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Windows 10 - Deeper Impressions


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On Thursday, March 31, 2016 at 5:06 PM, greenhillmaniac said:

But on a more serious note, it would be nice to convert Modern Apps into Win32 programs (notice the distinction I made beetwen apps and programs). It would be especially useful for UWP games, the only apps that might interest anybody (I'm talking Gears of War and the upcoming Quantum Break and Forza Apex, not mobile crap). Converting them to Win32 binaries would allow modding and other PC Gaming related tweaks. It would also allow the preservation of such games, either through tweaks to make them work on future hardware, or backing up the game files, because we all know what happens to online distributed games when companies decide to pull the plug...

Anything that tends to preserve a place for Win32 so that it doesn't disappear into the UWP abyss, is welcome. Don't want it to become the Betamax of software programming...

--JorgeA

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5 hours ago, JorgeA said:

Anything that tends to preserve a place for Win32 so that it doesn't disappear into the UWP abyss, is welcome. Don't want it to become the Betamax of software programming...

--JorgeA

I highly doubt that Win32 will disappear anytime soon, if anything UWP will disappear long before Win32 will. Right now, Windows 7 still has the majority, and probably will for a long time, and even if a lot of people "upgrade", there will still be people on it until at least 2020, most likely longer. Windows 8.x will be supported until 2023, and even after that, there still won't be 100% of the user base on 10. Along with the fact that Windows 10 conveniently supports the same Win32 applications that XP/7/8.x support, developers will target Win32 because they can write just one application and target all versions of Windows.

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5 hours ago, rn10950 said:

I highly doubt that Win32 will disappear anytime soon, if anything UWP will disappear long before Win32 will.

I hope you are right... M$ is pushing hard for that platform. I doubt they will get rid completly of Win32, but they might make it harder to install non UWP apps. Think about it, with the way Windows 10 is designed, with tons of telemetry, always on services, like Windows Defender, and the OS outright uninstalling programs it deems as "unsafe", I could see M$ restricting program use to the ones they got paid the most to keep approve.

5 hours ago, rn10950 said:

Windows 8.x will be supported until 2023

Unfortunatly, Windows 8.x accounts for a small share of the market. The only thing keeping M$ from having complete control over our computers is Linux Windows 7.
Can't wait for the fear campaign they will start to push people into Windows 10 when 7 is near EOL... :rolleyes:

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1 hour ago, greenhillmaniac said:

Unfortunatly, Windows 8.x accounts for a small share of the market. The only thing keeping M$ from having complete control over our computers is Linux Windows 7.

No! On average, for each random set of 20 computers, about 10 are on 7, 2 on XP, 2 on 8.x and just 3 are on 10. You are misrepresenting the shares of both XP and 8.x in a way that sure makes MS happy. Do take care what you say, to avoid reinforcing their misleading discourse!

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15 hours ago, dencorso said:

No! On average, for each random set of 20 computers, about 10 are on 7, 2 on XP, 2 on 8.x and just 3 are on 10. You are misrepresenting the shares of both XP and 8.x in a way that sure makes MS happy. Do take care what you say, to avoid reinforcing their misleading discourse!

Right, I completely forgot about XP while writing the comment! It still has a sizable chunk of the market, and XP+7+8+8.1 account for a not too shabby 74.8% of the market.

I wasn't implying that Windows 10 has a huge market share. I'm just saying that IF the Windows 8.x market share declines, and everybody in that line of OSs started upgrading to Windows 10, it wouldn't increase it's market share by too much (a gain of ~10%). The big fat cow that M$ is trying to attack is Windows 7, where most of its users are.

I'm sorry if I conveyed the wrong info. It was never my intent.

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7 hours ago, greenhillmaniac said:

Right, I completely forgot about XP while writing the comment! It still has a sizable chunk of the market, and XP+7+8+8.1 account for a not too shabby 74.8% of the market.

If you add Vista to the list, the number goes over 76%. :)

--JorgeA

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Microsoft continues to bleed browser share at record rates
 

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Computerworld has attributed IE's defections to Microsoft's August 2014 announcement that users of older versions had to upgrade, in most cases, to IE11, by Jan. 12, 2016. Since the announcement, IE has lost 15.1 percentage points of user share, representing a 26% decline.

