Posts by Jim-234 163 posts • joined 17 Aug 2012
The specification are quite lackluster for the price.
However if they could see their way clear to ship it without being loaded up with a bunch of uninstallable adware and bloatware and junk from FB, then it might actually be well worth the cost.
I've gotten a bit tired of paying for a Samsung flagship only to have it try to shove junk in my face anytime it can unless I get it all taken out after every major update.
It's more than a bit annoying if you purchase a top of the range Samsung phone and are out like $1200 to $1400 at a minimum, and you still have to put up with that stupid Bixby trying to shove ads in your face if you swipe the wrong way.
But now they just say let's forget the lube all together and not even bother putting in the $10 charger & cable so now you have to go buy it elsewhere or pay like $50 for our "original" one.
If they are not a bit more careful what they are actually going to do is destroy their entire high end range ability as the customers will eventually say why bother paying a premium and get treated this poorly?
This statement:
"Clearly somebody selling physical goods online has to collect delivery information but doesn't need to retain that information once delivery is complete"
Pretty much says you haven't ever been actually involved in selling things online.
If you sell things on line you ABSOLUTELY have to keep the information on who ordered it, where the order came from, where it went to, proof that it was delivered and all that stuff.
Try selling stuff online and not keeping super detailed records of the deliveries and orders for at least 6 months to a year and let me know how it works out for you once it becomes well known you don't keep that information in and the customer initiated fraud starts piling up and you find your bank account being drained by the payment processors....
Amazon should have just been honest and come out and said:
"We like all the other Technocrat overlords decided that if whatever you are saying is not what the current "correct" information according to the government about the whole virus thing, then we will block it."
And if at some time what you were saying happens to be come the now current "correct" information according to the government we'll say oops our bad... naughty algorithm.... and put it back up....
(See YouTube banning videos about how to make cloth masks to protect yourself from virus, right up till when the governments decided that was what everyone should do.)
If Linux Mint could be based on Devuan especially with the Cinnamon interface and their pretty decent set of fairly up to date apps installed & a decent application store and ease of installation, you would pretty much have it.
However Mint took a stand against Snap which I think is a good thing:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/06/02/linux_mint_team_snap/
You can enable it if you want.
As the poster a bit above me also noted.
The part in the article "Unfortunately, Signal doesn't allow group moderators to block individuals from taking screenshots, which would frustrate the process of leaking a conversation to the press." is kind of laughably stupid... What self respecting leaker doesn't have at least one burner phone that can take pictures of the screen on another phone? I mean you do use a separate phone for the leaking stuff to others right?
I would think with a bit of marketing work, they could advertise the stuffing out of them being better because they Don't have the google services as part of it and convince people to do a bunch of grey market importing of them.
Especially if they decided to leave the bootloader unlocked.
So if I understand this right the result of the sanctions is that Huawei has to produce an Android phone Without the google spyware?
Is it possible they also are going to be forced to make the phone without all the Facebook spyware as well?
They can rebrand it as the new privacy aware phone.
You can get about $5 to $10 in Amazon gift cards (or other options for similar value), per month using Bing, or more if you happen to be trying a bit harder.
Too bad their search results aren't quite as good as the top dog.
Still it's good to have at least one other well funded search engine besides Google, just so you know Google doesn't think they own the web completely.
This will probably force the Chinese (and for that matter every other government that would like to have a choice to do what they want and not what the USA says), to seriously and quickly come up with a bottom to top supply chain for their own communications / computing technology, encompassing all the hardware, software, designs and services needed.
So while it will hurt for a bit, there is a good chance China will actually come out ahead in the long run after they throw enough money at it to make their own decent alternatives for a lot of stuff. Perhaps the USA can up the pressure so China won't want to use Microsoft software any more (one could only hope).
Which they can then offer to others who may not wish to be fully under USA control.
The good news for the rest of us is one day we may be able to pick who we want spying on us instead of being stuck with it being google/NSA or Apple/NSA.
I get a little tired of people preaching about how much more work people need to do on "better" or "more random" or "more changed often" passwords when the biggest problem recently is it seems like corporate security is a total afterthought & they are just letting the hackers waltz in and grab all the data and all the password files.
Every week there is some new report of some big company loosing a big bunch of everything... oops...
