JorgeA

Following up on the post upthread about Bing usage in the wake of Windows 10: Windows 10 is not Bing's savior Report from the ivory tower at Redmond: "Dang, the peasants out there just won't play along!" --JorgeA

The final line of that post sums it up very well: @MagicAndre reported here on MSFN a couple of years ago that networking on Windows 8.x was a nightmare compared to earlier versions of Windows. I guess that they haven't fixed it... --JorgeA

^^ For those with limited time (or patience), the key portion starts at 5:30. If you're really pressed for time and don't care about the background, start at 10:30. Now here's the scary part of Microsoft's plans: --JorgeA

Mum's the word... Microsoft refuses to answer questions about forced Windows 10 downloads --JorgeA

Agreed! Yeah, I was thinking of folks who aren't savvy enough to install their own Start Menu replacement. --JorgeA

Bing’s search share growth falls far short of Bing exec’s predictions Bing usage increased by just 1% in the U.S despite escalated Windows 10 installations Hmmm... What does this tell us about the adoption (or usage) of Windows 10? One of the biggest benefits of Win10 for Microsoft, presumably, was that it would put Bing front and center since it's the default search engine on the default Edge browser. It looks like users are making their own browser or search-engine decisions, despite Microsoft's efforts to steer us in their preferred direction. --JorgeA

Wasn't that one of the choices for Clippy? --JorgeA

--JorgeA Dang if that isn't identical to the menu in preview build 9841. Or its an old picture They need to make that update available for normal Win8.1 Yeah, I remember thinking that the earlier versions of the Win10 Start Menu were better than what they finally settled on. It would make 8.1 more usable, no question about it. --JorgeA

but you're right, everything's getting turned upside down. How far we have gone from the heady days of the start of the PC revolution, when the personal computer was viewed as a machine to liberate people from the tech priesthood in white lab coats. We are coming back around to the user terminal model, where the local device is just a transmitter of keystrokes and a receiver of output and the data processing takes place in a central system, inaccessible to us peasants. Once again we are becoming dependent on nebulous, far-off Experts who make the big decisions for us and we're expected to adapt to them. [source] --JorgeA

One little bit of good news: Microsoft has yielded to reality and brought back the (pseudo-)Start Menu to Windows RT. The Windows 10 Start Menu on Windows RT 8.1 --JorgeA

The newest trouble swirling around Windows 10: Windows 10 is shaping up to be the most unstable release since Millennium Edition My biggest problem with Windows 10: Instability And check out the conclusion of the following post: Windows 10 build 10537 release notes leaked Of course we'll hear from the pollyanna crowd that everything is hunky-dory on their Win10 systems, but that would be to miss the point. At what percent of troubled installations does the public decide that it's simply not worth the risk or the hassle? Should the stability problems continue, Windows 10 will rightly or wrongly develop a reputation for being unreliable, and that is bound to affect its adoption numbers down the road. --JorgeA

Betanews published an interesting analysis: Windows 10: A closer look at usage numbers --JorgeA

Do you mean the Facebook thread, or the post in geek.com, or the report in PJM? The writer in PJM takes our (pro-ad blocking) side, which does make it curious that there's ads on that page. But then, he's probably not the same guy who runs the website, so kudos to the website owner for allowing an editorial that seems to run against his business model! Or maybe he figures he'll run the ads and it's your decision whether to block them or not... Regarding the downloading of videos without ads, I'm aware of YouTube Downloader which does much the same thing. It's like an arms race where the sites keep finding ways to block these applications and the application developers keep tweaking them to bypass the blocking. Ultimately, I think, the solution is going to involve some kind of micro-payment to the websites via some sort of online broker. I wouldn't pay $10 or even $5 a month to visit every single website I ever visit -- I'd go broke in short order -- but I wouldn't mind paying a few pennies on a per-visit basis. That would be preferable to subscriptions that can add up very quickly, and also better than losing time waiting for bandwidth-hogging ads to load. The key is to design a frictionless (and preferably anonymous) way ot making these payments so that you don't have to sign in or enter a credit-card number every time you want to make a $0.03 payment. --JorgeA

