Posts by Updraft102

Photobucket says photo-f**k-it, starts off-site image shakedown

Re: Have they tried...

If they've looked at the ads that have been served up, they've supported the delivery of the pictures. It may or may not be enough to allow the company to make money off of it, but they *have* supported it. And I'd hardly call $400 a year "a little" money, particularly when the cost has always been zero in the past.

The question is one of how much bandwidth is being served up per ad view. Embedded images don't get much of a chance to display ads to the viewers; it's the uploader who sees them while using the web interface for that purpose. If he's running a business on eBay and has a lot of people viewing images hosted by PB, that could easily be costing them a considerable amount of money without any chance at a return, and I don't blame them for wanting to monetize that or put a stop to it.

On the other hand, the person who simply uses it to upload images to various web forums is probably not going to be anywhere close to the kind of bandwidth that would justify paying that much.

I've been using Photobucket for years for hosting images on various web forums that don't offer that themselves. I don't know when I created the account, but it was years and years ago (probably when I moved off of my dial-up account with its personal web space; I always used that before I used PB. That was a LONG time ago!). I would not be surprised if my PB is almost as old as the site itself. In that time, I've probably used it a dozen times to upload at most a megabyte's worth of images for posting on a low-traffic web forum, ultimately to be viewed a few dozen times. Maybe half a gigabyte total over ~10+ years. Very, very low volume stuff, and seldom used (but always the go-to when I needed it). It's been a couple of years since I used it last.

Is all of that put together worth $400, let alone ten times that? Ten years of service would have cost four thousand dollars, and that's if it was only over ten years. I think $4000 for 500MB of cumulative bandwidth is a bit much. Of course, that's probably close to the minimum anyone who embeds would use it for, but that's just the point-- who does this high price target? It's clearly not me.

For people using $400 worth of bandwidth in a year, whatever that may be, it's obviously an appropriate price. Is that the typical amount of bandwidth their embedding account holders are using, though? I would find that exceptionally difficult to believe. It would seem to make more sense to have a certain ceiling per month that will continue under the free plan, with a cost per gigabyte above and beyond that baseline.

$400 just isn't a reasonable price. That's a "we're trying to kill off any demand for this service so we can get out of the business" price. If that's the goal, I would rather have them come out and say so rather than slap a completely asinine price on it and kill demand that way.

America throws down gauntlet: Accept extra security checks or don't carry laptops on flights

Re: "Yeah, let's remove all the security from airports, I agree. "

"Non Americans find this absurd level of security hilarious, given that every 9/11 plane was on an internal flight."

They're not trying to prevent 9/11... it already happened. They claim to be responding to some intel they have about a new threat using bombs built into laptops. Whether you believe them is another thing completely, but that's what they're claiming. Of course it's ridiculous... most people in the US find it so too, I'd say, but no one ever asked us if we wanted this.

"We find Trumps travel bans on even more hilarious given the #1 source of the terrorist was Saudi Arabia."

They're not trying to prevent 9/11... it already happened. Those countries were Obama's list of countries that represent the greatest threat to the US at the present time, according to the current intel.

" What are you going to do, fly without a laptop? (In my case yes. Next time I leave the country, I'll be on a plane but my laptop is flying DHL.)"

Perhaps you could pop the hard drive/SSD out of the laptop (if it's one of those where this is possible and easy; on mine it takes about 20 seconds to remove with a phillips-head screwdriver) and put in a dummy one that has nothing much on it (just the OS and some really basic crap to make them think it's a real setup... let them have the passwords, or just don't set any). You could then DHL the device's actual storage (hopefully a SSD, being lighter and more shock resistant than a HDD), and if you get a self-encrypting model, you don't have to worry that it's going to be read by anyone in transit. If you use a strong SED password and it's still intact when you get it back in your hands, you can be pretty sure that no one has read your stuff or done an "evil maid" style attack at the OS level. They'd have to want you badly enough to use a compromised firmware at that point, I think (and that might wipe the drive, so you'd know something happened), and I doubt the US government is going to risk having such valuable tools discovered unless they really want you specifically (in which case you hopefully know it and should just stay far away).

3 1/2 years to go?

You really think this is about Trump?

The USA grew into a surveillance state under Obama, using a law signed by Bush as justification. TSA started by Bush, grew into its current level of nastiness under Obama. This isn't new, and it isn't about Trump.

Re: Shelley Berman knew how to do it

"Because, of course, profiling has been shown to be inerrant and effective in every case."

Could it be any worse than what we have now? The TSA has a spectacularly bad record of actually stopping anything... they're always looking to stop the previous attempt (the previous successful attempt, like the shoe bomber being able to get the explosive on board, or the underwear bomber doing the same). It was dumb luck and observant passengers who stopped those... the TSA was, and is, useless.

Profiling is no magic bullet, but the Israelis have offered to show us how to do it right. Israel is a major, major target, of course, but their security has proven quite effective. Trying to keep the means to do harm off a plane, rather than the people who would do harm, will always put the flying public at an extreme disadvantage. The terrorists put a bomb in a shoe, so now we all have to remove our shoes and have them x-rayed. The terrorists explored liquid explosives disguised as contact lens saline, so now we can't bring more than trivial amounts of liquid on board. It is the airport security equivalent of Microsoft Security Essentials-- it only looks for attacks that have already been documented, and is completely useless against anything new (and even for what it's supposed to stop, it's not that good at it).

