microsoft

Linux Ain’t Hard. Just Different. Come Play.

~ Taran ~ Leave a comment

Microsoft Recall has been making waves in privacy circles. Some are calling it a privacy nightmare, some others are calling it a privacy nightmare, and privacy experts are sounding the alarm about it1.

As usual, when Microsoft does a stupid – and in my eyes, this is a pretty big stupid – people talk about migrating to Linux. Of course, people still think that people who use Linux wear funny hats and shout incantations at monitors through their keyboards to make it work. It’s not true. Well, not that true. To date, no Linux user has summoned Cthulu, though there are corners where there is concern about that. Those are silly corners.

Around the Fediverse, Linux users are being admonished to be on their best behavior, but I think that stereotype of bearded Linux users shouting at newbies to ‘RTFM!’ is a bit dated.

Linux has become more friendly. It’s become so friendly, in fact, that some who are long term users eschew the fancy GUIs for the tried and trusty command lines, but you don’t need to.

Linux is easy, and no, you don’t have to abandon your documents, or your way of life. A few things will change, though.

You won’t need the latest hardware to run an operating system – which means more money for beer and pizza, or wine and pizza, or whatever and whatever. You can breathe old life into that old computer system that you don’t want to leak arsenic into your water table and use it some more.

Linux-Curious?

If you are an academic, Robert W. Gehl has some Linux tips for you – he’s been using Linux in academia since 2008, on ‘Microsoft campuses’.

He hits some of the high notes for just about everyone, and I’ll only add that the Linux-on-a-stick and Linux User Groups are good ways to get your feet wet and help with the transition.

The trouble is you have so many options with distributions, and so many people have strong opinions on which distribution is better.

Spoiler alert: They all work. Start somewhere. Distributions are just flavors of Linux.

I suggest Ubuntu since it has oodles of support. I myself have different distributions I use for different things, but I’m a long time Linux user and have gotten to know my own preferences along the lines of Debian Linux, but I use Ubuntu as well. In time you will, or you won’t.

Linux-on-a-stick is a great way to check your hardware to see what issues might have with Linux as far as drivers. Since this article is written for Windows users, I’ll point to using Rufus to create a bootable USB Ubuntu Linux stick. You can put other distributions on a stick in the same way, too, so you’re not just stuck with one type of Linux.

If you want human help, search your area for a local Linux User Group. If you’re not sure where to start, here are some ways to find out if there is a Linux User Group near you. Failing that, ask for help on social media platforms.

The key to moving to Linux isn’t that you don’t know the answers. It’s that sometimes you might ask the wrong questions because of what you’re used to. If you think about it, that’s true of everything.

Grab a USB stick and see if your PC will run Linux so you can put the ‘personal’ back in ‘personal computer’.

  1. You have to admit, the idea of a privacy expert making noise seems peculiar. You’d think privacy experts would be like ninjas – so private you don’t even know about them. They must be more interested in your privacy. ↩︎

When The Internet Eats Itself

~ Taran ~ 10 Comments

The recent news of Stack Overflow selling it’s content to OpenAI was something I expected. It was a matter of time. Users of Stack Overflow were surprised, which I am surprised by, and upset, which I’m not surprised by.

That seems to me a reasonable response. Who wouldn’t? Yet when we contribute to websites for free on the Internet and it’s not our website, it’s always a terrible bargain. You give of yourself for whatever reason – fame, prestige, or just sincerely enjoying helping, and it gets traded into cash by someone else.

But companies don’t want you to get wise. They want you to give them your content for free so that they can tie a bow around it and sell it. You might get a nice “Thank you!” email, or little awards of no value.

No Good Code Goes Unpunished.

The fallout has been disappointing. People have tried logging in and sabotaging their top answers. I spoke to one guy on Mastodon a few days ago and he got banned. It seems pretty obvious to me that they had already backed up the database where all the stuff was, and that they would be keeping an eye on stuff. Software developers should know that. There was also some confusion about the Creative Commons licensing the site uses versus the rights given to the owners of the website, which are mutually exclusive.

