Posts by Updraft102

Free Windows 10 upgrade: Time is running out – should you do it?

Re: Calculator issues?

It's also not prettier. It's the ugliest calculator app/program I have ever seen on any platform. Look up Panecalc on Android and compare the two...

Re: Windows As A Service - What Cost

I think the shift in Microsoft's Windows sales model was less about the loss of PC sales and more about them saying "Never again."

In the good old days, people upgraded Windows when they were told to. Windows 95 was a buggy mess that crashed if you looked at it funny; three years later, the code had been worked into a semi-stable state. Microsoft then sold the debugged code as a completely separate product, and people just TOOK IT. What an idea! Charge them for the first version, but make it so buggy it drives them to distraction, and then a few years later, call the fixed product something new and sell it to them again!

That set in motion the MS cycle of rapid release of new Windows versions that all had to be purchased again. In the home user/small business space, there were 98 SE, Windows ME, and then XP after 98 and 95. Vista stalled in development and took longer than expected, and when it finally arrived, people had learned to say no. While in every pre-XP version they'd been anxiously buying every new Windows version to come down the pike in the hope of getting something that would keep running, they now had that in XP, and none of the Vista bells and whistles overcame its negatives to the happy XP customers.

One time is a fluke, though. MS again pulled a 98 and released a bugfixed version of the previous Windows as a new product with 7, which was successful. Win 8 was meant to follow in that model, only now with an emphasis on mobile stuff to try to get their fledgling Windows Store some apps to sell, but it too was rejected by the desktop market.

Twice is a pattern. The users' refusal to migrate to 8 in large numbers ruined Microsoft's plan to stock the app store by using sales of apps to desktop users as a carrot. That would only work if the number of Win 8 users was large, probably in excess of Windows 7 users, and it never got there.

'Never again," they must have said. "When given a choice, Windows users have developed an annoying habit of rejecting versions of Windows that serve our corporate agenda instead of their own," said the Microsoft suit. "We cannot allow the end user to stand in the way of our plans just because our products don't meet their needs," he said with a sneer as he raised both of his hands to make air-quotes.

So now we have Windows as a Service, where all changes that would previously have been held for the next Windows version will be pushed out to users whenever it's ready Microsoft damned well pleases, and there will be no rejecting it: the updates are mandatory, and they're not available as a la carte options anymore, but are instead single packages that contain all of the updates, big and small, security and otherwise, since the last update-- you can't get the security ones without whatever else they decide to put in there, and if you do manage to block a particularly bad one against MS' wishes, you can't get any more bug fixes or security updates until you give in and take it all.

We're getting to see first hand how committed to the "use the PC users as a carrot for Windows Mobile app devs" strategy Microsoft really is. Even though it had been thoroughly repudiated by the market, it was too important to MS to give up-- so much so that they were willing to try again and resort to extraordinary measures to get people over that ONE last hump and into the enwrapping arms of Windows 10, the last time they would ever need to be persuaded to do anything. After that, it's about where Microsoft wants you to go today, and the day after, and the day after; you won't even be asked, because your concerns no longer matter. At all.

Re: Mint it is

Many of us in the US regard the US government as a hostile foreign power too.

Re: Cue people complaining

So why didn't you do it that last time? Did you think people who downvoted you once were going to upvote you for restating the same thing, or did downvotes stop being important to you in the time between those posts?

FWIW, the downvotes were your dose of truth.

Re: yes i saw the icon, but still

It's called a metaphor. It's a commonly used device in English where a word or phrase is used in a context in which it's not literally true, but where the analogy is meant to convey meaning. Metaphors often exaggerate the negativity of a given situation to make a point. For example,

"The Sports Team A absolutely KILLED Sports Team B in the big game last night. They just MURDERED them."

"Your just a grammer NAZI."

"Did you see that idiot cut me off? People like that should just be SHOT."

And, of course, the example to which you responded.

Re: Why has there never been a reasonably priced upgrade path from Home to Pro?

Windows 7 came with an option called "Windows Any Time Upgrade" that would allow you to upgrade from Home Premium to Pro or Ultimate. I can't say if it was reasonably priced, as when I tried to do it, it told me MS was no longer providing those for Windows 7, and I should buy Windows 8, even though I am pretty sure it was before of the Win 7 main support window.

Re: am i the only one resisting this

"If DX12 is the only real advantage of 10 over its predecessors than for any none gamer there is no real reason to upgrade. Gamers are about the only group that could possibly benefit from using it."