As I mentioned before, people have body cavities that can hold stuff. Someone mentioned that it would dull the effect of the explosive, I think, but no one said the bomb would have to stay in there while it was detonated. They do have lavatories on planes, and unless we are ready to allow real-time monitoring of every lavatory in every plane by actual people, we can't stop the lavs from being used as staging points for terror attacks.

I'm not saying that we should eliminate screening aimed at finding bombs... just that if that's all we have, we waste a lot of time and money screening people that are not threats, and the effectiveness is questionable at best.

Re: Shelley Berman knew how to do it

Profiling would be an improvement over what we have now, but we're far too politically correct to countenance such a thing. The Israelis are experts in how to keep terrorists off planes, borne of necessity, and they've offered to help us learn how to do it, but we'd rather keep having government agents feel up old ladies and children in the name of safety. It serves another purpose for them, though; it gets us used to being the government's bitch whenever the government demands it. Land of the free, indeed. I wish we still were.

Re: Give us all your passwords

People who come in through the front door and obey the laws _are_ greeted warmly, and foreign visitors to the US are often amazed at how congenial and welcoming ordinary Americans are (having heard in the media things that would seem to indicate otherwise). If you want to sneak across a border and work unlawfully, then we have a problem. If your visa is for a year and you decide stay forever, we have a problem-- and the same is true in any other country, including yours.

When you give someone permission to come to your country on a visa, it means they're welcome pursuant to the terms of that visa, but not welcome to move in and do as they please from then on. I don't expect to be warmly welcomed if I attempt to stow away in a shipping container and gain illegal access to the UK, nor do I expect to be treated as a citizen with full rights if I come on a student visa, for example, and decide to stay. I'm not a citizen of your country, so I'm not entitled to enter it whenever I like... I have to get permission first. Why is it bad when the US seeks to enforce its laws to the same effect?

I agree that the TSA is horrible... I think it should be disbanded completely, as a matter of fact. It's a rogue agency that seems to think that upsetting passengers prevents terrorism... they don't have the first clue about how to actually prevent terrorism, so let's just make it a hassle to travel by air and pretend that is all that is needed. I wouldn't want to subject myself to that either, and I've pretty much reconciled myself with the idea that I will never fly again because I don't want to have to submit to the TSA goons. None of that, though, means that the US is wrong for enforcing immigration and visa laws, just like every other country in the world does.

"Enhanced screening: "Give us all your passwords so we can check for bombs."

Remember, it's the USA. No logic is required."

It's logical if you don't try to connect it to what they say it is (security screening). The US government (independent of Trump or Obama or Bush; this has been going on since the idiotic USA PATRIOT Act) seems to want to be a full-on totalitarian surveillance state, and this is just the first step in getting people accustomed to the next level of invasive intrusions. The road to tyranny is paved with "necessary" measures like this that are done "for safety."

Re: How about if we stop making more terrorists in the first place?

"Completely right. People should just accept another country blowing their homes up, blowing their parents and children up."

We didn't accept having the World Trade Center blown up, with a lot of people's parents inside. It doesn't justify the US killing innocents either, and in hindsight I think nearly everyone agrees that invading Iraq was a huge mistake, but to pretend that the US started this by invading Iraq is to be willfully blind. They were already killing westerners (mostly Americans, but the World Trade Center did live up to its name) by the thousand years before the US went into Iraq with the goal of regime change.

Re: How about if we stop making more terrorists in the first place?

I was talking about relative inteventionism in the middle east, and the countries that are known for it, since that's what we are discussing here (especially Iraq). What do you see in this thread? Lots and lots of people right here blaming the US for it... sometimes you see some blaming the UK as well. France never gets mentioned as one of the bad guys, and in terms of Iraq, they got that one right. If that's not a good enough example for you, look at other countries that have been hit by the Islamists... they don't restrict their attacks to targets that represent countries that have intervened in the middle east.

The Islamists killing westerners are not coy about it. They tell us in no uncertain terms why they do it. It's because their view of their religion is one where it tells them that they need to go kill infidels and instill a worldwide caliphate by any means necessary. I take them at their word! It may be more fun to blame the US for invading Iraq (and Afghanistan, to a lesser degree) in the years after 9/11 (conveniently ignoring 9/11 itself as well as the al Qaeda attacks leading up to 9/11 during the Clinton years) for all of the terrorism, but that's not the cause of the conflict. The Iraq invasion was a misguided effort that was itself an effect of 9/11, so it can't have been the cause.

If you want to say the proximal cause of the Islamic terrorism in the 1990s leading up to 9/11 was infidel boots on "holy" Muslim soil following the Iraq invasion of Kuwait... well, too bad. The US was and is in Saudi Arabia at the invitation of the Saudis, and if the terrorists don't recognize the sovereign authority of the Saudi government to allow such things, that's their problem, not ours. The fact that their mindset hasn't yet adapted to the concept of the modern nation-state doesn't mean that those of us who live in the modern world have any duty to defer to them.

The Islamists are welcome to have and express their opinions about world affairs and other such things peacefully, as is the custom in civil society, like we're all doing now. I can assure you that there are a whole lot of things I don't like about the world either, but I'm not blowing anyone up, shooting anyone, or running them over with a car over it. If I did, the blame would be properly assigned to me, not to the people who offended my worldview. No one would be blaming the world for having made a terrorist out of me by not capitulating to my wacky views about nation states and government that have been outdated for the better part of a millennium.

Re: How about if we stop making more terrorists in the first place?

Because the US getting out of other countries will change ISIS' mind about wanting a worldwide Islamic caliphate and believing that killing infidels is doing their god's will?

