AFAIK a license is paid with every new computer coming WITH Windows, so it isn't like people get Windows for free. I'm not sure it is even possible to transfer Windows's license from computer to computer anymore, so why is Microsoft doing this? just because they can. Imagine tomorrow some f\*cking ads pop up each time you open the start menu, or on the background of the desktop, or on the login screen, or in Visual Studio Code because why not? Absolutely outrageous. "Pay for the product and you're no longer the product they say". and while we are at it, why not display ads on websites hosted on Azure even when you paid for hosting?
The default experience was garbage thrown in your face.
The leadership had to drive revenue growth and msn/ads were a money maker. That’s how they get promoted and we had to play their game.
Seeing that ladder chasing culture made me quit.
Very few companies actually legit give a shit about their users and the user experience. It’s so easy to blindly do things that annoy users but make a quick buck.
For anyone curious about vscode, there is a fork called "VSCodium" which is vscode without any telemetry shit in it.
I still think it's an excellent option for the privacy conscious.
There are plenty of free software based operating systems that will take your money. Red Hat seems like the most obvious one.
I can't even SSH into the box. The SSH daemon accepts connections, firewall is off, and login sharing is enabled. But the daemon refuses my key, my password. I can't even figure out how to get it to display the reasons for the denied access.
At least on Linux I can turn off the daemon, turn on logging, turn the daemon back on, and get somewhere with denied access.
https://www.reddit.com/r/macsysadmin/comments/9wt05m/cannot_...
Fixed it with `chsh` and now all that good stuff works \o/
Several of the latest OSX releases have progressively locked down some executables/directories to Ring -1 (requires more than just root/sudo privs). I see it as Apple locking down the OS against potential malware, as I've always been able to work around their changes with some Stack-Overflow-fu.
I don't know about the parent; but, as an MBP owner for almost 15 years, for me "fiasco" means "best-in-class keyboard and trackpad have become second- to third-rate." (Most complaints are focussed on the keyboard, and the Touch Bar's insistence on interfering with touch typing muscle memory; but I've found the trackpad has its own weird set of problems, at least on my machine.)
May take a look at the Huawei Matebook X Pro, or it's successor next year. (Worries about chinese spying aside).
With macos, you need to buy the hardware, and the hardware locks you out of using Linux lately. You also have to spend like crazy on pre-upgrades since everything is soldered in. Then they fight tooth and nail to keep 3rd party repair from being viable, so the apple store says you need a fully new machine and yet the guy down the street can fix it for $700 (would be less but everything is soldered). The machines and os are great, but the other stuff is a buzz kill.
With red hat, I'm not sure its up to date enough for desktop use - dedoimedo likes to talk up his centos install but he doesn't actually recommend it. I'm going to look at red hat one day for production.
All this trouble so I can play modern PC games... Next system upgrade cycle I think I'll be moving to linux.
2018: I'd never connect a Windows box directly to the Internet. Microsoft might break my computer.
Blizzard has officially stated they won't boot you (permanently, apparently there are occasional false positives) for using other wine offerings. I've been tempted to try to install Overwatch using Lutris as well (productivity be damned!).
I'm lucky in that I tend to prefer indie games, which are more likely to support steamos, but I'm certainly feeling optimistic about gaming on linux. I've found that I need to boot into my win7 partition less and less in the last year for games reasons.
source: configured windows10 manually once, decided i'd like to never experience that particular circle of hell again
I don't think that works, I'm pretty sure the networking stack bypasses the hosts file for Microsoft sites because it's a potential vulnerability.
As to linux gaming, a lot of effort has been made with Steam, another walled garden, but a nicer one. I just wish some of the UI/UX in linux would solidify a bit. I've been running elementary with some tweaks on my spare, but still not enough for my main desktop.
The good news is that if Microsoft refuses to let me buy it as an individual, then I have no moral/ethical qualms with not buying it per se.
I've been a member for a while now. And we even ran a domaition drive for a local food nonprofit, and our COO would match to a nonprofit org we said. More to the FSF.
Thanks for sharing the link :)
>Is my money not good enough for them? This is getting absurd
Yeah, this is surreal.
Ads can be great in a (very) few areas: nobody is going to talk about a new great tampon or condom. Heck most people haven't even heard about the menstural cup, but other than things humans feel really embarrassed talking about, exceptional products don't need ads, and neither do exceptional programmers or companies.
