431–440 of 485 posts
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If you want people to accept forced updates, just send the security fixes. Don't change the UI and don't mess with the users preferences, especially concerning privacy.
Honestly, I've never heard anyone complain apart from tech people. Long reboots are annoying but overall, Windows 10 is pretty well accepted by every non-technical person I know.
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> That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in. I also remember Windows 2000 fondly. It was really really stable. Even if it looked like it's frozen like a polar ice cap (they weren't melting that bad back then), a short coffee break would give it enough time to normalize itself and continue like nothing happened. Should retry it in a VM sometime. :)
I stuck with Windows 2000 for many years after XP was released. XP brought absolutely nothing I wanted and a lot of things I didn’t want. All the truly interesting stuff, like WinFS, never made it in.
I was an intern at Microsoft in 2004, and personally helped make it clear that WinFS also wasn’t ready anyway. Fwiw, I think the iOS model of “makes users and apps no longer care about directories” has been more successful than the original WinFS plan of “maybe it’s all a SQL-ish database instead”.
Forgeting about legality for a moment, this is great. Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached. It was also from a time where people still did not expect proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you. So it's great that this source will not be forever lost.
Nostalgia is, it seems, a hell of a drug.
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What's the demographic that's using XP in China? I find this super interesting...
Form my experience, mostly government and state-owned companies, which account for a big part of China's paid software market. Even some Shanghai government systems support only IE6 to 8, some only love IE11. Most state-owned banks too, popular browsers are all duel-engine. There's little to no incentive to change what's working, and customers experiences don't really matter.
To consider it from a different perspective, perhaps customer experiences matter more in China. Technology in the US is super cool and cutting-edge but the constant shift to new technologies and the rapid deprecation of slightly old software leaves a significant body (perhaps even the majority?) of consumers in the dust.
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Windows 10 telemetry, secretly turning on auto updates even after you turn it off and correct me if I am wrong, even if you disable the update service or add the urls to the hosts file it now "mysteriously" undoes that stuff over time. Windows 10X will probably have some more goodies.
I believe auto updates aren't malicious. Microsoft had a huge problem with worms infecting millions of computers that used outdated Windows version. It made Windows less secure in public opinion, even though these issues had often been fixed a long time. Forcing people to update was probably the only way to stop that. I'm also not a fan, I got burned at least once by a Windows 10 computer restarting in the middle of…
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How many forced Windows 10 updates have bricked peoples computers? Just looking at the dates after googling has dates from '18, '19 and '20. So at least once a year. On an OS that has been out for 5 years now. Do I control my computer or not? If I do then I should be able to control what happens when.
You control your computer, turn off updates, get malware, then come back and complain how M$ / Windows is crap. I really don't understand why so many people in this thread are actively complaining about not being able to turn off updates. It's like once a month and they give you advance notice and "pick a time"; you have a whole week to choose a good time to restart and apply some updates...
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and they get prison time.
If they copy code line for line yes, but might get insights they otherwise couldn't have. Or just pretend they happened to come up with solutions by themselves.
" Legal notice: If you have seen proprietary Microsoft Windows source code (including but not limited to the leaked Windows NT 3.5, NT 4, 2000 source code and the Windows Research Kernel), your contribution won't be accepted because of potential copyright violation. "
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Many games did not work so well on 2K, and XP brought some substantial improvements specifically in that department.
I hear that said a lot about Windows 2000 but my experience was that it was only really true of legacy DOS games that didn't work right. Anything written for OpenGL or DirectX worked fine. In some cases even better (for example Quake 3 ran so much smoother on my BP6 board running Windows 2000).
There were plenty of games for 9x that assumed its lax memory and permissions model, especially for stuff like DRM.
How much of the source code is carried over from release to release of Windows and how much is new?