And even then, only the ones using AMD GPUs, which amount to about one in four Steam users (though 17% use Intel graphics, and I've never seen a DX12 test on those). For the majority who use Nvidia, DX12 at best is on par with DX11, and at worst DX12 causes a slight performance penalty. It's been true across all of the Nvidia architectures that support DX12 to date.

I know that some people will say that it will take some time for the game devs to optimize the code for DX12 fully, and that could be accurate (at least conceptually), but even with gamers being well ahead of the curve in Win 10 adoption, they're still under half of the market share as reported by Steam, so game design will still be tied to the least common denominator. Devs won't want to go so deep into DX12 that the more radical changes in the code make DX11 run poorly. They don't want to lose half their customers over poor performance that is a result of over-optimizing for DX12.

It also seems like a possibility that the "closer to the hardware" goal of DX12 will mean that getting to a level of optimization much beyond what we have with current DX12 games will require increasingly divergent code paths for AMD and Nvidia, or even by each architecture on both sides. Allowing more optimization to be done by the driver, as with DX11, allows greater abstraction of the hardware, which frees the game developer from having to worry about such nitty-gritty stuff and undesirable things like different code paths. There's no free lunch; you can't just slap DX12 on a game like putting a bumper sticker on a car and expect it to go faster. If the optimization is not being done by the driver, it has to be done by someone else, like the game developer. While a game can certainly be hand-tuned to be faster than one that is automatically optimized, that is labor intensive, and it has to be done for each GPU architecture the game is to be run on, and redone each time there is a significant game update.

Microsoft tweaks TCP stack in Windows Server and Windows 10

Re: Wow, a lot of whining here

Certainly we should be suspicious of Google and Facebook. The latter is easily avoided; I have the entire facebook.com site blacklisted in my adblocker, so done and done.

Google can be avoided the same way, but unlike Facebook, they offer some services I find useful, so a combination of Firefox addons thwart the scripts and tracking cookies that give Google its spying power. Combined with dynamic IP addresses that change at least once a day, and that I don't disclose any personal information online if I can avoid it, pretty much takes care of the Google threat on my PC. They can get short strings of data, but with no cookies or IP address to connect them back to any other short strings, it's not useful to them.

I have an Android tablet, but I know it's Google, so there is nothing sensitive on it. It's a toy, not a serious machine like my PC, and it has fallen into disuse. I don't have a smart phone and I doubt that will change.

Microsoft is different. I've been using Windows and MS-DOS for 26 years; all my personal stuff is on my PC. The things I would never disclose on a Google site or on my Android tablet are all right here. So when MS clumsily decides to try what Google does very efficiently, they still have a much greater chance of compromising my private data than Google does. And if they are clumsy and incompetent in their spying, it doesn't mean they won't get anything-- it could also mean they could end up inadvertently grabbing personal info they promised to anonymize, and that they might leave that data unprotected and vulnerable to black hats.

The OS maker has to be held to a higher standard. It must unambiguously serve only the needs of the user; anything else is a breach of the trust a user places on the OS. Other versions of Windows have dabbled around the edges of breaching the trust, like the Win 10 spying that was backported to WIn 7 and 8, but they've always been avoidable (don't install the updates) and removable (uninstall the updates).

That's not possible with Win 10, through normal means at least, and you never know when the next unavoidable update will change the rules again and bypass any hacks you had in place to block Windows 10 from doing what its meant to do. The entire forced update system was put in place to benefit MS, the spying is to benefit MS, the ads are to benefit MS, the focus on apps on the desktop and the Windows store is to benefit MS, the vendor lockin and tie-in to other MS products (like Cortana only using Bing) is to benefit MS, and there are lots of other examples too numerous to list.

An OS that cannot be trusted should not be trusted.

Re: Wow, a lot of whining here

"I'm certainly no fan of Microsoft, but if these had been listed as coming in the next version of Linux, everyone would be cheering them on."

Context is everything.

Microsoft has been under fire for abusing their customers with adware that in one case masqueraded as a security increase like a Trojan horse, advertising a so-called operating system that infects your system like a worm (try and stop it!) and phones home like spyware, soft-bricking many people's PCs in the process. While it's certainly good to make improvements to underhood things like the TCP/IP stack, it kind of reminds me of rearranging deck chairs on the deck of the Titanic as it sinks-- of all of the complaints people have been making against Microsoft lately, the quality of the TCP/IP stack isn't high on the list. It's like a press release that is meant to convey the idea that "despite the complaints, it's business as usual here at Microsoft. Look, we're working on networking stacks here; we're not even worried!"

