Posts by Updraft102 1773 publicly visible posts • joined 31 May 2015
Microsoft has clearly learned lessons from the nagware experience.
Yes, they've learned that they can get away with pretty much anything. MS has crossed the line so many times and in so many ways since Windows 10 arrived on the scene, but they're doing just fine, right? Windows 10 finally eclipsed 7, and more and more people fall victim to it each month.
That would just mean the warranty ends sooner. That's what the TBW rating is primarily used for, as you hint at with the reference to the length of the warranty period for the drive in question. The actual hardware endurance is much higher than this, as you also noted. This contradicts the statement that "hibernate is very bad for SSDs." More accurately, it would be that "hibernate may somewhat shorten warranties on some SSDs."
Most people who travel a lot still don't do it every single day, so even if the 54GB allotment per day is exceeded on any given day, it probably won't average out to more than that over weeks, months, and years. Five years is a long time for a frequently used and travelled-with laptop to be in service... travel is rough on gear, and a standard 2.5" laptop HDD is probably about ready to give it up at five years even on a laptop that just sits on a desk most of the time.
that "hibernate should just be removed" thing really annoys me. On every Ubuntu, Mint, Neon, etc., installation these days, the first thing I have to do is re-enable it. They disabled it supposedly because it is too buggy, but for me it has always worked fine once I get it set up, and that's across a pretty wide variety of hardware. Just because one person dislikes a feature doesn't mean that it should just be removed! Don't use it if you don't like it, but also allow me to make the choice that fits me like you made the choice that fits you.
If everyone who used a given product got to specify one disliked feature to be removed, it would end up without any features at all. There's no doubt that someone out there hates your favorite features on something!
That's why I favor lots of configurability and options in software, in defiance of the trendy minimalism that has infected everything these days. Not everyone loves a minimalist piece, and even of those that do prefer a minimal interface, the odds are they wanted a different set of minimal options than the ones you would have chosen.
Offering a lot of options increases complexity that might confuse some people, but that's a necessary evil, I think, and a less objectionable one than trying to dumb everything down to the level that a complete neophyte can understand and declaring that to be optimal. We need more options, not less!
That used to be the one thing that Boeing had over Airbus. Boeing supposedly was of the opinion that they would help the pilot, but ultimately that pilot was the absolute authority at all times. Airbus' attitude was that since pilot error is the largest contributor to air crashes, they would willingly disobey the pilot anytime the on-board computer thought it was a bad idea.
Now we have Boeing demonstrating specifically why the attitude that their competition supposedly has regarding overriding the pilot is a bad idea.
Ask you about something?
This being Windows 10 and all, Microsoft did as it usually does in 10, and made the choice for you. Yes, it seems that you are satisfied with Windows 10!
Amazing how much satisfaction one can achieve if the company doesn't have to leave decisions about things like, er, satisfaction level to the people actually using the stuff.
They've already announced plans to do exactly this with Edge, of course. Why reinvent the wheel by having their own proprietary rendering engine? If they use the open-source Chromium engine, they offload the development costs of the hardest part of browser design to someone else. By building their own UI around an existing Chromium base whose maintenance costs are zero, they can achieve the same thing for far less cost.
This would not have worked during the browser wars of the early 2000s. IE was proprietary and not very standards complaint by design... by conquering the browser market, they effectively replaced the official W3C standards with their own. What better way to conquer the web-design and server markets than to offer high-dollar web infrastructure that was designed to use the same closed standards as the browser everyone used?
Now MS knows they aren't going to achieve that kind of market domination in browsers again. They've struggled to surpass the market share of the discontinued, outdated legacy IE. Having their own rendering engine may help the web as a whole by forestalling a monoculture, but it doesn't do anything but cost MS money to try to write their own standards-complaint web engine that, if done correctly, will render everything exactly the same as a rendering engine they could be using for free.
That's exactly what MS plans to do, of course. They're adopting the Chromium web engine for Edge. What they're NOT doing, of course, is open-sourcing the Edge engine. They can offload web engine development to the open-source community without actually giving up any of their secrets.
The closest thing to this would be MS abandoning the NT architecture and adopting Linux as their kernel. It would require a compatibility layer to run existing Windows programs, and of course, there is one of those already. WINE is not at the level of compatibility that would allow a Linux-based Windows, but part of the reason for that is MS Itself and its refusal to fully document its APIs. It has to be more difficult to create a full x86 emulator for ARM than to create a Windows compatibility later for Linux, and they did accomplish the former.
I don't know what the long-term plan is, or even if they have one over at MS. What does seem evident is that they are not interested in continuing to develop Windows as it has been for so many years. Their head is in the clouds now, and no matter how many times they utter the inane "Windows is a cloud service now," it doesn't make it true.
