07:38 – Only one more day until Barbara gets home. She called yesterday around lunchtime to remind me to fire up Thunderbird on her notebook and download and delete all the spam so she wouldn’t have a ton of it to deal with when she returns.
As I was doing that, a message popped up telling me that the system was going to reboot automatically in 14 minutes and 50 seconds and suggesting that I save any unsaved work. I canceled out of that window, finished what I was doing in Thunderbird, and clicked on the MS icon in the taskbar. Turns out it was about to upgrade Barbara’s notebook to Windows 10. I called her back and we decided to discuss it after she gets home.
She’s using a low-end Dell notebook. I bought two identical ones when I was having problems getting postage labels printed on the USPS site. I signed up with stamps.com, which has Windows and Mac clients, but no Linux clients, so I needed a Windows system. Two, actually, one for backup. But USPS has been rock solid for months now, so I finally canceled my stamps.com account and no longer need a Windows system, let alone two.
I think I’m going to suggest to Barbara that we upgrade her system to Linux Mint. I’ll pull the Windows drives from both of our notebooks and replace them with SSDs for better performance. While I’m at it, I’ll also upgrade the RAM from 4 GB to 8 GB or more.
I finished watching Heartland series 7 last night. I couldn’t find the series 8 discs, so instead of burning another set I just started re-watching Jericho on Netflix streaming. It’s by far the best of the PA series I’ve seen. Yes, there are a few howlers–like the doctor telling someone who’s been exposed to fallout to take two tablespoons of iodine solution PO–but overall they get it right. And the doctor did at least tell the patient to take the iodine with some canned peaches. Those contain vitamin C, which would convert the corrosive, toxic native iodine to harmless iodide ions. The writing is tight, the acting is decent, and the scenario is plausible. Within the limitations of a TV series, they did an excellent job.
Speaking of SSDs, I noticed that Amazon has Samsung 500GB SSDs for $175 and Samsung 2TB SSDs for $750. I’ve never used a Samsung SSD having stuck with Intel and Micron thus far, but I was pleasantly surprised with what is available now.
If they’re low end laptops, make sure that the memory is upgrade-able to 8 gigs.
They’re Inspiron 15’s, but the Crucial site says there are a whole bunch of different models. I’ll figure out which we have and use their database to tell me which memory and SSDs are compatible. I’ve never so much as opened a notebook, but how hard can it be?
I’ll stick the hard drives on the shelf in case we ever want to run Windows again.
“I’ve never so much as opened a notebook, but how hard can it be?”
It’s not hard, I have an ancient Fujitsu laptop that I upgraded to have a 120GB SSD. I have done a couple of other laptop hard drive upgrades without too much difficulty.
I’ll stick the hard drives on the shelf in case we ever want to run Windows again.
I would do the update to Windows 10 while it is free. Then remove the drives and put on the shelf. W10 is working quite well and I have not found any issues.
I’ve never so much as opened a notebook, but how hard can it be?
There is usually a cover plate on the back where you can get access to the disk drive. There should also be another plate that covers the memory slots. Removing the disk drive usually involves undoing a couple of screws and you lift the drive out at an angle. The drive will be in a carrier. Replace the drive in the carrier and you should be good to go.
Memory is also generally easy. Just pop out the memory module(s) and replace them. You may want to look before you order. There may be only one memory module with space for another. Or there may be two memory modules with no space for another. The configuration will determine if you need to replace the current memory or just add more memory.
Some laptops have a case covering the entire bottom. If that is case then remove the battery and pop the cover off by gently prying at the edges and the cover will come off.
Thanks. This is on my list of to-do items, and I probably won’t get to it for quite a while.
I did my large 17″ Toshiba earlier this year. Upped the memory and replaced the drive with a 256MB Samsung SSD. Used a USB external case to swap out the drives. Replaced Win XP with Win 7 Pro. Like a new machine. It’s big and heavy but feels more like a desktop when setup. (Still using the Chromebook when out elsewhere. I take the Toshiba when I’ll be away for a couple of days or more)
Huh, just got about 2.5 inches of rain in the last hour. Slowing down but still steady.
Nice and cool at 73. Nice change and the rain is welcome.
And the world continues to destabilize.
