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To the shock of no one, Windows 10 users who upgrade to the Anniversary Update (scheduled for release next week), will not be able to disable Cortana using the settings.
If you compare the start menu settings of Cortana of the current version of Windows (version 1511) with those of the Anniversary Update (version 1607) you will notice that Cortana's off switch is no longer available (thanks Ian Paul @PC World for spotting that)
Cortana, the digital assistant that Microsoft touts as one of the major features of Windows 10 supports interaction via touch, typing, ink and voice.
Microsoft integrated Cortana deeply with the native search functionality of Windows 10. While linked to search, Windows 10 users may turn off Cortana currently to use search without it. While you might have to turn off web searches on Windows 10 as well, doing so ensured that you got search functionality that matched those of previous versions of Windows.
Windows users who turned off Cortana had two main reasons for it: either they did not need Cortana functionality, or they did not want it because of privacy implications.
[...] It is still possible to turn off Cortana, but not by using the preferences. The policy to disable Cortana is still available and you may use it to turn off Cortana on the device.
Please note that the Group Policy Editor is only available in professional versions of Windows 10. Most notably, it is not available in Windows 10 Home.
The linked article goes into detail on how to disable Cortana using the Registry in Windows 10 Home, and Group Policy Editor in Windows 10 Pro. However, Microsoft no longer makes disabling Cortana anywhere near as easy as it was.
(Score: 2) by SDRefugee on Wednesday July 27 2016, @11:14AM
*NO* I Won't... Sure MS *could* buy up Canonical/Ubuntu, but as soon as word of *that* happened, you can BET there would be a fork of Ubuntu immediately.. Or maybe not... Let MS *have* Canonical/Ubuntu, after all there's a bazillion other Linux distros.. I gar-on-tee you MS is NOT going to "extinguish" ALL of Linux with their "embrace, extend, extinguish" mindset.. I currently use Ubuntu, but if MS got their slimy tenticles into it, as in buying Canonical, I'd be moving my ass over to some other distro.. In
fact this current bullshit of MS, where they're putting bash on their "Windows NSA Edition" kinda gives me the creeps. I'm a "grey-beard" Linux user, started with Slackware back in 1994.
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday July 27 2016, @11:39AM
I gar-on-tee you MS is NOT going to "extinguish" ALL of Linux with their "embrace, extend, extinguish" mindset..
I suspect they fund systemd as a submarine to destroy OSes. MS would be a good purchaser for redhat, they'd fit right in.
As far as linux being impossible to destroy, the recent troubles were the last straw, and I moved to FreeBSD at home and work and am very happy with it. Love my ZFS, love my PF, life is better. After 20+ years of using linux, since 1994.
Probably more correct to say something like you can't extinguish "unix like operating system" as a concept.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 27 2016, @02:01PM
I'm doing the same thing... Linux used to be much better back in 2010/11. I loved Compiz on Gnome2 - which made for an awesome experience but both Gnome and KDE purposely broke compatibility and their version of compositing was awful. I miss being able to quickly zoom with the scroll wheel (awesome for presentations) but the feature I miss the most was the ability to selectively invert the colors of individual windows with a simple keypress (super+N/M). It made working in low light more enjoyable and helped reduce headaches (I suffer from migraines and white backgrounds are painful). I converted so many people just by demoing the wobbly windows, desktop cube, and window open/close animations... Instead of improving what we had, various projects decided to implode and reinvent everything!? Gnome3 and Unity truly suck balls and while KDE is nice it has such a wonky desktop paradigm that I've never been able to wrap my head around its' workspaces thing. There seems to be some kind of silent war on customization (looking at you Ubuntu). Cant move the task bar, cant move the window buttons, wtf! Want to write your own GTK3 theme? It's nothing like GTK2 and the little documentation that exists is a joke. Don't bother asking on IRC because the Gnome devs are fucking hostile pricks! So much time and effort spent rewriting stuff that already worked and then fighting with the communities that supported and relied on those projects. Then came systemd... GOD. DAMNIT. Sure, it works...hell, lots of people even think it's pretty good. Personally, I think its a pain in the ass and a power grab by Red Hat -- a company that is slowly following in Microsoft's footsteps. I simply do not trust systemd at all. I've looked through a fair bit of its' code and it's a hot mess (or it was a year ago). I really wish Debian would have released two versions: Debian with systemd and Debian without systemd. I hate that systemd is the default and I have to start every clean install by stripping it out (so ugly). Of course that's only a temporary solution because it will become increasingly difficult to avoid systemd as more projects form dependencies on it; sometimes unnecessarily. Soon they'll have significant influence over the Kernel! There's no conspiracy here, systemd is a hostile takeover of Linux...
Sorry for the rant... It's been building up for a while... I'm so glad to have FreeBSD! It turns out that those guys had it right all along...
(Score: 2) by KritonK on Wednesday July 27 2016, @12:57PM
There already is [linuxmint.com], and it is apparently more popular than Ubuntu.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday July 27 2016, @01:24PM
Linux would be damn near impossible to extinguish: All it takes is somebody, somewhere, with a copy of the source code and a C compiler, and the worst that can possibly be done to it is stagnation.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Wednesday July 27 2016, @02:26PM
I gar-on-tee you MS is NOT going to "extinguish" ALL of Linux with their "embrace, extend, extinguish" mindset
Correct; systemd is already busy doing that.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"