Is it slimy? You bet. It’s not new, and the companies training generative AI have been pretty slimy. The problem isn’t generative AI, it’s the way the companies decide to do business by eroding trust with the very market for their product while poisoning wells that they can no longer drink from. If you’re contributing answers for free that will be used to train AI to give the same answers for a subscription, you’re a silly person1.

These days, generative AI companies need to put filters on the front of their learning models to keep small children from getting sucked in.

Remember Huffington Post?

Huffington Post had this neat little algorithm for swapping around headlines til it found one that people liked, it gamed SEO, and it built itself into a powerhouse that almost no one remembers now. It was social, it was quirky, and it was fun. Volunteers put up lots of great content.

When Huffingpost sold for $315 million, the volunteers who provided the content for free and built the site up before it sold sued – and got nothing. Why? Because they had volunteered their work.

I knew a professional journalist who was building up her portfolio and added some real value – I met her at a conference in Chicago probably a few months before the sale, and I asked her why she was contributing to HuffPost for free. She said it was a good outlet to get some things out – and she was right. When it sold, she was angry. She felt betrayed, and rightfully so I think.

It seems people weren’t paying attention to that. I did2.

You live, you learn, and you don’t do it again. With firsthand and second hand experience, if I write on a website and I don’t get paid, it’s my website. Don’t trust anyone who says, “Contribute and good things will happen!”. Yeah, they might, but it’s unlikely it will happen for you.

If your content is good enough for a popular site, it’s good enough to get paid to be there. You in the LinkedIn section – pay attention.

Back To AI’s Intake Manifold.

I’ve written about companies with generative AI models scraping around looking for content, with contributed works to websites being a part of the training models. It’s their oil, it’s what keeps them burning through cash as they try to… replace the people whose content they use. In return, the Internet gets slop generated all over, and you’ll know the slop when you read it – it lacks soul and human connection, though it fakes it from time to time like the pornographic videos that make the inexperienced think that’s what sex is really like. Nope.

The question we should be asking is whether it’s worth putting anything on the Internet at this point, just to have it folded into a statistical algorithm that chews up our work and spits out something like it. Sure, there are copyright lawsuits happening. The argument of transformative works doesn’t really work that well in a sane mind when it comes to the exponentially higher amount of content used to create a generative AI at this point.

So what happens when less people contribute their own work? One thing is certain: the social aspect of the Internet will not thrive as well.

Social.

The Stack Overflow website was mainly an annoyance for me over the years, but I understand that many people had a thriving society of a sort there. It was largely a meritocracy, as open source, at least at it’s core. You’ll note that I’m writing of it in the past tense – I don’t think anyone with any bit of self-worth will contribute there anymore.

The annoyance aspect for me came from (1) Not finding solutions to the quirky problems that people hired me to solve3, and (2) Finding code fragments I tracked down to Stack Overflow poorly (if at all) adapted to the employer or client needs. I also had learned not to give away valuable things for free, so I didn’t get involved. Most, if not all, of the work I did required my silence on how things worked, and if you get on a site like StackOverflow – your keyboard might just get you in trouble. Yet the problem wasn’t the site itself, but those who borrowed code like it was a cup of sugar instead of a recipe.

Beyond we software engineers, developers, whatever they call themselves these days, there are a lot of websites with social interaction that are likely getting their content shoved into an AI learning model at some point. LinkedIn, owned by Microsoft, annoyingly in the top search results, is ripe for being used that way.

LinkedIn doesn’t pay for content, yet if you manage to get popular, you can make money off of sponsored posts. “Hey, say something nice about our company, here’s $x”. That’s not really social, but it’s how ‘influencers’ make money these days: sponsored posts. When you get paid to write posts in that way, you might be selling your soul unless you keep a good moral compass, but when bills need to get paid, that moral compass sometimes goes out the window. I won’t say everyone is like that, I will say it’s a danger and why I don’t care much about ‘influencers’.

In my mind, anyone who is an influencer is trying to sell me something, or has an ego so large that Zaphod Beeblebrox would be insanely jealous.

