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Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

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Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#351

Post by unprepare »

blahblah12 wrote: post #345
fpgaminer wrote: post #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 o…

Seriously did people even click the link? This is not some insidious full screen advertisement . . . it's windows spotlight. You were allowing Bing to show you random photos by enabling this feature. If you didn't want that, then disable it . . . give a break. Ads on installers have been common for ages. Ubuntu shows advertisements . . . this is out of control with the fear mongering.

But the enabling by default of advertisements in the OS is certainly something I'm not comfortable with, no matter how pretty the ad is or how simple it is to disable.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#352

Post by stillsut »

And look what Google did with Chromecast - beautiful, national geographic style pictures you could sit and watch for hours. Clearly there's a team spending money at Google to create the best experience for me.

If I went into a business meeting and Laura Croft showed up as my screen saver so MS could pocket $0.000001 for showing me an ad I would go ballistic. And I'm a MS guy. It's these type of shortsighted ad-in-the-os decisions which are making me doubt the future of MS as a serious company.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#353

Post by dethos »

shahidhussain wrote: post #313
dethos wrote: post #83

This is the price for the "free" upgrade to windows 10. I really don't like this trend of turning your personal computer into a thin client, where its properties can be manipulated remotely by the vendor like if it was a web app. This is why I stayed away of products like Windows 10 and ChromeOS.

Why Chrome OS?

> ... turning your personal computer into a thin client ...

Because, ChromeOS seems to be mostly about web apps, thus can suffer from the same issue that this post describes, for example.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#354

Post by Grishnakh »

melloclello wrote: post #127
fpgaminer wrote: post #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 o…

Have you considered: you don't really need to play video games anyway

No, you don't need to play video games, but they can be a lot of fun.

However, it's important to note that you don't need Windows 10, or Windows at all, to play good video games. All the best games play using emulators, since they all came out in the 70s-90s. And Linux supports emulators like MAME and MESS just fine.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#355

Post by Grishnakh »

userbinator wrote: post #330

Does anyone find it unpleasant how these new OSs are increasingly embedding online content everywhere, presumably opening many network connections and using bandwidth while increasing attack area unnecessarily? The start screen tiles in Win8, which continue into Win10's start menu, are the most obvious example here. It isn't that I hate the Internet or anything like that; I've certainly spent long hours online visiti…

Personally, I like it a lot, but I don't think Microsoft is going nearly far enough with it. For instance, what if a machine isn't connected to the internet, as with a lot of corporate and government systems? Hopefully, after everyone (esp. the government) has switched to Windows 10, they'll roll out an essential update which will require all systems to be connected to the internet for telemetry and advertising purposes, and these features should not be able to be disabled. This even goes for government computers handling highly classified data. These computers should simply refuse to run without an internet connection for phoning home.

Since customers have shown over and over that they're willing to accept any amount of abuse by MS, I think MS should just go for the gold and screw their customers over as hard as they can think of.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#356

Post by zymhan »

siegecraft wrote: post #272
zymhan wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many guides about this, just search for something like "VGA PCI Passthrough" https://www.google.com/search?safe=off&q=VGA+PCI+Passthrough...

For anyone that tries this route, following random tutorials on VGA PCI Passthrough is a route to sure frustration and time wasting (I tried it ~2 or 3 years ago, whenever I built my previous PC). You have to make sure your video card, motherboard chipset, audio, and anything else you want to pass through are all supported. It's much simpler if you can just follow a list that says "this combination of hardware + soft…

All I did was check the Wikipedia page [1] for IOMMU-supporting hardware, and I needed to upgrade my CPU from a Phenom to FX. You don't need special audio, just the right motherboard (chipset specifically) and CPU. If you do PCI passthrough, it doesn't matter if the Linux host can talk to the card, the guest OS will take care of everything.

Otherwise, check the forums. This has been done many times over the years, and there's no shortage of existing information.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IOMMU-supporting_hardw...

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#357

Post by [deleted] »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #309
seanp2k2 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who at Microsoft is pushing for and developing this junk?

Honestly, I've done a lot of support for seniors and non-technical users, and I'm absolutely positive there are people getting feedback like "we don't know where to get Office" and the like. And that decisions like this (along with the questionable methods of streamlining Windows 10 installs for Windows 7 and 8 users) are primarily motivated by a desire to make Windows not seem harder to use than popular mobile platf…

[deleted]

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#358

Post by Grishnakh »

LordKano wrote: post #284
cm2187 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

For a while, there were people who used to drop them all in the mail. Force the publishers and advertisers to pay the postage for them with the idea of making it less profitable to include them with the magazines in the first place.

I used to do that, back in the 90s in college. First I just put tons of trash paper in business-reply envelopes and drop them in the mail, then I started filling them up with gravel.

Years later, on the internet, I remember seeing some article about people doing this, and they had pictures of things like business-reply envelopes attached to bricks, which the USPS had received. IIRC, they said that the USPS didn't actually send these or charge the business for them, unfortunately.

So stick with just dropping them in the mail as-is, to make sure the business gets charged for it.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#359

Post by Grishnakh »

signal11 wrote: post #32
gargravarr wrote: post #6

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…

Having read the article, this is about the "Windows Spotlight" feature -- which shows you a different wallpaper just before you log in. For me it's usually the default "cave and beach" wallpaper[1] although it's shown interesting photos from time to time, so I've left the feature on. It's on by default but pretty easy to disable. Not sure how I'd feel if it started showing me blatant ads. I'd probably just turn it of…

Hopefully they'll fix it soon so people can't disable any of this stuff, and the ads get really blatant and annoying.

It's just like the old adage about boiling a frog. Except that in reality, frogs aren't actually that stupid, and will jump out of the pot when the water gets too hot. Humans aren't that smart.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#360

Post by Grishnakh »

bendykstra wrote: post #75
RealCasually wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the harm done? Of course you don't "own" your operating system. You also paid nothing for it. I also struggle to grasp the double standard of why Google, Facebook, et al are able to endlessly track and personalize ads, but when Microsoft follows a similar model, there is outrage.

I expect to own my operating system in the same way that a tenant owns the interior of building. The landlord cannot walk into the home uninvited. The landlord cannot install cameras or listening devices in the home. As Justice Roberts said in Riley v. California (which also applies to computers, surely), "Modern cell phones are not just another technological convenience. With all they contain and all they may reveal…

>I expect to own my operating system in the same way that a tenant owns the interior of building. The landlord cannot walk into the home uninvited. The landlord cannot install cameras or listening devices in the home.

Yeah, and I want a unicorn that farts rainbows.

If you continue to use Windows, you're going to get all kinds of uninvited stuff you don't want. The question is, what are you going to do about it? Sit around a whine?

Personally, I love this stuff, and I hope MS makes it so people can't disable it, and even requires that all Windows PCs must be connected to the internet at all times to phone home, or else they stop working.

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