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Windows 8 - Deeper Impressions


JorgeA

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I'm not actually doing anything like Sinosfsky is (or Ballmer): taking away other people's choices, destroying a great products

Speaking of taking away choices and destroying a great product, it's come out that Gadgets will not be supported in Windows 8.

I know that Gadgets aren't everybody's cup of tea, but I do use them and actually like them. (I follow certain stocks, the analog clock gadget gives me instantaneous time info, and the rolling picture gallery is nice.) And unlike with the Metro screen :rolleyes: I don't have to completely shift away from whatever else I'm doing to take a quick look.

Yet another way Windows 8 is inferior. :realmad:

Hmm, if I had the time I would take a cue from xpclient, and run down all the ways in which Win8 is less (not more) functional than previous versions of Windows.

--JorgeA

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I feel like we are mere spectators and are helpless...we can't do anything...case in point...MS removes Previous Versions/Shadow Copies and deprecates Backup and replaces both with an inferior less functional File History feature. One step ahead, three steps back. :realmad:They can no longer improve Windows without damaging some existing feature. They are incapable of doing that. I hope all of the User Experience people are fired after it fails spectacularly and people who did the UI of products like Windows 2000 and XP are brought in for doing the shell and UI stuff.They could hire Ivo and me for example. :w00t: We will make sure nothing gets removed and everything remains customizable and user is really in control.

Edited by xpclient
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As xpclient has mentioned, there is more subjective interpretation of telemetry data discussed at the official Micros~1 Destroying Windows Blog ...

"Regretfully, backup is not a very popular application. Our telemetry shows that less than 5% of consumer PCs use Windows Backup and even adding up all the third party tools in use, it is clear nowhere near half of consumer PCs are backed up. This leaves user’s personal data and digital memories quite vulnerable as any accident can lead to data loss"

As we have often mentioned throughout this thread and as many others have said on other forums, if Microsoft actually used their telemetry data in a consistent fashion, they would gut Windows to the core, leaving only perhaps Outlook Express (heavily used in the past) and Notepad! Certainly the Start Menu has incredibly high usage compared to all the obscure utilities and administrative tools (even among the noobs and rubes that stay opted-in to the CEIP data logger). Ironically, the CEIP itself should fall victim to the telemetry axe!

What I find more revealing and creepy is if we look at that same quote again with particular emphasis ...

"Regretfully, backup is not a very popular application. Our telemetry shows that less than 5% of consumer PCs use Windows Backup and even adding up all the third party tools in use, it is clear nowhere near half of consumer PCs are backed up. This leaves user’s personal data and digital memories quite vulnerable as any accident can lead to data loss"

Let that sink in for a minute. That is as close to confessing to pure spyware as I can remember, spyware that can differentiate between Microsoft applications and 3rd party tools. Hmmm. It is not a short leap to assume they can easily be aware of usage of certain Accessibility tools (identifying users as handicapped), or medical imagery (through Dicom medical viewers) or any variety of stuff that someone would consider absolutely private and illegal to know about. Phone numbers, banking records, and all other critical personal data is truly within their grasp and lies only a single promise away from theft - 'you have our word that data is kept anonymous and will never be used for marketing blah blah blah'.

This whole thing should be re-visited. It is strange when the focus of security concerns is on theoretical exploits from buffer overflows causing security update patching of countless files over and over again, but actual working spyware is built into the operating system and functions with such a high degree of precision as to distinguish between OS utilities and 3rd party software which implies gathering of file signing data or at least actual file properties (you cannot be sure only from a filename the source of a file!). And we're to believe that the IP address and Digital ID of the user's Windows and other identifying bits are magically stripped away before it gets to the servers in Redmond?

Edited by CharlotteTheHarlot
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Let that sink in for a minute. That is as close to confessing to pure spyware as I can remember, spyware that can differentiate between Microsoft applications and 3rd party tools. Hmmm. It is not a short leap to assume they can easily be aware of usage of certain Accessibility tools (identifying users as handicapped), or medical imagery (through Dicom medical viewers) or any variety of stuff that someone would consider absolutely private and illegal to know about. Phone numbers, banking records, and all other critical personal data is truly within their grasp and lies only a single promise away from theft - 'you have our word that data is kept anonymous and will never be used for marketing blah blah blah'.

This whole thing should be re-visited. It is strange when the focus of security concerns is on theoretical exploits from buffer overflows causing security update patching of countless files over and over again, but actual working spyware is built into the operating system and functions with such a high degree of precision as to distinguish between OS utilities and 3rd party software which implies gathering of file signing data or at least actual file properties (you cannot be sure only from a filename the source of a file!). And we're to believe that the IP address and Digital ID of the user's Windows and other identifying bits are magically stripped away before it gets to the servers in Redmond?

