Posts by biddibiddibiddibiddi 329 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Dec 2023
Just for your own sake if you don't like the feature, and because they don't explicitly say anything about it and this is confusing, I would make the assumption that about:config is what is actually happening (and so you should change it to false if you really want to make sure this is disabled). I searched though, and it turns out the option gets grayed out and unchecked if you have "Allow Firefox to send technical and interaction data to Mozilla" unchecked (which makes sense, as WSAP sends data to Mozilla). Theoretically this should mean that the settings page's indicator shows what is actually happening and supposedly that's how Firefox normally works, and you can disregard what about:config says. Having one setting automatically change other settings should also be more clearly indicated (since they added WSAP recently, so someone who had telemetry disabled already would have no idea why WSAP was disabled). Good programming and user interface design would make them match, of course, but consistency and following up on things like that has not been a programming guideline for a long time, at any company.
It would have been good for the article to point out where the setting is located. It's under "Website Advertising Preferences" since version 128. The description makes it sound like a terrible thing, like it's GIVING websites a whole NEW capability to measure ad performance on your machine, and does not make it sound like the browser is STOPPING them from doing the previous privacy-violating things. If it's actually taking away their ability to track you, then it should be made more clear. If it's not really disabling any capabilities, then it's nothing but giving Firefox/Mozilla the ability to track you in addition to all the previous stuff.
"easily discoverable opt out option + blog posts" -- The overwhelming majority of users, even the "advanced" people that use Firefox because they don't like Google, won't be reading blog posts regarding every point release or even major release of the application, and most probably just quickly close out of the "What's New" tabs that open when a browser or other application first runs after an update, without reading them. They just want to get on with their activity. Being "easily discoverable" just means that it's in the settings page and doesn't need you to drill down through sub-menus, and at least a large percentage of users probably don't even look at settings a single time and the rest don't look at after their first time setting up the browser on a new machine, so without a popup that clearly says this setting exists and they have to acknowledge it people won't know it exists. With MS Edge, I got used to needing to peruse all the Settings pages after every update because Microsoft would randomly add entirely new privacy-violating features or integrate new applications as if they were browser features; Mozilla shouldn't be following Microsoft's lead on this.
It was funny that until pretty recently, you could still see ATI graphics chips in Device Manager on some new servers. And what really sucked with those older chips like the G200e is that Windows Server 2016 and up (maybe even 2012 R2, I forget) just used the generic SVGA driver for them, so they ran at 800x600 and you couldn't increase it even for a 1280x1024 attached monitor until you installed the driver from the server vendor. They're so old Windows stopped including even a half-decent driver but they're still the most common display chip. Can't even get something designed this millennium/century/decade. There are doctors with full degrees younger than these chips.
If you buy an early AI PC, you won't have anything particularly useful to do with it, and you'll get hardware that just barely meets Microsoft's performance requirements to be called an AI PC. Then if AI stuff really does manage to find a use for common users in several years, that hardware will no longer be high-performance enough to run the tasks well since AI will have evolved significantly by then, and you'll need to replace it anyway. Or we'll go back to being able to just run it on general CPU cores. But more likely the hardware will just never get used at all and the money spent will have been wasted.
The difference is that the term "GPU" means that it has modern 3D processing capabilities. Prior to Vista, there were many systems that only had 2D graphics capabilities, or extremely limited 3D acceleration (1990s-class). Most 3D graphics had to be handled in software. Aero effects required hardware 3D processing at the DX9 level. XP's prettiness wasn't hardware-accelerated. Servers maintained their use of 2D graphics controllers for a very long time, and even now the Matrox G200 controller they use is just barely technically 3D-capable, designed in 1998, and wouldn't even support Aero.
Microsoft pushes both. Gotta have a hand in every pocket, even if you only half-ass all of them. The other companies are doing the same. Client-side AI is pushed as a reaction to concerns about privacy, avoiding having all your AI activity and usage being processed in the cloud and used by companies for training their AIs and the like (and in the rare case that you're offline, still working). It also cuts the company's costs, not having to process all that stuff. Theoretically, even a "Cloud PC" would still work the same, where that data wouldn't be getting sent outside of the virtual machine, even though that VM runs on shared hardware and a host OS. At that point, the risk is just the usual of shared hosts being compromised in ways that allow malware or someone with remote access to read the data of guest VMs either by peaking into the memory or storage or exploiting something like SPECTRE, or any other method where a master admin can access it.
