The amount of churn in the computer industry is staggering and the upgrade treadmill is a huge waste of resources to many, but I suppose it's the only way for them to continue making a profit. Personally, I think Windows as an OS reached its pinnacle sometime around the XP timeframe; since then it has mostly been frustrating UI changes and feature removals, "security" features designed to lock down your PC against you and instead follow the commands of some corporate entity, and massive amounts of data collection. Incidentally, that timeframe coincides with the rise of file sharing, and while the Internet certainly wasn't very safe or secure back then, it was an era of relative freedom.
I was quite disgusted when I saw that Windows 10's start menu contains adverts; maybe Microsoft realised that the average user would likely install adware themselves anyway, so they wanted to get into that industry too... all the evidence certainly supports that, including the now-well-known closing the upgrade window indicates consent shady behaviour common amongst malware/adware. It's clear that MS is really, really desperate to get as much users onto Win10 as they can.
To adopt a phrase MS originally used against Linux, "Windows 10 is a free upgrade only if your freedom and privacy are worth nothing."
I am not familiar with the technical details of XP, so these are mostly observations from a user and not developer perspective:
1. On my old Pentium 4 box with 256 MB of RAM any release after XP hardly met the OS requirements. Yes, hardware has come a long way since then, but IMHO there is no technical reason why a kernel with a bare bones desktop needs more than this amount. I never understood why Microsoft's recommendations for RAM went up to 1 GB and beyond. My pretty standard Arch Linux setup in 2016 does not take more than this right after boot.
2. XP had a rather long lifespan as an OS. It was only later that Microsoft got into the 2-4 year upgrade cycle, hoping customers would purchase a lot of the upgrades. What happened actually in many cases was a simple skip of alternate upgrades, concretely Vista and 8.
XP definitely had some pretty bad problems, like the fact that it was not really ready for the 64-bit era, manifested in things like the 2 GB limit on memory per process. I don't know about what they did with the 64 bit XP version; it looked a lot like a stop gap solution.
I used the EOL announced for Windows XP support as a nice excuse to get myself to use a GNU/Linux system. I have not looked back since then.
As an aside, there are still some holdouts of XP usage, such as some lab equipment software written many years back. In fact, Windows XP embedded was supported all the way till January 2016.
In case anyone wasn't aware, Ubuntu is best known as an introductory Linux desktop distribution that's made a few contentious design decisions over the years, furthering its separation from traditional FOSS community values and practices.
There are hundreds[1] of distributions built around the Linux kernel, and Ubuntu was the only one to try (and be immediately condemned for) including Amazon results in local searches, which anyone who didn't want was free to disable or else try any of the many, many Debian or Ubuntu based distros without.
I don't know of another version of Windows 10 that I can install if I don't like some aspect of how it collects data or prevents me from administrating my system, but even if there were, how many users would know to set up WSUS servers to prevent errant update behaviors?
Trying to equate Canonical and MS is desperate. Microsoft is undeniably worse. And Will Microsoft remove the ads? Of course not. When windows 10 first came out the only way to remove candy crush was with power shell.
You will jump through these hoops every upgrade unless you go through and disable certain updates, which you will need to keep up with for the rest of your life.
You now have to pay a monthly fee to avoid 30 second videos in Solitaire.
You think that's bad? I only upgraded to Windows 10 last week, and within minutes of booting it up, it quietly started downloading "Candy Crush Soda Saga" without my permission. I only caught it because I noticed the download indicator in my Start menu, at which point I cancelled it. Apparently there's no simple user option to turn these auto-downloaded apps off either.
The thing that grinds my gears is that MS cleary does not think people use Windows to do real work any more. None of this shit flies in an environment where you are billing hourly and need to be in control of your own software/hardware.
Indeed, their ever-changing "Get Windows 10" dialog is appalling. It's like a real life version of Cat Facts[1], or those stupid Best Buy emails I started getting after I bought a memory card from them and made absolutely sure I wasn't sharing my email address or signing up for anything. Hitting the "unsubscribe" link in the email resulted in more frequent spam from them, rather than actually unsubbing me.
Why should I have to spend any of my time on that shit instead of doing the work I have to do? I'm not a set of eyeballs for MS to sell. That shit might fly on Facebook or other free services, but the OS is a productivity enabler and that is all. The minute it actively tries to get in the way of my productivity in an effort to turn me into a product, I'm done with it.
Yes, Microsoft did. There are live tiles in the start menu that feature apps from the Microsoft app store. Of course, removing them from the start menu is as simple as right-clicking and selecting remove.
They don't really bother me enough to bother removing them but I can easily see how they'd be annoying to some.
> I think Windows as an OS reached its pinnacle sometime around the XP timeframe; since then it has mostly been frustrating UI changes and feature removals, "security" features designed to lock down your PC against you and instead follow the commands of some corporate entity, and massive amounts of data collection.
This is bullshit.
There have been many huge behind the scenes efficiency improvements plus security improvements.
