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Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

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Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#91
post #64
post #44

It's so funny to watch MSFT completely miss the lessons that have turned Google into the World's Most Valuable Advertising Business. HEY YOU GUYS LETS PLASTER ADVERTISING ALL OVER ALL OF THE THINGS! Look at Gmail: http://imgur.com/M8RF1TV Look at Yahoo Mail: http://imgur.com/Cjwxspc Look at AOL Mail: http://imgur.com/ZeaIe1L Which email product do you use? Which would you rather use? The advertising business that is…

This is the exact reason why Google is so valuable- when I use Google, I'm actively searching for something, so I'm happy to see relevant ads in my search results. If I search "bike shop London," I want to find a bike shop in London, so if I see an ad for a bike shop in London, I'm ecstatic, and I'll probably go there. When I go to check my inbox, on the other hand, that's because I want to see what email I've receiv…

You realize MS s number 5 and Google is 4... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_public_corporations_by...

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#92
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I wouldn't be willing to pay for an ad-free version of an OS that you are already paying for.

What? Who paid for Windows 10? I thought Windows 10 is supposed to be free?

It's only free to upgrade to it. If you buy/build a new PC you have to pay $100 (or more) for the privilege of being shown ads on your login page.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#93
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steam is the best of a bad bunch really - it's not perfect, but it's much fairer than other platforms. There's another article on HTG (linked from this one) that outlines the differences between Steam and Windows Store, and Steam scores quite highly. I was very surprised when some of my older games suddenly popped up as being available on Linux for no extra cost. When the Steam DRM works properly, it's pretty non-inv…

gog.com is the best option out there in my opinion. A strict no DRM stance, with sales on par with Steam's. You can download the installation binaries once and install offline as many times as you like with no extra effort, so there's no worries about losing your entire collection when a Russian script kiddy hijacks your Steam account to facilitate Counterstrike item scams and then Steam bans your account and says "w…

Gog is great for consumers, not so much for developers. The terms of their contracts are not particularly friendly to developers. The specifics are all NDA'd.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#94
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more prevalent than you would expect. People pay for cable and magazines. People even pay to become walking ads when they buy brand name clothing. edit: comma

When I was still reading paper magazine, the first thing I did when I received a new issue of The Economist was to shake it over a garbage bin to remove all the inserts and tear up the card board insert in the middle...

those cardboard inserts made the best joint filters

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#95
post #51

Seems like the only way people want to make money these days is through invasive advertising without the end-user's explicit consent. Granted the expectation of free software is driving most of this, but it starts a vicious cycle because those who get annoyed with them develop countermeasures, which the creator responds to with more aggressive ads, ad infinitum. It does start explaining some of the highly controversi…

People want free. Things aren't free. But people want free, so let's give them "free" and monetize them indirectly with surveillance, invasive advertising, etc. The entire Internet has gone down this road since it's very hard to compete with someone who is giving something away for "free" (note quotes). Free has given us George Orwell's bidirectional it-watches-you TV set.

Free was fine back when people paid their ISP or university to host their pages for them. The stuff put up by hobbyists was a lot more interesting in general anyway.

Free didn't ruin the web, advertising did.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#96

That particular example does not seem too bad. I personally would have just assumed the ad to be yet another random lock screen image. Which I like for the most part.

Thank you for being the only one in this thread not in an unreasonable panic.

It's a very attractive piece of high quality concept art. It doesn't even have a logo.

Is it for a game that they sell? Yes. But come on. This is one of the least invasive advertisements I've ever seen.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#97
post #44

It's so funny to watch MSFT completely miss the lessons that have turned Google into the World's Most Valuable Advertising Business. HEY YOU GUYS LETS PLASTER ADVERTISING ALL OVER ALL OF THE THINGS! Look at Gmail: http://imgur.com/M8RF1TV Look at Yahoo Mail: http://imgur.com/Cjwxspc Look at AOL Mail: http://imgur.com/ZeaIe1L Which email product do you use? Which would you rather use? The advertising business that is…

> Slapping ads all over my login page is a great way render the fat from brand advertisers into short-term revenue gains at the price of ENRAGING me.

