Posts by biddibiddibiddibiddi 329 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Dec 2023
It has been a long time, but McD's used to be a fun place for the family to go, with colorful characters, etc. Birthday parties at McDonald's were real bragging rights to kids. Now it may as well be a Soviet blockhouse cafeteria. Eventually we'll just be getting in line to accept our 1 McMeal per person per day. There will be no menu.
So they now have the operating system running processes that just monitor the applications that you use for the sole purpose of prompting you to use the Microsoft alternative services, altering your settings, AND continuing to monitor whether you try to change the settings back when the application notifies you (as intended) that something external tried to change the settings and scare you into ignoring it? (Or does that second prompt just happen automatically without actually looking at the settings, on the assumption that Chrome would be warning you?)
I'm okay with their websites prompting to switch, that's old news, and it's THEIR site. Even having the browser itself prompt when you visit the competitor's site is still that one app doing it. But monitoring my installed apps using a process built into the operating system to see if there's an opportunity to push their own is crossing the line.
So nobody gives a shit about your stuff and your ads aren't of any interest to anyone and people are tired of seeing them? Trick them into thinking they're not ads! Mislead your potential customers! Pretend that your misuse of outdated slang is cool! As long as they still have to come from an obviously corporate username, associated with nothing but obvious advertising posts, I guess it's still tolerable, but barely.
What's the over/under on how long it takes after the IPO before Reddit actually implodes? It IS pretty massive so it will probably take quite a while, but I don't think it will be like Twitter just going on and on with an owner that is just using it as a personal vanity platform with a target demographic and not being concerned about profitability or how people perceive it.
If people are getting NDRs which indicate the anti-spam service that blocked it, why hasn't that become public instead of us reading an article that repeatedly mentions it being an unknown service that Microsoft is talking to? And why is it taking so long to identify the IPs involved? The NDR usually specifically tells you which one.
This is the strangest and least user-friendly "forum" system I've ever encountered. I can't find any way to start a new post without entering an existing thread, and once there "create a new topic" isn't an obvious function since one wouldn't expect that to be where to go. No way to search topics, no way to sort them. Seems like it's geared toward just comments on the most recent articles, barely care about old stuff, and anything else is a secondary function where the bare minimum was done and then they stopped. I don't even know if this will get read as the "forums" section seems to be pretty dead. There isn't even a way to GET to the user forums except by going to an existing comment section on an article.
Anyway, I came originally to ask about comments being deleted and whether users are notified if it happens, because a back and forth between me and someone else on an article went missing, not shown in the comment section but they were in "My Comments", though they had been in the comment section before for a while. But then while typing I went into another browser, and they were visible in the comment section, but NOT in "My Comments". It's Chrome and Firefox that I compared. But now I just hard refreshed both, and the comments from both myself and the other person have changed again, either visible or not in the two places. And other comments that weren't visible before, but are timestamped 12+ hours prior to mine, are intermittently appearing and disappearing.
I assume there's something flaky happening with caching somewhere.
The head may have given in because there was no way to continue arguing without seeming even stupider, but he's still obviously a terrible boss and a terrible employee, given the CTO's attitude about him, and the CTO doesn't seem like a great executive if he's not handling his head dev to put a stop to that sort of behavior himself instead of letting an interviewee do it.
I think the goal behind not telling you the song title again is to encourage you to only be listening to that station so that you don't miss anything, which means you'll be sitting through the ads instead of switching back and forth. Although when it's a well-known song, it might seem pointless to keep repeating it.
That seems like a sign that you should cancel your acceptance of the offer. The CTO thinks one of his employees is terrible and watches him have a debate/argument with an interviewee, but doesn't actually do anything about the chief dev's behavior who would presumably be your direct or near-direct boss, and then talks about the chief dev behind his back to the new hire indicating out that the chief's behavior is well-known.