Or leaving everyone's passwords just in a plain text database.
How about we make the companies pay folks for the time and trouble of going in and resetting all their passwords after they loose them.
Maybe that would help a lot more.
Apple and then Samsung pushed the price for their new flagship phones way above any semblance of reason and now they wonder why suddenly their hugely overpriced phones are not selling?
At $500 it was already expensive, then the push to $750, then the push to $1k then the push to $1250 and so on.
If you had to fork out that much money for a top of the line phone, you are probably going to hang on to it for a long time to get your money's worth.
Also the newer models don't really have all that much more to offer the average user than the previous model.
Sure some fancy marketing features that people don't care about as much.
But having staked out huge prices, I doubt the corporate types want to roll them back, so they will be stuck in a loop of diminishing sales, which they try to make up for by hiking the prices to get the revenue numbers up, which then leads to less sales again and so on.
Or the late Libyan despot.
Gave up all his nuke materials an a PR move president Bush trumpeted loud and long.
In exchange for you know friendship & safety & coming in out of the cold
Right up till his rear end was being bombed by the guys he thought he was on good terms with.
Probably wished he had gone the NK route as the safer course.
So will they try again to pick a new "Ethics advisory board" that only includes people with a specific viewpoint set, and if they accidentally let in some people representing opposing views, will they trash the next board and try again till they get one that all has the same specific viewpoint?
Our new AI overlords might just see that this explains why human input is unreliable, useless and decide to do what they want and who cares what the meat sacks think.
Or you know they could just admit that when you have global travel, sometimes folks from countries that are not considered "first world" countries may have some diseases that they bring with them during travel, much the same as diseases have spread around the world for the past couple thousand years.
Yes actually, you'll find a fairly substantial percentage of the population have dissenting opinions from the current "new speak" definitions of biological based gender terms. So if you want to have a well rounded panel, then you need to include people who represent those opinions and concerns.
Your post seems to show a dislike for a specific group based on nationality and religious preference.
You seem to also forget religious belief systems encompassing a significant portion of the global population such as Christians, Muslims, Orthodox Jews and others often share similar concerns about things even if they don't agree on other matters. In addition the laws in many global countries are different than your preferences.
Then take your other argument about Google itself.... sure it is a global company, right up till it has to abide by global laws or taxes.... then they fall back to "we are a USA company so we only have to follow USA laws we can help pay for"... till once again taxes come due and then suddenly they are a shell company that doesn't actually exist in a place where taxes exist but are instead only exist in some off shore tax haven.
So having a panel member representing other views is probably a good idea, and if you really don't like them it's probably an even better idea to have them as then it will make you think about your own arguments and the basis for them which helps in many ways.
I think this is a perfect example to show people the well known bias for anything "traditional" or "conservative" that Google and their fellows are proud of.
If you are trying to get a well rounded set of views & concerns from representatives of society as a whole regarding technology & it's application, you should have some people from different sides to get a complete picture of concerns and ideas. This panel was supposedly to get as many viewpoints as possible to help avoid conformational bias... but I guess that's not going to happen.
But once again, we are seeing that if someone doesn't whole heartedly embrace the current "new speak" the mob over at Google will pull out their pitchforks.
I mean who needs a discussion on biology or science or structural anatomy, or even the beliefs and preferences of a large amount of the population, when we are living in the new post truth era?
The police are busy providing harsher punishment for sharing or having a media file that they "disapprove" of than if you were actually mugging someone or robbing them. You'd be out on bail right away if you did an actual crime against a person. But they want to use the process as a punishment to put fear and terror into the hearts of the local citizens that you best not do anything the government doesn't like.
The law they are using pretty much says any information or work of art, or document, or historical footage, or footage of an actual event, the government decides it doesn't like is now a crime to possess. So what's next? Documentaries discussing the very real issue of the lack of women's rights in certain middle eastern countries with a certain majority religion?
There are some very good reasons people may want to see the video & that is up to them. Sometimes people need to see what real evil actually is and what it looks like to understand why you don't want to allow people to get that way. For example they may want to see what the shooter did & how the victims reacted to debate and determine better methods for surviving attacks. Or you may want to be able to show the more twisted folk who might one day idolize the criminal as some kind of hero, that No, watch the video, he was no hero, just a sick twisted coward. Or when the accusations come out that it was faked and made up (much like the deniers in the atrocities of WWII) you can say, no, I saw it in detail & it was real and a real evil person did actual real evil things.
