Posts by anonymous boring coward 3543 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jan 2015
" in your car analogy, there was a "recall". But lots of customers flatly refused to bring their old cars in for repair or replacement"
First time ever a critical flaw has been repaired by giving customers completely new cars, that are incompatible with their old ones (i.e. replace flat-bed truck with a Mini), and which they also had to pay for. Nice fixing.
"Not sure that analogy is strictly correct. If the brake fault could only be activated by malicious intervention then not many car companies would be rushing forward to correct it especially on vehicles that are 17 years old and well out of warranty."
If it's an internet connected car (just wait 15 years), and it turn's out sending an email to the car can disable the brakes, I'm pretty sure they would quickly hand out patches for free.
They wouldn't sit on the patches, wait for a few deaths, and hope that customers come flocking to buy the fix. (Well, unless it's an american car company, that is.)
That's because there are real costs involved. If it's wear and tear it's obviously a maintenance issue. If it is a massive design fault that will make all cars dangerous to drive, then it's an all new ball game.
In the MS case we don't know if NSA has told MS it mustn't release certain patches to the non-supported OSs. This is a strong possibility.
"It is ambitious to create a protectionist border against the outside world while dumping internal surpluses at below market rates on north africa, driving local farmers and fishermen out of business and creating a huge immigration issue."
Of course! Brexit is in response to the unfair treatment of third world countries! Why didn't I realise that?
rUK will now save said third world. Boris at the front of the effort, naturally.
The sector has already started adjusting, and will keep doing so. Like everything else in old Blighty things will shrink down to fit the self inflicted reduced market share. Have you purposefully avoided reading the news?
And, oh yes, the situation with NY is this: Before London had the advantage of being in the EU. Now London doesn't have that advantage over NY. Get it?
"Using an OS written sixteen years ago and STILL refusing to upgrade it"
Presumably it's running on some hardware that can't handle later OSs, and has some software that only runs under XP (typically drivers). Why MS can't support it at a reasonable cost is beyond me. One could easily build a large team around supporting XP for the amount of money available, but MS takes the extortionate XP support money and obviously spends it elsewhere. Greed and stupidity in the long run (MS's fading reputation).
"The investigation is still going on. The agents handling the investigation were not fired. Nothing to see here but fake outrage."
Trump is trying to signal to EVERYONE that they can be seriously affected if they find the wrong things about him. There is lots to see here. Just your average dictator. I bet he looks with envy on how Erdogan has set up his little dictatorship. (As does May, the Strong and Stable leader.)
Problem is, the normal update may well f*ck you as well.
For example, my USB microscope just won't work any more with Windows 10. Perhaps if I find some other camera app, that isn't malware, I might get it to work again, but I wouldn't bet on it.
That's what one gets when MS decides that user's must eat whatever sh*t they feed you.
Foresaw it from day one, and it happened, as certain as taxes and death.
I read it more as being the case of "we'd like new chips please", unless you were using the LPC pins as GPIO in which case you would need to do a redesign given you'll be needing additional logic for the functionaliity you needed the GPIO for.
It's quite odd that they couldn't even fix the bug so that the processor works as originally designed.
Rather than trying to do new products which have always failed, this time they're doing it by messing with their cash cow. It could end up as their most expensive failure yet if the public decides they are sick of all the tracking and data collection!
Let's hope so!
My private laptop, which came with Windows 10, now claims, in Settings->Privacy, at the top of the page, in red:
Some settings are managed by your organisation.
What organisation would that be? And what settings?
W10 has been preparing to install the Creator's update. I had to turn off some spying, and for Windows to NOT spy on my browsing it seems I have to allow cookies and history, as MS says:
To opt out of personalised ads in this browser, your browser history must allow first-party and third-party cookies and you must have your browsing experience set to NOT delete browsing history on exit.
This seems bizarre.
W10 is still preparing, so we'll see how bizarre things end up being.
I'm looking at files on my local machine and it's showing me ads?
And given how often Explorer just hangs waiting for something random that you aren't even remotely interested in, what are the odds that this won't make Explorer even more intolerable?
If anything ever needed a complete rewrite from scratch it would be File Explorer. It it still part of the entire desktop GUI, BTW?
"They are now teaching kilo/mega/gigabytes as being 1000 and kebi/mebi/gibi/bytes as being 1024 (course and exam material not some random teacher)"
WTF??
k = 1000 anything (k is always lower case)
M = 1 000 000 anything
G = 1 000 000 000 anything
kB = 1024 Bytes ("B" is Bytes, "b" is bits => each Byte has 8 bits)
MB = 1024 x 1024 Bytes
GB = 1024 x 1024 x 1024 Bytes
Can't be much simpler than that. Please forward to the mentioned school.
"Really? How else can you get good video performance (especially memory-intensive 3D performance) without getting close to the metal?"
How close do you need to be?
A decent CPU does something in the order of 24 000 000 000 operations every second.
Memory intensive stuff is offloaded to some kind of DMA thing, using a few operations.
I'd say CPU resources being used up by background sh*t is a far bigger problem than "how close to the metal" something is.
I always have left all this turned on, as I have no care if my documents are used to fix something. Or if my personal habits are used to improve products...What would bother me was if my data was used to build personal profiles and then sold to advertisers. Hence I try not to use anything made by Google...
Hilarious!
"I presume you are talking about DX12. DX12 is an improvement over DX11, I agree, but it's not a requirement."
It's hard to think of any group with more OCD than hardcore gamers. They will HAVE to have DX12. They can't possibly watch their life waste away whilst stuck on DX11, and all their "friends" have moved on.
Why can't Apple grab the opportunity now and elbow in on the corporate market for real?
Some kind of normal file system access where the user knows where things are and can copy them without using the cloud would be a great start.
A simpler way to deploy your own apps would be a good continuation.
I think this would go a long way towards sinking MS.
"Some studies I have seen reported on show no improvement in core skills between kids that are given a computing device (tablet or laptop) and those that are taught in a more traditional manner."
Obviously they weren't measuring all the core skills then, since being able to use computers is now a core skill.
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