Regardless, to get popular, you have to contribute content. Who owns LinkedIn? Microsoft. Who is Microsoft partnered with? OpenAI. The dots are there. Maybe they’re not connected. Maybe they are.

Other websites are out there that are building on user content. The odds are good that they have more money for lawyers than you do, that their content licensing and user agreement work for them and not you, and if someone wants to buy that content for any reason… you’ll find out what users on Stack Overflow found out.

All relationships are built on trust. All networks are built on trust. The Internet is built on trust.

The Internet is eating itself.

  1. I am being kind. ↩︎
  2. I volunteered some stuff to WorldChanging.com way back when with the understanding it would be Creative Commons licensed. I went back and forth with Alex and Jamais, as did a few other contributors, and because of that and some nastiness related to the Alert Retrieval Cache, I walked away from the site to find out from an editor that contacted me about their book that they wanted to use some of my work. Nope. I don’t trust futurists, and maybe you shouldn’t either. ↩︎
  3. I always seemed to be the software engineer that could make sense out of gobblygook code, rein it in, take it to water and convince it to drink. ↩︎

So. Many. Layoffs.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

I’ve been looking at getting back into the ring of software engineering, but it doesn’t seem like a great time to do it.

When Google was laying off workers, I shook my head a bit. It ends up that Google spent 800 million dollars in layoffs just this month. Just this month!

By comparison, Google spent $2.1 billion dollars on layoff expenses for more than 12,000 employees over the course of 2023. Other Google employees only knew about people being dismissed when people’s emails got bounced back last year in February.

With so many layoffs, hopefully they’re getting better at it. Well, maybe not. Google employees have been told more layoffs are coming this year.

I imagine that there are some pretty high quality resumes floating around. As far as the tech field goes, Google is probably considered top tier, and landing a position against someone with Google on their resume is going to be tough.

There’s a problem with that, though. More than 25,000 tech workers from 100 companies got the axe in first few weeks of 2024. Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, TikTok and Salesforce are included in that… and Microsoft numbers may account for the Blizzard/Activision layoffs that happened this past week, sadly.

Blizzard was one of those dream jobs I had as a significantly younger developer way back when. They were often late on delivery for a new game, but it was pretty much worth it. I still play Starcraft II.

It’s become an employer’s job market – maybe it was before, but definitely more so now, and in an era when artificial intelligence may be becoming more attractive for companies and software development, as well as other things. For all we know, they may have consulted artificial intelligence for some of the layoffs, though. It wouldn’t be the first time that happened, though that was in Russia.

I can’t imagine that Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon aren’t using big data and AI for this, at least behind the scenes, but it’s probably not being explained because of the blowback that might cause. ‘Fired by AI’ is not something that people would like to see.

When tech companies axe companies, Wall Street rewards them, so stock prices go up – and there are more unemployed technology folk in a period when AI tools are making so many types of productivity easier. Maybe too much easier.

This reminds me so much of the 1990s. The good news is that tech survived the 1990s despite the post-merger layoffs.

Of course, the correction on the NPR article (at the bottom) is something I wish I had caught earlier. “Nearly 25,000 tech workers were laid in the first weeks of 2024. Why is that?” would definitely be an article worth reading.

How Much AI In Journalism?

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Recently, I’ve been active in a group on Facebook that is supposed to be a polite space to debate things. News articles fly around, and the news articles we see these days from different sources carry their own biases because rather than just presenting facts, they present narratives and narratives require framing.

I wondered how much of these articles were generated by what we’re calling artificial intelligence these days. In researching, I can tell you I’m still wondering – but I have found some things that are of interest.

The New York Times Lawsuit.

It’s only fair to get this out of the way since it’s short and sweet.

Of course, in the news now is the lawsuit that the New York Times has brought against Microsoft and OpenAI, where speculation runs rampant either way. To their credit, through that link, the New York Times presented things in as unbiased way as possible. Everyone’s talking about that, but speculation on that only really impacts investors and share prices. It doesn’t help people like me as much, who write their own content as individuals.

In an odd twist though, and not too long after the announcement, OpenAI is offering to pay for licensing news articles (paywalled), which you can read more about here if you’re not paying TheInformation1.