When you let the government decide what you can and cannot watch or know about and then allow the government to go harshly stomping on folks as they please for thought crimes or seeing what actually happened in an event, you might as well just give up your whole idea of free speech or free thought.
i7-8550U CPUs with Nvidia MX130 video, so fairly new chipsets.
On the 2 laptops the latest windows updates ruined last week, it actually overwrote something in the video chip firmware while "updating the driver" so the problem now exists even when you first turn on the system and go into the system setup, or boot to another OS like Linux.
The whole new Windows Update business is getting worse and worse at destroying hardware, and removing your ability to actually get the work done on your computer.
Windows Update is starting to be the best reason for moving to Linux.
We just had Windows 10 update ruin some higher end Dell 7573 laptops (just out of warranty) with Dual Intel/ Nvidia video. Working fine for ages under Linux, also working okay under windows 10 till the updates ran and then... well there went the video bios into permanent garbled mess and the laptops are done.
It's becoming standard these days that when one of our customers or clients mentions something is going crazy with they system (like their Surface Pro), we tell them that in a couple days it will be in the news about what update it was that made things nuts.
You would think that at this stage with all the big "Social Media" companies and their associated technocrats constantly saying how "Inclusive", "Tolerant", "Accepting of everyone", "Progressive", "Liberal", "?????+ Friendly" they are, still they actually are basically no more evolved in attitudes than a bunch of Fanatical Puritans.
I'm not sure how Corporate America became the enforcement arm of the Puritanical Religious Zealots, while claiming to be "progressive", but they seem to be doing a excellent job of banning everything that a Religious Zealot might not like.
It is really kind of sad that we are still saddled with such stupid outlooks on the human body & human sexuality.
At least the Nazi lovers on Tumblr will be happy, most of them like posting long diatribes about how naked pictures are a (insert some race here as needed) plot to ruin their minds. (Because apparently the minds of the superior race are too weak to stand up to a picture of a fully naked human).
Pictures of graphic violence, war, weapons, gore and brutality seem to be fine with the Puritanical censors that run Corporate America.
Then they wonder why everybody is making war and not love?
I've had the Samsung Smartwatches for several generations & just got the latest 46mm Galaxy Watch.
I use it every day and find it pretty helpful.
Specifically:
NOT having to pull out my phone to check things. Basically it lets me glance and ignore which makes me more productive.
I can see with a quick twist of my wrist if the message, chat, e-mail or phone call is something I need to take or just ignore to later on.
Also seeing and dismissing alarms and job reminders.
It's also a lot more socially polite than pulling out your phone to check when you are involved in some social interaction situation.
In addition to the usual suspects such as:
Looking at the date / time
Steps taken (my doctor wants this information)
Heart rate (trainer at the gym likes to see this to find out how much more punishment they can give me).
Making quick voice note recordings of reminders on the go.
Yes some evil characters called in a fake threat.
That is not what killed the innocent unarmed man who did nothing wrong.
Trigger happy police who are all jacked up on power and control & just want to kill somebody did it.
The police "officer" that shot him was in no way in danger, they were nice and safely far away watching him and pointing a rifle at him.
The real crime here is that NOTHING is going to happen to the actual murderer (the police shooter) or his stupid boss or the whole stupid clown circus of them.
So it will happen again and again because if you can just gun people down and never be called into account for it, no matter how much killing you do, then why would you ever care.
If some nutjob can make a crank call from half a continent away and you and your supposed "police" show up and murder (yes I said MURDER) an innocent unarmed man in the middle of the night for NO good reason, then that police force should all be looking for new jobs the next day.
Then if your society refuses to act against those killer police and simply lets them go about their business with no accountability for those that did the killing, they can't claim any moral outrage next time someone decides if they are going to be killed anyways, they might as well take a few of the "police" with them.
The whole issue of "Gun laws" and also the amount of guilt the hoax callers share is besides the main point.
There is an epidemic in the USA of Police feeling above the law and just shooting anyone they want.
