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Ben Funk over on TechReport has linked to a Terry Myerson blog post where he states that in early 2016, the "Windows 10 Upgrade" update will be changed in status from "Optional" to "Recommended". Therefore, if you haven't changed your Windows 7 system from automatically installing updates to manually notifying, but not installing, now is a good time to make that change, and audit every single "patch" you see. There have already been reports of users unknowingly experiencing ISP bandwidth overages due to downloading a massive 3 GB file due to the "Optional" update that was not requested, but Microsoft seems to be throwing caution to the winds.
In the blog post, Myerson has this statement: "Depending upon your Windows Update settings, this may cause the upgrade process to automatically initiate on your device. Before the upgrade changes the OS of your device, you will be clearly prompted to choose whether or not to continue. And of course, if you choose to upgrade (our recommendation!), then you will have 31 days to roll back to your previous Windows version if you don't love it." Historically, Windows has been far cleaner to install on a blank disk than to upgrade in place, so this sounds like a recipe for many support calls. There also seems to be no backtracking on any of the privacy concerns, or perhaps taking the "zero telemetry, selective update install" functionality promised (but not yet delivered) to Enterprise customers, and extending it to consumer licensees who value their privacy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Saturday October 31 2015, @03:28PM
I've been watching the Microsoft trainwreck from the sidelines since Windows 98, which with very few exceptions has only gotten worse. When Vista came along I thought for sure that would be Redmond's Waterloo. Then they outdid themselves with 8, and now this. Is playing a few games at home really worth all this nonsense? Is having a heart-to-heart chat with management about the company's IT really less headache than this rampant abuse?
Some will say that Apple and Google are better ways to go, but they're not intrinsically better, just earlier in the abuse progression. Shift the world's computing from MS to Apple and watch them pull the same nonsense in a fortnight. FOSS is the only way to go.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday October 31 2015, @05:17PM
Same here. Aside from understandable architectural or system requirement caveats, I would have been hard pressed to find anything truly horribly wrong with Windows 95 or NT 4. Then came Windows 98 and IE 4 with all of that insane "web integration" crap. XP Bozo the clown theme, product activation, letting IE 6 turn in to a cesspool for malware until Firefox kicked it back in to gear, the whole Windows Vista fiasco, killing of normal drop down menus in MS-Office, Windows 8 and it's craptastic tablet UI, their indecisiveness about 8.1 being a service pack or new version, not being able to count to "9", now spyware and shoving "updates" up everyones butt... really, when will people have enough?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 31 2015, @06:03PM
When the software they use migrates to *nix.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 01 2015, @02:44AM
And the software they use won't migrate to *nix unless enough people migrate to *nix, because otherwise the market just isn't there. This is really the problem: People do not value their freedoms, but instead value convenience. This is the folly of the "open source" movement.