When the title asks if anyone bothers with Windows anymore, you'd have to expect that would happen quite soon in the life of the thread. It would be like watching someone at the Reg going out into a crowd and shouting through a bullhorn some rhetorical question about crossfit, then expressing (mock?) surprise when someone came forward to talk about it. I mean, you know they want to bring up the topic at any opportunity, and here you are essentially asking large numbers of people to make the comment everyone knows is coming anyway.
I try to keep the mentions of Linux topical and relevant. There's a line between being a fan and a fanboy/girl/other. Obnoxious fans of any given platform can sour people on the product long before they even try it, after all. I loathed the Apple II a long time before I ever tried one because of how snooty and self-satisfied so many people were for having bought a 6502 for three times the price that the plebian hordes had paid for theirs. That little fruit logo has always come at a premium.
Hipsters like things that are actually outmoded so they can use them ironically. The things they declare outmoded, in turn, are things that are still useful and not actually outmoded. They're flip-flopped, for no other reason than some misguided idea that being ass-backwards is cool, or, er, hip. Once those things they shun actually do become obsolete, they'll like them again, unless they have actually grown up by that point.
Trying to appeal to people as silly, unserious, and irrational as hipsters is a recipe for frustration.
There was some story about a fast food place that tried to one-up their quarter-pound competition by making a third-pound burger. It failed because people didn't recognize that 1/3 lb. was bigger than 1/4 lb. After all, 4 is bigger than 3, right?
Before anyone sneers at the use of pounds as a unit of weight, keep in mind that a fraction of a kilogram would have been the same way. And I thought the "I don't get fractions!" thing was a trait of young children...
I use a cheap prepaid plan ($20 every 3 months) and SMS messages cost money to send OR read, and I am also in the US. I don't care, though, as my mobile phone is more for emergency use if I have car trouble while out and about or such. I'll use it to coordinate while out and about if necessary, but usually the people I arrange to meet are old-school like me, so we plan everything as if we never had the things in the first place. The phone only gets used when plans break down.
When I am home, I don't pay any attention to the mobile. I don't know if it's because my high frequency hearing is poor at my age or because I just tune it out, but the only noise it makes that I hear, typically, is its low battery alert. I use a land line for actual communications, and it doesn't have any text capability. Leaving a message there will trigger a bright yellow flashing light on my handset, so the odds are good that I will get that message.
Have a lonely ol' upvote.
I don't send or read SMS messages either. "Sometimes the only guaranteed way to reach a person is via old-fashioned text"? What device are they talking about that send/receive SMS but not an actual call?
There was an advert for a cellular provider I saw some years ago where a very angry woman, on crutches and bandaged or otherwise similarly injured, appeared at a guy's house. We learn that he is apparently her significant other as she ripped him a new one for not responding to any of her texts about getting in an accident... being taken to hospital... being admitted to hospital... eventually being discharged from hospital.
Just then he began receiving all of her texts, as if on cue, that she'd sent during that whole ordeal.
The idea was that if you had cell provider x, they would have delivered these texts on time, blah, blah.
SMS is stateless. You only know that it was sent, but this in no way guarantees that the recipient ever saw it, as the apparently dimwitted woman who persisted in texting over several days even though they were not eliciting any responses.
A phone call is a stateful communication, where the person making the call knows that the information was sent, because he knows the person was actively on the other end of the call, and he heard the response. If the person was not there, it reverts to a messaging service, which again is a stateless communication.
If the communication is not a complete throw-away so trivial in nature that it doesn't matter at all if it was received or not, text is not a suitable communication method. Thus, I conclude that any text must therefore be a complete throw-away, which is precisely how I regard them.
It's not that I hear the text-alert noise and see who it's from and then decide to ignore it. The actual situations is that I'm not aware when they come in. I never hear the tone associated... it's not a very loud tone, and if the phone is in my pocket, it's almost guaranteed not to be heard.
I only know what it sounds like because in the infrequent instances when I use 411 (in the US, directory assistance), which always texts the phone number to me as well as connecting the call immediately. The phone is in my hand and pressed to my ear, so I hear the text "beep beep" associated with the text message then. It's the only time I've ever heard it. I only become aware of the unread texts when I pick up the thing for some other purpose (generally, for one of two things... to give it is weekly charging, or to see what time it is), and it tells me I have a bunch of messages waiting, and I just get annoyed that it is bothering me by asking such a stupid question (I've had the phone ten years and never once said yes) and hit cancel to make the reminder disappear so I can get back to whatever it was I picked it up for.
I'd rather the phone delete texts (and voice mails) silently as they come in or just not ever have my number text-able in the first place, but the provider doesn't have that option.
