Re: Not sure why that was downvoted
Should Microsoft tell people to use Firefox next time there's a critical IE bug?”
Yes, if they cared about their customers more than their customers wallets.
2284 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jun 2009
Google stopped caring what we think a long time ago. Because they don't care, they feel no embarrassment over disclosure of things they can't be bothered fixing. They're roughly in the place Microsoft reached in the win 8 fiasco but haven't yet spent long enough pissing off customers for a revolt to start.
But make no mistake, they're firmly in a take it or leave it mindset and making no attempt to disguise it.
@ken Hagan... Or worried that those of us that do care won't be using the preview normally. Nothing that needs my passwords is going in the win10 vm, no browsing with account logins, I won't be running any dev tools until ms sends us non instrumented builds etc. Not going to be a lot of useful testing from my install with that!
@dogged: a free *UPGRADE* for an OS they're likely to abandon after <3 years? They have absolutely no option but to give Win8 users a free upgrade, or face another crippling backlash. For nearly a year there have been questions asked about whether Win9 then Win10, would be charged for or treated as Win8 service packs and the feedback has been pretty clear.
Win7 *UPGRADES* being temporarily free - that's market reality smacking them in the wallet. The $25 upgrade to Win8 didn't work well enough, they have to go cheaper. Or no one is moving off 7 till a few years after it's discontinued. By the end of that free year the market supply of Win7 licences will have dried up and the choice will be Win10 or another OS.
MS are desperate and cannot bully users they way they got used to under monkey boy.
"It's just not legally possible to do that, the Windows you've got now is yours and can't be taken off you."
I suggest you read the upgrade EULA before clicking through, it's possible to give away your current rights even if MS cant unilaterally remove them.
You don't own your Windows install, you own a licence to it.
The us gov don't believe there are any jurisdictions outside their reach when a us company is involved. The courts haven't told them they're wrong yet. Might want to hold off trusting them till that happens.
Then decide if you really want your local authorities able to raid your data on Microsoft servers so easily.
"the supported lifetime of the PC" - one interpretation of device. I want to see the small print before upgrading to make sure I'm not giving up my ability to swap out mboard every couple of years. My PC is the collection of parts I'm currently using, not a specific device.
...and so far you can still use the same 'Don't have...' way to a local login in Win10. Don't be surprised if they hide it better (or remove it completely) by launch though. They're raising the friction though, couldn't test download a Store app without handing over a Microsoft account AND give the app permission to rape it, hopefully I'll never need an app enough to actually accept that crap.
@voland: observation check, this comment *thread* is discussing broadband speeds/quality.
And the disturbingly common 1.5 to 2gb mobile game downloads are a painful experience over 20mbit mobile when the servers fail to keep the connection long enough for each chunk (thanks Gameloft though they aren't the only incompetents). Which is the consistency over raw speed argument of course.
@Pez92 I find my gigabit home network painfully slow at times when copying backups around. With game downloads now regularly topping 20gb I've had to learn patience with my 50mbit broadband. I remember how slow 100mb home networking felt (and 10 before that}.
There are a lot of people needing to transfer fuctons of data often enough to feel the pain, even when it's casual, not work related.
At work we courier Tb drives around while we wait for affordable >GB broadband! Waiting a guesstimated 4 months to populate workspaces from source control over broadband didn't really work for us ;)
@Lusty have you even noticed how bad most IPTV is, over compressed, under resolution and rarely streaming smoothly at busy times? Were years away from consistently good quality streams, if suppliers ever decide they even need to bother for an audience taught to accept crap.
Broadcast has its quality problems but the replacement is simply crap and likely to stay that way.
Voland's right hand:"There is a mandatory freeze and do-not touch period in most institutions around Xmas."
When you can prove that cybercriminals all take xmas off that might be an argument. But rather a lot of them live in countries that don't do xmas. If a company wants to slack over a holdiday they'd better throw more resources at the job to make up lost time.
Or perhaps we could stop pretending security is a normal business activity and actually accept it's high priority.
@Simon operators are more than happy to support it for foreign phones or networks, till recently they got to charge what they liked for the service and even now they charge far beyond cost. There's no way to hide profiteering in this compulsory national roaming, of course they don't want to play.
The argument against seems to be little more than the networks don't want to do it and government won't be able to compel them or have any clue about doing it right. It's a fair observation, gov IS incompetent and the networks are experts at maintaining profits by fair means or foul. Not hard to guess which will get what they want in that contest.
