Re: I call fake news....
Microsoft wouldn't implement a feature unless they have a every intent of putting it into the final product. The only think likely to stop them doing it is if they think they'll get in legal trouble for doing it.
5327 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Jul 2007
Even today they're desperate to get people to use Edge.
I set up a new laptop yesterday, installing Firefox as one of the first acts. When I went to switch the default browser to Firefox in the settings, a popup appeared asking if I really wanted to not use Edge because it was great. No it isn't. It's kind of shit actually.
The EU really needs to kick Microsoft hard in the balls, or enormous fines (whichever is legally permissible) until they get the message and stop interfering with people's choice of browser.
"Nice misdirection !!!"
No, it's a statement of fact. Unless you were visiting this site, your rights were not infringed. The FBI weren't tracking you because they had no reason to. If you WERE visiting this site then you were committing a crime and the FBI and every other law enforcement agency in the world is empowered to find out who you are in order to prosecute you. And so it was they stuck a bit of code into the site to get an IP address. Boo hoo.
There is no misdirection necessary here. Stop pretending this is a violation of rights. It isn't. And as I've mentioned elsewhere this is not limited to the FBI. Here you may see the image that visitors to Hansa saw after it was closed - the Dutch cops telling people that their IPs were logged, their bitcoins seized, their passwords & PGP keys logged and so on.
https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/images/editor/hansa.jpg
When you visit a site to conduct illegal activity you forfeit any right to privacy.
"Only under U.S. law would it be "legal". In theory, if one of them ever showed up in another country where such alleged hacking took place, the FBI guy responsible for the hacking could STILL be arrested for it, "over there"."
Not true in the slightest. Dutch police took over the dark web Hansa (similar to Silk Road) using similar techniques and arrested a bunch of people.
From their own press release "This involved taking covert control of Hansa under Dutch judicial authority a month ago, which allowed Dutch police to monitor the activity of users without their knowledge, and then shutting down AlphaBay during the same period."
Visiting these sites self selects people for monitoring.
"It's always the worst of society that are used to justify infringing on the rights of everyone else."
Except everyone else's rights weren't infringed. This creep and others like him were in the commission of a crime by explicitly and intentionally visiting a specific site dealing in child pornography. The expectation of privacy has almost no legal merit for these people. Clearly the judge felt so too.
Kinect was premised on two very shaky assumptions.
1. That people wanted a glorified EyeToy.
2. That games that use motion controls are desirable and more fun that those played with regular controls.
Neither assumption was correct. The EyeToy sold well as a peripheral but it didn't exactly set the world on fire. And motion controlled games tend to be terrible, limited to things like dance / fitness and dumb mini games.
On top of that, Microsoft overpromised, pretending the system could recognize faces, track skeletons, even track individual fingers even of up to 4 people. Some demos like "Milo" merely suggested the system even had speech recognition, natural language processing and could recognize expressions and mood.
Then when it was eventually crapped out it could barely recognize somebody flailing their arms around or pretending to be holding a steering wheel.
Undaunted, Microsoft shoved an updated version into the XBox One, whether people wanted it or not and nearly killed their new console stone dead.
So yeah.
I don't see the tech being much use in the iPhone X either. It's there to justify the high price, not because it offers some substantial benefit. I suppose it's great you can unlock a phone by looking at the phone (cheaper phones have a similar feature), but the security is terrible and most people would still prefer to use a fingerprint or pin.
Well quite. Never buy version 1 of anything. Anyone working in software or hardware development should know this implicitly.
No new vehicle ever rolls out with all its faults, bugs and quality issues sorted. Even with extensive testing, the manufacturer won't even know what they all are until people start crashing their cars, having them repaired / serviced etc.
Tesla is in a worse situation than most because it's rushing out a vehicle without an automated production line and with a hard deadline. They've never had a good reputation for quality and there are reports of quailty issues in the new vehicle. Eventually they'll sort it but the early adopters are basically paying for a beta quality vehicle.