Turkey headed for civil war. St. Louis headed for race riots. Stock market continuing down (I’ll bet a dollar we come close to Dow 17000 today.) Carter still alive. Cats and dogs, living together…..
nick
“Carter still alive. Cats and dogs, living together…..”
Carter and also the senior Bush. Both apparently with mental faculties intact, more or less. Helps to have top-shelf med care, of course.
Our three cats get along famously with our mutt; they all consider themselves in the same pack with the humans. The senior female cat was around when the mutt was a puppy, so he’s her kitten, though outweighing her by a factor of eight or nine. The big male cat thinks he’s a dog and comes out with us when we take the dog out and walks alongside the whole way.
Incidentally, we have no rodent problem here and pesky, noisy birds also get liquidated. And mostly consumed.
Sunny day here with blue skies but VERY windy. This is much better than that 90+ with 90% humidity we had earlier this week; OFD was starting to have bad flashbacks with Charlie in the wire….then he remembered that in SEA the temp was about twenty degrees higher with 200% humidity. Boy, did that suck.
Off to the VA group thang today and hoping everyone is copacetic.
So let me get this straight. An underclass scum in St. Louis committed a crime, fled from the police, and then pointed a gun at them. They shot the stupid SOB and killed him. So now other underclass scum are rioting and there have been calls for the police to stay out of their hood. So why don’t the police give them what they want?
Good riddance to underclass scum. Any reasonable person would be celebrating this shooting, not protesting it. I’d like to see the middle class protesting with signs to “Shoot More Underclass Scum!”
Yep, they want “the right kind of cops” to police the neighborhood. Wonder if that means asian females? No?
4 guns recovered. 3 came back stolen. I’m betting the 4th was stolen too, but either undetected or unreported or illegally transferred. Oh, and Federal law, no one under 21 can buy a handgun so ….
And the chief blames “lax” gun laws. No mention of a culture that glorifies crime and violence, or the fact they were stolen.
idiots.
nick
“…“the right kind of cops” to police the neighborhood.”
They undoubtedly want some of their own thugs doing the cop work. Because in my experience, albeit thirty years ago, the black cops were hated as much as the white ones; there was very little black or white: it was blue. And the black cops were harder on their own people than the white cops were. I have no idea how it is nowadays, living up here in Retroville.
“And the chief blames “lax” gun laws. No mention of a culture that glorifies crime and violence, or the fact they were stolen.”
Naturally. The left/libturd cognitive dissonance thing here is that if a program or law doesn’t work, like, say, gun laws, or communism, it means we didn’t do ENOUGH of it, and so we must now double down. Keep piling it on until we get it right. They’re not idiots; it’s a hardwired thing in the brain by now; as Mr. nick says, “they’re not like us.” No kidding.
Frankly I don’t see any way of talking rationally with these people anymore; I’m done with that. They don’t respond to reason, common sense or compromise. So fuck ’em all.
Yes, I think it’s long overdue that we all move on from these piddly micro-aggressions and start with the really, really macro-aggressions.
The paradigm is changing with laptop computers (consumer and low/mid end business grade), upgrading is becoming less and less of an option. Take a look at the current generation and you will find that there is no longer easy access to the hard drive or the memory, your lucky if the bottom is held on with screws and the battery is replaceable. You had better buy all the memory and drive you expect to need in the next five years and hope the battery lasts that long. The iFixit (https://www.ifixit.com/) site is going to grow.
Microsoft is expecting all of us to keep our computers running 24/7. There is not a day goes by that M$ is not pushing at least one update to Windows 10. Again, we are being forced to live with the new paradigm.
I have uneventfully upgraded 9 family computers to Windows 10. I put a program called Classic Shell (http://www.classicshell.net/) on all of them to bring back more of what was good with Windows 7 (this especially pleased the spousal unit 🙂 ). Now for the bad news, my 2010 Acer Aspire 5740 refuses to upgrade to Windows 10. Various errors that none of the fixes on the Interwebs or M$ support can fix. What I am going to have to do is do a wipe, clean install Windows 7 (not using any Acer drivers), then upgrade to Windows 10. Since I have better things to do with my time, this project is going to have to wait.
Now to ruffle some feathers.
