* Posts by JLV

2252 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Mar 2013

Straight outta Blighty: Readers, if you were a tech billionaire, what would you do?

JLV

brexit sentiment question

Reading the BBC comments, it seems way more people are defending Brexit, including hard Brexit, than you lot.

Any idea why?

An inquiring Canadian wants to know

Microsoft wins today's buzzword bingo with empowering set of updates to Teams

JLV

it’s almost as if we’re speaking German.

or Old English.

sounds twattish tho.

xHamster reports spike in UK users getting their five-knuckle shuffle on before pr0n age checks

JLV

Think of it this way. If you’re the Chinese govt, is it better PR to ban VPNs to stop porn? Or to ban it to stifle political dissent?

Ministry of Justice abandons key plank of £280m IT project

JLV

Re: IT, fostering delusions since 1977

not to defend waterfall, but the article makes it seem it was an Agile shop...

JLV

Re: IT, fostering delusions since 1977

+1

But, no, you’d use 1700 napkins, just for the contract, so one actually working on the system, rather than the doc and contract, would have the time to become knowledgeable about the system as a whole.

Paperwork and CYA would trump working software. Agile it up to make it look good. Testing? Hah!

Truth is, between rapacious and incompetent consultants and indecisive and incompetent bureaucrats, I have no idea, after working in software all my life, how you could systematically bring even medium complexity gov projects to satisfactory ending.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/phoenix-ibm-contract-union-pay-government-1.4295827

IBM insists it's not deliberately axing older staff. Internal secret docs state otherwise...

JLV
Trollface

Re: So Ginni should watch out.

Given performance of IBM...

She could should be next?

This is the final straw, evil Microsoft. Making private GitHub repos free? You've gone too far

JLV

Re: As ever

Thats certainly one way to view it. Another is the POV of running a stack with a dev name recognition really only equal to Stackoverflow (Joel Spolsky is a Net-stack guy btw). Costing little to run and with huge amount of potential goodwill.

Had I just paid (overpriced IMHO) 7.5B$, again IMHO, I wouldn't be sweating the limited free account stuff. OR effin up people with privacy grabs/fails. Bigger picture is running free and charging next tier/cornering a market/making MS cool again/shaping dialog around “a huge chunk of tech online interest”. Not that I am huge MS fan. Im not. But a mostly benign/hands off strategy seems best at this time.

signed: Mr. Naive

You can blame laziness as much as greed for Apple's New Year shock

JLV

Yes, it was interesting to see the stock plunge. They well deserved it

Bitching about innovation isnt totally justified. Smartphones have reached a certain technological maturity. See PCs,, CPUs for examples thereof and no one company can reliably and repeatedly out-innovate everyone else at this point. Until the next inflection point. Not Apple’s fault, really.

But upping your revenues by increasing prices wo new value is a bit like stretching a rubberband. You’ll keep your customers. Until they leave and never come back.

Trouble is, APPL’s valuation is circa $100/ human being. That’s, roughly, profits expected pp, for everyone. Rich people, dirt poor 3rd worlders, 45 yr olds, 3 yr olds. Apple haters. Doubt they’ll get that selling the product lines they do, to their customer bases. How to move the needle?

They have phenomenal brand appeal, but they need to sell new things or new customers.

- cars. Well executed that’s a whole new ball park to chew up $100/pp.

- enterprises. Macos is almost a Linux. And Windows is bound to have upset more than a few.

- the 80-90% of people still running Windows PCs despite Win 10. Can’t do that w $3k laptops.

- product X.

- dividends???

I aint no marketing expert so certainly messing up. But they’ve reached peak capitalization unless they switch gears. $2k phones aint gonna do it. Nor will price wars with Android phones. None of the above options are risk free. Or necessarily even clever.

Bottom line: at this level of cap, I see them very much prisoners of their own success. And a bit of an indictment of capitalism’s expectations, much as I usually defend that system.

My 2019 resolution? Not to buy any of THIS rubbish

JLV

Re: You missed one...

Maybe when you're too inebriated to drive, but home's too far to walk?

If they're anything like rollerblades however, even minimal drunkenness can be very taxing when operating them.

JLV
Joke

Re: Any computer game after 1994...

Dark Souls

Total War series

re. the robot sex, why is it that women talking about dildos => sexy/risque. men going about penetrating silicone implements or the like => creepy/desperate.

sexism much?