Whether you've experienced it or not, the behavior in THIS STORY is unethical, and any attempt to use an interviewee to solve actual problems without pay and without informing them is unethical, and probably illegal depending on the exact circumstances. This story had a happy ending for Colin, if you can call it happy to have to work for that type of CTO, but what if he hadn't been offered the job? What if the CTO had gone and looked at the code and found the problem and fixed it himself? What if they had only offered him the junior position in the end? This story is on the low end of the scale of egregiousness, but there are plenty of stories of people being given "tests" that they are expected to do at home, with hours of work, to "demonstrate their abilities", where they later find out that the company used that work for actual business purposes without compensation. It's a matter of degree in this case, not the underlying concept of whether it was acceptable. Usually it comes down to those people being desperate enough that they'll give up their time on the chance of getting a job, not realizing that it is setting the tone for the way their relationship with the company will go.
If they tell you it's something they're working on and you choose to spend a significant amount of your time helping them with it, with no guarantees or payment, that's up to you, but anything more than a few minutes means you're screwing yourself, and shows the type of company they are. If they don't tell you that you're helping them solve a problem and saving them money by doing so because they don't have to pay their own employees or an outside person, then it's unethical, period.
If you don't already know the solution, or multiple possible paths to it, how would you know if their answer to the problem is actually a good one or if they're just bullshitting you? If you want to test their knowledge, give them a test (with ADVANCED notification that a test would be part of the interview), not a single problem that you're currently facing which your current staff can't solve (or you don't have staff to even try). It's unethical, period, and illegal in most places, to use an interviewee to perform actual work for your company without pay and without even informing them that it's a real situation. I would also think it's not a fair measure of their ability to solve such problems if you're just doing it all as "hypothetical" with no access to the actual systems, having to just do it all in their head. There are plenty of ways to gauge abilities that don't involve trying to get free work out of someone. I would not be interested in spending an hour of my INTERVIEW time solving a problem for the company without pay which may still reject me. A second PAID "working interview" would not be unacceptable, though.
Working for an MSP (third-party IT services for SMBs) until recently, I dealt with more than one owner/executive that simply did not understand the concept of "off-time", and would be working on normal, day-to-day stuff from home late at night and call in support requests, which the on-call technician had to respond to up to a certain hour (and even later if they called the emergency line), for very basic things that could absolutely have waited until the next day, and this included happening on weekends when we would actually have to go to their houses to fix it (though we could at least tell them it had to wait until morning).
Until the days that such work was possible from home, I am certain that most of them would be willing to be in the office to do that work at those times. One of these people had a DSL connection with a 1.5Mb/128Kb speed, as recently as 2021 when I left, which his wife refused to allow him to upgrade (he could easily afford very fast fiber) because it at least somewhat limited his ability to work from home, and he still would queue up multiple 20MB+ emails and then call to ask why Outlook wasn't sending/receiving immediately. He also insisted he had to have a MacBook Pro, running Windows in Parallels which is where he did all his work in the office, never in MacOS, as well as a MacBook Air, also running Windows, for working at home, which meant weekly calls because the VM would flake out, he'd fill up the virtual drive, switching monitors wouldn't work right, always something. Others in the company had been doing the same thing, but had eventually let us move them to Dell machines. This one just made us upgrade his Macs to newer models. (Their previous IT person had convinced them all that using a Mac was "more secure", despite running Windows and only using Windows-based software for everything, wasting half their hardware performance, and that it was so secure that they didn't even need antivirus within the Windows VM.)
That guy also called in once (on a weekend, I think it was even a holiday) asking why his VPN to the office wasn't working. The tech tried to remote into his laptop and saw it wasn't connected to LogMeIn or the other monitoring and asked him about his Wi-Fi connection. His response was "I need Wi-Fi? I'm out at my cabin on the lake. I don't have Internet here."
