Posts by moxberg 35 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Jul 2015
Vista may buy you some time, but I can foresee Microsoft scraping the barrel before support ends in 2017. They may not touch XP because of the high number of illegitimate copies, but I'm not sure about that. One last "gratuitous" security fix might sneak in GWX on those as well.
Plan B has become Plan A now for many. Patting my not-really-lacking-anything box as we speak.
... for someone to write the obituary for Windows as we knew it, or, while on the job, for Windows altogether.
I can't say exactly what happened to Microsoft development. Seeing Win10 (functionality-wise) only _taking away_ from what's been there before (in 8.1, 8, 7 and even further back), as opposed to _adding_ new things (which can be a rough ride), I have a strong suspicion there's just nobody knowlegeable left after the lay-offs and restructuring.
Keeping, not to speak of redacting, change logs appears to be the least of their problems.
Open sourcing does not add or subtract security. Changes to code do.
What has to be assessed is the probability of closed source vs. open source getting patched. The likelihood of back doors being sneaked in. The odds of "phone home galore" aka Win10 being accepted into open source projects. The remoteness of, say, Linus Torvalds allowing downloaded font rendering code into kernel space vs. the reality of Microsoft clinging to that ludicrous design flaw.
Calculating the percentages is left as an exercise to the reader.
Microsoft's biggest mistake was to put their developers on Win10 0:00am on the 29th of July. Now all they can do is spew out dud updates, which in turn makes customers go back to their previous Windows version or jump ship altogether. If MS devs. were allowed to revert, word would certainly spread and that'd be that for 10. Nailed it?
At the company I worked for before we devoted the side wall of an office cabinet to screenshots of bizarre error messages. The rules called for them to be genuine, as it's too easy to program a fake one. Unavoidably, some of them were augmented with more or less funny comments over time, like:
"Word cannot open a Word document", drawing the comment "Try OpenOffice".
The ones I personally enjoy most aren't those simply telling you that something went wrong, but those caring for you as only a mother would and then double-fail (excuse me for translating them back to English, the original English ones may be worded differently):
"The network connection has failed. Do you want Windows to look for a solution online?"
My all time favourite, though : "Unknown error on unknown device. Please contact unknown supplier for a solution."
Discovered this diet drink the other day and switched over to it without hassle. Digestion hasn't changed much over a couple of days, so I recommended it to a friend who had no problems with it either. Didn't try strawberry cause I don't like strawberry and gave cassis a miss after it gave me a blue tongue that stayed.
Didn't lose any weight though, just as with the previous diet.
Preparation is a lot messier, taste isn't any better, but it goes down well so I'm relieved. Would have stayed on the old diet, but the first pack was free in exchange for all of my old powder. That offer only lasts a year, so I was in a bit of a rush. I'm confident it will grow on me.
There's probably a lot more unadvertised features in it that haven't made it to light yet, but the one you discovered is certainly a gem. Got blank icons in the menu? Don't fear, the next automatic reboot is near and will fix it. If only the other OS manufacturers were so meticulous with the tiny details.
Removing spaghetti code has a downside: it breaks legacy applications, which is the reason it was put in in the first place. MS is where it always was, between a rock and a hard place. Can't make a fresh start because there's nothing to replace "legacy", can't just refine what's already there, because every three years the have to sell a "new" edition.
The question of "Just how is Microsoft doing?", left to the acolytes, surely has only one possible answer. This may as well be a "BeOS thread", users of that OS anxiously discussing if and how it may affect them. With 85% market share and a world economy depending on the installed base, even the sturdiest MS hater might be granted the right to be worried about MS future and discuss that.
Now back to the attic and read a book, for a change.
You're welcome!
Re. the mouse thing: yes it's true. Happened to me the other day at the "kid's gaming computer". They tend to unplug the mouse and use it for their MacBook. I wanted to have a quick look for updates, so I started the machine and went for some other business. Coming back, I wanted to log in, but noticed the mouse wasn't attached. Rather than crawling around on the floor, I quickly plugged it into one of the front USBs.
