Speaking to Windows Weekly, Microsoft Marketing chief Chris Capossela explained that users who choose Windows 7 do so “at your own risk, at your own peril” and he revealed Microsoft has concerns about its future software and hardware compatibility, security and more.
[...] There’s only one problem with Capossela’s statements: they are complete rubbish. Windows 7 is no less secure than Windows 10 (it will be supported until 2020) and no less compatible with new hardware and software. In fact its far greater market share means it is developers’ priority and has greater compatibility with legacy programmes and peripherals. If Fallout 4 won’t run on your Windows 7 computer, it will be upgrading your components not installing Windows 10 which fixes that.
As for fragmentation, the only issue that creates is for Microsoft and its target of getting one billion devices running Windows 10 within 2-3 years of release.
Original article from Forbes. Article is behind annoying ads and JavaScript.
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The Forbes 30 Under 30 list came out this week and it featured a prominent security researcher. Other researchers were pleased to see one of their own getting positive attention, and visited the site in droves to view the list.
On arrival, like a growing number of websites, Forbes asked readers to turn off ad blockers in order to view the article. After doing so, visitors were immediately served with pop-under malware, primed to infect their computers, and likely silently steal passwords, personal data and banking information. Or, as is popular worldwide with these malware "exploit kits," lock up their hard drives in exchange for Bitcoin ransom. The exploit used was a version of hackenfreude.
Forbes has recently taken some flack from Soylent News readers for its heavy-handed approach to ad blockers.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @09:25PM
Hitler wanted all peoples to have a usable desktop, systemd distros are slower, tested Ubuntu, Debian, Mageia and so on and on. Stick all of the population by spending hundreds of tabs. "Stream it on servers but for fuck's sake, I found with one wheel slowly losing air and a cool looking trip toy."
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @09:27PM
Dont mess around and godwin it right away or something?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @09:27PM
The new version of Windows is spectacular, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Really.
But our old stuff? Phew, it stinks. Run away as fast as you can.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:51PM
One fewer cup of coffee and I would have missed the sarcasm. You should be modded funny, not insightful. W10 is a steaming pile. It was on this laptop for 45 minutes, and now I'm constantly annoyed by its nagging me to "upgrade".
Look, you arrogant idiots at Microsoft, I TRIED IT. HATED IT. SHUT THE FUCK UP ABOUT IT!
Sadly, the newest version of KDE (which I loved since Mandrake) is also a stinking pile, every bit as bad as W10. I'd look for a new distro if I wasn't so busy.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 2) by present_arms on Tuesday January 05 2016, @05:01PM
You should try Trinity, Like kde3 with bugs removed
Alie
http://trinity.mypclinuxos.com/
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 04 2016, @09:34PM
Is MS promising to sabotage Win7? "You've got a nice place here, be a shame if something were to happen to it."
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Celestial on Monday January 04 2016, @09:48PM
Microsoft already sabotaged Windows 7 several months ago with the "Get Windows 10" and telemetry updates. Granted, you can deselect those updates and hide them, block Microsoft at the router level, etc., but exactly how many people would know to do that? Even if you do hide the updates, they've had an unusual tendency to show up again a couple of months later. Odd that.
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Monday January 04 2016, @10:08PM
Yes, I got a critical update for the some obscure language packs the other day.
Un-advertised, what actually showed up was a re-install of the Get Windows 10 update code.
I've installed GWX Control Panel by UltimateOutsider.com which deletes the W10 updates, blocks them, and it is always on patrol for any attempt to sneak that crap back onto my machine.
The next update I get from Microsoft I'm going to carefully check for any mention of Windows 10, and if I find none, but still end up getting some, I'm going to complain to my State's AG's office.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by patella.whack on Monday January 04 2016, @11:08PM
So my question is, what do people do about the telemetry updates. Check KB against some kind of list, and manually deselect them?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @11:35PM
Don't install anything that isn't explicitly listed as a security update on Microsoft's monthly security digest. The other "important" updates are hardly ever important or relevant unless they address something that applies to your setup specifically (and in this case the KB article associated with them will refer to an actual issue - the Win10 crapola as a rule has extremely vague non-descriptions). Also avoid anything related to the update-client itself, I'm still running with the default update-client and have had no issues refusing dozen or so iterations they've been pushing since (in fact all those seem to do is change your update settings and add more ways for them to infect your system - such as automatically checking optional updates). Optional updates have always been useless/unwanted bloat since Windows 9x.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 04 2016, @11:38PM
Aegis complements GWX - https://voat.co/v/technology/comments/459263 [voat.co]
I've run it, it seems to do what it says, MSE doesn't alert on it - seems fine to me.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Dunbal on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:33AM
Turn off windows update.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday January 06 2016, @01:02AM
Given the number of actual security fixes they fix every month, that seems dangerous.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:32AM
I've switched to manual updates, and only install after a couple of days when there are no reports of them being MS malware.
It's pretty scary when the biggest threat of malware installs on your system is your OS vendor...
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Sunday January 10 2016, @10:05PM
Here is a handy .BAT file [alaya.net], so simple your grandma can use it, that will gut the Win 10 backported spying crap. Follow this with GWX control panel [betanews.com] and your friends and love ones will never again see a prompt to install the buggy malware that is Windows 10.
What I personally think is funny is how many sites are shilling for Windows 10 when I can say without a shadow of a doubt its a buggy pile of dogshit and that is completely IGNORING the spying, just based on its raw performance. I had several laptops and desktops at the shop in the month before Xmas, had a fast USB 3 1.5Tb drive for disk imaging, so I thought "Lets see if Windows 10 is better than Windows 7 and 8.1 on these systems", what did I find? Complete garbage, that is what Win 10 was, garbage. It barely beat Win 7 on a few systems, not once beat Win 8.1, and on every.single.system. it had worse response time and of course thanks to all their background shit it slowed the network to a fricking crawl. The drivers were a mess, with many things that worked suddenly either not working or becoming flaky as hell and of course Windows 10 refused to update the drivers, even when newer drivers were available. This was doing exactly what MSFT recommends BTW, and simply upgrading through Windows Update and leaving everything default...totally worthless.
