You can't backup everything that's on the phone.

Your process sounds great to a technology-enabled person. But for mere humans?

They don't remember their Apple ID password.
They put in random answers to security questions for password recovery.
Their email address has changed, their computer has changed, etc.
They installed all that music, all those videos, and all those apps, like, a *year* ago or more. Who remembers how?

"Can't you just copy everything from my old phone over to my new phone?"

As you say, the process ends up being:

Initialize the phone as new, to their current computer.
Create a new Apple ID and sign them in.
Install and position all the apps one by one by looking at their old phone as you hold it.
Get ahold of all the music that they already bought in some other format so that they don't have to pay for it again.
Give them the bad news about what can't be tracked down/reinstalled (apps no longer in app store, music that can't be found elsewhere without re-buying, etc.)

I could have sworn that in a recent case, we lost all of SMS and she was upset about that, but may I'm remembering incorrectly. Still, the process is onerous.

It pisses people off—"You mean I can't just move all of *my* stuff from my old phone to my new phone? Why do they call it an *upgrade?*"

I'm not saying they're right. Sure, they should remember their passwords, take care of their online identities, etc.

But the fact is that you cannot simply do this:

1. Connect old iPhone to computer
2. Back up full contents
3. Connect new iPhone to computer
4. Restore full contents

I've been on to Apple a couple of times with people standing next to me while I try to act as an intermediary, and the people on the other end of the line end up just throwing their hands up, apologizing, and saying they can't help.

To be fair, this isn't exactly easy on Android either. But it's slightly easier. And both platforms need to seriously work on it.

if the computer + iTunes is newer than the phone. Try this:

-> Plug a full, everyday-used iPhone that was backed up or set up on an old computer
-> Into a new computer where it has never been backed up before

What you will get is an option to erase the phone and start over. You will not get the option to back up the phone, and Apple says that's by design—the licensed content on the phone is tied to the iTunes installation where it was set up, and the license can't be associated with a new iTunes.

Problem is that people that ask me for help have almost invariably either bought a new computer or reinstalled Windows since the time they set up their phone. So there is no way to create a backup—when you plug the phone in, you only get the option to erase the phone and set it up new.

seamlessly? I have family members asking me to help with their iPhones routinely, and this is always a nightmare.

Is it just a matter of your having one stable iTunes installation over the entire period? Because the problem that I run into over and over again is that iCloud is either partial in its backing up and/or doesn't have enough space and thus doesn't back everything up, and they have invariably got a computer that's newer than their iPhone. As a result, their iPhone has never been backed up to iTunes, and when they ask me to help with a transition, I can't help them—iTunes simply offers to erase the phone when you plug it in since the phone predates the iTunes installation.

So we end up having to do a phone side-by-side—check each item installed on the old phone, then install and position it again on the new phone, one-by-one. Takes hours, and some things (SMS messages) are just plain lost. I'd love to find a way to just migrate one iPhone to the next with a click, but so far I haven't found it—the only way to do this appears to be to have an iTunes installation that predates your original phone and to which the phone has been synchronized since it was new. Then you can restore the backup to the new phone. But if the iTunes installation is newer than old phone, as far as I can tell users are SOL for easy transitions.

And most everyone I've helped to upgrade simply doesn't have this. Most of them don't even use iTunes at all.

I learned a fun one from a particularly annoying call.

Get them to repeat the messages. They rattle off the instructions, wait ten seconds, then ask them to repeat it. Alternatively, wait until they have rattled of the entire instruction, then slowly repeat the exact words from the beginning "first.. press.. the.. start.. button.. and.. type.. in.. "

Tell them you need to write it down first to make sure you do it correctly. Since you as the 'victim' don't want the infection to be worse you obviously should write it down to make sure you do it exactly right.

Naturally you can use the time for more productive things, like looking up ways to best take up the time of the scammer.

Get rid of your dictator and adopt a representative democracy and it will be over. Indeed, nobody could have thought it would go on this long.

I run a mixture of Dell UP2414Q and IBM T221 monitors. The Dell has 185 pixels per inch, the T221 a bit more. Personally I find that with 200% font scaling (in Windows) there is no need for anti-aliasing and I have it turned off.