:-) '19, y'all.

It's a lot of work, being popular: Apple, Tim Cook and the gilets jaunes

JLV

Re: Where history repeats itself

to be fair its fairly shit macOS 8.x didn’t help either. they’d failed, twice, at creating a new one (Taligent and Copland) and by then the poor thing was really showing its age to anyone else than the most uncritical fans or specialized industries.

i recall a Word resume-printing session with about half a dozen bomb icons in 30 mins.

JLV

Re: Apple business plan

yes and no. high margin low volume is the lifeblood of aspirational luxury brands like Hermes or Louis Vuitton.

but if you look at cars, most of the luxury brands are parts of consortiums now.

the difference is that old style luxuries do not require heavy R&D nor benefit greatly from economies of scale.

Apple can choose to sell exclusively to the 1% (ok, 10-15%) but its fixed R&D costs would then be spread on too few units.

to be able to innovate they need volume. selling lots of phones cheap in India is however not without branding risks and would not necessarily result in much profit either. even if investors want to hear it.

i suspect they will have to find ways to deliver better value to midlevel consumers at some point. but that is somewhat complicated by their products’ relatively long lifetime. media-wise they seem expensive and locked-in and, to me, deliver less value than in hardware. apps are good, but bound to hit saturation on existing users

tough having to justify valuation of $100/human.

Dutch boyband hopes to reverse Brexit through the power of music

JLV
Headmaster

>compitant

says it all...

(all on your own too, like a big boy, can’t be blamed on auto-complete)

JLV

Re: old 70's song

J'ai besoin de partir, de nous donner de l'espace

J'ai besoin de partir, de nous donner de l'espace

Quelque part aussi beau qu'avant, qu'avant, quand on vivait

Quelque part aussi beau qu'avant, qu'avant, quand on aimait

C'est ta voix, c'est la voix, c'est ta voix que j'aimais

C'est ma voix, c'est ma voix, c'est ma voix qui te plaît

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JAOEo_sVRo0

JLV
Trollface

oh, don’t be so harsh on the Dutch.

after all, the merkins picked someone who can’t lead for a slightly less frivolous role.

London's Gatwick airport suspends all flights after 'multiple' reports of drones

JLV
Coat

Re: I wonder if...

>For most of the time it's been dark and raining.

what, in the UK?

yes, yes, my coat ;-)

JLV

Re: I wonder if...

how dare you forget Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin!

Mark Zuckerberg did everything in his power to avoid Facebook becoming the next MySpace – but forgot one crucial detail…

JLV

Re: Good article. Assuming TheRegister is clean with our data.

>But politicians in general are the biggest liars of them all.

That is a totally unproductive and stupid attitude to have. Politicians's job is to get elected. If you've ever had to convince people of anything than you realize that you have to project some level of certainty in what you say. Some of it may very well be less than truthful. So, yes, it is a job where communication is highly scripted and has to fit the agenda. The agenda could be on the left or it could be on the right, but you will be getting political speech coming out.

Sometimes you get people who knowingly make a promise or a claim that they know in advance is wrong and it comes out later. It used to be that those politicians would get voted out of office.

But now you have people, like yourself, who actively hold all political actors as liars, all the time, regardless of their actual actions. That, to me, opens the gate to voter cynicism and stupid decisions. Why bother looking for a party with realistic policies? They all lie. Why bother assessing whether a given politician is honest or not? They all steal. Why vote for someone who proposes a hard road ahead rather than telling you what you what you want to hear? None of it means anything. Why vote out someone for underperforming? It doesn't matter, does it? Why examine

This level of angry irrational nihilism nurtures the kind of stupidity that has elected all sorts of losers and has the potential to elect many more. Syriza, in Greece, LePen in France, all the various incarnations of Putin in Russia. The biggest wanker of them all will remain unmentioned. It doesn't matter what you vote, as you long as you register your protest and anger, is your message.

You, and your kind, spend all your time telling how democracy is such a lie. And it is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. Not (just) because of the politicians. But because too many people believe angry disillusioned cynical ranters like you and then abdicate any responsibility as informed voters to make wise choices. "We didn't really mean X, we were just angry".

Consider this to be a lefty rant if you want. It's not. The Republican party has in the past had great leaders. Some of the leftist populist politicians waiting in the wings would be as useless as tits on a bull.

