Posts by Sandtitz 1712 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Oct 2010
"Hard wired ram, Hard wired HDD, Hard wired battery
Just who wants any of that shite?"
It's not that anyone explicitly wants unexpandable gadgets. People have been more and more fascinated by thinner and lighter laptops, tablets and phones for a long time. Obviously soldering the memory or storage chips to the board takes several millimetres less XYZ space. For the same reason the CPU in most laptops (and all mobile stuff) is not socketed but soldered.
last I checked, the Adobe reader kept asking me to REGISTER IT with an E-MAIL ADDRESS...
Last I checked, it didn't. Can't remember it ever having done so.
"So, with at least 2 decent alternative PDF readers out there"
So why won't you name them?
Do they work with all forms, do they work with and print unicode and other non-ascii characters without any problems?
"Because its there"
The superior Bzip2 has been there for couple decades already, producing significantly smaller archives, with minimal system resources. LZMA is even better though much slower. Then again I'm still working a lot with remote offices with 2/1Mb DSL lines and the much smaller packages offset the slower archiving.
My colleague always used the old compress util until he retired couple years ago. Never wanted to use even gzip.
"when you install windows (and, other OS's) on an SSD, it disables the pagefile/swapfile - among other SSD specific tweaks"
You're wrong.
Win10 doesn't disable pagefile or the hibernation file upon installation on an SSD. Windows just enables TRIM when the system has an SSD and that's it really.
"Last year you could literally walk over the heads of investors at trade shows wanting to invest in anything that had the word "blockchain" in it, even if it was evident from the most casual informed glance that it was utter BS."
A classic from 2017:
It's a mad mad mad mad world, I tell ya!
"Citation needed."
https://www.cnet.com/news/microsoft-windows-annivesary-update-demands-at-least-2gb-memory/
Windows 10 (or Win8?) upped the CPU requirements somewhat. The CPU must include PAE, NX and SSE2 instructions, and the NX part rules out anything before Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 (Prescott revision).
"Most examples that I've seen involves large corporations with lots of C-suite decision makers that enjoy a bit of hobnobbing with the sales reps at fancy restaurants and glitzy venues."
Not very long ago most large companies wouldn't have bet their infrastructure on anything else than Oracle, DB2, MSSQL or other proven databases. The open source stacks were and are fine for many things, but didn't necessarily meet the requirements, such as resiliency, scaling, 24/7 support - or the company's chosen line of business software just supported specific database engines.
Oracle is a very succesful company because they have had a good product to sell.
"Like many other big iron and big software sellers, the product doesn't meet the hype."
How? Please elaborate.
"(Jealously holding on to my mainly open-source stack that can run rings around a similarly configured big C enterprise version.)"
In your basement Pentium3 w/ 256MB memory or scaled out to 10 racks in several locations?
"many of our core services need something more than Windows servers, and we wanted more security, stable interoperability, and reliability... after doing a detailed investigation, we got an excellent high availability IP/DHCP/DNS solution"
Blah, blah, blah, and of course no mention what the better replacement product actually was. D'oh!
"Maybe AMD could help?"
I'm sure the Zen stuff is great on desktop or servers (I haven't seen any yet) but on laptops AMD still is trailing from what I've read on Notebookcheck and other review sites. And the driver support for the GPU is also (reportedly) poor.
I replaced my work laptop late last year and I contemplated on an AMD laptop but ended up with the HP 840 G5 (Intel) because an otherwise identical 745 G5 (AMD) had worse battery life. Perhaps the Zen /Vega graphics are way better but it was irrelevant as I don't game nor do graphical design.
The Intel CPU shortage is still on - we're waiting for a delayed batch of PC's - but Dell/HP/Lenovo are still not pushing AMD at all unless you're looking for consumer laptops. And not even then.
"Who are the owners of Linux, GPL, and GitLab and what are their goals? Now who owns GitHub and, together with LinkedIn, has exclusive access to a mother-lode of enterprise data and a history of abusing their market power?"
Easy there cowboy.
I was commenting on Cronus's comment: 'If you're not paying for the product, you are the product.' You seem to be reading something between the lines that just isn't there. If you feel my observation about being a product was wrong, just expose the falsity of it in your next reply.
By the way: GitLab Inc. is a multi-million dollar commercial entity, not just a lemonade stand. Their aim is to IPO in 2 years and get a $100M annual revenue before that to happen. Surprised?