But you should see the good guys at MS like a (BTW very gifted in their self-esteem) doctor.

In their own words:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/05/17/improved-server-manageability-through-customer-feedback-how-the-customer-experience-improvement-program-makes-windows-server-2012-a-better-product-for-it-professionals.aspx

I once talked to a doctor who told me about a recent patient that had serious medical symptoms for over a year before visiting the doctor. He said that if the patient had mentioned these symptoms when they first arose, the prognosis was very good but now the patient was in trouble. That reminded me of some advice I once heard, “Never hold anything back from your doctor”. Doctors have exactly one job: to help you. They can only help you with problems that they know about so if you aren’t completely open and honest with them, you are only hurting yourself. The other thing is that by sharing your situation with a doctor, the doctor gains knowledge and skills to help other people as well. This model and thinking applies to our Customer Experience Improvement Program ....

If you do not forfait all your data to them, NOW, you are actually holding them back from helping other people, you little selfish bastard! ;)

I do prefer the short version:

All your base are belong to us!

;)

jaclaz

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But you should see the good guys at MS like a (BTW very gifted in their self-esteem) doctor.

In their own words:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/windowsserver/archive/2012/05/17/improved-server-manageability-through-customer-feedback-how-the-customer-experience-improvement-program-makes-windows-server-2012-a-better-product-for-it-professionals.aspx

If you do not forfait all your data to them, NOW, you are actually holding them back from helping other people, you little selfish bastard! ;)

Wow, that link is some read! That 'spin-doctor' doctor spin still has my head spinning. :blink: Although the article is specifically about 2k12, there is a real gem in there which puts even further doubt on their ability to make informed decisions from the questionable sample size and quality of that sample.

Recall how the Start Menu removal is allegedly due to interpretation of telemetry data from Vista and Win7, and recall how so many people have pointed out the folly of this because few sane persons would voluntarily opt-in. Thus that sample is almost exclusively noobs that clicked through some last-chance prompt or maybe they are Mojave style focus groups of carefully selected Seattle hipsters.

This is right from the horse's mouth and IMHO demonstrates that whomever is in the CEIP sample, they shouldn't be considered representative of intelligent life forms ...

"After the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, we did an assessment of CEIP adoption and found that 5-7% of servers in market were reporting CEIP. While working with customers on CEIP adoption we found that although servers were opted-in we weren’t getting data from them. We did a root cause analysis and learned that the main reason servers weren’t reporting is because they are deployed in firewalled environments. To send CEIP data, servers need to be able to communicate over HTTPS (default port 443) and need to have proxy settings configured (if the server is in a network that uses a proxy server). In working with Technology Adoption Program (TAP) customers, we found that frequently one or more of these settings were not configured, thus preventing CEIP data from reaching Microsoft."

Again, this is concerning 2k12 and the data is pulled from 2k8 ... however ... it stands to reason that CEIP on consumer versions of Vista and 7 would also bounce off any working outbound firewall. Therefore, the already small and questionable CEIP sample used to kill the 17 year-old Start Menu consists of: ... users that are so bright that they voluntarily opted-in AND also actively added the CEIP to the firewall whitelist. ... and/or ... users that were NOT bright enough to opt-out of the CEIP program AND are happily running with no outbound blocking whatsoever. On instinct, I gotta go with the latter dominating the sample here.

Seriously, let's all pray real hard that Microsoft is not responsible for data services for any lifesaving clinical medical trials, and that they are definitely not allowed to be anywhere near vote counting on election day.

On the security front, the article continues ...

"To make it easy to send CEIP data, Windows Server 2012 Beta ships several new features that allow you to get past the blocking issues so you can ‘set and forget’ CEIP. To participate in the CEIP program, the simplest way to deliver CEIP data to us is to use a new feature called Windows Feedback Forwarder (WFF). WFF is a service that proxies CEIP data from machines in a domain to Microsoft. WFF will proxy CEIP data Windows products including Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 or higher. WFF will also proxy data for any Microsoft product that is enabled to ‘send customer feedback’."

I am almost at a loss for words. Almost. So I gotta ask. With all the data break-ins lately in the news almost every single day, would you really consider entering your personal data or paypal or CC numbers onto a commercial site that was 'powered by Windows Server 2012'? Seriously, If I were working for the competition I would just develop site banners/badges that said: 'Secure Site NOT powered by Windows'. Yeah I know there is more to it than hacking in, execution and getting out, but let's face facts. CEIP is a completely working spyware infrastructure designed to collect, aggregate and transport highly specific and sensitive data with a minimum of notice-ability. It is a miracle that it has not yet been compromised.