Linux blew it years ago. They had a chance to be a real contender to M$, but no they had to stay the choice of the uber-geek. Geeks think they are using Linux when they VM Windows in it. That might work, but is not for the average person. I venture there are more people using a Chromebook than Linux. I also contend that Apple is missing the boat because they continue to rely on M$ for their users’ business software.
I fully concur with Mr. OFD’s comment: Frankly I don’t see any way of talking rationally with these people anymore; I’m done with that. They don’t respond to reason, common sense or compromise. So fuck ’em all.
On my (relatively old) Compaq laptop, replacing the hard drive is a snap, as Ray Thompson suggests. Five screws hold a cover plate to the machine, and then four screws hold the carrier / drive in place. But a couple of weeks ago, I had to deal with a friend’s HP. It’s 12 – 18 months old, and getting to the hard drive would have been a complete nightmare. I would have had to disassemble the thing from the keyboard down, removing various fragile components which are tenuously attached to begin with and harder still to get back in place correctly. So saving the needed data and re-installing Win8 just took a few more hours than it would have, but swapping out a failed hard drive or upgrading memory would have been a really big deal. Ugh.
It reminds me of my dad’s old late 80s, midsize Chevy pick up truck. After the first time I changed the oil, I became convinced that the people who designed the engine layout had never done any routine maintenance themselves, and spared not a millisecond of time considering such.
my 2010 Acer Aspire 5740 refuses to upgrade to Windows 10
My main system at home refuses to upgrade. Update trundles along, boots a couple of times, then backs the update out and I am back at W7. I have no idea what is causing the problem. Some third party utility, a driver, I just don’t know.
What I am going to have to do is do a wipe, clean install Windows 7 (not using any Acer drivers), then upgrade to Windows 10
Same here. I will have to deactivate my Adobe programs and a couple of others. Then wipe the system clean. Will probably do that this winter. I am waiting for Black Friday (which will be spent in Atlanta) and look for sales on Intel SSD’s at Micro Center. I want to get 500 gig to replace my 180 gig SSD. My data is stored on four 1 TB drives so the SSD only contains the OS and programs. I may pick up a couple of SSD’s if the price is right and use the second one for Photoshop swap files.
“Sometimes the only option is the nuclear option”
http://www.gocomics.com/overthehedge/2015/08/20
Yes, I still like fart jokes.
It reminds me of my dad’s old late 80s, midsize Chevy pick up truck. After the first time I changed the oil, I became convinced that the people who designed the engine layout had never done any routine maintenance themselves, and spared not a millisecond of time considering such.
There was a GM car that required the engine be pulled to get to the oil filter. They got a lot of flack for that and supposedly have paid better attention to maintenance now.
Had a 72 chrysler new yorker in the 80s. 440 w/4 barrel. Monster. One spark plug had never been changed in ten years and was a complete nub, due to the steering column being in the way.
Ran better after changing that 🙂
nick
“Texas Supreme Court says city erred on HERO ballot language”
http://www.chron.com/news/politics/houston/article/Texas-Supreme-Court-says-city-erred-on-HERO-6452930.php
“Plaintiff and conservative activist Jared Woodfill said the original ballot language was “all about deception and trickery.” Woodfill noted that opponents have now sought and won two opinions on the ordinance at the state Supreme Court — the first essentially forcing a repeal or vote on the ordinance and now one on the actual ballot language.”
I do not understand why the LGBT folks must continually use lies and subterfuge to get their agenda passed. They wrote the ballet language to not use the terms of the HERO, Houston Equal Rights Ordinance, and expected that to be legal.
I like this comment, “Under HERO, Jared would have a case against Subway for firing him over his sexual preference. Let that sink in.”.
Microsoft is expecting all of us to keep our computers running 24/7. There is not a day goes by that M$ is not pushing at least one update to Windows 10. Again, we are being forced to live with the new paradigm.
That was forced by Google releasing a zero day exploit in Windows to the public before MS got a patch out for it. Now MS pushes fixes for all exploits immediately.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2871612/google-publishes-third-windows-0day-vulnerability-in-a-month.html
Shining a laser at a cop chopper is not smart. http://www.popularmechanics.com/flight/a16976/shining-laser-at-police-chopper-arrested/
I like this comment, “Under HERO, Jared would have a case against Subway for firing him over his sexual preference. Let that sink in.”.