Either way, that lawsuit is likely not going to help my content stay out of a learning model because I just don’t have the lawyers. Speculating on it doesn’t get me anywhere.

How Much AI is being used?

Statista only has one statistic they cite in the amount of artificial intelligence used in media and entertainment: 78 percent of U.S. adults think news articles created by AI is not a good thing.

The articles there go on and tell us about the present challenges, etc, but one word should stand out from that: foggy.

So how would it be used, if it is used? With nearly 50 ‘news’ websites as of May last year, almost a year ago, and with one news site even going so far as having an AI news anchor as of late last year, we should have questions.

Well, we don’t really know how many news agencies are using artificial intelligence or how. One would think disclosure would be the issue then.

The arguments against disclosure are pretty much summed up below (an extract from a larger well balanced article).

Against disclosure

One concern is that it could stifle innovation. If news organisations are required to disclose every time they use AI, they may be less likely to experiment with the technology.

Another is that disclosure could be confusing for consumers. Not everyone understands how AI works. Some people may be suspicious of AI-generated content. Requiring disclosure could make it more difficult for consumers to get the information they need.

Should the media tell you when they use AI to report the news? What consumers should know, Jo Adetunji, Editor, TheConversationUK, TheConversation.com, November 14, 2023.

On the surface, the arguments make sense.

In my opinion, placing innovation over trust, which is the actual argument being made by some with that argument, is abhorrent. To innovate, one needs that trust and if you want that trust, it seems to me that the trust has to be earned. This, given the present state of news outlets in their many shades of truth and bias might seem completely alien to some.

I do encourage people to read that entire article because the framing of it here doesn’t do the article justice and I’ve simply expressed an opinion on one side of the arguments presented.

How Is AI presently used?

Again, we really don’t know because of the disclosure issue, but in October of last year Twipe published 10 ways that journalists are using artificial intelligence. It points from the onset to Klara Indernach, a tag used by Express.de to note when an article is created with artificial intelligence tools.

Arist von Harpe is cited in the article for saying, “We do not highlight AI-aided articles. We’re only using [AI] as a tool. As with any tool, it’s always the person using it who is responsible for what comes out.” This seems a reasonable position, and puts the accountability on the humans related to it. I have yet to see artificial intelligences be thrown under the bus for an incorrect article, so we have that landmark to look for.

The rest of that article is pretty interesting and mentions fact checking, which is peculiar given the prevalence of hallucinations and even strategic deception, as well as image generation, etc.

We’ll never really know.

In the end, I imagine the use of any artificial intelligence in newsrooms is evolving even as I write this and will be evolving well beyond when you read this. In a few years, it may not be as much of a big deal, but now we’re finding failures in artificial intelligences all the way to a court, in a matter that is simply fraught with political consequences. They were quick to throw Google Bard under the bus on that one.

It is still disturbing we don’t have much insight into the learning models being used, which is a consistent problem. The lawsuit of the New York Times seems to be somewhat helpful there.

I honestly tried to find out what I could here and in doing so came up with my own conclusion that wasn’t what I would have expected it to be.

In the end, it is as Arist von Harpe is cited. We have to judge based on the stories we get because every newsroom will do things differently. It would have helped if we had less room to speculate on biases before the creation of these artificial intelligence tools, and whoever screws up should lose some trust. In this day and age, though, feeding cognitive biases seems to trump trust.

That’s probably the discussion we should have had some time ago.

  1. These paywalls are super-annoying for we mere mortals who do not have the deep pockets of corporate America. How many subscriptions is a well informed person supposed to have? It’s gotten ridiculous. We’ve known that business models for news have been in such trouble that a ‘news story’ has a more literal definition these days, but… surely we can do better than this? ↩︎

Windows 11 Initial Review.

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

When I posted that on Facebook yesterday, people who knew me laughed because over the years I have become as tired of Microsoft shenanigans as I have politics, and if you think about it most politicians have offices that use Microsoft products, which is an interesting thing to consider and could be fodder for a post on bias sometime in the future.

