I dare you to go explore their ERP offerings. It is impossible to grasp, and if you ask for help, your support request will be redirected to one of your local third-party Microsoft partners.
This is a feature, not a bug. The idea is to continue to devalue the Pro version of Windows so that business has to pay for the more expensive Enterprise to get rid of all the crapware via LTSB or just being able to use a version that will respect the 'disable store' GPO setting. Worse, there's no upgrade path from OEM Pro to Enterprise Volume. So you're paying for Windows twice, once via the OEM Pro license you'll never use and another by buying Enterprise.
This product is a another way to devalue the old SKUs by introducing yet another premium priced product.
Cant reply below so adding my comment here:
That path doesn't exist for volume. There is no OEM to Volume path and guess what every business uses: Volume.
> Dell and Lenovo and HP have standard agreements to put Home on every PC, youre not paying for an individual OEM license.
The cost per OEM license of windows was reported to be $40-$80 depending on edition. That is baked into the cost of the computer you buy from them. You're not getting it for 'free' the same way you aren't getting leather seats for free because you bought the LT model of a car. You're paying for that too.
there is an upgrade path in that you can type in a key to transition from pro to enterprise.
>So you're paying for Windows twice, once via the OEM Pro license you'll never use
Buy the computer with home. You cant buy most computers without Home anyway, so unless you are going to buy from a very slim line of linux laptops or become a laptop manufacturer, its not really paying twice. Dell and Lenovo and HP have standard agreements to put Home on every PC, youre not paying for an individual OEM license.
"Maybe if I invent more Windows editions my salary will also increase because of the increase in responsibility as well as the higher revenue from the nickle and diming customers?"
Why does Microsoft have to waste so many resources coming up with a dozen different "editions" ?
I remember (back in the day) Windows NT came in "desktop" and "server" editions. Someone did some digging, and it turned out the difference was 2 registry keys, whose settings were checked at boot time, and depending on the settings, the "server" or "desktop" editions were created.
Times have changed; Microsoft needs to change too.
From time to time (every 2 years or so) I make an attempt at buying a Windows license in order to run some program that only runs on windows. In 10 years (5 or so attempts) I have yet to figure out what edition of Windows I want, how to buy it and how to download an ISO image of it so I can load it into a VMWare image. Every time I realize that the effort just isn't worth it so I give up.
I just want an OS that works. So I use OSX and I use Linux. Where I don't have to care much about what I'm running. At most I have to occasionally care about the revision I'm running being a bit old. But there's no nonsense with different editions that I need to waste time on.
Everything I know about business I learned from Joel on Software. This sounds to me like trying to sell (essentially) the same product at a higher price point to users who are willing to pay more, to maximize profits. See Joel's "Camels and Rubber Duckies": https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/12/15/camels-and-rubber-...
The notion of "Developer editions" and "Power User editions" of windows really bothers me. I discovered a love of computers and IT from having my own computer with windows 98 and just fucking around on it.
I destroyed the OS on that computer at least twice by doing stupid things like deleting DLL's in the windows folder because 8 year old me decided he "didn't need them" and bypassed the system file protection, but apparently that's part of learning to use and understand computers. Certainly it taught me how to install a new OS, which opened up a world of new OS's to me, which brought me to VM's, which inexorably lead to experimenting with hosting services, which lead to sysadmin skills, and so on.
Considering Microsoft is operating in and even leading an industry that alleges it is slowly starving to death from lack of new talent, creating versions of the OS with anything less than 100% control seems like a really stupid long term move. How are people supposed to form an intuitive grasp of the potential of general purpose computers if they grow up with machines that say "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"?
Sadly it is a notion that is creeping into the FOSS world as well. Just look at the antics of certain desktop projects.
Basic thing is that power users and "security" do not mix. And yes, there is a small aspect of protection from external threats in there. But just as much it is about paternalism, and, in the case of Microsoft, about shoring up revenue streams.