So I can understand why so many are bringing me laptops and desktops to "remove that thing" and give them back their OS, as honestly IMNSHO this makes Win Vista RTM look like the height of quality and stability. The only positive I can say about Win 10 besides the extra money I'm making removing it? It has made my Windows 8.1 users appreciate Windows 8.1 more, in fact I now have to...gag...recommend Windows 8 for new builds as you can get it much cheaper than Windows 7 (around half price for a Win 8 system builders) and once upgraded with 8.1 and Classic Shell? Its a decent Windows 7 clone with a better file transfer system and faster boot times. Windows 10? Even on a fast dual core laptop with 8Gb of RAM it ran shittier than 7 and 8, its just worthless for anything other than throwing on some system that comes without a 7/8 key and dumping it on a sucker.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Monday January 04 2016, @09:51PM
MS absolutely did sabotage XP - if you want evidence, get a "Nettop" era Atom PC and install Windows XP from the same era onto it. Try it, it runs pretty well, just as snappy as the machine you likely replaced with it back then. Now, let XP update itself from the web - today, when that's done, it's a slow, laggy, unusable pile. Restore the original XP OS onto it and it's fine again.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 4, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Monday January 04 2016, @10:52PM
I recently bought a thinkpad with w7 on it (was looking for JUST w7 so that I knew there would be drivers for that hardware) and I don't plan to EVER run win update on it. I added all the right hosts to the hosts file (blocking MS), I disabled win update, I removed the KB's that would do harm and edited the scheduled tasks to remove bad things, etc etc.
out of the box, the laptop is great. I plan to keep it that way.
I have a disk dump of its original disk and I also make snapshot.exe (great program, btw) copies as I need to. if I get a bug, I'll restore from backups.
my days of running win update are formally over. never again will I trust that. sad to say, but I'll take 'restore from backup' anyday over MS's own malware.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by unzombied on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:42AM
XP Service Packs 1 and 2 were fine, but SP3 slowed even a decent machine. And I vaguely recall SP3 marketed as important for "security." It disabled some auto-start programs in Services, which the security-minded used to do manually, and one might think would speed up a machine. How the slowness was accomplished is a source of speculation. Though XP SP3 made Vista seem zippy (at first, until the hard drive started thrashing for hours). Makes me wonder if Win7 SP1 is the new XP SP2, and might be one to stick with for a long while. If the "security updates" don't drown it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:35AM
Too bad that with Windows 7, I've seen multiple machines crawl to a stop and the memory shoots through the roof on boot and every 24 hours. Finally tracked it down to Windows Update and the fact that it uses multiple 1GB+ databases that get loaded into memory when it scans. Microsoft had better hope that Windows 8 and 10 have a better solution to the updates piling up.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Joe Desertrat on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:17AM
XP Service Packs 1 and 2 were fine, but SP3 slowed even a decent machine. ... How the slowness was accomplished is a source of speculation.
Windows Genuine Advantage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @11:07PM
Not sabotage, just prudence. Windows 7 is in extended support. Meaning there will be no new features added, and not every bug found will be fixed, just those deemed "Critical" (IE: Mostly network related exploits).
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:45AM
They've already sabotaged the updater. It's impossible to cleanly update from the OEM W7SP1 media without repetitive deletes of the update database and running the troubleshooter. A process that takes about 12-48hrs depending on hardware.
The professionals know to use the Digital River updated images (a small ini file needs changing to reflect the OEM\Retail status). But for the brief time the service wasn't available a few month ago, I personally went through the full process all the way from SP1 on a couple of machines and saw how an i7, 16gb and SSD machine is brought to its knees.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:49AM
Sorry not just digital river. You need to manually slipstream an install media based on digital river's refreshed iso. A two days worth process that actually scales to a single machine nowadays.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:32AM
given where the article is published, it is intended to spread FUD through the non-technical business executives to help them gang up on any recalcitrant CIO/CTOs who are currently resisting downgrading to Win10.
But who knows... maybe Microsoft will push a patch that breaks the secure booting (UEFI?) and happens to bork much of a Windows 7 install on computers installed thusly, or somehow disables its functionality on non-UEFI installs, because "security"?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @09:38PM
And I should give a crap what Microsoft's chief Bullshit Artist says why?
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @09:38PM
Since Windows 7 remains supported until 2020 all the arguments here are FUD directed against their own product no less. The is even more amusing when we consider that Win 8 is just Win 7 with a different memory manage and an inferior UI, and Win 10 is just a repackaged version of Win 8 with a slightly less shit UI but spyware to make up for the loss.
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Monday January 04 2016, @10:07PM
Since Windows 7 remains supported until 2020 all the arguments here are FUD directed against their own product no less. The is even more amusing when we consider that Win 8 is just Win 7 with a different memory manage and an inferior UI, and Win 10 is just a repackaged version of Win 8 with a slightly less shit UI but spyware to make up for the loss.
So the first thing ms needs to do is embrace windows 7; then they can extend it...
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday January 04 2016, @11:31PM
They're on the Extinguish phase. They embraced 7 when it was released. They extended it twice with Win 8 and 8.1. With Win 10, they are actively attempting to extinguish Win 7.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by arslan on Monday January 04 2016, @10:45PM
That was what the author of the article pointed out...
(Score: 4, Insightful) by meisterister on Monday January 04 2016, @09:44PM
...that the last tolerable-out-of-the-box version of Windows is going to be kneecapped by Microsoft.
(May or may not have been) Posted from my K6-2, Athlon XP, or Pentium I/II/III.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:26PM
...that the last tolerable-out-of-the-box version of Windows is going to be kneecapped by Microsoft.
You mean Windows 2000, the last one without activation?
</scnr>
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 09 2016, @05:08AM
First, all Win2K retail boxes during the 'crossover' with WinXP got silently updated to SP3, changing the license terms from the original Win2K ones to XP style ones (I forget the specifics, but a bunch of the 'we can audit your machines' licensing terms.)
