Windows 10 - Deeper Impressions

[JorgeA]

Some other possibilities, inspired by Windows 10:

 

[...]

 

 

-Noel

 

Love that last one. What a delicious pun!

 

--JorgeA

[NoelC]

I can't honestly take credit for that, being an engineer of very little brain (but some remaining integrity) myself.  Google "golden poo", then hit the Images link and see what comes up. 

 

In fact, for a daily dose of humor/irony, I recommend you do that with most any phrase at least once a day, then scroll down and look through all the results.  I guarantee you'll smile at least once.

 

-Noel

[Formfiller]

• The continuous update model...  Who really wants their OS to CHANGE every few months?  Who wants their settings reset by Microsoft every few months?  Sorry, but Microsoft has lost the plot entirely... It's not about running the OS, it's about USING the OS.  The OS needs to be STABLE and USEFUL.

 

-Noel

 

 

If you confront the metrotards with this, they usually babble something about "Apple and Google". But that's such a dumb argument. People get new OSes there by buying a new device. It's the new iPhone they care about, not the new iOS. The version number of iOS or the automatic updates of it are not particulary cool for the crowd MS wants to target.

 

No one will flock to MS tablets just because Windows is a moving target now (or whatever MS is doing this for - this W10 madness is still about tablets, right?! But wait, they de-emphasized this actually with the new start menu.. so what is this madness about at all?)

[NoelC]

I think it's Microsoft trying to manage a company full of misfits and IQ 90 engineers, to be honest.

 

Blinding with Brilliance was last millennium.  Now...

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

 

• The continuous update model...  Who really wants their OS to CHANGE every few months?  Who wants their settings reset by Microsoft every few months?  Sorry, but Microsoft has lost the plot entirely... It's not about running the OS, it's about USING the OS.  The OS needs to be STABLE and USEFUL.

 

-Noel

 

 

If you confront the metrotards with this, they usually babble something about "Apple and Google". But that's such a dumb argument. People get new OSes there by buying a new device. It's the new iPhone they care about, not the new iOS. The version number of iOS or the automatic updates of it are not particulary cool for the crowd MS wants to target.

 

No one will flock to MS tablets just because Windows is a moving target now (or whatever MS is doing this for - this W10 madness is still about tablets, right?! But wait, they de-emphasized this actually with the new start menu.. so what is this madness about at all?)

 

 

Great point, and great question.

 

Another argument to make against the metrotards is that, historically, Windows is mainly for productivity, whereas Apple and Google are mainly for entertainment. If Windows turns into the third toy OS full of cr*ppy little single-purpose apps, where will people go to get serious work done?

 

As for your question, I'm starting to think that what the madness is really about, is building and storing user profiles that can then be provided to marketers and authorities as needed. Those of us who live in the U.S. may recall about 20 years ago when the government pressured the banks to "know your customer" and bank clerks started asking us all sorts of nosy impertinent questions when we simply wanted to deposit a check.

 

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Looks like a teeny bit of user choice is being re-introduced with regard to updates:

 

Windows 10 Home users can now toggle automatic app updates in Windows Store

 

Stop automatic driver updates on Windows 10

 

Concerning the driver updates, the choices presented are way more inflexible than the historical set of options that includes "notify me but don't install" and even "download but let me decide whether to install."

 

But I guess that individual choice is increasingly considered passé as we are marched toward the New Order:

 

[source]

 

 

(Say, isn't that the same background color as for the Windows 10 "PC Settings" app?)

 

--JorgeA

 

[jaclaz]

I think it's Microsoft trying to manage a company full of misfits and IQ 90 engineers, to be honest.

 

Blinding with Brilliance was last millennium.  Now...

To be fair the 90 IQ is the combined one of the product managers/marketers, the engineers are more or less as intelligent as they were before, only they are asked to produce nonsensical and predatory programs.

 

jaclaz

[rn10950]

 

I think it's Microsoft trying to manage a company full of misfits and IQ 90 engineers, to be honest.

 

Blinding with Brilliance was last millennium.  Now...

To be fair the 90 IQ is the combined one of the product managers/marketers, the engineers are more or less as intelligent as they were before, only they are asked to produce nonsensical and predatory programs.

 

jaclaz

 

 

Yeah, I really don't see Windows 10's stupidity being the fault of the engineers. Windows 10 is about as stable as Windows 7/8, stability is not the issue that Windows 10 has. I feel really bad for them, actually. They probably dislike Windows 10 as much as we do, it's just upper management is forcing them to put out this trash.

 

That is, if these are the same engineers that worked on Windows NT4, 2000, XP and 7.

Edited August 29, 2015 by rn10950

[NoelC]

Windows 10 is about as stable as its predecessors IMO because they haven't changed the guts much (outside of deletions).

 

All they have are Modern App engineers on staff now, and I'm sorry but the Modern Apps I looked at back when I tried them out don't even do cut/copy/paste in the text fields.  We all did programming of that caliber back in school (which for me was in the 1970s).

 

And it didn't take a rocket scientist to have seen that Modern Apps needed to be made to work in Windows even back the first Windows 8 pre-release came out.