Notice any countries other than the US being attacked lately? Not all of them are known as hotbeds of foreign interventionism (France, for one).

Re: Anon

Just wait until the bombers discover that they have body cavities that can hold stuff.

Re: Last I read...

I'm part of the frightened public, but I'm not afraid of the terrorists. It's the people "protecting" me that give me the cold sweats.

Don't panic, but Linux's Systemd can be pwned via an evil DNS query

Re: Just like to point out..

Who knew it would be that hot and dry on the Oregon Trail?

Re: If THIS isn't a reason to hate systemd...

A security vulnerability isn't reason enough to hate anything. I am skeptical of systemd because it goes against the Unix philosophy of a series of simple modules that each do one task really well, which is part of what has made Unix and Unix-like OSes endure for decades, but that's the neat thing about open source: No one forces any of the other projects or distro maintainers to use it. Most of them seem to be headed that way, though... in some cases, it's because the upstream has already made the decision, but within that upstream bunch are a lot of people that have a lot of passion for their projects that know a ton more than I do about Linux, and they are going systemd and PulseAudio.

Personally, I have never had any of the audio difficulties PulseAudio is supposed to cause, and Mint seems to be the same whether I select a systemd boot or an Upstart (though it does boot a little faster with systemd; Windows 8.1 trounces them both, even with the Windows fast boot disabled... not that I really care much, as I reboot pretty rarely).

It's pretty clear that Microsoft is dedicated to destroying Windows, and I will never migrate to 10 if it even somewhat resembles the mess it currently is (and it's pretty clear that MS is dedicated to making sure it remains an unusable crapfest), so Linux clearly is it. The local OS won't even matter if everything moves to "the cloud" and webapps as the prognosticators claim. I just hope to have a usable browser after Mozilla's upcoming suicide later this year so that I can use all that stuff. Firefox and FF derivatives are the only browsers in existence for the PC that I consider usable at the moment (there are none on Android, as far as I am concerned).

Very warm icebergs are just called water.

Microsoft: We'll beef up security in Windows 10 Creators Edition Fall Update

Re: Fall update...

"should have been in Windows 10 from the start (Like having stuff in the Settings, rather than Control Panel)..."

If you're using a phone or tablet, sure.

If you're using a PC, you shouldn't even be seeing the settings app. Control Panel is for PCs, settings for mobiles. Until MS gets this straight, I'm not going anywhere near Windows 10... though that's just one of a dozen things wrong with 10 that would have to be fixed first.

US Copyright Office suggests 'right to repair' laws a good idea

"the report suggests using the DMCA to tie up the repair market wasn't a legitimate use of the law."

There are no legitimate uses of the law.

WannaCrypt blamed for speed camera reboot frenzy in Australia

Re: U 1F4A9

In the US, the speed cameras are not usually (if ever) owned by the police or any government agency. They are owned by the ticket camera company, and operated by them as well. The police aren't really involved in the process... the ticket companies like to claim that police review all of the pictures before citations are issued (by the ticket company, as always), but there are, shall we say, questions over whether that really happens.

It all depends on state laws, but in states where the ticketing officer plays the role of the prosecutor, that role is taken on by an employee of the ticket camera company (who has, of course, no official authority or power of any kind). If there is an actual prosecutor, the ticket camera representative plays the prosecution witness.

You can bet the ticket camera company representative knows enough about how the stuff works to satisfy the court. It's their job to do that in that gray area where the ticket industry lives, where they like to pretend that traffic infractions (i.e. a person allegedly violating vehicle code, otherwise known as "the law") are civil and not criminal offenses, allowing the state to make up whatever rules they want in order to limit motorists' ability to prevent them from cashing in.

If it really is a civil offense to drive at 60 mph on a road signed 45, the state should have to prove how the motorist driving that speed on that day and in that time and place cost the state the amount they're requesting, and that they need the motorist to pay up to make them whole again.

If it's as simple as "the law says 45, and you exceeded it, and it says that if you do that, there's a penalty of $100," then that's not really civil... it's clearly statutory, unless you want to do away with the protections for the accused that exist within the criminal code. So now we have an entire industry built around treating minor offenders as a cash cow to be milked, and the existence of ticket camera companies (and the way the whole system is set up) is just one sign of that.

Microsoft admits to disabling third-party antivirus code if Win 10 doesn't like it

Re: '34 years of development - Windows 10 is the result'

"How do you get Windows 10 into any sort of repair mode, other than deciding before you shut it down that it must be time for it to fail to start so you can choose safe mode before you know you need it? How is that sort of shit even defensible?"

Boot from the Windows 10 DVD or USB stick (which works even if Windows is so messed up it can't even get into the recovery environment) and select repair. It's definitely a step backward from the old F8 menu, though, and you can have that back with a registry edit (assuming you do that in advance, before there is any trouble). I did with Windows 8.1 (which also has the F8 removed by default), and I have used F8 many times since then.

Supposedly, the F8 option has been removed for purposes of speeding up the boot process, but I can't see any difference between having it enabled and having it not enabled. If there is a difference, it's too slight to be noticed, and with that being the case, I would rather have the F8 menu be standard once again, for the reasons you mentioned. But this is from the company that now thinks it's appropriate to have a sad face emoticon and "something happened" instead of the old blue screen, and that now uses a creepily familiar tone with system messages like "We're setting things up for you" or "we've updated your computer." In the ransomware era... who is "we?" (Who is General Failure and why is he reading my drive C:?)