"You pay for open source products by contributing to them. Unless, of course, you don't. In which case I guess you are indeed the product."
What is this, the Bizarro World??
I contribute zilch, nada, zip to Linux or the various FOSS software I use. I am not the product, those software products are products. How is that not obvious to you and your upvoters?
To quote Asimov about Roman numerals:
"But why? Where's the need? To be sure, you will find Roman numerals on cornerstones and gravestones, on clockfaces and on some public buildings and documents, but it isn't used for any need at all. It is used for show, for status, for antique flavor, for a craving for some kind of phony classicism.
I dare say there are some sentimental fellows who feel that knowledge of the Roman numerals is a kind of gateway to history and culture; that scrapping them would be like knocking over what is left of the Parthenon, but I have no patience with such mawkishness. We might as well suggest that everyone who learns to drive a car be required to spend some time at the wheel of a Model-T Ford so he could get the flavor of early cardom."
"Replace "China" with "Japan" and that's pretty much word for word what American companies were saying in the 1960s and 1970s."
I'm aware of that.
You seem to imply that China produces better goods than the West World. Foxconn and others may produce some great gadgets, but they're just following Apple's and others' blueprints. What I'm thinking about Chinese manufacturing is the junk that fills AliExpress, everything from fake cosmetics to fake shipping containers, the melamine milk scandal and other faulty or dangerous goods.
"China has got this one right, no one should patents on ideas/inventions and if someone can make something better then so be it!"
China doesn't make things better, they just make it cheaper than the competition, partly because of lower labor costs and a big internal market, but also because they don't spend on R&D.
"Specially with drugs and medical equipment absolute joke we allow companies to hold patents on cures and treatments and allow research to be done behind closed doors."
The cost of drug development is super expensive.
Medical equipment costs a lot, because they're specialty products, need many (local) certifications, and the companies producing them are not selling a several X-Ray machines, ultracentrifuges or electron microscopes in large quantities.
"If humanity ever wants to progress we are going to have to start being more open the idea of sharing our ideas/designs/inventions."
Homo homini lupus. Turning all mankind to work for the common good would be the ideal Star Trekkian future but that won't work by just abolishing patents or trade secrets.
"Sorry but I wouldn't touch that ADATA SSD with a barge pool let alone put it in a new computer"
Why?
Apart from Alistair's anecdote, I cannot find any reliabitility data concerning ADATA. I have a few in casual use and I haven't had any problems. They're not the most performant, but I can't spot any difference between them and say, Samsung 960 Evo models unless I run benchmarks. This, of course, is also anecdotal data.
If ADATA really is worse than the competition, I'd like some proper evidence. I've had firmware problems in SSD's from practically every manufacturer, even Intel has had terrible problems. I'm also used to updating HDD firmware, they're no exception...
"I would think the reason should be obvious - you get more data space for the monetary outlay."
If that is the only metric. An SSD gets work done faster, and it consumes much less power when idle or in use - enabling a laptop to run longer on a battery. It also weights less and is silent.
"At the moment I can get a 1TB SSD for 400 euro and a 2TB spinning disk for 85 euro."
Please update your prices. At the moment I can actually buy a 2TB SSD for 280 eur, the ADATA SU800 2TB.
At the moment I can get a new 120 GB SSD for 25 eur. I can get a new 240GB SSD for 40 eur. The cheapest new hard drive, a WD or Seagate 2,5" 5400rpm 500GB costs about 45 eur. If you're specifying a new computer and 'money is of great concern', as you put it, then I'd go with a 120/240GB SSD.
But to each their own.
"Go read the policy."
I've read the policy, and your 'MS: the company that hoovers up your every keystroke' is a false statement. The MS Privacy Statement in that old page predates Windows 10 and was for the beta versions ("Insider") and I'm sure the data slurp was turned to 11 to get more input for it.
The page does not exist anymore and the current Privacy Statement is not exclusive to Windows, it's for their other products as well, Azure, Bing etc.
"MS: the company that hoovers up your every keystroke, file accessed"
MS published a tool some time ago for users to check what telemetry data is sent to them. I certainly didn't see anything of interest nor any snippets of text I've typed. Yes, I remember the keylogger brouhaha couple years ago, but I don't think anyone showed how their input/messages/files was sent for MS to ogle - I'm sure if it did happen then someone would have shown the evidence already. After all, there are plenty of able people with an axe to grind.