Now, you know, Windows installs its drivers for every USB port separately, and the particular one had apparently never seen a mouse. So Windows did what it always does when it installs a driver: create a restore point. This way they made me wait a couple of minutes before I could continue.
A rare use case, sure, but funny to compare with e.g. attaching a USB printer to Linux for the first time. 30 secs tops and you're asked if you want to print a test page ... Attaching a mouse is instant.
Who of us had a go with a Pi and hasn't developed a feeling of emptiness over the course, eventually putting that useless gadget aside? I mean, honestly, what good can come from a computer that isn't equipped with a virus scanner, has nothing to offer in the defragmentation camp and, lowest of all lows, doesn't even automatically create a restore point when a mouse is attached?
Clearly something had to be done and, praise the Lord, Microsoft went in at full throttle.
Same here. I remember well when a student brought the first set of Windows diskettes to the university institute I was working at. God, what a hard laugh we had, quickly returning to our Motif terminals, CP/M, Unix and (few) DOS machines. In hindsight, every single chuckle cost us arms, legs and even more vital parts over the years. There wasn't the faintest feeling of having to nip it in the buds, stillborn as it looked. But the student got it for free, and there was no copy protection (yet). Clever.
2015. Total lock-in. IT (staff) supporting Linux as best as they can (engineering, you know, needs to get things done). Virtual machine (one fully paid license taken) to be able to make PHONE CALLS, as IT (head) was talked/bribed into Lync and Windows-only-driver sets. Hmmrrrghhhh§$%"&
I looked up the cause for the infamous XP SP3 reboot loop at https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/windows/en-US/40a0eecb-bc00-4746-8f5b-610891d7a73b/xp-sp3-and-continuos-reboots-on-amd-based-systems?forum=itproxpsp. It's an interesting read, a classical example of why Windows is flaky, also underlining their third party software dependence.
[Spoiler alert] Don't read the comments over there until you're through with my "explanation" ...
Windows XP SP2 & SP3 include a driver (intelppm.sys) which will blue-screen the machine early in the boot process when run on an AMD processor. Neither does Windows check the system type (Intel/AMD) before calling this driver, nor does the driver refuse to run on an AMD system. Instead, the initial OEM install had to have set a registry entry correctly (which some OEMs didn't), that had no purpose for XP RTM and SP1. When machines entered a reboot loop with SP2, which evaluated this registry entry, Microsoft provided a fix.
Have a guess: was it a) checking the system type before calling intelppm.sys? b) fix intelppm.sys to check for itself (which merely requires reading a single CPU register)? c) adjust the registry entry?
OK, you all voted for c), and that's what MS opted for as well. Some time later, SP3 ran into the very same problem. What had happened _there_? Some OEMs, in between SP2 and SP3, shipped their own hotfixes, fiddling with that registry entry again. Some SP3 beta testers had problems with that, so for the final SP3 MS decided to "preserve" the registry entry from being fiddled with during its own installation (apparently, the known-to-be-dodgy OEM hotfixes were re-applied during the process). Now, when people went directly from SP1 to SP3, skipping SP2, the wrong setting from the initial install was "preserved" as well and hence SP3 went into a boot loop again.
I have neither palms nor faces enough to express my feelings here.
I finally found the time to put all the Statcounter numbers for desktops worldwide in an Excel, oops, LibreCalc sheet. There's a clear distinction between weekdays and weekends (e.g. XP dips heavily on weekends), so here's two sets one week apart respectively:
Wed 29/07 to Wed 05/08: Windows 86.08% -> 85.77%, OSX 8.01% -> 8.25%, "Other" 3.92% -> 3.90%, "Unknown" 1.99% -> 2.08%
Sun 02/08 to Sun 09/08: Windows 85.30% -> 85.23%, OSX 8.19% -> 8.06%, "Other" 4.09% -> 4.14%, "Unknown" 2.42% -> 2.57%
Clearly Win10 hasn't done anything to the Windows market share. At least a little "up" should have been expected, given that people had two weeks now to rush and BUY Win10 machines, right?