Seriously, Microsoft has issues but this sort of tripe doesn't help the anti-Microsoft cause.
Innocent bystander here just trying to learn, not trying to defy you, but could you inform me of these improvements? It feels like each iteration of Windows is just getting slower. I feel as though the software is getting worse than the hardware is getting better? Your thoughts?
There's a sense of irony seeing this post today when just last night, as my girlfriend and I were planning a weekend trip, I asked her what OS she was using (not being familiar with anything beyond Win7), to which she responded Win8. I then asked if she planned to upgrade to Win10, noting a post I had read about MS charging for the upgrade after a certain date, to which she responded no...then a minute or two later, poof, Win10 auto-update starts...literally in the middle of a reservation transaction. She swears she never explicitly consented to the upgrade.
It's one thing to read about and discuss the issues with Microsoft's overt push to migrate the world to Win10. It's admittedly a completely different experience to see it happen right before your eyes. Some time ago, I half-committed to never owning another computer with a Microsoft OS beyond Win7, reasoning that you just never know if a useful tool may pop up that's only available for Windows. After last night's surprise, that commitment became unwavering.
There was a user action to install it, but it's pretty sneaky. MS changed the behavior of the upgrade question dialog that if you close it with x it will start the download and then install when ready. Your girlfriend must have clicked the x some time prior to the sudden upgrade.
Even my tech-savvy coworker who didn't want to upgrade got caught out by this. Anyway, you can still roll back, and then install never10.
Edit: After some thinking: Yes, i agree this is a dark pattern and MS needs to be held accountable to it accordingly. My only disagreement with the current direction of discourse is that people are not saying "MS manipulated me into an update", which is the truth, but "Windows updated on its own and there was nothing anyone could do", which isn't.
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They didn't change it, it was always that way. People only realized just now that it does that.
Also, please do take a look at the window people X out of and then are surprised about: http://i.imgur.com/aWFX0vc.png It states clearly that it is going to happen, and when it is going happen, and how to cancel it. The only way a user would be surprised about that is if they didn't read the message in the first place.
Surely you're joking?
"Click here to change your upgrade schedule" is in such tiny font of course no one will see it.
If Microsoft cared about its users, that option would be way bigger than it is.
Edit: They purposely put in all that information because they know people won't want to read through all that. That dialog is purposely designed to trick users because they've been taught that if they want to cancel, hit the "X" button, not find the tiny link to change the scheduling of this thing you don't understand.
Charitably, Microsoft learned from Windows 95 and Windows NT that if you expect users to upgrade on their own they won't do it. So now they are forcing the issue, albeit with bad execution.
Really? I don't see a lot of people running Windows 95 or Windows NT.
The lesson Microsoft should have learned is that if they come out with a genuinely-improved version of Windows, the user base will adopt it in good time without being herded like sheep.
It is in the normal font size for that system, compare it with the window title. The "this is recommended" and the date are the only enlarged bits in that window.
> all that
I don't know about you, but to me and most anyone i know the amount of text in that window is miniscule. Difference in perspective i guess.
As for what users are taught to: What i and everyone else i know have been taught to is "Read everything the computer prints on the screen unless you know exactly what it is."
if you were designing that dialog box to actually let users control whether or not they could upgrade to win 10 and made sure they made the right choice, is that how you would have designed the dialog box? again the dialog box microsoft designed was not to help out the users. it was to trick them into upgrading win 10.
the dialog is purposely built to trick users into clicking on the X, something users have been taught to do and what has always by default been, "cancel, don't do whatever this dialog box tried asking you to do."
also, when is the last time you saw a dialog box with that much text? which dialog boxes have you been reading exactly? even so, it's not as though the amount of text telling the user absolves them from their dark design patterns to trick users. microsoft did the bare minimum to let users know and changed the way the ui works by having the close button _agree_ to the changes rather than canceling them.
And to be fair, the misreporting and misrepresentation of the reality in the discourse about windows upgrades caused my pendulum to swing too far in the other direction.
MS is engaging in dark patterns, and that is what needs to be stated clearly, and directly, not the sensationalist, and wrong "windows updated automatically and there was nothing i could do".
> having the close button _agree_ to the changes rather than canceling them.
See that kind of thing is wrong. No such thing happens, period. The window tells you that at the date a change was scheduled, and gives you the options of "change", "cancel", "do now" or "dismiss the information". Closing it does not agree to anything, the agreement was taken implicitly before the window even opened. You're opted in, and given an option to opt out. And that is the dark pattern here.
How many dumb windows pop up all the time that you close out without really considering? I'm constantly getting "Apple Software Update", "Java needs updating", "Adobe creative cloud needs updating" and about 4000 other irritating update windows. Nobody carefully reads those because nobody has time for that many distractions.
If people could read we'd live in a completely different world, run by people elected by voters because it was in their best interests; where no one clicked a EULA, because the contents of them are insane; and no one bought the extended warranty.
'll most likely be downvoted for this, but whilst I sympathise with the plight of those being auto upgraded at inconvenience a small part of me thinks that those users who cannot be bothered to read the important OS information notices, are the ones who may need the upgrade the most.
