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Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#231

Post by tamana »

krick wrote: post #174
rms_returns wrote: post #88

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…

IIRC Blender went open source due to an generous gesture by its proprietary owner and a crowdfunding effort that was years ahead of Kickstarter.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#232

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

agentultra wrote: post #72
dantillberg wrote: post #60

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 had become tired of the dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution.

I'm glad to hear this "out there." I've run Linux on the desktop for 20 years now, and just concluded, as of today, that I was done forever. It was my main OS at home AND work for probably 15 of those years. I've done many years each with Slack, RedHat, SuSE, Gentoo, and Ubuntu. I know them all very well. When I ran them on my desktop, I was running them on all my servers too, and getting both sides.

With all the kerfuffle, I decided to reboot out of my work-from-home Visual Studio gig into my Ubuntu install yesterday, and I did the apt-get update and upgrade bit, and then COULD NOT LOG IN. (It would think about it, then kick me back to the lightdm login screen.) Simple reading of the logs showed me that the nVidia kernel module was out of whack. For about an hour I purged the packages and tried reinstalling. I tried the x-edgers PPA packages. Then I remembered that I had had this sort of trouble before, and had concluded that Ubuntu's graphical "restricted hardware" driver-installer widget does things outside of the normal package management, and decided that I didn't care any more. I scraped the whole thing off my machine.

But I couldn't just NOT HAVE a Linux installation, so, today, against my better judgement, I installed Fedora. Within 5 minutes -- FIVE MINUTES -- of trying to install software, I had 2 SELinux error messages. Why in the world would installing native packages cause SELinux errors? And trying to install the Chrome browser RPM gave me some cryptic Gnome library error. I decided that was enough of THAT too.

I've fought this kind of stuff for a couple of decades. I was using Linux when getting it going required asking for advice from the most pretentious jerks on the internet -- #linux on EFNet -- because the "internet" wasn't big enough to have a lot of documentation about it yet. I've learned the ins and outs of RPM, apt, and portage. I'm just done. I have enough trouble with Windows, and Linux is at least 2 orders of magnitude worse. (I'm typing this on OS X, which an order of magnitude better than Windows.)

I BRIEFLY considered trying Arch, since that seems to be the only other viable alternative for Linux besides Ubuntu or Fedora, but my experience with Gentoo leads me to think that, like you say, it's just going to be a hassle. Even more of a hassle than either Ubuntu or Fedora, and I'm already DONE with them. So I guess that's that. Linux will be ready for the desktop just in time for everyone to stop running desktops in favor of tablets, phones, and -- according to Cringley, recently -- gaming machines in the cloud.

If handing my activity stream to Microsoft and Apple is the price to NOT have to faff about with tweaking package management systems, then I guess I'll pay. As Murdoch said, in the Lethal Weapon movies, "I'm too old for this st."

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#233

Post by tamana »

marssaxman wrote: post #147
serge2k wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That list looks less like valuable user data and more like basic telemetry data that is mostly useful to anyone trying to provide a good OS experience.

Is it my machine, or is it theirs? If they want to do research they can use their own resources.

Why can't you be collaborative for mutual benefit?

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#234

Post by agentultra »

clouddrover wrote: post #197
agentultra wrote: post #72

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…

> dearth of issues that crop up to maintain an Arch desktop distribution A dearth of something is a lack of it (see http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/dearth ). So a dearth of problems is a very good thing. I think you mean a plethora or an excess.

Ack... yes. Thank you.

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#236

Post by jrapdx3 »

alexandrerond wrote: post #212
PuffinBlue wrote: post #98

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…

>Yes. Photoshop and Lightroom. I'm always surprised how Photoshop is the first thing that comes up when naming software not available for Linux. Truth is, unless you're in the business, regular people don't need more than what Gimp offers. Never speak of CAD software etc... They make terrible examples as to why not use Linux. Additionally, as a Linux user I can't think of working with Windows because all the things t…

Used gimp since v0.54 back in the 90's. It's sure come a long way since then. I've been using v2.9.x on Linux and lately trying it on Windows 10. Not so good on Windows, but the Linux version seems pretty solid.

IOW for most users, including me, gimp 2.9 will be good enough for most anything we're likely to throw at it. And BTW I think xfce works well, reasonably complete (except for controlling Wacom drawing tablets). To me KDE/Gnome, might as well be using Windows...

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#237

Post by agentultra »

KirinDave wrote: post #153
agentultra wrote: post #72

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…

> 1. The Dev environment is basically superior to everyone else's now.

That seems to be subjective. I like the debugger in Visual Studio but I much prefer emacs and Makefiles. Even if emacs is often slow to highlight large C files.

To each their own.

> 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.

The article is fairly light on comments regarding retention policy.

> 3. The hardware is nicer. Especially now that the rev0 bugs are mostly worked out.

The surface book is intriguing to me due to having the built-in pen support. I love my Wacom but I hate lugging it around.

Otherwise, meh. Apple has the better hardware design that fits my preferences.

> 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.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of this. When I can hand off calls from my iPhone and get the same level of integration you get in the Apple ecosystem the deal will be sealed.

> 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.

This is an interesting turn of events. It's also the new black it seems: Apple with Swift, CLR.

I mainly want it because hardware vendors support it. You most likely can't get better than OpenGL 4.1 until the next major update to OSX even if your hardware supports 4.5!

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#238

Post by rasz_pl »

mikegerwitz wrote: post #7

Let's start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower. What's more concerning about these data aren't these specific numbers, but what other data that implies that they have, what they can do with it, and what they can infer about you from it. Privacy and anonymity aren't (reasonably) possible on a Windows 10 operating system. Any entity knowing that I…

>Let's start gathering statistics on how many times people open their refrigerator, or use the toilet, or take a shower.

three strong startup/KS ideas right there

Re: Microsoft reveals details of Windows 10 usage tracking

#239

Post by username223 »

harigov wrote: post #158

I think the newer agile software development process requires companies to focus more on monitoring rather than testing, in order to understand how software is being used and also to figure out what needs to be improved/fixed. Microsoft is just implementing such processes in their products just like every other company. We would be hypocritical to say that we can make use of that processes but not Microsoft, just bec…

I remember a time when so-called "beta testers" would be given your broken software for free, in exchange for providing bug reports. Now I guess everyone gets your broken software, gets data-mined in arbitrary ways, and maybe the next step on the version treadmill makes things less awful.
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