No, he was fired (or more properly, his contract terminated) for being investigated and then charged with a felony. That’s not covered by HERO. The level of deception and vile comments by both sides on this issue has me POed at everyone involved.
Why do people conflate people with political beliefs? All gays, for example, are not prog activists. I know many gay people who are as outraged by prog activism as any of us. Same thing on conflating blacks, even poor blacks, with prog activists like Sharpton.
Your enemies aren’t your enemies because of their sexual preferences or their skin colors. They’re your enemies because of their political beliefs and their actions. Things they’ve chosen to be and to do, not the immutable aspects of their bodies and minds.
^LGBT folks^LGBT activists
Three laptops here (all HP), plus an Acer destkop. Two HP’s upgraded to Windows 10 without problems.
The Acer can’t be updated, due to old nVidia video drivers. Not a big worry about that one; it mostly is there as the first backup of the notebooks. It runs the Carbonite program to backup all data to the Carbonite cloud.
The latest Firefox update (40) killed the fingerprint reader for web site logins on my H. Fingerprint logon works fine on Windows 10 startup. Have replaced drivers, reinstalled the HP SimplePass program, but still does not work in the browsers. I blame Firefox. The add-on is enabled, but doesn’t work. The drivers are old, and mostly ‘orphaned’.
It’s a 4 year old laptop, so maybe the CFO/SWMBO here will let me get a new one. In the meantime, I can work around the web page login. Thinking of a password manager that will store things locally (don’t need to sync passwords across devices) but is cheap (or free). Haven’t figured that out yet.
But the Windows 10 update was quite painless. Biggest change was that the screen is a bit ‘crisper’ (visually) than in Windows 7. Windows 10 update recommended here.
Password Manager: Keepass. You _can_ sync it to a cloud location if you want. You can also get a client for android & track them that way. I have several hundred. Couldn’t live without it. I sync 3 primary machines through OneDrive (used to use Dropbox).
Installing Windows 10 & won’t complete – I downloaded the install & put on a jump drive. Worked that way.
Think carefully before upgrading to Windows 10. There are reports that it is full of spyware: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jul/31/windows-10-microsoft-faces-criticism-over-privacy-default-settings
http://www.geeksnack.com/2015/08/03/windows-10-spies-on-users-by-default-microsoft-under-fire/
In addition, everyone you know can use your wireless: http://dotclue.org/archives/004625.html
Also, non-skipable ads in solitaire.
I’m not surprised. Microsoft is scum.
[snip] They got a lot of flack for that and supposedly have paid better attention to maintenance now. [snip]
Yeah, but GM had another huge foul up in the early – mid 2000s with their electric window motor assemblies. Some tiny, cheap part would fail, and require a $250 service call to take the door apart and replace the assembly. Just another reason they should have gone belly up and the carcass left to rot.
Windows 10, IMHO, is not doing any more ‘spying’ on your computer than Facebook or Google. Or Amazon. Or even many web sites. (How do you think those ads about what you searched for show up in FaceBook? Or other web sites?
I’m not worried about those. Besides, I changed the privacy settings to be ‘more private’. Still not worried. I just ignore the ads.
As for the wireless (Wi-Fi) connection, more FUD. *If* you turn it on, someone can use your WiFi connection to get the interwebs. They cannot get into any part of your LAN. Those articles are FUD, and not very accurate. We discussed that at Chaos Manor Reviews: http://chaosmanorreviews.com/wi-fi-sharing-in-windows-10facts-or-hysteria/ .
Unless you are paranoid….then you are probably also worried about the big meteor that is supposed to hit in September.
But the Windows 10 update was quite painless. Biggest change was that the screen is a bit ‘crisper’ (visually) than in Windows 7. Windows 10 update recommended here.
I ran one of the betas of Windows 10 for three days on my office desktop. I did not like it very much as the Start menu functionality seemed to be grafted on. I do know that the Start Menu functionality was in rapid transition at that time but the release version does not seem better from what I have read. I am going to keep my shop (13 PCs) all Windows 7 x64 Pro and one Windows XP for testing for now. I just wish that I could rid of the Windows 10 upgrade icon from my desktop.