The joke is that every suspects Carter Page of being a spy. Even Carter Page suspects Carter Page of being a spy.
He was under surveillance long before the Steele report, and there is no reason to suppose that his continued surveillance wouldn't have happened whether his name was in that report or not.
Every US news website does this BS and it's so annoying. If I want to watch the video I will click to the play the video. It's bad enough that it plays the video without asking, but then if I scroll down they'll put the video in a little floating frame and it will follow me all the way down the page.
And if that's not enough, when the video finishes, it'll start playing another video.
Just STOP IT.
Autoplay should be a whitelist. The browser shouldn't autoplay anything from a site unless I've granted that site permission to do so. Default to off.
I write semicolons out of force of habit since most C-like languages require them. But when I run a code formatter, one of the rules will normally strip out the unnecessary ones.
Personally though I think this is symptomatic of the dog's dinner that is Java / ECMAscript. Poorly thought out legacy behaviour that keeps biting people on the ass even to this day. See also the difference between null and undefined - if null was a billion dollar mistake I wonder how much of a mistake undefined is. Or the laughable scope rules for var. Or the difference between == and ===. Or the binding (or not) of this. And a million and one stupid other things.
I'm glad that WebAssembly is a thing now. In time it will provide a choice for web development which doesn't involve writing directly or indirectly (via Typescript / Coffeescript et al) in Javascript. Let Javascript go back to what it was supposed to be in the first place - glue.
Project Natal, aka Kinect was another one.
Microsoft released a load of demos ranging from plausible all the way up to outright bullshit lies. The worst was "Milo", a virtual boy who you could talk to through Kinect. It merely implied that Kinect had natural language processing, facial recognition, mood recognition and AI.
None of which was true. Turns out it was all faked. Even many of the "live" demos were choreographed and turned out to be fake.
When Kinect eventually turned up it did so in an emasculated form that could barely register exagerated arm flailing motions with any accuracy. Unsurprisingly it sold well from the built-up hype and then sank like a stone.
If the phone could operate more slowly to preserve battery then there is no reason it couldn't ask the user whether to do this or not.
Apple might make the excuse it's to "save battery life" but the more likely reason is to hasten the phone's obsolescence. If the phone gets slower then people are more likely to buy a new one. Same reason they seal the batteries in.
It's funny how Apple, alleged masters of design, can't design a phone where the battery can be replaced by the user simply and cheaply.
I could do without the "jelly" issue but it's not a major annoyance. The phone itself is well designed, very thin and performs well. My biggest beef is I wish that the phone OS was still Cyanogen / LineageOS because I miss just being able to block an app using GPS or whatever else it wanted for egregious reasons.
The only glitch I've see is that tabs look a bit weird in Windows 10 with a gap on the left. Pages load very quickly and I expect performance will improve even more as more stuff is parallelized.
I develop in Rust (and C, C++ and other stuff) and it's really good to see this stuff working in such a visible product. Rust is an effective way of writing much safer code without compromising on performance or speed.
I've got to laugh at these dark web stories because the outcomes are so predictable. Einstein here probably thought he was ordering a bomb from a terrorist but in reality it was a honey pot site or a cop posing as a seller. Then all the UK police had to do was deliver the phony bomb and wait for him to pick it up. Case closed.
The dummies who use the sites think they're safe but in reality they're drawing more heat on themselves than they think. It must be like shooting fish in the barrel for the cops.
I realise Logitech needs to make money and maybe these devices are at the end of their commercial life. But actively selling remaining stock while simultaneously working to kill it off is just a terrible dickish thing to do.
The correct way is to discontinue sales, wait a reasonable amount of time and then give another period of grace for discontinuation. And discontinuation means just the cloud stuff, then they should preserve any functionality the device is still capable of. e.g. if the device can still work as an AV hub, or an IR channel switcher.