Which, of course, means they're worried. Still, they keep going, full speed ahead, in the same direction...

Linux is far from perfect, but it hasn't earned the sort of cynicism Microsoft has. Bashing Microsoft is more than just a hobby-- it's just good sense to wonder what Microsoft's angle is when they claim to be "improving" something.

Re: They could

Linux is a kernel. Kernels do not have progress bars!

Desktop environments do, though, and unlike Windows, you can choose from many different desktop environments that all work with the Linux kernel; Unity, Gnome, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate being among the better known ones. They each have their own way of handling file copies, and if you don't like it, you can choose another-- there's no such thing as the one "stupid" way Linux does it.

Re: Not holding my breath

"Well, you told it to copy them all at the same time...."

No, you told it to copy them all; nothing suggests they have to be done concurrently. If you tell your favorite music-playing device to play ten songs, do you expect them all to be played at the same time? Just because Windows has always done it this way and you've come to accept that as normal does not mean that that's what you told it to do.

If there's a better way of doing this than all at the same time, I'd prefer that the OS be clever enough to do it that way. That's one of the things I noticed about Linux Mint that pleasantly surprised me coming from Windows-- Nemo (the file manager) queues the second copy operation and appends the dialog to the first one, clearly indicating that it is queued for copy, where you can then click the "go" button to copy concurrently, or click the stop button on either operation to cancel.

It's so simple-- anyone capable of understanding a file copy progress meter in the first place can grasp the concept of the second copy operation waiting for the first one to be completed (especially when the dialog tells you exactly that), so the idea that everything has to be dumbed down for the beginner doesn't really work.

It's Microsoft. They have no knowledge of a word 'opted'.

Re: Particularly on very high bandwidth / low latency connections like say 40 Gbit

I look forward to the time that I can experience 20 megabit...

One in five consumers upgraded to Win10 for free instead of buying a PC

Re: Having just bought a new laptop...

You did something right raising that one.

Browsing the web on a tablet or a phone pales in comparison to doing it on a PC. I have a small Android tablet, and it's gathering dust most of the time; my PC is vastly superior for browsing, and I got to the point that I could hardly tolerate trying it on the tiny 7" screen anymore (still bigger than a phone).

Sure, there are larger tablets, but they still end up getting the same dumbed-down, overly simplistic "mobile" web pages as their smaller versions; if you set the browser to request the full desktop version, it bogs down terribly and is painfully slow, and using a big fat finger on a user interface designed for the precise and quick mouse is a recipe for frustration.

The PC, by comparison to that mess, is not a burden. It's a breath of fresh air! Trying to get anything done on a hopelessly gimped, underpowered phone is what's klunky. If that's all you need, by all means, go have at it; if you're happy only scuffing the surface of the great depth that's available on the web, then a tool that can't do any more (though it probably costs the same and has only a fraction of the service life as compared to the real deal) may be all you need. You may also have transportation needs that can adequately be met by a motor scooter, but that doesn't mean that larger, more capable vehicles are obsolete in their current form.

Empty your free 30GB OneDrive space today – before Microsoft deletes your files for you

Re: NAS and a hard drive

Unfortunately for some of us, though, it would take about two months at full utilization of my upstream bandwidth to get one backup done-- and by the time it finished, it would be two months out of date.

Windows 10 a failure by Microsoft's own metric – it won't hit one billion devices by mid-2018

Re: 1 Billion?

And the irony of buying a PC with Windows installed just so you can wipe it and put Linux on it (the Windows tax, as it is called) is that the so-called tax may actually be a subsidy.

I think it was Dell that had an option for Linux preinstalled on one of its laptops instead of Windows, yet the computer with the free OS cost more than the MS one! People complained, of course, but it was no mistake: it turns out that the crapware that is installed alongside Windows on nearly every new PC subsidizes the cost of the PC and more than makes up for the cost of Windows itself. A lot of people uninstall that stuff, but at least by then it has done its job and made the user think of whether they want to buy this product or not (usually not, but that's all part of the game).

When you're just buying it with the intent to wipe it from the beginning, to the point that you see the hard drive as being (for all intents and purposes) blank, that crapware never had a chance. There was never any chance you were going to pay for Norton Internet Security for Windows on your Linux install!

