And the only reliable way to get your essay etc onto or off of a mac at the school labs was floppy disk. You weren't getting on the school network. And they were usually using older gear ...stuff like PowerMac 7100 or Powermac 8600 or even Centris 610 were still widely deployed in 2000. And having those co-exist with the "new" iMacs was just greif. The old machines lacked USB ports so no flash drives. The CD drives weren't writeable (on most models).
Meanwhile the new macs floppy drives, and scsi ports so even your external hard drives didnt work. And in school environments the networks were locked down, or in many cases non-existent.
The 8600 discontinued in 1998. The iMac launched in 1998.
Apple had simply moved too quickly.
It's one thing for it to be a strain to move files between computers separated by a decade, but no common file transfer technology between two units separated by mere months except networking? In an era where most people didn't have networks, when dialup was still king.
It was replaced by CDs, DVDs and at a later time USB-sticks. There is no actual need for floppy disks and therefore FDDs are obsolete.
Yes and no. Yes they were inadequate, but the replacements weren't quite ready when apple pulled the plug on them.
The floppy disk use case was still to get small files between two computers -- homework / basic documents / etc.
The 'network' wasn't always available.
CD/DVDs weren't generally writeable, and re/writeable disks were a bit of a pain; with +R -R +RW -RW, open and closed... I had Mac G5 that as I recall could only read one of +R or -R. It was years before everything could read everything.
Zip drives were a thing for a bit, but they were never ubiquitous.
USB sticks eventually truly replaced floppies, but they weren't ubiquitous either for several years yet.
Apple was right to remove the floppy, but they removed it a year or two too soon. It created a stretch where getting files around was a PITA.
PCs on the other hand held onto them a few years too long.
I agree with the rest of your post. Apple is just being irritating.
mod up ^
Sorry. You are simply wrong.
A service like carbonite or crashplan etc absolutely is a backup, and it is online.
The Tao of Backup fails to consider and manage risk.
The novice said: "I will save my working files, but not my system and application files, as they can be always be reinstalled from their distribution disks."
The master made no reply.
The next day, the novice's disk crashed. Three days later, the novice was still reinstalling software.
I'd say the novice made the right decision. For the average user. The cost of losing 2 days productivity is far cheaper than what the master proposes having in place just to avoid losing 2 days productivity.
Its not really a win if you spend $10,000 to gracefully avoid a $1000 loss.
Precisely, i think 'our' generation had a rather unique circumstance. Computers were 'rare' and 'new' and changing rapidly, so our parents were likely to be less knowledgeable about them than the kids were.
That doesn't generally hold true today.
The insistence of my dad to invade my privacy contributed in no small way to making me the security expert I am today.
I don't doubt it. That clearly applied to you. But if it were generally true, any child that had a snoopy parent would be a network security expert. And that doesn't pass any credibility test. And from my own experience with my kids, they just don't have a deep interest in it.
If I were to monitor my kids, and they were to find out, I'm confident they'd adapt by just avoiding networks and devices I have control over in the future rather than try to engage in cat and mouse on our own network.
Kids will find a way -- I agree with you there. But I don't think they'll all become IT security experts in the process. Some will perhaps, but not as a rule.
From experience (you being similar to my dad) I can tell you with some credibility is that all you will accomplish is that your kids will not only circumvent your attempt to sniff through their privacy
You were likely more technically savvy than your parents.
That doesn't generally apply to parents here, especially to a new generation of kids who just use the internet as a tool.
The internet isn't really new anymore, and the adults here grew up with it and know it inside and out. Protocols and ports, routing and switches, and operating systems etc, etc...and the theory behind how it works. And the kids, unless that is their passion... like it was ours... don't know anything about it.
The point isn't that its on when the system is off. The point is what it can do to the host system when its on. It can read RAM. It can communicate over the network. Its completely beyond the control or purview of the host operating system.
What does it monitor when the computer's actually on? Talk to Intel.
The point being that if it can be exploited, then its at the mercy of hackers. So you can run OpenBSD or whatever you like, and if the ME is exploitable someone can remotely connect to your system, keylog it, rootkit it, read out the contents of ram...
Its fundamentally incompatible with a secure system; to have a 'black box' OS that can do anything it wants and may have all kinds of weaknesses and exploits and then have that piggy-backing on the host systems network interface.
On servers, where its relegated to a dedicated wired port... and the people running them are running the management over separate secure networks... it makes sense.
But WTF is this doing on wifi on laptops?
If your BIOS has that option, I'd think so,
But the coprocessor is still physically there; and the prom space for firmware still writaeble, so the potential for a root-kit to infect the space still exists.
Although at least remote exploit is unlikely; we're now at least talking about a local root privileges exploit to get the new infected firmware loaded; same as any other rootkit... although given it infects the ME firmware, you'd have to re-flash to get rid of it; assuming you managed to detect it.
What the fuck was that about anyway?
Money. It was about money, and advertising (the usualy source of the money). If you controlled the network and the client, you could monetize it.
Mass shootings are frequent occurrences in the US because the US is big
Amazing, huh? Norway has about 1/60th the population of the US, so mass shootings should happen at 1/60th the rate.
The only thing amazing is that you wrote that not realizing how idiotic it makes you look.
What you've done here called lying with statistics. For Norway, its basically a one off event; but it happened to be a big one, and it happened to fall into a narrow date range they were looking at. Its a statistical outlier, and it's plain dishonest to count it like that.
For example, the US is about 10x the population of Canada. Therefore if 1 person per decade spontaneously combusts in the states, we'd expect it to happen 1 in 100 years in Canada everything else being assumed equal right?
So... lets get some data...
1905 - 1 in the US ...
1916 - 1 in the US
1924 - 1 in the US
2002 - 1 in the US
2015 - 1 in the US; and finally 1 in Canada
Now lets make a chart looking at the last 10 years: 2006-2016 what do we see:
1 in the US, and 1 in Canada
OMG, the rate is the SAME! Holy shit balls... Canada has the same rate of human spontaneously exploding as the US! Now lets calculate that per capita...
US : 1 in 300,000,000; Canada 1 in 30,000,000
Amazing huh! Canada has 10x the rate of exploding peeps the US does!
Now, tell me you do see the how absolutely retarded that argument is?
That's the same argument you and that website just made about Norway.
Norway is a statistical outlier, because it had exactly one mass shooting, but it was large; and it distorts the data, and that was amplified by selecting the date range it happened to occur in. For example, try expanding the date range from 2009-2013 to 1970-2013... how many mass shootings will Norway rack up if you do that? Meanwhhile the US just keeps piling them on.. 24 from 2000-2008 (adding another ~114 victims); 42 more mass shootings in the 90s adding another ~155 victims. 32 more mass shootings in the 80s...etc..
The Norway figure isn't going to budge, while the US is going to steadily climb the ranks; as more data adds up.
Gun control has never been shown to have any significant effect on either homicide rates or mass shootings.
Well ... except in Australia.
homicide rates
"The chances of being murdered by a gun in Australia plunged to 0.15 per 100,000 people in 2014 from 0.54 per 100,000 people in 1996, a decline of 72 percent, a Reuters analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics figures showed."
or mass shootings
"It was the April 28, 1996, shooting deaths by a lone gunman of 35 people in and around a cafe at a historic former prison colony in Tasmania that prompted the government to buy back or confiscate a million firearms and make it harder to buy new ones.
"The country has had no mass shootings since."
http://www.reuters.com/article...
Not saying Australia is a solid argument for gun control but you are going to have to pull your head out of your ass and make a cogent argument why it isn't instead of just pretending its not real.