Exactly. And the advertisers usually don't benefit either. When I was looking for a password manager, I saw Dashlane listed and it looked like a decent product … but I didn't click on it or research it because it had kept showing up on my Firefox homepage, and I associated "ads in my Firefox" with "Dashlane". Sure, I had more brand awareness, but it didn't do them any good.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#98
post #44

It's so funny to watch MSFT completely miss the lessons that have turned Google into the World's Most Valuable Advertising Business. HEY YOU GUYS LETS PLASTER ADVERTISING ALL OVER ALL OF THE THINGS! Look at Gmail: http://imgur.com/M8RF1TV Look at Yahoo Mail: http://imgur.com/Cjwxspc Look at AOL Mail: http://imgur.com/ZeaIe1L Which email product do you use? Which would you rather use? The advertising business that is…

Well that's a fairly misleading comparison. Where is the screenshot for Outlook.com which has no ads either?

Not to mention the fact that Gmail is valuable to Google because it gets people to sign in in all the browsers they use, allowing them to track them via cookies on all Google properties including search.

The "World's Most Valuable Advertising Business" does things like track which physical stores Android phone users and Google maps users on iOS visit.

Plenty of Android OEMs install adware and bloatware, sometimes which cannot even be uninstalled, so I guess people are already conditioned to this.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#99
With Windows 10 doing things like this, and Windows 7 being aggressively deprecated, I decided I finally wanted to ditch Windows as my daily driver. It was good timing, then, that I watched the "7 Gamers 1 CPU" video from LinuxTechTips, which showed me how to do it without sacrificing gaming.

Most everything I use runs in Linux, and for the few things that don't I can spin up a VM. But there's the caveat that is as old as Windows itself ... gaming. Dual booting isn't an option for me, because I tend to run various server VMs 24/7. I also didn't want a second tower just for Windows; that's non-ideal. But wait! Apparently modern CPUs have this fancy thing called IOMMU I never knew about, which lets you give direct access to PCI-E devices, like GPUs, to a VM.

So I bought up a 5820K, a X99 motherboard, and an extra graphics card, and away I went. I now have Arch Linux running as the host system where I do all my work. Windows 10 sits in a VM where it's given direct and exclusive access to a GTX 970 for graphics. So far, things are working well and Windows runs the benchmark apps just fine.

The end result is that I can use Linux as my daily driver, but flip over to my Windows VM whenever I want to game. It keeps Windows isolated, which is great from a privacy/security perspective, I don't have to dual-boot, and best of all I can spin up different VMs if I want to use the beastly GTX 970 for other work like machine learning. Thanks to using the 5820K which has a few Xeon features in it, the entire process when smoothly. The biggest caveat is I haven't found a DisplayPort switch yet, so I can't hook up the Windows VM to my primary Cinema monitor, and I haven't nailed down the mouse+keyboard thing yet. QEMU's virtual mouse+keyboard doesn't normally work with these kinds of VMs, so you have to hack it in, and even then it likes to randomly stop working. I could just grab a second set of physical mouse+keyboard but that's not ideal. Steam Steaming will probably be the best option for now.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#100
post #67
post #5

I really don't like this direction that MS is heading. I'd rather they charger for Windows 10 and newer and not start bundling software and pushing ads by default. Also, fuck buying games off the Windows store, Steam and any other service that locks you into DRM. My steam client in Linux is hopelessly broken due to updates. Some of my games will still play, but most require the stupid Steam DRM layer. I should have b…

I'm in the same boat. Steam was DESTROYING my PC for a long time. I couldn't figure out what it was and finally tracked the random spikes and focus losses to Steam's update service being corrupt. Re-installing Steam means uninstalling everything you've downloaded with steam, possibly losing save games and stuff like that, then having to wait for everything to re-download and install. There are ways around it, which I…

You should have backed up your games first. That's pretty easy. You can even install steam into an existing library folder and it will find all the games.
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