As parent (+1'ed) notes, the message itself is quite clear in its intent. I would not for a second think that closing the window would infer the "cancel path" as the result.
Yes, they are being too forceful, and Microsoft ought to have given users a clear "I do not want to upgrade, ever" option, yet at the same time Windows 10 represents a significant increase in security, and in these days of massive botnets and what not that is a good thing on a big scale. In a roundabout way, I'm picturing this as forced immunisation for the greater good.
> Windows 10 represents a significant increase in security
Is that really so? It seems that last 20 years Microsoft just plays whack-a-mole game closing endless vulnerabilities instead of designing a better architecture that would not allow such things.
For example in Windows any app has full access to a device. The user can run any app written by anyone just by clicking a link on a web page or mail message. In Android these problems are partially fixed and in iOS the user is unable to run malicious applications at all.
I have no idea whether you're being sarcastic or earnest, but the post is funny either way. Describing "the user has a high amount of control over their own personal machine" as a problem is new. :)
I agree with that on the principle that it's a nice thing to have if it's optional. And amazingly enough, Windows 10 actually does have that: http://i.imgur.com/XV4Hpwd.png
It depends on how this is implemented. Is it enforced on a kernel level? What if some application, like browser or email client still allows starting an unsigned .exe file? Is Windows Store protected from publishing malware? Is there real privilege and access separation for different apps?
I'm on the edge about agreeing that this is a good thing, but you're right. Due to the long history of people ignoring updates and then blaming MS for when they get hit by the latest 0-day, parts of MS are probably feeling very antagonistic against some of their users at this point.
While security is a good goal, surely you can agree that they could have (and should have) rolled any major security updates into a small, free OS update for that purpose alone? They didn’t have to simultaneously revamp the entire UI, replace default programs with less-useful versions, etc.
> The only way a user would be surprised about that is if they didn't read the message in the first place.
Users don't read anything. They take whatever action is the quickest way to get rid of the dialog box they aren't interested in so they can do what they actually wanted to do with the computer.
The user did not request an upgrade. Microsoft uses dark patterns because in fact it is only Microsoft who needs upgrades to protect their future profits.
This is what a simple and honest upgrade message might look like:
“A major system update is available for your computer; for more information on Windows 10, please go [here]. IMPORTANT: In addition to changing Windows, this update could also require you to find and install updates for other programs on your computer.
What would you like to do?
[Upgrade Now] [Upgrade Later] [Do Not Upgrade]”
No marketing-speak, no crap about how many other people have been affected by the virus-er I mean upgraded, all they needed was to be straightforward with users. Why was that so hard for Microsoft to do?
As someone who held onto Win2k until it hurt, I still thought it might be a good deal back then when they offered the free upgrade from 7 to 10. I thought: I'll just wait until the last moment so I can see what kind of bugs come up. While upgrading one of my laptops to 10 to play around with it and be prepared (which was a horrible experience on it's own).
Now with the moment coming closer and seeing what they do there, I'm pretty sure I'll play the win2k game one more time with my win7 and see what comes up next. Even if I'd have to pay for it.
I thought Nadella would bring an ending to such hamfisted, Ballmeresque/Gatesian approaches what with him supporting such open projects lately. This is sad.
I don't think this debacle can be blamed on Ballmer, and certainly not on Gates.
In fact, I have to wonder if the reason why Ballmer was finally handed his walking papers by the board was that he was unwilling to greenlight these frog-marched upgrades to Windows 10.
Somebody very powerful at Microsoft, or perhaps elsewhere, wants everybody to accept this free update way, way too badly, and it's not clear why.
They're getting their asses handed to them by malware. They have a huge attack surface of users on various versions of Windows. Forced upgrades reduces that attack surface of older versions of Windows.
That's all I can think of. In open source software where this is more transparent, computer security is hard. Backporting fixes is harder, and expensive, and has its own risks. Microsoft can't be immune to the same problem.
I don't believe a single second that Microsoft is adopting this hard line for security considerations. They want to monetize their users. They want them to watch their in-OS ads, they want to accumulate data on people, they want them to go to bing for search, etc.
Exactly. If Microsoft cared about user security, they've had the last three decades to do something about it. This is all about monetization and tracking.
I forgot it and completely agree, they want a cut of anything installed on the machine. And following this logic I wouldn't be surprised if they would make it increasingly difficult to install any non store app. Requiring them to be signed first, then signed by them against a fee, then simply not allowed like iOS does.
Which is why not having the option to turn down upgrade after having been upgraded to windows 10 is problematic.
They did do something similar with Windows RT, but that was completely locked down with no existing Win32 app base to worry about. And yes, they do have uninstall I think with 30 days before files are deleted.
They are already doing it with drivers. Windows 10 will only load Microsoft signed drivers and Windows Server 2016 will only load WHQL signed drivers for which you have to pay a fee.