Have you tried Windows's DPI scaling? I am using Windows 7 with 200% font size and it works well. Before that I used Windows XP and that worked almost as well. To get a usable scaled display, pick exactly 200% so that if icons have to be scaled up they do so cleanly - I agree that odd multiples like 150% can look ugly. Next, make sure Aero is turned off and switch back to a 'classic' theme. The scaling is set in Control Panel -> Display -> Set custom text size (DPI). I use this at work and PuTTY, Firefox, Microsoft Office and sundry other tools all work fine. The only things which don't scale, annoyingly, are the command prompt window and Remote Desktop.

Emphasis in your quote.

As gets mentioned every time this story appears on slashdot, this is a warrant not a subpoena. The two are different tools. Both are used to find things but one is clean and neat, the other broad and aggressive. As a parallel, a subpoena is a scalpel and a warrant is a chainsaw.

A subpoena says 'We know you have this specific information, provide it to us within a time frame'. They get subpoenas of this type all the time. There is no dispute a subpoena would get the document no matter where in the world Microsoft held it.

A warrant says 'We will search for and take anything even remotely related to this, search it ourselves on our own terms.' When they demanded dumps of servers and copies of databases they were told the servers were in another nation and were not subject to a US warrant.

As was discussed in the previous incarnations of this story, the warrants are rather broad demanding they turn over everything related to the email address and user in question even if it isn't related to a criminal investigation. They want it all, everything the user ever touched or potentially touched, everything sent to the user, everything related to the user. While government investigators can usually get that through a broad warrant, they cannot get that with a subpoena. A subpoena would give them the specific emails related to the crime under investigation, but it is quite likely they already have the specific documents they could ask for.

This is I think the thing that so many people miss about the Apple Watch announcement. The problem with existing smart watches hasn't been that the features aren't useful, it's that the promised features simply don't work. I owned two different smart watches and had the same experience:

- Extremely limited app selection
- Very, very slow and oversimple apps that did exist
- With input that was just plain cumbersome and unreliable
- And bluetooth connectivity that had to be constantly restarted/reconnected (like, every time you tried to use it, bluetooth was down)

As I've said in previous posts, I'm one of those that does still wear a watch every single day, so I could be an obvious target for a smart watch, at least moreso than people that don't wear a watch at all and haven't done so in years, if ever.

But for a smart watch to make sense, it can't be a worse experience than pulling out the phone. Watches will always lose on the screen size front, so it's got to be compelling in other areas. The phone experience does have some problems (you have to pull it out, it's risky to pull out and manipulate in some contexts—walking in the city, for example, where a drop can kill it and jostles from pedestrians can come easily, it's bulky and conspicuous, you have to put it back, and so on), so it's not inconceivable that a smart watch could make sense.

But smart watches thus far have been lessons in user friction—you had to really, really, really want to do a given task *on your smart watch*. One that I tried for a few days (the Sony watch) only recognized about 10% of the taps that you made (Want to tap that button once? Then tap manically on the screen over the button 15 times in rapid succession and hope one of them takes.) and was so slow and oversimple (presumably due to lower processing power) that even aside from UI horribleness, it just plain didn't do anything very well in practical terms.

If the Apple Watch has:

- Processing power analagous to that of smartphones
- A high-resolution display
- Input surfaces and controls that are as reliable as those of smartphones
- Battery life long enough to get through a day with certainty
- Reasonable ruggedness
- Stable bluetooth connectivity without hassles

Then it could well be a winner, not because it claims to do anything new, but because it actually managed to do what smart watches claim to do. So far, my experience with smart watches was that they claim a lot, then do absolutely none of it in practice. It's not that the feature list sucks, it's that the features themselves haven't actually been implemented in such a way that you can use them without sitting down for ten minutes to have a "smart watch session" and eke out a tap or two.

It depends what you do. For text-based workflow (Emacs, web browsing, possibly an IDE) 30Hz is fine. I've even gone as low as 12Hz refresh (on an early model IBM T221 connected to a laptop with only a single DVI output) and it was usable. Tip: if you do end up with 30Hz, Nvidia cards let you turn off vsync. This seems to speed up refresh a bit, making the mouse pointer smoother.