Furthermore they ensured the next version of Visual C/DirectX broke Win2k compatibility, despite no significant reasons it needed to (There were API/ABI hacks within a year or two that allowed running both XP applications and drivers on Win2K.)
Long story short: They ensured Win2K was dead before SP5 even came out. It apparently made it up to 6, but I never actually got up to running it since all my apps had been broken for 2 years by then.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by GungnirSniper on Monday January 04 2016, @09:47PM
One of my relatives got a budget ASUS tower after Christmas. Not being tech-savvy, she Binged for Firefox and ended up on C|Net's atrocious Download.com. This 'installer' gave her Chromium, WeatherBug, and some other crap. So far this is a user training issue, no big deal.
When I went to go into the Control Panel, the one that I'm used to from Vista and Windows 7, it was unrecognizable. To me, this is madness that how to administer the system via GUI has again changed for the worse. Of the main 7 categories, none were the obvious choice for uninstalling software. I went looking for System Restore next. I didn't see it under System, the legacy and most obvious spot for it. I typed it in the search box in the Control Panel window, no luck. So in the process of making Windows "pretty" they have alienated those of us who have gotten used to how to do things, and broken the way to find things via typing too. Was I in the wrong spot for a major system function?
The operating system should do its job and do it well, rather than be changing for the sake of change.
From a SysAdmin perspective, the only "benefit" of Windows 10 is that installing a non-slipstreamed copy of Windows 7 SP1 + some version of Office now takes well over 100 updates. This can take hours, but I'd rather have one major desktop platform to support rather than two, so my install base will remain the same.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by tibman on Monday January 04 2016, @10:14PM
I have win7 at home and win10 at work and from my view they have "hidden" any non-metro admin programs. You can still access them of course, but they won't be included into existing win10 workflows.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday January 04 2016, @10:17PM
They do go out of the way to hide shit, but really, if you can't google how to do it, you probably shouldn't be offering to help anyone else. Blind leading the blind and all that.
Just type "control panel" in that little search bar and hit enter, and take the first choice to get you to the control panel, or type "uninstall programs" to get you directly to the add-remove programs feature.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @10:27PM
One of the wacky things MS did with Win10 is to split what used to be in Control Panel into two. Part is still in Control Panel, the rest is in Settings. Yes it's annoying, but then it's MS.
Windows 10 is why I switched to Xubuntu.
(Score: 5, Informative) by vux984 on Monday January 04 2016, @10:29PM
When I went to go into the Control Panel, the one that I'm used to from Vista and Windows 7, it was unrecognizable.
You didn't go into "Control Panel" you went into the Modern UI "Settings".
Right click on the Windows 'start button', select "Control Panels". Their they are pretty much exactly as they have been for years.
To me, this is madness that how to administer the system via GUI has again changed for the worse.
Its exactly the same, you went into the new Settings system, which is amongst other things supports touch etc. Given that lots of new devices are hybrid tablets, touchscreen netbooks, etc this isn't necessarily a bad move either. Still I FULLY agree that Windows 10 has lots of UI issues stemming from the two different settings systems that don't really integrate well with eachother; and one is not easily discovered from the other nor is it intuitive which functionality is where. ( But to be fair, Linux is still just as bad in this regard. )
I typed it in the search box in the Control Panel window
I typed "Programs" in the search box in settings, and the results included "Programs and Features" (the classic control panel). I also typed "Programs" in the search box that is on the taskbar, and that found the "Programs and Features" control panel as well. Don't know what to tell you. System Restore came up too when I searched for "Restore".
From a SysAdmin perspective
Oh hell no. Anyone who wants to pull the "SysAdmin" card out would have spent at least 5 minutes learning the OS basics first.
Seriously, this is the right click windows menu:
https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.dedoimedo.com%2Fimages%2Fcomputers_years%2F2014_2%2Fwindows-10-preview-menu-right-click.jpg&f=1 [duckduckgo.com]
What's the FIRST item?
Programs and Features.
And this "right click the start button" isn't even all new to Windows 10. A lot of that stuff has been there since 8.0 / Server 2012
Frankly, this system management stuff is EASIER to get to in 10 than it was in 7. The system control panel, device manager, computer management, task manager, its ALL right there. Its one of the things I prefer about 10.
but I'd rather have one major desktop platform to support rather than two, so my install base will remain the same
Now that you've learned about the magic right-click menu that's been there for 4 years, and that nearly all the control panels and system management functionality you are used to is pretty much identical your declaration sounds a bit ridiculous.
There's a lot of good reasons to avoid 10, but the fact that "as a sys admin" you haven't bothered to spend even 5 minutes orienting yourself with Windows since Server 2008 / Windows 7 says a lot more about you than it does about Windows.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @06:50AM
In his defense, if the way you access an interface you've been using for 19 years has drastically changed without prior notice and you need to fire up a browser for basic functionality, you know the UX team screwed up pretty horribly.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:19PM
Yeah, we all know why Linux is bad, but we're talking about Windows here!
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday January 06 2016, @09:50PM
without prior notice
It was released with about as much notice and fanfare, and technical previews, and websites jabbering about it as possible. And then some. And if someone "as a sysadmin", managed to tune out all that, then found themselves sitting in front of a new windows 10 install, click the start menu which is right where it's always been... and the very first item is "Get Started" which opens a quick tutorial that shows you exactly where all this stuff is and what the new stuff is. It was a major new release - he had plenty of prior notice.
And again... this has been there since windows 8.0 so 4 years now... so this particular 'change' isn't even 'new'.
Windows 10's right click start menu is BETTER than windows 7's 11 random different places to get to these 15 different admin elements. The UX team did a good job there.
PEBKAC.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @11:01PM
The interface change is always to be expected. It happened from Windows 3.x->95->98->ME and from NT3.5->NT 4->2000->XP. People bitched and moaned about each one, then got used to it and life moved on and the interface was "always" like that.
