221–230 of 272 posts
There's DisableWinTracking GitHub project [1]. Wouldn't installing this software solve problem for those who don't want to be tracked? [1] - https://github.com/10se1ucgo/DisableWinTracking
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enoug…
> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Woah, really? There are plenty. Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately. AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one). Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstrument…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The shitfit is this sort of cognitive dissonance. As Apple does a lot of this shit without discussing it and has for years, but mysteriously people are comfortable with OSX. 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 ines…
I just blocked it and didn't bother to inspect the packets.
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…
I don't quite understand this. I've been on the bleeding-edge (using testing packages) of Arch for quite some time now and have had fewer problems than when I used, say, Fedora or Ubuntu.
What sort of problems were you having?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Open-source, meanwhile, has struggled to provide a basic desktop environment to rival the best from five years ago. Open-source is pretty young on the desktop arena. Consider that Microsoft ruled the entire nineties and tried all tricks in the book to sabotage linux. Despite this, the fact that linux desktops are even available today is nothing short of a miracle! IMHO, the GNOME and Unity desktops are mature enoug…
> Can you cite a single widely used software that doesn't have a FOSS alternative which works on Linux. Woah, really? There are plenty. Photoshop & Lightroom debatable, but I can agree — nothing FOSS really substitutes them, unfortunately. AutoCAD & ArchiCAD. Solidworks. Pretty much all specific 3D modelling tools like Poser (though I don't really need that last one). Ableton, Cubase, everything from NativeInstrument…
Ardour is the basis for Harrison consoles which are fairly well respected. I would also comment that open source audio plugins tend to look much worse than they actually sound. Totally vanilla UI for an audio plugin doesn't inspire much confidence in the audio quality (watch Century of the Self for more on that). I'd personally like to see a real contender for open source clone of Propellerhead Reason. Cubase is far less programming work than Reason IMHO.
Sample libraries aren't "source code" and in that sense they cannot be truly "open sourced". Creative content such as this is more on the Creative Commons side of matters -- for better or worse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you found a favourite distro? I started using Ubuntu a couple of years ago on my home laptop, but when that new design came out with that horrible big side bar, I kind of gave up on it. I also ended up buying a new laptop that came with Windows 7 so the Ubuntu one sits in the attic rotting. Still, I'm still tempted to move back to a good GUI based Linux distro if I can find one. I just haven't got the time these…
I use Xubuntu on Work PC, Home PC, Media PC and Laptop. I love XFCE, It's fast, stable, easily configured, uses normal GTK stuff so fits with the Gnome apps, is a regular plain old desktop (main menu, window buttons/taskbar). Mostly the thing I like about XFCE is I don't have to think about it, it just does it's thing, stays out of my way and doesn't break a user interface covenant I'm used to all the way back to Win…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you found a favourite distro? I started using Ubuntu a couple of years ago on my home laptop, but when that new design came out with that horrible big side bar, I kind of gave up on it. I also ended up buying a new laptop that came with Windows 7 so the Ubuntu one sits in the attic rotting. Still, I'm still tempted to move back to a good GUI based Linux distro if I can find one. I just haven't got the time these…
I use Xubuntu on Work PC, Home PC, Media PC and Laptop. I love XFCE, It's fast, stable, easily configured, uses normal GTK stuff so fits with the Gnome apps, is a regular plain old desktop (main menu, window buttons/taskbar). Mostly the thing I like about XFCE is I don't have to think about it, it just does it's thing, stays out of my way and doesn't break a user interface covenant I'm used to all the way back to Win…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Generally: no That's very misleading. The option is called "Suggestions" and it's on by default. I'm convinced they called it that because if they called it "Ads", everyone would turn it off. > By default the store app MIGHT show some logos for featured apps That is far from only problem. Here is a screenshot of a Win10 start menu, out of the box, at default settings. Count the ads: http://cdn5.howtogeek.com/wp-con…
It's a single right click to unpin them. I personally found it useful to have a link to the store to download Netflix, etc. Should they have displayed a totally empty start menu to start? I think people are getting way too upset about the smallest things.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Come move over to windows. I have. I'm not unhappy. 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 bug…
I've done "Windows" development for about half of my 20-year career, and PHP/Rails for the other half. (It's all mixed together; I'm talking about overall effort.) My job, for the past 2 years, has been 100% Visual Basic .NET. (Personal projects continue in Rails.) I'm sick to death with it, and eagerly await a side gig in Rails and OS X, which should lead to a massive side project in Java. I can't wait. I'll take development on OS X and Linux every day of the week and twice on Sunday over Windows and Visual Studio. Some days, like today, I don't know what I was thinking taking this job.
I guess it all comes down to personal preference, but today was a perfect example. I spent half the day fighting updating packages with NuGet, from one machine to another, and a sudden incompatibility with Azure database exports with my local version. Sure, there are problems with every dev environment, but it just seems so much MORE of a hassle with Visual Studio on Windows, since, for all their money and effort and marketing and the fact that they own the whole stack, the pain ought to be much LESS than the alternatives.
And I mostly HATE IntelliSense, always popping up and covering what I'm trying to type, and Visual Studio's stubborn way of screwing up my code with its auto-completion of IF statements. Yet I leave it on, for the 5% of the time I want to actually use it.
It also doesn't help that my Fortune 150 IT department has my development machine so locked down that the Azure worker simulator literally cannot get the permissions it needs to run. (So I do that work on my home PC.) And they run their own DNS system, which doesn't know that about half the internet exists. Oh, and the proxy has recently started killing my application for one user at random. No, these aren't Windows or Visual Studio's problems, but these SORTS of problems are frequently part of a "Windows development ecosystem" found in large companies that pay a lot of money to rubbish consultancies.
I know, I know. Horses for courses.
I still can't imagine why Microsoft would think it's worth the bad publicity to not offer the option to disable telemetry, considering how few people tend to deviate from defaults in general, and how tiny a percentage of their users even care about privacy to begin with (evident from the commercial success of Windows 10). They've been getting so much goodwill for all the other great things they've been doing lately.…
I would consider Win10 if there is an option to disable the phone home stuff. Without the LTSB license, you simply cannot deactivate all stuff. Why are various IP addresses and domains white listed in signed kernel mode dlls? Microsoft still thinks the will get away with this. Their bad. They will get problems with their mass collection of data from sensitive areas like doctors, lawyers, etc. Windows 7 is a very good…
It wouldn't be the first time they overplayed their hand in the area of privacy. Recently they were trying to tell everyone their new Xbox was going to be constantly on and watching them in their living room even if they shut it off. When there was a huge uproar they backtracked.