Try turning off Aero, going back to a 'classic' (Windows XP style) theme, and setting 200% font size scaling in Control Panel 'set custom text size (DPI)'. At least, this does the trick on Windows 7 and I expect 8 would be similar.

choice. Again—the freedom to do what we want vs. the inability to do the things that we want/need to do, yet labeled conveniently as "more freedom (*though you can't do what you want/need to do with it)."

It's a losing argument. I'm happy to pay for a view. The market has set prices reasonably well. I'm happy to pay for Kindle books, for an iPad, for Adobe Creative Cloud, and many other things. They enable me to do the things that I need to do before I *die*.

Free software can offer none of these things right now. My life is finite; I don't have time to wait for the second coming before doing my computing. The freedom to be shafted? Sure, I suppose if that's how you want to see it. Nonetheless, it's what I want to do. Telling me not to, then selling that to me as "freedom" is just not persuasive. Paternalistic, sure. Persuasively free? Not really.

I used Linux exclusively as my desktop for 17 years (1993-2010). I did it because Linux did what I needed at a price that I needed—for most of that time. Toward the end, it became clear that Linux wasn't able to do the things that I wanted to be able to do—that it was restricting my freedom. The pendulum had swung; I switched to the GNU toolchain way back in the SunOS days because it gave me more freedom, not for ideological reasons, but for practical ones—the freedom to get stuff done that I couldn't otherwise get done; by 2007 or so, being stuck with the FSF world was like using stock SunOS back in the '80s—there were things I wanted to get done that I just plain needed other tools in order to accomplish. I was willing, and remain willing (and most consumers are willing) to pay a reasonable cost to accomplish those things. When powerful computing cost $tens of thousands, GNU was persuasive. But now that it's priced reasonably, we're happy to pay.

The heavy costs of a complete platform switch in mid-life kept me on Linux from about 2007 through 2010, but eventually it became clear that a switch was in order. My labor in maintaining a working Linux desktop and trying to bang free and open software into shape to do the things I needed was exceeding the costs of buying an off-the-shelf solution from a proprietary vendor, by several orders of magnitude.

FSF advocates can argue all they want that somewhere down the road, as a result of my having chosen a "non-free" platform, my freedom will be restricted—but I'll be happy to deal with that eventuality when it comes. I have no interest in sitting around for decades to wait and see if more freedom to accomplish my tasks arrives in pure FSFland; by then, my working years will be over. It's not a tenable proposition.

I began to use the GNU toolchain on SunOS in the '80s; RMS and I are of the same generation, and I value his code and contributions.

However, at the end of the day, his utopian and context-independent understanding of freedom falls flat. Freedom is not about potential, or about futures unrealized. It is about agency, today—at least for most people.

In very simple terms, if what you want is the freedom to watch DRM'ed content that you value, then RMS has no answer for you other than sacrifice—i.e. give up that freedom in the interest of some other freedom that he promises will be better. But that's not an answer to the question, nor is it—practically speaking—freedom at all. I want to watch that movie. RMS suggests that I should choose not to, as a matter of ethnical responsibility and self-interest.

But I already know where my self-interest lies—in watching the movie. And the ethical responsibility to others may be laudable—but it rings hollow to call that a measure of freedom: "Your freedom lies in not doing what you want to do, and others not doing what they want to do."

That's a strange definition of freedom, indeed. It's rather like other utopian versions of freedom, say under the Soviet system—"We are all setting each other free! We have almost no freedom at all today, particularly in comparison to others, but by god, someday, maybe a few decades or a few generations down the road, we'll get there and have far more than them! In the meantime, heads down and sacrifice, everyone! And stop complaining!"

You just won't get that far in the world if you're selling that as "freedom."

Out of interest what monitor ran at 1920x1600? For desk space, many 24 inch monitors can rotate 90 degrees so they have a small footprint. (e.g. Dell UP2414Q rotated will give you 2160x3840)

FWIW, at work I use 24" 4k monitors with 200% font scaling on Windows 7, and pretty much every application works fine. The only thing which doesn't scale is the command prompt window. Note that I am talking about the old font size selector in Control Panel which has been there for years and years - the first thing to do is to turn off all of that Aero crap.