Jimmy Kimmel Live did a segment where they told people they worked for Apple and they had pre-sale iPhone 16s that they wanted to give to people to show off how amazing they were, and they could instantly (within a few seconds) transfer everything from their old iPhone to the new one. Behind their backs, they just changed the case or in some instances just removed the person's case, then handed it back to them. They of course only showed the ones that were duped, but they were absolutely amazed by how much faster their "new" phone was, how much sharper the screen was, how much faster web browsing was, and how it had upgraded the quality of all their existing photos. One of those people actually worked for Apple.
Small and medium businesses employ almost half of the workforce, and they don't need AI features in any way, and they don't upgrade on cycles. They often keep machines well past the 3 year mark, and they continue to do the job just as well as when they were new, until hardware actually dies. I had customers on 15-year-old servers before they finally failed. Only forced obsolescence makes them get upgraded before that point, with software that is forcibly updated with unneeded and unwanted features until it becomes so bloated it feels slow. Even in larger corporations, the majority of users don't do work that would get anything out of AI in the way it functions right now. Nobody wants it, nobody needs it, and it doesn't really work that well.
Exactly what "context" does he think wasn't clear to readers of the post which would have made that hilarious? The only context I am aware of is "two publicly-known assassination attempts on a former President and current candidate, who Musk likes, but none on his opponents, who Musk doesn't like".
Most of us think things like that at least briefly, but we don't say them, certainly not when we're in a position of "authority" of any kind.
Would be nice if there were actual shots of the transparent skin in the video, rather than an animation. The actual images shown on other articles makes it clear that it's just kind of transparent, dark, not at all clear (like seeing something out of focus), and requires a special laser imaging technique rather than just being able to look at it even with a microscope, so it's not going to really make it possible to just look to make diagnoses or anything, but of course it's just a first version.
You're describing how it ought to work from a consumer's assumption, but not about how it works from a legal perspective which is very often very different and full of legal jargon that makes it unintelligible to anyone but a lawyer. Does the law state that not clicking Accept automatically means Don't Accept? How does that work with banners that don't even have Accept and Reject buttons, where the very fact that they have informed you of the cookies and you continue to use the site means you've accepted them, unless you click a link in the banner to go to a page to change your preferences?
So websites were legally required to start showing cookie banners because people complained about cookies automatically happening, but browsers will now automatically block the banners, so how does that affect the rights of the user and the site when it comes to cookies? (I know there are add-ons that will do it already but people have to go out of their way to get those.) Are you considered to have accepted them if you block the banner and continue to use the site? Does blocking it mean the cookies are enabled because the code that lets you disagree didn't run? Not all sites even have options in the banners like "limit cookies to those necessary" or "I don't accept cookies" and if you don't click a specific link in the banner to go to a cookie selection page, closing the banner or just leaving it open means you accepted the cookies.
On the one hand, everything other than "failure to comply" seems like an unenforceable charge since he can't control the content and there aren't any laws that say his product must give him the ability to control it. On the other hand, it is nice to see direct action with real consequences other than a small fine against the high-level person of any corporation who makes the decisions and is ultimately responsible for their product and any harms it causes.
And it could very well approach criminality in some cases (at least being a civil legal issue). The people running those companies have a legal duty to their shareholders to spend the money wisely and to make the company look good and be successful, which means NOT being associated with horrible things like Nazis and racism anti-trans stuff. If they continue advertising in places that make them associated with that stuff, their shareholders can take action.
"Please corporate-friendly Texas judge, force these other companies to buy things from us!"
Yes I know in this case both sides would be considered corporate but one side is advocating for more corporate power and suppression of others' freedom, while the other side is exercising their actual free speech rights and their right to not be bullied.
I never said there was nothing in the article about the compression rate. A big highlighted/bold section stands out more for people just skimming the article, it's meant to be a focal point that emphasizes the important information, so it ought to be directly related to the title and opening of the article rather than being something that isn't mentioned anywhere else and isn't about what the article mentions repeatedly.
