Debates & Undebatable

by Bryan

The Democratic candidates made CNN cry by not acting like four-year-olds with a sugar high. Hillary noted that Bernie Sanders didn’t approve of every gun control legislation that was proposed in the Senate. Bernie said that everyone is tired of hearing about the “damn e-mails”.

The candidates talked about issues and what they wanted to do. I heard a GOP pundit complaining about ‘all the Democrats talked about was what the government was going to do for people’. It sounded like the GOP isn’t in favor of “promoting the General Welfare”.

What is not debatable is that I don’t want to install Windows 10 at the moment, but Micro$oft really wants me to. Today I went through the monthly patching of the operating system, and they attempted to sneak it by me. If I let them decide what to install I would have downloaded a couple of Gigs of Win10 (sic) because they selected to download and install it rather than the patches for Win7.

Via skippy, The Tech Republic covers The Windows 10 privacy debacle: Five big issues to consider. The short version is that the defaults are not good for your privacy.

16 comments

1 Shirt { 10.15.15 at 9:01 am }: Microsoft is to operating systems like Volkswagen is to diesel cars.

Shirt
2 Steve Bates { 10.15.15 at 7:33 pm }: Micro$oft should have named it Win10-10 ’cause I hear it’s a real dog…
3 Bryan { 10.15.15 at 8:31 pm }: Shirt, VW is apparently using software and controls from Bosch to cheat, and anyone using the Bosch can do it, and most of them have done it. VW is the brand people hear about, but most Euro made cars with diesels have to make fixes.

Win-Ten-Ten, Steve? ….arf, arf! … groannnn
4 Shirt { 10.15.15 at 11:34 pm }: Ah, OK we exonerate VW because why?

You don’t think they knew?

We either exonerate them because they were really dumb fecal mater or they weren’t.

Personally I’d rather damn them because they put profits and stockcruds above the common wellbeing.

I’m really pissed about this.
5 Badtux { 10.15.15 at 11:39 pm }: Of course they knew.

In general hilarity, VW appointed a new chief of VW USA to replace the chief who resigned a few days ago…. and he resigned too. Man, the search for a head of VW USA is starting to look a lot like the search for a Speaker of the House, none of the candidates want the job!
6 Bryan { 10.16.15 at 12:33 pm }: I wasn’t making a case for reducing VW’s culpability. Bosch issued a tech sheet with their part telling people not to mess with the settings in the software because it would screw up emissions readouts. VW made a conscious decision to do that – they intentionally changed the settings to make the emission readings lower than they were. I brought it up because it means you can’t trust the readings from any car manufacturer in the world who uses Bosch controllers. It isn’t just VW, they need to start looking at others in addition to VW, because if one of the evil schmucks cheats, they will all cheat.

Apparently, Badtux, no one in VW management sees any future in testifying in front of Congresscritters or being pied by angry customers. They should see if they can find the guy who made the Joe Isuzu commercials. It is definitely time for a major injection of humor. Hmmm, maybe they could hire Carly …. 😈
7 Badtux { 10.18.15 at 12:51 pm }: The Joe Isuzu commercials worked so well that Isuzu no longer sells vehicles in the United States. Just sayin ;).
8 Badtux { 10.18.15 at 1:02 pm }: On the Windows 10 front, I finally bought that Windows 10 laptop for the awe-inspiring price of $259, then spent yesterday installing Windows updates and removing all the bloatware then making a rescue flash (the rescue image is too big to fit on a DVD anymore, you need a 16gb USB flash drive to make one). My take on it: Meh. It’s usable, unlike Windows 8, but still the typical mess that Windows has always been, with Metro apps and the Metro-based configuration tools still side by side with the old Windows stuff that’s been around since Windows XP. At least they finally retired the hoary old Performance Monitor for something better, it actually works pretty well, but they need to merge the old Control Panel and the new Settings because finding where you configure stuff is a mess. I imagine it’s even a bigger mess on the server versions, where there’s *three* possible places to go to configure stuff (presuming the Server Management control panel hasn’t gone away).

Oh, and Cortana is Clippy for the 2010’s. Heh.
9 Steve Bates { 10.18.15 at 1:34 pm }: For many years now, I’ve regretted being retired. In one fell swoop, Micro$oft has made me regret that fact a lot less. Whatever else I lament, I don’t lament being able to ignore Windows altogether… well, until Stella has a question, and she only uses ancient versions.
10 Bryan { 10.18.15 at 3:25 pm }: Well, Badtux, after this debacle VW will probably be gone, so they may as well leave their former customers laughing before joining Yugo. 😉

You have the same machine I bought [Toshiba Satellite] except you got twice the memory and disk space for $10 more than I spent for the Win 7 version. Now you spend your time and bandwidth to ‘fix’ a new computer before you can use it. The yappy dog, Clippy, and now Cortana – really, truly annoying people in the bowels of M$.

Yes, Steve, having to stay fluent in multiple dialects of Windows is definitely not a lot fun.
11 Badtux { 10.18.15 at 8:58 pm }: I took 200 gigs of that 500 gigs and gave them over to a Fedora 22 dual boot partition, so now I have about the same disk space for Windows as you have. The problem of bloatware is, alas, a time-honored tradition in Windows-land. I remember having to de-bloat my Windows 7 laptop back in the day too. SIGH.
12 Bryan { 10.18.15 at 10:41 pm }: Toshiba also adds a lot of things that you have to delete, which I found really annoying. If you don’t build your own, you end up with not just bloat, but sides of bloat that you don’t want, because you will never use any of it.
13 Badtux { 10.20.15 at 2:54 am }: No bloat on my gaming box! But it will run Windows 10 only after I can no longer find hardware supported by Windows 7 drivers. Which will happen, but not for a while yet.
14 Bryan { 10.20.15 at 1:11 pm }: Drivers are the curse of computing. I hated it when computers stopped supporting parallel printer connections and I had to get a new printer.
15 Badtux { 10.21.15 at 10:51 am }: In more news, the free ClassicShell tool suite on Windows 10 gave me back a Windows 7 style Start menu, which put everything I had to ask Cortana to find back into the Start menu like God and Bill Gates intended rather than scattered to the four winds. Windows 10 has its own Start menu of course, but it’s deranged. It has live tiles to the right of the menu where Windows 7 puts the helpful stuff like the link to the control panel. ClassicShell not only put the link to control panel over there, but put the link to the new Settings program and to the Admin Tools too, so at least you have links to all three places to configure the system right there together again, instead of scattered to the four winds.
16 Bryan { 10.21.15 at 9:53 pm }: Thank you for pointing that out. If I am forced to make the change, I will seek out that sucker and install it. Amazing that M$ is so bad at a GUI that there is a cottage industry making it usable.