Have to ask: does anyone know what policy change they're trying to sneak in while we're all too full of stuffing to notice? Why else would they be feeding rabble rousing scum like the Telegraph this recycled 'news'?
And does anyone believe they were successfully tracking anything but amateurs?
What's most surprising is frontier not learning from Microsoft's disastrous xbone launch and it's 'online only, we know best, screw you' attitude. Microsoft at least had the commercial good sense to pretend to back down (before sneaking the same crap embedded in with games for the platform)
And the hoard of rabid supporters ms managed to drum up didn't work for them, does Frontier really think they can do better than professional astroturfers like ms?
From the SCO lawyers POV the case was a catastrophe. Early on BS&F were so dazzled by the amount SCO told the world it was going to win and so confident the world would pay them to go away at worst, they took a share of the case. Later they escaped and that became a fixed cap on chargeable costs, however long the case took.
Last time I saw a figure they were already estimating a $30mil loss. That was several years ago and the case was almost at a standstill by then so it wasn't likely to get much worse. But it's a big loss and along with the shockingly unprofessional work they did, it's done their reputation no good.
The IBM/Novel etc. lawyers did well though ;)
I dislike the ui enough to not use vlc as my default player but it's essential for the the times mpc decides it can't play a file. In my experience mpc is at least 10x more bug ridden than vlc and has extremely poor handling of file errors and sucks more cpu. I really need to man up and drop it.
The move to simpler devices has nothing to do with Microsoft, although their complete failure to spread their OS monopoly into mobile/tablet removed one obstacle to adoption. Few ordinary people need the power of a PC for the 'work' they do on them or a huge bloated OS stack to do it. The moment tablets and phones became good enough they stopped needing an overpowered PC.
Microsoft created the whole Win8 fiasco because they realised too late they had no presence in the post-PC world and no monopoly leverage because of that. So the Windows monopoly was abused to bludgeon us into accepting the crap they threw together for mobile. Hasn't worked so well, the users they targeted had already jumped ship to IOS and Android and have no problem using multiple OSes - the right one for each device.
"Also often the main cause of infection isn't necessarily Windows"
But sometimes it's the anticompetitive business strategies MS so love overriding the slightest bit of common sense - like embedding crapware like IE in the OS where it could do maximum damage and gain maximum exposure. Until MS genuinely value my security above their business skullduggery Windows will remain infested.
He's hardly the a high achieving MS loyalist MS would have chosen to send. He was what they were faced with dealing with after the fact.
Make no mistake, MS would have paid a lot to buy a successful Nokia WP business and it's easy to believe they'd hope for Elop to facilitate that. They clearly aren't so keen on the train wreck he actually created (with plenty of help from MS's WP mismanagement), suggesting any 'conspiracy' didn't work as expected and you have to wonder just what leverage Elop had to get re-employed at MS now.
Elop does appear to have outwitted Microsoft though, despite all the other failures.
Remember: the first decision DID NOT SAY APIs were not copyrightable in general, it specifically limited itself to that case. It's something that seemed to get overlooked in the initial celebration.
My personal opinion is the appeals court completely screed up here but the first hearing didn't do much better at establishing why in this specific instance copyright didn't apply.
A Windows 'universal app' is surely just what Android apps have always been, adapting at runtime to the platform they happen to be run on, with perhaps some help from the app store picking the right build? Apps that largely run everywhere there's an Android runtime available, just like the story of Win apps running everywhere the runtime is available.
Till now MS ground troops (and their Apple equivalents) have banged on endlessly about Android fragmentation... but MS just brought the same 'fragmentation' problem to 'new Windows'
So how long till the bs script changes? Because from now on the astroturfers will be on orders to paint fragmentation as a good thing!
NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Complain NOW before they try taking it away.
Apparently already forgotten how willing MS are to remove features then drag their feet waiting for users to give up complaining... it's like Win8 never happened. Still annoyed that XP SP2 reduced access to all the RAM on a 4Gb+ system.
The reality is for almost all windows users the ui is the OS, a view Microsoft reinforce by packaging the whole thing as one monolithic blob and their take it or leave it choice of ui. Few are aware of improvement in the core post win7, few need those improvements enough to care. And crucially the businesses that should care know win7 is good enough already for their users needs.
By tying the os to their ui so tightly Microsoft have tied their future to the ui. And the win 8 ui stinks.
