Posts by RyokuMas 1880 posts • joined 29 Oct 2009
"you can guarantee that... they would have added all that Windows 10 telemetry to Windows Phone 10!"
Wow.
I suggest you take a look at the second line of my post - here it is in all it's glory:
"... that's not to say that I don't believe for a second that they wouldn't have added it."
"since they added all the telemetry to Windows 10"
WinPhone 7 / 7.5 / 8 predates WIn10 and its telemetry... that's not to say that I don't believe for a second that they wouldn't have added it.
In fact, I think that one of Microsoft's greatest own-goals (of which there are too many to count) is not taking advantage of the growing concern over privacy - had they continued supporting and developing WinPhone/Windows Mobile (and by that I don't mean "totally rewriting it every version) and made a public commitment to not collecting data, they would have stood a reasonable chance of grabbing and holding a decent chunk of the mobile market share.
... but then this is Microsoft we're talking about - the only thing they've got anywhere near right recently is cloud technologies - and I'm pretty sure that that was only because the law of averages means that they had it had to happen at some point.
"There is plenty of interest in the idea of a phone that is free from Google or Apple..."
Oooh, I recall there being just such a thing some five to ten years ago... it got up to about 10% of the UK market share too, along with widespread panning from a lot of people on here who had never used it, but preferred Android "because Android was Linux-based", and therefore open source...
... oh yeah, that right. It was made by Microsoft...
The question in my mind is that if every year the media whipped up a hysterical frenzy over how many might die from this year's flu variant, whether or not we would see a similar response from the public.
Pre-vaccine, measures to control the spread were absolutely neccessary - lockdown #1 was the right thing to do, albeit too late. The ball was the dropped again later last year, prompting lockdown 2/3 - these should have been avoidable by my reckoning, with alternative measures being put in place to protect the vulnerable, if only to allow vital functions such as kids going to school to continue with minimal interruption.
Now, we have over 85% of the population on at least their first jab - when you take into account those who cannot be vaccinated due to being children or some other medical constraint, or those ignorant enough to refuse the vaccine, then we can pretty much say that all those who can be and are willing to be vaccinated have now had their first dose. Second doses are still in roll-out, but progressing well - pretty much everyone on the "vulnerable list" has ben double-jabbed and then some.
However, this does not stop the media from going into complete headless chicken mode whenever some professor or official makes a comment about the apparent risk of the rising numbers of cases - reports that almost always ignore that the number of hospitalizations ate a couple of orders of magnitude lower than they were last time infections were spreading at this rate. The whole thing is now politicized; collateral damage like the anxiety that this sort of reporting may cause is being completely ignored.
Now, anyone in the IT arena should be all to aware of how readily the general public buy into these sort of messages, especially when they are designed to instill and/or deal with anxiety. Just look at how Chrome has become the #1 browser by Google's splashing great big "download Chrome for faster, safer browsing" all over the tops of their search results page...
So people are now hung up on the hysteria, and any survey or poll is going to reflect that. I recall back in the 80s when the "don't die of ignorance" campaign was in full swing and people were worried you could catch AIDS from a toilet seat...
The biggest problem we now face from COVID is not the virus itself - it's the ongoing point-scoring and backstabbing between the politicians and the media, with the general public getting caught in the crossfire.
... how much of Javascript's "popularity" is due to each of the following:
1) Development of new systems or additional functionality in existing Javascript or well-established frameworks
2) Exploring the latest "framework-of-the-month"
3) Maintaining/repairing the shit code in production that has come about as a result of 1 & 2?
I think that the last year and a half shows beyond any doubt why we absolutely need a manned space programme - and why the likes of Dr Zubrin and Mr Musk are right...
Every major population center on this planet is within two days travel of any other. Now imagine if COVID had had the lethality of Ebola - the human race would have been all but wiped out before we got anywhere near a viable vaccine.
All our eggs are in one basket which, over the last century, has become very small. It is vital to the future of our species that we get another basket, before the aforementioned hypothetical high-lethality pandemic hits. Or the next major asteroid strike. Or Yellowstone blows. Or - most likely - we end up wiping ourselves out because a bunch of fuckwits value profit over the only home we currently have.
Look up the Drake equation - in particular, the last component.
... but surely once you've written the algorithm you (and I quote) NEVER! HAVE! TO! TEST! IT! AGAIN!!!... right?
Or maybe a decent unit test suit and code scanner will pick these things up before they hit production...