The CTO wasn't even aware at first that somebody had modified the source code of the mail server that he wrote, didn't think to even look at it before trying to get someone to fix it for him for free on the sly during an interview (for a junior position that the CTO wouldn't be expected to bother with) and also still hadn't even checked whether Colin was right in the time from the interview to Colin being hired and onboarded and however long it was until he was asked to look at it. Up until Colin showed him the actual bad code, the CTO still thought Colin was wrong about the problem. The CTO may not have even been aware Colin had in fact been hired. It was a "shouting match" which implies it wasn't very civil, and the CTO was being rather rude and unethical trying to get Colin to solve the problem for him via "hypothetical" discussion during an interview, so yes, he should have apologized and thanked him for fixing it and bought him a beer.
It makes me wonder if he was given the senior role when he was applying for junior, and that the CTO got involved in the interview instead of the existing senior, because that company might have a problem retaining people to work under that CTO.
They will magically find a way to make it work when they don't see sales of the Pro and use of Gemini increase. It will be a race for absolute numbers, a desire to be able to report a high number of "Gemini-capable" or "Gemini-installed" devices, and if there aren't enough Pro phones sold to make that number big enough, they'll just make it part of the non-Pro as well even if it's nigh-unusable (for what little use it has). They might even make it a "Cloud-interactive" version on the non-Pro, or whatever euphemism they can come up with, as a workaround for the limitations, so they can still say it supports *A* version of Gemini.
Maybe that's what Cruz was attempt to refer to about the ACP being given to people who already had broadband, if he was pointing at the subset who couldn't use the ACP for the cheap plans because of the arrangements you mentioned, so the people who couldn't pay for broadband before still couldn't pay for it, or couldn't apply the ACP to what they had, making it look like it was mostly people already paying for broadband that used the ACP. I'm sure Republicans were involved in allowing the ISPs to squeeze in those profit boosting terms, so they could get money from the ACP AND push people onto higher cost plans so they'd end up not getting as much of a reduction as expected.
T-Mobile certainly doesn't seem to want to let people stay on grandfathered plans anymore. They were just going to move people without consent (I think they backed down from that) and I think they added a fee for anybody not using a currently-advertised plan. Somebody did anyway. I'm not sure Verizon is willingly maintaining them anymore, either.
"targeting taxpayer subsidies to consumers who already had broadband" -- OH NO! They might have been able to shift some of their spending to other things that are important but were slightly lower priority and improve their lives! Poor people should only ever be able to have X number of dollars, otherwise they might start getting uppity and educated and vote me out!
Broadband is a necessity these days for most people to participate in the modern world, just like phone service is.
I've been trying for two years to get on SSDI (disability support), through 2 denials that are virtually automatic and finally a hearing, and should be getting the ruling from the judge anytime from now to the next month, then would have qualified for ACP (perhaps after applying for other programs that required me to get disability first), just in time for it to go away.
Wait, they actually modified the underlying SOURCE CODE of Windows and compiled their own version to install? Not just changed some of the default settings in their image, like bundling software? How is that even allowed? If I'm not getting code that was finalized and signed by Microsoft, I'm not getting Microsoft Windows which I paid for and it may as well be a backdoored-to-hell Chinese knockoff. Or is this a mistranslation or poor wording by someone who doesn't speak strong English (and maybe depended on AI)?
I think the vast majority of the time, the people touting all this know it's just meaningless puffery, including the executives, but they have to do it. They can't very well say "You know, everything's working pretty well right now. No need to go out and buy anything. You don't need upgrades."
The managed service provider (third-party IT for SMBs) I started with in 2012 had their one small server hanging from industrial hooks in the bathroom. It did get moved to a shared rack in a closet with a co-tenant in another building when we moved at the end of that year.