And to figure out how to uninstall software? In Windows Vista and beyond that's really easy. Go to the start menu (Windows 8.1 you have to go to the "metro" screen, or whatever they called it), and start typing "uninstall" The start menu will become populated with everything relating to uninstall, including the control panel options.
When I went to go into the Control Panel, the one that I'm used to from Vista and Windows 7, it was unrecognizable. To me, this is madness that how to administer the system via GUI has again changed for the worse. Of the main 7 categories, none were the obvious choice for uninstalling software.
This is just incompetence (or a bad troll, now that I think about it). If you're in "Category" view in the control panel, choose "Programs". If you're in Icon view it's: "Programs and Features". You know, exactly like Windows 7 and Windows Vista.
Really, it's much ado about nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:54AM
Changing the interface for no good reason just reduces inefficiency because it forces people to learn the new interface, which takes time. Even if the time wasted learning the new interface is small on an individual level, it might add up to be quite a bit of time if you count all users.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @05:28PM
And yet, the standard MS BS to corporations has been that you don't really want to switch OSes because it will cost so much money to "retrain" your staff to use the new OS interface. It is the same crap that gets rolled out when there is talk about moving to StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice/whatever.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by TheGratefulNet on Monday January 04 2016, @11:02PM
a friend of mine used to always say that the value of a company and software is in the training investment. once you learn the cisco cli (for example), you mostly know it and you prefer it (ok, give me some slack, I'm trying to make a point).
you invest a lot of time in learning your tools, if its software or even drills and saws. you are good at your tools because they always work the same way and you learned how to use them.
MS forgot that lesson. they keep changing the UI and this invalidates all the training you did on windows!
look, MS, if you are going to yank the carpet out from the users, I bet many of them will say 'screw this, if I have to relearn a UI, I'll get a mac that I've always been thinking about'.
I do think it will backfire. if I had to start from zero, maybe I'd pick a mac, too.
or maybe even see what all the fuss is about with that linux thing.
if I was an end-user, I'd have all those thoughts.
fwiw, I've been on win7 since it came out and when someone at work asks me to work on their win8 box, I get annoyed since its too different. I have not yet even seen win10 but that day will come, and I'm not looking forward to it.
for my own machines, I'll nurse win7 along as much as I can. the only way I'll abandon it is when my last bit of win7 compat hardware dies. the drivers are the reason they force you to abandon older os's. thankfully, few of us are on the frequency of hardware upgrades that once was very common. I'll now go years between upgrades or system builds; but there was a time that I'd change out hardware more often than once a year. those days are now long gone (which is probably WHY MS is forcing the new model of win10 on us. it really wants to sell software as a service so that we keep paying for APPS and not the os, anymore)
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by SDRefugee on Monday January 04 2016, @11:32PM
I supported/used Windows since WFW311, but when I retired in 2010, I moved all my home systems to Linux.. After seeing what a privacy nightmare Windows 10 is, and how desparately they're trying to get everybody on it, and even stooping to slip in the "telemetry" crap into 7/8/8,1, and now this moron spouting his crap. I got a sneaking suspicion that *somebody* is pushing MS to get as many people's systems pumping everything they do into -guess-who's- big datacenter in Utah.. You guessed it.. Take a bow, NSA... I wonder how long it will be before those of us who don't use MS's stuff are harrassed by the TLAs, as they can't vacumn up our privacy *quite* as easily as folks who use MS products, and don't bother reading the EULA that spells it out, if you understand legalese....
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 1) by anubi on Tuesday January 05 2016, @05:52AM
I can imagine the confusion if Microsoft ever made musical instruments.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday January 05 2016, @05:39PM
"Your tuba-violin-piccolo is ready!"
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:06PM
Microsoft has always been stupidly anti-user like that. It's annoyed the hell out of me ever since the second IE. And don't get me started on that damned ribbon interface...
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Popeidol on Tuesday January 05 2016, @03:34PM
What's interesting about the changes is that casual or expert users will probably be fine with it, the group that suffers the most is Power Users.
Expert users often aren't committed to specific bits of the UI. Mash the start button, type 'regedit' or 'gpedit.msc' or 'diskmgmt.msc' on muscle memory and you're where you want to be. The last time a change to that workflow happened was moving from xp, where you had to also hit 'r' to get the run dialog. Your batch and powershell files still work, all the environmental variables are still there. They've moved a couple of things around and replaced some commands but overall you'd be comfortable.
The casual user has a bit of a 'click on what seems most suitable' method and that will get them far in win10. Settings are under settings, most of the icons do what you'd expect, and you can type related words into the search bar and it makes surprisingly good suggestions about what you want. Hit the start button, type 'stop computer turning off', and it'll suggest the power settings first.
Power users tend to have learned how the OS arranges things and do fairly advanced stuff almost on autopilot, which means moderate changes can throw them badly. When vista and then seven came out there were a lot of complaints about the control panel, and changing the start menu, and 'documents and settings' suddenly becoming 'users', and so on. For years I was still setting the control panel view to 'classic' whenever I had to go in there just to get it to what I knew. They'll get hit worst by this but they will recover, and if microsoft doesn't do anything too silly for a little while it'll be very normal in a year or two.
Windows doesn't do things like this often. If you went between 'stable' windows releases you'd be going from XP to win7 to 10. The timeline would be: moderate changes from prior version -> 8 years on stable UI -> moderate changes -> 6 years on stable UI -> moderate changes. OSX spreads the UI changes out over their yearly releases so there's no sudden shock, but the changes are there. Windows gives you long stable periods and then a more drastic change between versions. Given they're making win10 a rolling release, There's good odds they're moving to the apple way of doing things.
Needs and capabilities change over time, and I'm happy I don't have a win9x style desktop anymore. Some of the changes I felt were forced upon me (start menu search? that just makes it harder to use the start menu while taking away resources to index that information. And they're replacing quicklaunch by 'pinning' icons permanently to the taskbar, so there's no clean separation between what I use regularly and what I'm working on?) turned out to be really useful.