In my experience, this happened with the S2 watch actually on the charger all night long, it was actually off and showing 0 battery in the morning (despite the full charge indicator being shown when last checked at night)
My morning routine is a bit busy at it is, I should just be able to pull the watch off the charger and call it a day without having to turn it off before bed and turn it on again in the morning.
I don't know why either they don't know or never get told but we actually would like to pay them.
I'd be happy to fork over probably something in the $10 to $20 per year as a donation if they could make sure I got a version of the browser where I was the actual customer not the product.
If they claim to be happy with making $1 per year from me as the product... how about they take my offer to make 10x that with me as the customer instead?
I think there is a HUGE market right now from the tech savy folks for a browser, email client and e-mail provider as well as a search provider that doesn't use you as the product to sell all your data.
I think if they advertised it right & set the price decently, they would get plenty of income.
In order to have the ability for free speech and the ability to freely discuss topics, you have to have anonymity or you will find that nobody can safely discuss anything but the most mundane of topics.
The social media companies want to push "Verified" in a big way because like facebook, they use that to then directly invade your privacy and sell you individually to the highest bidder.
In addition with the rise of endless data storage, people are being attacked and pilloried for discussions decades earlier and applying modern hysteria over words or assumed insults to vastly different times.
We are fast becoming a much better version of 1984 than ever imagined.
Today people are attacked and the mobs of group think try to destroy the lives of people simply for having possibly at one time said a word when discussing it as part of a list of words that should not be said as they could be hurtful.
Now imagine if you had to say only what would not get you in trouble for the next 80 years across a wide variety of places and cultures, and worry about fanatics who vilify even talking about the things that should not be talked about.
Without anonymity, you won't be able to survive and have intelligent meaningful discussions about important social or cultural or historical matters.
What also if your government takes a dim view of being criticized and would like to skim through social media to determine anyone not speaking in favour of the government?
The "Social Media" empires are happy to let people say how much they hate the current president of the USA... but did you happen to notice they seem to be also perfectly happy to fall in line with Chinese censors without so much as a protest? When the stick gets big enough, they will turn on their users and side with the Government to eliminate dissent.
If you look at how much you are going to be forking over to Microsoft over the next 20 years (at their nice ever increasing rate), you could budget 1/4th of that to pay for competent programmers to write the software that you want the way you want it to run under Linux & once it's OpenSource, then it gets a lot easier to have the community help with bugfixes and security patches etc.
This ruling is full of so many holes it won't stand up for long.
In any "Public" real life forum, trouble makers are promptly ejected or not allowed in without any issues being raised.
So if the same judge or anybody else in the government have a website or twitter account or anything that allows commenting, do they have to leave it open to be overrun by every troll in the entire planet?
Stupid decision that is entirely politically motivated and won't stand up for long.
The whole idea of "Personalized ads" is yet another rip off that the people selling the "advertising" space foist on the companies trying to pay to get people to take notice of them.
Pretty much without fail I get "Personalized" ads for things that I have just bought and will most likely not buy again for many years.
Totally random things would be far more likely to actually provoke a bit of interest.
The current generation Nvidia GeForce cards such as the 10xx series (such as 1080Ti etc) will give some installations (Like Linux Mint 18.3) fits & black screens.
Since, I didn't get around to reading how to fix the issue properly, I put in an older Nvidia card, do the install, then load the Nvidia drivers, then swap the card back in, sometimes it fails & I have to remove & do it over, but then it usually works fine.
You had to put in the current liberal hate object of the AR-15 which is completely wrong.
She did not use this "bad evil AR-15" you speak of.
California already has more gun control rules (most of them stupid) than most of the Democrats wildest dreams.
If you go to a gun store in another state to buy a gun with California identification, they will most likely deny your purchase.
So Microsoft goes on about how you don't need your own data on your own servers & computer, just trust it all to our magic "cloud" that will always be there for you.
Until apparently you post something that some corporate shill doesn't like and they lock you out of all your data, contacts & anything else they can.
The things they claim will get your account and all your data deleted include some perfectly legal things (at least in countries that still respect freedom of speech and expression).
They claim they will "only act if it's reported" but by who?... Somebody doesn't like your point of view and you are suddenly "reported"..
