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Right now, Microsoft is inspiring horror stories with "forced upgrades" and/or incessant nagging to upgrade to Windows 10. Yet more horror stories are being generated with the invasive "telemetry", and the personalized advertising found within the OS.
In recent weeks, the wife has complained about the Windows 10 nag. She runs Win7 Home Premium, and got the nag until I "fixed" it. I run Win7 Pro in my virtual machines, and I don't get the nag. I got the telemetry updates, but not the nag.
Those of us over a certain age remember the original separation between enterprise grade Windows NT (NT3, NT4, Win2000) and the consumer grade Windows (Win 1, 2, 3, 3.11, 95, 98, 98SE and Millenium) until they were joined together with WinXP. With WinXP, we saw the same OS used for consumer and enterprise, with advanced features enabled in Pro and Enterprise, and the same features disabled in consumer versions.
So, here we are today, with MS trying to phase out Win7, and force feeding Windows 10 to the world.
Going forward - is MS also going to force feed Win10 to the professional/enterprise world? Or, will they send the consumer and enterprise OS's down divergent paths? Are we going to see insecurity built into the consumer line of products, and better security and features built into the professional lines?
What does the future hold? Any guesses?
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Saturday December 26 2015, @01:00AM
I worked in a shop where we all had two windows boxen; one was connected to the Internet, the other was in a securely locked rack, with ethernet KVMs to our desktops. Only three employees had keys to those racks.
I also have a friend who is a paralegal, he writes briefs for attorneys. His partner is paranoid about malware, so he's not permitted to attach his PC to the Internet - he does all his work with Lexis/Nexis CD-ROM. He wants to install a driver, but the driver download page wants him to connect to the Internet then permit an "installer" to download the actual driver. He doesn't see any option to download the driver as a standalone.
A US intelligent agent once called me on the phone to ask whether it was possible for the end-user to disable Working Printlogger. We would have had a fat government contract but sadly I concluded that - at the time - end-users could disable it. "We keep our printer in a room all by itself," he told me "under constant video surveillance".
Industrial control systems are often connected directly to the Internet, without firewalls or anything. They shouldn't be but in my experience, industrial engineers are lax about security. I worked on an HMI/SCADA product that likely would stop working if a surprise upgrade to Windows 10 were to occur.
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