But this persistent insistence that _everyone_ who considers public service is a scum is a plague. It is not what our societies and forebears have strived for, and sacrificed to achieve, over centuries. Since Americans respect the Founding Fathers so much, would you care to speculate what they would think of people with your outlook?

It is, truly, the Facebook level of civic engagement so it fits this article very well.

JLV
Trollface

Re: Good article. Assuming TheRegister is clean with our data.

I think that, given Trump’s tendency for strident hyperbole and HUUUGEing every little thing, BB feels he’s dealing with a kindred CAPSLOCK soul.

JLV

Re: Facebook's shadow profile.

in my case of FB stalking i’ll privilege the IP cross-matching hypothesis

i created a burner FB profile for Tinder. new pix, slightly different name (same age (: ). my phone, a near death wifi-only Android never left home. FB app had never been activated on that phone before. i never surfed anywhere while logged into this FB on my browser. never friended anyone from it.

yet within days i had tons of friend suggestions for people i did know, but barely. somebody’s cousin or mother for example.

seems to me straight that’s this was IP matching. creepy though.

JLV

the more things change

the more they don’t. while FB is due for a nasty time on this, i’m willing to bet nothing will happen in the long term. no Friendster, no Myspace, no Friends Reunited

- FB is a classic example of a network effect. leaving it for greener pastures would mean being on a scarcely populated social network. many of you may think that would be a good thing. but that’s just not how most people, except for us, reason nowadays.

- no provider much respects privacy. so while Zuck and co may be pondscum, who’s going to be the paragon of trust and virtue that most people can switch to? (yes, i can see earnest claims about peer-to-peer FB clones coming up...).

the best _likely_ outcome would be a serious fine (GDPR?) and a credible and factual commitment to keep data in-house. FB has a niche and is relatively safe, as long as it doesn’t commit enough criminal acts to motivate a breakup it can’t lobby itself out of and doesn’t earn itself a nasty enough reputation to wake up the slumbering sheep.

i don’t much like FB - been years since ive used it and my router blocks DNS on it. but I am cynical enough to doubt much will come out of this, with the exception of a share price dip.

(and, yes, i’ve had the same creepy friending suggestions happen to me)

Suunto settles scary scuba screwup for $50m: 'Faulty' dive computer hardware and software put explorers in peril

JLV
Happy

did i misread or 55.7$M award > $5M legal fees?

ie the claimants got more benefits than the lawyers???

nah, must be too much holiday grog yesterday. surely it’s $5/claimant or the like.

Oh Deer! Poacher sentenced to 12 months of regular Bambi screenings in the cooler

JLV

research on Swiss military gun access also found it strongly co-related with higher rates of suicide.

JLV

Haida Gwaai, a bigish island in BC, never had deer. The Canadian govt helpfully brought them in. But they have no predators there so they’re literally like rats, overrunning the whole island. Deer will jump over a fence and nuke your garden or farm quick as you please.

Next the Canadian govt wanted to bring in (also not native to the island) cougars to control the deer.

Thankfully the local Indian tribe had by that time enough say-so to give that miserable idea the boot.

But if you like deer hunting (im not a hunter) there is no place in Canada with freeer rules than Haida Gwaii ;-)

Home users due for a battering with Microsoft 365 subscription stick

JLV

Re: Never guessed...

actually this brings up a good point.

when you buy a Dell, say, it comes with Windows. FWIW to you, I realize. that OS is yours as long as that machine, sold to you by Dell, but without MS being directly involved, still works

if MS moves Windows to a subscription basis, then what would be the contractual effects to all parties if the Dell basically becomes an expensive paperweight if you stop your MS subscription?

would they be held liable for that? an easy solution would be for Dell to make a Linux distribution available to take over. not good for MS.

another might be legal verbiage by Dell warning that their shiny won’t work without a sub. not good for Dell.

In 2018, Facebook is the villain and Microsoft the shining light, according to techies

JLV

Re: Legislate, regulate

started out well, lost steam by “giant govt project, forbidden anonymity and we decide the truth ministry”.

i’d be happy with big data breach => jail time if egregious misconduct or gross negligence. a lot of the rest follows from there: no data, can’t go to jail.

JLV

Re: Some what does MS do with the data?

whatever they’re doing with it, it does not extend to making a stable OS.

JLV

Dear MS, all your Telemetry is forgiven.

Not.