You can take ownership of any folder and do whatever you want to its contents. The fact that Windows tries to protect you from doing something dumb (but gets out of your way if you're sure) is probably a good thing.
Yeah, that bothers me too, and its actually scary to think that in the future, we could all be locked out of our own machines. As it is, looking at UX trends, it seems like everything is slowly being diluted to the lowest common denominator. Soon there will be no more "pro" devices - because who needs all those ports, and who needs to upgrade the ram/hdd/etc - but hey, atleast it will be shiny!
Still no actual control over what data they suck up and keep for who-knows how long and sell to anyone who asks? Still no actual control over what updates happen, when?
One of the features of the Windows 10 Game Mode is that it raises the thread priority of the application. This proved incredibly useful for me in some games - most notably GTA 5 - and in a lot of other games it didn't seem to do anything at all. I'm pretty thankful for the feature - because manually raising the thread priority every time I open the application was a very unnecessary pain.
That mechanism only boosts the priority of whatever thread is actually attached to the window in the foreground. This doesn't matter for single-threaded applications (obviously), but means the background threads can get lower priority than the main threads of other applications.
LTT did a review and for at least one game the result was worse performance in game mode. It was minutely worse and probably within margin of error for something as fickle as hardware, but still. Not an improvement.
Operating system is not website. I don't want my system to be sanding any data anywhere without my knowledge. Currently operating systems are used for handling various of very sensitive and potentially dangerous information (credit card details, bank accounts, SSNs, tax returns etc). There is tons of informations on computers that can cause a lot of problems if used by bad people. Blocking unknown and unnecessary traffic and strong encryption is our best bet against cyber criminals.
I keep seeing this nonsense about how operating systems and web services are different as a way of suggesting Google's behavior is okay but Microsoft's is not. Almost all of the data you deal with on your computer in the modern era eventually ends up traversing the Internet. You enter your SSNs into forms to pay bills and the like, your credit card details are entered into your browser to buy stuff online.
All of this can potentially be inspected by Google if you use their platforms or services.
There's really no difference here. Condemn Microsoft, condemn Google. Be upset both have defined your privacy as unimportant.
I'm frustrated and angered at both, but I have more solutions when dealing with one than the other. If a website is tracking me, I can minimize the amount of exposure, randomize aspects of my browsing, send out false information, etc. If my operating system is spying on me, then the only thing to do is use it in a VM, or avoid using it altogether.
the double standard is simply better PR by one company. Not to mention half of HN either works at goog or wants to. Add in the historical hate for MS and it really starts to make sense. Apple or google could literally start forcing users to give blood samples and you wouldn't hear a peep.
No it's not simply better PR. That's completely absurd. One of them is a website I optionally go-to occasionally, the other is unremovable shitware on _my personal computer_.
It's not the same. Take for example companies that are working in PCI DSS environment (credit card companies, payment gateways etc). They handle very sensitive data on their computers, not even getting close to any Google services. Because of that lack of security in OS, Windows shouldn't be used in PCI DSS environment because user can not control where it's data is going to.
The features that they mention...SMB Direct, large memory, more sockets, REFS...are great, but I think that they should only have one client SKU.
Also, it should have a telemetry manager that applications have to use for sending telemetry data to Microsoft. It should have UI and PowerShell cmdlets that help people see the data that's being collected. It should have a global off switch for people that are concerned about it.
I tend to think that things like telemetry or "swarm" downloading of updates and patches are good things. I know that's not popular. I think that they need to be far more transparent about that stuff to make privacy concerned people happy.
Also, there are some people that are never going to like Microsoft, Windows, or anything that they do. I kind of wish those people were less involved in the conversation. If you aren't going to use their stuff, why should they listen to your feedback?
ReFS as a boot drive file system? That'll be the proofing for it by default from server 2019 onwards. Every three years is LTS/Server cut from current branch I thought I read.
The only version of Windows 10 I'm interested in is the one where it is I who is mostly in control, or, you know, be the power user, not just some power sheep.