It's mostly about Windows Phone, which needs apps, which means the store needs users. If it gets users then people will bother to develop cross phone/desktop apps. Of course no one uses the store still, even as Microsoft tries to force/trick you into logging in with a Microsoft ID.
They're rushing to copy all the things I dislike about Apple. They're also rushing to emulate the things I hate about Google and Facebook. Meanwhile they are doing little to fix what I don't like about Microsoft, nor are they copying many of the good things.
In Zero to One there is an excellent chapter about the dark side of competition and how it makes you cargo cult your competitors instead of thinking creatively. This is an example.
Don't compete. Innovate and focus on the user and the problem domain, not the others. Otherwise you just become an inferior copy.
Windows 10 Spyware Edition is a misstep like Google Plus.
They can address security issues (as they always have) without forcing an OS upgrade.
The low-level 'attack surface' is mostly unchanged. Windows 10 is not a total rewrite of Windows Vista/7/8, or anything close to it. As proof of this assertion, you'll note that most security patches that apply to Windows 10 will correspond to equivalent patches for earlier versions.
Bill is back, and he is a major force behind Nadella, Nadella is just a marionette. Yes, Microsoft used to be a better citizen when Ballmer was in charge.
i wish some trial lawyers found an opportunity here for a class action against MS. Couple weeks ago one of our laptops became Win 10. May be it is better than Win 8.1, yet i still would have wanted to be a part of that decision :)
I'd personally see people just stop using Windows. The more people using Linux, the more money in the market for Wine to get better and better replace all the Windows APIs for everyones "I cannot use Linux because X program is Windows only" software.
I mean, I'm already playing Skyrim natively on an AMD GPU thanks to Gallium Nine. And that is only because there has been a lot of internal pressure in the community to have the best Windows only games running here. The more people we get to switch, the more market for businesses to make the process of switching easier.
Of course, we still need Ubuntu (or SteamOS) computers in stores. That would be a nice start. It is hard to get people to switch when they need someone with technical know-how to violate their warranties and give them no commercial support unless you have a small business IT shop like what I run in the evenings that will do it.
>Never10 does NOT prevent the installation of Windows updates, including the infamous Get Windows 10 (GWX) update KB3035583. Never10 simply employs Microsoft's documented and sanctioned configuration settings to instruct it NOT to change the installed version of Windows.
That would not have helped in this situation OP stated what hurt them was the huge amount bandwidth (6GB) used on an account where they pay per MB.
What it actually does [0] is set group policy according to the Microsoft specified methods [1]. It would have helped in this situation as not only would Windows not have downloaded the update in the first place, it would have deleted it had it already been somehow downloaded.
While MS is clearly using dark patterns here IMO the user is at mostly fault for the internet bill. If you have an expensive metered internet connection and you don't do all the necessary steps to prohibit autoupdates it's only a matter of time until this repeats itself with any other software installed. The Win10 update never circumvented a disabled auto-update-download setting, correct?
I think it's weird that so many people want to demonize Microsoft for snapping to a model that Apple has been using for a decade. I'm currently in one of those weeks where every time I wake up my iPad I have to click through two separate dialogs to tell it that, no, I don't want to install the updated version of iOS it downloaded without asking. Yet everyone is fine with this. I mean, except the Linux guys, I guess.
Yes, but now they're resorting to (IMO, at least) some dark patterns to essentially force or deceive users into an upgrade, which is not something Apple has done (yet, at least).
I finally got around to updating my iPhone and iPad and I also found those endless nags very, very off-putting. But what MS has done is much worse, with their upgrade-by-deception tactics. I've lost all interest in Windows 10, not that I had much to begin with.
I have realized that these people are incompetent and can't be trusted with updates. I've neutered the update on my iphone 6s and my W10 desktop and couldn't be happier. Like I had a 4 month uptime on my W10 install till I had to install a driver for my oculus and reboot.
No, it doesn't. I'm running iOS 9.0 on my iPhone, because that's the last jailbroken version. My phone NEVER nags me to upgrade. NEVER.
Now if I plug it into my computer and run iTunes, iTunes does ask. But I don't do that very often, as there's no reason to plug your phone into a computer these days.
Yeah, sure buddy.. I learnt my lesson when my 4S turned into a laggy POS after updating the OS. I was forced to sell it off because it became super slow. Never going to trust Apple again.
As far as I understand it, the auto upgrade happens when you have "give me recommended updates the same way I get important updates" checked in Windows Update. That isn't a default setting - you need to consent to it. Sure, maybe it was a year ago that you clicked it, and they never said a full OS version update was something that would land in that category, but it's not like they're pushing mandatory installs to everyone.
They just flash a dialogue up with an opt out button. Closing the dialogue is consent to go ahead with the update. Most people close those kind of annoying pop ups without reading the message. So technically MS aren't push a mandatory update - de-facto to millions of people they are though.
They pop up an information dlg telling you it will be upgraded. clicking x like close does nothing as it should. The lesson to learn is to not enable os auto updates, anywhere.