I upgraded a perfectly fine Windows 10 machine yesterday to Windows 11 without reading too many reviews on it. It went amazingly well, which is why I generally wait to adopt things. There’s no sense being a beta tester for new stuff, I’ve found, other than to write a lot of things that a lot of people write about anyway. Let an upgrade soak a little before you dip your toes in it is generally my advice.

My initial reaction is that they screwed up the task bar, putting things at the center – which leads me to believe they’re planning to work more with touch displays, where that is a good thing, but on the desktop it’s kinda crappy for those of us who are used to the Start button on the left.

Yet there is a cold logic to it. The mouse pointer lives around the center of the screen most of the time, and it is probably statistically important for decreasing hand movement. It’s not going to contribute to obesity too much through the decrease in calories burned, but it might help with carpal tunnel syndrome.

Do I like it? No, and I immediately found out how to ‘fix it’ in the taskbar settings. It was intuitive to do, which speaks of good design for those of us who have found our way around Microsoft’s operating systems before.

Everything else I normally do on the machine has worked as it did before. LibreOffice is just dandy with it, at least so far, Scrivener and Scrapple are working well, and Firefox has had no complaint. Battlenet was curious about a ‘new machine’ since apparently it checks the Windows registry and other things.

This is a relatively clean machine, not one I do coding on, but since most of what I use is multiplatform, not one of the things I expected I could have issues with did.

There’s been quite a bit said about how good Windows 11 is by people who get paid to say it. To me, so far it’s just an update of Windows 10 with the new stuff hidden. I ran across the snipping tool when I took a screenshot of that Facebook post, and found it immediately pretty handy. Cropping the image down was done within that app, and it saved in a predictable place: /Pictures/Screenshots.

So yes, I found one thing that was kinda cool. But overall, it’s somewhat a vanilla experience and when it comes to operating systems, vanilla is just dandy.

I do think with what I’m seeing, Microsoft is catering for more multiplatform, but there are some things that do seem worth paying attention to – as leaks about Windows 12 are already happening. Neural Processing Units? Dedicated? What?

Blocking AI Bots: The Opt Out Issue.

~ Taran ~ 3 Comments

Those of us that create anything – at least without the crutches of a large language model like ChatGPT- are a bit concerned about our works being used to train large language models. We get no attribution, no pay, and the companies that run the models basically can just grab our work, train their models and turn around and charge customers for access to responses that our work helped create.

No single one of us is likely that important. But combined, it’s a bit of a rip off. One friend suggested being able to block the bots, which is an insurmountable task because it depends on the bots obeying what is in the robots.txt file. There’s no real reason that they have to.

“How to Block AI Chatbots From Scraping Your Website’s Content” is a worthwhile guide to attempting to block the bots. It also makes the point that maybe it doesn’t matter.

I think that it does, at least in principle, because I’m of the firm opinion that websites should not have to opt out of being used by these AI bots – but rather, that websites should opt in as they wish. Nobody’s asked for anything, have they? Why should these companies use your work, or my work, without recompense and then turn around and charge access to these things?

Somehow, we got stuck with ‘opting out’ when what these companies running the AI Bots should have done is allow people to opt in with a revenue model.

TAANSTAAFL. Except if you’re a large tech company, apparently.

On the flip side, Zoom says that they’re not using data from users for their training models. Taken at face value, that’s great, but the real problem is that we wouldn’t know if they did.

Lawsuit Regarding ChatGPT

~ Taran ~ 2 Comments

Anonymous individuals are claiming that ChatGPT stole ‘vast amounts of data’ in what they hope to become a class action lawsuit. It’s a nebulous claim about the nebulous data that OpenAI has used to train ChatGPT.

…“Despite established protocols for the purchase and use of personal information, Defendants took a different approach: theft,” they allege. The company’s popular chatbot program ChatGPT and other products are trained on private information taken from what the plaintiffs described as hundreds of millions of internet users, including children, without their permission.