The two ways to reach me are by phone (calling my landline at home, not my mobile) and email (which is also a stateless communication, subject to all the same lack of certainty). All others probably will not work (calling my mobile for a voice call when I am not actively waiting for the call) or definitely won't work (texting my mobile or leaving a voice mail on it). If you need to reach me, you know how to reach me, and if it's not worth a call, that's cool too; I probably didn't want to talk to that person anyway.
Fortunately, in my circle of friends, family, and acquaintances, most of the ones I care to communicate with don't text either. I know, it's shocking to some people, but there's a whole population of us non-texters out there!
So how will you feel a few years from now when Microsoft announce the next version of Windows will be Linux+Wine?
That would mean that MS would have removed one of the biggest hurdles to WINE in the first place, which would be the lack of complete documentation about the APIs, especially for DirectX. If MS would do that, maybe even submitting patches to the project (which would have to be thoroughly checked out by the senior WINE devs first-- this is Microsoft, after all, and they can never be trusted to have dropped embrace-extend-extinguish), WINE could really make some great strides, with the non-gaming Windows hold-back titles like Photoshop and Office working in Linux seamlessly.
While I do share in the suspicion that Microsoft desperately wants out of the OS business, I'd have a hard time believing this in particular would ever happen. Then again, I would have had a hard time believing MS would cancel work on their own browser rendering engine and replace it with Chromium, yet they're doing just that.
I liked it better when MS hated Linux too, since they seemed to spare that hate for their own users back then. The time when Linux was bad, mmkay, saw releases like XP and 7, with one or the other regarded by many as the high-water mark for Windows.
Now that they love Linux, supposedly, they seem to hate Windows users, especially non-corporate users. The behaviour of MS has been appalling since Nadella came on board, with MS using the Windows Update system to distribute out-and-out malware on several occasions. They've successfully grown an entire crop of Windows users who now fear Windows Updates more than garden-variety malware they may encounter out there on the web.
Having Linux be a real alternative to the Windows hell would be the opposite direction from what MS is taking now. They're making being a Windows-using consumer as horrible as they can, in particular by forcing them to use an OS that serves the needs of Microsoft more than the owner of the PC in question, and Linux with Wine would be the opposite of that.
If it came to pass, I'd be thrilled by it, cautiously. WINE would benefit from Microsoft's input, and the Linux setup I use (which includes WINE) would get better, while the influx of Windows-using "n00bs" (sorry, I hate the term, but I can't think of something that captures the attitude better) into the Linux world that so many graybeards fear probably wouldn't happen, since they would stick with the new Windows itself rather than venture out into the wilds of "real" Linux distros. It's open source, so if MS ever did get control of any one aspect of GNU/Linux as a whole, forks would definitely occur.
If it did ever come to pass, I think it would be because MS sincerely wants to get out of the Windows business and offload development costs to whatever ends up bearing the name "Windows", not because they're trying to use sneaky means to destroy a competitor. Linux commands 2% or so of the desktop PC market, so it's not really much of a threat. Their monopoly is built on vendor lock-in, and even helping WINE for a short time would put a spotlight on the notion that there are, in fact, alternatives to Windows.
If they saw Linux with WINE as a real threat, FUDding in the usual Ballmerian fashion would seem to be a better strategy. The odds that they can get enough control over any FOSS projects of note to invoke the third and final phase of "embrace, extend, extinguish" seem very slim, and even if they did, a fork would appear, and most likely that fork would begin to be seen as the real "main" fork by everyone except Microsoft. The whole system is designed not to be controllable by any one corporate giant.
Windows Insiders are Microsoft's army of volunteer testers, given access to early versions of Windows 10 in order to give the OS a thorough kicking on as many hardware configurations as possible the Insider forum in order to participate in the ongoing party atmosphere with all of its clowning and buffoonery.
The actual testing is left to Windows consumers.
Users need to have greater control over the data their extensions can access...
Are you sure you meant 'users' and not 'Google'?
They're going to limit the ability of the addon APIs to do what the users want the addon to do, and that's the same as the user having greater control, apparently.
Why stop there? Why not give the user total control over the data their extensions can access, and just get rid of extensions completely? Since the user having control means limiting the kinds of addons the user can choose, of course.
The last Word version I used was 1.1b, which we used to call "winword" because "MS Word" meant the character-based DOS application. It was one of the few things I actually used Windows 3.0 to do, since everyone knew that real work was done in DOS.
I found that it did all that I needed a word processor to do, which wasn't a whole lot. Well, printing a ten page document in less than 45 minutes would have been nice, but I suspect that had more to do with the hardware available at the time. I remember waiting anxiously as the dot matrix printer slowly ground out the pages I needed for the uni assignment that was due shortly, having waited 'til the last minute to print.