"MS: the company that hoovers up your every keystroke, file accessed, archived file stored on any connected (local/cloud/network) drive, how often you run every program, how many times you run them, every website you browse (and can MITM intercept everything you do via that supposedly secure VPN)"
You've learned well from the best - MS was master of FUD.
"Mind, the things are equally happy to send your scans by (unsecured, in my experience) email."
I haven't seen a new MFP in eons that didn't support TLS encryption in email transport.
Fax certainly isn't secure, since the low bitrate traffic can be intercepted and replayed on another fax at the telco. Caller ID spoofing is also easy to do.
Just sayin'...
"Accused of rape, skipped bail, scarpered to an embassy. Just follow the law."
How do you feel about Snowden? He'd probably be convicted of treason, yet most people are delighted for him to be at large.
"I suspect Trump has a pardon for him in any case"
Why would he pardon him? Assange has been so much demonized in Fox and other US media that pardoning him would be politically very stupid, even from Trump.
"And I underline publishers, it's not the authors that reap the benefits"
Well, they certainly won't benefit from Youtube according to the article.
Do you think Napster was in the right side of law since they just made a nice P2P platform for everyone to publish their songs? Napster didn't upload any of the music. Does Youtube really differ from Napster?
"I regularly remove Candy Crush (and the ten million assorted other abominations MS force feed hapless users) from new PCs only to see it "....Installing" in the start menu a second or two later."
That's because the bundled versions on the OS media are out of date and the Store app checks for updates immediately when the computer is online. The updates are added to the download queue. The removed apps will bounce back once the update is downloaded.
Either pause and and cancel the App updates, disable automatic App updates, or disconnect the computer until you've uninstalled the apps.
Also, disable the "occasionally show suggestions on start menu" setting.
HTH.
"Thus effectively killing the last remains of human presence in space"
Not at all. There are 'remains'. And more are to come.
Wiki: Ashes of Clyde Tombaugh are travelling within New Horizons towards interstellar space and a small capsule of Eugene Shoemaker's ashes are in the Moon, probably buried.
"What would you've done if you get a 911 call regarding a hostile hostage situation, you go out to try to defuse that situation."
Um, call back the phone or the home landline for confirmation?! Since the alleged shooter called 911 (multiple times) there's a pretty good chance he would answer´if it was real.
Of course you'll have to ASSUME that ANYBODY walking out of the door is part of the hostile party and if said person do things quite contrary to your orders (dropping hands when ordered to place his/her hands up)
I'd be pretty dazed if I walked out of the house and suddenly cops were all around shouting orders and lots of lights. Hands dropping due to confusion - quite possible. Finch flinched and that was it.
Just makes me wonder why the cop who shot him (with a rifle and looking through the scope) had to aim for his chest - the bullet went through his heart according to autopsy. Why don't they aim for feet just to incapacitate? The cops were behind cars and any wild shooter from that distance would have zero chance to hit anyone if he managed to pull a pistol from his pocket.
The local paper has a report with multiple poor quality bodycam videos (due to night time?). The officers' reports vary and some didn't regard him a threat and thought he was going to pull his pants up. Not all officers even had their bodycams turned on.
"I'm pissed off with Microsoft for dropping it. They may not have had as much initial success with it as they liked but it is a solid OS and ceding the market entirely to Google and Apple is a huge mistake."
MS ceded the market to Google and Apple not because they wanted, but because they were too late in the market, and the poor management and poor technical decisions bungled it afterwards. Not gaining developer love had some part in their undoing as well.
MS could only have had a better chance with underhanded tactics, like hampering O365/Exchange connectivity from non-Windows devices. Similarly, Google didn't code a Youtube app for WinPhone (perfectly excusable), but Google did have a hissy fit when MS made their own Youtube app and blocked access. Well documented on El Reg site.
They want to make people move from that platform...
Why? MS has committed to maintain Win10 Phone until 12/2019. I'm not seeing MS gaining or losing anything even if people keep using the service until then. After that it is not Microsoft's problem, even if people continue to use phones that are not up-to-date. People still use pre-5S iPhones, Gingerbread Androids, and older Nokias happily even if they're considered obsolete by many.
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