Re: Linux "pushers" again

"Linus and the likes generally have the user interface down. However 90% of people (I assume) are 100% invested in GUI being *exactly* the same."

The same as what version, though? Windows doesn't even offer a GUI that is exactly the same as the previous version of Windows. One of the reasons I like Cinnamon on Mint so much is that it's more like Windows 7 than is any later version of Windows. MS is so determined to tack a phone interface on to the desktop, come Hell or high water...

Re: Microsoft: from vindictive to cack-handed...

"Now the era of Gates and Ballmer is over (and thank God for that), Microsoft is far less vindictive;"

The Ballmer era gave us Windows XP and Windows 7, both far better than the monstrosity we are being force-fed now.

I don't see MS as less vindictive. They've just changed their target from their competitors to their users. They're just as hostile and aggressive as ever, only now they're directing that aggression at the very customers they need to remain in business. Now they're incompetent AND vindictive.

I would take that to mean that only people who don't live in Russia _should_ use Kaspersky. What do I care if the Russian government has my personal data? They're not going to use what they learned to fabricate some nonsense about how I must be a terrorist or criminal and come arrest me when I am not in Russia. My own country may do that to me, but they're not getting that information from Kaspersky. They'd get it from Microsoft or Google, which are about a million times worse.

Re: Admission

We already know that Microsoft uses the relatively benign phrase "not supported" (as in "Windows 7 is not supported on Kaby Lake and Ryzen") when they really mean something much more sinister, like "we don't care if it works, we're going to sabotage it."

With that in mind, "not compatible" probably means exactly the same thing.

It doesn't seem like Microsoft really has any specific competitive reason to block Kaspersky. Defender doesn't make MS any money... it's an antimalware program of last resort, something to fill the gap if the user doesn't provide something else. It's not like Internet Explorer, where MS hoped to leverage their browser dominance to push proprietary WWW extensions and sell more Frontpage and IIS server packages that supported those extensions.

Similarly, there's no great reason for MS to remove things like Speccy, Classic Shell, or CCleaner. They don't have competing products for any of those things.

To me, these seemingly random uninstallations, along with the unwanted download/installation of apps (and other assorted things) seem to be a display of MS marking its territory. Your formerly personal computer is now Microsoft's territory, and MS wants to make damn sure you are aware of it. For now, they're removing stuff that MS doesn't have a direct competitor for... once people have gotten used to MS removing stuff and accepted it as the new normal, who knows?

Re: Nothing new under the sun

Welcome to Windows as a service. You've been serviced! All Windows 10 users are there to be serviced. Against their will, if necessary.

"One of the key planks of Kaspersky’s case against Microsoft is that it cut compatability testing times from two months to six days."

Come on, Kaspersky, you must know that Microsoft testing is now being done by end users post-release.

Not Apr 1: Google stops scanning your Gmail to sling targeted ads at you

Re: Gmail, or Gmail?

"Worry more about the search engines you use (my primary is DuckDuckGo, but I miss Blekko and hope they are being fed well in IBM's dungeons), and the "Like" trackers on darn near every site."

As Pascal Monett said, "Thank goodness for NoScript." All social media scripts are blocked, along with Google Analytics, Tag Manager, Ad Services...

I miss the original AltaVista, which for me was the first search engine that actually seemed competent. I used it right up till the point when it became Bing (even after it was bought by Yahoo), and the quality of the search results fell into the toilet. Google's search quality has done the same thing since then too... it's much worse than it was when I switched from the no longer useful AltaVista.

Re: Users can change those settings at any time, including disabling ads personalization.

I've never seen any ads in Gmail. Not that I use Gmail addresses for anything important, but I do use it for throwaway stuff and registrations for stuff that requires an email address (better than giving them my real one).

But then again, I don't use it from a mobile app or a website... I use it from Thunderbird. I have no idea what the web interface for it looks like; I've never seen it.

Heaps of Windows 10 internal builds, private source code leak online

Re: With source to drivers, will it now be a walk in the park for the other OSes?

Did you try booting into Windows with driver signing enforcement disabled and then installing the unsigned driver(s)? That's how I got my modified nVidia driver for my laptop to work. I had to change the PCI ID in the .inf file to work with my card, and of course, any modification causes the driver to become unsigned. It's working fine, though, in 8.1 x64 (it worked also in 10 x64 when I was using it).

Once it's installed, there's no more signature checking; it appears to only be done at installation time.

Re: So how'd they get it?

Or maybe they didn't pull it off.

https://www.betaarchive.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=37283

According to that, it was 1.2GB that was leaked. Just a bit less than 32TB!

Re: Long File Path support

I pretty obviously wasn't talking about hardware compatibility.

Linux devs change APIs with great regularity without any concern for backwards compatibility, and that's a pretty well-known thing. I can run ten year old binaries on Windows without issue now; on Linux, you're lucky if you can do that with binaries a third of the age. Don't let your Linux fanboyism blind you to the deficiencies of Linux; the problems it has can't be overcome by pretending they do not exist. There's little hope for Windows, but Linux at least can evolve in the right direction (and generally it is, if slowly).