You can't say no. It's like Windows 10 upgrade. Do you want to upgrade now or do you want to upgrade today. I don't call that leaving the option to say no.
It's not weird, and succinctly explained in one phrase: "If I wanted the Apple way, I'd buy a Mac." People do not want Microsoft to turn into another Google nor Apple. They want MS to be different from the others, so they can actually choose what they want and not get a product that differs from other offerings by nothing more than who made it.
And in my case there is the added frustration that I will have to switch to another platform which has its own problems (linux). I guess for IT professionals learning linux is a good thing anyway. But I am not an IT professional and I have little appetite to dedicate some time to relearn the basics.
Note that that's for OS X. iOS, for what it's worth, will always check for and download OS updates when certain conditions apply (connected to Wi-Fi and power), with no way to disable it short of DNS hacks - which is obnoxious. All you can do is delete already downloaded updates. And if you ever go through with the update, it's impossible to downgrade: the bootloader forbids it. Both of these are far worse than Windows.
But for all of that, it won't actually start the update without getting consent. I guess that makes a big difference.
Fair enough, few would buy an iPhone instead of a PC. But I consider anti-consumer behavior partially a question of ethics, not just a factor in practical buying choices; and I don't think there is a good reason to have different ethical standards for, or generally to separate in such considerations, desktop and mobile OSes, and in particular reject the idea held by some (maybe not you) that the latter are less important as general computing devices because they're for "content consumption" or whatnot. So when comparing Microsoft's behavior to Apple's, to me all their devices are relevant.
I agree that Apple is becoming hostile to its users. iOS has now a level of nagging for Apple services which is similar to the cheapest PCs full of crapware. Please us Apple music. Please use Apple Pay. Please use iCloud. etc. You have to click and confirm you don't want any of that shit pretty much at every OS update. And their "do you want to update now or do you want to update today" is also unacceptable.
I just don't see how that makes it OK for microsoft to do the same.
I disagree with your premise. Plenty of people demonize(d) Apple for it, too. I generally hear what Microsoft is doing with Windows 10 described as "moving to the Apple model."
I have a Apple iPhone 5 and a Mac (OS X) currently neither of them forced an OS upgrade to me. I always needed to explicitly click the install button.
With software its a little bit diffrent, but major/minor OS upgrades i.e. OS X 10.9 > 10.10 > 10.11 (everything between 10.11.1 etc) needed an explicit click and on iOS the same.
> I think it's weird that so many people want to demonize Microsoft for snapping to a model that Apple has been using for a decade.
PATENTLY false. Yes they shove the upgrade down your throat metaphorically pretty hard, it's going to appear on top of the App Store on OS X and all over the iOS one, and it will put a notification on your Settings app, but to my knowledge there is no way for iOS or OS X to initiate a system update on it's own. And we've looked into having our monitor box at work do that so we have one less thing to maintain, it isn't easy.
The windows boxes in our office have been upgrading themselves, much to everyone's dismay:
The one in the meeting room decided to upgrade and then break in the middle of a client presentation I was leading. I got my Mac and continued on, but it was embarrassing.
My colleague's machine upgraded itself overnight, and in the process deleted a bunch of files and corrupted creative suite.
I know having as many people as possible on the latest version is a good thing from a platform perspective, but in reality it's such an irresponsible thing to do. It just lets people know that Microsoft are quite happy to reach in and break their stuff at any point.
If anything it's persuaded the last few Windows holdouts in the office to switch to the Mac or Linux in short order.
Edit: Note that i am not disagreeing that MS is engaging in a dark pattern by opting-in users implicitly, and then only informing them about said opt-in having happened. The snide and snark in this post only came about because i realized rather suddenly what was actually happening, and how the misreporting and sensationalizing had skewed this whole thing in a way that the reporting helped literally nobody but people's click counters.
Know that the upgrade is not unavoidable, and if you have friends who don't want it, tell them how they can avoid it.
> The windows boxes in our office have been upgrading themselves, much to everyone's dismay
Go around and ask which of your colleagues closed this window without actually reading it: http://i.imgur.com/aWFX0vc.png
Also ask them about how many bloody times prompts about upgrading have come up, again and again and again. People are not perfect robots that crunch data, fatigue sets in at some point, which is exactly what microsoft preyed on in this case. Crunching data is what we use computers for, or at least try to.
Ok, then report "MS is using dark patterns", not "Windows is upgrading on its own and there was nothing we could do to stop it". Those are both very serious failure modes, and both need to be adressed, but by obscuring which one is actually occurring you're doing nobody a favor.
Blaming the victim is doing nobody a favour either.
The distinction between “windows is upgrading on its own and there was nothing I could to to stop it [once it started]” and “microsoft used a bunch of shifty tricks to fool me into pressing a button that supposedly gave my consent, and then there was nothing I could do to stop it” becomes pretty moot, pretty fast.
Yes, the latter is technically correct, and should be the main focus. But for the victims who are wondering what the fuck just happened, a snide, “did you read the dialogue before closing it?” isn’t helpful. It comes off as smug because because you consider yourself superior.
