Windows 10 - Deeper Impressions

[JorgeA]

I remember that quote/screenshot from a movie but can't remember its title. Not important, anyway.

 

I'm pretty sure that the screenshot is from the early '80s film "War Games." I remember that line from the movie.

 

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

My opinion:  Unix and its derivatives (one of which is OS X) will persist.  Apple will continue to hold a minority market share, though will advance slowly.  Microsoft will recede, while Google - for some reason - will advance with products that are no better than any others and deliver just as much adware.

 

I suspect that the steadily climbing dotted line in the OS usage graphs that you've been posting (thanks for the link BTW) represents mostly Linux.

 

 

Those with skills seeking to do serious computing will struggle for a while but probably adopt a Unix derivative system in the end and be mostly irrelevant.  They'll deplete their retirement funds faster than usual and may end up destitute or wards of the state.

 

But hey, they'll have saved $$$ on their Windows licenses!

 

--JorgeA

[Drugwash]

 

I remember that quote/screenshot from a movie but can't remember its title. Not important, anyway.

 

I'm pretty sure that the screenshot is from the early '80s film "War Games." I remember that line from the movie.

 

--JorgeA

 

Yep, that's it! Good memory you have (unlike mine).

 

I wonder, if people would start the OS war game, would M$ acknowledge that the best move is not to play (with us anymore)?

[TELVM]

 

I remember that quote/screenshot from a movie but can't remember its title ...

 

It's from the milestone 1983 movie 'Wargames'.

 

The supercomputer 'Joshua' utters those lines after a frantic, doomed effort to completely disable W10 spyware.

Edited October 3, 2015 by TELVM

[Drugwash]

Seemingly unrelated but maybe not, in the big picture - I've just received a newsletter that says:

 

The lower chamber of the French Parliament just voted in favor of an international surveillance bill that would give the French secret service (DGSE) eavesdropping capabilities on par with the U.S. National Security Agency. The bill, officially called the projet de loi sur la surveillance des communications internationales, now moves to the Senate for deliberation.

 

If this bill makes it into law, French intelligence agencies would be allowed to spy on millions of people around the world. It would allow mass surveillance of international phone calls and allow the government to tap French undersea cables to vacuum up all internet traffic.

To make things worse, the bill includes limited mechanisms for independent oversight, no effective means to challenge actions by the intelligence agencies in court, and excessive data retention mandates of up to 8 years.

[...]

 

Wearing my paranoia hat, I could say the French secret service wouldn't even have to try very hard when most people would use Win10. I can only envision "personalised" updates sent to French citizens that would simply switch certain listening servers to local ones instead of Microsoft's. Easy as a breeze…

And then the rest of the world follows suit. A big happy family sharing everything, no secrets. No privacy either, but who cares…

[JorgeA]

Seemingly unrelated but maybe not, in the big picture - I've just received a newsletter that says:

 

The lower chamber of the French Parliament just voted in favor of an international surveillance bill that would give the French secret service (DGSE) eavesdropping capabilities on par with the U.S. National Security Agency. The bill, officially called the projet de loi sur la surveillance des communications internationales, now moves to the Senate for deliberation.

 

If this bill makes it into law, French intelligence agencies would be allowed to spy on millions of people around the world. It would allow mass surveillance of international phone calls and allow the government to tap French undersea cables to vacuum up all internet traffic.

To make things worse, the bill includes limited mechanisms for independent oversight, no effective means to challenge actions by the intelligence agencies in court, and excessive data retention mandates of up to 8 years.

[...]

 

Wearing my paranoia hat, I could say the French secret service wouldn't even have to try very hard when most people would use Win10. I can only envision "personalised" updates sent to French citizens that would simply switch certain listening servers to local ones instead of Microsoft's. Easy as a breeze…

And then the rest of the world follows suit. A big happy family sharing everything, no secrets. No privacy either, but who cares…

 

Reminds me of Winston Smith at the end of 1984:

 

"O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

 

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

Forget Excel, Photoshop, and all other boring applications intended for (eeew  ) serious work in Windows 10. Here's the biggest Win10 news of the year --

 

Candy Crush Soda Saga is now available on Windows 10

 

Everything is all right with the world now. I'm going out and getting myself 10 licenses.

 

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

...and finally, the truth comes out. The culprit for Windows' abandonment of 3D esthetics in favor of the 2D look was revealed this week:

 

 

--JorgeA

 

[jaclaz]

Reminds me of Winston Smith at the end of 1984:

 

"O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."

 

--JorgeA

Hmmm , I still find it more like Araman at the end of "The Dead Past":

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

"Happy goldfish bowl to you, to me, to everyone, and may each of you fry in hell forever. Arrest rescinded."

The goldfish bowl concept is the one that IMHO better describes the future of our digital lives.

 

Forget Excel, Photoshop, and all other boring applications intended for (eeew  ) serious work in Windows 10. Here's the biggest Win10 news of the year --

 

Candy Crush Soda Saga is now available on Windows 10

 

Everything is all right with the world now. I'm going out and getting myself 10 licenses.

