Posts by WatAWorld 1360 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Feb 2012
The penguin struggles to reach 4% market share with a free product.
With all of MS's many failings, reasonable regular consumers and IT professionals still choose it over Apple and Linux.
I'm not saying MS is wonderful. I am saying that your penguin is nude.
Esoteric is not a virtue. Having a rude, abusive and harassing pseudo-hipster CEO is not a commercial advantage.
Push something on a person, and they'll naturally resist, even if you're trying to give away bricks of gold.
The sad thing is that Windows 10 is great and adoption would have been far higher if MS had been polite and respectful in its upgrade offer.
A once-a-month explicit easy to opt-out-of offer of the free upgrade,each month, and nothing more.
Instead MS chose to make a total nuisance of itself by screwing up the daily, weekly and monthly work-flows of previously loyal customers, all the while incurring unplanned training and support costs on those same previously loyal customers.
Windows 10 is much better than Windows 8 and 8.1, and is much faster than Windows 7 on multi-core machines.
Yeah, because after laypeople spend $200 on a device they're ready to spend $500 on a server to support it.
Let us face it, the company that made the devices is still in business, just it has been purchased by Google.
And Google could easily be running the required servers. But by abandoning devices sold a mere 30 days earlier Google opens up sales for the Nest product it is continuing to produce.
It has been reported many times that many Google alumni populate the Obama administration.
And Google founders have been big supporters of Clinton.
So it would not matter the merits of the case, whether it was likely to succeed or not, there would be little chance of a prosecution being attempted.
One of the reasons that the UK doesn't fit in well to the EU is that it is in many ways more Scandiavian than European.
The benefits levels are too high. The assumed 'work ethic' is too high.
This BBC article explains it:
http://www.bbc.com/news/education-35374822
Possibly the UK, Finland and Sweden should leave the EU and join with Norway and Iceland to create a new union.
Potemkine your comment makes me wonder why the French and Polish fought the Germans in WWII.
I mean, if you want an undemocratic mindless bureaucracy that endorses socialism and state intervention in the economy at every step, the enforces allowing big business to create standards to exclude small business, and that has a racist immigration policy, you could have had it decades earlier.
Subtract the death camps (which I will admit is a really big subtraction) and the EU is not that different that what you would have had. The old nationalism of Germany being replaced with the new nationalism of free migration for white Europeans.
IF you think racism should play a factor, remember that the EU practices systemic racism -- regarded in North America as one of the worst forms of racism -- in its immigration practices.
Yes, under North American definitions, those 'elites' calling you 'plebs' racist are amongst the most racist people in the developed world.
The EU's immigration systemically discriminates against non-whites because we EU citizens are overwhelmingly white. Yes quite convenient that.
We grant free immigration to EU citizens and it is "purely coincidental" that 99% of the time that means whites.
EU system rules that systemically create a race-based immigration system that fulfills racist objectives, without the need for individuals to take racist actions on their own.
And these EU racists have the gaul to claim that those who'd prefer the UK set its own immigration policy are racist, despite the fact that the pre-EU immigration policy was far less racist.
In the UK "middle class" has a different meaning than in Canada or the USA.
Here in Canada the middle class is pretty much anyone whose income is between the bottom 25% and the top 1%, maybe top 0.1%. And your occupation doesn't matter. You can be a tradesperson. A professional. Or living off of an inheritance.
In the USA the middle class is pretty much anyone whose income is between the bottom 25% and the top 0.01%, maybe top 0.01%. (Some multi-millionaire business owners consider themselves middle-class.) Again, occupation doesn't matter.
In the UK tradespeople used to be -- and apparently still are -- excluded from the definition of middle class. So no electricians. No technicians. No plumbers. Rather than the middle class being the middle 80% of the population it is maybe 40%, maybe less?
Maybe Andrew could clarify his definition of middle class for us in a boot note. Is it people who neither sweat for a living nor inherited a title?
Promoters and vendors should not be taking kick-backs from ticket agents and second-level ticket agents in deals kept secret from artists.
When an second-level agent can step into the middle and confidently buy up 90% the tickets in seconds to knowing with complete certainty they can be resold for a several hundred percent profit that pretty much indicates something is wrong.
Why would a promoter sell the tickets for so much less than their obvious value? Why deny himself and the artist their just rewards?
It points to the need for forensic audits to follow the path of the money. Are agents and promoters getting rewarded via some path that cuts the artists out of the loop?
