111–120 of 178 posts
They've done some brilliant things for developers this year, but sadly shipped a giant spyware operating system at the same time. From what I've read people are still trying to determine everything it's calling home.
What makes you feel that Windows 10 is any more of a "spyware OS" than Google Android?
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Yes they're both companies, but Sun open sourced stuff to get you to buy it on Solaris, their traditional cash cow. Microsoft promotes stuff like Visual Studio Code and Chakra not to sell Windows - their stand at Node Interactive earlier this month had a 50 inch TV running Ubuntu. Instead, they realise you don't necessarily want Windows, and are happy to sell you Azure (which runs Linux VMs and is a pretty good produ…
Azure is their cloud OS and runs on a special Windows server cluster in huge datacenters. (One can run Linux VMs on it, but that's just a byproduct) Azure and software as a service are their mid term future plans. Not for a reason Dave Cutler (73 years old!!), VMS and WinNT fame/chief architect has worked on Windows Azure and Hyper-V since 2008. He is undoubtly Microsoft's oldest and most important person - without h…
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Hopefully not.
Why not? A strong premium hardware manufacturer is needed pretty badly right now in the PC industry. The last one standing is Lenovo, and most of its product line is shameful garbage. When manufacturers compete on merit, everyone wins.
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Azure is their cloud OS and runs on a special Windows server cluster in huge datacenters. (One can run Linux VMs on it, but that's just a byproduct) Azure and software as a service are their mid term future plans. Not for a reason Dave Cutler (73 years old!!), VMS and WinNT fame/chief architect has worked on Windows Azure and Hyper-V since 2008. He is undoubtly Microsoft's oldest and most important person - without h…
Everything you've written in your comment is true, but I don't think it responds to anything I've said: it just looks like you're trying to show off your knowledge of NT.
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Yes they're both companies, but Sun open sourced stuff to get you to buy it on Solaris, their traditional cash cow. Microsoft promotes stuff like Visual Studio Code and Chakra not to sell Windows - their stand at Node Interactive earlier this month had a 50 inch TV running Ubuntu. Instead, they realise you don't necessarily want Windows, and are happy to sell you Azure (which runs Linux VMs and is a pretty good produ…
Azure is their cloud OS and runs on a special Windows server cluster in huge datacenters. (One can run Linux VMs on it, but that's just a byproduct) Azure and software as a service are their mid term future plans. Not for a reason Dave Cutler (73 years old!!), VMS and WinNT fame/chief architect has worked on Windows Azure and Hyper-V since 2008. He is undoubtly Microsoft's oldest and most important person - without h…
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Why not? A strong premium hardware manufacturer is needed pretty badly right now in the PC industry. The last one standing is Lenovo, and most of its product line is shameful garbage. When manufacturers compete on merit, everyone wins.
That may be true, but there is clearly an argument against that premium manifacturer being the already giant corporation that licenses the os run on 95% of those machines. If it were startup I'd say 'more power to them', even if they only shipped machines with windows preinstalled.
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For me it was about 2012. Herb Sutter (at MS) wrote his famous "Welcome to the jungle" article ( http://herbsutter.com/welcome-to-the-jungle ). It seemed if anyone was adapting, their platform, development tools, and languages to match the revolution in hardware, it was MS. (Given this revolution, on the language side MS changed focus from managed languages to the previously neglected native C++)
> It seemed if anyone was adapting, their platform, development tools, and languages to match the revolution in hardware, it was MS. C#'s async/await certainly the most accessible way of doing asynchronous operations in any mainstream language. The same for PLINQ and (simple) parallelism. Clojure, a language that supposedly has concurrency as a main focus, is awkward and arcane in comparison.
The garbage collector. Even lock free garbage collectors require some synchronization. That doesn't scale well to many cores.
Another things is that low level memory layout and alignment matters for users, to avoid false sharing etc. In managed languages you end up fighting a system that tries to hide low level things like this from you.
Finally managed languages have ref semantic and therefore use a lot of pointers under the hood. However the data layout that is the cache friendliest is contiguous memory, so the core can predict and pre fetch the next values into cache. A core that has to chase down pointers all over the memory address get a lot of cache misses.
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All can be turned off in Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB (Long Term Servicing Branch) - it's very expensive and not sold to consumer nor small business at all. But think about your doctor, your lawyer, etc. many smaller business, cheaper Windows 10 editon (non LTSB) they will unintentionally leak your confidential personal data. You say such PCs shouldn't be online at all? But they are and many of them run on Windows. Sca…
Technically the bit about it not being sold to small business is not true. You can get LTSB through Software Assurance through Windows Intune licensing on a per-user basis through Microsoft Online Services for companies of 5-250 people. And you don't need LTSB or Enterprise/Education SKUs to turn them off, you just get more convenient toggles there. Ultimately you're responsible for what services run on your computer…
Or because you don't trust any of the other options either, which is an entirely reasonable stance.
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> It's easy to run Windows 10 without any calling home at all. Not true at all! It's impossible, without a hardware firewall. Their kernel network driver whitelists several microsoft domains and IP address ranges. What's worse Microsoft back-ported that phone-home crap and ships them as updates to Windows 7 and 8.x (of course the coincidentally stopped writting descriptions for their Windows updates). Not even mentio…
Why do you think ordinary users should try to disable all the cloud based features of their OS? Surely a lot of the features they want (e.g. Google Now, Siri, Cortana) are based on the OS provider knowing about the users and having information about them. If your threat model is that the OS provider is hostile, no amount of changing of settings will protect you from their actions...
> If your threat model is that the OS provider is hostile, no amount of changing of settings will protect you from their actions...
IMO, it has less to do with the OS provider being hostile and more to do with eating up resources and increasing available malware attack vectors.
Operating systems and "phoning home" and the whole privacy thing is an interesting battlefield. I could never imagine Microsoft standing up to the Department of Justice like Tim Cook has. I also can't imagine Apple making iOS available on anyone's hardware but their own. So that leaves making the hardware available for someone else's OS.
I suspect there is a small market for a phone tether solution which suppresses all of the privacy leaking information from the network stream. Perhaps the Silent Circle folks will consider that a feature in a future release. But for now its really hard to plug that leak. So many apps on iOS, Windows, or Android leak stuff left and right. Whether its maps, or Waze, or location based games, or the Uber client to tell Uber where you are to get picked up. No to mention IMSI catchers and just general phone company douchebaggery like injecting an ID on every http request. I don't think that battle is lost, only that the depth of it is immense and any one player is probably not going to swing it one way or another.
From a company perspective though I think Microsoft has made some very positive steps and I hope the market rewards them for that.