“Birthright Citizenship: The New Immigration Scam”
http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2015/03/11/Birthright-Citizenship-New-Immigration-Scam
“Among developed nations, only the U.S. and Canada still offer automatic citizenship to children born on their soil. Not a single European country follows the practice. We take this right for granted, but the evidence is that this entitlement encourages a booming birth tourism business (which undermines our immigration objectives) and virtually guarantees that the number of people in the country illegally will continue to grow.”
“Federal agents recently raided 37 sites in southern California, which appear to have provided thousands of Chinese women the chance to give birth to babies on U.S. soil in exchange for fees of up to $60,000. Enticements included not only the opportunity to acquire automatic citizenship for their children – a package of free schooling, food, health and retirement benefits potentially worth millions of dollars – but also more mundane attractions like nannies, trips to Disneyland and fancy restaurants.”
“The New York Times notes that affidavits filed by law enforcement authorities “quote Chinese government sources as reporting that Chinese nationals had 10,000 babies in the United States in 2012, up from 4,200 in 2008.”
Unreal. I have been hearing the term “anchor babies” for quite a while now.
While Trump has his myriad of imperfections, his criticism of the invasion going on in the USA rings quite true with this voter. I am a fifth generation Texan and a fifth generation USA citizen but all of my forebears came here legally as far as I know.
Hat tip to Rush Limbaugh speech today saying that illegal immigration is really an invasion.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/08/20/not_one_european_country_gives_automatic_birthright_citizenship_to_children_born_there_illegally
and
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/08/19/it_s_an_invasion_not_immigration
“I know many gay people who are as outraged by prog activism as any of us. Same thing on conflating blacks, even poor blacks, with prog activists like Sharpton.”
Is this anything like all the moderate muslims we keep hearing about who are utterly dismayed and bummed by the tactics of the radical hadji rapists and mass murderers? Or the feminists over the years who didn’t like what Larry Klinton was doing with subordinate females, or what the hadjis were doing to their “sisters” in Afghanistan soccer stadiums?
Let’s hear from them, then; why the silence? Why the crickets? Or do we just blame it on the selective reporting from the usual media scum?
“Windows 10, IMHO, is not doing any more ‘spying’ on your computer than Facebook or Google. Or Amazon.”
Probably not. Which is why I’m not going to 10 here, and I don’t do FaceCrack anymore and I’m getting us off Google and the Chrome browser and gmail ASAP. And also going to an offshore VPN. I’d dump Windows entirely if I could and will be applying the pressure to do that by Xmas with the Spousal Unit. Of course we’re all already “made” but why make it so easy for them? Make the bastards work for their tax money that they rob from us at gunpoint.
Media scum is certainly part of it, but the bigger aspect is probably that most people whatever their sexual preference aren’t willing to spend time or effort being activists or speaking out.
I have a good friend my age who’s gay. As far as I know, he’s never marched in a Gay Pride parade or done anything like that. He’s a guy with a lot of facets to his personality, and it just happens to be one of them that he’s gay. He doesn’t walk around all day thinking about that any more than I walk around thinking how straight I am. He’s voted Republican in every presidential election since he cast his first vote for Nixon. He’s more of a social conservative than most of the people here.
I have a good friend my age who’s gay. As far as I know, he’s never marched in a Gay Pride parade or done anything like that. He’s a guy with a lot of facets to his personality, and it just happens to be one of them that he’s gay. He doesn’t walk around all day thinking about that any more than I walk around thinking how straight I am. He’s voted Republican in every presidential election since he cast his first vote for Nixon. He’s more of a social conservative than most of the people here.
Sounds like one of the Log Cabin Republicans that I read about. Very conservative and gay.
I do not currently have any LGBT friends that I know of. I kinda know a guy at church who is six on the Kinsey scale, is HIV positive, and has decided to go back to church and be abstinent. He taught our bible class one day and gave us his life story, he is 51 or so. He is looking for a godly woman to marry who can deal with his issues and be a companion, apparently not many can. I have no idea what his politics are. I have only talked with him once.
Speaking of Kinsey, this report was kinda freaky. Supposedly only 46% of the 18 to 24 year old people in the UK surveyed listed themselves as completely heterosexual. I have no idea how valid the survey was, 1623 seems kinda light.
https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/08/16/half-young-not-heterosexual/?