Microsoft Corp., which plans to invest a reported $13 billion in OpenAI, was also named as a defendant…”

“Creator of buzzy ChatGPT is sued for vacuuming up ‘vast amounts’ of private data to win the ‘A.I. arms race’“, Fortune.com, Teresa Xie, Isaiah Poritz and Bloomberg, June 28th 2023.

I’ve had suspicions myself about where their training data came from, but with no insight into the training model, how is anyone to know? That’s what makes this case interesting.

“…Misappropriating personal data on a vast scale to win an “AI arms race,” OpenAI illegally accesses private information from individuals’ interactions with its products and from applications that have integrated ChatGPT, the plaintiffs claim. Such integrations allow the company to gather image and location data from Snapchat, music preferences on Spotify, financial information from Stripe and private conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams, according to the suit.”…Misappropriating personal data on a vast scale to win an “AI arms race,” OpenAI illegally accesses private information from individuals’ interactions with its products and from applications that have integrated ChatGPT, the plaintiffs claim. Such integrations allow the company to gather image and location data from Snapchat, music preferences on Spotify, financial information from Stripe and private conversations on Slack and Microsoft Teams, according to the suit.

Chasing profits, OpenAI abandoned its original principle of advancing artificial intelligence “in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,” the plaintiffs allege. The suit puts ChatGPT’s expected revenue for 2023 at $200 million…”

ibid (same article quoted above).

This would run contrary to what Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, put in writing before US Congress.

“…Our models are trained on a broad range of data that includes publicly available content,
licensed content, and content generated by human reviewers.3 Creating these models requires
not just advanced algorithmic design and significant amounts of training data, but also
substantial computing infrastructure to train models and then operate them for millions of users…”

[Reference: 3 “Our Approach to AI Safety.” OpenAI, 5 Apr. 2023, https://openai.com/blog/our-approach-to-ai-safety.]

“Written Testimony of Sam Altman Chief Executive Officer OpenAI Before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, & the Law“, Senate.Gov, Sam Altman,CEO of OpenAI, 5-16-2023.

I would love to know who the anonymous plaintiffs are, and would love to know how they got enough information to make the allegations. I suppose we’ll find out more as this progresses.

I, for one, am curious where they got this training data from.

Bricking Machines: The Microsoft April 2018 Update (1803) (Updated)

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

LeaveEverythingToUsMSI’m leery of updates. Experience over the decades has taught me this, from my own code to those of others who worked with me, from using content management systems to operating systems.

Updates can break things.

This time, Microsoft broke my Dell laptop – one of my favored machines for dealing with the rest of the world because so many people are tied to their operating systems. Or chained. It’s a matter of perspective.

I put off rebooting after the update for reasons obvious to many. Despite my cautiousness, my Dell laptop still sits there quietly after 24 hours. There has been no official word from Microsoft on this. One shop, The Computer Cellar, had a useful link that mysteriously no longer works. One article indicated that this bricking during the update had something to do with Avast, saying it only happened to a ‘few’ systems – but on Twitter, someone told me that they heard Microsoft representatives say, ‘millions’ on two separate days.

There’s room for some thoughts on conspiracy here, about keeping things quiet to minimize the public outcry. The hashtag on Twitter, #Windows10April2018Update, doesn’t show millions and isn’t representative of anyone but those with a system they could still tweet from to complain about the update.

So, how does one fix it? People have reinstalled Windows, blowing away their previous applications and data. It seems really bad that no restore points could be found with this bug – that’s exactly what restore points are for.

I’m not done fixing my system yet, and I’m not sure that I can, but here’s some tips to help you survive and perhaps get your system back up and running:

(1) Get some media, like a USB stick, that you can boot from. Under the ‘troubleshoot’ option, you’ll find the command prompt. Use XCopy to backup your files directory by directory. I simply did the stuff under my Profile. This way, no matter what happens, you have your stuff.

(2) Get the latest Windows Media Tool. Some well intentioned IT person handed me an older version of this yesterday and we both mistakenly thought it would work for all versions, but as it happens every major release seems to have a corresponding tool. Which would be fine….

