Posts by Updraft102

Microsoft Surface laptop: Is this your MacBook Air replacement?

Re: Had windows 10 running for 6 months now

"the Win10 settings are still cr*p compared to the connection/locale management utilities that were around in the days of W2K/XP."

Indeed. Yet most of those utilities have gone by the wayside now. The lone exception I have been able to find as far as wlan is the Intel Proset utility, still pretty much the same as it was 9 years ago when I first used it, and still far better than Windows itself.

I found the networking UI on XP to be vastly superior to all later versions. Starting with Vista, they buried the adapter settings several layers deep instead of being right there after a right clock on the icon in the system tray as they used to be.

Re: ... but will it

It would be an interesting conversation piece for sure.

Apple: Our stores are your 'town square' and a $1,000 iPhone is your 'future'

Re: "Animoji" icons that match the emoji's expression to your own face.

Not being a ten year old Japanese girl, I don't have any use for emojis. I've never had to see one in an actual attempted communication until a week or two ago, when one of the commenters on a tech site sprinkled a bunch of them in instead of actual words (which would have worked even better-- the damned message looked like a rebus). My browser and Windows happily cooperated, displaying the idiotic things in color (but thankfully not animated).

The first impulse I had was to get... this... crap... out... of... my... computer. I found it offensive that Mozilla and Microsoft thought it appropriate to transmit this idiotic buffoonery to me without any optiion to turn it off.

Upon a quick google (using it that way because Google said it was bad, heh), I found tons of people asking the same thing, yet there's no simple way to do it in newer Windows versions. You WILL have emojis, damn you!

I found that by substituting fonts in the registry, I was able to vanquish the color ones at the very least, replacing them with less annoying text glyphs. Trying to go further than that resulted in "unknown character" boxes all over the place in Windows, replacing many UI elements. Overkill, I think. At least the color ones are gone, and I've used .css to replace emojis with the unknown character boxes while browsing. If a person wants to use stupid little pictures to try to be cute while communicating, I'd rather see a bunch of meaningless boxes and move on to the next message.

So... yeah, Apple, big swing and miss with this one, for me at least. Same for the face recognition... I would need to use a pin or password to authenticate anyway, and that being the case, I would rather have a fingerprint reader as the second factor. Instead of a password or pin... no way.

Re: "ecks" or ten?

"no "tradition" of the use of roman numerals other than OSX (which I invariably hear pronounced by most people as "Oh Es Ecks" anyway)"

You mean that's not right? I've always thought that was how it was pronounced (not being an Apple user, I don't really have much reason to pronounce it or hear it pronounced; most of my exposure to it is in written form), and it sounds a lot slicker than "Oh ess ten." I mean, if you don't want it to be "oh ess ecks," why write it that way? "OS10" is only one more keypress. They picked "OSX" because it looks cooler, so it follows that the pronunciation matches the text.

"Nope, Apple has lost its mojo in my eyes. My bank account may be forever grateful, but my inner fanboi is weeping silent tears. If a love affair is to end it should at least be with a feeling of betrayal. All I'm left with is a profound sense of apathy."

Nothing gold can stay, I suppose.

I don't have any interest in iPhones (or Androids, for that matter), but it kind of reminds me of another "X" that has been pushed on us lately, in the form of Windows 10. Windows may never have been golden, per se, but XP was pretty close and 7 not too far behind. Talk about lost mojo...

Or perhaps we could discuss Mozilla and Firefox, what with their upcoming amputation of Firefox's most distinctive and defining feature (XUL addons) in their endless quest to be more like Chrome. I don't really know offhand how Chrome looks; I've only seen it a few brief moments, but when I heard that Firefox had jettisoned the search bar, my first thought was that Chrome must not have one then. And it doesn't.

We can keep our old Windows and iPhones and browsers even after they release the latest, greatest versions that we don't want, but security updates prevent that from working forever. Maybe you can skip the new iPhone for now, but your existing one won't be supported forever. Then what? At least the iPhone X is just an overpriced, underwhelming product, not one where its key feature is being removed or that is an abomination unto operating systems the world has seldom seen.

Re: Apple copying Microsoft?

"Apple copying Microsoft?

Well, they skipped the 9"

And calling it "X" for 10 brings up some none-too-happy memories of GWX.

And the reply by AC:

> ... and installed an inward-facing CEO to follow the one that actually built the business.

...who, in Microsoft's case, is trying to copy Apple and Google at every opportunity.

