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Windows 10 - Deeper Impressions


xper

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I disagree with the conclusions on that story. The entire thing reminded me of the normal users were doing to make things work on their Windows 95 and 98 computers. Did that person use a computer back in the late 90s? Did he forget about codec hell?

 

And the 2000's as well, I rarely use/watch videos on the PC at all, but until VLC came out, it was pure hell (at least for me) with codecs.

 

jaclaz

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I have gone through the Codec / Dependency / Driver hell period on Windows all the way through to Win10 today but I don't have any deep coding knowledge beyond a bit of VB for Excell and Access Databases. Last Linux I played with was Mint15 about a year ago. To be fair Mint installed everything I needed out of the box - Media worked with VLC, MP3s played, Wireless networking just worked - it was just fine. So why not use it - well because most of the stuff I do requires Windows or Apple and I just can't be arsed to put the time in to learn Mint and commit to it, I am not that enthusiastic. It has taken years of head banging frustration to get where I am now where nothing much causes me more than 10 minutes to reserach and fix in Apple or Windows, but I occasionally have a look at a new Linux distribution for what reason I have no idea, I am never realistically going to use Linux as anything but a curiosity. I think the PC world has wedged itself in a cul - de - sac of Windows or Apple where there is no incentive for coders to build a new OS although I agree it could be done it just needs funding, organisation and support from devs which is crucial. Now I am stuck using OSX because Windows 10 is too mickey mouse and Linux is just tedious.

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I rarely use/watch videos on the PC at all

 

Same here, but when I do it just seems to work.  I have done nothing to alter the standard set of video decoding software available on my Win 8.1 Pro / MCE system, yet I seem to be able to watch everything I try to see - I can't recall any failures.  YouTube always seems to work.  Videos posted by people showing screen grabs of problems show okay.

 

Where are people finding videos they can't watch?

 

Are we talking about Win 10 here?  (Yes, I know Dedoimedo was ranting about Linux)

 

We already know that media playing capability has been reduced in Windows 10.  Is it a case where the news of that is so old now that people are rediscovering it?  I hate it when "normal" gets redefined and things take a step backward.

 

-Noel

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No, I was talking of earlier systems, and of "real" videos, not the Youtube streaming ones, there have been years of issues with codecs and with (crappy) codec packs, besides the issues with WMP (Windows Media Player) that led to the development of the "Classic" version (JFYI):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Player_Classic

that eventually evolved into MPC-HC:

https://mpc-hc.org/

 

And some (historical) comments:

http://blog.codinghorror.com/video-codecs-are-the-next-dll-hell/

 

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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VLC is a stupid player because it will not display subtitles on the overlay. This has been its plague for years and they do not intend to fix it. It's plain stupid to watch a 16:9 movie on a 4:3 display and have the subtitles occupy the active video instead of the darn black space below.

 

I'm using GOMPlayer with ffdshow and a few other codecs manually installed. I don't need or want any HD. This is all madness, it has to be stopped!

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It's been a long time since I had problems playing video on my Windows systems. Things seem to "just work" for me. Not that I play all that many, but nonetheless...

 

The main idea I got from Dedoimedo's post was not that this or that particular software requires an inordinate amount of technical knowledge to get it to work on Linux (although that's certainly the case), but rather the contemptuous and condescending reaction among too many in the Linux community to people who report such technical difficulties.

 

--JorgeA

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I find it hard to argue against the "more education needed" camp, though, even if the extremists are trying to get you to be a dyed-in-the-wool computer geek in order to use your computer.

 

The extreme in the other direction is for the geeky stuff to just be removed altogether, because it's simply so troublesome to support, and (as one who has coded a sed script in the past day) I'm here to tell you THAT is most definitely bad.

 

Balance is good.  Humans don't communicate that way, though - they want to polarize to extremes.  The silent majority I imagine would want balance.  But they're just not motivated to be Dick from the Internet.

 

-Noel

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when they kill some app and driver support, then people will be forced

 

skype is one of known examples

firefox too

chrome too

Brother Windows XP almost identical to todays mordern operating system.

Windows 10 apis can be implimented easily in xp.

if you have knowledge in reverse enginearing you can do anything.

Grab some tools like IDA pro , visual studio, cff explorer , diassembler and what not , you can easiliy impliment apis in kernal base(kerenal32.dll) and other.

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Brother Windows XP almost identical to todays mordern operating system.

Windows 10 apis can be implimented easily in xp.

if you have knowledge in reverse enginearing you can do anything.

Grab some tools like IDA pro , visual studio, cff explorer , diassembler and what not , you can easiliy impliment apis in kernal base(kerenal32.dll) and other.

 

The *what not* is particularly hard to find around here. :w00t:

 

Really Dibya, notwithstanding what you have seen your friends do or what you managed to do yourself :) in the field of reverse engineering and new windows versions api implementing in XP, you might want to check the dictionary for "easily":

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/easily

and while you are at it also for impliment, enginearing and kerenal:

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/implement

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/engineering

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/kernel

 

You can easily better your spelling this way. ;)

 

jaclaz

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Windows 10 and telemetry: Time for a simple network analysis

 

The article itself is a bit of a whitewash, but there's an excellent discussion down in the comments section where Win10 apologists get repeatedly skewered. One of my favorites:

 

...Historically when software makers/web platform makers do anti-consumer things do we just say oh well they can do anything they want or do we push back for better software? Yes, we push back.

