111–120 of 131 posts
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Amazon gives you a $20 discount to take ads on Kindle purchases. The possibility of having to pay $10 only if caught and fined seems like not at all a deterrent.
Agreed it’s tiny.. hopefully this fine implies that future infractions may carry much more serious penalties
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Yes, Windows has a feature called Microsoft Windows Platform Binary Table that allows the OEM to embed any executable file they want into the UEFI image which is then automatically run on every boot. Extremely terrifying backdoor mechanism.
Not half as scary as Apple's DEP program. Pretty much everyone is moving this way because it's super convenient for admins -- devices arrive out of the box working and configured. Google has "Zero Touch", Samsung as their Knox program.
IBM Thinkpad t43p was my first heavy duty laptop. In 2005 IBM made a mistake that someone in their management must regret to date, selling Thinkpad laptop line to Lenovo. Things went downhill for Thinkpads and I lasted 3-4 more generations before finally giving up. Thinkpad had a shot at being the world's most loved laptop, by developers and businessman on the go. Passion for great products and great user experience…
To this day I want an older 16:10 thinkpad to run xubuntu on. Happy with my 2013 mbpr, however.
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In Japan the government kept essentially all the companies' debt, and incurred the cost of the 80k employees that were fired. And even now the profitable companies seem to get their profits from shops at the train stations. And from the 6 companies the public railroad was split into, not all are successful: "JR Hokkaido expects to incur a record pretax loss of ¥23.5 billion in the year that ended in March [2017], wit…
Of course, you can't have successful train operations in low density areas. Hokkaido, Shikoku, and the extreme west of japan is doomed in that regard. I don't even know how you could expect things to turn differently. But in Tokyo, and Kansai, the private train companies are doing very well.
It's the same with postal services, broadband access and similar infrastructure.
Of course a society as a whole can decide to stop subsidizing these low density areas, but that discussion is largely orthogonal to the privatization topic.
I still cant bring myself to purchase a Lenovo product because of this, despite the generally favourable reviews I see on HN regarding the ThinkPads. Its just such a revolting decision to me to do that to a paying customer. I may just put my money where my mouth is and start the break up with Google too, as painful as that will be. I just dont feel like I align with these fucking companies at all anymore.
Three times. They don't deserve to exist anymore.
Edit
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/security-failings-demonstrate-...
I'm always surprised that Lenovo use in the enterprise space didn't take a hit after all this came to light. I would have thought competitors like Dell and HPE would have used that opportunity to disparage Lenovo.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/11/dell-...
Apparently hp also
https://www.computerworld.com/article/3238512/microsoft-wind...
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But if you install Win10 don't you just get spyware/adware/crapware direct from MS then? (asking, I don't know, not a regular MS user)
Having done this in the past year... kind of. I view it as a lesser brand of evil though. Also it's possible to turn off telemetry. Cortana still sucks though.
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Any source on them selling telemetry data?
They haven't provided one, but I'm guessing if someone provides a source, it'll be a link to Microsoft's ads products. They'll argue this information _could_ be used to target users for advertisements, even though it might not be.
https://law.stackexchange.com/a/1848/1059
you're dismissive, but they've specifically claimed the legal right to sell your usage data. it seems pretty clear to me.
So, somewhat offtopic. I'd like to buy some tablets as presents and the Lenovo ones seemed well rated for the price. Are there others that are made by a, umm, nicer company? I'm looking for cheap and reliable rather than performant.
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Of course, you can't have successful train operations in low density areas. Hokkaido, Shikoku, and the extreme west of japan is doomed in that regard. I don't even know how you could expect things to turn differently. But in Tokyo, and Kansai, the private train companies are doing very well.
But that's the point - the profitable tracks were probably profitable before privatization, too (no idea about Japan, but it was the case in Germany). Service in low density areas is the crux of the matter: railroad is a necessary infrastructure there, and if a nation wants to keep quality of life high in these areas, the tracks have to be operated at a loss. It's the same with postal services, broadband access and s…
On top of that, railroads (the actual rails and public transport lines) also tend to be a somewhat natural monopoly, so even the high profit lines veer towards minimal service and maximal price.