Windows 10 Creators Update will add app-level privacy controls

"Security – the new setting for enterprise users only, in which what's sent home is limited to “data about the Connected User Experience and Telemetry component settings, the Malicious Software Removal Tool, and Windows Defender”;"

It's still too much. What part of "no" do you not understand, MS? Ask me for the data and I may or may not decide to give it to you, but it is not yours to demand and to take without my consent.

Microsoft fixing Windows 10 'stuttering' bugs in Creators Update

Re: Sigh, Poor Ordinary Folks

"What better QA testers would you suggest than actual real world users?!"

People who know how to stress test, narrow the scope of a bug, and write an actionable bug report. People who actually run the stuff natively and not just in a VM. People who know how to test-- it's more than just using it and seeing what happens.

Kaspersky shrugs off US government sales ban proposal

Re: I wonder why that might be?

"Because Russians are not aggressors."

Neat story, but if you've already been condemned to death, the thing about the other guy being the aggressor has already been satisfied.

'Don't Google Google, Googling Google is wrong', says Google

Or the use of "reveal" as a noun. We already have a word for that, and it's too bad if it sounds too much like a book of the Bible for people to use.

Re: For techincal documentation we need

Abraham Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address while traveling the country on the back of an envelope.

Re: In the UK...

"My brother (state-side), states things like 'Ping me' in his emails. That feels me with distain too and I'm not sure why, it just does."

Because it's stupid?

Ask him his IP address and then ping it, and then give him the results. Do that consistently and he'll learn not to use that idiotic phrase with you. Emailing is not pinging. Pinging is pinging.

(I presume the cited sentence is, uh, the way it is for effect.)

Your teacher was wrong. I don't know how it's an "Oxford" comma or controversial at all. It just depends on what you're trying to say. For example:

"I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

So Ayn Rand and God are your parents, and you dedicate the book to them.

"I dedicate this book to my parents, Ayn Rand, and God."

So you dedicate the book to the following:

Your parents

Ayn Rand

God

Both are completely correct grammatically, but they don't mean the same thing. As I mentioned the other day, commas save lives:

"Let's eat, grandma."

"Let's eat grandma."

Again, both of the examples are grammatically correct, but they don't mean the same thing. Taking out a necessary comma doesn't (always) make the sentence grammatically incorrect! It makes it mean something else.

Re: Because It's Not Google

"A bit like in the novel Making History where the funny little pictures on your PC screen are call "glyphs""

If they are pictures on an otherwise flat background, like on a Windows desktop, they're icons, but if they are meant to be part of a predefined UI button or other UI element, they're referred to as glyphs.

Five ways Apple can fix the iPhone, but won't

Re: My Battery lasts all day...

If you want to go that far, my 12 year old feature phone lasts about a week on a charge (since I almost never use it), and it still has its original battery (though it is removable). Smaller and easier to carry than a smartphone too.

Red panic: Best Buy yanks Kaspersky antivirus from shelves

Re: Bounty

"Why would they need to examine documents while checking a computer's functions?"

They don't... it's an end run around the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable search and seizure. The courts have concocted this "expectation of privacy" standard to determine if a government action is infringing on a person's Constitutional right (hint: If it's in question, the answer is "yes"), and they've decided amongst themselves that when you bring a PC in for repair, you expect that it's normal for the repair people to go rooting through your stuff. That means there's no "expectation of privacy," they say, so to bring your PC in for repair is the same as giving consent for a government agent to have a gander at all of your personal stuff, even though you brought your PC to a Best Buy, not an FBI field office.

Government agents don't consider the Constitution to be a limitation on their powers, as it is intended to be. They see it as an annoyance that necessitates a series of procedural games that have to be played to pretend they're in compliance, while they actively and deliberately attempt to subvert every protection it has for ordinary people (and in full view of everyone). The Constitution says "no," but law enforcement agencies and the courts see a little asterisk by the "no," and they get to write the footnote at the bottom of the page that goes with it (and the exceptions they grant themselves are hundreds or thousands of times longer than the Constitution itself).

You can't lawfully have government agents randomly going through people's stuff to see if they broke a law; the government is required to have enough suspicion of a specific person committing a specific crime to satisfy a judge, who will then issue a search warrant. The very idea of that makes the petty tyrants bristle, so they wrote themselves a *footnote: if the people don't have an "expectation of privacy" in a given setting, then the government agents can do whatever they want (even though the words "expectation of privacy" never appear in the Constitution at all).

It's a tremendously convenient ability to have a roadmap of how you may "legally" violate the inviolable rights of anyone you wish. It's good to be the King.