In Linux, the typical dev attitude is that since the source code is available for the program in question, it doesn't matter if the APIs change, just recompile it with whatever is the newest version of gcc, Xorg, what have you (often systemd, to the chagrin of many). That's great if you're the kind of person who can recompile things at will and if the program in question is actually open source, but those two things are not always going to be true, particularly if Linux is ever going to exist in significant numbers on the desktop. It certainly doesn't work with things like proprietary video drivers from AMD and nVidia, with their binary blobs that prevent drivers a few years old from working with recent distros. A lot of older GPUs don't have Linux drivers newer than that, so you either run the open source driver (often slow and lacking in features, including power management on laptops) or use a distro release that's several years old.

The idea that requiring users to recompile their programs 'cause we done just broke all the APIs again isn't compatible with the way regular people use computers. As a niche hobbyist OS, that kind of thing is fine, but if the idea is to compete with Microsoft head to head on the desktop, it's not going to fly. Linux is going to have to work with closed-source precompiled binaries if they want to get any traction on the desktop. Precompiled binaries that people have to pay for means they are going to want to keep using them for years; no one wants to pay hundreds of dollars for a program (precompiled binary, as is the norm with closed-source) only to have it go out of date in six months because the APIs it relies on have changed because reasons.

Re: "Technically, it's the best news we will get all year"

Hm, yes, I saw Windows 8.... seeing it now, as a matter of fact!

Obviously, it's a disaster as far as OOBE, but so is 10... but 8 (and by that I also mean 8.1 for the purposes of this message) can be made quite nice with things like Classic Shell, Old New Explorer, and Metro Killer in a way that 10 cannot. Metro was largely "tacked on" the outside of a Win32 core, and it's relatively easy to wall it off and live completely in the Win32 part. With MS removing more and more Win32 functionality and adding it to UWP, you can't do that on Windows 10.

Once all the de-dumbification of Windows 8 is done, you get an OS that allows the user control over updates, doesn't spy on you (same caveats as with Windows 7 about those telemetry updates MS pushed out), doesn't have advertising in it, doesn't uninstall your stuff without permission, doesn't install Candy Crush or other apps without your permission, doesn't change your drivers without permission, doesn't nag you endlessly to use their crappy Edge browser... things that we used to take for granted as being baseline-level expectations for OS behavior are now "features."

The best part of 8 is that it gets security updates for six more years. That's a very long time in computing, of course. By then, Windows as we know it may not even exist... or maybe MS will have seen the light and given us something that doesn't try to be a crappy phone and a PC at the same time. Whatever the outcome, that's six more years that a Windows user gets without being subjected to Windows 10.

Six years is more than enough time for the irrational exuberance over Satya Nadella's inane vision and how "innovative" Microsoft is now to come crashing back to reality (including their stock prices). As long as the stocks are up, they're not going to change direction, but everything about the current stock prices of MSFT screams "bubble." It's a lot of sizzle and not a lot of steak.

Re: Long File Path support

Developers of other systems don't concern themselves with backwards compatibility as much. Linux seems to make a hobby of breaking backwards compatibility.

Amazon squares up to Walmart over boycott calls: Talk sh!t, get hit

Re: Yeah, well

Fiat had a 50% share in Ferrari from 1969 until 1988, when it increased that to 90% (also the year Enzo died). Seems appropriate to me, given that Ferrari's market isn't really people commuting to work.

'OK, everyone. Stop typing, this software is DONE,' said no one ever

Re: Some software is "done"

I use Thunderbird, and it doesn't have a hamburger menu. It has a regular menu bar... it's been ages since I've messed with TB extensions or prefs, so it's been this way for some time.

Microsoft's new Surface laptop defeats teardown – with glue

Re: Nonsense

"Too many people here complain they can't dismantle things or replace parts, or don't have the portage they want in one thread, and then engage in techo-masturbation over a device that's 1mm thinner or half an ounce lighter in another."

I've never swooned over a device of any type for being smaller or lighter. If people want that, it's their prerogative to seek out such things in the marketplace. I do hold manufacturers responsible for spectacularly unserviceable devices like this one, though. Manufacturers have engineers; maybe if they worked on engineering ways to make devices serviceable AND small instead of using "it's too small to be serviceable" as an excuse to do what they wanted to do anyway, which is to build in planned obsolescence so that the devices have to be replaced fairly regularly.

Apple has long been the master of this; its devices were near the top of the heap as far as lack of serviceability before the Surface Laptop took that prize. Even so, some shops have figured out how to repair the various iThings. Then, of course, Apple famously issued an update to brick devices that had already been successfully repaired and were functioning perfectly with reasonably-priced (non-Apple) parts. That update didn't make the iPhone any smaller or lighter, but it did illustrate Apple's real motive-- a cynical desire to prevent people from repairing their expensive iPhones and forcing them to buy new ones, to the benefit of Apple but to the detriment of their customers and to the environment. The same could be said of the non-removable, remarkably short-lived battery in some of the early-generation iPods, not to mention Apple's efforts to block "right to repair" legislation across the US.

It's clear that the desire to make their products small and light isn't exactly the only thing Apple is trying to accomplish by making them difficult to service. Microsoft has joined them, and even one-upped them with this laptop that is specifically designed to be impossible to open without destroying it. Apple's devices are difficult to service, as are other Surface products, but this Surface Laptop appears to be impossible to service, by design.

Disposable items, more than any other thing, are cheap. Make this Microsoft lappy cost $150 and you might have a deal (depending on whether I can get something other than Windows 10 on there; I am guessing not). Of course, I don't mean the 4GB model; selling a non-upgradeable laptop with 4GB in this day and age is nuts. I don't care that it's higher-spec than the laptops that actually cost $150; those are within the price range that disposability would be somewhat acceptable.