Let’s hear from them, then; why the silence? Why the crickets? Or do we just blame it on the selective reporting from the usual media scum?
Look up the Gay Patriot blog. There are the Log Cabin Republicans. All pretty conservative. (Sure, many of them supported SSM. But that’s a dead issue now.) The left leaning media doesn’t admit that there are conservative LGBTQ people out there.
On the SSD front, Instapundit has a link up to an article on a 16 TB SSD drive from Samsung. (http://www.wired.com/2015/08/flash-storage/) I expect that they are about $10k each. I’d guess that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and the other big database people are lining up to buy them to use on servers. Put them in an array and you can get very fast index searches that can then go to slower hard drives to fetch the data.
I’d guess that Amazon, Google, Microsoft and the other big database people are lining up to buy them to use on servers.
Nope, they use a SSD built by the old Texas Memory Systems company, owned by IBM. The box is in a 2U rack format and holds up to 57 TB. I’ve got a friend who works on their device driver code there. He said their production line is running 24×7.
http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/storage/flash/v840/overview.html
I wonder how big Amazon’s database is? I know that it runs on a multiple thousand cpu cloud using Sparc 64 bit cpus and a monster Oracle database. I would guess at least a PB and maybe many many PB.
Our CRM database is approaching 2.0 GB and I have thought several times about moving that PC to an SSD drive. It is currently a 2.0 TB Caviar Black with 1.2 TB of free space.
So maybe each of us has known, or currently knows, an LGBTQIA-whatever person, or a muslim, or a feminist. Meanwhile we’re told there are zillions of them, in all three categories, yet when their radical brothers, sisters, and cousins commit atrocities or rave and rant like lunatics in our faces constantly demanding this and that, I still hear crickets. I shouldn’t have to hunt down one or two obscure web sites that speak out against madness. Or use one or two personal anecdotes to disabuse myself of that notion.
I go away for a while and all heII breaks loose.
Syria rockets Israel
NOK and SOK are engaged in fisticuffs
Dow drops even further
Tsipras quits
Man.
Got a call from my tenant that they had no hot water. Did some quick research, grabbed a thermocouple as most likely cause, and headed out. Thank goodness it was only in the 70s as the heater is in the attic.
I was still soaked thru by the time I was done, and fixing old plumbing always risks breaking something else loose, so of course I had to make another trip to the store to fix that. All fixed, weird problem, not the thermocouple, tedious to explain.
When it’s a little cooler, I’ll have to replace more plumbing in the attic, but for now, it should hold. Rental units are a pain. I guess that’s why they call it ‘work’ and not ‘play’.
nick
Ah, the cracks are starting to show:
“Hillary Clinton claims to be the champion of the little people, but behind the scenes she nasty and abusive toward her own Secret Service detail, reveals best-selling author RONALD KESSLER. And her right hand woman Huma Abedin is no different. Agents say Abedin treated them like second-class citizens. ‘She’d have four bags, and we’d stand there and watch her and say, ‘Oh, can we hold the door open for you?’ ‘There’s not an agent in the service who wants to be on Hillary’s detail.'”
Soon they’ll all dog pile on her and pretend they never liked her, and always knew she was corrupt….
nick
“I go away for a while and all heII breaks loose.”
Hey, you think this is bad, just wait’ll September 23! Apocalypse!
Hey, you think this is bad, just wait’ll September 23! Apocalypse!
NASA says that September 23 meteor is a bad prediction:
http://www.chron.com/news/nation-world/space/article/NASA-forced-to-debunk-rumor-that-asteroid-will-6455897.php
I don’t know which is worse, the moron that predicted the end of the Earth or that NASA felt they had to debunk him.
“A NASA spokesman said: “NASA knows of no asteroid or comet currently on a collision course with Earth, so the probability of a major collision is quite small.
“In fact, as best as we can tell, no large object is likely to strike the Earth any time in the next several hundred years.””
I wonder what NASA’s definition of large is?
The Pope is visiting Barry Soetero at the WH on that day and together they will form a total world government and make us all get the number 666 tattooed on our foreheads and put Cankles on the ten-dollar bill.
“Windows 10, IMHO, is not doing any more ‘spying’ on your computer than Facebook or Google.”