Re: Counteract stupidness or it will spread

"I wish the EU would ban American software that sends data over to America which most the world see's as a hostile country, at least in the way of it's government and it's actions. "

I'm American, and I see the American government as hostile, both to myself and to the rest of the world. Not sure how any thinking person could really see it otherwise, really. They're not hostile to foreigners and friendly to Americans, or even to other American government agencies; they're just hostile, period.

"Hey! Spying on Americans is the job of the American government, not the Russian government!"

Did Best Buy say that, or did the NSA say that with their hand up the back of Best Buy like a puppet?

As an American, I'd much rather have the Russians spying on me than the NSA. The Russians don't have a habit of using the prosecutorial process to destroy Americans (who are physically in the United States). I'd be more likely to go to Best Buy to have them remove an American anti-malware and have it replaced with Kaspersky than the reverse (though in reality I'd do neither... no one works on my stuff but me).

It's official: Users navigate flat UI designs 22 per cent slower

Re: Fashion victims

> The so-called 'flat design' sucks. It's horrible, every GUI using it looks like coming from 1982.

That looks like Lotus 1-2-3 R3.0, which was released in 1989.

Re: Semi visible text

> minimal eyestrain comes from black text on #FFFFE8 background.

Still way too bright. I prefer #C1C1C1; all of my windows get that as a background, and all web pages get an overlay to darken white to that level.

Re: Mr Nielsen

"I see that Jakob Nielsen is still fighting his personal war against good design."

And three cheers to him for that. Look at all of the comments here... on a site frequented by people who spend a lot of time looking at screens, yours is the first one in several pages of comments to take issue with the article, or to mention "design" and "ugly" and "art" without a word about usability, intuitiveness, workflow, or anything else that actually matters more than aesthetics to people who actually want to get things done and not just admire whatever it is that is supposed to be a tool to accomplish a task. It speaks volumes that all you can say about any of the objections to flat design is that it's "ugly."

If I may be so bold as to speak for the other commenters: We're all part of this "war against good design." It seems like we're starting to get some traction here... maybe we can win this war and vanquish "good design" once and for all.

Re: based on 71 users

"Actually they did. When the web started it was all flat."

When the web started, links were blue and underlined, and they turned purple once they'd been followed, so the user could easily see where he'd already been. They were not flat or unflat; they were text, but there were consistent clues about what was a link and what was not.

Now, I guess it's not cool enough to have underlined or color-coded links. At least on a traditional PC, we can mouse over the elements and see if something that looks like it might be a link really is. It's really the same thing as the flat design trend; it's "designers" who care only about aesthetics (their own, subjective aesthetics) winning out over everything else.

"The abomination that was Metro in Windows 8 was so they could run it on phones barely more powerful than digital watches."

Still more powerful, though, than the 286s and 386s that ran the skeuomorphic Windows 3.0 in 1990!

"UX experts did some research and discovered that introducing 3D elements increased navigability. This must have been sometime around 1988.

Not surprising that modern research agrees, as meatspace hardware changes terribly slowly."

And that's the entire thing neatly wrapped up with a bow.

Proponents of flat design tell us that skeuomorphic design was needed back in the early days of PCs because people didn't know how to use them, and the physical resemblance to actual tangible objects helped them to grasp such a heady topic.

Now, we're told, people have been using graphical computer interfaces for years, and they no longer need the "training wheels" of skeuomorphs.

Human brains have been dealing with 3d objects in the real world for hundreds of thousands of years (assuming 'human' means 'H. sapiens'). Our ancestors also dealt with 3d objects for millions of years before that. Beings that can quickly recognize threats, useful objects, edible objects, etc., in this 3d visual world are at an advantage compared to those who take longer to do the same. Everything about our evolutionary legacy is about creating brains that are adept at identifying objects in that 3d context.

Skeuomorphs are not training wheels for people who don't know that a box containing the word "Ok" means "Ok". It sounds dumb to put it like that, but that's essentially what the flat UIers are trying to tell us. Skeuomporphs are representations of UI elements using the native "design language" our minds have evolved to work well with over thousands or millions of years of living in a 3d world full of 3d objects. Of course we process things faster that way; that's not shocking or puzzling in any way. The shocking thing would be if, despite this evolutionary legacy, we were just as good at dealing with flat UI stuff that we've been evolving to use for four or five years (while continuing to spend all of our non-screen time in the 3d real world).

Can we finally put this whole flat trend to bed and worry about what works rather than what is trendy and new?

It's happening! Official retro Thinkpad lappy spotted in the wild

Re: Thinkpad BIOS

> Tried to find a revised BIOS but no joy.

I had a similar problem with the other major marque of laptop that does wifi card whitelisting... HP. I wanted to improve the wifi, but as soon as I put in the new card, it refused to boot.