How do you keep people buying the same thing over and over when the old one still works? Always the question, with all sorts of answers, none of which benefit the consumer.
OK, so Google now knows I have something I call a lamp, and at dusk time, I usually turn it on. Big deal.
That would be if Google was only listening after you said "Ok Google." They're also listening the other 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 55 seconds each day. That's kind of the point of this whole article-- a way to make it so that Google only knows what you specifically tell it, like that you have a lamp that you turn on at dusk time, and not the stuff you said all that time you weren't talking to the thing.
Windows 10 should have been the solution to exactly what the article was about, namely the inevitability of the market for home PC's evaporating.
It wasn't that because a phone that looked and worked like a PC, or vice versa, was doomed to fail from the start. There is a reason touch UIs for small screens and non-touch UIs for larger screens are different, and it is not just styling. Some ideas look good on paper, but are proven daft in the real world. The "one UI to rule them all" was one of them.
Windows 10 has been so bad that its undesirable nature has entered pop culture, where even phone-only millennials know that "Windows 10 will fuck you up," as one viral video put it. Having that as the sole choice in a market already facing long odds is not helpful, and would never have been helpful in different circumstances. Treating customers badly and trying to take control of other people's hardware is not going to win friends in any case. If they had kept the dysfunction contained to the UI, as with Windows 8, aftermarket tools could make it a decent OS despite Microsoft's efforts, but in 10, the crappiness goes so much deeper that it's irredeemable.
Some of the factors relating to the loss of PC sales are beyond Microsoft's control. The rise of smartphones and the end of the Moore's Law-related obsolescence cycle, especially. One thing they can control is the quality of the OS they sell that is preinstalled on nearly all of those PCs, and it's terrible. It is not the first terrible Windows release, but it is the first one that people were forced to accept anyway because they've sabotaged their older, better versions for currently-sold hardware and promised that this will be the last version ever (so abandon all hope, ye who enter here).
If MS was really interested in keeping Windows viable long-term, I doubt very seriously they would be following the path they are. The current path will monetize people short term and push them away long-term, and I must conclude that this is the desired goal. Time will tell if this is another one of those fateful business decisions that are future textbook material in business administration texts as a case study in what not to do.
I honestly judge our banking supplier (Barclays) SO harshly because their online smartcard-based super-duper sign-in to authorise payments for a multi-million-pound business has a minimum spec of "IE 10, or Firefox ESR"... and it literally doesn't work on Chrome at all.
Does it use a Java applet, by any chance?
Google gives away nothing for free. They are not a charity. They lure people in with claims of free stuff, and while you're there, they pick your pocket enough to not only pay for the "free" content, but to make massive profits on top of it. They would not be able to turn a profit offering costly services for "free" if they were actually free. The data they take without asking is valuable, and a service that does that isn't free, it's bait.
Ads are one thing, but using my CPU power and my electricity to power trackers to do something I don't want done even if it didn't have to steal my resources to do it is too much.
When I used to read paper magazines regularly, I didn't mind the ads... in fact, they were part of the attraction. I wanted to know which company was selling the products I was interested in, and for what price. The ads were targeted only in the sense that if I was reading a PC magazine, the ads were thought by the advertisers to be relevant to readers of PC magazines. Somehow, though, without mining data about me and observing me at all, those ads managed to be far more relevant than anything I have seen on the internet.
It looks to me that using all of the data collected for advertising purposes is a huge sham, and the real money is not in using that data to generate sales, but in selling that data to others who think they can use it to generate sales. Google isn't just fleecing the users of their "free" services... they're also fleecing the advertisers, who have been led to believe that Google's targeted ads work so much better than the old-fashioned, un-targeted print ads of the olden days. As long as Google can keep them believing that, the money will keep rolling in.
I bought a lot of things as a result of those print ads back in the day, and those ads never tracked me. They never moved over on the page and blocked the content I was trying to read. They never made noise and they never had distracting animations. They never bogged down the magazine so that turning the page took several minutes rather than seconds. They never delivered a virus that would spread to all my other magazines and make them hard to read too. How could those old print ads have been effective without all of that stuff? It seems a given now that if you want to get results, you need really obnoxious ads that do all of the things that print ads never could.
If Google and the others are willing to return to that kind of ad, I will consider unblocking them, but as long as I go to a site and see trackers and other malevolent scripts trying to run, that's not happening.
That doesn't matter, though; Google doesn't care whether the ads they sling actually work. All they care about is that their customers (advertisers) believe that the ads work.
The Tiles were the thing that made the UI the best of the phone UIs.
