Posts by Annihilator 3782 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"But the fact remains that Windows for *consumers* has been designed for data collection and telemetry."
So, if this only applied to the "Home" edition, then this would almost be acceptable or understandable. But I'm willing to bet quite a lot of money it applies to "Pro" editions as well, which is utter BS..
"so that the document always looked ok on screen"
Unless the document legitimately contained the word "tuna" in it. Presumably they were replaced with "the" upon loading.
I wonder also if he was smart enough to consider spaces before and after, so that words like "thesaurus" and "lathe" weren't converted to "tunasaurus" (a fishy sounding dinosaur..) and latuna.
"It is remarkable that Windows 7 is reaching end of support on January 14 2020 while maintaining something approaching 27 per cent market share among Windows users,"
It would be remarkable if it weren't so predictable with a healthy dose of deja vu. The same thing happened (probably with a larger percentage) at the end of NT4 and XP. Tellingly, I don't remember anyone giving a hoot when Vista went EOL...
Yeah think the reason they were always reluctant to do this was a) people would see just how sh1t some of it is, b) a lot of it is still actively proprietary stuff - i.e. still used in Windows 10 (and carried over from NT4/2K in some cases).
Also, the only way most people's machines are patched is through the WU servers - how you would feed patches to the general public through some sort of open source approach would be dubious and rely on the users either actively seeking it, or applying a patch to look to a different source (and then the obvious problem of who would host that source).
"With the heavy modding (disabling WU, re-enabling the Win7-style rendering engine, etc.) things become palatable,"
Yep, same here, until you're forced to update, when all the modding you've done will be partially undone, then you spend 3 months tentatively discovering the bits that were undone.
The other thing that's not really being made a deal of - Windows 10 has an even more aggressive support period. The "April 2018" build (1803) went EOL back in November last year.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/13853/windows-lifecycle-fact-sheet
I can't see me sticking with Windows for much longer.
"Junked my last Dell because it cost more for a new PSU (proprietary twin motherboard connections for the 2 cpus) than a secondhand HP dual cpu rack mount (with much superior twin platinum psu's with hot swap that still cost less than the dell machine)."
I suspect if you can be bothered then it's pretty easy to retrofit a standard PSU and re-use the old plugs, either in a permanent or Heath Robinson configuration. Different scenario I'm sure, but I managed to string out an old Shuttle XPC while I built up a replacement when the custom PSU died (£120 replacement cost).
If it's so rugged it won't even dent, I wouldn't fancy being hit by that as a fleshy pedestrian. Wouldn't fancy being the driver if it hit something non-fleshy either - I prefer the energy of my car accidents to be absorbed by the car's crumple zones, not passed straight on to me like some sort of Newton's Cradle Deathtrap.
Not necessarily - trade-ins also form part of it.
However the refurbishment usually involves stripping back to the component level, testing the heck out of each component individually, ditching the duff elements, and putting all the good ones back together again in a cannibalistic fashion. Not quite the same as "just swap the batter/screen over" approach.
I'd say the risks were pretty well quantified, but people have trouble associating the probability of risks vs what actually happens. When you look at the Apollo missions as an example, there were 32 astronauts - 3 died (Apollo 1) and 3 almost died (Apollo 13). Neil Armstrong is often mis-quoted when people say they had a 50/50 chance. The full quote is a 50/50 of successfully landing on the moon - he thought there was a 1/10 chance they wouldn't survive - similar to what the overall programme ended up as.
Similarly the space shuttle. During the Rogers commission it demonstrated that the odds of failure were close to 1/50 to 1/100 (compared to the management view of 1/100,000). Of the 135 missions, 2 ended in disaster - a failure rate within the predicted range.
Funnily enough Nasa were highly criticised for the Shuttle failures and the lessons learned have put a toll on the size of the quality assurance. To look at it in isolation may lead to criticism of over-complicating it, but managing down to low failure rates is expensive and time consuming with good reason.
The people that then criticise this approach have little understanding of the human cost that drove the need for it. It's worth noting that the Russian approach to space flight was a lot more gung-ho - they just got lucky (and covered up their failures). Gagaran was strapped into what was basically a cannonball.
"NASA themselves are part of the problem though - they insist of a specific set of tests over extended periods, and demand successful results at least a dozen times before certifying any part of the project, which slows things down again"
I know - damn NASA with their health and safety. Morton-Thiokol have a lot to answer for.
Yeah, already sort of happens really. I get unsolicited calls that try to guess how you'll respond...
"Pause.... Hello?...…… Yeah, I'm calling because of an accident you had?...… Yeah can you tell me a bit more about that?...…"
Remaining silent makes them hang up.
Agreed - I've previously been a fan of them, but given they have to be consuming *some* level of power consistently it feels like it's a step away from green-dom, and will naturally wear out.
I'd be a lot happier if they could have trigger switches that only activate them when a USB cable is plugged in (similar to how shaver sockets work in bathrooms - the transformer is only energised when you plug something in).
As an aside, that house in the article has just about the correct number of outlets for my liking.
"The aircraft's fuel gauges were inoperative because of an electronic fault indicated on the instrument panel and airplane logs; this fault was known before takeoff to the pilots, who took steps to work around it"
Another highlight for me... I get slightly stressed when driving a car with a defective fuel guage, and the worst case doesn't involve the car falling out of the sky!
"It was 2003 and I was 3hrs into a Win98 install on a 486 (and my 8th reboot* after driver install) when I installed the motherboard chipset driver (from board mnfr}. Reboot"
Kids today don't know they're born - even Win XP probably needed 5 or 6 attended reboots to install. (wait 20 minutes, reboot, enter product key, reboot, wait 20 minutes, enter user settings, reboot, wait 20 minutes, enter network settings...)
And that's without the memory of 3.x and the multitude of floppy disk swaps. Thankfully was never crazy enough to do a Win95 install from floppy...
It's clearly been launched by the Arachnids and is set to obliterate Buenos Aires. In order to claim citizenship and reap revenge on these "bugs", I've signed up to the Mobile Infantry and have been assigned to some unit called "the Roughnecks"?
"Something I'm not an expert on, maybe someone here can enlighten me... but surely a drone which is mostly made of ultra-lightweight plastics, weighing a couple of hundred grams and no more than a foot in diameter, could be chewed up and spat out by a modern jet engine with it barely noticing?"
Plenty of youtube videos out there showing this. "No" is the short answer. While the majority of the drone is made of nice light plastic, the batteries and the motors aren't.
Yeah but I'm almost certain the minimalist approach to soil surveys enabled them to win the bid, with a caveat in the bid saying "further soil surveys may identify issues at a later date".
Nearly every single public sector project that involves external parties in some manner will experience some level of cost increment.
Thing is, in this case it wasn't necessarily obfuscation - logos.sys and logow.sys were *technically* system files, so arguably it's correct (if not helpful).
But I agree, the stupid pretend folders (junction points?) are a pain for running backups or transferring files from disks. More so when you move the user folder to a separate disk.
"You might lose your own S3 copy if there was an S3 outage but chances are your iCloud backup is going to be available because of multiple cloud providers backing up the service"
I'm not sure that many data owners would be comforted by a "chances are" statement like that.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
