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With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

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Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#341

Post by Vexs »

r00fus wrote: post #242
ben_jones wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet the game Overwatch doesn't have an OSX port so I have windows 10 setup as a dual-boot option. It seems that Microsoft has correctly deduced that users don't really give a fuck. They'll throw a hissy fit, they'll make all sorts of blog posts, but at the end of the day the majority are still staring at a windows 10 installation screen and dealing with it.

Once you stop playing games (it happens eventually for many of us), your need to have Windows around will drop considerably. Are there any killer apps other than games to have Windows around @home?

Sharex. Holy shit, sharex.

It's a program that's a combination of a universal file sharer, screenshotter, image editor, screen recorder (which can output gif) and a seriously unbelievable suite of tools like OCR, image combiners, a QR generator, etc.

When I say universal file sharer, I mean everything. It uploads to different sites based on the filetype, be it drive for files, gifycat for .mp4's, pastebin for text, whatever. And there isn't a linux equivalent. Which sucks.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#342

Post by emodendroket »

cowkingdeluxe wrote: post #196
emodendroket wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - They are continuing to try to weasel the Windows Store into my life by buying up or forcing exclusives (games), with all the drawbacks of UWP. A neat trick is if you download something from the Windows App store and sign in for the first time without using an MSN account to log into your PC, it will ask you something like "Do you want to use this login with all Microsoft services?" And if you say yes then your lo…

Learned that the hard way on my primary development machine. Have a crazy long randomly generated password for my Microsoft account. Had to reset password on a different machine.

Haha, yikes. It's also a pain in the ass to change it back once you figure it out.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#343

Post by r_smart »

plantocorp wrote: post #135
0xmohit wrote: post #2

Some highlights: Microsoft installed an app in users’ system trays advertising the free upgrade to Windows 10. Not satisfied, the company eventually made Windows 10 a recommended update so users receiving critical security updates were now also downloading an entirely new operating system onto their machines without their knowledge. This is essentially equivalent to saying: You've been running whatever version of Win…

As a Microsoft employee, this W10 force upgrade things is the single thing that pisses me off the most by far... It goes against everything that we are trying to promote/change. Sometimes I'm really wondering if we work for the same company (I'm not in the Windows division). I feel like all the effort we put in investing in open source, being more open, and just generally a more empathic company is totally destroyed…

As an anecdotal reply from a totally random person on the internet: Your feelings are spot on. I was really impressed with the clear shift in Microsoft. They were on their way to becoming the cool tech company I could kind of get behind (as much as one can have loyalty to any corporation), but then....Windows 10. The worst part of it, to me, is that MS seems to understand why it wants a new version of Windows, but hasn't done anything to convince me why I would want it. And sadly, Windows is the most visible part of the company for many, many people.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#344

Post by ionised »

maglavaitss wrote: post #233
jakebasile wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gaming is my passion, my hobby, and by far my largest expense save mandatory things such as my mortgage. I don't understand why this means that I cannot say that Windows 10 is upsetting to me unless I give up a huge part of my identity. It is an unfortunate situation from which there is little recourse for people like me.

I'm not saying people shouldn't play games, hell, I'm a gamer myself. But we have to compromise in life, and when I fire up my Windows VM, I understand all the implications that come out of it: I might get malware, I might get my personal information sent to various sites, my OS might be upgraded to NewWinOs or downgraded to OldCrappyOs automatically and so on. And this is freaking unfortunate for everybody involved,…

The solution is two separate machines. One Linux machine for all personal computing and dev work, and a Windows machine with Steam on it, and anything else game-related.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#345

Post by WayneBro »

bitmapbrother wrote: post #277
ben_jones wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would add VS to that, and potentially Unity/Unreal? Also I imagine corporate and government environments that use windows might also hamstring their developers into using it.

Unity and Unreal are all cross platform. As for VS - that was never really a consideration to stay on the platform for a lot of developers.

> As for VS - that was never really a consideration to stay on the platform for a lot of developers.

By what means are you measuring these considerations? Do you have some sort of citation?

As a developer, the biggest reasons for me to stay on Windows are Office, IIS, SQL Server and Visual Studio. Nothing on any other platform comes close the the usability of these.

Furthermore, knowing these products really well gets you a lot of easy work...because almost every business on the planet runs Windows.

Anyway there's no reason to single out Microsoft here since both Apple and Google are some mixture of anti-choice, anti-freedom and anti-privacy. And the EFF wants you to quit all of them too. They recommend moving to the equivalent of a hippie commune where you'll enjoy spending time milking your own cows instead of feeding other companies' cash cows.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#346

Post by Silhouette »

graycat wrote: post #291
sjellis wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as a veteran Microsoft administrator, in total seriousness: buy a Mac. If you have a corporate network complete with good administrators, Windows can be made to work well enough. If you are a lone professional, Macs are secure, low-maintenance and have an OS designed by people that care about your privacy. Windows is probably not worth your time or energy right now unless there a specific piece of Windows-on…

Thanks. Okay, and when my Web site software, with several special back end servers, is all working well, what platform do I use to keep, say, an 8 core AMD processor at 4.0 GHz busy? On Windows, I'm aiming at Windows Server (WS). My initial usage of WS will be just dirt simple. As I get revenue, for more I will pick up a phone, call an expert, maybe you, pay for an hour to walk me through the most recent issue, take…

As no-one else seems to have replied to the parent as I write this, let me just reassure you that if you do ever want to look into using a Linux platform for the server side of your system, it's not so big and scary.