For $1000 plus, though, there's just no friggin' way. I'll pay 30 cents for a disposable Bic pen, but I am not going to spend hundreds of dollars on a super premium pen set that can't have a new ink cartridge installed. Expensive things with consumable bits (batteries, SSDs, or ink cartridges, for example) need to be serviceable.

"Make whatever choice you want - I don't care. I do object to the selfish attitude - "It isn't what I want, so no-one else should be allowed to buy one either."

I believe you have created a strawman here. I don't recall anyone saying that no one should be allowed to buy glued-together, expensive, disposable devices. I'd go as far to say that anyone with any sense wouldn't want one, but never that it shouldn't even be allowed.

If manufacturers can sucker people into buying disposable pens, computers, or anything else for a thousand bucks, that's between them and their marks... ah, customers. At least we should try to make sure people are informed of the disposable nature of their goods before they shell out their hard-earned cash. I'd bet that most people don't really understand that this Surface Laptop can't have its battery replaced at all. They're used to smart phones and other things where replacement is difficult, but it would be reasonable for them to expect that it can be done in some fashion.

Re: Recycling also difficult

The case halves of the base unit of the Surface Laptop were spot-welded, according the the aforementioned article.

Re: Does Microsoft offer an exchange program too?

"The only time a user has to repair a laptop is if it fails after the 3 year warranty period but before it so outdated as to be no longer useful..."

Well, two points there.

(1) I've never seen a laptop with a three-year warranty (according to the MS site, the Surface Laptop comes with a one-year warranty and a whole 90 days of technical support), and

(2) Now that Moore's Law has stalled, a laptop can easily be useful many years after the first three (and certainly past the first year), although this one's lack of upgradeability limits that future usefulness too.

SSDs in particular don't last forever (not even mentioning the battery!), and they're definitely a consumable part with a known and finite service life. I have a SSD in the PC I am using now that would be close to end of life (by TBW) if it were some of the ones I've seen in reviews and not a Samsung 840 Pro with better-than-average endurance. While most people probably won't wear out a SSD, it's still not something that ought to be part of the motherboard.

My laptop was manufactured in late 2008, approaching nine years ago, and it's still my go-to when I am out and about, despite its age. While it was decently responsive in stock form even by modern standards, it's even better now with a few upgrades, and that's something that won't work with the Surface Laptop.

I expect something costing a thousand dollars or more to last until it is obsolete, which could easily be ten years or more these days, and that includes these kinds of simple upgrades that not long ago were pretty much universally available.

Disposable items are supposed to be cheap, but this one isn't. It's a premium-priced throwaway laptop.

Firefox 54 delivers sandboxes Mozilla's wanted since 2009

Re: I may try FF again someday

It would be nice if applications would respect the system theming and not impose their own appearance in every case. I remember reading an article by a UI dev who was extolling the virtues of putting content in the title bar (NO! BAD!) and other such things. He said that not long ago, most applications looked like the OS, but "at some point we stopped caring about that."

Um, no, we didn't. YOU did, maybe, but "we" didn't. "We" didn't have a choice.

I put a lot of effort into writing my Windows theme and getting it to look just the way I want it to (I use Windows 8.1, sufficiently gutted and modified to look and act a lot like 7... and not just in the way that people erroneously say that Windows 10 is "like 7," 'cause it's not even close). I use a theme that maintains the "Classic" skeuomorphic appearance of the Win 7 Classic theme, with a few modifications to make it work within the limitations of the Windows skinning engine. I learned to edit themes and bought a commercial theme editor specifically for the task of making Windows look the way I want it to, and I've got a ton of hours invested in it.

The system appearance defines how I want things to look, and for an application to ignore that definition and impose its own appearance upon me really is annoying. I'm the one who has to look at the application's UI, so why does the opinion of some dev I've never met matter more than mine on my own system?

Because of the upcoming suicide of Mozilla, I've been trying new browsers. Not Chrome, of course; I know just from what I've read about it that it's a no-go, but Vivaldi, Brave, and Opera (based on Chromium, of course) were all in the running, but none of them extend the simple courtesy to me, the user, of using the carefully-selected system appearance on their programs. Vivaldi's option that's supposed to use the native UI just puts the whole ugly, flat mess into a window with the system borders. None of them have the options to configure things the way I require them to be.

For browsers, there's no other choice but Firefox and its derivatives, and I've never used anything other than Firefox, Netscape, or the Mozilla suite browser (now Seamonkey), other than for testing and Windows Updates (until I migrated to 7). It pains me to have to consider alternatives now, but FF without its XUL addons is... well, useless to me.

I know there are FF derivatives like Pale Moon and Waterfox (both of which are installed on my PC; I am using one of them now), not to mention Seamonkey, but these all depend on FF, and with FF going in a direction they can't or won't follow, there could come a time that FF diverges from the alternatives so much that it is no longer feasible to have to backport all of the security updates, bug fixes, and support for new standards every time Moz releases a new FF-- not to mention maintaining the repository for the then-obsolete XUL addons that will probably be purged from the FF one eventually.

There has been a little bit of discussion about those small alternative projects combining forces, and I hope they succeed, as the possibility of finding myself without a decent browser seems to be a definite possibility, as absurd as that seems.

Re: Firfox on Linux removal of ALSA support

Waterfox (a Firefox derivative) doesn't require PulseAudio in Linux. Not sure about Pale Moon, but it may be there too.