Boffins build blazing battery bonfire

JLV

Re: Interesting idea

specious argument.

no one outside of homeopathists takes their claims seriously.

yes, climate scientists DO gain employment from climate change concerns.

but someone who managed to scientically debunk climate change, using good old science - i.e. a sound theory with reproducible results - would immediately achieve scientific superstardom.

and it’s not like there aren’t tons of people willing to bankroll that line of research. Trump and the US coal industry come to mind.

Or... there’s always the remote possibility that you are wrong. What level, if any, of proof would it take for you to adapt your worldview to new facts coming to your attention?

JLV

Re: Interesting idea

Germany’s fail is that climate change is too much of a problem to allow the Greens much say in solving it. We agree on that much.

For the rest, your ranty ramble is fairly content-free. If climate change is happening, something accepted by almost all scientists in the field, costs will be immense over time. Think of the effects on agriculture and losses from coastal real estate flooding.

All for what? To resist changing the way we generate energy? Yes, it will change economies and yes there will be losers, but people will end up being employed in the new jobs, new companies will grow and life will go on pretty much as before. If youve been paying attention you realize a lot of hardnosed capitalist corporations ARE increasingly banking on climate change being a problem. Because, well, the math and science add up. If it’s happening then it’s just a physical phenomenon, not a political one.

But, yeah, just keep on putting your head in the sand cuz it doesn’t fit your world view.

Brit bomb hoax teen who fantasised about being a notorious hacker cops 3 years in jail

JLV

not the greatest video, music or vid-wise. and kinda mean-spirited to boot.

Microsoft polishes up Chromium as EdgeHTML peers into the abyss

JLV

Re: I did use Edge...

It also lacked quick access to a menu or a bookmark bar.

They might be there, somewhere, but I dislike Windows menu-lessness as much as its Ribbons. Firefox, Vivaldi, Chrome all recognize bookmark bars are key (and if you don’t agree, allow you to decide to hide them).

Changing the rendering engine ought to help MS render html standards. Won’t help with their lobotomized UI. The rancid ghost of Sinovsky lives on.

Musk's popstar girlfriend Grimes croons about next-gen AI, plus more machine-learning news

JLV

Re: Grimes against humanity

eh, better than an Ariana Grande vid, IMHO.

Marriott's Starwood hotels mega-hack: Half a BILLION guests' deets exposed over 4 years

JLV

Re: police-requested guest registration

well then, if i was designing hotel POS systems, i’d

1. limit ID intake to strictly what’s _locally_ legally required.

2. upload to the relevant police db and delete

3. if 2 doesn’t exist, delete as soon as you reach end of locally legislated retention period.

fwiw, when I visit the US, it’s always just the CC# and car plate #. ditto within Canada. so that’s at least 2 countries not needing retention.

JLV

Might not be as big as Yahoo! but that info seems a lot more identity-theftable. CC# are easy: just get a new one, the rest is not.

Are passport and DOBs # globally mandated for storage? I know France had police-requested guest registration info for a while, maybe still does. But most of the time now CC# and license plate is all that’s needed. DOB? Why?

Security 101: if you don’t store it, it can’t be hacked.

See this, Google? Microsoft happy to take a half-billion in sweet, sweet US military money to 'increase lethality'

JLV

Re: "to give them greater visibility on the battlefield"

Errr...

: the ability to see or be seen. : the quality or state of being known to the public. See the full definition for visibility in the English Language Learners Dictionary. visibility.

Visibility | Definition of Visibility by Merriam-Webster

Toutes mes excuses, El Reg. Je suis confus.

JLV

Re: "to give them greater visibility on the battlefield"

got here before me.

“vision” is probably the better choice. perception, (situational) awareness too.

ever heard of this thing called camouflage, El Reg? ;-). that’s why the guy on the article pic doesn’t wear a Power Ranger suit.

Amazon's homegrown 2.3GHz 64-bit Graviton processor was very nearly an AMD Arm CPU

JLV

Re: how clueless

+1

and kickstarting interest by having real-life silicon, priced cheaply.

chicken/egg. not rocket science, is it, @john.jones?

wonder the performance/vm pricing tradeoff given this current benchmark?

and, how much is this going to increase ARM compatibility/interest in general across the commodity FOSS stuff like nginx, postgres, redis?

not good for Intel, in the long term. esp if it coincides with macOS moving to ARM as well.

pity the guys @ Intel in charge of 10nm. they must be getting tons of pressure internally.