On the desktop, though, the tiles were, and continue to be, crap. I've never used a Windows phone (don't read into that; I've never even held a smart phone of any variety), but the thing that really was obvious during the post Windows 7 PC releases was that a Jack of all trades was master of none. From what I understand, the Windows phone based on 7 was still too PC-centric for the phone market, but it obviously was/is popular on the platform for which it was intended primarily.
The Windows 8 phone was supposed to be the best of the bunch on mobiles, but Microsoft's insistence that it had to be one UI to rule them all meant that its touch-centeredness made it awful on desktop PCs, the vast majority of which are not and will never be touch-enabled. Touch is not a good match with devices with non-handheld screens, where holding one's arm out in front to use it will soon become tiresome. The ergonomics are terrible!
Windows 10, of course, was just a retry at what Windows 8 had attempted, but this time with the PC to Phone slider moved a bit more toward the PC side of things, making it somewhat better, UI wise, on the PC, and from what I have read (YMMV), worse on mobile (but still pretty shitty on the PC end). That's just the UI, of course; MS also chose to put in all kinds of other poison pills to make sure that the product was as painful to use as possible on PCs, especially those in the consumer sector.
They have the monopoly to force people to accept crap in the PC market, but it was always going to be a tough slog for MS when Apple and Google both have established app marketplaces that MS could only have wished for. For MS to forsake its desktop PC dominance (they can force the issue as long as the monopoly holds, but monopolies that are fully weaponized against their customers don't tend to last very long) to try to get into the game with Apple and Google seemed like a foolish gambit doomed to fail from the start, and I had hoped that when it did eventually fail, MS would no longer have the incentive to try to make millions of PCs look and behave like phones, but that hasn't happened. MS is out of the mobile business, but the phone look and hopelessly ugly and functionally gimped UI for PC Windows are still here, and are still being expanded.
can't recall a single event where any Android, Mac or Linux machine decided to deactivate licences on a global scale, Windows has counted two now
Windows shouldn't have that ability either. I have no problem with Microsoft doing what they will to validate a license before the EULA is accepted and Windows is activated, but that should be that. Once it's activated, it should remain so forever... no further license checking, ever. Once Windows becomes the official OS of that PC, which happens at the point that Windows is activated, it needs to work to serve one master and one master only, and that is the owner of the PC. There's no room for any process using my hardware and my CPU time to try to find a reason to prevent me from using the agreed-upon (by MS and myself) OS from working fully. An OS that is working to serve someone else's needs can't be trusted, and license check whose best possible outcome is to do nothing isn't serving my needs.
MS is being very clear in demonstrating to people why they and Windows should not be trusted. How much more clear do they need to be before people get it?
Upvote from me, but there's a caveat!
I bought three PC laptops (new) for my own use in the last year or so. One cheap, go-everywhere, passive-cooled, all day battery life model, another one a few months later for that same role that was a big upgrade over the first and offered at a price I could not pass up, and the third a DTR for when I am able to set up camp while out and about (ie plug in and not have to haul it around everywhere).
All three came pre-infected with Windows 10, which I was prepared for, so I cured that pretty quickly. All three are now running Linux, with everything working save the fingerprint reader on one of them (the second in the sequence), whose OEM as usual did not release a Linux driver and does not have an open-source one yet. I would not be using that anyway, so no big deal.
Buying with Windows and wiping it is still the best way for consumer-level shoppers to get Linux PCs, since so few come that way from the factory, and those that do tend to be costly (even without the MS tax) and/or come with distros I would wipe and replace with my own anyway. One of the things I like about the PC world, as opposed to the Mac world, is the broad variety of hardware choices and manufacturers, and most of that goes away if you stick to models and OEMs that have Linux as an option.
It does annoy me to pay Microsoft for garbage that is so full of moneygrubbing attempts that it should at best be a "freemium" product, not a commercial one, but MS has demonstrated that licensing fees for Windows aren't their focus anymore in the consumer sector... it's about the monetizing, and they're not getting any of that if I'm not using Windows 10.
They pushed so hard to try to force me to use 10 that they lost a nearly three decade long user of Windows. The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems slip through their fingers.
Would it be needlessly pedantic of me to point our that in this context, the exclamation mark should be placed outside the quotation marks rather than inside?
No, it would be incorrect to point this our.
Since it was "color" (American spelling) that went inside the quotation marks, it would be logical to assume that the writer is using American English. That being the case, the exclamation point goes inside too, as is correct in the US.
they want the ability to engage in system updates (including BIOS) without requiring someone to be physically at the machine in question.
So these machines can have the write-enable jumper installed all the time, if they prize convenience over security. No sense in having the rest of us have to have that insecure option chosen for us because some outfits want it that way!