... thinking back to the late 90s/early 2000s - Microsoft got in a lot of trouble for bundling IE with Windows, ending up with them having to (among other things) offer users a choice of which browser to install upon first run.
So how is it that Chromebooks do not have the same requirement? Is it just that there are no other browsers out there until now, is it "one rule for them"... or has the internet simply forgotten (or is still too busy ranting about Microsoft)?
I'll admit, I've never used a Chromebook, so I'm in the dark here - genuine ignorance on my part. Deliberate too, as even if they were the best machines on the planet, no amazing functionality or user experience on the part of the hardware/software can overcome Google's reputation in my eyes. Only reason I'm stil on Windows is that I've yet to successfully get a Linux install on a machine...
... I was out of work for 2005 (too much niche tech straight out of uni, dammit!), and as the months passed I became increasingly desperate as I scoured the then-nascent job boards trying to find new employment. The number of ads I was that were looking for 3-5 years commercial .NET experience was unbelievable.
Okay, so at that point in time it was possible to have that kind of experience, but given the sheer volume of ads that cited this I'm pretty sure it was all buzzword-stuffing.
On another note, I recall another place I worked for, some eight years later (older, wiser and more burned) - they were one of about half-a-dozen London-based firms who seemed to have this great bleeding-edge tech pissing contest going on... which probably explains why when I left, they were scratching their heads trying to figure out just how to deal with the fact that a band new chunk of their website that had just gone online and was written in Angular v1 was now stuck with no upgrade path.
I can see them falling hook, line, sinker, waders and copy of the Angling Times for something like this.
Well, given they already got rumbled for trying to do just that illegally, it's hardly surprising they'd take another stab at it...
Don't forget to opt-out of the great NHS data sale, people!
A few years back, the place I was working in at the time was transitioning from desktops to laptops. The process was being done in stages so when I joined, about a third of the department had laptops and docks - let's call these "batch A". About a year later, "batch B" arrived, taking us up to two-thirds laptop & dock. Why the delay? I'm guessing budget constraints.
Anyway, what nobody had considered were the different power requirements between the laptops in batches A and B - a problem that became apparent when one poor soul with a low power requirement "batch A" laptop moved onto the desk of someone with a high power delivery "batch B" dock...
Let's just say that on this day, the chap in question was quite literally "hot desking"... after which, the idea of moving desks was shelved.
I don't know whether this is sheer greed or utter stupidity, but Apple could so easily turn this situation around, present themselves as "the good guys" and still come out financially ahead... and doing it is really simple, too:
Right now, everyone uses the App Store - because they have to - so people are used to using it. At the same time, this also gives the App Store a reputation for moderation and security (okay, and being a complete pain-in-the-ass walled garden, but that's only really a developer thing)... so even if a whole bunch of new, non-Apple "app stores" were to open up, the vast majority of users would still probably come to the App Store itself for the foreseable future*...
So here's the trick - all Apple need to do is to allow devices to load apps from any source. At the same time, the App Store switches from the defacto app download source to a discovery hub; developers can sell their apps via whatever means they want, but if they want it to be visible on the App Store then it has to pass Apple's moderation and security requirement... okay, and some kind of cut would be needed as well - definitely not 30%, maybe 10% if the developer want Apple to host the App and handle all sales, or 5% if Apple are just providing a link to the developer's own hosting at a stab-in-the-dark guesstimation?
So the App Store is now one of many stores - albeit the one that people still go to through habit, and still maintains the "gold standard" of security. A savvy user would at least check if an app is on the App store and maybe then go on and buy direct from the App Store knowing that the app at least was secure - although it is entirely possible that the store itself, if hosted by another third party, may not be. Which is something Apple could capitalise on by means of a simple press release every time a third party store is compromised - something along the lines of "while we acknowledge that there are other stores out there, only the original App Store provides [x] level of moderation and security..."
Apple wins - okay, they may not make the swingingly large profits they do currently, but they're out of the woods with the courts, and no longer presenting themselves as a walled garden. Developers also win - they have the option of not using the App Store if they want, but also have it as a "trusted" channel, much like you would get a Nintendo Seal of Quality back in the NES era. And consumers win because they can shop around.
And all it would take would be a bit of work and for Apple to admit that their current model is broken... don't know which they'd find harder!
* Except, possibly, if Google opened their own iOS store offering and did the same trick with it as they did with Chrome ie: abusing their monopoly and plastering their search result pages, youtube ads etc, with "use our app store instead!" links...