The answer for me was to find the PCI ID string for the old card in the firmware image and use a hex editor to replace that with the ID of the new card. Worked perfectly. As long as the relevant bit in the firmware image is not encrypted or compressed, the string should be there.

Be careful if you choose to do this; there is always risk when messing with firmware images.

Re: T400/C840

"I recently went through the agony of deciding whether to replace my aged ThinkPad T400 with a new laptop or simply replace the worn keyboard with the erratic spacebare and pop in an SSD (even though it has only SATAII interface)."

At first I thought the same way for my Asus laptop of similar vintage as your Thinkpad, so I bought a WD Black rust spinner for it instead of a SSD when its Seagate bit the dust. I soon regretted that, though, once I learned a bit more about SSDs and realized how relatively unimportant the maximum sequential read/write really was. I now have a Samsung 850 Evo SSD in there, and it's a really massive improvement even with SATA 2, as you already know, having done so yourself. I had the WD Black HDD back in there for a test, and it was so ponderous and slow that it felt like there was something wrong with it (but there wasn't). The difference going back from a SSD to a HDD is to me much more noticeable than going from the HDD to the SSD was, which seems kind of weird to me.

While the SATA2 interface tops out at only 250-300MB/s in sequential reads, it's still more than quick enough to allow the SSD to really shine in comparison with a HDD for the much more typical usage pattern that involves lots of short reads and random seeks. On a synthetic benchmark, the random 4k read stats are much more important, and are likely to give an improvement of at least one order of magnitude over the hard drive. The Samsung SSDs have some of the best numbers as far as 4k random reads; that and the built-in full drive encryption of the 850 were the reasons I picked that model.

US government: We can jail you indefinitely for not decrypting your data

The Bill of Rights*, a foundation of liberty and freedom in America for over 200 years.

* Void where prohibited by law. Or by the court, as it were.

Re: All Writs Act

I didn't expect the Spanish Inquisition.

Linus Torvalds passed a kidney stone and then squeezed out Linux 4.13

"And so was the naivete of the hordes who left it in place and let the WannaCry and Petya malware exploit it."

Except that this was a specific zero day within SMB1 which has since been fixed, and not by disabling SMB1. It could just as easily have been in SMB3 or anything else, which is the nature of zero days.

If you're up to date on security fixes, that particular exploit is plugged, so while the lack of security features on SMB1 will still be there, the vulnerability to EternalBlue and the malware that used it won't be.

Microsoft sets the date for Fall Creators Update

Re: Ya'll missed it by a mile...

"So if Google are making moolah from doing things and acting in a certain way, why would Microsoft do the same thing?"

You could substitute "Apple" for "Google" in that question and it would work just as well. They're trying to copy Apple's walled garden and offer their own line of overpriced "luxury" hardware (except that the Apple stuff actually works).

"Microsoft is innovating now," we keep hearing. Copying the business models of other businesses (whether or not they even apply to what MS has to offer) is innovation?

It's like the business plan of the "underpants gnomes" in South Park... Step 1. Steal underpants. Step 2. (?) Step 3. Profit!

MS thinks that if they copy the step 1 of Google and Apple, they'll get to "Profit!" without knowing what step 2 is. "Apple does this and they make more profits than us on far less revenue! If we do it, we will have Apple profits too!"

I swing back and forth between thinking Microsoft is crazy like a fox (with some kind of plan we can only guess at) and thinking they're just indescribably stupid. The things they're doing are so dumb at face value that I have a hard time believing that they're really what MS is up to, but what if they are? What if this bumbling incompetence really is what they're about right now? For those of us still within the MS gravitational field, is that any better than them being cynical but brilliant?

Re: Fall, Creators! Update.

Remember, commas save lives!

"Let's eat, grandma."

"Let's eat grandma."

Windows 10 isn't free, though, and it never was. People who already have a license for certain Windows versions can get 10 for no additional charge, but that doesn't make it free. The vast majority of Windows revenue in the consumer space comes from OEM sales anyway, and that has not changed-- MS is most certainly not giving away Windows 10 for free to OEMs who will then install it on the PCs people buy.

For the time being, it looks like MS is serious when they say they are using the collected telemetry data to "improve the product," which seems harmless and benign enough. Which person who uses Windows would not want it to constantly evolve into something better?

What they leave out of that little claim is recognition that they fired their quality assurance people to save themselves some money, so now they've decided to force their home and SOHO customers to be beta testers for free. Few of these "testers" have any kind of clue about how to file a bug report that is actually helpful, let alone knowing how to test to narrow the scope of the bug and define it as well as it can be defined, so telemetry is a must-- it provides the bug reports, with enough details (which may or may not matter for any specific bug) that the necessary data is invariably going to be in there somewhere in the vast database containing all of the telemetry data.