I think it would be more accurate to say they were trying to unify the look&feel of the 3 OS products in the Ballmer era, letting the poor app developers paper over the total lack of API convergence and the users suffer utterly inappropriate interfaces.
Of late they're trying to look more serious about actual convergence but it's too late, Win8/WP showed users the 'one UI everywhere' idea is just stupid, a plan born of MS marketing needs rather than sense. Even using the same core OS everywhere is questionable, I like my mobile devices tuned very differently to my desktop.
Win9 is coming too soon to show real progress on backing out the idiotic choices, if only because MS didn't take the problem seriously till more than a year after Win8 launched.
http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte
Provided the controller doesn't die prematurely (used to be a problem) looks like you get sufficient warning from SMART to retire an SSD. I still won't be storing anything that cant be reconstructed or pulled from my system backup on one though.
My problem is I started by adding 32Gb RAM to Win8, which needed it - was hitting 24Gb RAM use during builds. With Win8.1 it now never reaches 16Gb and hardly hits the drives after stuffing 16Gb+ of ram with cached loads.
By the time the SSD went in there wasn't much left for it to do. If I done it in the other order it would look like the SSD made more difference. More and faster RAM remains the best investment in Windows systems, especially now it's catching up with Linux on memory management ;)
It depends a great deal on your use pattern and hardware. I rarely reboot, so boot time doesn't interest me and Win8.1 greatly improved caching and memory use so most of my tools are sitting in RAM whenever I need them - I don't actually feel much difference after switching to SSD!
More surprising, I added one primarily to help with massive compile jobs, able to max out 6 cores continuously with 100k's of files being processed. Again it's hard to tell if it's helping, The 12 core office build machine wasn't noticeably drive bound either on the same job.
For my work load its obvious throwing 32Gb RAM at it is more effective than a fast 500Gb SSD. Nice things to have but I'm not seeing the magical improvements many claim. Probably much more effective on the low end systems most use though.
Not so sure about that upgrade. It looks suspiciously like they've made a deliberate effort to inject little annoyances designed to nudge users away from using the menu. There was more scrolling in that 2 min video than I've had in all the years I've used the Start Menu, far too much crap injected into it's top level. And it looks just as fugly as everything Win8.
And WTF is the point of putting live tiles in the start menu? Either put them on the desktop where they can be some use or drop them. And that won't happen because they'll have to address the ongoing inability of any version of Windows to leave desktop furniture where the user puts it.
They haven't given up trying to foist the Metro crappery on us, just got about 1% more subtle in enforcement.
Well... Mojang made $139mil *profit* in 2013. They also paid Notch's licensing shell another $130mil that year. If MS bought out the IP as well as the company they get both chunks as profit - $269mil annual profit starts to make this look more like a typical purchase, albeit with a tonne more risk than most.
Luckily I never saw the appeal of Minecraft, too much like the day job, so my interest ends there ;)
This is much of the problem specialist mobile middlemen have: the supermarkets have taken too much of their market through lower prices, not pissing off the customers with hard sell and the certain knowledge that getting support will involve many less hours shouting at people.
With most phones now 'good enough' even the (dubious) sales advice isn't adding more value than the annoyance listening to BS merchants causes.
It seriously worrying that competition is now in the hands of supermarkets though, even if they're the only groups large enough to force carriers to the table.
It seems their analyst somehow completely forgot Apple are the ones late to this market. Admittedly a market so unappealing to buyers (Samsung & Sony cant even give them away) Apple might just kickstart it but it's not theirs yet and the underlying sentiment that others will be stealing Apples market is misplaced.
That 'simple' ui is most of what puts me off ios, simple to the point I don't find it 'pleasant'. Win8 is similarly afflicted (along with some misguided android skins).
... And the quality of the camera will be the major decider on my next phone along with its gaming credentials because that's about all I've used my smartphone for!
"Presumably they make a profit out of that price"
No and with no mass production yet to lower costs and all current 'sales' being promotional they may be making a loss on the few devices shipped so far.
They're trying to build Apple style frothing fanbois attention while they wait for component costs to drop, hoping none notice the value for money eroding away as the phone ages. Obsolete before launch still seems the most likely outcome.
Apple could get away with this sort of manipulation because they ship on time and ship at prices that always make them a hefty profit.
There's nothing new about multiple user touch either, games on phones/tablets have been doing it all along, either tracking fingers independently or in some cases tracking 2 users sharing a screen with independent controls.
What's new is bothering to apply that to a work UI. As so often, where gaming leads, the workplace follows.