I was more or less resigned to do so anyways, so he didn't do anything I wasn't going to do eventually, he just hastened it.
I wonder if EULA's accepted by a cat have any validity though :)
PD: I googled that and Slashdot has a story on a hardware to have cats accept EULAs :)
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/09/02/18/1817221/dont-li...
But no, it's not a good anti-lawyer method, a comment says, regarding children and cats "The child is an instrument of your will. Note - they are not acting as your agent, as a child cannot be an agent. Instead, they are your instrument, much like a pen signing your name or a cat clicking a button for you is an instrument. "
But if Microsoft automatically downloaded BankHacker 3.11 to your machine and set it to pop up a dialogue box so that hacking into a bank was so simple your cat could do it — and if then your cat "used your laptop to hack into a bank", then common sense says that Microsoft would be responsible.
It's time to move to Linux on laptop/desktop/tablet I think. While I love my surface pro 3 and the Windows 10 experience is overall a good one, I don't like them changing undisclosed stuff on me.
Getting an MCE remote (arguably the most common PC remote type) working with Kodi (formerly xbmc and very popular full screen media player) took some cumbersome steps.
On average one app breaks every 6 months or so after updating.
By comparison, omitting the privacy issues, MS has a much better track record with updates.
Should we trust your anecdote, because it has more words, or mine, because it mentions more than one computer?
It's not that I don't believe Linux is that reliable. I use it daily.
I don't believe any software is that reliable.
Maybe you're not using it?
To answer your questions- Linux is my primary OS, at work and at home. I don't recall every single issue, especially way-back, but traditionally, I create problems by doing something stupid.
Maybe I'm just lucky with updates, but I stick to popular distros, and I specifically seek out Linux-friendly hardware. Others surely have a different experience. It just felt like OP was painting with too broad a stroke; their statement was valid in 2003, but not so much these days.
I've been stuck in an update hell with windows where security updates simply would not install the only solution I could find was a full re-install. I've been in a similar situation with Ubuntu and was able to fix it - but only because I understood it - otherwise I would have had to do a re-install.
The key with Ubuntu updates is to stick to LTS versions and to do a clean re-install (keeping /home as a separate partition makes this painless).
Both have rubbish audio systems. Windows breaks on my laptop every few suspend resumes (fixed by restart). Ubuntu every few months (fixed by restart).
At this point I'm disappointed by every system I use.
USB used to just work. Now it stops working after you connect ten or so devices - which is not a common thing, but not unusual in music studios. And external USB hubs only work if they have a specific generic name in the firmware ID.
Apparently if you hack your own kexts you can get it working again, kind of.
>At this point I'm disappointed by every system I use.
This. The Win 10 situation is beyond horrific. I would never have imagined that MS would set itself up for a class action suit like this. I know people who have had their PCs trashed by this forced upgrade, and they're really not happy about it.
But the alternatives are not great. Linux and OS X are both in similar "kind of works, mostly, except when not" states.
Consumer OS reliability and design has become an embarrassment for the entire industry.
Where do you start though when W10 changes the entire damned UI, replaces a bunch of apps, moves stuff around, creates two versions of some control panels, etc.? That is just a special level of “don’t give a crap” that is embarrassing for any company making billions of dollars.
I agree there are aspects of every OS that I don't like... I just wouldn't single out Windows (again other than privacy) as particularly bad on updates... updating my mbp to el capitan took a wipe as the upgrade broke half way through.
TIP: Never update when you're tethered to your phone on vacation, always update a week before leaving for vacation by the way. lol
Drivers still breaking in S3 is often a result of lack of Windows driver workarounds for this case. And Ubuntu using slightly outdated kernel versions.
I keep running it, my point was that it's not exactly rosey with Linux all of the time either.
[0] Or 'OS X', which, technically, is just the tenth version of Mac OS rather than an OS name in its own right (despite what I think is the fact that most people think of it as the latter).
I'm much more scared of Ubuntu aptitude updates than I am of Microsoft updates.
Most updates in Ubuntu can be recovered from. That doesn't make it better/easier than recovery in Windows... as it depends on what got updated, how it got updated, and what all came with it.
Despite this, it's not too hard to fix, and I'm much more scared of forced Microsoft OS updates though.
Win7 will be my last Microsoft OS. The way they've been trying to trick people into updating is disgusting.
Plus for some reason every time I update I have to manually edit the grub file to boot the correct kernel and run the nvidia installer. I think it's because I'm still on an older version of grub or something.
