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Don't you do your own backups? I have completely shunned the cloud and yet - amazingly - I haven't lost any data since 1976 (though I admit that some of it is on punch cards and mag tape, which I never transferred into the PC environment). As far as files on my computer go, my oldest Word document in my Documents folder is from 1990 (which is when I started using Word). Never once have these documents been "on the cloud". You cannot espouse advantages of "cloud" computing - which differs from traditional computing with networking in one key point, you don't have control of the communications - because there simply are no advantages for users. The only advantages are for those who would seek to profit from handling your data. Surely you don't believe in a free lunch. The oldest program in my BIN folder is dated 1986, which is when I started accumulating useful applications. It no longer runs on my host system since it's a 16 bit application. However, to this day I still run the NT CLOCK32.EXE application, which is dated late 90s, on my desktop 24/7. Why? Because it accomplishes its purpose (showing me the time and date) with almost no resource consumption. The executable is a whole 42 kBytes in size. My point? There is no reason to believe that "newer is better" when it comes to software. People aren't any smarter than they were decades ago. If anything, they lack the wisdom and prowess people had to develop when computing was more expensive and difficult, and they weren't distracted by their damned phones all the time. -Noel

New build of post-deprecated basilisk/moebius for XP! * Notice: This repo will not be built on regular schedule. Test binary: Win32 http://o.rthost.cf/basilisk/basilisk55-win32-git-20180616-de24cec63-xpmod.7z Win64 http://o.rthost.cf/basilisk/basilisk55-win64-git-20180616-de24cec63-xpmod.7z Repo changes: - cherry-picked mozilla upstream changes: bug1338404, bug1110928, bug1332745, bug835981, bug1331414, bug1332812 (6feeca67b) - ffvpx: update to 3.4.2 with extended codecs (893d9859d) - nsWebPDecoder: pluged up memory leak by properly calling WebPFreeDecBuffer() before WebPIDelete(). (26e6ef5ea) - icu: cve fixes of CVE-2017-7867, CVE-2017-7868, CVE-2017-14952, CVE-2017-15422 (b7fb50397) - NSS: update to 3.36.4 (e9b13dc7b) - harfbuzz: update to 1.5.1 (7d954d472) - libs: update OTS to 5.2.0, woff2 to fx57-bundled version, brotli to 1.0.1, also modify mfbt/Compression for LZ4 and netwerk and inspector for brotli API changes. (94dbc3aac) - cherry-picked mozilla upstream changes: bug1335829, bug1336216, bug1319771, bug1329179, bug1330823, bug1334085, bug1312049, bug1335070, bug1336018 (de24cec63) * Please don't classify these changes as "security update" as a whole, because they aren't. Changes are experimental as usual. ** Current moebius patch level is at about 52.1 level, porting esr52 security patches onto it takes time.

I had been holding my Win 8.1 workstation, which I use for my primary software engineering and business management work, at a December 2017 level of patching (i.e., I have avoided all core Windows Updates for it since December, though I have applied things like the Internet Explorer and Office updates). Being at a good breakpoint a few days ago, and equipped with at least 4 different methods for restoring my system should I wish to do so, I applied the June core cumulative Windows 8.1 update. My system had run 50 days flawlessly without a reboot prior to that. After the updates, benchmarks showed more than a 30% drop in overall performance, but 50% or more in the user interface (i.e., where you really feel it), and more than 30% in disk I/O operations. It turns out the Spectre and Meltdown mitigations are responsible for this, so I used the Gibson Research "InSpectre" tool to disable them. This caused the performance hit to drop to "only" 8%. That is to say, my system performance was 8% lower overall than it was at the December patch level. I have a number of both compute- and I/O-intensive jobs scheduled, for which I have good logs for recent runs. In particular, one build of a set of our software has been taking 47 minutes to complete. After the updates, the time jumped to 51 minutes - right in line with the 8% drop in performance the benchmarks showed. I found the same exact thing with a Windows 7 hardware system. Exactly the same slowdown with those silly mitigations disabled - 8% - and much more with them enabled. Is everyone just taking these performance hits without question or complaint? Are folks really so scared of the well-developed marketing campaigns for things like Spectre and Meltdown that they will pay any price for (a false sense of) security? -Noel

Not at all. It's a sad day. Every time a technology that gives one a hardcopy of what one buys dies is a time some of our collective freedom is lost. You must understand one has a book or a CD/DVD with a .pdf, or with music, or whatever, one owns that... one has a text into kindle or a music in iTunes one got nothing, and it can be taken from one anytime with little or no explanation and no money back, because one had previously given them the right to do it, when buying that. Ever heard of the memory hole?

Thanks for letting me know. I'm pretty sure I meant to have it marked as UNS as I recall testing newer versions after Vista support was dropped, and they still worked. Haven't tested the latest version though. I'm on vacation and don't have access to a Vista machine right now, but I'll be back tomorrow so I'll test it to see if it still works or not.

So Windows 10 really is a nightmare. It has wasted way too much of my time since installing it. Windows as a service, turns out to be Windows as 'your' servitude. The license agreement basically states that your hardware will be controlled by microsoft as long as you run their software. So if they are using my hardware as their surveillance system, and I have to maintain it for them when they keep forcing updates that break stuff, then shouldn't they be paying me? Personally, I think they are in some very gray territory legally. Really, I think they are way beyond grey. What they are doing is illegal in a dozen different ways at least. But the courts seem to be behind them, as the courts have been siding with corporations who have precluded class action lawsuits through their licensing agreements. The courts allowing licensing agreements to rule out class action lawsuits is basically a license for the corporations to get away with just about anything, no matter how shady. Because individual lawsuits will generally lack the financial and legal fortitude to go up against giants, and in those rare cases that they do, the cost of a settlement for the giants will be negligible and will not serve to curb their practices in any significant manner. Another thing that really makes me wonder too, is how shady are the enterprise licensing agreements. I have not gone through them in great detail. I mean currently in enterprise, it is possible to disable telemetry (which actually only sets it to a minimal level, so the setting of 0 is a bit misleading). It is also possible to redirect all telemetry data internally - though again, that does not really account for all telemetry, only some forms of telemetry. To really shut down all telemetry and gain complete control of updates is entirely possible, but it is also a lengthy and convoluted process which is liable to break some things, and seems intentionally designed to make it possible for admins who are not extremely thorough to miss something. The question though, is do the enterprise license agreements guarantee these 'features' of being able to control the software's penchant for phoning home? Just because the software allows these customizations at present, is there any guarantee that it will do so after the next update? Seems like some enterprises may be lulled into a false sense of security, by Microsoft including the ability to manage and control services, task schedules, logging, and set group policies according to their needs, rather than Microsoft's agenda. But is there any legally binding promise from Microsoft that such functionality will be supported in the future? Seems like a massive trap to me, and smart enterprises would probably do better to seriously look into other OSes at this point. I wish some of the big players would pour some resources into bringing ReactOS to maturity. That could be brilliant. It also seems to me that other companies who are supporting Microsoft's push for world domination, like Adobe, nVidia, Intel, Wacom, Lenovo, Dell, Etc.. Should really think twice at this point, because the moment MS doesn't need them anymore...