If there was more nuance to your original comment, you probably should have made it in the first place. Your one-liner only came across as snark.
> The distinction between .... becomes pretty moot
I vehemently disagree, since by identifying the actual issue you can, instead of frightening other people into fearing an automatic upgrade at any time, inform them about what is actually happening and better prepare them to prevent the same happening to them.
That said, yes, my previous comment was snide snark. At that point it was all i had upon realizing how badly the whole discourse was fucked up towards not being useful to anyone.
> I vehemently disagree, since by identifying the actual issue you can
I understand where you’re coming from. And I already agreed that what actually happened – the shifty practice to supposedly gain consent – should be the discussion. My entire sentence about the distinction is with regard to giving consent, which is what your original one-liner alluded to. Microsoft tricked people so they would have the excuse after the fact that you gave consent, when they really do no such thing.
So in most ways we probably agree on the actual issue – but your original one-liner came across as blaming the victim for being human – my reaction to it was to blame microsoft for intentional manipulation of human nature to achieve their objective, without the person’s consent, against the person’s desire, in a way that tries to make it look like their own fault.
If nothing else though, the snark comment prompted us both to elucidate our viewpoints and (I hope) find common ground.
If the common ground is that we're somehow in a situation where both Windows users, and MS are being harmed, and the only people benefiting are news websites who get clicks for sensationalist headlines that do nothing to help the users, then i think we've reached it. :)
It's pretty much unprecedented that closing a window is giving consent to have your machine upgraded. I'm not sure you can blame users for not realising this.
The cancel button is in the blue box under the huge date, at system-normal font size. OK does the same thing as [X], dismiss the opt-in the OS informed you about.
The problem here being that such an opt-in happened in the first place.
Besides opening up a sales channel, is there SOMETHING that can explain what the right way to license Office + Windows in a 50-employee business?
I've gotten by for SOOO long with samba + OSS, and our main stack is OSS, and have remained on the up + up with licensing. But with CAL's, Domain Controllers, File servers, etc, etc -- It seems to get so obnoxiously expensive fast --- for the only benefit of entrenching yourself to Microsoft tech?
Given that I have to maintain a fleet of 40-50 Windows devices, Along with Samba 4, is there any good tech stack OSS or otherwise for managing all that?
If the company only has 5-10 employees, it is pretty safe to assume they will not have a dedicated IT function who would worry for them about volume licensing, domain joined systems, etc. They likely just buy a laptop on Dell's website which comes with whatever version of the OS Dell tells them is good for them.
It's still a hard sell. If a machine comes with Windows [Version] Home edition, there are business reasons to upgrade.
If you buy a business machine with Professional edition, it already services all the business needs.
I used to have good reason to push volume licensing when Enterprise was necessary to get Bitlocker.. but now there's very little business reason to do so.
As I understand it, you have to be on an enterprise installation to avoid the nagware, the sort that typically places hundreds of users under centralized group policy administration. Just buying a "Professional" or "Ultimate" edition license isn't enough.
Using dark UI patterns (like dialogs without cancel button) is disrespectful to users. They bought Windows to get stable and reliable operationg system. The system that updates at night and gets drivers or software broken is nowhere near stable. Even linux (which is awful as desktop system) doesn't autoupdate.
It might be acceptable if Microsoft gave their product away for free: many free products (e.g. Sublime or Skype) include annoying autoupdate popups for non-paying users. But Windows is quite expensive software.
Microsoft's motives are just getting more paid services, getting more telemetry (for free! they do not pay for it) and maybe adding some kind of subscription in future. Recent Windows versions like 7 or 8 seem to be 'good enough' for most customers so they do not want to upgrade for free let alone buy newer versions.
I disagree. Linux is great as a desktop system precisely because you're in control, not some third-party. And in terms of desktop functionality there is no meaningful difference anymore.
But the drivers problem isn't really behind them. I just purchased a lenovo laptop after reading similar comments noting the progress of linux desktop, and can't get the laptop to connect to an external monitor, despite the device being on ubuntu's certified list.
If you post your model laptop on the Ubuntu forums or on reddit.com/r/linuxquestions with your issue, you'll likely get either a solution or enough information to know how about soon support will be added for your device. It's often a solved problem just with no upstream patch yet.
Plenty of windows machines, with MS logo stickers, have terrible windows drivers. Or have drivers that sort of work in Microsoft Windows 8.1 with Bing but not in Windows 10.
Graphics adapters and WiFi are still the two things you have to really pay attention to if you are buying a new PC with the intent of running anything other than the OS it's delivered with.
I'm 100% positive that for every single instance of Linux having some driver issue, I can find 10 times the amount of issues on Windows through a simple google search.
So yeah we can go on all day about the driver issues in Linux or we can go on all decade about the driver problems on Windows.
I my self bought a brand new laptop from dell with Windows 10, the laptop would not wake from sleep the first time I opened the lid, I had to close it again and re-open it every time. When it did wake up the wifi wouldn't work.