On a more offtopic note: Windows 10 is a serious improvement on windows 8 and a decent compromise. I don't agree with all their choices and their default theme is ugly, but I've got it on a 1.6ghz netbook with 2gb ram and it's as responsive as xp was on the same hardware (and while it's a bit slower it's competitive with the debian openbox install it dualboots with). I'm not going to roll it at work yet but give it two years and I might just consider it.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:03PM
Similar experience, but not with W10 (I rolled back to 7 before going into the CP). When I bought this laptop about 5 years ago, it took months to find out where the retarded "mouse gestures" were so I could shut them off. Just bought a used notebook a month ago for its DVD burner. It's running W7 as well, but the "mouse gestures" were in CP under "mouse" where they belonged. Both computers are W7.
Had to reinstall Windows on this one after the OS melted, spent hours uninstalling bullshit like Bing Bars, McAffee, and other garbage.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 3, Insightful) by tempest on Monday January 04 2016, @09:52PM
I don't think he's wrong. Aren't those concerns with all of Microsoft products?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ticho on Monday January 04 2016, @09:53PM
users who choose Windows 7 do so “at your own risk
I wonder how the digit "7" got into the mix, the statement makes more sense without this typo.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Monday January 04 2016, @11:40PM
I wonder how the digit "7" got into the mix, the statement makes more sense without this typo.
And it's been true since at least 1985.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Monday January 04 2016, @10:16PM
That comment at the end got me curious about what makes the Forbes site's JS and ads more annoying than normal? So I went, and goddamn, was it right.
I couldn't view the site at all in Firefox with NoScript, just got a blank page. So I tried in Chromium and it whined about me having Adblock, asking me politely to disable it. It sounded optional so I ignored it, hit continue, and it brought me back to a similar page complaining that I still haven't turned it off yet and with a timer that prevented clicking the continue button to be sure I read it. (Oh, and a an ironic and smart-assed quote* about perseverance being doing the same thing over and over until it eventually works.) Tried clicking through expecting it to load the page, but nope, it just kept perpetually dropping me back to the same quote-and-continue-timer button because something was completely broken
No way in hell I'm going to disable Chromium's adblock, so I tried again in Firefox, allowing just forbes.com and its image host urls, thinking maybe that would work. Nope, still thinks I'm using an ad blocker and whines because I didn't enable the 9 or 10 third-party domains too. Though, after whining, it actually did properly load ad-free in Firefox, so I went to see why Chromium was failing...
It turns out that, not only does the site harass you for using adblock, it also doesn't work properly if you use Chromium's incognito mode. Good job, Forbes, you made your site completely unusable and I'll never be visiting again. 10/10, would close tab again.
* The quote was "Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 04 2016, @10:27PM
yeah forbes has been fucked for almost a year now
even more annoying is that the text of the story is usually there in the html, it just won't show it without javascript
makes me wonder if someone has come up with a greasemonkey script to fix it
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:34AM
Disable CSS (View > Page Style > No Style) - If you're using one of those fugly modern menu-less browsers good luck finding the place to toggle that.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Monday January 04 2016, @10:29PM
Hmmm, I had no such problems.
Running Chromium on Manjaro with Ublock Origin, the Forbes site stopped on the continue to site page, and one click later I was at the page (with 23 blocked trackers and ads indicated by Ublock.
So I went to the link "xpda" mentioned, and I arrived instantly at the networkworld site with 24 blocked ads/trackers.
It seems the Forbes site uses some sort of algorithm to determine who it is going to pick on today.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by xpda on Monday January 04 2016, @10:41PM
I went to the networkworld link and only had one address blocked by uBLock Origin. Then I thought to enable JavaScript: 40 blocked.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by frojack on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:20AM
You must be using the default settings for Ublock Origin.
You should step to Third party filters tab and turn on everything in the first group except the expirimental,
Then for Ads, everything except the tirst and 4th
In Privacy all bur first and play with third.
Malware - pick the defaults.
Also under Social, I run some of Fanboy's filters, just to get rid of the stupid facebook buttons.
Ublock was never really meant to be run out of the box. You are supposed to expiriment with it a bit.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by xpda on Tuesday January 05 2016, @03:56AM
I only use the uBlock filters (except Experimental), and a bunch under "my filters" including cosmetic filters. The eyedropper tool is really handy for Facebook ads, flyovers, and animated slideshows.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday January 05 2016, @04:20AM
And that's why Ublock doesn't work for you.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by xpda on Tuesday January 05 2016, @04:51AM
Actually, it works great! I am happy to get a blank page on Forbes in exchange for a readable web.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday January 04 2016, @10:54PM
Hmmm, I had no such problems.
Running Chromium on Manjaro with Ublock Origin, the Forbes site stopped on the continue to site page, and one click later I was at the page (with 23 blocked trackers and ads indicated by Ublock.
I think you missed the line at the end where I said I had Chromium in incognito, which turned out to be the cause of the infinite loop. Viewing the page outside of icnognito worked as expected, with a nag and then continue. I only rarely use Chromium for misbehaving pages and the like, so all it has is adblock. Made it pretty easy to figure out that Incognito mode was breaking the site further and turning it off confirmed it.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 04 2016, @11:51PM
Oftentimes, a site refuses to cooperate with me. I just go into a VM, and C/P the address into an unprotected browser. It loads, I read, I close the browser, and delete cookies and crap. I don't do it very often, but now and then, I feel a need to read the article. Usually I come away wondering why I bothered.
(Score: 5, Informative) by xpda on Monday January 04 2016, @10:31PM
I got a blank page, too! I'm glad to see it wasn't just my version of Firefox.
Forbes.com has made two strategic blunders recently. First, they block web traffic that doesn't conform to their rules. Traffic that doesn't see ads is still very valuable, as it could earn Forbes a link in Soylent News or even 4Chan. Second, their site is now full of clickbait headlines attached to information-deficient articles. They have thrown away any competitive advantage they once had with the name "Forbes".
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3018879/microsoft-subnet/microsoft-exec-makes-bizarre-claims-against-windows-7.html [networkworld.com]
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:18AM
Thank you for that link which also contains a link to an audio of the interview. All it takes is a bit of google-fu. I guess the poster and the editors all subscribe to Forbes which is in all likelihood plagiarized from Network World.
