151–160 of 272 posts
The moment Ballmer switched from "Developers, Developers, Developers, Developers!" to "Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers, Advertisers!", I knew it was time to start migrating myself to Linux and Mac.
From the MS blog mentioned I find this section, or how it's formulated, rather interesting and disturbing: "3. Advertising Data We Don’t Collect Unlike some other platforms, no matter what privacy options you choose, neither Windows 10 nor any other Microsoft software scans the content of your email or other communications, or your files, in order to deliver targeted advertising to you." Most people would read that a…
I spent my holiday break shifting my alignment 2 or 3 points towards Stallmanism. The existence/collection of statistics like this increase my confidence in that choice. Between Windows privacy craziness and Apple's continuing lockdown of OSX (I think that System Integrity Protection augurs an iOS-like walled-garden future for OSX), I recently switched all of my OSX/Windows/Ubuntu systems to Arch Linux; it takes some…
I went the other way around. I started with your conclusions and have been migrating to the Apple ecosystem and am tempted to move to Windows. I had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution. While the privacy collection issues should be addressed and be transparent to end-users I think open source is not the way to go for these devices. I'm tired of each device being…
1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now.
2. Microsoft is very open about the stats and rules they collect. Apple does many of the same things (don't believe me? Proxy your apple machine and use it for a day. Start typing in spotlight, too) and it's straightforward to disable them.
3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.
4. The ecosystem is more open by design. You can bring in an iPhone or Android Phone without trouble. Heck, many of the interesting bits even run on OSX.
5. There is an MIT license over most of the core dev tools (some other projects use the Apache license) Microsoft has released, and their libraries and APIs. This means that unlike Oracle's java, the Mono project has a great deal of future proofing against these absurd lawsuits.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Yes. Photoshop and Lightroom. And before you all jump in and slather me with suggestions of Darktable, Shotwell, GIMP, ASP, RAWtherapee et al please know that NONE of these are a true substitute for Lightroom and Photoshop. Individually you can put together a decent work flow with Linux programmes but it's slow. Pa…
> Individually you can put together a decent work flow with Linux programmes but it's slow So... you're saying that there are substitutes, but that they aren't as fast, you don't want to use them and that (getting back to the discussion) you don't view the privacy concerns with commercial OSes as sufficient incentive. If so, why not just say that and avoid all the pointless flamage.
That's sort of the story of desktop Linux, to be honest.
And Ubuntu was keytracking in searches, collects data on its users usage, and does centralized update authority as well. It's marginally better for a substantially inferior experience with much worse hardware support. Especially if you're on a modern laptop.
I fully agree with the complaints, but I never understood why this outrage doesn't happen about e.g. Gmail (or all of ChromeOS for that matter). Lots of people virtually live in Google Apps, which certainly does a lot more tracking than Windows 10 does. The argument that "it's OK because it's on the web" just doesn't cut it anymore guys. An application is an application. We should just be as angry about browsers that…
Of course, Caspar Bowden was fired years ago, but I have a feeling Satya probably only made this culture worse. I remember this for example too:
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/12/ballme...
When your start menu (or whatever the hell it's called now) serves you ads you know you can give up on that OS and that the vendor does not care about the user.
Everything I hear about Windows 10 confirms my choice to steer clear.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Microsoft is pretty good at catering to the desires of enterprises, so you're right, but in the linked article I see at [0] that with a typical consumer license of Windows, I can reduce the "telemetry" level, but only to "Basic" from the default level of "Enhanced" (side note: how is it "enhanced" if it's the default?). While the Enhanced level accounts for a lot of the usage-specific statistics detailed in TFA, Basi…
I'm objecting to the claim that users are "powerless to stop this [data collection] even if they knew what was happening, and they don't." To the contrary, it's very clear what is being collected and how to turn it off. As well as what you can't disable in cheaper versions, and which versions you need to buy in order to get that option. Obviously consumers would like Microsoft to sell them a product with more feature…
And of course, mobile apps are saturated with complex metrics collections. Every major phone app ships with a huge sum of metrics embedded that can be monitored and almost no mobile apps discuss this.
Need we even mention web sites and their inescapable universal surveillance of their users? Even if cookies are turned off, there is so much we can (and do!) use to track users with startling specificity.
Microsoft is just a brand people like to yell about. It's a well-known brand name and people who want to express but not actually show education about digital privacy desperately cling to it to signal they are "IN THE KNOW."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Individually you can put together a decent work flow with Linux programmes but it's slow So... you're saying that there are substitutes, but that they aren't as fast, you don't want to use them and that (getting back to the discussion) you don't view the privacy concerns with commercial OSes as sufficient incentive. If so, why not just say that and avoid all the pointless flamage.
There are substitutes, but they are of such poor quality and such user unfriendliness that they're inaccessible to all but the most technically inclined, patient and sympathetic users. That's sort of the story of desktop Linux, to be honest. And Ubuntu was keytracking in searches, collects data on its users usage, and does centralized update authority as well. It's marginally better for a substantially inferior exper…