Windows 10 Creators Update preview: Lovin' for Edge and pen users, nowt much else

Re: Fall Creators Update

"M$ knows that its buyers are as gullible as out of work miners voting for Trump."

http://dailycaller.com/2017/06/11/another-promise-kept-first-coal-mine-opens-under-trump-administration/

That's... not very gullible. Are you trying to say MS buyers are perceptive?

Intel to Qualcomm and Microsoft: Nice x86 emulation you've got there, shame if it got sued into oblivion

Re: Briar Patch

If MS thought they could get by without the emulation, they would not have put much time, effort, and cash into developing it. They're hoping eventually to have a lot of UWP apps that will allow them to deprecate Win32, but enough of those apps don't exist now, and a device that can only run UWP is presently dead in the water (like Windows phone). Unless and until that UWP library exists, that emulation is going to be the only thing that makes a Windows ARM device usable for the people who need more than what the few existing UWP apps can do (nearly everyone, in other words).

Microsoft totters from time machine clutching Windows 10 Workstation

Re: Desperation

"People for some reason simply don't like change."

People don't like change for the sake of change when what they have is working. That's the problem here! Microsoft keeps changing things that work, things that don't need to be changed, things that people don't WANT changed. Maybe if they listened to what the customers want instead of trying to tell them what they want they would not have to force people to take the product, even when it's free.

" If you ask them to quantify why they actually don't like 10 most have never used it"

Utter nonsense. People who have never used it don't have a dog in the hunt. Why would they even care? To be concerned enough to HATE 10 requires someone to have used it. You can't appreciate what a turd it is without experiencing it first. Fans of Apple or Linux will criticize Windows in general, but when you see specific attacks on Windows 10, you're nearly always talking about Windows users (or former Windows users who are angry that MS forced them to leave Windows). It's clear that MS intends to force us all into 10, and we'd rather have something as good as what we're supposed to be giving up, thankyouverymuch.

"and those that have will usually come up with something like "WELL Micro$$haft shouldn't CHANGE anything without ASKING ME"

Utter nonsense, part 2. We've had a TON of people here and in other discussion areas describe what is wrong with 10. Not ONCE have I seen a message like the one you say people "usually" come up with. Look at Bombastic Bob's post... while his rundown is written bombastically, it's still quite clear as to what he dislikes about 10, and it's not that MS CHANGED things without ASKING HIM. I've written enough on the topic to be a small book if it were ever put together, and so have many, many others.

This idea that people who criticize 10 have never used it is often cited by people widely regarded as probable MS astroturfers. I've never seen anyone else try to sell such an obvious whopper.

Re: Yet another version?

Apparently, all that means is that instead of having the name "Windows" followed by the version name or number, it will be called "Windows 10" and then the version name or number.

Re: Desperation

" But it is absolute fucking madness to take an interface for a touch-screen phone with limited screen area and put it on a desktop."

That's the bottom line, and I wish I could upvote it more than once for this bit alone. Phones and PCs have different interfaces because they have different needs.

PCs can have much greater information and active UI element density not only because of the larger screen, but because of the greater precision of a mouse. A mouse has a two-stage point and select, so that you know exactly where the arrow is pointed when you hit the button. Not so with tapping... as the finger gets close, your view of the target is obscured, and no further feedback guiding the finger is possible. When it touches the screen, it covers a huge number of pixels (thousands of them on a 1080p phone), and it is up to the device's algorithm to decide which one was the hotspot. Which one? You won't know 'till you tap.

A mouse offers hover effects that aren't possible in touch devices (though they may be at some point, subject to the same lack of precision as the tap itself... and for that to make any difference, the OS and the app would have to be written to make use of it, which won't happen if the majority of devices don't have it). And of course, there's the right-click or modified click (CTRL-click, etc) too.

To get away with not having hover, right-click, modified click, or 2-stage point and click, a lot of compromises have to be made, and even more so if the screen is small (as it is in mobiles, relative to desktops and standard laptops). These compromises are pretty serious, and apps that attempt to deliver the full feature list that is normal and expected on a PC program will typically confuse and irritate phone users, as it is an unintuitive mess of options to wade through, requiring considerable drilling before reaching the option desired. Most apps, thus, won't have the full complement of features; they will be pared down to make it less confusing. Even so, it will be harder to use and less intuitive than a PC with a traditional menu bar and a reasonable amount of onscreen "chrome."

While these compromises are necessary for mobiles, they're not on PCs, so the idea that one UI can ever be appropriate for a PC is just inane. Look at the various system dialogs in Windows 10 that use the UWP style... huge, comically oversized controls, very low density of information or UI options, with vast areas of wasted space. This has NO place on a PC! Neither do those phone apps that Microsoft thinks people are eager to run on their desktops, as they will suffer from the same issue. Of course, it is possible in theory to write two complete and excellent UIs for the app, one for each usage type, but if Microsoft itself won't even do that for the OS hosting the app, I doubt any app is going to either. To do it right, the app running on the desktop should be using the Win32 common controls, as those are designed and intended for the desktop environment, but that's not what UWP is about.

The best way of doing this would be the way Apple has done it... a PC-only OS on the PC (Mac) and a mobile-only OS on the tablet/phone (iOS), but with both designed to seamlessly connect to one another and share the same data. One is touch oriented, one is not... one is x86, one is ARM. It's a nice, clean delineation between them. Both device types get an OS that is written without compromises to accommodate other devices.

The outlier in this would be the 2 in 1 that can be a tablet or a "laptop." If the keyboard unit includes a full featured pointing device, a lot of the benefit of a real laptop can be realized (precision that allows for smaller UI elements, 2 stage pointing, hover effects, control clicks, etc), but only if the software is written for it... and even with 10, it isn't when it's in the UWP mode.