"Resilient file system"... sorry, if you want professionals to use and trust your new filesystem you should give it to end users first; wider audience. Then the pros will pick it up.
How billing for socket/CPU could matter anymore with 16 core CPUs (32 SMT) with many DDR4 memory channels going to hit the market during this summer [1]?
MS need to drop the crazy minimum requirement for licences of 8 * 2 core packs per server. Otherwise the pricing seems to work. It feels like they're forcing smaller customers to buy Azure instead of paying a fair price for the software.
That is basically what is going on. MS i getting out of the shrink-wrapped software market, and trying to push everyone towards SAAS. This by either crippling local software or putting nagware everywhere.
Adding SKUs to a product line that is already confusing to non-windows users is not going to help them win back market share.
it might help them wring more cash out of already-windows-users who need these new features. but those users will be glancing to the side and noticing all the features packed in for free by OSX and linux, and without a malignant upgrade process.
> Workstation mode: Microsoft plans to optimize the OS by identifying “typical compute and graphics intensive workloads” to provide peak performance and reliability when Workstation mode is enabled.
Shouldn't reliability always be as high as possible? Why would workstation users get more reliable operation than anyone else?
Win10 Pro supports 2 CPU sockets and all cores within them. Expanding this up to 4 sockets seems to undercut their server market as past 2 sockets Win10 Server charges per socket.
As a power user, I hope this doesn't ship with ads and telemetry enabled. It's things like that that pushed me away from windows and towards Linux. If Microsoft had never participated in the NSA PRISM program I would have never decided to "just try this Linux thing out" and I'd probably still be a windows user.
I think at this point they'll have to do more than get rid of ads and telemetry to get me (and others) to switch back. Linux turned out to be much more stable than Windows for me, and after experiencing package management and sane update policies I can't go back to an OS that won't even let me use it while it's installing updates.
When I sit and try to make a list of reasons to use Windows it seems to come down to program compatibility and not operating system quality. Instead of trapping people on an OS because of vendor lock-in, try improving core parts of the OS to make it worth using.
What it comes down to for me is that I can do my job (web development) on Windows just fine. But I'm going to spend the entire time trying to trick Windows into doing Linux things. Mintty for terminal stuff, VMs or the new Ubuntu mode for Linux software, etc. And yes, that works, but it feels hacky, performance is so-so, and it takes considerably more time to setup than the native alternative.
The inverse of that is that all I need Windows for is Adobe stuff and Outlook (we use Exchange for mail, meeting scheduling, tasks etc.), which all run perfectly fine in a Windows VM with minimal resources. The only real extra setup involved there is running the Windows installer, which takes like 20 minutes tops.
So what's left to compel me to use Windows? The UI? Admittedly, I feel a bit more zippy in Windows than I do Linux, but Kubuntu feels pretty damn close and I kind of prefer its UI over Windows' at this point.
> But I'm going to spend the entire time trying to trick Windows into doing Linux things. Mintty for terminal stuff, VMs or the new Ubuntu mode for Linux software, etc.
Windows is not UNIX and that's its strength. Don't try to coerce it into doing Linux things; learn Powershell and Windows concepts instead. I've recently switched development from Linux to Windows and couldn't be happier.
Let me guess... You don't like the path completion?
The only credible complaint I've heard against PowerShell terminal is path completion. I call it credible, because it's an actual behavioral difference with meaningful impact. Myself, I actually prefer the Windows path completion, where it fills the entire path and hitting tab again will cycle through the available options. Nothing drives me crazier than going into a directory generally knowing what I want, typing in a few letters, hit tab, get a subset of the path completed, think about what's there and where I want to go, figure out the next letter I need to type, hit tab again and hope for the best. When in reality there's only a few options that match my original text, and just hitting tab to cycle between them is pretty ergonomic. And shift-tab even cycles in the other direction, for those rare times when there actually is a huge list and you hit tab a little too quickly.