Not sure about that part...at this point most companies that are growing at a significant rate use recruiters. They may be internal recruiters (but even then they often use a minimal amount of external recruiters too). All of the companies we all know (Facebook, Google, Microsoft, whatever) use recruiters, most VC startups do, and a portion of small to medium size companies also do.
The current process is inefficient and suboptimal for all concerned. Recruiters have trouble identifying good candidates. And on the other side we have trouble identifying good companies/projects. On both sides we dumb down the skills provided/needed to bullet points of technologies and tools, often completely ignoring the actual problem domains. While I don't think the suggestion here about gleaning insights from git repositories is a solution by any means, it might make a small improvement by providing some deeper insight into real demonstrated skills and experience. As someone else mentioned, of course this could lead to gaming the system, but I suspect most fraudulent stuff could be filtered out--there would be clear differences between real projects contributed to over the course of years and "resumé fodder".
Anonymous description of a company/profile for the recruiter Anonymous profile of candidates looking for a job...
Swipe left...or swipe right...if both swipe connect them...
F. Why did I post this. Its such a good idea I could make money out of it.
That being said, you really want money to go to developers making the software. Not to discredit the work of packagers and integrators (mostly at Debian) but actually writing the code at the end of the day is the deal breaker.
For that you can donate to Gnome, KDE, specific projects like Krita, or Software in the Public Interest that funds a bunch of the non-umbrella projects like LibreOffice and Postgres.
Also, they (Apple, MS) don't want your money. They want your freedom, which is virtually priceless. I'm sure a fat monthly fee will suffice, but yeesh.
There used to be a time where ads on the internet were, if not outright illegal, then at least considered like spam is today. I am not sure we wouldn't be better of if we didn't go back to to those classifications.
You could maybe make this argument about popups before browser vendors killed that behaviour off, but ad banners where still a thing even with those.
The idea that they were ever even close to “outright illegal” is almost certainly a stretch in the vast majority of legal systems.
Enabling telemetry collection as the default setting needs to end - even if it is well intentioned.
[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/2226648/opensource-subn...
[2] https://www.techradar.com/news/the-controversial-ubuntu-1804...
I wish the fsf distros could get more contributors. I understand why corporate contributions aren't aimed in that direction, but I wonder why Trisquel doesn't have more hobbyists pitching in.
edited to clear up opening sentence
(I agree that the Amazon search thing was bad.)
"This data collection is turned on by default"
I took this to mean that telemetry was being collected and, if someone desired, could be turned off after the fact. I have a problem with telemetry being opt-out (it should always be opt-in). If Ubuntu is prompting to allow or disallow the collection of data, then that is good news, as people are being asked for their informed consent.
It's the same direction they go when they desperately push subscription licenses (see: Office 365) They want a business model less dependent on people replacing their PCs every three years.
I don't doubt they see a rapidly approaching future of management saying "these computers are more than adequate for office work and web browsing, so we won't replace them until they physically fail in 5+ years." It's an easier and easier argument to make, especially when we're running out of easy, cheap across-the-board performance boosts. (Office and Chrome don't run that much better on a new 32-core Threadripper than on a second-generation i5)
So people used the same argument with games and loot boxes. But even if videogames cost $500 a copy, there is so much money to be made with loot boxes that they would still exist in these games at that price.
I don't think this is true, but if it is, please provide a link to prove the assertion.
I doubt that companies are selling software at a loss with the intent to make it up in ad revenue. They're selling the software at a profit, and then getting ad revenue for additional profit.
All this just to "maximize revenue potential" for a bunch of faceless investment funds.
Let's be honest though, if a company can make money doing something they most likely will do it. It wouldn't matter if you paid $100,000 a month to use windows, if they could make an extra $1000 selling your personal information and pushing ads at you they will.
The value of marketing to Windows users is in the network effect. If one Windows user can pay $1000 to avoid advertising and change nothing else, the other users will probably hear about this and take notice. But if every Windows user is subjected to ads, I very much doubt that Microsoft is making $1000 in advertising revenue from just one person.
Microsoft would never convert 100% of users to "ad-free" paid subscriptions, at any price. But they can make money directly from advertising to 100% of their users, and there is no "loss" except from attrition (which I would guess is still probably quite a bit smaller than their numbers for overall user-base growth.)
Is my money not good enough for them? This is getting absurd