I don't wish to be part of Microsoft's effort to make end users into beta testers against their will, even if it does ostensibly "help MS make Windows better." My thought is that Microsoft should be doing more to make Windows better, not the end users. If MS wishes to procure my services as a beta tester, they can email me or call me and we will discuss pricing and other terms. I may or may not be willing to do it, but we can at least talk about it. I will not, though, be forced to do it for free for a product I paid for. I won't be a part of this insane idea to fire QA testers to save money and then use your customers (who pay YOU for a finished product, not a job that doesn't pay anything) for that task.

Re: Promises, promises

"Does that mean there will be the removal of all the slurping code and the stupid flat phone interface because that is the only way it could be 'the best yet'."

"Hey! Don't you worry about that. Take a look at this! Paint 3d! Wow, shiny, isn't it? Isn't that really what you wanted? Shiny shiny shiny! We added the ribbon to the debugger too! Wow!"

MS tells us they have to have this "rapid update" cycle in today's world, yet all it brings is more crap no one asked for and yet another failure to address the core complaints people have had with Windows 10 for more than two years now. MS has to put new "features" into each biannual release to justify having that release and therefore the entire concept of "WaaS," but there simply aren't enough bells and whistles to distract people from the ugly UI, the lack of control people have over their own PCs, the spying, the ads, and everything else they've been telling us we really should not care about.

MongoDB quits Solaris, wants to work on an OS people actually use

Re: Welcome to commercially driven open source...

Everyone needs to make a living, and if a person can do that while working on an open-source project, that project can be reasonably certain he is going to be giving it significant effort; after all, it's his job. Otherwise, the contributor will have to spend his working hours on some other thing to keep the lights on and food on the table, and if any time is left over after that, time with the spouse and kids, errands, household chores, only then can he consider donating some of the time he has left to whatever open-source project he favors.

Someone doing coding for a living can be given a job description that includes the drudge work of debugging. It's part of the nature of work that not everything you do is going to be the most fun thing you could have chosen if you were able to, of course. But if you are the person donating a slice of what little free time he has after everything else he has to do, it's because you want something out of it other than money. A hobby, in other words, which is usually something done for entertainment.

Maybe he would be such a giving or dedicated person that he would volunteer his time to do un-fun things like debugging, but more likely he would want to do something fun like adding new features. When one's time is volunteered, no one has the authority to demand that a given contributor stop working on new features and work on bug reports... they're happy to have any contribution they can get, especially if the contribution is of high quality.

As such, I tend to believe that commercial involvement in OSS is a good thing, but it's not without its limitations. Commercial entities can always withdraw support from a project if there is not enough money in it, but that can happen even with non-profits... consider how Mozilla is only months away from stripping the defining, central feature of Firefox that was its reason to be, which is to say its powerful XUL addons. The entire point of Firefox was to be a lean, quick browser that had a feature set limited to those things that nearly every user was going to use, with the more advanced features supplied by addons rather than being part of the base package as was the norm with the Suite (now Seamonkey).

While the project itself is not being abandoned, for many of its users, it might as well be; I for one know I won't be using any version of Firefox that can't run my UI addons or provide the same functionality natively. I have about 21 addons active now (all marked 'legacy'); want to place any guesses as to whether the new FF will incorporate all of the UI changes/options my 21 addons provide? The odds are about the same as me winning the lottery (which I never play).

Fortunately, FF is open-source, so projects like Pale Moon and Waterfox are possible. Whether they get enough traction to get addon devs to continue to update their Firefox-obsolete addons for the derivative browsers remains to be seen, but at least there's the possibility. If something like Windows started to take an insane turn (and if has, of course), our only choices are go along for the ride or get off the ship.

Mazda and Toyota join forces on Linux-based connected car platform

"No, not what *people* want at all. I've noticed for decades that cars seem to be built to cater to car salesmen."

That reminds me of a discussion I read on a UI blog about how Apple devices, since the demise of Steve Jobs, seem to be oriented not toward advanced or even beginning users, but toward prospective users. Things like disappearing scroll indicators to let the user know where he is in the document result in an uncluttered UI that probably looks really simple and easy to a prospective buyer in the Apple Store, but once that person gets the device home and starts to use it, he begins to notice that these features inhibit his use of the device.

