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posted by
cmn32480
on Friday April 29 2016, @11:29PM
from the inconvenient-timing-for-a-new-os dept.
from the inconvenient-timing-for-a-new-os dept.
El Reg reports
Microsoft's relentless Windows 10 nagware has interrupted a live TV weather forecast, urging meteorologist Metinka Slater to upgrade.
The operating system suddenly popped up a box on screen insisting the station's computer be upgraded to the latest version--while Slater was on air describing thunderstorms rolling through Iowa, USA.
The cyber-badgering blatted over her doppler weather radar, which was being broadcast on KCCI 8 News [April 27].
"Microsoft recommends upgrading to Windows 10. Gosh, what should I do?" Slater asked sarcastically.
So, do you know of a case of MSFT update pushiness that rivals this?
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Windows 10 Nagware Interrupts Live TV Weather Forecast
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The last time I saw him he was walking down Lover's Lane holding his own hand.
-- Fred Allen
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday April 30 2016, @06:48AM
Windows ME was Microsoft's first real dog of an OS, but they saved with Windows 2000 which came out around the same time. Then, the "activation" requirement introduced in Windows XP annoyed a lot of people, but MS got away with it. I thought Microsoft's move to extreme DRM in Windows Vista was such a big mistake it would prove fatal. Instead, they lightened up and survived. I've heard Vista with Service Pack 1 is tolerable. Windows 7 was a winner. Then MS took away the start button in Windows 8. Still not fatal, and they backpedaled on that with Windows 8.1.
And now this ongoing arm twisting of reluctant people into an ill-advised massive upgrade to Windows 10. How many more moronic moves can MS survive? Seems every 3 years they do something else incredibly dumb in the OS area. The free software world simply does not make comparable mistakes. That in turn suggests that MS's business model is inherently inferior.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Saturday April 30 2016, @08:08AM
KDE 4? Gnome 3? SystemD?
The difference is that with Free Software you've usually got alternatives that don't require you to get a different operating system (SystemD might turn out to be an exception in the long term, though, as SystemD and non-SystemD Linuxes might diverge sufficiently that at some point they have to be regarded different operating systems).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Saturday April 30 2016, @01:37PM
Windows ME was Microsoft's first real dog of an OS,
Says the person who obviously never used MS-DOS...
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Saturday April 30 2016, @05:44PM
I used MS-DOS, starting with version 3.3, with the 33M limit on partition sizes. The main advance for MS-DOS version 4 was removing that partition limit, but otherwise it was rather bloated compared to 3.3. Version 5 was fairly nice, cleaned up some of the bloat in version 4. I also used Apple DOS 3.2 and 3.3 on the Apple II, and one of the big differences was that MS-DOS supported a directory structure, while Apple DOS did not. Had to use Apple's ProDOS to get directories. Also, Apple DOS was slow thanks to some brain dead coding in which data was read into a buffer and then copied to a final location, taking just long enough that the next sector had rotated past the head and the system would wait for it to do a full revolution. Aftermarket DOSes fixed that. I don't know if MS ever made that mistake, but I think not. The #1 spot for slowest disk access is the Commodore. So in comparison to those, MS-DOS was pretty good.
Yes, they were severely limited, they really were _Disk_ Operating Systems, not full operating systems. They didn't have virtual memory or task switching and they let programs do pretty much anything to the system, including accidentally trashing the copy of DOS loaded into RAM. They didn't run a GUI, didn't even have drivers for video or audio. They were really only drivers for disk drives. Calling them an operating system was a stretch. Even the file system MS-DOS used, FAT, was limited and inefficient, no journaling of course, but then ext2 didn't have that either. I mean, dang, Apple DOS didn't even have a built in "copy" command to copy files! Had to use a file utility (FID) to make a copy. The point of FAT and DOS is that they are simple and don't take lots of memory, and on that they were fairly successful. What do you expect on a computer that has only 1M or even just 640K RAM and bad (80286) or no (8086) protected mode?