Posts by A2Wx8

Guide for the perplexed – Google is no longer the best search engine

Re: Perplexing...

Just look at Boeing! Make money now, so what if our product is a bit crashy. It's gotten to the point that it seems companies are getting blind to long term losses if it means short term gains.

Seconding Kagi

If you're delving into the very obscure it can sometimes fail to give you anything, and if you're as prone to typos as I am sometimes a misspelling will be taken literally, that's one place Google is pretty good at finding and correcting. Otherwise I've been using it as my daily for several months now and have been rather impressed. I also like the fact that I don't have to drop into an incognito window every time I want to look up something that I don't want on my "permanent record."

Has Windows 11 really lost marketshare to Windows 10?

Ought to make "Pro" more attractive

I didn't mind 7 or 10, even 8/8.1 weren't horrible with a proper start menu replacement. It's the ads, the dialog boxes to trick you into pushing everything back to Bing and Edge (no thanks, I've seen reports on the data harvesting there), and all that stuff. I mean I shouldn't have to coach my elderly father on "okay, if it boots up and tells you to finish your setup, there's a no thanks button in blue text on the blue background in the lower left hand corner, click that or it'll ruin your browser settings. Let me know and I'll come by and reset the options to stop that from happening." I think 11 would be a lot more attractive if they made 11 Pro something like the version where you can tame the ads, halt the constant cramming of Copilot into every unpleasant space they can and the tricking you into changing the browser defaults back to Edge. Stop reverting settings like making the copilot button come back randomly on reboot would be nice as well. Little quality of life things like that.

11 would be better if it just did what an OS ought to: run my programs, honor my settings, and stay out of my way.

Suppliers to Intel and TSMC's Arizona fabs now face build delays

And this is what happens when you let your industrial base atrophy

A few decades of offshoring and underinvestment 'cause it's cheaper "over there" and now when the time comes to actually build stuff, supply shortages, labor shortages, companies that can't produce domestically. A sad, but entirely expected result. The Pentagon can't get their warships done on time because nobody can build the parts fast enough. All this. Boeing. The prolific short-termism "make money now and damn the consequences for later" driven by Wall Street is starting to show its ugly side.

We're not Meta support: State AGs tell Zuck to fix rampant account takeover problem

Re: This is a real problem....

It's happened to several pages I follow. They were taken over by people who, for some reason would just spam it with garbage "viral" videos until it died, meanwhile Facebook support is saying "huh, this WWII history page is suddenly posting dashcam videos. Well, I don't see a problem here, ticket closed."

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

So Long HP!

It's stuff like this that's made me abandon HP and no longer recommend it for others. They used to be solidly reliable printers that just worked and stayed out of your way. Ah do I miss "old HP." My father, after replacing his photo printer on my recommendation remarked that he used to have all HP printers, now he has none.

It's a symptom of a larger problem, though. GM killing off CarPlay and Android Auto to try to force you into a subscription to use your car, Adobe, and the list goes on and on. Companies just can't get their hands off your wallet anymore. It's all about "merchandising the post-purchase experience" or "increasing the long-term customer relationship." I don't speak managementese, so I just call it "ripping me off."

Welcome to 2024: Volkswagen really is putting ChatGPT into cars as a gabby copilot

Re: People have pushed back, and VW is installing real buttons

My Kia has tacticle buttons for all the radio/HVAC functions as well as the heated/power accessories. A friend of mine has a brand new Corvette that's the same way. It seems that at least some automakers are slowly starting to listen to the people who sensibly say "a context sensitive interface is not a good idea in a device where you can't look at said interface while operating it." I can reach over and press my HVAC controls by memory, I don't want to have to rummage three levels deep in a touchscreen to change the settings. I can tweak things via the touchscreen, but I don't have to.

Being some customer satisfaction polls have had terrible touchscreen interfaces as buyers' leading complaints in new cars for several years running, I'm hoping manufacturers listen to common sense and return buttons to where buttons ought to be.