It seems much worse now, though, because the pace of change is accelerated. The 486 series lasted 6 years, with little changing except clock and bus speeds, voltage, etc. (Plus versions with disabled FPU, and outright removed FPU.) The Pentium Classic overlapped for many years with that, and lasted a good 3 years, plus another 3 years with the MMX variants. Now we're down to 2 years between completely new models from either company, with Intel usually changing the socket and chipset just enough to make them incompatible at least every couple of generations (the last few "generations" have been minor changes from the previous so they've used the same chipsets and socket). With AMD, Ryzen 7000 with Zen 4 came out less than 2 years ago, 9000 with Zen 5 is about to be released, and Zen 6 is already being leaked. We can't even buy Zen 5 chips yet and are already being teased about how great Zen 6 will be. At least give us a chance to get some use out of "the new hotness" before telling us about how obsolete they are.
It's reached the point that it's not worth buying a CPU because by the time they come down in price to a reasonable level, the next generation becomes available which is potentially a huge uplift. Particularly with Zen 4 which required a complete replacement of every component and was only the first generation for AMD for things like DDR5, so I was never really looking to go with that. But those prices are just now down to "affordable" for the CPU itself, and motherboards are still expensive if you want models with "full fat" features, on top of the DDR5, and now there's a whole new generation of processors and chipsets coming out that are a very large improvement which makes me want to wait until THOSE start to come down in price so I can get the improvements they gained from experience with DDR5. A move from a Ryzen 5 5600X to a 7600X might be a bit of a bump in performance, but not worth a lot of money, and nothing in the 8000 series has any value, but a 9600X could be quite a big boost.
"Only took 41 years" implies these were features that we actually needed and people were asking for, neither of which is true. Notepad is no longer a minimalist text editor; it's now bloatware. On my Win10 system, notepad.exe is 196KB. On Win11, it's now 1590KB. EIGHT TIMES the size. Notepad performed perfectly for 40 years, doing exactly what was needed, and there was zero need for any of the recent changes. The only reason for putting some of these in is because they've eliminated WordPad, but that never had spellcheck or tabs either, and there was still plenty of reason for having different apps for different purposes.
At least they didn't tie it into the primary Windows 11 spellcheck feature, forcing you to turn it off globally for all applications that use it when you just want one app to not use it.
I don't recall ever having a prompt for that during setup.
Well, there's something to be said for doing it that way, but it's really an issue with the naming of the feature. It's not "backups", which are by definition machine-specific; it's "folder redirection using the cloud" which is not machine-specific. You wouldn't want it keeping a copy of those files on every device, so that you could potentially end up with different versions that might all contain valid data, when they're supposed to just be a centralized storage location of a single version, and there is no way for the system to differentiate between files that should remain in the cloud for other machines to access and which files should remain on that particular machine. (Compare to Google Drive's way of doing it, where you can select the folders to sync and they are all stored separately for each machine, and only the global Google Drive mapped drive storage is combined.) Removing the files gives you the option to transfer them OUT of the cloud and onto the individual machine so that there is only one copy. Unfortunately that could mean needing to download a huge amount of data, but OneDrive isn't supposed to be keeping all that data cached locally anyway, is it?
It's now been 3 years or more since I touched real folder redirection on a domain-joined PC and had to turn it off so I can't recall for sure, but I believe when you turn that off it actually transfers all the data OUT of the server storage and back to the local folders for the first machine you log into that applies the new policy where it's turned off. So that's the opposite of OneDrive and would result in a single machine having all your data and the others having nothing.
I don't understand why this is being claimed as something new. Windows 11 has always automatically turned on OneDrive backups when I've installed it or set up an OEM machine, and I'm certain that Windows 10 has done the same thing for years (perhaps not in the initial release but I can't recall). At no point do I remember being given an option to NOT enable it, so why are these reports acting like they've changed something?
No, it's both OR just one. "faces up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine, or both". As for it being "up to", yeah, but that's basically the same "up to" that people can get for situations where there are DEATHS involved. Hell, the monetary penalty is a lot more than cases involving death. And the same "up to" in situations where multiple billions of dollars are stolen and thousands of lives are destroyed (when there's even any indictment in those situations, which is rare). There should be no situation where someone like this is even remotely likely to get the same penalty or WORSE than someone who caused the death of another person due to things like negligence or carelessness or greed, or who made massive financial gain at the expense of innocent people and will end up keeping most of that profit in the end.
