In Android, it is not mandatory to use Google apps - you can use your favorite browser, mail or maps instead of the Google ones. Firefox, Nine or Here, for example.
Your typical Android phone calls home around 1200 times per day. Getting that number down to zero means making it pretty much unusable.
My phone with LineageOS + microG is very usable. It does use Google's service for Push Notifications (because I do want them) — with an open source client for that service.
What keeps me from updating that I am confused about the way forward regarding FileVault & APFS. I currently have FileVault enabled as I need my drive to be fully encrypted (liability for my clients). I want my backups to be encrypted as well. But now APFS solves disk encryption on FS layer instead of going through CoreStorage. And I'm confused about the way forward for me. Is there some documentation that explains 1…
And I'm even more confused about how things should go about for more complicated Core Storage setups. I have several disks with Core Storage. All of them have multiple logical volume families in a single logical volume group. And some are encrypted and others are not. I also have Core Storage volume groups that span multiple hard disks and/or hard disk partitions. I read the Ars review but that doesn't cover APFS in much technical detail at all. I'm really missing those Core Storage deep dives in Siracusa reviews.
MS + Google (via only recently more finely-grained Android permissions) It amazes me at the arrogance in assuming users are idiots, so it's not worth engineering features for them. "Warning: This installer is attempting to replace core Windows files. Do you want to allow it to do this?" isn't hard but gives substantially more useful information than "Do you want to allow this installer to do stuff?" (Current UAC)
"Warning: This installer is attempting to replace core Windows files. Do you want to allow it to do this?" This better but in reality most users will still have no clue what it means.
And the software can just put in the installer "click 'Yes' on any windows messages to install."
Really? Bluetooth audio seems all jacked up. Problems connecting, some applications like Safari still use built in speakers even when Bluetooth audio is connected. Dual Shock 4 no longer works over Bluetooth. I'm surprised they are releasing in this state.
I agree, the good thing about Apple and Microsoft is I know what they want to sell me. Apple want me to buy relatively expensive devices on a regular basis and ideally a cloud subscription. Microsoft want me to buy subscriptions to their cloud services and ideally devices running their OS. In both cases the value for them is fairly clear and they have limited incentives to do anything that might jepordise those reven…
And yet, microsoft started incorporating ads inside of windows 10. The business models helps, but if you can both sell a product and get ad revenue, why wouldn't you ? In apple's case, they have a fairly small but dedicated marketshare that cares deeply about those issue. That's why I trust them to not sabotage their product. Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to care.
Really ugly ads, too. There's just like 2 or three random cut-off strings of text randomly sprinkled around my login screen on my SP3, with little searchglass icons next to them. They're always totally incoherent and I'm not even sure how I would interact with them if I wanted to (clicking does nothing).
Yes you can. Anyway, how many UWP apps are you running? Do you think every Win32 desktop app is now magically tracking you? Nope. So, let's compare how many UWP apps that you actually want to run (I don't use any of them) and see if they're tracking you as much as all the mobile apps you're running. There's no contest here.
It actually turns out that you can't. [0] You are able to turn it down to "Basic" using the GUI, and if you are using the enterprise edition thru corporate volume licensing you can turn it down further to "Security" with admin tools. There is no way to turn it off completely, and since its cranked up by default, that is where it will stay for the majority of installations. As an anecdote, even Microsoft employees I'v…
Incorrect. There are in fact three ways to completely disable it. You can get the Enterprise edition [0] or modify your registry configuration [1] or by a third party tool [2].
Even if you don't want to do any of those for some reason, reading about the Basic level of telemetry - it's nothing. At least it's nothing that I care about.
Within large organizations, I don't think there's any replacement for Excel. Google docs are great as a Word replacement, but Google's spreadsheet offering is a spreadsheet. Excel is an extremely sophisticated development environment.
> I don't think there's any replacement for Excel That would be great. People over use Excel to no end and it causes problems. They need to use programming. Get people with R or Python and Pandas, or some other statistical program. (88% of Excel Spreadsheets contain human errors) These are human error. Use a program not an Excel sheet. https://www.forbes.com/sites/salesforce/2014/09/13/sorry-spr... One error cost $6…
I would be astonished if switching from Excel to Python or R or something else yielded even a 12% (much less greater than that) error free rate.
> There are clear paths to NOT use anything Microsoft if you want to. For a lot of people there isn't. Take my dad for example. He sells weight scales for retail (think butchers, greengrocers, cheese shops, etc). Those scales are pretty much embedded PC's nowadays, they connect to the internet and can be remotely accessed to update product prices, promotions, get the daily sales numbers but also things like changing…
But all of that is not a monopoly by any stretch of the imagination. It speaks less of Microsoft and more of the vendors who find no need to change their ways. Yes it really is all held together with spit and tape, but nothing has forced them to change from it.
Your example may be a monopoly (if there are no alternatives then Microsoft has a monopoly in that market, whether they actively pursued on or not, just as the first entry in a market has a monopoly until other entrants appear), but when talking about operating systems in general, Microsoft hasn't had close to a monopoly in a while. They still have significant market penetration and the majority of desktops, but credible alternatives exist in most cases, and more and more people are using them (thus the importance and interest in this MacOS release).
And yet, microsoft started incorporating ads inside of windows 10. The business models helps, but if you can both sell a product and get ad revenue, why wouldn't you ? In apple's case, they have a fairly small but dedicated marketshare that cares deeply about those issue. That's why I trust them to not sabotage their product. Microsoft has a monopoly, they don't need to care.
Instead of saying “monopoly” just say “enough market lock-in” and people won’t get hung up on the semantics of “monopoly”.
Too late to edit, but that's really what I meant. It's true that windows isn't a monopoly in the truest sense, but it feels like one because of the huge marketshare and vendor lock-in they have.
I only have a Windows PC for gaming. I'd gladly switch to Linux if all games were also available there. (I tried wine and stuff like that ages ago, but that was just a pain.) Windows has effectively a monopoly on gaming PCs.
One third of the games I've purchased on Steam are available on Linux. I guess the perception of whether or not Microsoft effectively has a monopoly in the gaming PC market segment really centers around the games you play.
1/3 is pretty poor coverage. State it this way: "In order to play 2/3 of available video games, you must have Windows."