When life isn't going right, go left.
(Score: 3, Informative) by martyb on Tuesday January 05 2016, @09:59AM
I can understand this conclusion based on your perspective, but it is misinformed. Here is a summary of some of the steps that I took:
Saw this story come up in our #rss-bot channel on IRC [soylentnews.org]. Looked interesting and wanted to submit it, myself.
Went to look at the article, encountered the same adblock warning as others have posted here. Got a blank page (thanks to NoScript). Permitted forbes.com and forbesimg.com — saw that it required another bunch of domains to be enabled, none of which I wanted to permit on my system. Had run into this on forbes.com before, had no interest in going down that rat hole again.
Spent well over a half hour searching for other coverage of this story. No joy, as the story had *just* gone up. Punted on the idea of submitting the story.
Next, saw that an AC had submitted this story. There wasn't much to go from (follow the Original Submission [soylentnews.org] link.) Performed another search and found some coverage. As I had not seen the Forbes story, I could not tell if they were the same. Made a note on the submission for the other editors:
Submission was picked up by another editor and queued to go out as a story on the main page. (Above comments made to the submission got dropped (possible bug) when the submission was promoted to be a story.)
NOTE: The story was originally posted at Forbes, it was not until *after* it had been queued out as a story here that it finally gained coverage at network world.
tl;dr: It was a real eye-opener when I became an editor for this site and saw how much more happens "behind the scenes" to get a story out. There is MUCH more here than meets the eye! Hopefully the foregoing has given some idea of what is involved and a new perspective on which to base conclusions in the future.
(Please pardon any typos / errors — it's barely 0500 and I need to go back to bed.)
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:36PM
A lot of stories these days are sourced from the Soylent rss-bot [sylnt.us]. Forbes starting showing up a lot a month ago or so, but there are other sources there, too. Check 'em out. If you see something good, copy & paste representative paragraphs in <blockquote> </blockquote> tags, put a title & category on it, and submit it. You can do more than that, of course, but doing the aforementioned is easy and takes under 5 minutes.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @04:51PM
also "drupal" has a built-in RSS-feed FETCHER (it has a built-in RSS feed MAKER too).
just find some atom/RSS link on some newsworthy website, example: http://feeds.reuters.com/ReutersPictures [reuters.com]
put that link into drupal and set it to reload and drupal-fy the data.
(here is reuters RSS category overview link: http://www.reuters.com/tools/rss) [reuters.com]
of course you never know if somebody hijacks the RSS-feed providing website and then "makes the RSS data
go bad" in the mouth of unsuspecting drupal ^_^"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by TheGratefulNet on Monday January 04 2016, @11:06PM
if I have to try more than 3 times to see a page by unraveling my blockers, I will give up and not try again.
I take it as a sign of 'we are evil' and so I don't worry about not going there.
no big deal. some sites are obnoxious in how their 'code' runs. fuck them - if that's how they want to be, I want no part of them, so the feeling is mutual.
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday January 04 2016, @11:14PM
Yeah, I'm the same way, though you may be slightly more forgiving than I normally am. If I had hit that page on a search or linked from another page I would have just closed the tab as soon as I saw that it displayed nothing with NoScript enabled. I do not tolerate sites that can't at least display some useful text when JS is disabled.
The only reason I even bothered this time is I was curious how bad it was that it got a special notice at the end.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:57PM
An internet generation ago if you ran into a flash based website you knew it was trash and best avoided. The clickbait of its era.
Today, same story, but for extensive javascript and tracking. If Ghostery lists more than 30 blocked items, just skip that page, its worthless.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:48AM
> ...I didn't enable the 9 or 10 third-party domains too...
Actually, the number of third-party domains is 19.
Amazon Associates - Advertising, Affiliate Marketing
Brightcove - Widgets, Video Player
ChartBeat - Analytics
DoubleClick - Advertising
Gigya Social Analytics - Analytics
Google Tag Manager - Widgets, Tag Manager
Gravatar - Widgets
LiftDNA - Advertising
Media.net - Advertising
Moat - Advertising
Pinterest - Widgets, Social
RevContent - Advertising
Sailthru Horizon - Beacons
ScoreCard Research Beacon - Beacons, Analytics
ShareThrough - Advertising
SimpleReach - Beacons
TRUSTe Notice - Privacy
Twitter Button - Widgets, Social
Yieldbot - Beacons
This is insane, but no worse than most of the mainstream web these days...
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:15AM
Oh wow, that's even more insane. My estimate came from what NoScript was showing as allowable domains. I guess Ghostery killed most of the crap before NS even got a chance to list it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:39AM
Story archived @https://archive.is/kLyAB [archive.is]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 10 2016, @03:55PM
451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:05PM
While I don't mean to defend their behavior, it worked fine for me on Firefox with Noscript and Adblock when I temporarily allowed forbes.com and forbesimg.com and left everything else disallowed. Perhaps you were letting too MUCH of their scripting through that was whining about adblock?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday January 05 2016, @09:15PM
That was what worked in firefox for me, as well; that's what tipped me off that chromium's infinite loop was probably something else. As it turns out, the biggest problem was chromium's incognito combined with adblock. (chromium uses nothing else since it's my backup.)
I doubt it is a deliberate decision (though the adblock nagging is, so maybe) rather it's probably just a side effect of the idiotic site design. It doesn't happen often, but I've encountered a few sites in the past that behave strangely with incognito but never cared enough to to find out why.