Rants welcome here! That's the crux of the matter for me. I wouldn't mind so much if it were simply a private company gathering the data to try to sell me stuff. The problem is that this data is then available to official and extra-official snoops, who may not have my own best interests at heart. --JorgeA

Not quite OT, due to the Win10 ad tracking and profiling connection: Is Ad-Blocking Software Immoral? The commenters' replies run pretty much along the same lines of what we would say. Personally, I don't mind seeing ads on websites, but I do object to pushy audiovisual ads that take over my computer's speakers, and I certainly do not want a profile of my likes and preferences to be built up somewhere, be that on Google's or Microsoft's servers. While we're on the topic of ads, has anybody noticed that anymore, when you're streaming a show online (we do it once in a blue moon), not only are they running commercials now but there is no way to skip past them? In addition to the general clunkiness of the streaming experience, that's another reason I prefer my DVR and Windows Media Center: I can just fast-forward over the ads. For the life of me, I cannot understand why streaming is so popular -- you're surrendering control of the viewing experience back to the provider. --JorgeA EDIT: BTW, I can't access the Facebook discussion because I have facebook.com in my Hosts file.

This website might be useful. Note especially their right-to-the-point advice (scroll down a little from the top): Don't use Windows 10 - It's a privacy nightmare BTW the link for one tool in particular, which has been mentioned on MSFN, is broken. Wonder what happened there; maybe Microsoft had an issue with the "fix10" moniker. Remember three years ago there was a former 'Softie who launched a website called "Fix Windows 8" or something like that, and his site mysteriously disappeared in short order. --JorgeA

^^ Man, I'll need to see the manual for that app. --JorgeA

It looks like that the answer could become like this. Block everything even updates. Do updates through wsusoffline.net or something. This is another tool I'm going to play with Maybe one solution would be to port Samsung's Windows Update blocker over to PCs made by other manufacturers... --JorgeA

Emulating @jaclaz here... Meanwhile, over in Mountain View (Google HQ) they've joined Microsoft in sneaking in PUF (potentially unwanted features) without people's knowledge or permission: This all was said before the Mozilla ad revelations, but the point about Google still stands. --JorgeA

There are so many factual and logical problems with that Winbeta editorial, it would take me a week to sort them all out and explain them. Note that, almost every time the writer refers to a Windows 10 keylogger, he combines the noun with the adjective "malicious." The lawyer in me suggests that that's the writer's way of implicitly admitting that there may be a "well-intentioned" keylogger there, just not a "malicious" one. Brings to mind the old saw, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." --JorgeA

I believe the subject at hand in that case is simply that Microsoft has ALWAYS - as a rule - created applications that require a final confirmation before anything is changed. [etc.] Thanks a ton, this is exactly the kind of explanation I was hoping for! It's all much clearer now. --JorgeA

I was only dimly aware of DEC when it was around so I don't really know if the following applies, but perhaps there may be a parallel to the contest between the VHS and Betamax VCR formats back in the '80s. Betamax was said to be technically superior to VHS, but the latter ultimately won out in the market for one or both of two reasons that I've heard: VHS was adopted by more companies (Sony kept the Betamax format for itself) and thus enjoyed greater market exposure; VHS tapes were physically smaller and offered longer recording times than Betamax tapes, so customers deemed it the more practical choice.--JorgeA P.S. My only contact with DEC was that there was a DEC store on the bottom floor of the office building where I worked back then. I never did walk into that store: I remember thinking how incredibly expensive their computers seemed to be, based on the window displays. (This, too, may help to explain what happened to the company.)

More reports of unexpected Win10 installations here. Here's the story from the post: Down in the comments section, the staffer in question gives more info: Some of the commenters report their own cases: And then there's this sequence of comments, which I'd like someone here who's knowledgeable about XAML to discuss: Heh, that last one sounds like what malware pop-ups used to do where they'd program the Close button to actually launch the virus; that's how I learned that the proper approach to that kind of situation is to open Task Manager and kill the browser. Anyway, can anybody comment on that sequence of observations, especially the third one about the asserted deficiencies of XAML? (I assume that XAML is the "new design language" they're talking about.) --JorgeA

I'm afraid that's exactly right. --JorgeA

Very hard-hitting indeed, nicely done. It's outrageous but not surprising that they removed it. :angrym: --JorgeA