Formfiller

Another C9 adventure: http://channel9.msdn.com/Forums/Coffeehouse/Is-Windows-Update-for-XP-sabotaged edit: fixed link.

Opera proudly continues its suicide path (seems to be hip nowadays): http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/important-announcement-about-your-my-opera-account The villagers commenting are pissed of course. That's expected though.

What a brilliant way to encourage people to buy your product. Imagine if Toyota or Ford were to adopt this idea: "Yes, our new base models sell for $23,000, but you may not use them for charities, in a small business, or in any occupation that earns money. That may or may not include commuting to work; after all, our car IS helping you to make money, right? (BTW, the built-in Cloud GPS will send us a constant stream of data as to where you're driving and where your car spends time parked, so forget about lying to us about what you're really using the car for.) If you want to use the car for charitable or business purposes, the price of the base model goes up to $34,000." --JorgeA Office Home and Business costs 220$: http://www.microsoftstore.com/store/msusa/en_US/pdp/Office-Home-and-Business-2013/productID.259321600 Imagine if business would just buy Surfaces and no Office suites any more! They would make a huge loss. Funny - that's one true leverage they have here ("get a Surface for your business and you don't have to pay for Office!"), but their greed is just too big to let it happen.

Yes, it's crazier than Orwell, but on another level. Governments and corporations want power, that's expected and the rule of the game. In Orwell's world the people are forced to abide and the secret police will use you as target practice if you dare to turn off the telescreen. But the reality is a lot more cynical: People love big brother freely! They are literally in love with their plastic gadgets, no matter how creepy all the default settings are, and they feed the facebook database with things they wouldn't confess to a priest ten minutes before the gas chamber, even though they KNOW that all these internet services are literally bugged to hell and back (this was common knowledge even before Snowden). And they will turn into mad dogs defending their masters. Orwell was just not cynical enough. You don't need opression to opress people: Apparently, they melt already when you give them a blinking piece of plastic. Not even Brave New World was this cynical: At least Soma is a literal drug.

Introducing the iPhone 5 nsa! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSJqBJ1TF-E#t=195

All the major services are PRISMed anyway. It doesn't matter if the communication channel is secure, if the agencies have direct access to the servers at the end of the channel. If you're it using mainly for smaller independent services it's another matter.

High octane from windowsitpro.com (Thurrott's place). The author is not Thurrott though, and that's why there is less shilling and more truth: http://windowsitpro.com/industry/new-world-order-microsofts-biggest-competition-it Well, not exactly news, it's obvious for anyone that followed the drama so far. Microsoft is not only waging wars against users, they are waging wars against pretty much all IT-pros and Windows/Microsoft shops as well! Any company that is offering Windows hosting, any company that offers IT services for MS products, any in-house IT technicians are on Microsoft's kill-list.

Apple shows that it's not completely up the whazoo: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-reduces-ios-7-animations-2013-10 Now, that's a fix. NuMicrosoft would have slowed down the animations everyone complains about slightly, but added even more distracting animations in other places, which would be more annoying than the original issue. This update would be hyped by MS as "the fix you have all waited for" and released one year later in a several gigabyte-sized package that bricks an entire phone line.

I can't see it. One thing is sure, Microsoft needs a CEO who won't see the last 30 years of continuous improvement and overwhelming market share accumulation as some kind of "legacy" the company needs to throw off and discard...! That's el Nutso, in the extreme. It's just not gonna' happen. Yes, it's insane. Were there any comparable deeds? A company flushing down their core products and come off unscattered? I can't find any examples. That said, I applaud Paul Thurrott's coming out. Remember that the metrotards until very recently were still sure that the desktop isn't going away and that you just have to "deal with the start screen" and that's it. Thurrott and other insiders calling for the end of the desktop brings clarity into this debate. Even many W8 fanboys still don't like metro at all, they just have found out way to skip it. Note how many of them them praise the reduced boot times or other such smallish W8 boons, and don't even mention metro (or tell straight up that they have installed Start8).

Actually, metro IS hard to use on a desktop: You have a mystery meat navigation, with no chrome or any hints. To close something, you need to grab it and drag it down. The red X on the desktop is far more intuitive. There is no menu bar and no standard items (File, Edit etc.), this means you need to learn the basic handling for EVERY SINGLE APP, in opposite to the desktop, where most programs follow a similar layout. It's a lot like the DOS times, where applications didn't follow a single rule, but each program had its own handling paradigm. The whole charms approach to share information between apps is far less obvious than drag & drop on the desktop. Multi tasking is far harder. Copy and pasting is more difficult due the full screen nature of it. There are far more mouse-meters because the controls are so spread apart on a bigger screen. The OS is invisible, and essential features (Charms) need to be invoked by some gesture-voodoo or keyboard shortcuts. This approach has far more in common with DOS TSRs and pre-Windows DOS GUIs than with Windows. It's a mess. They should have just added an app store to MS-DOS and sell that, they would have gotten the same result.

Ouch, and read the comments here: http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/159988/googles-schmidt-says-android-more-secure-than-the-iphone Pretty neowintastic. Best-of quotes: They are even using the metrotard terms, wow.

Deja vu: http://forums.appleinsider.com/t/160244/california-man-sues-apple-ceo-tim-cook-over-automatic-ios-7-update/80 Reply: I get the DotMatrix vibe from that reply! Apple is getting metrotarded big time.

Given how small the 8.1. update actually is in terms of features, and how tiny the Windows RT userbase is, the extend of the breakdown on Microsoft's part is truly epic. Let's not forget they have recently botched up quite a lot of Windows Updates for the previous versions as well. Maybe all the negativity regarding Microsoft's course has reached the employees, making them unfocussed and error-prone.

