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posted by martyb on Saturday April 30 2016, @01:23AM   Printer-friendly
from the get-off-my-lawn! dept.

From ComputerWorld:

Microsoft on Thursday began blocking rival browsers and search providers from using Windows 10's Cortana search box, the operating system's prime search real estate.

While Gavin didn't name names, Mozilla's Firefox modified Windows 10 so that when that browser was made the operating system's default, Firefox's selected search provider generated results from in-Cortana queries, with the ensuing pages appearing in Firefox, not Edge. Other browsers, such as Google's Chrome, did not go that far, but third-party extensions available in the Chrome Web Store did.


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  • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday April 30 2016, @05:55AM

    by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday April 30 2016, @05:55AM (#339366) Journal

    Now would be a really good time to get into VirtualBox or some other similar client virtualization software package. At some point you might want to P-to-V your current system and run it as a VM under Linux.

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    I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
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  • (Score: 1) by ShadowSystems on Saturday April 30 2016, @06:44PM

    by ShadowSystems (6185) <ShadowSystemsNO@SPAMGmail.com> on Saturday April 30 2016, @06:44PM (#339553)

    I'd love to except that my Screen Reader Environment (SRE) is notoriously crap with anything resembling a CLI.
    The update in the CLI window doesn't trigger the SRE to read the newly added data, so the only way I have to find it out is to force the SRE to reread the *entire screen*.
    Each. And. Every. Time. For. Each. And. Every. Command.
    It quickly gets to be a migraine in the making to deal with anything CLI, or that works like a CLI window.
    Which is what most VM's do for Windows.
    The SRE can read the screen, but whatever happens inside the VM window doesn't trigger the SRE to read it.
    So for everything I do under the VM window, I get to manually trigger the SRE to read the entire screen.
    For each & every thing I might do in the VM.
    There ARE ways to "fix" this & cause the SRE to read such CLI/VM windows properly, but implimenting them then causes the SRE not to react to "normal" windows (EG browser, Outlook, any other program) as if it were going bonkers.
    Stuttering, skipping, auto rereading bits of text it JUST got through speaking, all sorts of behavior that would ALSO be a migraine in the making.
    I'd be damned if I did, I'm damned if I don't, and it's all because of how MS implimented the CLI environment to SRE's.
    Had they coded it like they did everything else, then the CLI window would READ like every other window as far as the SRE is concerned.
    Instead MS did something fundamentally brain dead, rendered the CLI window a total SNAFUBAR, & left users of SRE's to "just ask a Sighted Person".
    =-\

    I'd love to migrate my current physical machine into a VM then move the VM to a Linux box.
    Unfortunately that would require Windows not to be a pain in the butt AND it would require a Linux distro that talked to me from the moment it powered on.
    Think Vinux, Sonar, or even SUSE +Orca.
    Except that the time I bought a Netbook from the Vinux project (both to support them AND to try & migrate to Linux), the Netbook stopped talking just shortly after power on.
    Went round & round, back & forth, trying this & that, having to get a Sighted Person to try stuff, all to no avail.
    I later sold the Netbook to someone else & washed my hands of the deal.
    I don't blame the Vinux folks, but neither do I consider it ready for prime time.

    I tried Adrienne Knoppix, Sonar, & other talking distros, but something invariably goes kablooey & leaves me in the lurch.
    Maybe it stops believing the audio subsystem is actually there, maybe it thinks FULL VOLUME is ok to trigger at random, or maybe it hangs on boot & refuses to go any farther.
    Since there's no pre-POST Screen Reader Environment (it needs the OS to load it first), I have no way of interacting with anything.
    Boot menu? Can't hear it, no options spoken, so I don't even know it's there.
    Boot problem? No SRE means I don't even know there MIGHT be one until the system has failed to boot after $X minutes.
    So until/unless the SRE starts speaking, I *can't* interact with the computer.
    Which means no fiddling with a distro to give it a run if it fails to even load properly.
    "What went wrong?" Damned if I know, it never booted.
    "Was there an error message?" What part of 'never booted' can I expand upon? The SRE never triggered & I can't interact with the machine until it does. No SRE, no boot, no deal.

    So I'd have to get a computer that someone else proffessionally set up to speak from boot, made sure it spoke with the VM active, and then did all the fiddlybits to turn my current Windows into a VM, move it over, & bring it up to make sure there are no kinks.
    Because without that SRE working perfectly, I have no way of fixing what's wrong.
    =-(

    Taking it to a LUG & asking for help would be great...
    If I didn't live in a cow town outside of SF/SJ Bay Area.
    Either I travel hours to go to them (I'll just hop in my car & drive by braille!), or THEY have to commute to me.
    Because this town seems to have the collective tech know-how of a cow.
    *HeadDesks repeatedly*
    Migraine. Migraine. Migraine...