Possibly twenty YEARS in prison for 2.1 million dollars stretched over 5 years, where no one actually got physically hurt, significantly less actual profit was loss, and somebody else really should have been paying attention to the books as well, but you can be in and out in a few months when people DIE due to your deliberate and knowing actions, or get no time or even a trial when billions of dollars are lost and thousands of people's lives are ruined. Or a fine of $250K which hardly seems of equivalent "value" to two decades in prison, in terms of punishment/deterrence/rehabilitation (HAHA! prison being rehabilitation).
Just what they need, a remote control with 21 buttons to figure out (which will inevitably have ridiculously unnecessary modes for the lights and sirens), and jumping in for a hot pursuit but the computer does a software update and the car won't work for an entire day. And an off-road rated vehicle that needs an additional off-road package purchased to be able to go off-road. And the vehicle can't be sold off on the second-hand market when it's time to be replaced in less than 3 years (assuming it even makes it as long as an average normal car). And the officers are embarrassed to be seen in it. But at least the bicycle and Segway cops will feel better, no longer being the most ridiculous unit on the police force.
Broadcom's executive's thought: If you could just go find the answer on the forums, instead of contacting support, you'd feel less like you were getting something for all that money you're paying them. They think if you're forced to use the support you pay for, you'll be content with the high cost.
That still leaves the question of WHAT they're doing with 24,000 servers, even if they've been made virtual, when the calculation is that a company that size ought to get along with 1,400. (Whether that's a truly valid number, I don't know. It would depend on the company.) One contributor to that might be simply separating out workloads onto different "servers" for ease of management where a company in the past would have needed to lump them all under one OS/host simply because that was the only way to take full advantage of the hardware. If you can afford one physical server and can't run virtual servers on it, all of your workloads end up running on that one host even if it's harder to maintain, like having to take down the entire infrastructure just for one update. You'd only put in a separate physical server if it was absolutely critical that the workload on it be separated, because you'd be wasting a lot of hardware cycles and electricity. Once you can run virtual servers, you can run one workload on each VM and they won't affect each other if one has to go down, and you can even run two VMs performing the same task so that service is never down unless the actual hardware goes down, and you take advantage of as much of the available system performance as possible which is more efficient. So 1400 physical servers could potentially be broken down to 5000+ virtual machines, and even more if they're spread around the country. They may also run a lot more development machines now.
But VMware licensing for the hosts for servers on this scale isn't based on number of VMs usually, is it? So that would mean the majority of that 24,000 is actual physical hosts, which could be running hundreds of thousands of VMs, which would be even harder to understand.
Forgot to mention, that wasn't even for permanent dentures. It was just two implants on top and two on the bottom, so the dentures are removable. (Which turns out to be preferable to me because of the amount of food that gets stuck under them which would be harder to clean if they couldn't come out.) A non-removable set, only able to be taken out by the doctor for maintenance, with 6 on top and 6 on the bottom, would have totaled $75,000. That is on the high end, due to the area I'm in, but still.
I will be very impressed if this is capable of giving us teeth that align well without having to get braces as soon as they come in. When they're developing as a child, it's alongside the rest of the face and jaw, so everything is guided and fit together. Having them come in separately might not work the same, whether they're able to regrow a single tooth or a full set. I would expect it to also cause wisdom teeth to regrow, which would be a problem. This doesn't seem to be a targeted growth. They just inject it into the body and wait to see if any teeth grow, so I don't understand how they can give it to humans who have any existing teeth without a whole new set growing and pushing those out, or coming out sideways underneath them. Perhaps having an existing tooth somehow inhibits the regrowth, but I wonder how something like having had a root canal would affect it.
The animals like alligators and sharks that completely regrow teeth have an entirely different arrangement of teeth, with a completely different shape and function from human, which is far more forgiving of misalignments. When you're just stabbing the food and tearing it apart, a jagged bite isn't a big deal and even helps. When you're grinding vegetable matter and need things to squeeze relatively flat, those teeth need to grow in a pretty specific way. I suspect this may be WHY some species lost the ability to grow new teeth after birth. (There are species that have teeth that continuously grow, like rabbits, but those are not NEW teeth, and they have to constantly wear them down or it will kill them.)