Linux (to be completely fair: including the odd BSD or Solaris used as a desktop) has to be in "Other" and "Unknown", the latter probably smaller distributions or even LFS. I wouldn't know of significant numbers of Amigas, Haikus and OS/2s around (no offense). I also very much doubt anybody sitting in front of a Win2003 server on a weekend surfing the internet or Win9X/Me/NT combined to exceed 0.5%, so one might well draw the conclusion that Linuxy OSs have about 5.5% desktop share on weekdays and about 6% on weekends.
It's all in the numbers. Wonder why nobody cares to read them properly (skew is another thing, but that can go either way, we just can't know).
Looking at Statcounter, Windows market share continues to shrink. All Win10 has managed so far is eating into 7 and 8, where it's free for consumers. That's like putting a "new formula" toothpaste on shelf besides the old one, yet still losing customers. Bad news, if news at all.
Microsoft's radical shift (no, not the touch obsession) roots in eleventh hour panic. They must have concluded Windows 10 would be the last time they could use their leverage effectively:
XP taught us very well business doesn't like change just for the sake of change. 8 was a disaster 8.1 didn't fix. As for 7 we're already committed to support it until 2020. 10 won't fly with businesses before then, while consumers turn, not away from Windows, but to devices it simply doesn't come with, in alarming numbers. While Windows has been "good enough" most of the time, it is nothing anybody actively chooses - neither businesses nor consumers, but for different reasons -, we just graze on there being no choice. Something has to be done before any alternative grows strong enough to make "good enough" not good enough anymore. Once our market share starts to drop, we're entering a death spiral. Any thoughts?
Enter development: We could fix all the bugs and polish Aero and reduce the number of mouse clicks needed for everything and a modern file system would be very appreciated and ...
WHO THE F..K ASKED FOR YOUR OPINION????? [yikes!]
Enter marketing: bet on ignorance with consumers, let them be the guinea pigs for 2020's business challenge: deploy the next Windows or something else? Make sure these five years allow for large scale testing _anything_ fancy we might come up with, but haven't yet: make updates mandatory, even for new features. Make sure people start using it _now_: free offer, always makes people crazy.
Enter accounting: We won't make any money, then, for five years. Look what Google does, can't we do the same? And make it a subscription some time later?
Enter Balmer's breed: Yeah, but we'll take it to extremes, not like those Mountain View wimps. Full screen desktop ads, 24/7 speech recognition surveillance, fingerprints and mughots, log every site visited, every button clicked, every keystroke and the kitchen sink. Oh, and tag every _user_, that's something Google can't do. Sell to the highest bidder. Make that free offer only to those who paid us their tax already. We're not the salvation army, right? Them darn hillbillies won't be able to tell the difference anyway, but if they ever find out, it'll be too late. Windows forever. I think we're gonna call it SecureBoot. If only to tell them stinkin' Linux retards that they're insecure. Muuhahaahaha!
[Black Books]
Nick: Bernard. This new system. It's very closely modelled on the old one isn't it?
Bernard: Well Nick I'd actually go further than that. I'd say it is more or less exactly... the same...
If Windows buckled, it'd be one OS less. Shrug.
Did you care as much when Microsoft killed off DRDOS with the nastiest of tricks and bribery? They eventually had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, but by then it was way to late for recovery - and MS had meticulously planned for this outcome) It was a far superior, less expensive, fully compatible alternative to flonking MS-DOS. That "cyber crime" set us back at least five years back then, and staying on the "major", yet third class OS, we're falling behind with every single day.
On another note, out of all conceivable choices, is WINDOWS the one you'd want to keep because it scares off the hackers and crackers of the world? see icon.
Whawhazat? Having to use a command line, let alone an elevated one (that's the one above the current one, right? Oops, no history. Or did you mean become administrator for whatever command you blindly copy/paste there from the internet when Windows needs a nappy change?), is the single most regurgitated no-go bigotry held up against Linux. Proudly so.