I'd like to see an actual comparison test using multiple devices (all the same model so there's no variation) all dunked in water, then like 3 of them placed in each type of drying method - air drying with a fan, a bag of rice, and a bag with a silicon desiccant - and see how long each one takes to be dry enough to use, so there's an average per method. I'm fairly sure that rice won't actually dry things any faster than leaving them out with a fan or just normal airflow in a room. Even desiccants aren't meant to absorb water that you've already got in the container. They're meant to absorb moisture from air that moves in and out of a container or was sealed in originally, so it doesn't condense on the product. Which means in both the rice and desiccant cases, the water has to evaporate into the air in the bag first then be absorbed, which is probably slower than just letting it expand away as it evaporates in the open, and active airflow will make that happen faster. Unless perhaps the humidity level is extremely high, that is.
Which smells like skunk spray, and skunk weed is particularly strong-smelling. It wouldn't have been called skunk weed if it didn't smell like skunk. If weed smelled like roses, strong-smelling weed would be called rose weed. Other strains don't smell as strongly (though I have limited experience, only smelling what my sister and brother use and whatever I happen to smell around town), so you can't really even say "weed smells like XYZ" if there's weed that doesn't smell like XYZ, and skunk weed distinctly smells like skunk while other strains don't so it's a descriptive identifying name. Trying to make it really clear by repeating so it gets through your weed fog.
I used to wonder why there were so many skunks spraying all the time in the area around my old apartment. It took me years to figure out that "skunk weed" was a literal description of the smell of that strain. It's awful when you're going through a restaurant drive-thru and get that wafting through your car (even with the windows closed, A/C blowing and set to recycle the cabin air) and then it lingers despite no visible smoke ever having entered.
Android doesn't support PCs period, and the expectations for mobile devices are different from PCs. And Apple is an entirely irrelevant comparison due to it being a closed ecosystem where you have limited choice of hardware and OS, and they can arbitrarily cut off support anytime they like with no promise of backward compatibility. Backward compatibility is an expectation in the Windows world. The only difference between a 32-bit processor and a 64-bit processor that is inherent is how much memory they can address. It has nothing to do with processing power or multi-tasking capability (other than needing more memory for the bloated applications and OSes). When comparing 32-bit and 64-bit versions of OSes and applications which are capable of running within the sub-4GB limits, there is no performance difference. All of the architecture improvements and performance increases could have been done with 32-bit-only processors, if RAM limits weren't a factor. Virtually everything moved to 64-bit as a practical requirement several years ago, with 32-bit just there for the edge cases, and many others made 64-bit a hard requirement in that time. Microsoft made the change because there was no longer enough need for 32-bit among customers.
So you can have a problem with them not supporting things as far back as 7th-Gen, but other people can't have a problem with not supporting 6th-Gen, 5th-Gen, or older? Other people can't have a problem with them completely disabling installation on older hardware? All that matters is what affects you?
If it's 7 years old, it's not able to simply install Windows 11 and expect that it will be supported and that updates/upgrades will continue to work. Having POPCNT isn't the only issue. You can only install on a 7-year-old CPU by using unsupported workarounds, that may stop working at any time, and which may disable updates at any time.
Plenty of people do still want to upgrade their OS without replacing perfectly capable older hardware that can run the newer OS if there weren't arbitrary requirements for non-essential features. Plenty of people have older hardware that they can't afford to upgrade until they absolutely have to, but still would like to have a current and supported OS that gets security updates. Plenty of people can't afford to get a new system with a processor that is less than 4-years-old (the requirement at the time of Windows 11's release; now 6.5 years). Microsoft didn't need to disable installation on older hardware to begin with, they could have just made it "unsupported" but still functional since there was nothing in the actual code that prevented older CPUs from working for the actual OS, and if something didn't work, too bad. That would make this new change more palatable, to me; even more so if we really knew what the POPCNT instruction was being used for and whether it was actually necessary and useful. My guess is it's related to all the unnecessary graphical features and acceleration.
I just noticed that the release dates for both Windows 11 and the first 8th-Gen Intel processors was October 5. They chose to support EXACTLY 6-year-old hardware on release.