I rate myself as comfortably middle class, but stuffed if I will spend over $400 on a mere phone.
I would have to think long and hard before spending much more than a tenth of that. It's a phone whose most common use (other than being a clock) is being recharged once a week or so!
I went through three Logitech G500 mice in under a year. The side buttons (the entire point of the G5) kept failing and somehow internally crossed with the left mouse button. Once the warranty on that ran out, I bought a G700, and bought the Best Buy extended warranty on it. That proved to be one of the best purchases ever! The warranty, not the mouse.
Over the two years, I probably exchanged the mouse 15 times. It would last a little over a month, and then the side button would break internally and come out.
It's like Logitech didn't expect anyone to actually use the extra buttons. They stick them on there, use them as a selling point, then apparently hope no one uses them, 'cause they're going to fail if you do. These were fairly pricey gaming mice, and while I was using the extra buttons, I wasn't being overly rough with the mice... not nearly as rough as you would expect a "gaming" mouse to take in stride.
Just before the warranty ran out, the store apparently discontinued the mouse, so my last exchange didn't work. They ended up refunding the purchase price of the mouse instead! I can't remember if they refunded the cost of the warranty too, but I ended up getting a couple of years of mouse rental for at most the cost of the warranty.
Before all that, I also had a G5 that developed another side button issue (got stuck in the pressed position) and a M400 non-gaming mouse whose largest side button simply quit doing anything. I didn't warranty those, so the warranties must have been finished before they failed.
The real question is why I kept buying Logitech. Why I bought the extended warranty on the G700, though, was quite obvious!
So, yeah, they were that bad, if you actually tried to use the extra buttons. I never had any issues with the main buttons or the LED/laser tracking bits. The extra buttons, though, were on borrowed time before you even got the box open. They're there to get sales, not to be used!
For being an OS given away for free for a while, it's remarkable it took so many years to reach that number - including new PCs for which there was no choice.
No choice for sure, and they made certain that was the case. No previous version of Windows used Windows Update (the thing that's supposed to deliver updates that protect you from malware) to distribute a Trojan horse that breaks Windows Update forever, leaving you vulnerable to third-party malware, if you dare to install a pre-10 Windows version on newer hardware. That's well beyond "MS does not support this." There's a difference between not supporting and committing acts of sabotage.
On top of that, MS has apparently forged some unholy alliance at least with Intel, if not other OEMs, to not create drivers that will work with newer hardware and other versions of Windows. I tried setting up Windows 8.1 on a Kaby laptop some time ago, and I was expecting the Update sabotage. The touchpad, as it turns out, was impossible to get working properly in Windows 8.1. The i2c drivers that were necessary for the "precision" touchpad (which had no option to use basic mode in the UEFI) did not exist for Windows 8.1-- the 8.1 i2c drivers for previous hardware would not work at all when force installed on the Kaby laptop, and neither would forcing the Windows 10 drivers that worked with that model in Windows 10.
I know AMD was also part of the announcement when MS glibly told us that we'd better get used to the idea of using 10 on newer hardware, as they'd all had a confab and agreed to only "support" 10, but AMD apparently wasn't as obedient as MS would have liked, since they released Windows 7 drivers (and maybe 8.1 also, I don't remember) for the various chipset bits of Ryzen when it first came out.
Intel, on the other hand, has held firm, at least on the chipset drivers for things like the i2c drivers (packaged by Intel as "Serial I/O drivers"). Intel also declined to release a Windows 8.1 driver for the Kaby Intel integrated graphics, but in this case, force-installing the Windows 10 driver worked perfectly, with all of the options in the tray applet functioning perfectly.
It's fine, I suppose. If MS would rather I have only Linux on the machine rather than Linux and one of their own products, I can live with that. I guess they really do love Linux now!
And you think Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon are any better?
I don't think Apple deserves to be in the same group as the rest of them... not that I would touch an Apple product with a ten foot pole, but their business model is charging insane amounts of money for substandard, poorly designed hardware that will break if you look at it funny, and then they will refuse to honor their warranty and blame the user for the failure, who will accept this and go buy a new one so it can all happen again.
This has proven to be very lucrative without pissing about trying to spy on the users. Why steal from them (the data, which is worth money, belongs to the users, so taking it without real informed consent and compensation is stealing) when they willingly hand over money as fast as they can earn it?
I find it humorous when people complain about Microsoft doing this while continuing to use their smartphone.
Why is it humorous? It doesn't make it okay to do something if you can point out someone else that is doing the same unscrupulous thing.
I'd bet the people complaining about the Windows 10 slurp also dislike it when Android does it. In that case, though, the slurp has been there from the start (the price of admission, so to speak), whereas in the Windows world, the slurp that can't be turned off fully in consumer versions and that keeps turning itself back on to full is a new thing.