I don't know the answer. But why else would a promoter sell a $600 ticket for $100, unless there was some means to make the money back via a backchannel?
"How about just making it illegal to sell a ticket for more than face value?"
That used to be the law, at least in Canada.
Then the tickemaster-types lobbied government to get the law changed.
That was a big mistake that really hurt the public so that a few could get rich through no effort on their own part.
Do you consider this to be part of the "tabloid press"?
http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-10-deadly-heart-problems-dont.html
Note: "Since teenager Paul Houle's story, similar incidents have been reported of people seeking help on noticing abnormal heart rates being measured by their watch."
Pretty much means that the watch or fitness band was the initial warning.
I think you're forgetting high value targets, spearphishing, and so on.
Some people have heart rates that are worth knowing, and those people probably have no idea of that fact, or how easy it would be to find out their heart rates. Political leaders. Business leaders. Engineers, Lawyers, Celebrities.
“Nobody cares if your treadmill says you hit a heart-rate of 150 bpm this morning.”
Screw with the treadmill's heart rate monitor and help a heart attack along. Or evaluate how stressed out a business competitor is.
Time and time again we learn that information that superficially seems useless can be analyzed to reveal a lot about us.
As it turns out, in the actual event there was only one gunman and storming the club would have been the right thing to do.
Problem is, our police have been told to put officer safety ahead of public safety.
Something they doubtless learned from US special forces whose doctrine is to put American military lives ahead of the lives of the foreign civilians they are supposed to be defending.
Oh well, at least they didn't order in a drone strike.
Seriously, the world is going downhill and it isn't all the fault of "foreigners".
@AC "If you're such an expert, why don't you tell us exactly how it happens then, and somehow prove to us that hot headed young men of this sort don't use the Internet in any way whatsoever?
Your view is at odds with newspaper reports of court cases involving such people."
If you want links provide them yourself.
The logic of blaming Google, Twitter and Facebook is the logic of blaming the water company, department of highways and FAA for providing water, roads and flights to terrorists.
It is even sillier logic than that used by Germans in the 1920s and 30s in their book burnings.
At least the Nazis only burned the books they objected too, not all books.
The Nazis didn't try to eliminate the publishing industry (they just tried to put it under loose state control).
He doesn't have a point. ISIS grew because the USA has done everything it can to aid and protect the Wahhabi kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabi is the name Islamists give to their sect of Islam. Wahhabi, or sometimes Salafist.
The US government has spent the lives of young American men to allow Saudi Arabia and Qata to evangelize Wahhabism throughout Africa, Asia, Europe and now North America.
Now we're having to put up with the Wahhabi terrorism that before struck only Shia and Suffi Muslims and we don't like it.
You can have your free speech. You have your freedom of choice. And so do other people.
You cannot expect banks and grocery stores to succumb to your right to choose to wear a ski-mask when withdrawing funds or making purchases.
People who work and own banks and grocery stores have their right to freedom of choice and freedom of speech too. And more importantly they also have a right to know who they are doing business with.
Sure there are ways to bypass this. There are ways to bypass bans on wearing ski-masks inside of banks too.
What I'd really like to see is merchants being stricter on insecure browsers and allowing us to impose geographic limits on the us of our own accounts. We need more security on the web, not less.
My only question is what the FBI has, thanks to past supposedly legal spying, on Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) that would cause the Senator to act against the interest of his constituents and his country?
I mean, why would the guy just turn against regular American citizens?
It seems to me, and this is just my opinion, that the bureaucracy must have some hold on him.
Canada, Chile and China are outside the EU and are not hobbled by protectionist standards.
What is required to avoid protectionism -- the EU is protectionist as it ever gets these days -- the solution to protectionism is to be living in a democracy where voters will not tolerate protectionism.
In a sovereign UK you have the ability to collectively eliminate that protectionism. That you never devoted a few hours to selecting an MP or canvasing for a political position was your choice. You and your peers did not care about protectionism, so you allowed vested interests (workers and business owners of protected UK businesses) to prevail.
In the EU you are stuck obeying what the bureaucrats tell your parliament you must put up with.
In the EU no amount of hours on your part, no amount of canvassing by you and your neighbours, will alter the fact that the legislation you must obey will be dictated by bureaucrats working for one of the five unelected EU presidents.