You contradict yourself. Backward compatibility mostly just means not adding instructions that aren't available on older hardware (or that have known bugs or performance issues on older hardware), but you complain that they added arbitrary and unnecessary instruction requirements that eliminate older hardware support.
Android and ChromeOS are operating systems with Linux underpinnings, but they are not Linux distributions, in similar way to how MacOS is an OS with FreeBSD underpinnings. If you dig really deep, you can get *some* of the functionality of Linux or FreeBSD, but the OS as a whole is not intended to be used in that way and even Android/ChromeOS/MacOS don't function like they're based on Linux or FreeBSD on the whole. You can't make any of them act like an arbitrary Linux/FreeBSD distribution.
If I had anything to do with it, the first time an actual human operation in space was scheduled (not life-threatening emergency of course) I would rig the video feed with an "AI" to create a fake patient and the other astronauts around them, with everything responding to the surgeon's input, and when they made the first incision it would be like the Alien chestburster scene. Blood spraying everywhere in zero-G, people screaming. Maybe the xenomorph rips open one of the station walls.
Those devices all have to be registered to valid Apple ID accounts, and I imagine a large percentage of them use those email addresses online, and I can certainly imagine a company like Apple actually going through the effort of tracking that kind of thing down when it's a low-hanging fruit (HA!) that they can delegate to automated systems. "Your refund will be processed within 7 to 10 business days while we investigate."
Well, guess you should request that all your relatives die on a schedule that is convenient for you to be able to book the cheapest flights on short notice or that their funeral be held off until you can get a copy of the death certificate to send to Air Canada in time to wait for approval of your discounted fare.
Do they think allowing a retroactive discount is going to result in large numbers of people bumping off a relative so they can book expensive vacation flights on short notice? Or using their vacation time to dig through the obituaries to find people that died a few days before to pretend to be relatives? Is everybody going to have 6 dead grandmothers each year?
It's not just about updates that add needless features and bloat, but security. The majority of users are not running locked-down networks and locked-down PCs, or costly anti-malware and firewalls (or free anti-malware that bogs a system down more than Microsoft does) and don't have IT staff, and the majority of businesses are small businesses that don't have those huge resources, so having an OS that doesn't even get security updates (unless Microsoft deems a particular vulnerability so bad that they patch an old OS) is a bad thing.
Corporations rarely bother to resell their old equipment. Really big ones might pass them to a refurbisher but likely aren't paying their people to eBay anything directly, but there are vastly larger numbers of small and medium businesses that have 1 to 25 PCs that don't have the resources to bother with trying to offload stuff like that AND won't bother with eBay just to get a few dollars, who run the machines until they physically die or are not worth being used by anyone, and it just goes in the bin or to a recycler which isn't allowed to resell them and usually strips the parts or sends stuff through an industrial shredder to get precious metals out of it. And if they do get resold, they usually want to include a refurbisher's Windows license, which means Windows 11 after next year, which means it probably can't be resold because it won't run Windows 11. Even if there are millions that get resold for Linux use, there are still millions more getting trashed.
The arbitrary cut-off to only allow Windows 11 on machines less than 7 years old without dodgy workarounds that may suddenly stop working, and less than 15 years old even with workarounds after 24H2 is released, combined with the cutoff of all Windows 10 support, means there will be millions of systems that are suddenly nothing but junk in the eyes of the majority of the developed world. Just look on sites like Amazon at how many refurbished systems are available with Windows 10 pre-installed using pre-8th Gen Intel processors, which will suddenly be virtually worthless because the OS is completely unsupported and the resellers aren't going to spend time trying to get them set up with Linux. Even if they just tried to sell them off as blank Linux boxes, there just aren't that many Linux USERS to buy them.
It's not considered a Linux distribution because while it is based on the Linux kernel, it's a closed system, not intended for the user to be able to modify the OS themselves, install arbitrary apps running directly on the kernel, etc. and it all depends on OS updates provided by Google. It may be possible to hack some of that in, but then you're no longer running ChromeOS itself.
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