I'm still much happier running ubuntu on my server/htpc than Windows. I'd be ecstatic to use ubuntu exclusively if I didn't need to run Ableton Live on Windows, which I can't run in a Windows VM.
For the past few months, my laptop pointer controls -- this is PS/2 mouse emulation, folks, what, 20+ years old? -- has broken thanks apparently to libinput.
Middle mouse button is only partially functional. Not that I use that ever....
Making increasingly complex things, and failing to keep an eye on the ball, ends up bolluxing stuff.
Happens on Microsoft (a lot), OS X (see Walt Mossberg's rant). Android, all the fucking time. And Debian.
I'm going back to a fucking sliderule....
I can't remember anything else breaking on stable. It's been a much experience than updating Windows.
NetworkMangler joins a long list of other FooMangler tools which are best destroyed with extreme prejudice. I manage WiFi with an /etc/network/interfaces stanza, and it mostly works. Static wired interfaces are, of course, vastly simpler.
I agree that the Linux experience is hugely better than Windows, and the Debian experience hugely better than RPM-based distros. This is why having the mouse, THE FUCKING MOUSE!!!!!! fail is .... I'm beyond words.
That it's been months is the other problem.
I swear to fucking god Linux has lost the beat.
It did, however, serve the needs and wants of those of us who'd experienced Unix and wanted that for ourselves. Doing a vastly superior job than the Unixes that started us off in the first place. Speaking for myself, 3.4BSD, Ultrix, SunOS, Solaris, HPUX, DGUX, Irix, AIX, and probably a few others. Plus some other platforms.
The rot started to show with the GNOME Project and PulseAudio. Both introduced a tremendous amount of complexity and gratuitous change with little benefit by way of utility or ease-of-management. Systemd has largely sealed the deal.
The lack of setting on a standard desktop offering has also hurt, and for fairly complex reasons. Red Hat is a commercial success (like Microsoft before it) because of its technical shortcomings, not in spite of them -- they directly feed its revenue model. This is quite unfortunate.
I think Ubutnu made missteps, but was (and may yet be) a superior option.
OTOH, building tools for the billions is hard. I'm willing to admit that. Microsoft only barely manages, as does Apple, and both have had quite notable failures.
The key is to remove all applications he has touched (logind/systemd/NetworkManager/PulseAudio/Avahi), and you'll find yourself with a stable system.
Good distros, such as Calculate Linux or Gentoo, help a lot with this.
However, should you continue to use Red Hat-based distributions (of which Debian, Arch, and Ubuntu should be considered, post-systemd; package managers notwithstanding), you will constantly experience these pain points.
Microsoft actually offers this. Enterprise customers requires it.
Disclaimer: Linux user. Can't check which settings are exactly where.
And this is why all manner of devices go unpatched, and another reason why IoT will be a nightmare.
I'd like to sympathise, but I'm afraid this is looking like a general trend for modern Microsoft, and if your group isn't doing similar shady things then it's the exception.
Some other examples:
I was going to try a bit of C++ programming on Windows for the first time on a new PC a little while back, so I looked into what is now called Visual Studio Community. Whereas Microsoft used to make the basic Express tools to develop on its platform free and readily available, I now have to sign in with a Microsoft account to use Community. I don't know exactly what that does, but after probably half an hour of reading on Microsoft's site, I do know that it seems to involve uploading data to Microsoft, multiple very long privacy policies, and no guarantee that I could find that potentially sensitive things like the actual code I'm working on wouldn't be included.
We were looking at getting some office software for that PC as well. I thought MS Office still came as a standalone desktop application as well as the online service-y thing, but I couldn't find anything in more than 20 minutes of looking around Microsoft's site that even mentioned the former any more. Again, it's all online-this and subscription-service-that now, and I have no interest in renting important software or sharing whatever I do with it with Microsoft.
Obviously the new PC itself, which we specifically ordered with Windows 7 because we didn't want any of the more recent versions, also needed lots of updates immediately uninstalling just to clean out all the spyware, adware, and so on.
There have been related concerns with other MS products, such as the gaming and console line, in the more recent generations as well.
For many years, I have generally been positive about Microsoft, and considered Windows, Office and Visual Studio the gold standards for useful software. I'm sorry to say that none of that is true any more, and I'm now actively hostile toward and distrustful of anything associated with Microsoft. It's a great pity.