I haven't been able to find that blog again, and I don't remember the name of it, but it is one of those things that had the "ring of truth" to it... I wonder if it is helpful to Apple's bottom line by promoting new sales to former non-Apple customers, or if it does more harm by driving more seasoned users to consider other platforms. I don't think ALL Apple users are cultists who would use Apple devices even if Apple screwed them up so much that it was nearly impossible to get anything done.

Re: Please Stop

"Knobs that rotate endlessly to change volume/fan speed/temperature, likewise up/down buttons that mean you have to look at the readout you're upping or downing."

Absolutely this. My older American car has all of the tactile features; I can operate all of it without looking at the controls, from the stereo to the climate control to anything else. I rented an American car a couple of weeks ago, though, and so much of it was tied into the touchscreen control; it was to me impossible to try to operate the radio even while moving, if I wanted to be as certain as possible of not running into a pole or something like that. No tactile feedback on any of the controls and a LCD display that can be hard to read in certain angles of the sun... this is more advanced than my decades-old car where I could do it all by feel?

Re: 3 years of supported apps?

OBDI generates trouble codes too, though, without the data logging capability required by law. That's the part I don't like. Far from being hostage to a carmaker's special equipment as the other poster wrote, I can pull those codes with a three inch length of wire or an unwound paper clip, by jumpering two pins together on the test plug and watching the codes flashed by pulses of the check engine light. It is true that the level of sophistication of the OBDI system is not as great as that as OBDII, but then neither is the complexity of the entire system as a whole.

I wonder how much weight you could dump by getting rid of all that extraneous stuff... the lightweight "doughnut" spares don't weigh much, so it probably wouldn't be too hard to lose enough to make it a wash if the spare is added.

Is there at least a provision for the spare if you should choose to add one?

Re: 3 years of supported apps?

People diagnosed problems long before there was such a thing as OBD, and it takes more than plugging into a computer to actually diagnose anything. That gives you one data point, but you still have to know how to interpret the data. You can't just plug in and immediately know you need to replace the catastrophic converter. (heh).

I've never had an OBD II car, nor have I ever been held for ransom by my car's maker. I can go anywhere I want to get it fixed; compared to cars today, it's a marvel of simplicity. Simple cable-controlled throttle, cable-controlled clutch, manual transmission with only the most rudimentary sensors...

there's nothing in there that requires any marvels of technology for a shop to diagnose, though just as often I have done it myself. I can pull codes from my car's ECU with a three inch piece of wire; beyond that, it's pretty standard automobile diagnostics. I can do a lot just with a simple multimeter.

That's not to say everything is bad with OBD II, but the government's involvement in determining that ALL cars sold in the US must have this is not good, and that standardized format has led to other stuff I don't like, such as governments demanding to plug things into my car before I get permission to drive it on the road every year. We don't do that where I live, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.

I don't want a car that logs any data beyond adjustment of the a/f and spark tables; if I don't want to be spied on by Microsoft with Win 10 or Samsung with my TV or Amazon with Alexa or Google with Android, I certainly don't want any data logged about throttle position angles or brake inputs or anything else either. Even if it has to be manually queried by physical contact with the OBD port, it's there, and I don't want it to be. It's even worse if there is connectivity that allow any data about my car (at all) to be transmitted over the air. Do not want. The only radio built into the car should be in a DIN format and be strictly a receiver.

I know exactly when OBD II was introduced... that would be 1996. I remember opposing it, not that it did any good. The fears that it would lead to the end of the aftermarket modification industry didn't happen, but it has limited choices in a few areas. There were still some of the 90s before OBDII, and even at the end of the 90s, some of the OBDI cars were still fairly current. They're quite old by now, as I well know, and getting older all the time. I don't need a thing in a car that wasn't available then.

Re: 3 years of supported apps?

Used to?

Does that mean car radios are not in new cars at all anymore?

I wouldn't buy a car without the ability to upgrade that as I see fit, and by "upgrade" I mean removing the old one and sliding in the new one. Tactile buttons can be operated by feel without looking away from the road; touchscreens, not so much. Keep them out of the car if you want me to consider it.

The more I hear about new cars, the more I realize I'll never buy a new one again. I... don't want any of this crap they're putting in there. I don't want a car that's connected, that has any kind of communication ability with anything anywhere. Don't like OBD II. Don't like new laptops, don't like smartphones, don't like smart TVs (or anything else "smart" or IoT), don't like Windows 10... it's like the entire tech world decided to put out only crap from now on.

Grumble... to hell with the 2000s, I'm going back to the 1990s...

Well, debugger me. Microsoft's BSOD fixer is getting a makeover

"Some bits aren't *for* beginners, microsoft."