Re: "run MS Office"

Or put Windows 8 on it and do the various modifications to make it look and work like Windows 7... Classic Shell, that kind of thing. I've never used Win 8 personally, but some of the other "never 10" guys I talk to on other sites (who also like Windows 7) say that 8 modified is as good or better than 7. 8.1 is good till 2023!

It might also be a good time to start exploring Linux. While I will offer no prediction of any year really being the year of the Linux desktop (it's been called a million times and never happened), Linux has some really good distros now, like Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon, and they keep getting better while Windows keeps getting worse.

This growing disgust with MS has gotten a lot of previously happy Windows customers interested in Linux, and I have been one of the flood of newbies on the Linux forums lately. I am really impressed with Mint; I am using it now, and while I do have my Windows 7 available in dual boot form, I seldom boot it anymore, and I've only been using Linux for a couple of weeks in earnest. I had dabbled with Kubuntu and Mint KDE on a "test" PC before, but I thought to really get to know Linux1, I had to put it on my main PC, and it was the right move.

WINE may also be an option; I have heard some versions of Office run well in it.

Re: Pulling dick moves has historically worked really well for Apple.

I can think of three right offhand-- if I used Apple devices, I am sure I'd have more. Nothing that can compete with Microsoft's, though; they really have been shooting for the stars with dickmovery.

Here's the ones that I, as a non-Apple user, know of offhand:

Putting DRM chips in their charging cables to ensure that people had to buy their overpriced replacement items.

Putting batteries with very short service lives into the original iPods intentionally, to hasten planned obsolescence.

Pushing out an update that bricks your iDevice if it had been repaired with a non-Apple touchscreen.

There are more, like iMacs that have the touchscreen and the LCD fused into one piece so they have to be replaced together at additional cost, gluing their batteries to the aluminum case innards so that changing a dead battery was major surgery, things like that, but they're just extensions of what they already did before to new devices, so it feels like cheating to get to six if I list them individually.

Re: "and increasing customer delight with Windows."

"Delight." I do not think that word means what they think it means. (Disdain? Disgust maybe?)

Mint is really excellent, isn't it? I've only had it installed for a few weeks now, but already I hardly boot Windows anymore. I found that my favorite game works really well under WINE (not perfect, but close enough that it might soon get there, and it's playable now even in imperfect form), and that was the one "MUST have Windows" thing for me I thought I had up front. I've been finding Linux versions for everything else pretty well... I've used Firefox and Thunderbird exclusively since their respective initial releases, so that much was super simple.

My Win 7 install is fully updated, though, aside from the telemetry updates and those that have any kind of reference to "the latest version of Windows." Just keep it on manual installation ("Notify me of updates that are available, but let me decide whether to download and install them," or whatever the actual text is), keep the list of the bad updates handy & keep hiding the bad ones when they pop back up, and read the description text very carefully before allowing any non-critical update to be installed. And as always, keep backups of everything! Even if MS were to sneak a non-removable "security" update in that contained a Windows 10 trojan, you can always just restore from backup.

Re: M$ showed us their Poker hand...

The smart thing to do would have been to have only the positives in now and save all of the negative changes for after people are already dependent on 10, as you said-- and maybe, compared to what they have planned, they think this is what they did. What kind of diabolical plans can they have to make what they're doing now seem like sweetness and light to them?

It's not our fault we don't hire black people, says Facebook

Recruit fairly?

Facebook is a business. It's not a job program. If they get enough qualified applicants coming through the door from the recruiting methods they're using now, then there's no reason to change those methods.

Farewell to Microsoft's Sun Tzu: Thanks for all the cheese, Kevin Turner

Re: 2007 was the turning point

When it became less "Where do you want to go today" and more "where do we want you to go today?"

AMD promises code fix for power-hungry Radeon RX 480 GPU

Re: AMD RX 480 is a defective product! Period.

Of course software can fix it. The power limits for all of the internal supply rails inside the card are controlled by firmware and the drivers on existing cards; there's no reason to think the 480 is any different.

One of my PCs has a Nvidia Kepler GPU, and it resisted my attempts to overclock it using tools like MSI Afterburner. I increased the overall TDP limit with Afterburner, but it was still scaling back its boost clock under heavy loads, with the power-limit (TDP) bit set.

Once I edited the card's firmware in Kepler BIOS editor or whatever it was called, I could see that I could adjust the power limits for each of the card's three power sources (each its own internal power rail)-- the PCIE slot, the 6-pin power connector, and the other 6-pin power connector.