Driver issues are a common occurrence on Windows and in my experience more common on Windows than Linux.
No usually when you buy a laptop, it pretty much works out of the box. Now there might be some smaller compatibility issues but not some core feature simply not working like this.
Not for all Linux distributions. A lot of Linux distributions give you lots of control at the expense of reading an excessive amount of documentation just to tweak things to your satisfaction.
Linux might be great if you have enough free time for learning how to set it up, experimenting and fixing bugs. Also you'll need time to optimize it. For example out-of-the-box Debian boots slower that Windows. And latest Ununtu is maybe 2 or 3 times slower than Debian, I don't remember when I saw such a long operating system bootup. Maybe it needs SSD but I don't want to buy it.
Windows might be great if you have enough free time for learning to disable all the crapware, experimenting and fixing bugs. Also you'll need time to optimize it. For example out-of-the-box Windows on an SSD boots slower that Ubuntu and Windows boots slower than any Linux OS on an HDD. And latest Windows 10 is maybe 2 or 3 times slower than Windows 7, I don't remember when I saw such a long operating system bootup. I know for certain it needs SSD but I don't want to buy it.
(this is my experience, and the experience of many on the Windows 10 forums)
Realistically, who reads and reasons about every line of code that their system runs? For the most part, people don't ever really consider software beyond just installing it. In that case, maintainers have control.
I choose from among the dozens of options, based on functionality and configurability. That's the degree of control that I've needed. Saying that "control" would require someone to read every line of source is a wonderful strawman.
> In that case, maintainers have control.
And if they change the software in a way that I dislike, I can fetch a previous version of the program and use it that way forever, or disable the changes in the new version. Thankfully, I don't usually have to do that. There's almost always another piece of software that can be reconfigured to do what I want.
> I can fetch a previous version of the program and use it that way forever
Unless it is a web browser because modern frontend developers tend to make their web apps compatible only with the latest version of a browser they use on their Mac.
Point taken. Still, if it's important to me for something local, I've got the choice. It doesn't need to be useful with every program on my machine to be a useful capability to me.
You don't have to read every line of code. But if some maintainer goes and adds something like the Win 10 autoupdate, you are allowed to go and revert that and provide an alternate fork or distribution (assuming GPL license or similar). You can't do that for Windows, because legally you're not allowed to.
This is a good time to mention selling Windows to a non-profit foundation, so that Windows would truly be actually free. I remember a comment mentioning retirement funds.
I tune cars as as as a hobby. My current setup is based around windows xp due to driver supports (technically an embedded application). My plan was to upgrade to a windows 8 machine and emulate an xp install. But I'm not going to anymore. I tune while driving and it could be catastrophic to have the machine install updates. I'll continue with the air gapped xp machine. Too bad because I was looking forward to not using a machine that was a hundred years old.
Your decision is the correct one, but I'm pretty sure that no consumer version of Windows has ever shipped without a requirement that you shouldn't use it for real-time/safety-critical purposes.
For exactly the same reason I had an XP virtual machine, that I was running at whatever computer I was currently using. Worked like a charm on all host OSes, including Ubuntu for example.
If you would update to 8, which is more of a TS interface with an ap store, why not windows 7? You could have a 64bit OS with a nice quad core+ cpu which is impossible in XP. Then you could virtual machine xp on top of that and have the latest and greatest. XP is rather dated to say the least. The only reason to run it is if you have older hardware such as a pentium 4 single core processor on board.
Welcome to being a victim of sensational misreporting. Win7 does not upgrade itself randomly or without telling you. It will schedule an upgrade, then tell you about it and give you a chance to cancel it beforehand. And using something like https://www.grc.com/never10.htm you can also disable the scheduling.
> Win7 does not upgrade itself randomly or without telling you. It will schedule an upgrade, then tell you about it and give you a chance to cancel it beforehand
Technicaly true.
Practically, it will sneakily get a human to eventually let the upgrade in. Just as we've been seeing all around.
Windows 7 is solid. I had Windows 10 on my laptop and downgraded because it provided zero benefit. There are ways to prevent Windows 7 from from nagging you to upgrade.
Can we get this changed to the original source? Not only does the Softpedia article not add anything substantial to the original source, it's also factually inaccurate. Windows 10 wasn't installed on any of their computers, the issue was just that it racked up a huge telecom bill for caching the installer. It also didn't impede any operations or disable any computer.
Our business's recent experience with forced upgrades
Our accounting team used Quickbooks Pro 2014 which worked on Windows 7. Then all our machines went to Windows 10, and Quickbooks no longer worked. Our accounting team basically did no work for a week while they did a combo of trying to figure out which software to migrate to (went with Quickbooks Online), recover any missing data, and make sure the data migrated successfully to the new accounting package.
The nice part of this forced migration is that Quickbooks online does not require Windows, so three less Windows boxes to support at our shop as we have moved the acct dept to Linux boxes.
The rule of unintended consequences in full effect.