 

If you are happy Microsoft wants data from you PC then great, be happy. Why are many so agitated with those of us who don't think it's right? What is the fear? No one is saying to take away the ability for others to opt in to send data to Microsoft. We simply want to be able to opt out.

 

:thumbup  :thumbup

 

--JorgeA

 

 

 

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>Windows 10 and telemetry: Time for a simple network analysis

 

The article summary comment that states...

 

"it looks as though Microsoft is doing just what it says: taking the data it needs to improve PC applications and services."

 

...completely ignores the fact that some of us have no interest in spending even the least of our resources to help Microsoft improve PC applications and services. 

 

Focus on the word "taking".

 

Ever since telemetry came out they've done essentially nothing to improve things.  Is Windows 10 improved?

 

But even more fundamentally, the taking of information is STILL an invasion of privacy.  Even just the timing of when I log into my computer is more than I'm willing to have anyone else know. 

 

And let's not forget how far away from defaults we are when discussing this...  I sure as HELL don't want recordings of what I'm talking about in my office sent to a Cortana speech recognition server!  Yet I have to seek out ways to turn that off.

 

When I put data online it's exclusively because I choose to do so.

 

If they can't make an operating system better without knowing what I'm doing with it, then they need to fund their own test lab and make it work to specifications.

 

For the dyed-in-the-wool geeks among us, consider implementing your own DNS server and watching the logs.  I've done so, and it's eye-opening all the names that get resolved into IP addresses (or not, if you've chosen to blacklist the name resolution for certain sets of sites) even by a Windows system that's been configured in every way possible to be private. 

 

-Noel

Edited by NoelC
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Good points, NoelC.

 

One thing I don't understand is the official justification for forcing ongoing, contemporaneous telemetry. We're told that it's to "improve" Windows. But in earlier versions of Windows, users had two options: 1) join the Customer Experience Improvement Program; and 2) perform Error Reporting when something went wrong.

 

If there is no problem to report, then there is no need to report anything. Therefore, Error Reporting is all that's required: you report a problem if and when there is a problem. The report presumably includes everything a Microsoft engineer would need to know about the troubled PC's configuration, enough to identify problem patterns and to devise solutions.

 

So unless Microsoft actually wants all this user data for some purpose other than the publicy stated one, the purpose of the real-time telemetry function remains obscure, despite what the likes of Ed Bott might say.

 

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
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Windows 10 overtakes Windows 8.x, but its growth is slow despite Microsoft forcing it on users

 

...In a month when Windows 10 became a recommended update, meaning on some machines the installation of the OS could start automatically, you might expect growth to be strong, but you’d be wrong.

 

In February, Windows 10 went from 11.85 percent to 12.82 percent, a gain of 0.97 percentage points. That’s about half as much as it grew the previous month, and its second slowest month yet (in December it grew by just 0.96 percentage points). Sure, February is a shorter month, but only by a day or two.

 

That suggests a majority of Windows 7 and 8.x users are currently choosing not to go ahead with the upgrade when presented with it. Interesting. I wonder what the share growth would have been like if Microsoft hadn’t made Windows 10 a recommended update?

 

[...]

 

Windows 7 is mostly unaffected by Windows 10. Going from 52.47 percent in January to 52.34 percent in February. A drop of 0.13 percentage points.

 

--JorgeA

 

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If there is no problem to report, then there is no need to report anything. Therefore, Error Reporting is all that's required: you report a problem if and when there is a problem. The report presumably includes everything a Microsoft engineer would need to know about the troubled PC's configuration, enough to identify problem patterns and to devise solutions.

 

Playing devil's advocate for a moment, there could be (and probably are) a whole bunch of things "going wrong" that aren't obvious.  It's possible that something could be failing, and internal robustness logic to work around the problem continues to have to work around it. 

 

In short:  Not everything that goes wrong results in an obvious failure that you can see.

 

Look, for example in the event logs.  There are (and always have been) many warnings and errors that no one quite knows how to get rid of, and that imply something's gone wrong.  I wonder how many folks comb through all their hundreds of event logs looking to solve problems...

 

A minor example, for which I have sought remedy several times and just happened to look up again this morning (only to find no one's yet published a definitive way to avoid it) is a Warning that shows up in the Applications and Services Logs > Microsoft > Windows > Known Folders > Operational states:

 

Error 0x80070005 occurred while verifying known folder {3eb685db-65f9-4cf6-a03a-e3ef65729f3d} with path 'C:\Users\NoelC\AppData\Roaming'.

 

The folder exists, and appears to have the proper permissions, yet the warning is logged (multiple times a day).  IDEALLY, Microsoft would be notified about this via telemetry and work to correct it, in order to make a more perfect operating system.  But note that the content of the message has personal information in it.

 

-Noel

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