Disclosure: I was one of the people that signed the petition to ask the EFF to get involved. The stories from people whose computers were taken out by upgrades that they were tricked into just got too much. If you think that this kind of thing is totally surprising, though, I'll refer you to the disaster that was the Windows 8 UI changes, and the swamp that has been the Windows Update experience lo these many years.
http://www.bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts/
For all Satya's promises, nothing _really_ changed.
IT professionals wanted control over this upgrade.
Microsoft responds by providing registry settings to block the upgrade process, which Microsoft later chose to ignore.
As I observed on my system, Microsoft had also pushed out some preparation updates that reset some telemetry settings I had opted out of at one time, like the customer improvement program.
Microsoft obviously has their head in the clouds now.
Are there any killer apps other than games to have Windows around @home?
I guess that doesn't count as home use. Personally, I've been on Linux for over a decade. I don't feel like I'm missing out on any "killer apps", but there's always some odd bit of software that only works on Windows - like the freeware RC helicopter simulator I use. Wine's great.
It's just the path of least resistance for most people.
Plus I really don't use Word/Outlook for home stuff, though sometimes LibreOffice doesn't cut it for spreadsheet stuff.
It's a program that's a combination of a universal file sharer, screenshotter, image editor, screen recorder (which can output gif) and a seriously unbelievable suite of tools like OCR, image combiners, a QR generator, etc.
When I say universal file sharer, I mean everything. It uploads to different sites based on the filetype, be it drive for files, gifycat for .mp4's, pastebin for text, whatever. And there isn't a linux equivalent. Which sucks.
Also Photoshop is pretty much the gold standard for image editing, but I could be happy running that in a VM.
Should you want a sandboxed VM, Windows in KVM/Qemu with USB passthrough, and GPU passthrough might solve all your audio/photoshop needs.
Worth keeping an eye on if you want to get off Windows though.
By what means are you measuring these considerations? Do you have some sort of citation?
As a developer, the biggest reasons for me to stay on Windows are Office, IIS, SQL Server and Visual Studio. Nothing on any other platform comes close the the usability of these.
Furthermore, knowing these products really well gets you a lot of easy work...because almost every business on the planet runs Windows.
Anyway there's no reason to single out Microsoft here since both Apple and Google are some mixture of anti-choice, anti-freedom and anti-privacy. And the EFF wants you to quit all of them too. They recommend moving to the equivalent of a hippie commune where you'll enjoy spending time milking your own cows instead of feeding other companies' cash cows.
Also, VS isn't exactly a compelling reason to stay on Windows. Last time I installed VS 2015 it sprayed 30+ GB's of files all over my SSD and installed about 30-40 apps in the process. To say VS 2015 is a bloated pig would be an insult to bloated pigs everywhere.
We're not talking about best of breed for "the cloud" either. SQL Server and IIS are absolutely best of breed for in-house, self-hosted business apps.
And your big complaint about VS 2015 is lacking any kind of substance. Do you measure the quality of all software solely on how much disk space it takes up or is that one you just reserve for Microsoft? I run 6 or 8 instances of VS2015 at a time and my Windows machine stays lightning fast. Meanwhile, I run one instance of Xcode (all I'm allowed on OS X, on my Mac Pro) and it's dog slow.
You didn't name anything you think is better either. Says a lot.
Do you think it will ever reach parity with the Windows version though?
Microsoft is acutely targeting devs who build cloud apps for the public or for very large organizations with the Linux version of SQL Server. Devs like me who build apps that are self-hosted (almost always in-house) for small and medium sized businesses. My customers need all that Windows integration including (among many, many other considerations) Windows authentication, Windows file sharing and security, SQL Server Integration Services (none of which are probably available on Linux...SSIS for sure) and they need it running on Windows because that's all they know or want to know.
There are certainly more developers like me than their are of the other type.
If Microsoft forces a new version on your computer, and you refuse the EULA, what happens?
Second thought - if you can't undo the install upon refusing the EULA, has Microsoft committed a crime of computer vandalism by (in effect) bricking your computer?
Something tells me that some smart lawyers are going to blast some holes in this. Especially from a trade secret perspective where some smart hacker gets his computer bricked (just go with me for a second :) ) and then has to reverse engineer something to access his data, but because he didn't accept the EULA, and MSFT took over his computer without explicit permission, he can't be sued for violating the EULA.
Now obviously IANAL, but you can see where this could go.
It reverts as if noting happened.