But for those who prefer the other way for some reason, there are projects like PSReadLine:
The PowerShell terminal is also incredibly aesthetically grating. They decided to take the old aliased bitmap font and fixed width window from cmd.exe and layer on a white/yellow/red on blue color scheme.
It sucks out of the box though, which is true of so many things in the Dev experience on Windows. It takes so long to tweak every little thing and download every missing utility.
True, but terrible defaults are terrible defaults. And when I find myself using someone else's machine, rather than the comforting glow of a familiar terminal I'm thrust back into the harsh reality of Microsoft's poor design decisions :/.
The best approach I've seen isn't to change defaults, but rather to make porting customization painless. And that's definitely something that can almost always be improved. I've actually been recently impressed by Samsung in this regard with their "Smart Switch" phone app. Super simple to transfer a lot of the stuff you care about from one phone to another, including sourcing from iOS and even Windows Mobile!
There are many other options available with 'compinstall', but I set this up years ago and don't remember what I needed to choose. It's probably also available in Bash nowadays.
> To me Powershell is OK but if you go in expecting it to behave like bash you will be in for a lot of pain.
Completely agree. PowerShell is an object pipeline, which means that its axioms are different than a text pipeline. If you come in trying to treat it like a text pipeline, you're not going to find the tools you expect.
> The most annoying issue I have run into - try to delete a node_modules folder with powershell. It's painful.
I was curious, so I just did the following in PowerShell v5:
And does the existence of Wine prove that Linux is inferior? It's just nice to have a way to run software written for other systems. Doesn't mean you think that system is superior.
I don't think they imply that windows is Unix (of which is most definitely is not), but rather that one of its original design goals still works. People forget that the original NT was designed to be agnostic to the user-space API.
And how does one exactly do that? Because I once tried to learn what a "home group" was and to my surprise it wasn't defined in precise terms anywhere. Not to mention lower-level stuff such as the init system.
> Not to mention lower-level stuff such as the init system.
The init system on Windows is robust enough that 99.999% of users never have to consider it. There is a UI to control what runs at startup, and that suffices for most things.
Windows has services of course, and there is a dependency graph built up of how they initialize, and for a huge % of people developing services, this also doesn't matter. Set what dependencies you have, if your service can be loaded on demand or if it has to be always on, and have at it.
More complicated services do require work, at which point documentation can be dug into.
> Because I once tried to learn what a "home group" was
Bing actually provides a great answer box on this. (search term: windows home group) tl;dr a group of PCs on a LAN that share out file folders (video, music, etc) and printers. Each computer can choose what to share. A PW is requested upon joining a home group. The first non-ad result on Google also explains it pretty well. :)
Here's the first Google result for "Windows homegroup" https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17145/windows-homeg... . Microsoft is famous for its meticulous documentation compared to other closed sourced systems and is often even better than open source systems where developers will not document and instead tell you to just read the code.
Well, I was careful to write cross-platform C++ code from the start, meticulously isolating the few platform-specific parts.
Yes, it's a lot to learn at start, but Powershell is rather user-friendly, so it helps. Yes, I work slower now than in Linux, but I'm quickly picking up the pace and it's paying off. Plus, there are many hands-on howtos for specific tasks I need to accomplish.
Hmm... sounds like OS X would be the perfect fit for you. All the Adobe stuff, and Outlook/Office for Mac is pretty decent (although it uses Spotlight for its INTERNAL search, which means I have to use my org's webmail for search because I hate disk indexers that run in the background). Also you get a proper terminal (the built-in is fine but iTerm is a bit better imho) and a native Unix filesystem.
Apart from the apple tax and the lag in performance both IPC and in core count plus the fact that apple seems to not realy be focusing on the real power user/workstation user
Man how often do I hear "I don't want ads on my desktop" or "I want higher quality hardware" or "I'd pay more for a system that X" and then in the same breath someone says something ridiculous like "the apple tax".