By tweaking the individual power limits that controlled the draw from the 6-pin connectors and increasing the range of the overall TDP target (the max it can be set to in Afterburner) from 110% to 120%, I was then able to maintain about one step higher in boost clock under heavy loads than I had ever seen before under any amount of load (and never under heavy load; it would always throttle back about 2 steps from its maximum when under heavy load), and by making a slight tweak to the boost clock in Afterburner, I got it to go one more step up in boost clock under load, for a total of some 4 steps under heavy load.

All of that was done by altering the BIOS.

One thing I could not do is increase the voltage to allow even higher overclocks. The peak overvoltage on my card was all of 10mv-- trivially tiny, and because it was set in the driver, there was no way to use the BIOS tweaker to raise the limit. Not effectively, anyway; the BIOS has its own internal limit, but no matter what was done with it, the driver would prevent the overvoltage from exceeding 10mv.

BIOS would seem to be the proper place for AMD to fix the 480, but there is really no way for me to know whether it uses a system like my Kepler card or something quite different. Anything the BIOS can do can also be done by the driver, and the enforcement of power limits most certainly is done in BIOS in some (perhaps all) modern GPUs.

Now, it is possible that there is some engineering defect in the power control hardware on the card, causing it to disregard power limitations set by the driver or firmware, but that has not been established. Given that some media outlets have reported performance increases by undervolting the 480, it is quite possible that this is nothing more than a driver or firmware defect, and that the card will emerge from all of this as a solid product.

Or it could fall flat on its face.

We won't know until we see what happens. I'm inclined to believe it's the former; this just has the feel of a firmware bug, and while the driver fix could be a useful Band-Aid to prevent any more motherboards from burning up, it will probably take a firmware revision to fix it permanently. I don't really know, though; it's possible that all of this is functionality built into the driver too.

Re: Compare to the GeForce GTX 970

So for those of us who will never go to Windows 10, Nvidia may still be the better bet, as DX12 and DX11 are close to equal with Nvidia, at least so far (it's very early in DX12's life cycle; things could change).

Microsoft's cringey 'Hey bae <3' recruiter email translated by El Reg

Re: Poor Microsoft

"What would you expect them to do?

Actually offer a fun work environment with great benefits and a chance to work on great projects that people actually want?"

They're looking to hire people, not change their entire product lineup!

Re: Ah...

Well, that would at least rectify the part where MS said," The email was poorly worded and not in keeping with our values as a company."

Microsoft's Windows 10 nagware goes FULL SCREEN in final push

Someone who enthusiastically believes in something is not a 'shill.' A shill is someone that is paid or otherwise compensated for pretending to be one of the people who enthusiastically believe in something. Perhaps you're confused because there are no people in these discussions who really do enthusiastically believe in Windows 10, so everyone who claims to be actually IS a shill.

Second, Windows 7 will be updated until 2020, and 8 will be until 2023, regardless of whether it is an enterprise edition or not. If Microsoft fails in that obligation, they're setting themselves up for lawsuits for breach of contract, not to mention demonstrating once again that one should not trust Microsoft.

Finally, things that can be counted don't come in amounts. They come in numbers. On a beach, you'd find a certain amount of sand, and a certain number of seashells. Ok?

I would be more likely to pay if I could have nearly all of the new "features" of Windows 10 (which were so perfectly described by Bombastic Bob in the first few posts in this discussion) removed rather than having new ones added. The only Win 10 feature I can think of offhand that I would want to keep would be DirectX 12; otherwise, a clone of Win 7 would be perfect.

Given the relative popularity of both of them, that could be a good angle for them. Get everyone thinking that the horror known as Windows 10 is their only choice, and then let them know that they can have their much-appreciated Windows 7 experience... for only a few dollars/pounds more. They could make money by riding the wave of opposition to their own "flagship" product.

At one point, I would have considered paying more to avoid all of the new stuff they want to stick in there, though a subscription model would have always been a bit of a stretch. It's a little late now, as I have already seen how little I need MS (did I mention that the one game I play regularly works awesomely well in WINE? No? Well, the one game I play regularly works awesomely in WINE. Now I have).

There's a saying in marketing... something like not giving your customers the opportunity to discover they like someone else's product even more than yours. Why should I stick with a paid product from a vendor who wants me to be locked into their product line when there is a free option that works? It may not be as polished as Windows, but it's not engineered to serve someone else's agenda at my expense.

Re: @Dave32 - Windows XP

If you come under specific target because the hackers want *you,* XP will fall faster than 7, certainly, but I don't doubt for a moment that 7, 10, or even Linux would fall under such circumstances either-- it would just take longer.