The sad reality is that in the parliamentary that UK was for a few brief decades, if you didn't like government regulations you can remove them by running for parliament or going out and knocking on doors in support of a candidate for parliament who will.
You cannot do that in the EU because the EU parliament does not set the regulations.
In the EU various un-elected commissions set the rules and cannot be over-ruled by any elected officials.
In the democracy that the UK once was, if you felt workers had inadequate rights, you could fight for those rights and get a better party and MP elected, and that party and MP could change things.
Not so in the EU, where parliament is a mere stooge, a whipping boy to shield bureaucrats.
Which alternate universe do you live in where the EU protects workers rights?
The EU protects bureaucrats rights, and as many have already learned, if you are not a bureaucrat the only right you have is that of supplication if the EU rules dictate that your job belongs to residents of a more important EU country, like Luxembourg, Monaco, France or Ireland.
Hidden from the public by the= regular public by left-handed neo-fascist pencil-wielding BREXIT is the simple fact that English is now an EU language and British people will no longer be allowed to speak English at work if the BREXIT succeeds.
In fact, international regulations will require that English not be spoken at home and the PM has been required to assure all 7 EU emperours that -- in the event of a BREXIT win -- each and every British citizen will be made to undergo mind-wiping to eliminate all knowledge of the English language.
The public must be told that, in the event of a neo-Nazi inspired ultra-Communist BREXIT win, the only people legally allowed to speak English anywhere in the local galaxy cluster will -- will be citizens of EU nations and Sirius 7.
The most monstrous thing is that, if the ignorant barbarian ignoramus hordes succeed against against the wise and powerful and properly breed, and the Brexit succseeds, then UK computers won't be allowed to use Zeros and Ones.
I also have it on good authority that UK businesses will no longer be allowed to use screens or A4 paper, but will be relegated to B7 paper, which is 2.85 x 3.75 cm, totally hobbling the UK's ability to compete in international business.
But how can it work from a technical point of view.
I get that a computer science person might think it would obviously work, but only if they didn't study acoustical and electrical engineering/physics.
My guess is he's assume the mike only picks up sound, and that really it is picking up electrical impulses, as mikes will do.
You just cannot say 10 GHz sounds, even 10 MHz sounds, can be transmitted through room temperature air without explaining how.
Either something must reduce the frequency with which each bit is processed, or the transmission is electro magnetic. I'm a rusty on this, but that is how it seems to me technically.
I would love to read the theories of someone who is actually up-to-date in the EE aspects of this.
That said, I agree that this is not much of a threat to someone working in an acoustically and electrically noisy office.
But people who need privacy often also end up with a fair degree of silence.
And no matter what we do to prevent it, a dozen intelligence agencies around the world can capture our data. There is no privacy against the FSB, NSA, and so on.
A metal case is a Farady cage.
The issue is of course the cords and wires, which act like antennas outside the case.
And for laptops the case is plastic. And if the case isn't plastic you have the screen.
Engineering labs and US consulates have Faraday cages and acoustic isolation rooms.
Depending on the frequencies it has to work over, it can be a coarse conductive net. Like the mosquito netting North American in north American windows. It can be conductive paint in your walls.
But that won't shield from what is inside the cage. And that is probably the thing. A cage big enough to encompass your power and network cables would also encompass the eavesdropping device.
"Given that the routine is running at GHz and is presumably completing in much less than a second, that's not very many cycles of audio per bit of key."
I think you mean that the cycles on the computer should take longer than 1/20,000 of a second, the maxim frequency that humans can hear and that microphones and speakers designed for human ears can handle.
Then there is that debye frequency, "The Debye frequency of a crystal is a theoretical maximum frequency of vibration for the atoms that make up the crystal".
As a consequence, ultrasound at 1 or 2 MHz can only propagate in air over a distance of a few centimeters.
But apparently somehow they've found a way around that. Maybe because the calculations require much more than one cycle to complete. I don't know. The mechanics of how would be interesting.
Or maybe the ear piece mic is picking up the electrical impulses directly, rather than acoustically?
I've pretty much forgotten the acoustics I learned in university, except for a few limitations that I've kept to remind me to consult an expert (recent EE grad) when they come up.
"But for a person of colour, that same expression might be met with "Then why does the police keep pulling me over?"
This is a story I heard my old German teacher repeat several times, including in front of his wife and including in chamber of commerce meetings. So I think it will be okay to use real names since he has already told the story so publicly.