Lenovo's Yoga 9 is flexible at home, but stretches the friendship at work

Sounds like a downgrade from its predecessors

I have the previous model in this family, the C940. It's been a good little machine, two USB-C and one USB-A which is pretty typical for this and better than the comperable Dell with only C. Display is good, touchscreen is excellent, sound is the best I've ever had in a laptop. The only issues I've had is the keyboard is... meh, the battery life is also not so great, and the thermal throttling if you pushed it could be a bit flaky. The battery only lasted two years but that was an easy DIY repair. Looks like I'll have to step up to the Thinkpad version going forward as this sounds like they're giving you less for more money.

At Citrix, 'perpetual licenses' means 'we'd rather move you to a subscription'

Well, time to call my reseller

We've got a LOT of licenses, and while we pay maintenance every year it looks like we may be facing an ugly surprise. Guess I'll be contacting my reseller on Monday to see what kind of surprise I'm looking at.

Got to admit I got a good laugh out of their "world class" support. It's bad. Like, really bad. Some of the worst I've ever experienced in my career. If I can pay a subscription and get people who understand the concept of time zones (no, I'm not here at 9 PM, I told you what time zone I'm in, stop giving me grief about it), understand their own product, and don't take days or weeks to get back to me it may be worth it. Not getting a pile of bugs loosely wrapped in an installer would be nice as well, but that may be beyond their capabilities.

Smart ovens do really dumb stuff to check for Wi-Fi

It could get worse!

My boss has a nearly new US market Honda Accord, we discovered when driving across the campus to meet a contractor that the car stops beeping and actually yells at you to put your seatbelt on in a computerized voce. I miss my old car that just beeped a few times and then went "eh, I tried," and never beeped again.

Rackspace confirms ransomware attack behind days-long email meltdown

Re: So...

That's why we eventually went Google Workspace for our email. With everyone at home our old legacy on-prem email kind of fell over during the quarantine as our email volume went up about six hundred percent. We were leaning that way and decided to make the jump and, well, it just works, spam protection is great, it has a malware sandbox for attachments, they make SPF and DKIM dead simple, and nearly everyone's familar with it from their personal Google accounts. I have enough other stuff on my plate that I don't miss the rote maintenance of the aging on-prem system that even the vendor kind of gave up on.

I am coming at it from a somewhat fortunate position, though, as I'm in the EDU space and my state has a data protection contract with Google to stop a lot of the mining (or at least the obvious kind).

Ex-HP finance manager jailed after going on $5m spending spree using company plastic

Re: Tracing??

The poor financial controls sounds like one that happened here in the States recently where a member of the finance department of a major college with rights to purchase up to $10,000 without a second signoff embezzeled something like 40 million dollars by making purchases of electroncis just under the cap and selling them through a company that was in on it and would fence the stuff for a cut.

It went on for over a decade until she pissed the wrong person off and they decided to take a closer look at her purchases.

New York to get first right-to-repair law for electronics

From someone familiar with NY politics...

If these are the best politicans money can buy I'd hate to see what the cheap ones are like.

Though in all fairness good on them for passing this - would have preferred a version that didn't have exceptions and holes you could sail a freighter full of dodgy electronics from China through, but it's far better than nothing.

I really do wish they'd omitted the car exception - the current federal repair laws on the books don't really apply to EVs and the dealers on this side of the pond only rise to "mostly terrible" in rare and blessed occasions. Some competition in that arena would be nice.

Jeffrey Snover claims Microsoft demoted him for inventing PowerShell

I love it but I hate it

You can do some awesome stuff with PowerShell, but sometimes making it do that awesome stuff is an utter nightmare. What a cmdlet returns isn't always documented well, or at all. What repository the cmdlet is in and what permissions are required, etc. etc. PowerShell ISE on Windows is a tremendous help for all that.

But then you get it all working and the power to automate some very tedious or complex tasks is fantastic.

The simple can sometimes be brutally cumbersome, and the complex can be a breeze with it.