If you mean garden-variety malware (ransomware, etc) that spreads by the usual automated means, I think that XP is probably too small in market for anyone to really bother with specifically. Most of the stuff we're seeing now uses social-engineering stuff to get people to run it on 7, 8, or 10, not malware that relies on XP-specific flaws to work. Any self-propagating malware that relies on Win XP flaws is not going to go far; as soon as it reaches one of the 90+% of the desktop market that is not susceptible, it stops dead.

I would say that if you are using a non-IE, up to date browser without Flash or Java enabled, in a user-level XP account, you're probably not as unsafe as a lot of people think (though it's not the choice I would make). People using XP know it's vulnerable, and they are more likely to be careful about what they do compared to typical users of Windows who end up with multiple layers of useless toolbars and other crap.

Re: Simplix

It does raise an eyebrow, but I don't exactly trust the US government either. There is a lot of good stuff that comes out of Russia too... they have a lot of really talented programmers over there (not that packaging MS updates is really coding).

Re: Wine to the rescue!

I don't know how MATE's any more traditional than Cinnamon. Might as well try them all on Live CD/DVD/USB and see; I prefer Cinnamon to MATE,

Re: Updates off - Rock on

It's not really boasting to say that one has migrated to Linux. It's very easy to do, and it's free-- what is the point of boasting about things that are easy?

Yeah, I am one of them. Been with MS since 1990 with MS-DOS and Windows 3.0, but 10 is the final straw. I started the migration to Linux (Mint Cinnamon) a couple of weeks ago. I still have 7 set as dual boot, so I can take my time migrating everything over the course of the next 3.5 years, but already I spend most of my time in Linux now. I'm using it now to post this message!

I was never one of the ones who said I would never upgrade from XP. No one was trying to force me to, so it simply never became an issue. I kept using XP without thinking of doing any different until XP no longer served my needs adequately-- I'd outgrown 4GB of RAM, so it was time for something 64-bit, and I decided to give Windows 7 a try.

This was only three or so years ago, though. Why would I give 7 up now? The paint's hardly dry on the installation as it is!

I don't know what I'll be running in a few years, but it won't be 10 if it bears more than a passing resemblance to 10 right now. Even if MS fixes all of the issues I have with 10, I doubt I will ever use it, as I've already seen how little I need MS.

I'll probably still have 7 on my machines in case I need it right up to the end of support date, and maybe beyond it. Using Linux as the general-purpose OS means that Windows 7's lack of security updates won't be as much of an issue, as the riskiest stuff (like browsing) will be done on Linux. For gaming purposes, I can have the Linux installation spoof the NIC's MAC ID, so there will be a separate Windows and Linux MAC on the same PC, so I can have my router restrict the Windows (original) MAC to only preapproved, trusted URLs.

Re: Games

"Plus what happens when DirectX 12 comes along, which is exclusive to Windows 10?"

Easy-- we reject it.

Those games that only use DX12 have excluded me from their market, but the rest can be set to use DX11-- and if you're using Nvidia hardware, as most gamers are, there's no benefit to using DX12 in any of the benchmarks to date.

Windows 10 adoption rate

The new Netmarketshare.com stats are out, and there are some interesting bits to point out.

First, OSX and Linux grew at a faster rate than Windows 10, despite Microsoft's tactics (or because of them). If things keep going at the current rate, OSX will pass Windows 10 in April of 2017. I know that's exceedingly unlikely, but it does show that the adoption rate of 10 is less than MS had hoped.

Second, Windows 7 has posted an increase in market share for the second straight month.

Linux letting go: 32-bit builds on the way out

Re: Bunch of idiots

"Linux is for those who want to avoid upgrade tax..."

Interesting then that many of us are just now moving to Linux to avoid the first-ever "free" upgrade version of Windows.

Re: Thinks Bubble

And on the AMD side, my 11 year old, single core, 1.6 GHz Turion laptop ran Win 10 x64 without any problems that were not attributable to its <1 GB of RAM. I only put 10 x64 on it as a test; I had no intention of leaving it (and certainly not paying for it once the no-activation grace period ran out); it was back to its non-internet duty as a call screener under Win XP soon enough.

It has been obsolete for a long time, but even it can run x64 if it needs to. Whether it's actually a good idea or not is another discussion... as it is incapable of recognizing enough RAM (max is 2GB according to the manufacturer) to warrant 64-bit addressing, it's still a natural match for 32-bit, which should be more efficient with its limited RAM, all else being equal.