They show a ferret that grew an extra front tooth, like that's a good thing. We don't want humans just randomly growing extra teeth. And ferrets and other animals aren't concerned with the appearance of their teeth so if they aren't straight, it doesn't matter, as long as it doesn't negatively affect their ability to eat.
My father's side of the family is one of those with hereditary bad teeth. We all end up with all of them pulled by the time we're in our 40s, after decades of fillings, root canals, etc. I had 8 or 9 abscesses over the years (my body seems prone to that as they happen in other parts as well), plus deep cavities that occurred just within the 4 months between cleanings and exams, requiring a total of 9 root canals, 9 crowns (not all on the root canals), 70 to 100 fillings, and 14 extractions (not counting wisdom teeth) before finally having to give up and get the remainder removed and get dentures when I was 44. I didn't practice the best oral hygiene but part of that was because when I did make an effort, it didn't seem to make a difference.
Considering it cost $24,000 for the final extractions, implants and dentures, it seems like a round of this drug and the monitoring or whatever goes with it could have been less expensive and given me a better set of teeth than dentures do.
I think just brushing and flossing properly would be a far cheaper and convenient option than extracting a tooth and re-growing it every time it gets a cavity, even more so than getting a filling for each cavity. This shouldn't be considered just a casual option to oral hygiene.
I read recently a study found that things like the need for fillings are greatly over-diagnosed anyway, so this is just one more thing for them to do. But a single tooth can need multiple fillings that each cost 50-100% as much as an extraction, so pulling and re-growing might be less profitable. I had close to 100 in my adult life before my last dentist finally told me to stop trying because it was a waste of money due to there not being enough of anything left to hold them together for long periods, and I just had the remainder (only half left) pulled. Unless you can only get the drug directly from your dentist (or most likely they'll get kickbacks for prescribing a particular brand), and it requires them to monitor you with weekly visits for months, and then they can tell you that you need braces to straighten the new tooth and line it up with the others. Oh, and it's not the same color, so you need to have whitening treatments.
Safety by not staring solely at the one in front of you applies to every driver, and bicyclist, and pedestrian. Watch multiple cars ahead of you for signs that something is shifting and you'll have a better chance of knowing that the one in front is about to change in some way, even if you don't see any brake lights. By law, the vehicle in the rear is responsible for being able to stop safely even if the one in front comes to a sudden dead stop with no warning. The majority of us don't follow that rule because we're in a rush, have a natural tendency to think getting closer is getting there faster and not getting "left behind", and unfortunately because other people think an open space that is long enough for safety is a big welcome sign to change lanes into that space and then act stupid themselves.
Lane splitting is just asking to die as far as I'm concerned. Jamming your motorcycle into a space where nobody in the surrounding 2 ton death machines expects an unprotected human body to be. Just because you don't want to wait like the rest of us.
Considering drives that really needed TRIM didn't exist when dynamic disks were introduced, and dynamic disks were hardly ever even used, and then Storage Spaces arrived not all that long after SSDs started to become popular, I think it's excusable or at least understandable for MS not to have made much if any effort to make it work. (That would have given people one less reason to move to Storage Spaces even after dynamic disks were deprecated.) Windows 7 didn't even properly and fully support TRIM with basic disks unless they were the right kind of connection.
But the recovery partition is going to be completely wiped and rebuilt using the Windows 11 version, and if the build you're installing already contains this update, then there is no problem. I don't think the problem is that the installation suddenly bloats the partition's ongoing space requirement by 250MB; it just needs that much space during the update's installation because of it involving BitLocker, which has to continue to function throughout the process and may involve the recovery partition somehow during the reboot with this update. So I suspect it's doing something like an "active/standby" configuration inside the recovery partition during the update install, writing the new data to it but not removing the old version, then rebooting with the new version as the active build, and deleting the old data if everything worked properly. The final configuration ends up being pretty much the same size as before. That may be what it always did, but there have just been very few major updates to the recovery partition.
Too bad dynamic disks weren't commonly used (now deprecated anyway). Then the C drive could be shrunk and the free space allocated to the recovery partition even if it wasn't contiguous, reducing the risk of data loss since there would be less need to move data around. With SSDs, non-contiguous allocations don't even incur a performance hit. The update process probably still wouldn't do it for you, but at least it would be easier for those doing it manually.
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