This isn't "hacker news", this is "corporate news". It's amazing that some people consider themselves "hackers" when all they use is VS and Office programs on Windows and actively stay away from any process they perceive as difficult.
MS kind of infiltrated HN in 2015, visible to HN users during the Build 2015 conference in early 2015. Coincidentally Microsoft and Y Combinator formed a partnership, https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/stevengu/2015/02/09/y-combi... and somewhere I read that they formed a joint venture (but I haven't found the source again).
In 2015 a lot of new (green) sock puppet and corporate accounts appeared that down vote comments and flag stories that share not their "nice vision". The worse situation around MS all started when Gates (who is apparently still a driving force) replaced Ballmer with Nadella, a marionette. I am viewing HN using a third party front end, and every time a unfavorable MS story appears it doesn't last long on HN until it gets flagged - no other company story is handled that negatively or flagged in any way that often. So there is a clear pattern behind it. To make my point clear, also this story quickly vanished from the HN frontpage. And I would have no chance to even know about it. HN used to be a better site :(
Microsoft has no special status on Hacker News. It's true that HN sees a flurry of MS stories on their big conference day, but it's also true of Google, Apple, and Amazon's annual conference days, and maybe others. That's how they all like to do their big tech announcements. Each time it happens, people complain that HN has fallen into the clutches of MS|Google|Apple|Amazon, but nothing has changed at our end. Actually we raise the bar a bit on those days so that only 3 or 4 such stories stay on the front page instead of 7 or 8. They'd probably get more attention overall if they staggered their releases through the year.
There have been a lot of unfavorable stories about MS on HN, including recently. We don't do anything special to penalize them, nor do we let users abuse flagging in the way you suggest. In fact the Windows 10 update nagware saga has appeared numerous times on HN's front page, including multiple stories about clicking 'x' on the dialog box, how it screwed some African satellite operators, etc. The current one fell suddenly off the front page because of software (it set off the flamewar detector).
If MS "infiltrated" HN, it's news to me and I'd like to know about it. It's our job to protect the integrity of this place for the community and we take it seriously. When we see gaming and manipulation we crack down on it hard. But actually the BigCos aren't the ones who do such things. They're (rightly) too risk-averse.
If you think you see evidence of manipulation you should email us at hn@ycombinator.com. When we get emails like that we always look into it.
Those stories fell off the front page because of software that penalizes overheated threads, which tend to be shallow and sensational. That software has been running for years.
Even if an automatic penalty hadn't kicked in, moderators would have penalized that first link (even if we personally agree with what it says). First, it's a duplicate that adds no new information over previous incarnations of the story (which have already appeared more than once on the front page, already an indulgence and certainly not a pro-MS one). Second, it's a garden-variety riler-upper, and those aren't a good fit for HN, as should be well known by now.
None of these mechanisms has anything to do with Microsoft. I'm pretty sure that the bias you're arguing for doesn't exist at our end. How sure are you that you're not simply noticing things because they fit your interpretation?
Ok, fair enough. It's certainly a fine line. Though, a company is playing a not so nice but well known game, a game it is known for decades. And one can see how reasonable objective comments get downvoted and highly opinionated pro-biased comments get upvoted to influence the audience. And about stories, you rarely see objective stories about that company, because the fear to loose ads or the big gorilla and its lawyers. I will continue using a third party frontend, as HN frontpage hides some of the "heated discussions" or "high voted stories" that got flagged a lot too. But I am here because of the insightful comments and stories.
In their quest to remain relevant and join the 1 Billion install club for their latest OS they're using every trick in the book to fool users into upgrading their OS just so that they can meet their timelines. What they didn't account for was the backlash and rage their malware inspired tactics would ignite. Forcing people to upgrade to Windows 10 against their wishes is despicable and disgusting.
What about "Unpatched Windows PC shuts down N instances of x,y or z due to worm/virus/malware," which is a headline far more common than this completely ridiculous headline.
This is the technological equivalent of that one person pontificating and whining on about someone who once knew someone who died in a car crash BECAUSE they WERE wearing their seat belt.
Back before updates were forced, users have proven themselves too clueless to manage their own PCs. I don't care what people do as long as they are not connected to the internet. It's a shared resource.
For security updates, yes. But this is not a security update. Upgrades that completely change the UI, alter the set of programs that are capable of running on the platform (potentially disabling critical software), and add new processes that do things behind the scenes that you might not want (like monitoring/tracking etc.), and may not even be compatible with your hardware are another thing entirely.
Updates or upgrades should only be forced when backwards compatibility is preserved.
I was quite disgusted when I saw that Windows 10's start menu contains adverts; maybe Microsoft realised that the average user would likely install adware themselves anyway, so they wanted to get into that industry too... all the evidence certainly supports that, including the now-well-known closing the upgrade window indicates consent shady behaviour common amongst malware/adware. It's clear that MS is really, really desperate to get as much users onto Win10 as they can.
To adopt a phrase MS originally used against Linux, "Windows 10 is a free upgrade only if your freedom and privacy are worth nothing."