"U[sic] cant hide from web-apps Apple"
Google and the like have been trying to push us to web-apps for years - the truth is that if the app in question is something you download from the relevant store for your device, the expectation is that its UX is in-line with that of the device. Apple users want iOS apps to look like iOS apps, while Android owners want their apps to look like Android apps, and these half-baked attempts to create an app that is actually just a webviewer pointing at a website are often deemed clunky and less user friendly. This is why the concept of the native app persists.
Then of course, there's "games" (although I use the term lightly as most seem to be about flogging IAP or delivering ads more than actual gameplay) - the biggest share of the mobile market. Ultimately, game developers are looking for performance, which will always be better running on native hardware than in a browser. And since most game engines give the option to build for native, I can't see any game developer voluntarily take a performance hit for no reasonable pay-off.
"How dead was it, on a scale from 1 to 10"
To be honest, I can't recall - it got past the BIOS check and started booting, but never got to anything resembling a desktop, or anything I could interact with... thinking about it, it was probably salvagable, but given that it was an old machine at the time I got to the point where I thought "to heck with it".
... so yeah, "dead" is probably a bit unfair on my part. Apologies.
As for this latest attempt, I was using a Dell Studio 17 that's the best part of 10 years old. I'm guessing that the Radeon graphics card is part of the problem (pretty sure I saw something about it in the output before it zipped off the top of the page), but the lack of network etc. proved something of a showstopper.
I spent the best part of the weekend poking at it and searching the web, but didn't get anywhere... it feels like a catch-22 situation - I need to fix the problem to be able to find out what the problem actually is...
Don't suppose there will ever be an rc of Linux that focuses on making it straightforward to install...?
This weekend, about 10 years since my last attempts to venture into Linux-land (which resulted in a dead PC tower), I tried to install Debian on an old laptop - mostly because I need it to kick-start another side project I've been dabbling with, but partly on the grounds that so many on here have said "oh, things have gotten a lot easier since then".
I now have another computer that can only be made useful if I re-install Windows on it - which kind of kills my project dead in the water. No network connection. No graphics card recognition. No trackpad/mouse recognition. Heck, not even a way to scroll back up through the text output and try to figure out what might have gone wrong.
Web searches have given me nothing beyond "try another flavour of Linux" (not an option due to the nature of the project), or "download some firmware" - which I can't do on the box in question (due to the lack of network), and can't even figure out which devices need which versions (due to not being able to scroll up through the output).
Last time I installed Windows on a machine... yes, it was a pain stepping through all the wizards etc. But at least it told me what was wrong and either scanned automatically for fixes or pointed me in the right direction.
Yes, I know this post will get a lot of downvotes - mostly, I expect from the same Linux users who view Windows users as lower life forms.
But it's clear to me now why Windows still rules the roost on the desktop - and until Linux (and, from what I have seen in a number of places, various members of its community) get a bit more friendly, that's likely to remain the status quo.
A while back (a good while back, pre-pandemic), I was talking to one of my collegues about BOFH, saying how I'd learned a lot from it.
A few weeks later, these little straps appeared on all the windows above the ground floor, preventing them from opening more than a few inches.
... funny, that...
"Having been persuaded in March 2020 by a mathematician, an AI expert and the founder of Google’s Deep Mind... ...the need for a national test and trace system became obvious"
"Test" (track) and trace is Google's wet dream come true - a completely legal remit to monitor people's movements in relation to each other through devices that are already phoning home with their browsing, shopping and communication habits. Let's not forget that they've already been illegally using NHS data...
"a glimpse at the most inexpensive of Dell Inspirons shows customers needing to opt out of having McAfee's's products preinstalled"
A bit further up the line and they don't offer opt-out at all.
I had to order a couple of developer-capable Dells a few weeks back. Tried to get them to ship without McAfee - no dice, even after lengthy conversations with several of their support team...
Apple Arcade is a subscription service, which raises the question of how the app developers are paid.
I'm guessing that there must be some regulation in place to prevent the number of games included growing faster than the audience, so that Apple can cover the costs of paying the developers. It's a step in the right direction, but they can do a lot more.
"... which he claimed would prevent the App Store becoming swamped with spam or low-quality apps..."