Did you say something Microsoft didn't like? Is someone in Microsoft using their position to go after political or ideological opponents?
Did they get paid by some political party to find ways to "vanish" their rivals? They take great care to specifically NOT give any information.
Seems the more time goes forward the more it starts looking possible that the future may resemble the very many dystopian science fiction movies with a few big corporations ruling the world & making the rules with the governments not as important.
The apologists will go on about "they are not the government so they don't have to respect your civil / speech rights"... yet the corporations are the first in like to demand they get "corporate free speech" rights and all the other rights for individuals, applied to them.
Office 2010 is sometimes a bit better behaving than the later versions.
I'm not sure I'd really suggest upgrading from 2010 office unless you had a reason to do so.
Personally I prefer to run Office 2010 myself over the later versions which seem to run endlessly slower on ever faster hardware.
So if you got a nice new AMD or Xeon workstation with more than 4 cores and are running Windows 10.... Is it suddenly going to stop working or stop letting you use most of your cores after the next update?
All those trumpeting how great Windows 10 is have no idea how much Microsoft plans to squeeze every last drop of money and monetary value out of you from their new ever changing ever more expensive ever more intrusive spy OS.
I'm not getting any car with this "advertising" garbage on it, I'll just drive older and older cars if I have to.
I get exceptionally angry when stupid advertisements start popping up on things suddenly & it makes me not want to use them.
Suddenly my cell phone wants to put ads in my voice mail or pay a fee to remove them??? I already pay a ton for the service, take a hike.
Waze used to just have little add icons, now it tries to pop up full screen overlay adds all the time if just on the phone.. because that's what I want to look at while driving.
I don't want my car to bother me with "things that might interest me", that's a good way to go straight to the junk yard.
It's a bit too much to listen to him go on about the evils that "fake news" causes.
Perhaps he is forgetting the Millions over the past near 1500 years that the organization he heads caused to be killed, tortured, abused based on their interpretation of concepts that cannot be proven or disproven.
It's not like the Russian trolls are literally burning people at the stake or literally torturing them.
Pretty sure Russian internet trolls have not yet been proven to be part of a vast cover up for child abuse.
One could also add that various things his organization pushes still cause ongoing harm and distress to many, in excess of what "fake news" could ever be.
When you have actual skeletons in the closet..... Huge amounts of them.....
I have had several Dell branded laptops unexpectedly become totally unresponsive (apart from the power button lighting up) while installing the Windows 10 Creators or Windows 10 Creators Fall updates, right after the new drivers were downloaded from Microsoft.
A couple were able to be salvaged by leaving the system battery unplugged and the CMOS battery unplugged for an extended period of time (a bit hard when the batteries are deep inside the units), others never recovered at all.
So it's not just a Linux thing, I'm pretty sure the same buggy drivers were present in Windows 10, but got removed quickly and without any public mention.
It does have movement / motion detection and you can configure the movement zones and sensitivity for each camera.
It's a great feature as setting the recordings to on movement only lets you quickly jump to where something happened when remotely browsing over the recordings list, so even if you don't know the exact time, you just pick whatever movement time might be close and jump to see that.
For the Ubiquity cameras I got, ubiquity offers a pretty nice little free Linux software package that both manages the cameras, provides live feed and provides the recording / storage features, as well as providing remote viewing capability via web browser or using the cell phone app.
You can view both the live feed and the recordings remotely, which is nice to see if a package actually got attempted delivery or not while you are out.
I run it on Linux Mint 18.2 (since it's based of the Ubuntu version they recommend).
I was recently doing some cameras for my house, and wanted simple live streaming and event recording.
I was actually looking at the Y-Cam along with several others and then decided instead to go with Ubiquity as while it was not quite as all singing and dancing as the others, you can simply boot up a Linux* box in your home, install the free software, configure the network and done, all under your control and nobody to jack up prices or force subscriptions or sell on your information / footage to others.
I think eventually after being burned a few times, the more do it yourself inclined people may start to realize that if you buy something that requires other "cloud" services to run, you'll be paying eventually or replacing it or both, so there will be more of a market for stuff you control locally.
*It will run on Windows, but if you want something with 24/7 uptime for a couple years that's not going to reboot itself or hassle you for various stuff, Linux is a great option.
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