And if they wanted to be cool about it they'd even release keys that allowed people to write their own apps that talked with the device, or even keys to hack the now-obsolete device to do something else.
Maybe in so doing, it might make Logitech seem like they cared about their customers instead of fleecing them as they sell them a duff device.
Trump was exhorting his love for wikileaks throughout the campaign and begging them to release more emails. In addition, Roger Stone (a slimy GOP operative) was making contact with Assange to get Hillary's emails. Then it turns out Cambridge Analytica (another part of the Trump campaign) was making contacts with Assange for emails. And then we have stories like Matt Tait who was asked by another GOP operative to hack Hillary's emails. Then we have Trump Jr meeting Russians about Hillary's emails.
It's almost like there is a conspiracy here or something. Let's be clear too - opposition research is a normal thing in US politics and legal. Conspiring with agents of foreign adversaries, and hacking is extremely illegal.
And on the day that this new Assange contact dropped, Russia, Breitbart and a bunch of media outlets start screaming in unison about who funded the dossier. Almost like it was coordinated or something. The troll farms in Russia must be working over time to combat every revelation. It's starting to all sound a bit desperate.
"Let's keep some perspective here. Windows 10 S turns into Windows 10 Pro with a mouse-click and reboot. "
Which more or less illustrates it is crippleware doesn't it?
Microsoft are crippling their own operating system under the guise of an "educational" version of Windows when the vastly more likely reason is they want to shove people into their store and through their browser whether they want it or not.
I've used a few Thinkpads and the biggest attraction of them was the fact that if something broke you could order a replacement part. And aside from that they were quite rugged with nice lids that closed shut properly. The red nipple thing was and still is vastly easier to use for precision than a touchpad.
I wonder if this is true for the Thinkpad 25 or if it's going to break if you look at it sideways and the whole lot has to be junked.
I'm sure the smallprint says "where the next decade refers to 2020-2030 as opposed to 2027".
Even an extra 3 years is generous given we're talking about designing, prototyping, testing and building a large body passenger aircraft in an untested configuration. Not just the aircraft itself but all the construction facilities and all the infrastructure that airports would need to service and operate them.
The usability or lack thereof of a car's infotainment software is largely unrelated to the kernel underneath. Any modern kernel running on a decent SoC should be capable of delivering an excellent experience. It's a matter of supreme unimportance if there is a Linux, QNX, BSD or NT kernel under it all.
And if the car doesn't deliver an excellent experience, blame it on the software developers or the car manufacturer. I've seen a number of cars where the stingy buggers equipped their systems with resistive low res displays and sluggish SoCs and didn't even have the good grace to stick some physical buttons and knobs next to it for the common stuff. Hardly any surprise when the experience turns out to be awful.
We've been down this road many times before with WebOS, FirefoxOS, MeeGo, Tizen etc.
People care about the general usability of the device as a phone, planner, messaging platform etc. as well as the availability of the apps they want to use on it - maps, Youtube, Netflix, Facebook, Twitter etc.
It's an issue of little importance if the kernel or the software over the top is free as in libre or not. What matters is that the device does the stuff they bought it for.
If this "freedom oriented" smartphone expects to go anywhere it had better remember that. Even in the absence of apps, the most important part is getting the user experience right. It's great that Debian is underneath it and all but if the gui sucks then it sucks regardless.
"If there weren't any wiretaps, the whole thing goes down the drain."
Ho ho. No.
Manafort, Flynn, Trump sr, Trump's adult children, Kushner, Sessions, Pence, Guilliani, Bannon, Prince and DeVos, Rohrbacher plus a bunch of 2nd tier people like Stone, Cohen, Page et al all have Russian ties which have been extensively reported and are doubtless under investigation.
A lot of indictments are going to be handed down before all this is over with.
As president, Trump would have the complete authority and power to declassify any wiretapping operation assuming there was one to begin with. Instead he took a cheap shot at his predecessor and didn't follow through with any evidence.