My old German teacher, Joachim Richter, was pulled over by the police.
In the car ahead of them was a couple that were pulled over by police at a road block.
The couple was taken from the car and shot in the head.
The couple was white. The police were black. The country was Namibia and its leader had died earlier that year.
My teacher was a white ethnic German married to a black Namibian, Rose. They sat in their car waiting at the road block as his wife tried to hide her wedding ring in hopes that maybe at least she might be allowed to live.
My teacher was saved by a black police colonel who came by and knew him.
My teacher and his wife left Namibia for Africa the next week.
A year later came to Canada. A year after that I met them.
The issue is not white or black. The issue is racism. Black police in majority black countries are racist too, just like white police in white majority countries, and Chinese police in China, etc.
Their racism does not justify our racism. We are computer professionals. We have higher ethical standards than police.
"It might never end, but hopefully time will marginalize it."
In Canada and the USA racism is far and away more acceptable today than it was in the 1970s and 1980s.
It is like after WWI. Racism was against the Germans for starting The Great War.
The Germans decided to blame the racism of Jews and other European nationalities for their plight. As far as other Europeans go, historians agree we unjustly shafted the Germans after WWI, so the consensus is there was something to that part of it.
So the Germans embark on a process of what we call in English "reverse discrimination" and "affirmative action" to displace the advantaged groups.
Nobody is saying that we've gone as far as the Germans did in 1939, but the Social Justice Warriors in Canada and the USA -- our SJW Brownshirts -- certainly have us somewhere in the early to mid 1930s, where Brownshirts battled Communists and openly hurled racial epithets against their country's designated victim group.
Mid 1930s I'd say. No war. Just legally mandated discrimination and open racial slurs against their country's designated victim group. And like today, there was some basis for German's feeling oppressed because of how oppressive the reparations payments were after WWI and the social deprivation this brought on their society.
Of course none of this justified what happened then. It doesn't justify what is happening now. And I'm not saying that things now are as bad as the late 1930s, let alone after 1939 or 1941.
What I am saying is that past racism is not a permit for current racism.
I agree there is a strong likelihood of graft, corruption, conflict of interest and corporate capture of regulators.
But that has nothing to do with it being African. Sepp Blatter is Swiss. The EU isn't run by Africans. The UN isn't run by Africans.
The problem is small groups converting public concerns and public property into private resources, and it exists on all continents (probably even antarctica).
But not all Africans are black !
Get the 'Americanish' notion out of your head that North Africa is on some different continent and governed by some different registry.
And get the racist notion out of your head that what a tiny segment of the ultra rich did a couple of hundred years ago justifies sub-Saharan discrimination against other Africans and foreigners.
"African" is not a synonym for "non-white" any more than Asian is a synonym for "Chinese".
There are people in Africa who were oppressed by the slave trade, but (except for some Liberians) they were oppressed by other Africans.
The Africans oppressed by the European's slave trade now live in the USA, West Indies, UK, France, Belgium, and elsewhere. They were taken out of Africa over 100 years ago.
Apartheid was only in Rhodesia and South Africa. While the eurocentric think they make up all of Africa, those two countries are in actuality a small atypical drop in the bucket.
In fact Africa is pretty much made up of atypical countries.
It is like with Asia. I've read articles from the UK where the term Asian is used as a synonym for someone who is of Indian or Pakistani ancestry. Whereas in the USA, Asian often means Chinese.
We allow one ethnic group to appropriate the entire continent.
And further more, just like in Europe the racism is often strongest between neighbouring groups, groups that outsiders would see as different nationalities. Tutsi and Hutus, Zulus and bushmen, English and Irish, Germans and Jews, Parisians and provincials, and so on.
I note that their board has only one member from Northern Africa.
As for legacies of racial oppression excusing anything:
1. Would it excuse us saying similar things against the Italians or French who historically enslaved us?
2. Would it excuse a Caucasian or black in China?
3. Would it even excuse a Jew in Germany today?
4. Would it excuse a Tutsi or a Hutu in Rwanda?
There comes a time when we must expect members of all races to grow up and act like adults, rather than excuses other races if if they were made up of small children.
"this is only a problem because of forced W10 updates."
No this is a problem on Samsung's Android devices too, and MS has nothing to do with those.
MS is at fault of nagging people to do the update more than once a month. MS is at fault for not checking that compatible drivers are available. But most of the problem here is Samsung's greed.
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