(3) If your system doesn’t have a CD/DVD drive, or you lack a burner to the appropriate media, when you run the Media Tool you need to use the USB stick option. This is grotesquely slow – overnight it has managed to only get 80% done for me. I read somewhere it’s faster if you run the Media Tool from the USB stick you’re using it on, which sounds a bit like witchcraft to me, but if you think it will work… This is an annoyance that is simply bad UX on the part of Microsoft, IMHO. Such a large download is… ugh! With better bandwidth, it’s not a problem, but most of the world doesn’t have access to the Big Pipes.

(4) When your USB key is done becoming bootable media – read some books or something – you’re now ready to deal with the violated system.

(a) Let the violated machine boot and do the Update dance until, eventually, you get to the black screen and the errors.

(b) Open up the Task Manager, either by right clicking the taskbar and selecting it or by CTRL-ALT-DEL. Do this only once, despite how unresponsive your system is… or you may end up with more than one task manager. Also, add your hard won USB stick.

(c) Based on what little has been shared on the Internet, I have already disabled Avast’s tools in the startup processes. I’d make sure that they’re not running for the update.  They have a tendency to show up again when the machine restarts for updates, so always check. Allegedly, there’s a fix for it, but I did not get it at the time I fixed my machine.

(d) From the top menu in the task manager, you’re going to add a process from a file. You can attempt to browse for it, as painful as that is. On my system I will only have to type D:\setup.exe. And from there, with the latest tool, it will probably fix things; it did for me after loading again broken, then updating again. With older setups, you end up having to wipe the data.

This was an annoying experience. Microsoft needs to work on doing things better for the people who choose to stay with their operating systems, needs to work better with software manufacturers who support their platform, so that ultimately, they don’t screw over their consumers as they did with an indeterminate number of people with this last update.

Me? Linux is on the horizon for all future machines. I can’t pay people to brick my machine. It’s against my good sense. I can brick my on machine for free.

 

Running The Biostar Racing P1

~ Taran ~ 7 Comments

b20160823I had a problem. In my apartment here in South Oropouche, I had the need for a sort of media PC in the living room.

Sometimes I want to kick back and write on my old Chromebook while watching Netflix or a streaming news/space service on YouTube. Sometimes I want to write from my dining table – really, a patio table I have indoors because I like it. Sometimes, I want to listen to music while I’m working out in the living room. Sometimes, I want to have multimedia ability in the living room when I have visitors who aren’t in the bedroom (can I write that publicly?).

I’m in Trinidad and Tobago, so options are limited as far as what I can find locally. When I visited Pricesmart, I saw a Lenovo ‘Yoga Pad’ I almost got until I tried the keyboard (ugh!) and thought through what I actually wanted. They had a Haier Mini-PC that looked promising, but there were no boxes and a web search on my phone only showed a link to The Wizz whose site was down for maintenance.

I visited an Apple reseller and stared at the old and somewhat disappointing specs of the Apple Mini, which has become the one thing that Apple doesn’t seem to want to advance. And for the cost? Oh, Apple, your systems are so pretty, and OS-X is nice, but my word, your prices suck. Apple lovers, sorry, I see how you like spending your money but I can buy a lot of beer with the difference in price.

So I ended up at The Wizz in San Fernando, mainly to chase down the Haier and see what it looked like outside of a Pricesmart display that managed to tell everyone nothing. A gentleman helped me out, and dutifully trotted out the competition. That competition included the Biostar Racing P1, which I ended up with, as well as it’s little sibling, an Android version.

I’ll commend The Wizz here – over the years, on the rare occasions when I visited them, they have always been good – even over a decade ago when they were in some ways competition (I had a brief flirtation with wholesaling with one of their competitors). This was, hands down, my best experience with them. I picked up a keyboard, mouse and modest monitor for the system.

I got home. That’s when the troubles began.

Setting Up The Biostar Racing P1.

The box says that it’s Windows 10 compatible – and I mistakenly thought it actually came with Windows 10 on it. No such luck. Instead, it came with a CD for a system that – oh, this has got to take the cake – doesn’t have an optical drive. In fact, it’s so small, an optical drive couldn’t fit in it. So why on Earth would Biostar do this?

