Re: Irony?
"Can’t it be bottled somehow?"
Well yes, but a) to distill it from the atmosphere is very energy intensive, and b) when used for beverage products it gets released again.
3511 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2013
"I would much rather have random ads than ones that some algorithm thinks is relevant. They never actually manage to be anything I would want... "
"when I had my adblocker off"
So maybe you are getting random ads?
"Because all people who watch plane videos own airlines"
If you had an interest in aircraft they might also have been trying to make you want to fly in one? And if you normally use an ad blocker they might only have been able to match that interest.
"won't the BASIC needs of many (most?) smartphone users be met?"
Well no because you have to root the phone to do that and many apps like banking and Samsung pay will then no longer work. For most users to be happy there should be a requirement that all crapware can be uninstalled not just Google's.
Unfortunately that's not the focus here and Google will likely be forced to allow OEMs to install what they like, and make Google apps optional. What this will almost certainly mean is instead of just Google's crapware, you will get a whole selection of crud from anyone that will pay for it. Rather like a Dell PC!
"Google docs: Use another program. Microsoft has this one they've made in a bunch of different ways. They don't have to track you, because you pay for it. It's called office."
Actually if a web crapp will do then the Microsoft cutdown versions are free!
https://products.office.com/en-US/office-online/documents-spreadsheets-presentations-office-online
It's called "Office 2016 Click To Run" service
So that's simply a streaming installer service. A more modern version of MSIexec. It doesnt collect user telemetry. So comms will likely be related to software updates, licensing, certificates, etc.
"When I tried to disable this Stasi Service, Office applications such as Excel would then refuse to start up"
And what would be the name of this mysterious service? Office 2016 certainly doesn't require internet access to work. Smells like bs to me. Otherwise why post AC?
"The poor contractor is going to find that winning the Small Claims Court action isn't actually going to help when the company has no assets and no intention of paying."
It might at least result in the Directors being forced to appear in court and explain where the money has gone. And also establish his rights over the source code in question.
And if he wins before they are declared insolvent, it's of high enough value to go to the high court, appoint bailiffs and seize assets. First come first served in that case!
"I've also bricked my mother-in-law's laptop trying to fix a Windows driver error."
Unlike previous Windows versions, with Windows 10 you can do an in place update from a USB key even if it wont boot the install you want to recover. See
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/videoplayer/embed/RE201WL
"The other factor to consider is that Windows Update locks you out of your PC with pointless full screen blerbs that tell you nothing useful. "
You do get the option for restart or restart and update these days. The are also plenty of options to defer if you are logged in and at the screen. And you can set active hours when updates wont install. However once pre-installed they will still prompt for a reboot during active hours which causes the common misconception that active hours isn't working. You can repeatedly defer the reboot.
"So you're sat there waiting for 15-30 minutes"
For build updates (~twice a year) it is installing a fresh copy of the OS, so yes it isn't as fast as a patch. However the range is more like 5 minutes (NVMe) to 30 minutes (laptop with spinning rust).
"That is hilarious - while you are of course wrong - Windows Update isn't fast at anything, and the installation requires 32GB of disk space and uses 20GB"
Installation actually requires a recommended minimum of 16GB for 32bit or 20GB for 64bit. Windows 10 itself uses about 10GB on a clean install. The main additional space eaters are page file, hibernation file and of course future Windows updates.
If you have a <= 32GB device then commonly you run out of space for major updates and it's majorly sucky that Windows doesn't have built in intelligence to deal with that.
Hopefully it helps a few people to know that disabling the Hibernation file on such a device will usually free up enough space to update. You can do this from the command line via POWERCFG /hibernate off
"Lack of complaints may be caused the number of people (and companies) which upgrade as late as possible to avoid at least some problems."
If you read the linked blog, its been deployed to ~250 million devices, and the stats are based on that.
Companies do get up to 2 years from pre-release / 18 months from GA to remain supported. And builds will get fixes / security updates during that period.
"That's because everyone downgrades to Win7."
Apparently circa 700 million users have not.
Windows 10 has better performance especially on crappy hardware and is way more secure, so If you want Windows why not just run a relevant app to disable the spyware if not happy with the built in options, and install a Windows 7 start menu app if you hate TIFKAM would seem to make more sense to me. Or don't use Windows.
