Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 402 posts

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#141

Post by signal11 »

tdicola wrote: post #81

Looking at the deprecated features that won't make it to Windows 10 I see: > Solitaire, Minesweeper, and Hearts Games that come pre-installed on Windows 7 will be removed as part of installing the Windows 10 upgrade. Microsoft has released our version of Solitaire and Minesweeper called the “Microsoft Solitaire Collection” and “Microsoft Minesweeper.” Does anyone else find it kind of sad that they killed off the old…

I just noticed that the old EXEs -- sol.exe and winmine.exe -- are not bundled with Windows 7 (Win7 has Solitaire.exe and MineSweeper.exe). I wonder if copying the EXEs over to Win10 will work.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#142

Post by jleight »

dhess wrote: post #126
pjc50 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft expects me to buy a separate, full Windows license for each virtual machine I create, for each host machine I run it on . Yes, that's what the license says. In practice, what corporate VM users do is get MSDN licenses, which are assigned to the developer. I have one. It's basically a license to not worry about licensing: I can run as many copies of whatever I like, so long as it's "for testing and developme…

Thanks. That's what I was afraid the answer would be. The cheapest MSDN subscription (OS-only) is $699/yr. For that price I could buy about 6 copies of Windows 10 Home edition. Or 2 new laptops each with a Windows license included. Sheesh.

True, but I don't think anyone really buys an MSDN subscription just for installing a copy of Windows. I haven't looked into the actual licensing terms, but my MSDN subscription (not the cheapest version) only allows me to claim five license keys per Windows version through the UI. If you need six licenses just to make up the cost of the cheapest MSDN subscription, you're probably using your MSDN subscription incorrectly.

Generally if you have an MSDN subscription, you're using it for other products like Visual Studio, and the free copies of Windows are just for helping you get a development environment set up.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#143

Post by donkeyd »

megablast wrote: post #121
donkeyd wrote: post #58

Dear marketing people, please stop using "The best ever". If you make a new product it should be better than the previous version, it it's not, you did something very wrong.

Maybe they are trying to say this will not be another Windows 8. Or Vista. Or ME.

It's not about Microsoft in particular, it's about every tech company now using this for every new release of an existing thing.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#144

Post by andygates »

linker3000 wrote: post #96

Call me cynical, but I have just made a bootable Linux USB stick with GUI in order to keep working if/when the corporate update roll-out kicks in and borks my work machine. Happily running Fedora 22 on my home laptop!

"We're still not finished clearing XP, you've got plenty of time before 10 is on the horizon." -- Corporate IT.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#146

Post by Joeri »

jbk wrote: post #106
shocks wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use VLC. After your comment, I wasn't sure why that was the case. Apparently: > Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable (see French section below). Therefore, software patents licenses do not apply on VideoLAN software. From http://www.videolan.org/legal.html

(disclaimer: I wrote that page :) ) Well, there are 2 legal parts that apply here: - DRM - software patents. Software patents for DVDs are almost all over (it's a 20 year old technology). And in Europe, we don't have valid software patents. On the DRM part, libdvdcss is not DeCSS, it's either finding the right key or brute-forcing to find the right key. In order to play a DVD, you need to "open" the DRM, else you can…

The underlying motivation of the encryption on DVD's goes beyond preventing piracy. It's about making sure you cannot skip past the ads at the start of the movie. They needed a mechanism to require all DVD players to respect the flags on a DVD that say "this cannot be skipped", and did that by pushing it into the 1996 WIPO treaty that you must have anti-circumvention laws that prohibit people from breaking the encryption on copyrighted materials without the permission of the rights holder. Only licensed players are decrypting with permission. VLC is not a licensed player, so VLC often runs afoul of such laws.

Just because the patents expire doesn't make the anti-circumvention laws go away. Those laws only stop applying once the copyright on the DVD expires, in a century or so.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#147

Post by pjc50 »

dhess wrote: post #112
toyg wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Microsoft expects me to buy a separate, full Windows license for each virtual machine I create That is indeed the case. Otherwise you can buy licenses meant for ISPs and cloud-hosting providers. Your "personal use of multiple VMs" is simply not contemplated. You could probably get by with a MSDN subscription, which gives you some leeway.

Thanks for the reply. What does an MSDN subscription permit with respect to running multiple VMs? Edit: sounds like pretty much whatever you want.

Whatever you want, for development purposes only.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/584162/what-is-the-window...

http://www.itassetmanagement.net/2011/05/31/msdn-subscriptio... : there is a lot of fractal madness in this. "This applies to virtual machines as well – so if even one application on one virtual machine hosted on a physical server is used for production purposes, then ALL the virtual machines AND the physical host must be licensed as if they were production machines."

"Training is NOT considered a development activity, so all those being trained and the machines used for the training must be licensed appropriately." may be one of the reasons nobody ever gets any training in this business.

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#148

Post by e12e »

toyg wrote: post #108
dhess wrote: post #85

Anyone here know much about Windows licensing? This seems like a good opportunity to ask. I never run Windows on bare metal. I only run Windows on virtual machines on my Mac desktop and Mac laptop; only for personal use; and only on the rare occasion when I need to run the odd Windows-only application. I would like to go legit this time around, but it's nigh-impossible to find any specific documentation from Microsof…

> Microsoft expects me to buy a separate, full Windows license for each virtual machine I create That is indeed the case. Otherwise you can buy licenses meant for ISPs and cloud-hosting providers. Your "personal use of multiple VMs" is simply not contemplated. You could probably get by with a MSDN subscription, which gives you some leeway.

The 2012 Server Datacenter Edition is a mere ~6000 USD and allows to run unlimited VMs on up to two physical CPUs. Who ever claimed the licensing costs made a real difference between Microsoft and Linux?

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#149

Post by kozukumi »

In case there are people wondering I am using Windows 10 Pro x64 and did the following -

Downloaded ISO using the media creation tool at [1] then did an upgrade from 8.1 to 10 which complete just fine. I then booted from the USB drive I just made, did a diskpart clean on the only drive in the machine then did a clean install.

When prompted for a product key I pressed skip then when asked again during the out-of-box experience I selected to do it later. I signed in with a local account. I connected to the internet and it activated without any questions. Yes it activated using NO product key.

It seems when you do the upgrade from a valid 7 or 8.1 install it stores the hardware hash they generate on MS servers so when you then do a clean install it generates the (same) hardware hash, sends it to MS activation servers and sees it is already validated so it just activates you again. Very nice not having to deal with horrible product keys!

[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10

Edit: And so far it has been great. Stable and fast over the last 5 hours of doing updates (fucking Office 2013 has like 2GB of updates after install!).

Re: Windows 10 Free Upgrade Available in 190 Countries Today

#150

Post by kijin »

yAnonymous wrote: post #145

Does the key/license that comes with the upgrade allow for a re-install? If not, I'd rather stick to Windows 7.

"How to perform a clean installation of Windows ... you can skip the product key page by selecting the Skip button. Your PC will activate online automatically so long as the same edition of Windows 10 was successfully activated on this PC by using the free Windows 10 upgrade offer."

Source: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-10/media-creation...

I'm burning an old-fashioned installation disk as I type this, using the tool mentioned in the link above. The tool can also create bootable USB sticks or ISO images.

Post reply on HN