Wanna know something they must be worrying about up in Redmond? Here it is. Just imagine if the next version of Stuxnet/Flame or some banking credit card virus simply masquerades as CEIP! Microsoft will be royally screwed then, and we will see the largest patch Tuesday in history.

Microsoft Windows 8 : The customer is always right (when he agrees with the Telemetry data)

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Wow, that link is some read! That 'spin-doctor' doctor spin still has my head spinning. :blink: Although the article is specifically about 2k12, there is a real gem in there which puts even further doubt on their ability to make informed decisions from the questionable sample size and quality of that sample.

Yes, but "traditionally" all good (and most evil :ph34r: ) have come from "Server" or however "Professional/Corporate" solutions, that in the years have been forced to "innocent" end customers.

Just think of the use your mom or grandmother makes of features like:

  1. NTFS quotas
  2. file permissions
  3. transactional filesystem
  4. fast user switching
  5. ....

on her netbook (that she uses to read some news, find some cook recipes and write/receive e-mails to/from her friends/relatives, besides keeping a spreadsheet with home expenses).

With regards to your quote:

"After the release of Windows Server 2008 R2, we did an assessment of CEIP adoption and found that 5-7% of servers in market were reporting CEIP. While working with customers on CEIP adoption we found that although servers were opted-in we weren’t getting data from them. We did a root cause analysis and learned that the main reason servers weren’t reporting is because they are deployed in firewalled environments.

I will translate it in plain English:

  1. We conducted a market research on a non-casual sample of users representing no more than 7% of the market.
  2. Instead of realizing that any sample - if not casual - is meaningless metrics, we tried to enlarge the sample size still keeping it non-casual, i.e . having a bigger volume of meaningless data instead of attempting to have an even minimal volume of meaningful data.
  3. Then we learned :w00t: that the reason why the sample was so meager in size was connected to the fact that Enterprise Servers (i.e. something designed to keep possibly sensitive data either of private or commercial nature) were on purpose shielded by firewalls and similar devices in order to prevent information from escaping them :whistle: .

Those correspond, respectively, to lesson #1 and #2 in statistics, and to lesson #3 in computer science (Lesson #1 being "turn on the PC", Lesson #2 being "turn the monitor on, too"), the good MS guys must have had some more interesting things to do instead of attending class :whistle: .

jaclaz

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..people who did the UI of products like Windows 2000 and XP are brought in for doing the shell and UI stuff.

no, no, no. I don't need a new teletubbies Windows like XP :no: :no:

You are confusing the theme with the actual UI. I didn't say we'll bring back Luna. :P Just good looking productive customizable design. Like Classic Shell offers.

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..people who did the UI of products like Windows 2000 and XP are brought in for doing the shell and UI stuff.

no, no, no. I don't need a new teletubbies Windows like XP :no: :no:

LOL

Things got much nicer for me when I discovered the "silver" theme for XP. Looks pretty snazzy. (And with any different desktop wallpaper.)

The only remaining Fisher-Price element is that bright red, square X button for closing windows.

--JorgeA

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it stands to reason that CEIP on consumer versions of Vista and 7 would also bounce off any working outbound firewall. Therefore, the already small and questionable CEIP sample used to kill the 17 year-old Start Menu consists of: ... users that are so bright that they voluntarily opted-in AND also actively added the CEIP to the firewall whitelist. ... and/or ... users that were NOT bright enough to opt-out of the CEIP program AND are happily running with no outbound blocking whatsoever. On instinct, I gotta go with the latter dominating the sample here.

Looks to me like we have here a classic case of GIGO. The "GO" part being Windows 8...

Yesterday I was struck by yet another annoying aspect of the flattened Win8 look. I wanted to scroll up and down a window, and -- I couldn't find the scrollbar!! Took me a while to realize that they'd made the scrollbar so faint that I could hardly see it!