There are lots of Linux distributions. For general purpose server work, something big and well-supported like Debian would be a sensible starting point. You can install a relatively bare bones system to start with, and then use Debian's package manager to install and keep up-to-date most other software you're likely to need without having to build anything manually yourself.

You have several decent web servers available. Apache is the 800lb gorilla, huge but does just about everything and very thoroughly documented. There are some good alternatives like Nginx and Lighttpd as well.

There are also plenty of tools that you can add to do things like load balancing and caching if you need them.

You have several decent database servers available. Postgres is a solid choice for most things if you want a traditional relational database. Again, there are plausible alternatives such as MariaDB if your needs are slightly different. The main "NoSQL" databases also tend to run on Linux if that's what you're looking for.

Almost every major programming language has tools available to run back end code in that language on a Linux system.

Basically, the only thing you give up by moving to Linux on the back end is the Microsoft-specific technologies like IIS, SQL Server, .Net and C#. (There have even been some efforts to get .Net and C# supported usefully on non-Windows platforms, but I have no experience with those so won't comment further here.)

There is obviously a learning curve to configure these things if you haven't used Linux before, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend jumping ship if you're already set up on Windows servers and comfortable administering them. But if you do ever decide to switch, there are plenty of tutorials and HOWTO guides for setting up things like web servers and databases on Linux as well, and it's the kind of thing where you could probably get up to speed on the basics within a week or two of homework and experimentation.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#347

Post by WayneBro »

supernovae wrote: post #306
jakebasile wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Universal Windows Platform [1], which has been derided by some prominent game developers [2]. [1]: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/get-started/wha... [2]: http://www.pcgamer.com/epic-ceo-tim-sweeney-pummels-microsof...

Derided for no good reason. Why would an app developer NOT embrace a technology that would allow them to write once and run anyware from phone to tablet to desktop to tv and hololens? Most of these people are projecting their perceived issues with the platform, not the reality thereof. Steam still runs great on Windows 10 and Windows 10 is steams largest OS base already. UWP solves a lot of problems with win32.. a lo…

> ...from phone to tablet to desktop to tv and hololens...

You mean the Microsoft phone, Microsoft tablet, to Microsoft desktop, Microsoft (XBOX) TV and Microsoft Hololens?

Well, nobody uses Windows Phone and hardly anybody uses Windows tablets or Hololens...so that leaves XBOX and Windows desktop. I don't make games for a living, I make business apps - and no businesses are using XBOX....so there's literally no reason for me as a developer to go out of my way to build UWP apps for these business customers. Also, Win32 apps work fine on my Windows tablets.

> Most of these people are projecting their perceived issues with the platform, not the reality thereof.

Not at all. The reality is that UWP is a sandbox and I don't want to program in a sandbox. I also refuse to make programs that can only be sold through the Microsoft app store (and asking customers to enable a developer feature in order to side-load my app is out of the question.)

> UWP solves a lot of problems with win32...

It also threw away a lot of win32. A lot. But it doesn't matter to me because I'm not touching it until they loosen it up. And they will, because nobody else is touching it either.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#348

Post by ionised »

cptskippy wrote: post #12

By default, Windows 10 sends an unprecedented amount of usage data back to Microsoft... location data, text input, voice input, touch input, webpages you visit, and telemetry data regarding your general usage of your computer, including which programs you run and for how long. Unprecedented for Microsoft or everyone? This is inline with what Google collects on Android. ...the fact remains that many users would much p…

> Unprecedented for Microsoft or everyone? This is inline with what Google collects on Android.

This is a logical fallacy and excuses nothing.

> Which they can do at any time, the initial setup permits opting out of almost all of this.

Nope. They can only disable some. Even on Enterprise some collection still occurs.

> Microsoft has been doing this since Windows XP as do Apple, Google, and Amazon for their respective OSes.

The quantity and scope of the data collected has increased massively.

> Right or wrong, this is what Apple, Google, and Amazon currently.

Again, I'm not sure why you think pointing this out somehow makes Microsoft any less in the wrong.

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#349

Post by ionised »

cptskippy wrote: post #82
syshum wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Apple, Google, and Amazon currently So in your world 2 wrongs make a right... because "everyone else" is doing it is a justification for you? See I was taught from a young age that just because my friends did something incredibly stupid, illegal, or immoral that dis not give me license to commit the offense.

So why aren't we complaining about this industry practice? It's purely focused on MS.

We are.

Where have you been?

Re: With Windows 10, Microsoft Disregards User Choice and Privacy

#350

Post by Silhouette »

CJefferson wrote: post #257
graycat wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is probably a registry value you can change to do so though. Thanks, but with "probably" I sense that I'm about to get into what I call "mud wrestling" or hours or days of just throwing wild guesses against a wall to see if any appear to stick. I've only got 365 days a year, and I've given away far too many of them to such mud wrestling. GOD knows I do NOT want to do more of that. For physical things, say, an…

Why don't you want security updates? Personally, on all OSes I use I just want security updates to happen. My time is too valuable for me to go reading about every minor security update, when I will just install it anyway.

Unfortunately, Microsoft of recent times has demonstrated that they are even willing to bundle things they want to force on you within "security" updates. Many commentators at the time suggested that this was a line they should never have crossed and will pay for in loss of trust later.
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