(Score: 4, Informative) by xpda on Monday January 04 2016, @10:18PM
Chris Capossela must be pretty stupid to make that kind of statement, even if it were true. Networld is better-behaved than Forbes:
http://www.networkworld.com/article/3018879/microsoft-subnet/microsoft-exec-makes-bizarre-claims-against-windows-7.html [networkworld.com]
(Score: 2) by SDRefugee on Monday January 04 2016, @11:12PM
Good God, they're positively foaming at the mouth... I'm beginning to wonder if MS is being pressed by the NSA to get EVERYbody onboard with the "telemetry" either on Windows 10 or slipped into Windows 7/8/8.1 .. After all the NSA needs *something* to fill their giant datacenter in Utah... I used/supported MS products in my career since WFW311, but when I retired in 2010, I decided I was done with MS on my home systems.. Alas, I still get pestered by family/friends to fix their MS booboos, but after seeing the privacy nightmare that is Windows 10, I couldn't be happier with my decision to go strictly Linux...
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 2) by SDRefugee on Monday January 04 2016, @11:23PM
About as stupid as any of the current senior government officials (take your pick..) that utter some of the most off-the-wall shit you can imagine, and the sad part? a significantly large percentage of the US population BELIEVES them... And of course if you happen to know (because of FACTS in evidence) that they're lying their ass off, you're called "racist/mean-spirited"... That MS idiot has been told by his superiors to throw that idiotic shit against the wall and see what sticks.. Knowing how many ignorant (computer-wise ignorance here) there are in the world, most of them will believe this and frantically install the Windows 10 turd that MS has helpfully placed on their system... Makes one sick to ones stomach...
America should be proud of Edward Snowden, the hero, whether they know it or not..
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @03:36AM
I used to have respect for Thurrott and Foley, since they've done a lot of reporting on Windows, both on sunny and not-so-sunny days for Windows. I haven't watched the video, but if the NetworkWorld report is correct, Thurrott and Foley almost completely failed to call Capossela on his marketing brown geyser, and I have far less respect for them as journalists.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Monday January 04 2016, @11:09PM
This has always been true for that boot sector virus called Windows.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Monday January 04 2016, @11:32PM
I want to stay with Windows 7, which will be my final Windows version. They're making it very hard to choose though, the 10 crap keeps coming back up with every new batch of updates. I now find myself having to read the information on every single update before I decide if I need it.
I hope that they'll get fined by the EU for billions of dollars if it turns out that they have decided that Windows 7 is going to be less secure. Even then it can't be less secure than Windows 10 anyway, because that's already leaking every little detail to their servers.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday January 04 2016, @11:56PM
https://voat.co/v/technology/comments/459263 [voat.co]
http://ultimateoutsider.com/downloads/ [ultimateoutsider.com]
Run them both. Their functions overlap, but they clean up all the crap. The (known) bad updates will be blocked, you'll gain back the 3 gig of disk space that the Win10 upgrade occupies, and everyone is happy.
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:41AM
I'm pretty sure this is yet another attempt to push telemetry.
First, they push the telemetry updates to 7.
They mark it as important.
Called out, they're now optional.
But wait, they're selected automatically anyway.
Called out again.
Updates are rereleased, bypassing Window's Ignore Update feature.
More alerts to upgrade to Win10 before it's too late.
Now this.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 2) by Nollij on Wednesday January 06 2016, @01:33AM
Here's an interesting question - MS has said the free upgrade is only for the first year. Does that mean they'll stop this after the year is over?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @12:51AM
Let's be clear here: Windows 8 was a colossal failure, and Microsoft's marketing department has been using sleazy tactic after sleazy tactic to try and gain back market share, in every way possible EXCLUDING the service and respect of their customers. There are subliminal messages in this interview about the hell that MS marketing is putting their employees through right now; let's tease through them:
They "worry about people running an operating system that's 10 years old"; yeah, it's because the last time Microsoft had solid product direction in Windows was back when Bill Veghte was leading the Windows 7 release to fix Vista. Microsoft fired Steven Sinofsky three weeks after Windows 8's release, most likely due to abysmal sales figures that were never acknowledged to the public until summer 2013.
"The next printer they buy isn't going to work well." You mean the printers that have 500 MB driver packages that install crapware? For over a decade, I have preferred printing with OS X, since it already has drivers that Apple codes and installs themselves, or using generic PS / PCL drivers with professional-level printers that support these drivers. One of Microsoft's biggest Windows OEMs is the world's largest printer maker, and Microsoft never leans on them to stop releasing crap drivers. Of course, it doesn't help when they're playing "frenemies" by directly competing against them with the Surface.
Fallout 4? I guess that the plan to release a few Windows 10 exclusive games, because their previous Windows 8 exclusivity plan backfired miserably when Skulls of the Shogun's developer sold horribly, and the developer said how bad the exclusivity experience was [rockpapershotgun.com]. Also, Microsoft's about to anger PC gamers yet again with another Games For Windows Live redux via the Windows Store.
"Old stuff... bad... viruses... security problems..." ...for an operating system with a support end date of January 2020? FUD FUD FUD. Don't forget that Windows XP was extended to 2014 because many corporate users stuck with XP instead of migrating to 8. And if they did migrate, they migrated to 7.
"There's a lot of people out there who constantly kick the can down the street without a bit more of a push." Pushing and shoving; if Microsoft's marketing strategy could be distilled down to two words, those would be them. Nothing quite like the Door-in-the-face technique [wikipedia.org] to get some short-term results, but bruise a reputation down the line. At this point, there's an uptick of consumers going to Macs running OS X so they don't have to deal with the planned obsolescence and customer disrespect, and companies are pushing farther away from Microsoft for backend operations.
"We don't want to anger anybody." Wrong. Collateral damage has already been factored in. I've already heard some Microsoft internal employees uttering phrases such as "mistakes will be made", in regards to software compatibility. They don't care because their mass-market force-feeding plan is already pulling in people who blindly click "yes", or click "later" in the dialog box with "install Windows 10 now", "install windows 10 later", or a tiny X to close the window (or killing the calling process via Task Manager).