Ah, that brings back memories. Back in the DOS days, when you ran "format", it replied something like "Ready to format disk X. Press any key to continue:" (with X being the drive letter). And it really meant press any key to continue. Escape would continue. Control-C would continue. Even control-alt-delete would continue. The only way to not continue was to turn power off.
Windows used to be the product, now Windows users are. This is similar to Google and Facebook's offerings. Very few companies still strictly sell software anymore.
The open sourcing of tools is marketing and a consequence of prioritizing adoption over exclusivity. Like Android, Windows isn't going to be the bare foundation you build on, but the cushy, fully furnished condominium... complete with cameras and microphones.
Of course, if you have any factual evidence that Windows users are a product, then I'd be interested to hear it.
He sure is going a strange way about it
http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/
Leopards don't (generally) change their spots.
1. Open sourcing crud.
2. Taking away your rights and violating your privacy.
We need to communicate clearly to Microsoft what types of new behavior are good, and what types of new behavior are bad. It's just like raising a child. :)
Basically, Mission Accomplished for Microsoft.
Windows, and a lot of other bits are more consumer space, and moving closer to Google/Facebook model of customers being the product. I don't necessarily think it's entirely a bad proposition. From a web application developer standpoint, old windows versions, tied to old IE versions have held things back over and over again. Even given some of the privacy concerns, I'd rather most people were on a frequently updated operating system with a frequently updated browser.
That's not to say I think it needs to be windows. Also, if privacy is a concern, one can upgrade to the pro version, or use enterprise skus in offices to disable those bits.
All of that said, I upgraded pretty early (tech preview) and use Pro, so didn't see a lot of the restrictions, or very sleazy upgrade push. My parents/grandparents are mostly on Chromebook devices, and one Grandmother has an Ubuntu desktop. My sister and her family have all bought into the Apple ecosystem... so I'm the most heavy windows user in the bunch and I spend more time on my macbook, ubuntu htpc or in a Linux ssh shell from windows than using windows exclusive software.
Privacy without security is like a hut in the wilderness. Security without privacy is like prison. Where would you rather live?
So what? I clicked that X multiple times and it didn't _install_. It may have _downloaded_, I'm not sure, but did not install.
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/6/27/12046738/microsoft-pays-10...
Rather the Washington Times article states that: "The company denies wrongdoing, and a spokeswoman said Microsoft halted its appeal to avoid the expense of further litigation."
And: "Microsoft says it offers users a choice to update, not a requirement. People have to acknowledge a dialogue box before the installation, and agree to a license agreement afterward, to receive Windows 10, the company says."
I've experienced the process on multiple PCs starting from day 1 when Microsoft started the campaign at it never _forced_ me to install. Specifically, the Close button never started the installation. There _always_ was a specific button to accept the start of the installation.
I've generally assumed that people either don't actually read what's in front of their faces (probably pretty common among the non-computerate), or don't understand what they read (ditto), or they panic and do something stupid. Of course, I have no evidence for any of these assumptions in Windows 10's case, but I've seen them in other situations.
I know people who apparently can't tell the difference between an operating system, a web browser and an email service -- or else they just don't have the vocabulary to express such distinctions. It takes some time to find out what they've actually done, and why. The idea that they know which party is at fault is generally not one that fits reality.
Note: this is not a defense of "dark patterns" or whatever. I'd assume Microsoft has a good idea of the technical level of much of its audience, and that it should therefore have been extra extra careful to communicate the Windows 10 upgrade in a far clearer manner than it did.
I entirely believe there's a lot of people that just click on everything that comes up.
Was it bright enough to reliably detect metered connections (did it even try at all?). If not then just this could have cost people money.
And consuming a couple of Gb of space could be a noticeable inconvenience on a small system (say one of the many tables and laptops with nothing more than a 64 or 32gb solid state drive).
I don't recall windows 7 having any way to explicitly mark your connection as metered.
As for Windows 8 (I believe it's the same as Windows 10), you can't mark a wired connection (ethernet) as metered if I recall correctly, even though you might be on a satellite internet connection for instance which most definitely is heavily metered.
Edit: I take it back, I was wrong. No ethernet metering. You can do it via regedit, but no way to do it from the UI.
My 4Gb per month download limit doesn't like secret 10Gb downloads, that's what
--
Microsoft appears to have learnt a lot from LinkedIn [0].
[0] https://twitter.com/darylginn/status/590664399041519617