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Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

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Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#361

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…

The link to the video by LinusTechTips for anyone interested[0]. He actually had a heck of a time getting it working fully with all 7 graphics cards, as shutting a VM down wouldn't correctly release the card's resources (apparently an AMD-specific issue, but they denied it[1]), causing him to have to do a full reboot of the whole system every time one VM needed a restart[1]. [0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXOa…

Sounds suspiciously like this hardware quirk[0] that was only supposed to affect Hawaii/Bonaire... Guess it's a little more widespread. Easily fixed, I guess[1].

Then again Nvidia cards have their own set of horrible problems too, although theirs are somewhat on the side of malicious intent rather than incompetence.

[0] - https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/hw/vfio/pci-quirks....

[1] - https://github.com/qemu/qemu/blob/master/hw/vfio/pci-quirks....

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#362
post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IDC PC numbers are depressed partly because it doesn't count tablets/2-in-1s as PCs, it counts them as tablets. The story to which you link notes that "The impact for 2016 will be larger as detachable tablet volume grows, boosting earlier forecasts of PC growth in 2016 from -3.1% to growth of 1 to 2%." The quote is saying that if you add those "tablets" back, it's predicting that the PC market will grow this year. An…

You're right, I'm still not used to Windows running on so many tablets. Also, tablet sales were also down last year so I didn't expect it to help. http://www.businessinsider.com/tablet-sales-down-in-addition...

Windows runs on everything from USB thumbdrivess to supercomputers. Windows 10 also runs on phones and games consoles. The IoT version runs on the Raspberry Pi etc. I'm not sure how many of those I'd want to count, but Windows 10 on a Asus T100 looks like a legitimate PC to me, whatever IDC says ;-)

https://www.asus.com/2-in-1-PCs/ASUS_Transformer_Book_T100TA...

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a still-music-hoarder, I tried Spotify Premium for a while, but decided I didn't want to pay for it - I spent about the same cost monthly in new music, but if I stopped paying, I'd still have free access to all that music with no ads, and be able to play it all on any device with or without an internet connection (e.g. the old iPod connected to my car stereo). Streaming is certainly convenient, but they make it ve…

That's weird, because the variety of new music I listen to each month greatly exceeds the $10 price tag to own it, by magnitudes. Even if you pirated, the time spent each month finding, managing, and evaluating torrents is worth $10. With the money saved you could always just purchase the songs if the service stopped.

I don't see how it could possibly cost $10 for this service. I do most of my music listening in my car, so using a streaming service would require using my cellular data connection to access this music. Cellular data isn't free, it's charged by usage. So playing hours and hours of music a month over a cellular data connection would cause my cellphone bill to balloon.

Much cheaper to just buy it.

And that's neglecting the fact that my data connection is spotty anyway. Fixing that would require buying a new Verizon phone and subscribing to Verizon, so that's probably at least $150-200/month right there, plus whatever the phone costs.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#365
post #9

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…

Except windows isn't free. Even users who upgraded for free initially paid for a windows license (at least outside of China).

Unless you installed the tech preview. I didn't pay a dime for Windows 10.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#366
post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A coworker of mine has been wanting to do this for ages, and I've always wondered - what's the workflow like for getting the mouse and keyboard from the Linux screen to the Windows screen? For the past few years I've been running two desktops side by side (one with Windows and one with Linux), then use Synergy to get from one to the other painlessly. When I next upgrade, IOMMU might let me consolidate the number of P…

So, there are several ways to handle mouse+keyboard that I've seen. 1) Virtualized Mouse+Keyboard. If you've ever used a VM before, this is what you most likely are familiar with. You click within the VM's window, it captures your mouse and keyboard, and then everything is like normal within the VM. To release, you hit some special key combo and your mouse+keyboard is released back to the host. The VGA Passthrough se…

Hah, I can't escape Synergy. Which is ok, I use it 24/7 because it's an amazing, peerless piece of software.

But yeah, modern synergy crashes pretty often. There was a lag in development a few years back when it looked like synergy was dead, but the most recent version at the time was sooo stable. Now synergy has more features but tends to crap out or start dropping your clipboard every few hours or days.

If you're connecting multiple Linux machines (I suppose it would work for Mac too) then you can hack in this fix that I came up with:

Have a once-a-minute cronjob on the server tail the synergy log. Grep the tail for "server dead" messages and restart the server. Grep the tail for "client dead" messages and ssh into the client and restart synergy.

You have to use commandline synergy for this to work of course, but you probably want that anyway - otherwise you have to log in to each machine with a physical mouse and keyboard and manually start synergy at each boot. synergyc and synergys are your friends.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's weird, because the variety of new music I listen to each month greatly exceeds the $10 price tag to own it, by magnitudes. Even if you pirated, the time spent each month finding, managing, and evaluating torrents is worth $10. With the money saved you could always just purchase the songs if the service stopped.

I don't see how it could possibly cost $10 for this service. I do most of my music listening in my car, so using a streaming service would require using my cellular data connection to access this music. Cellular data isn't free, it's charged by usage. So playing hours and hours of music a month over a cellular data connection would cause my cellphone bill to balloon. Much cheaper to just buy it. And that's neglecting…

You can save music offline on your device, as if you owned it, so yes the cost of streaming is just $10/mo and cheaper than buying.

This was already pointed out, so I'm beginning to think you have some sort of cognitive bias against streaming services. Who are you really trying to convince, me or yourself?

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#368

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…

I would really appreciate a write-up, or link to a step-by-step guide on this as well.

I have a 5820K as well, with a GA-X99-UD3P motherboard and 32 gigs of quad-channel DDR4 RAM, and I dual-boot Linux and Windows. Windows just has Steam, and I do all my work on Linux. It would be wonderful to not have to reboot and switches OSes and just run Windows off a VM with full graphics performance! :)

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#369

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…

Lara, not Laura.

Re: Windows Now Showing Full-Screen Ads

#370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 act…

One time, back in the 80s, American Express had some kind of disagreement with the union that my step-father belonged to and the members of his union went out and every time they'd see the American Express credit card applications, they'd take them all and send them back in blank.

They had been told that each application cost a dollar to have mailed and processed.

I was a child so I never cared enough to ask about the details of the dispute and I don't know how long they did this, only that they did.

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