As others have mentioned, that's the nice thing about open source. When a developer of proprietary software decides to call it quits, that's it. With open source, there are others who can take it up, and with Linux specifically, there are lots of other distros that support 32-bit and will likely continue to do so.

Visiting America? US border agents want your Twitter, Facebook URLs

Re: When can us Yanks. . .

When can us vote for anything?

I feel much safer knowing this.

We all know those terrorists are using social media to promote their cause and communicate with one another. Now those terrorists are going to be identified and caught before they can do anything. It's foolproof!

I mean, It's not like they could come here and *not* give the agents the names of the terrorist Twitter accounts they've used, right? We could just ask them if they are coming here to blow things up or shoot a bunch of people, which seemed like the perfect solution for a while, but eventually someone realized that the terrorists could lie about it. But the thing about asking about social media-- it's genius, because no terrorists are going to think to lie about THAT. They wouldn't begin to have the wherewithal to make a dummy Twitter or Facebook account just to give to the government goons.

/eyeroll

It's all security theater... of the absurd.

Re: I'll have whatever you're smoking.

When Bush was in office, people criticized the PATRIOT Act (rightfully) because of what the government *could* do. Under Obama, it's what the government *is* doing.

If the PATRIOT Act is bad (and it is), it's bad no matter whom is using it to spy on... well, everyone, American or otherwise.

'I urge everyone to fight back' – woman wins $10k from Microsoft over Windows 10 misery

Re: Who's next?

Cnet's download section has been known to wrap the programs it hosts with a layer of adware that installs PUPs (potentially unwanted programs) if you're not careful enough to avoid the dark patterns (attempts to trick you into saying YES when you mean NO).

If that sounds to you like someone else, someone Redmondy, you're not alone.

"And presumably, the MS techies could have done this. Were they under instructions not to let any user escape the clutches of W10?"

Probably.

MS has shown that in its quest to pump up the number of Windows 10 users out there, there is nothing more important. It's willing to risk rendering their own paying customers' machines unbootable if there is even a chance that the upgrade could succeed and add one to the tally. If there were a 9 in 10 chance that a PC would "die on the table," as one MS employee told is sometimes inevitable in these kinds of situations, but only a 1 in 10 chance that the upgrade would succeed, MS absolutely would go for it.

The customer, of course, may have other opinions about what is an acceptable risk, but MS made sure to keep them uninformed of the risks. Was there anything anywhere in the GWX adware or in the Windows Update for Windows 10 that informed customers that their PC "dying on the table" was a distinct possibility, and that they had better have a full backup before proceeding?

We've already seen the GWX adware give the green light on upgrades that were in no way advisable. When MS is telling non-tech people that they should perform this upgrade, they have a duty to inform them of the risks and precautions that should be taken. Those of us that know Windows realize that in-place upgrades are troublesome, and that clean installations are always preferable, and that nothing like this should ever be undertaken without having a backup on hand.

Regular people don't get that. When they see a MS program telling them it's a good idea and that it's fully reversible and your files will all be where you left them, they take that as gospel, and MS knows this.

Of course, that's just for the people who (lacking informed consent) allowed their PC to be upgraded intentionally. Of course there cannot be informed consent when the person is tricked into permitting the upgrade, or if that upgrade just happens!

With all of this, MS has shown that the only thing that matters is the number of devices with Windows 10 installed. They don't need to work well, and they don't need happy owners. MS deserves to see this lawsuit repeated thousands of times.

Re: Now the precedent has been set ...

I'd be more interested in giving MS a black eye. That would be more than good enough for me!

Dev boss: What will Microsoft do with Windows 10 Mobile? Surprise – it's for work!

"The truth is that Windows 10 Mobile is in an awkward spot, the victim of the company's frequently changing mobile strategy as well as competition from Android and iOS. Without it, the UWP concept hardly makes sense; yet it is hard to see anything other than a small niche for the operating system."

So Microsoft will have squandered any goodwill they'd accumulated, spread adware by means of the formerly trusted Windows Update system, pushed uncommanded multi-gigabyte downloads and started uncommanded upgrades, made their "last version of Windows" into a disjointed half-and-half mess, rendered many customers' PCs unbootable, spawned the creation of programs with names like "Never 10", driven a significant number of customers to Linux or OSX...

All for nought?

Good job, MS; this should be amusing to watch.

