Posts by JohnFen 5648 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Feb 2015
"Most people I know use bluetooth headsets"
Most people I know don't. But even if they did, that still doesn't take away from the fact that for many people's use cases, Bluetooth just doesn't cut it at all.
"As to the notch, does it really matter?"
To many people, yes.
"For the price, it's a cracking phone."
I disagree completely.
"I've asked myself many times over the past year why manufacturers make such a big deal of the front camera."
Because smartphones have become a commodity thing, and manufacturers are absolutely desperate to find any sort of differentiator.
That said, the front camera is useful for more than selfies -- many people use their phones for video calls.
I say this because of two things it simultaneously does -- it makes it necessary to rely on a large provider for your DNS resolution, and it makes it less likely that the problems with DNS will actually get resolved in a manner that maintains decentralization.
It's also a security problem, because it only addresses browser use. People are likely to think that all DNS queries will be secure, when that's not the case at all. It also encourages the terrible tendency for people to think that the web and the internet are the same thing, a factor which is, in my opinion, terrible for the internet.
On top of all that, this is shoving yet another unrelated thing through the HTTPS port. Doing this is also a security problem because it makes it difficult-to-impossible to selectively block services you don't want your network to be interacting with.
But please understand, if DoH were the only objectionable thing to come down the pike, I wouldn't react so strongly to it. But it just the latest thing in a series of moves that I think is harming the internet as a whole, so there's a bit of "straw that broke the camel's back" going on for me.
I view DoH as a bad thing overall, and it is yet another step in the degradation and corporatization of the internet. The DNS system certainly needs fixing, but it should be fixed rather than bring DoH into the mix.
But it looks like we're going to get stuck with this bullshit.
"Its a pointless gesture."
I disagree.
Let's say that you're a supplier of something, and you refuse to supply a particular customer because you object to the actions of that customer. The fact that they can simply use another supplier is irrelevant, and doesn't make your refusal pointless.
The point isn't to prevent the customer from doing whatever they do, the point is to avoid complicity with their actions.
Note: I'm not necessarily 100% in agreement with the Microsoft employees, mostly because Microsoft has been a military contractor for decades so anyone working for them already declared that they're OK with that -- that's a substantial difference from, say, Google. However, their stance and the action they want Microsoft to take are not pointless just because the government can go elsewhere.
"It is only storing information"
That's leaving out so much detail as to become misleading, though. It isn't just about storing information, it's about mining information. Phrasing it like that is pretty much the same as saying that the Big Data movement itself is only about "storing information".
On one point, Microsoft is correct: it's not a secret that Microsoft has been an enthusiastic military contractor for decades, and this will certainly never change. Nearly everyone who works there has known (or should have known) this from before they submitted their application, so they've already said in loud and clear terms that they're fine with that.
"so machines on your LAN can have an actual WAN-visible address of their own without needing a trick like NAT."
Avoiding that configuration is exactly the use case for using NAT with IPv6. As others have pointed out, you can accomplish the same thing with IPv6 router configuration, but NAT is easier in terms of configuration and maintenance. Given that, and assuming that you don't want to be able to have arbitrary machines open ports that are visible to the internet, then why not use NAT?
Also, if your goal is to make people more likely to move to IPv6, pointing out IPv4 methods that will work with IPv6 (even if you don't consider them optimal) seems like a really, really good idea. It eases the transition.
"If you run a Systemd-based Linux system"
I remain very happy that I don't use systemd on any of my machines anymore. :)
"others within the Linux world seem to still be less than impressed with Systemd"
Yep, I'm in that camp. I gave it a good, honest go, but it increased the amount of hassle and pain of system management without providing any noticeable benefit, so I ditched it.
"If you have things run on your machine rather than remotely you get something which can interact with you with a tiny latency"
True, but relative to other factors (such as security), that is very unimportant to me.
"you also get something which (at least potentially) doesn't vomit your information to some remote system you don't own or probably trust."
Potentially is the key word here. In reality, client-side scripting or not, if a site wants that information (and most seem to), they're going to use every trick in the book to get it. Client-side scripting makes that effort so very much easier.
"The flip side of course is you end up running code you may not trust."
I don't, as I don't allow script to run.
Neither of your points sound like meaningful wins to me.
"Providers have a certain reputation for quality that they try to target and that's easy to translate into a filtering threshold."