It could be argued that Windows itself fits into this category. The beginners have iPads now; they can do everything they want to that thing and the chances of getting it good and screwed up are minimal. There's no need to know anything about computing to use one; the fact that the thing has a file system somewhere under all of that UI is completely hidden, so great is the level of abstraction. For people who really and truly only want to use (the web, Facebook, whatever) and not understand it or develop any actual skill or knowledge that would result in them NOT being a beginner anymore, a device dumbed down and locked down is probably the best choice for them.

I would not want to use such a thing. I would want to be able to change things and get at the nitty-gritty underneath. An iPad is like a car with the hood (bonnet?) welded shut... no thanks. The ability to mess things up is power... you can't have power and "for beginners" at the same time. The people who never needed a full PC in the first place (but had to have one back when that was the only way to use the internet) have moved on to mobile devices; those of us left in the "real computer" space are not here because of ease-of-use.

I am sure there are exceptions; there are always a few. Still, I think that those of us who remain in PC circles (not just professional IT people that are in unusually high concentration here on this site for obvious reasons) are not simply a randomly-sampled subset of the PC usership that existed in the pre-smartphone days.

Now that the BSOD is a sad face :( and "something happened," maybe the debugging info will just be "Yep, something happened all right. Sorry. :( "

Facebook will deny ads to repeat promoters of fake news

Re: Cue the inevitable

I haven't yet heard any news about Trump so far from the so-called "mainstream" media that weren't fake in some way. Of course, I stopped paying attention after I realized that it was all propaganda, so the stories I hear are the ones that bubble up from the swamp and make it into my consciousness, like the other day when a story here on The Reg said that Trump was a racist (fake) and that he had expressed support for white supremacists or Nazis (fake) while condemning anti-fascist protestors (fake; Antifa is anything but). The whole Russian connection was fake; while reports that some of his statements about never having met any Russian ever can be proven false, the underlying premise of each of those stories is that it supports the collusion thing, which is fake.

Some of the news is fake by means of a lie of omission, in that same manner. Some is outright fake, and some is partial truth that still amounts to fake news by that bit which isn't fake. Partial truths make the lies told at the same time seem more believable. Then there's the presentation of things as being scandalous and terrible when they're not, like Trump exercising his lawful authority to fire subordinates as he sees fit (something every president is entitled to do). It's not fake news in the sense that he didn't do it; it's fake in the sense that they're presenting it as wrongdoing when it isn't.

The hookers peeing on the bed was fake. Trump being a pussy-grabber is fake. Trump insulting a reporter's disability is fake. Trump having been under investigation by Comey is fake. Trump imposing a ban on Muslims entering the country is fake. Even a blind pig finds an acorn every now and then, but the media actually reporting honestly would be even more of a surprise to me than finding an acorn would be to the pig. I am sure that there have been SOME stories out there that were accurate, just by the law of numbers, but they're not the "blockbuster" ones the left thinks are so good that they're trying to use them to destroy Trump (which really should be the most irrefutable claims, not the most easily refuted). If the media had to issue retractions every time a story was misleading, factually incorrect, or otherwise not up to normal standards of journalism, the retractions segment would exceed the length of the news segment on any given day.

Alex Jones doesn't (presumably; I really don't know much about his show, having never heard it) issue retractions because he's probably not taken seriously by anyone, and in the US, you have to show that there was harm done by the libel/slander and that it was likely to be believed before you can win a case. It's a good deal harder than it is in the UK to make a successful claim, particularly if the person targeted is a public figure.

As such, he's probably never presented with serious threats of lawsuits over his claims; even if the standards for libel or slander in the US are met, the people he targets probably don't want to elevate such outlandish statements to the level of serious consideration by responding to them. I'm merely guessing; I can't tell you why people are not suing the daylights out of Jones if he is making so many crackpot statements. Your guess is as good as mine. The point is that retractions are not a sign of serious journalism as much as they are a sign of fear of lawsuits from the people they libeled, and if a serious news outfit gets things wrong enough to make them fear lawsuits from public figures even in America's legal system, and it starts to become a pattern rather than an occasional "oops,:" it may be indicative of a broader problem.

Whether Trump is "brought down" or not will have nearly nothing to do with his own actions. Reality hasn't been a part of any of this so far; it's all about "we know that guy sucks really really bad, so even if the facts aren't exactly right, let's go with it, 'cause we gotta get him, and we know that he probably thinks all that bad stuff we accuse him of but can't prove, because he's the embodiment of all evil and automatically will do the most evil thing in every single case." It will be about whether the people believe the fake news or not, with the actual truth playing an ancillary role at best.

San Franciscans unite to smite alt-right with minefield of doggy shite

Re: Remember when...