 

If this is insulting to some junior engineer who was forced to do bad work by his bosses, I apologize.  For the rest of you who may be reading this, including those of you who were promoted into decision-making positions, you should be ashamed of yourselves for doing such poor work.

 

-Noel

Edited August 29, 2015 by NoelC

[jaclaz]

Meanwhile in (or around) Cupertino:

1. They found out that an "Orthodox File Manager":

http://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml]http://softpanorama.org/OFM/index.shtml

may work nicely (better than an "Explorer" or a "Finder") to move/copy/organize files:

http://mac.eltima.com/file-manager.html

2. They are definitely going to allow blocking ads on iOS (though for the "wrong" reasons, i.e. to re-centralize their iAds platform or their "News App"):

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/08/24/ios-9-content-blocking-will-transform-the-mobile-web-ive-tried-it/

and there is already some bickering about the impossibility of doing proper A/B tests:

http://thenextweb.com/apple/2015/08/27/content-blocking-in-ios-9-is-going-to-screw-up-way-more-than-just-ads/which of course are (mostly) meaningless as this A/A test report highlights:

http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/aa-testing/

jaclaz

Edited August 29, 2015 by jaclaz

[Formfiller]

 

As for your question, I'm starting to think that what the madness is really about, is building and storing user profiles that can then be provided to marketers and authorities as needed. Those of us who live in the U.S. may recall about 20 years ago when the government pressured the banks to "know your customer" and bank clerks started asking us all sorts of nosy impertinent questions when we simply wanted to deposit a check.

 

--JorgeA

 

 

Sure, but that's not all of it. Noel is right - MS lost the plot.

 

Gimmicky crap like Cortana - you play with it for three days and then you forget it's even there. Voice control on a computer is annoying and has been tried for 20 years (Warp 4 anyone?)

 

Same with their "one OS" fetish. Is anyone even caring about phones running the same Windows PCs do? Why are they even advertising with it? Tell your average customers that "Windows 10 runs on this computer and on a phone!" and they couldn't care less. 

It's amazing how much time they spent on all this useless garbage.

 

"One OS", "Last Windows", "Windows as a service", "Cortana" - all this stuff is either appaling and/or doesn't excite customers in the slightest. That's why they have completely and utterly lost it.

 

They have no idea what they are doing and are throwing crap at the wall to see what sticks.

[NoelC]

Thank you.  What I like about you, Formfiller, is that you realize we've come to a point where there is no longer any reason to "be diplomatic".  You tell it like it is.  The world needs more people who speak plainly and know what they're talking about.

 

This situation has got to be called what it is - outright predation by a company that's overtly changing something decent - something that in its day changed the world - into no more than the most intrusive piece of malware the world has ever known.

 

For what it's worth as of today I have finally been able to muzzle Win 10. 

 

It took a "deny first" firewall strategy, a hosts file filled with lists of Microsoft snooping servers and tens of thousands of malware and adware servers, gpedit.msc settings to stop auto updates and a tool to check for pending updates without having to install them, a pretty draconian script that uninstalls quite a number of "features", further effort to specifically uninstall Cortana (thanks to maxXPsoft), 3rd party start menu and Aero Glass software to return usability to the desktop, a number of other measures I can't recall in detail - and of course unprecedented ongoing vigilance. 

 

EVERY SINGLE ONE of these measures is needed!  This is about as far from a single "switch" you can throw as you can imagine.

 

As an example, EVEN WITH the draconian script and everything else I've done, I STILL see the firewall regularly blocking attempts by things such as taskhostex and Silent Install Helper Client to contact servers all over the world.

 

I can confidently say, though, that by the log I've accumulated over the past 18 hours, not one damned telemetry packet has reached Microsoft or Google or anyone else.  Even the snooping done by web pages is virtually all thwarted.  Yet I can still get a list of pending Windows Updates, which I can vet / hide before installing.  And I can use all my applications.

 

This configuration won't keep, though, unfortunately.  There will no doubt be changes to server addresses.  There will ultimately be a new in-place upgrade in a month or three from Microsoft that will replace everything and turn back on many of the things I've deconfigured.  Too much is mutable.

 

While it may be possible to momentarily tame it and still have it run your programs today, I can't help but reach the conclusion that Windows 10 is simply unacceptable for any serious long-term use.

 

-Noel

Edited August 29, 2015 by NoelC

[JorgeA]

Microsoft to treat most Windows users like mushrooms:*

 

Consumers not in plans to get change lists for Windows 10 updates

 

(*) that is, kept in the dark and fed bu!!$h/t

 

--JorgeA

 

[NoelC]

What's worse is this:

 

Any of us with any experience at all in the real world realize that now that they've "gotten away with it", only an act of (whomever God looks up to when he wonders how HIS universe came into being) would be needed to get Microsoft to do documentation again.

 

Another aspect of this is the assumption that "serious business users will use Win 10 Enterprise" while "Win 10 Pro and below will be used by consumers".

 

Did someone forget about SMALL BUSINESS?

 

-Noel

Edited August 31, 2015 by NoelC

[JorgeA]

Thanks to @NoelC by way of @dencorso, a much classier avatar over there on the left panel.

 

--JorgeA