Many Linux users value the console for productive work, hence its refinement over the clunky excuse in your favourite operating system. It is in no way meant as a last resort to keep the beast going, one short of not booting at all, as in Windows. A "normal" user will never see it or feel the need to.
Of course not. I never came across a smarter TAB-completion than Windows'. They must have copied it from Amazon. It makes suggestions along the lines of "People who reckon this would've been a nice path also tried something totally unrelated". Why always follow the beaten track?
It would appear Linux Mint was made for you.
Install upgrades when YOU deem it worthwhile, enjoy a structured "start menu" + powerful search as a bonus, browse an "app shop" (free though), give Wine a spin on your most valued Windows applications and if that fails, put your old XP in a virtual machine. Let the rock solid base system take care of your hardware, while you browse the internet without anxiously avoiding that one false click. Let others scan their hard drive to shreds for viruses, reboot for the tiniest of patches and try to defragment their broken heart.
I could go on, but you get the drift. Download a live CD and see for yourself, invest 30 minutes that might open your eyes. You can safely install it alongside Windows if you want to give it a fair go, the live CD performance can (for technical reasons) be a bit underwhelming.
Every use case is different, I know, but for myself there has never been a useful application that came with Windows. 10 isn't in any way different. There is one glaring exception: XP's calculator, taken away in Vista (still downloadable though). Everything else I always replaced with better working third party tools, most of them even free.
I only ever touched Explorer (I think that's what it's called) when helping a colleague who didn't have Total Commander installed. That basically leaves the start menu (mostly gone now) and (admittedly) the Task Manager to keep the troops in line if necessary.
Windows has never been more than a glorified application starter that got worse on every iteration, chasing for files (English speaking users just see the tip of the iceberg there) being the most notable brake shoe. For my personal use, I long switched to Linux, and guess what, most of the replacement/productivity stuff is either natively available or runs smoothly in Wine, if not better. Might have to do with programming skills (read: shunning Visual Studio and .NET) on part of the ISVs.
Sooner or later, work will have to switch to Windows 10, so all I could possibly care about is the big brother part. But by then, I guess, the still unavoidable Windows-only software will live in a virtual machine that can access the intranet only. IT (at least in my company) actively supports this scenario already for the heavy lifters. It's all about productivity, they say. Pick your tools, we won't step in your way.
Windows is a living dead, in many ways.
The only reason Office is still relevant is this: Once upon a time, a little apprentice in marketing solved her life long byzantine riddle, the rule of three, once and for all with an Excel macro. As she was not only cute, but also bursting with pride for her finding, word spread in her ilk and will be handed down 'till the end of time.
If only we could find her and punch her in the face.
Over at ZDNet there's talk about the first ransom screens popping up. $1.49 a month to get rid of full screen ads in Solitaire. More moles expected to raise their heads.
With their modernized (or should I say metroided [http://de.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Metroided]?) license terms, Microsoft has set the stage for much more than the odd nag screen in an easily replaced mini game. That's just the tip of a massive iceberg. You have to accept anything they want to shove down your throat, or your license will be terminated, i.e. you can not legally use your copy anymore.
They want your desktop background to be a commercial slide show? Accept or wipe your hard drive. You found some trickery on the web to get rid of that? Congratulations! The next mandatory update finds it deinstalled or inactive: wave goodbye to your license or (maybe) fork out some cash to remove it "the official way".
Cortana starts "randomly recording and uploading your conversations to improve the service"? Live with it, you already blank signed for that. And don't forget to have your fingerprints taken and your face scanned while you go, use of the data left to Microsofts discretion.
A dodgy update kills not only your machine, but simultaneously those of a hundred thousand other people (remember, all those Orwellian features constantly fiddle with the same little cryptographic chip that handles (mandatory, of course) "SecureBoot", eventually locking down your machine for good? Kismet, no class action for you. Just make sure you encrypted all your data to be done with them as well.
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