That said, intelligence agencies can and do gather intelligence on "agents of foreign powers" so if one of those were conversing with somebody in Trump's organisation, or talking to somebody else and mentioning their name, then it would be incidental collection. The agency wasn't monitoring Trump / associates / business directly but those things came up in things they were monitoring.
It may well be that such incidental collection contains some very damning conversations between Trump's cohorts and foreign agents. In which case that might explain his ranting.
3 separate platforms have tried to launch VR platforms in the last few years and they've all flopped.
Turns out people don't like expensive, dorky, uncomfortable peripherals with a mess of cables and sensors especially when there is no "killer app" that justifies the effort. VR / AR have some niche uses (e.g. flight simulators in VR are awesome), but they're too much effort for the mainstream.
Microsoft's effort is likely to fail as hard as all the rest. It seems like they're aware of that too if they're getting 3rd parties to take the financial risk of selling headsets in competition with each other for the platform.
The link doesn't work.
But from the description I doubt this lawsuit will go anywhere. Nestle will either pay Atari their fuck-off settlement fee, or it'll go through the courts and be ruled a parody and fair use. Either way it's a mercenary cash grab from Atari. I have to wonder what Atari even *is* these days.
The Amiga brand is like a Japanese horror movie curse.
Since Commodore went bust the brand has been passed through a multitude of owners. Each promises a new model "soon". And invariably the endeavour flops and the brand passes on to a new owner. Rinse and repeat for twenty years.
I bet most people encounters one or more problems in a daily commute that an automated vehicle would struggle to solve in a correct or even remotely acceptable way.
Automated cars are probably fine on a closed loop circuit, e.g. transferring people between airport terminals, or on certain stretches of roads like motorways. Standard urban commutes / city driving not so much.
I doubt the hypervisor adds much impact to file, messaging or network IO compared to actual activity itself. Biggest impact would be on graphics. Graphics necessarily runs against the hardware so you either abstract and badly degrade the performance or you let the software use the hardware and pray that there are no exploits (unlikely) in the driver or the hardware itself.
A hypervisor in a car would serve the same purpose as a hypervisor in a games console - it allows code to run in its own little box with little or no access to code running with a higher privilege or in a different box. So that even if someone managed somehow to hack / root the infotainment system, it wouldn't provide them with access to other critical systems in the vehicle.
Given the number of stories about remotely hacked vehicles and the increasing use of over the air updates, phone apps etc., this would seem like a sensible thing to add.
That said, I could see how even hacking the infotainment system could screw with a car. Most systems would have control to functions like door / boot locks, fuel cap release, air conditioning, volume controls, bluetooth, gps etc. then there are still opportunities to grief the car, remotely open it, listen to conversations, track its location etc.
I've got one too and it's a good phone for the price although the "jelly" effect is noticeable on some apps. I'm also waiting for LineageOS to start supporting it because OxygenOS is a nice barebones Android, it still lacks additions I miss from Lineage such as privacy guard.
Still it's very responsive, the screen is bright, it charges fast, the battery has been excellent so far, the finger print reader is great. The phone isn't burdened with crapware and it has lots of storage and ram.
I like the camera but then again I come from a Oneplus One & Nexus 4 where the camera were so slow they were frustrating. Just taking a picture and seeing the picture in a split second is a novelty. Taking a picture which isn't a blurry mess is also a novelty.
One criticism I have is not of the phone but the official flip cover case. It has a very neat feature where closing it turns off the screen, but the the damned thing makes it hard to push the volume buttons. Maybe the volume controls should have been on the right side and the power somewhere else.
Is to program something non-trivial suited to that language / api / package. i.e. don't write some crappy hello world equivalent. Go all-in and write something which you estimate will take several weeks to write at the least and touches on 2 or 3 major features of the thing. Better yet, open source your efforts, put it up on github or somewhere and make sure to stick it on the CV.