"So, basically it collects all the data on the PC, hardware and installed software and checks to see if there are any "gotchas" and either does or does not give you the update. Where's the AI?"
Presumably mostly in sifting "all the data on the PC" times tens of millions and working out what the "gotchas" are.
""because the download is at least four gigabytes"
It kind of makes you wonder.. 4 gigabyte update..."
The 64 bit update 1803 ESD / ISO download is about 2.9GB and 32 bit is 2.2GB containing all versions of Win10 except enterprise. For instance 64 bit US English:
http://fg.ds.b1.download.windowsupdate.com/c/Upgr/2018/03/17133.1.180323-1312.rs4_release_clientconsumer_ret_x64fre_en-us_8483d330ba2e42d8e0a2bdd377074358afb0c864.esd
And its a similar size for the update because major Windows 10 releases effectively install a fresh copy of the OS and then transfer your configuration and the fastest way to do that is from a complete OS image.
"Because WSUS is a crock of shit that downloads the whole universe, "
It only downloads what you tell it to - which is pretty granular by product and OS.
"depriving you of your internet connection for a week"
It only downloads it once. Better than multiple clients all downloading the same thing.
"and then stubbornly refuses to make any of the updates available to your clients"
Works just fine in everywhere I ever used it. You do have to use group policy to point your clients at it and set an update policy.
Surprising that the article doesn't actually mention the main content of the Microsoft blog post that it links to. That Microsoft is using AI to deploy Windows 10 updates:
Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues to be a key area of investment for Microsoft, and we’re pleased to announce that for the first time we’ve leveraged AI at scale to greatly improve the quality and reliability of the Windows 10 April 2018 Update rollout. Our AI approach intelligently selects devices that our feedback data indicate would have a great update experience and offers the April 2018 Update to these devices first. As our rollout progresses, we continuously collect update experience data and retrain our models to learn which devices will have a positive update experience, and where we may need to wait until we have higher confidence in a great experience. Our overall rollout objective is for a safe and reliable update, which means we only go as fast as is safe.
"Anyone notice Visa credit card charges going up in the past 2-3 years? Foreign exchange spreads etc..."
If you mean interest rates as well as FX rates then those are controlled by the issuing institution, not VISA. And yes with historically low interest rates, those have presumably risen to compensate.
"I don't know why anyone would move to MS SQL."
Well compared to Oracle, better security, lower cost of ownership, ease of development and far better integration would be significant reasons to move.
"Azure is a complete rip off too."
Compared to what? It's usually marginally cheaper than AWS for generally better performance.
"That PostgreSQL is used at all by yourselves just goes to show it's making inroads all over the place."
It isn't used by us. We ditched Oracle and have moved to AAG on SQL Server. However I have worked places where it is used, and it's generally niches where developers could do their own thing. Hardly anyone uses it in prod instead of Oracle or SQL Server. Market share is tiny, and few vendor systems support it.
"According to the latest gartner magic quadrant, azure has 4 billion run rate and AWS has 20 Billion. Ms dominating email in the cloud, but not much else."
Those figures are a bit out of date:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bobevans1/2018/04/27/microsoft-tops-amazon-in-q1-cloud-revenue-6-0-billion-to-5-44-billion-ibm-third-at-4-2-billion/
Azure is also consistently growing twice as fast as AWS. Microsoft have a lot more in cloud than just Azure - O365 for a start. They beat AWS in total cloud revenue over a year ago now.
"Chinese could imaginably ruin American economy by flooding the interest rates market with Treasury notes, which would push the yields up. It would cost them an arm and leg"
And America could simply say devalue the US Dollar by a factor of ten making that that debt worth much less.
"Big advertising (my sponsors) think that it will be too much hassle to try and stop theft, so we should make it legal. Big advertising (my sponsors) think that it will be too much hassle to try and stop theft, so we should make it legal."
Well, firstly copyright infringement is not theft. See here for the difference:
https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4
And secondly its already illegal. This is purely about who has liability for enforcement. And as soon as you make it the companies that are basically jusr pipes to content, then loads of unrelated stuff is going to get censored by special interest groups, governments, etc or simply as collateral damage.