A month or two ago, I would have said that now that the push for an app store for Windows mobile phones has demonstrably failed, this whole UWP business and the ill-conceived half-phone, half-desktop UI can finally be put to rest, and Windows 10 can be morphed into a decent desktop OS. They may have failed to capture the mobile market, but they still have desktops, and if they act quick, they can stop the self-inflicted bleeding.

As I am one of the ones MS has frustrated to the point that I've decided to leave the platform, though, I really don't care what they do anymore. I've already discovered how little I need MS, and that genie's not going back into the bottle.

Vanishing EMC golden handcuffs could cause brain drain

Can't you at least find a stock photo that shows real handcuffs?

Microsoft bans common passwords that appear in breach lists

Re: @codysydney: Because, Dear Commentard.

It's basically impossible to implement the best practices with passwords without electronic assistance. We're supposed to use long passwords that don't spell anything, that are not in repeatable patterns like "qwerty," that contain upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols, and are unique per site. No one short of a savant could possibly remember hundreds of strings of gobbledygook and also which sites with which each is matched.

Remembering one strong master password is a lot easier.

I use a password generator to automatically create strong passwords , which are then remembered by Firefox's password manager when I log in. If I change the password, the manager asks if I wish to update the login in the store, so changes are relatively painless. It's encrypted on the disk, so the password store is as secure as the master password. It's not perfect, but there's really no better way that I can think of. It's better than using an easily-guessed password or the same one on every site, or keeping it written down on a post-it or in plain-text in a file somewhere.

Dad of student slain in Paris terror massacre sues Google, Twitter, Facebook for their 'material support' of ISIS

France isn't known for having a "bombs first" foreign policy, and it was France that was the target of the attack in question.

The terrorists are absolutely clear about why they want to kill us. It's not a secret; they've told us many times why they do it. We're infidels, they don't like the way we live, and we don't follow Sharia law. They particularly hate gays, as homosexuality is against Sharia. The attack on a gay bar/club doesn't have any connection to US foreign policy. Neither does the attack on Charlie Hebdo... what brought that on was the magazine's illustration of Mohammed, which is against Sharia law.

See the pattern here?

Unless it is to adopt Sharia law and become a Muslim theocracy (caliphate), it's doubtful that any policy change is going to convince the terrorists to stand down. This is not speculation; it's from their own words.

Windows 10 market share jumps two per cent

If you're talking about phone operating systems, sure.

On a desktop, I don't run apps. I have no use for an app store, or an app anything.

Probably one of the PR companies that MS hired. Plausible deniability, you know.

We're the customers. We're supposed to be the ones calling the shots. Customers don't hold MS back-- it's Microsoft's job to give us what we want. By definition, we can't hold them back. Your arrogant attitude fits right in at Microsoft!

There's nothing modern about Windows 10. The UI is the worst MS has ever offered; I'd rather use the Windows 3.0 UI than the "I'm a phone... no, wait, I'm a PC" monstrosity of 10. If that's what you're calling "modern," I think it's fair to say the market has spoken-- we don't want it.

If I have to agree to a EULA that gives MS everything but the kitchen sink to be modern, I want no part of it. If I have to agree to let MS do whatever they want with my PC's operating system, without exception, in advance, and in perpetuity, in order to be modern, then you know what you can do with that.

Universal things suck. Go to the auto parts store and get a universal part... it's never going to work as well, fit as well, or be as easy to install as a custom fit part. It's always like that-- something designed specifically for the task at hand is going to outperform something that is a jack of all trades. Windows 10, with its "universal" Windows platform, is a shining example.

Windows 8 was a disaster on the desktop, but on tablets and phones, it was nearly universally praised. In an attempt to placate the desktop users that shunned 8, MS made 10 more desktop-friendly. Now the consensus is that Windows 10 pales in comparison to Windows 8 on mobiles; a major step backwards.

Does this mean that at least MS has finally made an OS as good on the desktop as Windows 7? Not even close. Windows 10 is still too mobile-oriented when used on the PC... the unavoidable "app" bits of the UI have the massive amounts of wasted screen space, the comically oversized controls, and the menus that require excessive amounts of drilling down that are necessary evils on a mobile device, but are completely unnecessary on a PC with a real mouse and decent sized display.

Windows 10 is a universal product that is supposed to run on anything, and apparently it does... poorly. It has the dubious distinction of being equally crappy and inferior to previous versions of Windows on both mobile and desktop. Congratulations, MS; you've created a masterpiece of suck.