About one-third of all IE users ran an unsupported version last month, and so did not receive the usual security updates Microsoft released March 8.

By forcing customers to upgrade to a newer version of IE -- or alternately, turn to Windows 10 and its default Edge -- Microsoft demanded that users change browsers. That had a disastrous impact on IE's user share as people rethought their browser choice, and then abandoned Microsoft's browsers for rivals' -- notably Chrome.

[emphasis added]

A word to the wise: let that be a warning about forcing customers to do things your way...

--JorgeA

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Another Wind10 nuts-and-bolts feature from Dedoimedo:

How to remove Skype ads - New tutorial
 

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Skype has incremented its version to 7.X, we have Windows 10, there's more forced integration of commercially-flavored online features, and lo and behold, my quiet and peaceful Skype was showing ads all of a sudden, at the top of each and every conversation screen. This won't do.

[...]

Skype is still probably the most prolific and useful VoIP program on the market. But its levels of annoyances are growing by the day, influenced by the touch desperation and Microsoft's push into the online world. And most likely, the rather mediocre Windows 10, as we've seen in my recent reviews, is the driver behind all this intrusive crap.

--JorgeA

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Check this out:

Cfb1_yCXIAAxZD3.jpg:large

Over time, my elevator pitch against Windows 10 has boiled down to three main areas of concern:

  1. UI
  2. Telemetry
  3. Forced updates

If this new Group Policy setting can be set to defer receiving Windows Updates indefinitely (and see the "pause updates" check box), this will be a significant improvement in point #3.

This appears to be a global setting, though -- and of course updates are all cumulative now in Win10. Best of all would be to be able to select the specific updates to be deferred. Even I don't decline ALL my Windows Updates.  :)

--JorgeA

Edited by JorgeA
additional info
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Windows 10 Roadmap Reveals Upcoming Features

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Late last week a webpage surfaced from Microsoft that provided a detailed roadmap of Windows 10 features and unexpectedly revealed several updates that have not been announced publicly.

All right, so the question is: in your opinion, is there anything on that list that would more than make up for Windows 10's drawbacks and make it worth using over an earlier version of Windows?

--JorgeA

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That was pretty much my reaction, too: there's nothing earth-shaking in there. Some of those features can be done with third-party applications, others with stuff that's already on the OS ("picture in picture" -- how is that different from viewing a video in a small window in the corner?). Some of these capabilities seem to present obvious security issues. Others I just don't care about. -_-

--JorgeA

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4 hours ago, ralcool said:

I'm hoping someone will explain why this is useful?

http://betanews.com/2016/04/11/linux-bash-windows-10/

It's cool, Linux, bash (as if we hadn't bash on NT since NT 3.51), you cannot really expect it to be also useful (or to be useful to anyone but those belonging to an extremely small subset of Windows users, those familiar with and liking Linux BUT using Windows 10, roughly 0.01% of the already small enough Windows 10 user base).

JFYI:
http://reboot.pro/topic/21074-windows-10-is-now-shipping-with-linux-command-line/

jaclaz
 

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Making a separate post, but connected to the news on new features of Windows 10 (the cool, 1337 ones):
http://arstechnica.co.uk/information-technology/2016/04/microsoft-adds-qr-codes-to-bsods-in-new-windows-10-preview-build/

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The latest Insider Preview build of Windows 10 (build 14316) has tweaked the Blue Screen of Death to include the most moddest of cons: a QR code.

Now, instead of scrambling to write down the CRYPTIC_ERROR_CODE, you can just whip out your smartphone and scan an on-screen QR code. If you don't have a phone or QR scanner to hand, the new Insider Preview BSOD also includes a help page URL that you can try to remember (or take a photo of).

In theory it's a pretty neat idea. In practice the feature isn't quite there yet: currently the QR code (and the written URL) always points you to the same "dealing with blue screen errors" page, irrespective of the actual error code.

Bolding is mine ;)

jaclaz

 

Edited by jaclaz
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