 

--JorgeA

Well, no .

You also need a new tablet/phablet or similar, without a touch enabled something you won't likely go further than - say - level 25 or so, there is simply no way to use a mouse effectively for that .

As a side note, and OT as often happens, an IMNSHO interesting comparison between current privacy issues and nuclear power:

http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

is data going to become unmanaged waste?

jaclaz

Edited October 4, 2015 by jaclaz

[Drugwash]

As a side note, and OT as often happens, an IMNSHO interesting comparison between current privacy issues and nuclear power:

http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

is data going to become unmanaged waste?

The most startling thing of that speech is this tiny quote: "We kill people based on metadata".

 

I think we should seriously consider backing off from all the so-called social network services and keep all (sensitive) talk strictly to face-to-face meetings. Otherwise, at any time some id!0t could misinterpret a word, a phrase, a joke over the Internet and they put a hole on our foreheads "just to be on the safe side". Human life is meaningless to them and unfortunately this is not a game where you can reload the current level if you happen to die from a headshot.

Edited October 4, 2015 by Drugwash

[NoelC]

http://idlewords.com/talks/haunted_by_data.htm

is data going to become unmanaged waste?

 

Some random thoughts:

 

1.  I hope so.  The more that's collected, the more the pile will grow and the more effort it will take to slog through the sludge to mine anything at all that's harmful to us.  I hope it utterly clogs up all the servers with Tweets about what self-important people had for dinner and "social" networking BS spelled with "u" and "ur" for the words "you" and "your / you're"..

 

2.  Computers and networks are getting faster to counteract the clog, and with no end in sight.  The $200 Haswell-based small business server I purchased this year is phenomenally powerful.  Just with residential Internet service I can download 14 megabytes per second now.  Big Data processing capacity is already here.

 

3.  The more that individuals with skills work to block data gathering, the more we will stand out because of the absence of data in our online portfolio.  We will be flagged and targeted on the premise that those who block collection must have something valuable to hide.  We might even be prosecuted for "theft of service".

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

 

 

.

 

@neville2: I'm heading off to view the Device Manager in Win10 to see what you're saying for myself.

 

BTW, the link leads to the MSFN home page. Maybe it got changed?

 

--JorgeA

 

Try this link then  http://windows10_dpi_blurry_fix.xpexplorer.com/

 

Sorry, I'm not doing well here. I will type it. http://xpexplorer.com/windows10_dpi_blurry_fix/

 

 

I downloaded and installed this little program yesterday. It did improve the sharpness of the type, especially at 125%. It's also survived a couple of reboots.

 

The only glitch is that three of the four Windows Gadgets along the right edge of the screen are now slightly further away from the edge than they were before. Only the Clock gadget seems to have stayed where it always was.

 

How to uninstall the program? It doesn't show up in the installed programs list.

 

BTW, has anyone noticed how clunky the Windows 10 font size selector is? If you try to set it anywhere other than at either end of the bar, as soon as you release it it will jump to the nearest end: you can't leave it anywhere in between. What's the point of that? And the only settings available on my laptop are 100% and 125%. Why not just make it a switch then, like the On-Off sliders Win10 uses for so many other settings.

 

--JorgeA

[NoelC]

the only settings available on my laptop are 100% and 125%. Why not just make it a switch

 

 

For what it's worth, with a VM in a window sized at 1920 x 1200 I can see up to 200% on the slider.  If I expand the window to 2560 x 1600 the maximum number expands to 250%.

 

I agree that a slider that snaps in general is rather silly, especially since there is an advanced dialog elsewhere that lets you set it to any number you want.

 

It's got to be hyper-simple so they can reach complete idiots.  If, once they make it hyper-simple only complete idiots find use in it, well, then it sucks to be us.

 

-Noel

[JorgeA]

All right, so my most recent attempt at wordplay seems to have fallen flat (so to speak ). You might even say that I was PUNished for it by the application of complete silence...

 

Here's a more straight-up treatment:

 

Flat Design: Its Origins, Its Problems, and Why Flat 2.0 Is Better for Users

 

Since flat design’s emergence in 2011, Nielsen Norman Group has been a vocal critic of its inherent usability issues. Our primary objection to flat design is that it tends to sacrifice users’ needs for the sake of trendy aesthetics.

 

For years, users had been exposed to traditional signifiers of clickability, such as blue, underlined links and 3D effects on buttons. As design trends shift and users are exposed to new patterns, the average user’s ability to intuitively identify linked elements has evolved. But just because users are better at detecting linked elements doesn’t mean they don’t need any clues at all.

 

--JorgeA

[JorgeA]

It's got to be hyper-simple so they can reach complete idiots.  If, once they make it hyper-simple only complete idiots find use in it, well, then it sucks to be us.

 

I'm afraid you're right. I have to  in order not to  .

 

--JorgeA