Consultant misreads advice, ends up on a 200km journey to the Exchange expert

JLV

Re: Spoilers in Tech Docs!

So true.

Click, click, click... see this is one reason to prefer command line, copy-pasted, geez, gasp, even bash-ed configuration mechanisms ;-). I remember colleagues shuddering about the horrors of hour long Sharepoint deploys... how daft.

Check your repos... Crypto-coin-stealing code sneaks into fairly popular NPM lib (2m downloads per week)

JLV

Re: What's the Count So Far?

its not node.js specific. could happen with any github-sourced code. in many cases the main code doesn’t even need altering, the underlying package install scripts (never looked at) can do the dirty. and those are not infrequently run under sudo.

In Python land, for example, that’s setup.py. Npm has active script install hooks too

:-(

JLV

Ouch. Clever, and simple, hack. Social engineering FTW.

How about an optional mechanism where an established github dev can be shown to have vouched for a new maintainer? A la web of trust?

Tons of holes, yes, but better than scammers just freely trawling the owners of no-longer-maintained popular repos.

Blighty: We spent £1bn on Galileo and all we got was this lousy T-shirt

JLV

Re: UK contributions

Georgia, Moldavia, Chechnya, Ukraine, Estonia cyberattacks. Gay rights snafus. Dead Russian opposition politicians. bogus elections. MH 217. Magnetsky.

All funded by the EU.

Do go on, Herr Putain.

one thing I grant you, NATO-near-border is way too provocative, except for Baltics. But actually probably suits Vlad just right, more enemies abroad to sell.

JLV

don’t misunderstand me on this. letting in Eastern Europe was the right thing to do. 100% and if anything, Putin’s nastiness only reinforces that. For them, but also for the previous EU core.

i’m not even sure a 10 yr freedom of people movement moratorium would have been good. But it was a policy decision at the time and it did allow those 3 countries to build up their economies gradually, dialing down the motivation to seek better opportunities elsewhere in the EU once full liberalization was reached.

The EU is a great club, but, when reasonable, it needs to be more sensitive about national preferences and perception. Subsidiarity being key here.

Pressuring the Piss folk in Poland and Viktor Orban not to become lil Trumps against human rights? Good. Need more of that. Setting banana curvature? Bureaucracy gone amok and recruiting poster for big Borises. Getting Italy back in line on their budget, to avoid another Greek bailout? Much, much, needed because the risks outweigh national prerogatives.

As to Galileo, purely on military self-interest, the EU should have found a way to keep the most capable European army integrated. The rest of Brexit negotiations however? Well, they’ve got the leverage and very little incentive to cut a sweetheart deal encouraging future xxxexit movements. They got you by the balls.

Too bad the Borises and Ress-Moggs didn’t see that coming or just managed to pull wool over the eyes of the more clever Leave voters. Yes, they exist, and Remains need to gently convince that constituency to reconsider in light of all the hollow promises.

btw One brilliant thing the Federal government here did, late 90s, fought tooth and nail by the Quebec separatists, was to force future leave referendums to have a clear Leave or Stay question. They can’t just fudge something harmless sounding. Wasn’t the issue with the actual Brexit vote wording, but it sure was with previous Quebec referendums.

JLV

Re: It'll be like decimalisation all over again, but spelt decimation due to a shortage of letters.

>investment banking industry

think again. I suspect a large part of the UKs attractiveness as a financial center is being an EU member. No doubt, the really big cheese won’t be suffering with the little people. But i’d be surprised if a large proportion of British investment bankers didn’t get shafted out of this. Yes, yes, they may not be all sympathetic but they pay taxes and spend money.

EU bankers can head towards whichever city takes London’s place. Probably a net loss for the EU, but nowhere as dramatic.

JLV

>b. We stop the process, try to salvage our dignity and resume trying to democratically influence the EU more towards the UK’s point of view.

As much as I am pretty relaxed about immigration myself, not everyone is. It bears remembering that, when Greece, Portugal, Spain joined the EU, in 1982, there was a 10 year moratorium on allowing full free immigration into/from those 3 countries.

In hindsight, it would have been more sensible for the EU to apply the same kind of transition period to Eastern European countries. Or indeed any new member with a sufficiently big GDP difference.