As an ex-mobile game developer, it is clearly evident that this has failed spectacularly. Mobile "games" - which are the clear front-runner in the various types of apps available for mobile - tend to be low-quality shovelware, asset-flips and clones that rely on either milking their players for in-app purchases in order to make any reasonable progress, or bombarding them with adverts as often as humanly possible.
With the kind of revenue they're making, Apple could easily curate beyond the "paid"/"free with in-app purchases" split they currently employ. A huge step in the right direction would be for them to move away from the "one-size-fits-all" $99/year and 30% cut figures and instead create a scale that accounts for whether or not a game must be paid for in the first instance, whether it offers in-app purchases and what those purchases do, whether or not it displays ads and what triggers the display...
Restoring some sanity (and morals) to mobile gaming would go a long way towards re-establishing Apple's credibility.
"If app stores become an unregulated wild west then how do I know whether the metronome I've just bought for my phone isn't going to download malware, steal log in creds and spam all my contacts?"
Very simple. If the app store becomes unregulated and/or Google is reigned back in from their attempts to turn the Play store into their own walled garden, vendors would be able to offer the apps to download from their own websites.
Not only would this shatter the monopoly status of the stores, it would also vastly reduce the problem of malware on mobile: if I want Fortnight, I'd download the app from the Epic website - any other site offering it, I know there's a chance it might be containing an unwanted passenger.
And the irony of this is that in this new world of total market freedom, Google and Apple could still win by repurposing their stores as promotional sites - users would still use them to discover and rate/review apps, but instead of purchasing the app via the store, the user would be directed to the vendor's own website. By charging a "reasonable" fee to register each app on the store, Google and Apple could still make a considerable profit. However, the choice of whether or not to do this would lie with the app's vendor thus satisfying the legal requirement of "not a monopoly" - for example, the vendor could decide to promote their app solely on social media and not use the "app store".
Breaking the current stranglehold is the best thing that could happen to the mobile app market IMHO.
Simple way for Apple to prove this - show the ratio of jailbroken to non-jailbroken devices... I'm sure with all the telemetry in play these days that tehy can do this...
... although since I expect that the percentage of jailbroken devices will be little more than a rounding error, it would be a pretty suicidal move!
"not easy, to say the least, to install Android programs from anywhere except the Play Store"
As has been stated in numerous places, it is pretty easy to sideload on Android.
However, obtaining those APKs and knowing that they are not cracked and piggy-backing some kind of malware? There's your problem...
That said given the state of the Play store, if I have to own an Android phone, I think I'd prefer to download and side-load APKs from the websites of their developers than take a chance of getting something from Play that turns out to be something else masquerading as what I'm after.
"And seek them they did: Chrome now enjoys over 60 per cent market share..."
Surely if it were just a case of "seeking" then surely the market shares of Chome, Firefox and other browsers would be much closer to each other?
Or is the runaway success of Chrome something to do with Google plastering great big "Download Chrome!" calls to action in very visible locations on their search landing and results pages???
Once again, Google abusing their monopoly on web search to undercut their competitors, just like the numerous adverts for Pixel phones on Youtube videos...
"Almost by definition something that's old and spare is no longer expensive as you'd already written off its value"
It was being chucked out by the company I was working for at the time; it was about three years old. At the time, I was trying to get my finances back int the black after a year out of work and two more in the most disasterous work-from-home position, so any PC was expensive.
... and, of course, they had thrown out the distribution disk...
"There ARE alternatives if you don't like Apple or Google products..."
Like what, exactly? In this day and age, it's almost expected that people have smartphones. It's kind of like the argument "you don't have to use Google on the web" - except that the vast majority of pages implement Google Analytics...
The last real "alternative" that (eventually) provided most of the tools that iOS and SpyOS do was Windows Phone... and look at the reception that got!
"That's why a lot of desktop software and even hardware vendors stay away from it..."
I recall the brief foray I made into Linux - I'll admit that this was a good few years ago now, but in my attempt to set up an old spare tower PC I had at the time, I ended up with a very expensive doorstop.
Naturally, I hit the internet trying to figure out where I had gone wrong. The response I got was largely unhelpful and in many cases insulting: I haven't bothered since.
According to it's history, Javascript was designed in order to remove the need for a server call when performing simple operations such as validating input (obviously this waaaaay pre-dates the current situation where server-side validation is a must for security reasons and people are deliberately disabling Javascript because of how badly it is abused for tracking/ads/malware delivery).
Javascript is for client side development - it is not fit for purpose as a server-side language. This situation with node is just the latest proof of this fact.
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