Above all, if you work for Microsoft, you drink the Kool-Aid, and say, "Please, sir, I would like some more." There's fewer and fewer Microsoft employees who don't follow this rule (they either work in a support role, were laid off in the past year, are trying to punch their ticket out, or are named Raymond Chen [microsoft.com] [hint: I have lots of respect for Raymond Chen; he's probably the only sane man in the asylum right now]). The Kool-Aid doctrine is even more prevalent under Nadella, just with a softer message than the bombastic shouting of Ballmer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @02:41AM
It wouldn't surprise me if the jobs of these marketing reps are tied to them hitting their imaginary install-margin.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @03:53AM
Yeah, I wouldn't doubt a license sell-through target; despite Microsoft parading around "60 million Windows 8 licenses sold" in January 2013, those were sell-in numbers... and most of those licenses were sitting in OEM warehouses, ultimately becoming unsold inventory.
Microsoft wouldn't acknowledge the sell-through numbers until much later, bu the executive deck chair shuffling told the true tale. Sinofsky was dismissed mere weeks after Windows 8's release. The replacement "heads" of the Windows division, Julie Larson-Green (creator of the "Ribbon" in Office) and Tami Reller (originally from Great Plains software, which was acquired by Microsoft and became Dynamics GP). That duo lasted only until the summer 2013 reorg, when most of the divisions were turned upside down. The Windows 8.1 RTM was late August 2013. The ouster of Larson-Green and Reller from the Windows division was probably more motivated from the Surface writedown.
Even funnier: Capossela is the stand-in for Reller's marketing position, as well as the advertising duties of Mark "Scroogled" Penn [recode.net]. I didn't think that Microsoft's advertising strategy would get much worse than the architect of Hillary Clinton's awful 2008 campaign, but Capossela's shameless FUD-mongering and Apple-ripoff Surface ads have proven me wrong.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Tuesday January 05 2016, @04:00AM
At this point, there's an uptick of consumers going to Macs running OS X so they don't have to deal with the planned obsolescence and customer disrespect
Good post overall, but this one line is hilarious to me, because Apple is king of planned obsolesence. They've used their tight coupling of, and control over, the hardware+OS to keep users on an upgrade treadmill forever, and there's no sign of that ending. A better way of saying it would be that you don't have to deal with the overt, sleazy attempts at planned obsolesence because it's already built in. Microsoft's trying to get the same results but without the hardware control, they're having to resort to any sleazy trick or bald-faced lie they can use.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @04:55AM
Mock all you want, but Andrew Orlowski of El Reg nailed it: Apple is essentially an insurance firm now [theregister.co.uk]. Apple also hasn't made it a point to shout at and belittle their customers. They do it far more subtly, through skeueomorphism, ultra-flat design, primary color gradients, thread-thin typefaces, and designing an entire font to be easier to read, but ultimately making it harder to read due to an utter lack of hinting [ycombinator.com].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @06:06AM
If this were true I wouldn't still be running my seven year old MacBook Pro, which is running Apple's latest operating system perfectly well. They did not make me pay for it either.
This counterexample seems perfectly sufficient proof for me to say that you, sir, are full of $#|+.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Marand on Tuesday January 05 2016, @06:33AM
If this were true I wouldn't still be running my seven year old MacBook Pro, which is running Apple's latest operating system perfectly well. They did not make me pay for it either.
This counterexample seems perfectly sufficient proof for me to say that you, sir, are full of $#|+.
Ah, yes, you certainly got me there. A single anecdote from one anonymous person claiming to not update hardware or software is definitive, irrefutable proof that Apple doesn't want to encourage people to buy newer versions of its products. Well played, sir. By that same logic, because some people haven't upgraded to Windows 10 -- which is also free, so what's your point? -- Microsoft clearly isn't trying to push users to upgrade.
PS: Apple's business is selling you the hardware, not the software. Of course they're giving you the software cheap (or free, as it has done more recently), it almost always results in things getting slower which encourages people (especially less savvy users) to get new hardware. Like I said, Microsoft can't do that sort of thing because it doesn't have a stranglehold on its ecosystem the way Apple does.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @09:57AM
That's how I read it. I'm using a PC, not a phone, so the 8/10 touch UI is useless. This leaves me with a choice between XP and 7 (Vista was crap).
With that choice, he recommends against Windows 7. I can't read that as anything as a clear recommendation of Windows XP.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:12PM
Since there're third-party reverse engineered drivers for XP for newer hardware out there nothing stops you from actually using XP forever as this will no doubt continue.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Geezer on Tuesday January 05 2016, @01:48PM
After years of shooting themselves in the foot, Microsoft's all-in commitment to Windows 10 may have finally succeeded in hitting a vital organ.
As Win 7 sunsets and compatible drivers for new hardware become scarce, there might be just enough angst and frustration generated by the "Windows 10 Experience" to drive users big and small into the *nix and/or Mac camps in large enough numbers to make MS's business model implode.
Since I can do all of my work on a Mac with VMware running Win 7, and most of my fave games are on Steam for Mac now, I'm thinking my next desktop will be a Mac Pro. Not because I'm any sort of Mac fan per se, but just because it isn't Windows 10 and I'm tired of the perennial Linux driver clusterfuck.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Tuesday January 05 2016, @04:38PM
There’s only one problem with Capossela’s statements: they are complete rubbish. Windows 7 is no less secure than Windows 10
BS. The statements were made by an authority at Microsoft. Who does the article's author think he is to contradict him? If MS says that Windows 7 (an MS product) is unsafe to use, what kind of idiot would continue to use it? They're in the position to best know their own product is crap. And since they've sold you a crappy product, and now don't want to support it because they want you to buy a newer, uglier product, why would you continue to use any of their products at all, instead of switching to a better vendor?
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday January 05 2016, @07:26PM
Chris Capossela explained that users who choose Windows 7 do so “at your own risk, at your own peril” and he revealed Microsoft has concerns about its future software and hardware compatibility, security and more.
So does this mean that that product is not fit for merchantability [wikipedia.org] and thus I and everyone else who has a Win 7 machine is entitled to a full refund of purchase price as well as any punitive damages?
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 06 2016, @10:08PM
No, as according to the EULA you have always been using it effectively “at your own risk, at your own peril”.
And also Microsoft are offering a free "upgrade", so even if the EULA didn't cover their arses on this one, then the free upgrade probably would.