"To go back to the OPs point: violent protest is unjustified against the Nazis at this place and time."

There are no real Nazis at this time. Those that call themselves that are a bunch of idiots out to get a little publicity and to parade their stupidity before us all. They're too small in number to even worry about... the idea that there has to be an "Antifa" movement to oppose them is laughable. They're irrelevant, right until the media makes them into a story that is relevant.

The leftists out there in Antifa know this... they're deliberately trying to conflate the irrelevant and laughable "Nazi" and "KKK" idiots with anything even remotely right-wing, in a massive attempt at a strawman fallacy. If you make your political opponents into literal Nazis, it makes it so much easier to oppose them than if you had to debate their actual political opinions! Never mind that their neo-Marxist beliefs are only a hair's breadth from actual fascist beliefs, and that what is meant by "right-wing" these days is about as far from fascism as one can get. Small, decentralized government, deregulation, individual liberty, low taxes, free enterprise, unrestricted speech... none of that is any more popular with fascists than it is with communists.

Re: Fines?

"I fully support your right to free speech, so long as you also accept my right to throw shit at you if what you shout in the name of free speech is racist, sexist, dogmatic cretinitude."

If you think you can physically assault someone with biohazardous waste if they say something you don't like, you don't support free speech.

"And no, you can't object or protest when I call you an ignorant shit-eating cretin, because it's my right to do so in the name of free speech."

It is your right to do so in the name of free speech, but it is also the person's right to object and protest. You don't really seem to "get" this whole free speech thing at all.

Ad blocking basically doesn't exist on mobile

Was it at least a really cool hammer like Mjolnir? If it's just a regular hammer, I can get one of those anywhere... I'm taking the cash.

Re: Doesn't exist.. my ass..

There are other root apps that claim to be able to hide the root status from other apps.

NSA ramps up PR campaign to keep its mass spying powers

Re: You only need to remember one thing...

That also shows how foolish it is for politicians across the globe to advocate the idea that they should have backdoors for every encryption-enabled software product in existence, and that it won't harm regular people 'cause they won't give it to just anybody.

They handn't planned on EternalBlue being given to just anybody either, but it was.

If there is a backdoor, it will be used, and even if I trusted the US or any other government to only use it lawfully (stop laughing! This isn't funny!), I certainly don't trust them to keep it a secret. I'd put money on the cybercriminals cracking the backdoor-weakened cryptography long before I'd bet on any government keeping the keys a secret. How long would they use those keys before we found out they had them? One can only guess.

Re: "he couldn't even get his party to agree on what to do about Obamacare. "

Most Republicans only like to oppose Democrats when they know it won't matter. They voted to repeal Obamacare many times when the Dems had the White House and the Senate... they'll fight like lions if they know they're going to lose anyway. They like being the token opposition that never gets to do anything... it's their little part in the play and they're okay with it. They have to pretend they want to win and prevail and all that kind of thing (political theatre, you know), but they really don't want to.

Every now and then, something happens and they find themselves with the levers of power, and it freaks the hell out of them. They know their assigned role is not to advance the policies they ran on, their so-called core beliefs-- those are just for show, to dupe the people into thinking there's a real choice, that there's a battle of ideas going on in the halls of government. What do they do when they, despite their best efforts, end up in the majority? If they vote as they promised in that case, why, they may actually end up causing the kind of change they campaigned on, and that. was. never. part. of. the. deal.

The US is effectively a one-party state, and is not a working democracy (representative or otherwise). Trump is not part of the one party, so he will be opposed and vilified by operatives from "both" parties. No one but a loose cannon like Trump was ever going to stand a chance in defeating the Hillary, the President appointed by the establishment party to ascend to the throne. The fix was in on the Democrat side; Bernie lost before he even began, and he knuckled under and supported the corrupt machine candidate who robbed him in a heartbeat. Trump was such a blowhard that the fixers who dispatched Bernie thought he'd do their work for them.

Not that it matters, anyway. We can see that the president of the US is merely a figurehead now; the entrenched bureaucrats from the swamp are the ones in control. If you dislike Trump, and if you're reading this, chances are you do; it may sound good to you that the bureaucrats are refusing to get with the program and respect the authority of the duly elected leader of their branch of government, but consider what that means: They only obey lawful orders if they happen to agree with them. In what way is a government controlled by such an oligarchy a "democracy?"

Node.js forks again – this time it's a war of words over anti-sex-pest codes of conduct

Re: Just the tech please

"That would explain the quixotic secession movement in Cali..."

It's hard to know which side supports Calexit more-- those in California or the rest of the US outside of California.