This use case strikes me more of a "gee whiz, will you look at that" kind of technology demo more than a practical thing. A tablet with a display large enough to be a credible laptop when docked is not much more portable than an ultrabook with the same display type. In any case, it's not and will never be the dominant configuration of PCs or mobiles (tablets and phones both), and to have this niche of a use case form the basis of the OS that everyone uses on all PCs and mobiles is just a ridiculous idea.

Re: @Def: 4 Processors Chips which could be 88 cores, 6TB of RAM...

They CLAIM there is a substantial benefit to their customers. I don't know that any of them actually believe it. They believe it has an actual benefit to themselves, though, we can be sure of that.

Re: Desperation

I'm "still" using Windows 8.1, though it's only been about two or three months now since I migrated from 7. It takes some aftermarket programs to get it usable, but even 7 needs most of those same programs to be its best, so there's not much difference there.

I'm a traditionalist when it comes to UI, and to me, the archetype of an ideal UI is Windows 2000. I strive to make my UI look and feel as much like that as possible. This whole "one UI to rule them all" has been one of the dumbest trends to hit computing to date, and I applaud Mark Shuttleworth for realizing this. GNOME and Microsoft, we're waiting.

So with all that said, I use Windows 8.1 and am pretty satisfied with it. Windows 10 isn't even in the running... it's so far from being usable that it may as well not even exist to me. A lot of that doesn't have anything to do with UI, but even if the spying, the forced updates, the unwanted installations and uninstallations of various things, the ads, the changes of user settings with every major update, the permanent beta status of the rapid update cycle, and all that other stuff was stripped from 10, it would still be crap.

Windows 8.1 as I have it is very close to Windows 7. I'm using the same theme I was in 7; I just had to port it to 8. There's no ribbon, no apps (removed, not merely hidden), no tiles, no charms... just Win32 desktop, with only a few widely scattered Metro-styled intrusions. The Windows login screen is Metro looking, and so is the "these programs are preventing the PC from shutting down" dialog. The "How do you want to open this file" dialog is in that hideous style too. The task switcher (alt-tab) has a vaguely Metro look to it, but it's just a plain background with text on it, as is the Ctrl-Alt-Del menu. That's about it, though.

The Settings app is essentially gone (it's still there, but it's locked out), as the Win 8.1 control panel is still fully functional (with only a very few exceptions, for which I use other tools... like the inability of the Control Panel "Users" applet to create Windows accounts. I just use the Computer Management snapin of the MMC instead).

I have to wonder at those people who say that 10 is like Windows 7-- it only bears the most passing similarity. Windows 7 doesn't have that hideously flat UI with vast seas of retina-burning white (just a theme, but it's a really bad one), those tiles in the start menu, the ribbon, a Settings app, or any other apps for that matter. Windows 7 doesn't have "folders on this PC" in the content pane of Windows Explorer, and it doesn't have the jarring discontinuity between Win32 and UWP-themed bits of the OS.

All of the few remaining Metro bits that still exist in my Windows 8.1 are also in 10, but 10 adds a lot more of them, and that gets worse with every new update. Microsoft's intent is for all of the Control Panel to end up in the Settings app eventually, and that means a lot of system dialogs are going to be UWP ugly, with nothing you can do about it.

Windows 7 has a coherent UI that's clearly meant for desktop PCs, through and through. Windows 10 is a poorly-executed mess that is half Win32 and half phone, and unlike Windows 8, you can't easily wall off the phone bits and live in the Win32 portion. MS has moved too many essential things into the phone part; it can't be avoided. You can kill the ribbon, replace the start menu, apply a better theme, and other assorted stuff like that, but you will still be stuck with a large portion of the system dialogs that are in that ugly, inappropriate phone UI style.

I also don't know how Cinnamon still sucks "big time" from the perspective of one who thinks the "one UI to rule them all" idea is stupid (as I do, and as you appear to). I've tried a lot of DEs, including MATE, and Cinnamon is the one I like the best. I've had to learn to edit Cinnamon and GNOME themes to get it just how I want, but the same's true of Windows (from Vista on), and doing it in Linux has been a far easier task.

Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon has a very traditional UI, and Mint's "X" project is working on removing the stupid UI (hamburger menus, for example) from as many GNOME programs as possible and replacing it with desktop-PC style traditional menu bars and pulldowns (rather than simply maintaining much older pre-GNOME 3 versions of these programs that never had the touch crap in the first place).

Cuffed: Govt contractor 'used work PC to leak' evidence of Russia's US election hacking

Interesting

Interesting that you would cite some of her posts on social media, yet miss on where she said that "Being white is terrorism" and pledged her loyalty to Iran if there is a conflict with the US.

"I have a dream that [people] will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." Well, guess not then, eh, "Winner?"

She's white, by the by, so she's saying she's a terrorist. Just saying.

The open source community is nasty and that's just the docs

Re: "The nature of IT attracts sociopaths, always has."

Actually, the behavior you're trying to describe is "asshole," or whichever term you want to use. I know a lot of spectrum people, and while they are direct and blunt, they've got nothing on "normal" people for pure malice and nastiness. Can you holster your stereotypes, please?

'My PC needs to lose weight' says user with FAT filesystem

Re: Scuh-zee IS the official pronunciation in some circles

Ah nuts, you beat me by a full day... I just posted that.