The documentation that comes with the system, a folded sheet of color printing, looks informative at a glance until you try to use it – they believe you know more than you do – and it’s actually not much better than their FAQ on installing Windows 10 on the Biostar Racing P1, dancing between informative and ‘WTF?’. It’s then I realized that my other systems also lacked optical drives – who uses those anymore? So here, I have a CD with no way to use it and cagey documentation on how to use the CD.

So I went with Linux. Lubuntu, Kubuntu – I went through quite a few distros in the course of an hour, using Rufus as noted in the FAQ, and every time there was no love for the AP6255 Wifi on the system. Oh, and the sound didn’t work. 3 hours in, I found myself scanning through kernel logs and considering hacking through all of it when I realized:

(1) I’m tired.
(2) I did not buy the machine to be a project, I bought it to be an appliance.
(3) I wasn’t committed to any course of action, I was committed to getting the results I wanted.

As it happened, a helpful cousin lent me a portable optical drive – so I (mistakenly) thought I’d install Windows from it. No joy – there is no Windows on that CD, I found, only drivers (not for Linux). At that point I realized I actually had to install Windows – I was tired – so I went to Microsoft and downloaded the ISO for Rufus to install via USB – that download took all night. I attempted to purchase a Windows 10 License, having figured out that it was necessary, but Microsoft gave me no joy. Amazon.com did. I punched in the product key during the installation on the Biostar Racing P1, and after an hour or so I used the borrowed optical drive to install the drivers.

It works, but honestly, this was annoying for me. Sure, I could have hacked through, sure, I could have done other things, but the documentation sucks and is a little misleading in my opinion. So, what do you need to know?

It’s a pain to get running, largely because no OS is pre-installed (to keep the price down, probably) and because the driver media is in a form that doesn’t come with the machine. You quite literally need another working machine to set the Biostar Racing P1 up, and if you don’t have an optical drive, you’ll have to navigate to Biostar to download the drivers, put them on a USB key, and hope you manage that without problems.

Now, using it once it’s all set up with Windows 10? Not bad. In fact, I wrote this entire entry using the system. Do I like it? Now that the annoyance of setting it up has passed, yes.

Would I suggest buying it for the casual user? Not unless you have a portable optical drive and access to a Windows 10 ISO as well as license. The lack of those two things is infuriating. It could easily be resolved by Biostar if they chose to install the OS at the factory – and honestly, they could toss a Linux distro on it themselves and save everyone some heartache. And money.

Know Your Environment: Oh Tay

~ Taran ~ 1 Comment

Artificial IntelligenceYou may remember – it happened only last week – that Microsoft’s Tay got shut down for being a jerk.

The commentators already have speculated – and in the broad strokes properly, in my opinion – that this is because people were jerks. Tay- which, from what I saw, was pretty much a simple ELIZA brought forward a few degrees1. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but in the really broad strokes, one has to wonder what Microsoft was actually thinking by setting Tay up on Twitter and not having some safeties in place.

Please tell me someone on that team said, “You know, I think that this is a bad idea. We should add some safeties.” It’s like sending a kid on her own to a prison to hang out with the inmates and not expecting something to go wrong. “Pick you up at 5 p.m., have a great time sweetie!”

Maybe you’re thinking, “Twitter isn’t that bad.” Maybe for you it isn’t – for me it isn’t – because I attenuate who and what I ‘listen’ to. Clearly Tay didn’t. All things considered, that’s a pretty important thing for people to do – and frankly, it does seem like we humans get that wrong more often than not.

As Software Engineers, we tend to forget sometimes that while we are building interactions within complex systems that our participation is a functional part of the design2. We shouldn’t just be tossing things out into a Production environment without understanding the environment.

Clearly, the decision to put Tay out there did not factor that in – because it’s blatantly obvious from the days of Usenet forward, people can be jerks. Trolls abound. It takes something a bit more to deal with that, and they should have known that.

I’d wager that at least one engineer said, “This is a bad idea”. Listen to your team.

1Sorry, Microsoft, but that’s kinda what it looked like to me.
2Recommended reading: Design as Participation.