So, what -- are the MS geniuses going to tell me that their "telemetry" suggested that people don't scroll up and down in their windows much anymore, so that it was OK to deprecate the scrollbar?! :angrym:

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
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So, what -- are the MS geniuses going to tell me that their "telemetry" suggested that people don't scroll up and down in their windows much anymore, so that it was OK to deprecate the scrollbar?! :angrym:

Sure they don't. (I mean people actually runnning the telemetry :ph34r: )

They tend to get to a web site and read the title, and possibly the incipit of an article, at this point all their neurons are already busy with the overflow of information contained in a few sentences and they click away to some other site, while senselessly twitting a random thought about the news they didn't actually read, let alone understood.

jaclaz

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There's the legal option if are in the US. You can sue Microsoft claiming they are selling an OS as an upgrade which removes features and with the help of their OEM and hardware partners like Intel, eventually it or its derivatives will be forced on you as older versions run out of compatible hardware drivers. So you would be paying for the OS and lose essential features, and you can't stay forever on the older OS which won't work any more when your old PC hardware breaks down and you are unable to put the older OS on the new hardware even if you are perfectly happy with it. If I was in the US, I would have sued Microsoft for Vista or Windows 7 itself removing a boatload of features instead of keeping them as options and forcefully obsoleting older versions from the retail and OEM channel and from the entire ecosystem by working with partners and not developing drivers for it.

It all depends on US law. I don't know anything about laws in the US, you could consult a lawyer and ask him if there is a provision in the law to protect consumers / end users from companies who reduce the usefulness of products by stripping features and then with the help of the planned obsolescence business model of its partners, the corporation forces the new products with reduced utility, reduced features on you - these features were actively deleted despite strong feedback (case in point: Start Menu). A single person certainly wouldn't dare to sue a big corporation like Microsoft for the fear of losing against them but then it all depends on how strongly you feel about it and how much you care about "doing the right thing". I mean someone has to take the first step to fight against this corporation who's expecting money and giving less in return in the "upgrade". I wouldn't certainly instigate anyone to sue them if they are going to end up losing a lot of money (again it's a matter of knowing the US law well before you proceed). And even if one does sue them, he or she and his lawyer has to be well-versed first with what features were exactly removed to convince the court that is a significant reduction in functionality.

If you are serious about filing a lawsuit, make sure you do all the homework first and use your own discretion to decide and understand all the consequences of this lawsuit (ask your lawyer this). You can keep in mind that you are fighting for the right thing, the only expectation from Microsoft in case of users like you and me is that they don't destroy all the existing system they have built with advanced features that you have a business or personal need for. To build something new, they actively delete these right in the next release, that's not the right approach because end users invest a lot in their platform. Another thing to note is that with Windows 8 in particular, Microsoft is well aware of the fact that there can be lawsuits (haven't you heart Ballmer say "Windows 8 is the company's riskiest bet"?). So it anticipates lawsuits and is therefore going to put a clause in the End User License Agreement of Windows 8's RTM build that if you accept the license agreement, you can't file a class action lawsuit against them. Read this article for more details: http://www.forbes.co...inst-microsoft/ One can still bring the dispute in small claims court but not a class action lawsuit.

You could argue in court that if the case was that we could continue using older versions of Windows permanently and happily, then there would been no need to sue. However there are two major reasons we cannot keep running older versions of Windows permanently.

1. Lack of security updates after a certain date: While it is normal for companies to not support their products forever, and no one is saying that

Microsoft hasn't supporting older versions of Windows long enough, there is no reasonable replacement for many features older versions of Windows in newer OS. Microsoft has monopolized the operating system market since the early 90s and Linux is an underdeveloped OS with a bad user experience. Apple is far worse than Microsoft, they have even shorter lifecycles and they remove features you start using from their products even more rapidly. Once security updates stop, your computer is likely to be infected by malware and you certainly don't want malware affecting your valuable data. I personally would even use and learn Linux than getting infected by malware. Because the situation is so concerning and is rather unique in this case of technology, you could appeal to the court that Microsoft should not remove features because customers are forced to migrate after a set date to its newer iteration. In any other industry, such a situation doesn't arise. Even if your car gets 50 years old, you can keep running it, the fuel your car runs on won't combust or get incompatible with your car. And you will still be allowed to drive the old car on the road.

2. Lack of driver availability on newer hardware: The argument would be the same as above - because no system provides the functionality of older versions of Windows and you invested in it, even if you have a retail license of older versions of Windows, you can't continue using it permanently because on newer hardware, Microsoft's partners won't deliver drivers for the older OS. Virtualization is not an option for graphics intensive applications like games and 3D rendering apps. So in effect, Microsoft is expecting users to pay them $$$ in return for an OS that removes the system features you need and you use. This is plain cheating.

The result of such a lawsuit may be that even if one loses the case, this shakes up matters at Microsoft and they get serious and they change their policies and start giving special attention to such regressions in functionality. They would certainly care about someone else suing them for the same accusation again and would try to avoid removing features.

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