I suppose a big part of this is what your concern about advertising is. Mine isn't the advertising itself, it's the tracking that comes with it, and my goal is to prevent tracking. Providers (as near as I can tell) don't consider tracking to be a bad thing, and won't block based solely on that. So the only effective method, for my goal, is to block all scripting.
"Blocking scripting is hardly a solution."
It's been a fantastic solution for me for years. If a site doesn't work properly without scripting, then 99.9% of the time, I just don't use that site. If the site is, for some reason, essential, then I can selectively allow certain scripts from the site and block all the others.
Even if Microsoft actually listened to insider reports (and I find it amazing that they apparently don't), the insider program still cannot adequately substitute for a real, internal, QA process. It can only supplement. This isn't because of some failing with the insiders, but because the fundamental concept of "crowdsourcing" QA is deeply flawed.
"Unless MS wrecking Windows somehow harms their cloud offerings, MS is happy to keep letting Windows flail about."
But that's the thing -- Microsoft's cloud offerings are really only attractive to people and companies who are invested in Windows. I don't think Microsoft can disentangle the two.
"Linux wasn't written "by God", and has its own issues"
True. All nontrivial software has bugs, and the more nontrivial it is, the more bugs are there. That said, Linux is certainly more solid than Windows, and it comes with the considerable benefit of not forcing you into Microsoft's (or anybody else's) "ecosystem".
"Linux really needs a complete, well designed GUI system and libraries, managed like the kernel"
I thought that was the goal of Ubuntu.
I like the idea of there being a distro to meet that need. I would hate it if that meant that the other distros had to be the same way, though.
"It could be argued that being compatible with your brain would be one of the basic requirements of a good OS."
I hear what you're saying, but I suppose that how true that is depends on what the goal of the OS is. That I find Apple OSes difficult to use (despite having done a fair bit of application development on them) may be a personal problem, so I'm hesitant to slag them just because of that.
"New businesses don't have the money"
It takes far less money to get a business going than people seem to assume. You don't need a deep pocket to finance a business startup. The traditional method of starting business still works, it's just less likely to make anyone an overnight millionaire.
"You really want a shiny new Windows Search"
In the realm of search, I'd just be happy if the one in Windows 10 actually worked right. As it is, it's so bad that I can't use it at all and use third party search applications instead. Much like what I'm doing with zip files now.
In a monetary sense, they probably will. But it will mean that Github is a Microsoft product whose customer base is primarily the business world.
That's fine as a business decision, but it does mean that the Github community as it exists now is marked for destruction -- thus Github's days are numbered. There may still be a service called "Github", but it won't be serving the same people in the same way, so it will best be considered a different service and will no longer serve its existing community.
You know what other dominant computer manufacturer was riding high on the profit wave while their customers grew increasingly unhappy with them? IBM.
"It will be all about maintaining the GitHub community and the ethos at the core."
Maybe, for right now. But the odds are somewhere near 100% that the day will come when Microsoft kicks all that to the curb.
"exorcise anonymity"
I'm with you except for your dislike for anonymity. Anonymity is an essential component to being free and being able to freely express opinion. It should not be "exorcised".
Indeed, short of draconian measures that bring even greater nastiness, it cannot be exorcised.
"Heiman said the reason the US tech industry is the envy of the world is that regulation was relatively light compared to elsewhere, allowing companies like AirBnB, Facebook, Google, and others to develop."
This may or may not actually be true, but for the sake of this comment, I'll pretend that it is. My response is: so what?
"Innovation" has turned into a blanket excuse to justify the ongoing, and increasing, attack against the liberties of actual human beings. It's just another way of saying that harmful actions should be considered fine as long as someone is making a lot of money from it.
I reject that line of argument completely. If the choice is between innovation and freedom (and I don't think it is), then give me freedom.
"Why would anyone want to start someone young with outdated concepts such as BASIC?"
When I first learned to program about 40 years ago (jeez, I'm old), it was a commonly held stance that nobody should be exposed to BASIC until they have already learned at least one other language. This is because BASIC lets you get away with terrible programming practices and so it brought a risk that new programmers would learn bad habits far too early in the game.
I still think there's merit to that argument.
"You can't turn it off because unfortunately that's how the equipment works."
Yes, for cell phone providers. That in no way applies to Google, Facebook, etc. Or shouldn't anyway. There is no inherent infrastructural need for any of those companies to have access to your location (or any other) information.
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