Didn’t happen. Brexit was a bait and switch but the EUs bureaucracy will need to reassess its our way or the highway attitude towards its _member_ states. The ratification referendums for the constitution being another clusterf***. Ditto the pointless insistence on metric system precedence. Or curly bananas.

Subsidiarity was a very useful UK-sourced principle, IMHO.

None of this really makes Brexit any less of a self goal 8-/

JLV

and so it continues. I really wish El Reg would let Tim Worstall re-explain his rainbows and unicorns once again in a guest article. Smart guy, but one wonders in this case.

Trump => 4 years (surely not 8?)

Brexit will keep on giving for a long time. Long past those who voted for it too.

I wonder if the - beneficial - aspects of the UKs traditional role in nuking some of the EU's more daft - usually French - proposals will be outweighed by its salutary inspiration on what NOT to do. Wonder what this spectacle will do for Le Pen's snake oil, for example.

Will it out-Greece Greece in that regard? I sincerely hope not, but this is certainly on track to be some massive foot machine-gunning.

Reverse Ferret! Forget what we told you – the iPad isn't really for work

JLV

and you know, I am A-OK with where the non-Pro iPad is at, a media consumption device. Bringing out the Pro model has dropped the base version prices a bit.

Where this article disturbs me is that my perception that Apple's thinking that iPhones and iPads are the future gettings-things-done devices is bleeding out onto their macOS devices. Their stewardship of the MacPro has been shameful, the Mini hadn't had an upgrade in ages until last month and the MBPs are really losing their Pro monicker in favor of thin and light. Prices are, Apple-high, as usual. too bad, I still rather like OSX.

If you believe that iPad Pros are "all the laptop you will ever need", then yeah, why not drop the ball on the rest?

Groundhog Day comes early as Intel Display Drivers give Windows 10 the silent treatment

JLV

Re: Drivers?

Honest question.

We all know "it's not MS's fault that they have to look after so many devices". "Apple has it easy with their closed ecosystem".

But what of Linux? It gets to support a massive bunch of drivers and devices on _multiple architectures_.

Why can't MS uncouple things like the Intel driver, provide an apt-get type repo and let Windows download the drivers? They're not like regular application level software, you pretty much have a license to use it, by virtue of having the hardware. They're not sold separately. Then it's Intel's fault, not MS's. Why bake it all together, unless it works out better than on Linux?

Is that because the kernel-level separation is so much clearer in Linux? I seem to recall a number of kernel-level changes in Linux are motivated by hardware support: 4.19 has x, 4.20 has y. So Linux doesn't get out of jail by dumping it all into userland. What makes Windows such a unique sh*t sandwich?

Now, that's not claiming there are no driver issues in Linux land. But a significant % seems caused by hardware vendors not providing Linux drivers. Or specs. i.e. Windows-only. But those vendors DO have an interest in keeping Windows drivers tuned up.

Why not decentralize hardware support as much as possible?

JLV
FAIL

Win10 telemetry had one job. And it failed.

I have a win 10 laptop that hasn't been updated in 2 years. I rarely use it, when I do it's as a db server, there is nothing confidential on it and the whole thing doesn't venture outside its LAN. The biggest safety risk is my gmail login is saved in Firefox's password manager, password protected. FF is patched regularly and carries NoScript.

I do play games on it, it's originally a gaming laptop (very good choice for workstations profiles, IMHO. they're beefy, gamers value quality and they love modularity).

I'd say I don't really want to touch it much and 1809 is doing very little to motivate to think otherwise. I may actually install 1809 later, once all they've whack-a-moled at it sufficiently, it might actually be safer than betting on MS next build to be any better.

For my limited expectations of it, sure, leave it as is. If it was confidential, then that'd be different, but my biggest take on Windows and confidential is that they're best kept on different computers.

You know, this actually brings something to mind. OK, we get MS is "thinking outside of the box", QA-wise. We also get that the Insiders, whatever their (few) merits, sucks at doing QA. Or being a meaningful force for user feedback. We get that bugs were filed throughout at 1809, but no one in MS bothered to really follow those through. There's a crisis brewing at MS and they don't know to make things right.

But... wasn't that the whole point of telemetry?????? Avoiding all the crap like 1809 because we are so instrumented that MS will KNOW something is wrong? With no need for insiders or followed-through bug reports.

Wasn't that what - most unwillingly - giving up our privacy was all about?