Some more tidbits: It has now a SteamGuard like protection system. You should enter a keycode at installation that MS sends to you per mail. (when you use MS accounts). You can skip that though. Boot to Desktop-option is there but it feels weird: You still have the lock screen and the metro-styled login-screen (which have a completely different style than the Desktop). After you log-in, you get thrown immediately into the Desktop, without any kind of transitional animation or fade effect, in opposite to the previous Windows versions. This stark smash cut generates a disorientating feeling, unpleasant and almost uncomfortable. Given how NuMS behaves, I won't be surprised if they did this on purpose, to move users away from "boot to desktop". Kinda in line how they have uglified the Desktop in general. if you click on the Desktop tile on the start screen, there is a transitional animation. The lack of it is very noticable with boot-to-desktop.

If you install new programs (desktop and metro apps alike) they don't show up on the start screen anymore. You need to press an arrow-button in the start screen, get an even more convoluted busy "all programs" like screen, and there the new programs are. You can pin the programs there to the start screen. That whole concept still sucks. I like it how the tards complain about the need to scroll the start menu, while here you need to horizontally scroll the whole screen!

By the way, the lock-screen looks funky now:

I have just installed the 8.1 90 days demo just for this in a VM and saw that screen as well. It pops up separately after you chose "Express Settings". But given their course, they could make it truly insidious in the next version; just like they did it with the MS Account deception in 8.1.

Don't hold your breath regarding Linux. I know that community very well and they have never managed to get their acts together. Android is the most successful Linux because it is pretty much completely encapsulated from the FOSS "community" and uses only the kernel: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/googles-iron-grip-on-android-controlling-open-source-by-any-means-necessary/ Linux on the desktop can only be successful if a professional company (not the Ubuntu dudes) "robs it" and creates something like Android for Desktop. Maybe Valve can do just that for games. The end result wouldn't be much "open" though.

Frank X. Shaw (Why do I always think about Bill Murray when I read this name?) says that the review is inaccurate. He's right. The reviewer doesn't mention all the regressions (no backup program anymore) and all the bullying new in 8.1.

Oh my God, has Microsoft NuMicrosofted the "My Documents" folder? http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/10/windows-rt-8-1-update-temporarily-pulled-due-to-a-situation/?comments=1&post=25513165#comment-25513165 Can someone test this? Unbelievable! As you all know, I am not exactly fond of NuMicrosoft, but that they will go this far with 8.1 is not something I have imagined.

Oh, nice: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-security/windows-81-removing-local-account-bug-during/f2c43beb-7035-43ed-86f6-6d5560746222 I knew they trick people into creating MS accounts when installing 8.1 on a new computer, but I didn't know they forcefully convert old Windows 8 accounts too. Cute!

Man, HTML5 Youtube sucks. Speaking of HTML 5: The "war against Flash" so many tards engaged in will bite them in the a**. Remember the anti-Flash hype a few years back? Flash wasn't perfect, but at least all the DRM shenanigans and other annoyances were confined in that plug-in. Didn't want it? Don't install it! Now with HTML 5, all that stuff is getting buit-in into the browser! And you won't be able to just deactivate it this time! (and its performance still worse than Flash) I knew it that with the death of Flash they will put all that crap into the Browser core itself - all these HTML5 fanboys and kiddies thought the industry would just give up on DRM once Flash dies or something, yeah right.

Arts and crafts peak, and once they do, they go downhill. Take literature: I would say it peaked in the 19th century around with Dostoyevsky, Hugo, Goethe, Dickens, Tolstoy and went downhill from there. Sure, there were some great works in the 20th century, but they haven't reached the greatness of Brothers Karamazov etc. and the 21st century so far is an utter trash heap compared to the 19th. Music: You've said it yourself. And by the way, where's the new Ninth Symphony? That story is pretty similar as with literature here. And arts peak far sooner now: Movies, despite a far younger medium than the above, have already peaked, too. 70s and 80s (and many 90s) films wipe the floor with most newer productions. Even straight action films twenty-thirty years ago had a lot more heart and skill than today's "teal and orange" abortions. Computer games: The retro scene is thriving, and for very good reasons. Engineering: The dumberization in computing, the still unmatched designs and reliability of "classic cars", CRT monitors from 12 years ago often have STILL superior color representation than the newest flat displays (along with no ghosting and blurring), analog radios from the 20s can still work while the newest digital models die due to missing codecs and stuff, analog TV was able to withstand anything and produce a picture, while the newest digital TVs die once the signal becomes slightly distorted. There are examples galore here. Stuff turns to s*** a lot faster nowadays, and progress moves backwards quite a lot.

The EU is on the job now and Microsoft is no doubt tucking away a few pennies to cover their next fine. To Microsoft it's a business expense. To Brussels, it's operating income. To me, it reminds of local counties and towns over here that have ticket quotas that the cops set out to collect, and the elected bureaucrats ring the cash register accordingly. Nothing of substance will likely come out of this, but one can hope. Nothing of substance will likely come out of this, but one can hope. Pretty pessimistic, no? I am certain that the EU will be able to strike a deal with MS just like they are able to do with the NSA: https://www.bof.nl/2013/06/11/bits-of-freedom-dutch-spooks-must-stop-use-of-prism/ I am pretty sure the EU will get the same user-data from MS-Skype as the US does (the threath of a billion bollar fine keeps the data flowing). And everyone will be happy.

Even many metrotards at Neowin came to that conclusion.