As for me, I personally don't have a smartphone of any kind, and I never have, so when I tell you I switched to Linux to avoid Windows 10, you won't find any such humor.
I find it more humorous when people post, "that's why I'm running Linux" while using Chrome to make that very post.
Why would anyone do that? Except for a recent faux pas by Debian, de-Googled builds of Chromium are available in all of the popular Linux distro repos. I still don't use it, but if that ugly UI and the paucity of configuration options is your thing, why go for the harder to get, branded spying version?
And Microsoft wonder why people are not upgrading to Windows 10.
I’ll give you a one word hint - there is no trust.
Absolutely. An operating system, by virtue of what it does, is privy to all information stored on that computer, everything the user does on that computer, and to everything that passes through the computer. It has the keys to the kingdom, so to speak... like having top security clearance to every state secret a hypothetical country might have.
To be in such a lofty position requires the utmost in trust. To grant such a level of security clearance would require the most stringent background check possible, and if there were even the slightest hint of the potential for divided loyalty, the person would most certainly be denied such clearance. It is imperative that a person embued with such a profound level of clearance would be loyal to the entity granting that clearance, and no one else at all.
That's the key failing of Windows 10. To use an OS is to grant it total security clearance, but can Windows 10 be trusted to have loyalty only to the entity granting it clearance (in this case, the owner of the PC)? Even the possibility of divided loyalty would be enough to prevent clearance being granted to an individual, but Windows 10's divided loyalty is more than a possibility. It's a well-known, documented fact.
This alone renders Windows 10 unfit for purpose. An operating system must have only one master, and that must unequivocally be the owner of the PC (often also the user in home settings, of course, but not in corporate settings). Any company that attempts to develop an OS to serve two masters, itself and the PC owner, is going to run into inevitable conflicts of interest which it will end up resolving in its own favor. It will, of course, twist things around so that it can claim that serving its own need is really serving the PC owner, like when MS forces updates on the unsuspecting customer's machine. MS will claim this is really in the best interest of the customer, since then he gets the latest and greatest in security and features.
It's nonsense, of course, because it's the owner of the PC who gets to decide what the owner's interests are. If he decides it is in his interests to never get updates at all, then that's what the OS needs to do. It doesn't matter if you, I, or Microsoft think that he would be better served to get updates, because we're not the ones who own that PC. Ownership comes with certain benefits and prerogatives, and being able to decide things like that using any criteria imaginable is one of them. The company that makes the OS can try to persuade the owner of the PC to do something, but ultimately, it needs to respect that the owner's authority is absolute. It's why all previous versions of Windows included an OFF setting for Windows Updates (which they were sure to tell you was "not recommended").
All of the problems with Windows 10 can be traced back to this MS philosophy of WaaS, which apparently means that Windows is now a service to Microsoft. What, you thought it meant that Windows was a service to you?
The bizarre, inappropriate half and half UI was initially part of Microsoft's effort to use its Windows dominance to sell Windows phones and force a usable Windows Store into being. That's Windows being used to serve Microsoft, not the user. The ads scattered throughout are the same, as is the inability to remove "apps" like Xbox and the Store itself. It doesn't matter if you don't want these things on your PC... Microsoft does, because it serves Microsoft's interests to have them there. It's pervasive, even being evident in minor changes like the one where they took out the ability to select local searches only for entries typed into Start Menu/Cortana. The PC owner may wish just to have a local search that isn't cluttered with useless and irrelevant web results, but it serves Microsoft's interests to force you to have them, since the odds of you clicking on a sponsored link are always greater if you see the sponsored link than if you do not.
That's the root of what's wrong with 10... it's not built to serve the user. It's built to serve Microsoft and the user, and the only reason the user is even in that loop at all is because even the most Microsoft-bound victim of Windows lock-in would not use a product that never serves his needs. The worst version, of course, is Windows 10 Home, which is so loaded with monetization and MS-serving that the only way it would even somewhat be ethical would be if it were a free product. It's not, though, with MS recently increasing the price on what at best is a freemium version of Windows. Even the free-upgrade version was not free, since it relied on an existing license that had been paid for.
Satya Nadella may think that Microsoft has its mojo back, but its Windows product, no longer worthy of its own division, is in shambles. If they ever wanted to get Windows back to being fit for purpose, they'd have to undo every change they've made to the development process in "Windows as a Service." Every change they've made while getting back said mojo has been destructive. I get that MS wants to be in the cloud, but clearly WaaS has failed quite convincingly.
That worked because as the aircraft lost height it entered denser air, increasing the chance of a successful relight.