Exactly that. Of course, earlier version of Windows did less spying – Microsoft is playing catch-up. But it’s generally not hard to avoid. Lots of the tracking and unwanted sharing is driven by logging in with your Microsoft account. Since this wasn’t even possible before, most users upgrading will continue using their existing (local) accounts, which won’t sync things online.
In that sense, the one bit of sharing that I find most disturbing – and legally questionable – is the sharing of WLAN passwords. I disagree with Rick here – he cannot know how a little business has their WLAN set up. We aren’t always talking about just going out over the router. If you have a simple setup with DHCP, you are in the network just as if you had a wired connection. I have our network setup this way, because we use laptops quite a lot. Being tiny, I don’t have any additional authentication (MAC address, Radius server, whatever).
So: If I were naive and handed out our WLAN password to someone using Win10. I cannot know how the person has their Win10 machine set up. Even if sharing is “off” by default, they may have enabled it (and who is to say that sharing will always be off by default – that can change). If they share their WLAN passwords, then strangers now have access to my network. Some business somewhere is going to get hacked. I predict lawsuits.
That said, as long as you are aware of your settings, and logging in with a local account, Win10 seems to be a good thing. For me, anyway, everything from Win7 still works, the upgrade was painless, and there are a few new bells and whistles that are nice. The worst bit is figuring out where the old control-panel bits and pieces have gone.
Meanwhile, the Greek comedy show continues. Tzipras resigns, but intends to stand for re-election.
“I’ve never so much as opened a notebook, but how hard can it be?”
Ha! I can’t believe that there’s a computer related topic in which I have more experience than you… 🙂
I upgraded my Ispiron from 128 to 512 MB in 2001, and after I spilt a bourbon and coke on it I opened it up to retrieve the HDD so I could destroy it.
OFD wrote:
“The Pope is visiting Barry Soetero at the WH on that day and together they will form a total world government and make us all get the number 666 tattooed on our foreheads…”
Ah, so the old Calvinists were right. The Pope *is* the Antichrist…
“Unless you are paranoid….then you are probably also worried about the big meteor that is supposed to hit in September.”
No, I’m more worried about the asteroid, Apophis, which is supposed to miss the Earth by less than 22,000 miles in 2029.
Rental units are a pain.
That’s why I use a management company. 10% of the rent and they coordinate everything. That’s the house in KS, of course. I did do some maintenance myself while still in the are, but never again. Takes too much time.
I’ve thought about the management company option. With our increases in property tax, our margins are too slim.
If we add more units, it is definitely an option.
nick
I’ve thought about the management company option. With our increases in property tax, our margins are too slim.
If we add more units, it is definitely an option.
With crude oil going to $25/bbl in the next couple of months, you may get the chance to buy more rental units as property values crash here in the Houston metropolitan area. I suspect that the layoffs will become a flood at that point.
Here we go again ™.
Whoooo ohhhooooos
European stocks down 6-7%, dow down over 850 in two days. This may be it fellas.
I’ll predict some buying of the dip first thing on monday, but I bet after a short upswing, it keeps going down. And that is NOT good news.
nick
Appropriate for a ten-dollar whore.
“Appropriate for a ten-dollar whore.”
An insult to all whores throughout human history, sir; you have just committed a heinous micro-aggression. She should pay ten bucks to every human who’s had the misfortune to look at her or her picture or video since she was spawned/whelped by a cross between a jackal and a warthog impregnated by a very minor demon who was blind and deaf and drunk on his ass.
“And that is NOT good news.”
Hey, don’t worry; it’s one of two things: The Feds will keep printing boat-loads of more fiat currency and do whatever it takes for nobody big to fail, that is, those too big to fail, the only ones who count. Or….they’ll let it ride and the rulers will start pushing some more buttons and accelerate the slide down the toilet.
Peeps might start BEGGING for Trump at that point. And the Repub and Dem halves of the War Party may just give in and let it rip. To hell with Cankles, Bipolar Biden, Brooklyn Bernie or any of the Stupid Half clowns from that tiny circus car. The new Murkan Il Duce may step in and start kicking some ass. It all depends on what the rulers are thinking and deciding this weekend.
I’m pretty sure I won’t like it, no matter what they decide.
nick
“I’m pretty sure I won’t like it, no matter what they decide.”
Well then, put me down for a PLUS ONE on that, too!