Not exactly. The volcanish ash had re-melted in the hottest part of the jet engine (probably the combustion cans, but they didn't specify) while the engines were running, coating the surfaces therein with volcanic glass, blocking the flow of fuel, and causing a flameout. The engines would not restart, obviously, because there was no/insufficient fuel flow.
After a while of not running with cold air rushing through the engine as the plane continued to glide, the coated bits of the engine cooled enough to contract. The coated metal bits of the engine had a different contraction rate than the glassy coating, which shattered and unblocked what had been blocked, thus allowing a relight.
Until this incident, I would have said that's why I like Boeing more than Airbus. Boeing's philosophy was supposed to be as you say... assist the pilot, but never usurp his authority. The Airbus philosophy is that since pilot error is a/the cause of most crashes, it's going to overrule the pilot if it thinks he is in error. This incident seems an example of the Airbus philosophy, not the supposed Boeing one.
Is the email from someone/someorg you know?
You mean does the sender field claim that it is from someone I happen to know, right? I can't actually tell if it is actually from that individual until I get a look at the headers, and that means I have to open it. I've gotten spam "from" people I know before... it's really easy to spoof the sender field.
If you just open the mail, you should be good if your client does not auto-execute code willy-nilly (meaning if you use Outlook you're likely screwed), but if you go and click the link, your machine is good for a reinstall.
Isn't that just a bit overdramatic?
Do you reinstall your OS every time you go to a link you've never visited before from the search engine of your choice? In either case, you're taking a leap of faith. There's always a first time visiting a site before you've established that it is reputable and really what it claims to be (and even then it could have been hacked to serve malware), and you have to hope that the site isn't compromised and your browser does not contain a zero-day that will allow a drive-by execution of arbitrary code (that happens to be meant for your OS, which is less likely for those of us using one that has 2% of the desktop market).
Amazon announce that it sold more Chromebooks in the past three Thanksgiving to Christmas shopping seasons than every brand and model of Windows computers combined".
I've heard this kind of thing many times, but how does that reconcile with netmarketshare.com stats that show Chromebook share at <1%? Are most of them being detected as mobiles?
A lot of people who use Linux wouldn't buy it just because it was made by Microsoft, irrespective of how well it runs Linux.
Which is a rational thing.
No other manufacturer has an inherent interest in making sure "alternative" OSes don't run properly. The rest of them just want to sell hardware. Microsoft wants it to be a showcase for the latest Windows 10, and that means that even if it runs Linux well now, there's no guarantee that the next firmware update will not do something to sabotage that. MS has already shown they're not above such practices. Given how troublesome these things are, you'd possibly be in a situation where you had to choose between having a firmware bug fixed or being able to use the OS of your choice.
Then there's the price of the MS devices, and their poor repairability...
It would be fun to run Linux on one just to flip the bird to Microsoft, but it's only a little bird... perhaps a hummingbird. After all, they still got your money for the Surface AND for the Windows that came preinstalled, even if you don't use it.
Microsoft will kill their own business if the as-a-service model destroys more than it creates. Note to M$ slow down your release cycle, and start testing if you want to keep credibility and customers.
It is evident that they do not want to keep Windows customers. They're a cloud company now, right? Windows has gone from the jewel of the MS empire to its whipping boy. They seem to think they can pull off the scuttling of Windows while still keeping their cloud customers. Time will tell if it works, but I think that enough people still think that MS=Windows (including those who make the decisions over which cloud services to use) to make this a very risky proposition. They may be eager to shed Windows customers, but the part about credibility remains. If Windows is floundering, people will think MS is floundering, and that makes MS cloud look risky. Well, it is risky, of course, but I mean even riskiER than relying on someone else's server (where your data and livelihood can be held hostage) already is.
Easy. A 2013 Macbook pro weighs more than my iPad Pro, Ipad Air2, and a Macbook Air stacked on top of each other.
You said that to be thin and light, glue is needed, and no one buys such devices anymore.
I provided an example of a device that people are buying that is thin (lightness is implied, as it comes with the reduction in materials from thinness), and that is not glued together. I could provide more examples-- I've actually bought three brand new laptops in the last year, and none were glued together. Every one of them was easy to open for the purposes of upgrading (and all three needed it right out of the box).
There are plenty of laptops out there that are not glued together, and I'm far from the sole owner of each model (meaning other people are buying them).
I don't doubt that a 5 year old laptop weighs more than a bunch of other newer devices, only one of which is a what we were talking about, a laptop (btw, stacking them doesn't change their weight), but what relevance does it have to the claim that people aren't buying non glued-together devices now? People aren't buying five year old laptops brand new, certainly, but that's very different from saying that people aren't buying anything that's not glued together.
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