It's like in cell phones. People bemoan how expensive iPhones are and brag about how cheap you can get an Android phone. An iPhone is $600 but you can get an Android phone for $100! Then I ask which Android phone I should get and I'm told "Samsung Galaxy S8", which is the same price as an iPhone!
I'm told Apple laptops are too expensive, so I ask which Windows laptop I should get and I'm told a Surface, a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, an XPS 13... all of which are exactly comparable in price with a Macbook.
It's almost like "the apple tax" doesn't exist and people are just mad that Apple doesn't make cheap low quality products that the person complaining would never buy anyway.
> Man how often do I hear "I don't want ads on my desktop"
OS X has plenty of ads and nags for iCloud and Apple Music FYI.
Fill up your iCloud space and it will ask you to buy more on every boot.
Siri on OS X was artificially limited to only play music from Apple Music but not your iTunes library when even the iPhone 4 could play music stored in its internal app.
Wow, if that classifies as an ad I don't even know what the definition of advertising is anymore.
I want a car that doesn't come with advertising built in. Every time I'm low on gas it starts dinging and flashing lights at me, and - can you believe this, people - if I refuse to buy any more, the car won't even start! And don't get me started on what happens every 10,000 miles... demanding I change the oil! I'm not a sucker, I won't fall for their advertising!
If your car said "You're almost out of gas, stop by your nearest Exxon station and fill up!" or "It's been 10,000 miles, drive on over to Jiffy Lube for an oil change", then surely that would be an ad.
It's an ad because they are advertising the iCloud service to you. It's not just that they say "Your iCloud is running out of free space", it's that they say "Your iCloud is running out of free space, buy more space here!"
You're using iCloud. Do you expect it to say "your iCloud space is filling up, buy more space on OneDrive or Google Drive here!"? My cell carrier sends me a notice every month that I need to continue paying them or I will lose service. Sure I can switch to another carrier, but if I want normal service to keep happening like it has happened in the past, I will need to send more money as per the agreement I signed.
That's not an advertisement. That's a critical notification about a service you've chosen to use. It's not any different just because they offered a free trial.
It's not that they say "Your iCloud is running out of free space." or "Your iCloud is running out of free space, buy more space here!" it's that they say "sign up for iCloud and store your X!". The first two are status updates for a service that's already being used. The last is an ad.
Umm...those are the exact kind of "ads" people complain about for Windows (this is basically the exact same thing as the OneDrive info strip inside File Explorer).
There are similar popups for Safari on iOS, and for Chrome when you use gmail on iOS. There used to be Chrome adds on the google homepage when you hit it with a non-chrome browser, but they didn't load for me when I tried it today.
I have never seen a safari ad and chrome ads on Google's page used to unobtrusively trigger for outdated browsers, which is arguably more relevant to the user.
The edge notifications look like a system alert and trigger constantly.
Fwiw GM cars with OnStar spam you with nags to activate it, which is super annoying. The iCloud "out of space, manage or ignore?" Thing pops up on my watch, on CarPlay, and a few times a day on my phone. It's super annoying that there's no option to say "OK + I don't care".
You choose to use iCloud and then consider it an ad when you run out of space and it asks you to upgrade ? You choose to use iTunes and then consider it an ad when Apple asks you to sign up for Apple Music which is the streaming service for iTunes.
> People bemoan how expensive iPhones are and brag about how cheap you can get an Android phone. An iPhone is $600 but you can get an Android phone for $100! Then I ask which Android phone I should get and I'm told "Samsung Galaxy S8", which is the same price as an iPhone!
I know your being facetious, but the easy answer to that question is the Moto G5 Plus, which you can pick up for $230 in most any Best Buy or Costco in the US.
There are many other good choices there too.
> I'm told Apple laptops are too expensive, so I ask which Windows laptop I should get and I'm told a Surface, a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, an XPS 13... all of which are exactly comparable in price with a Macbook.
I don't think that's true. Apple store is down for WWDC today, but as of yesterday a 13' MacBook Pro is $1,300. The closest matching Dell XPS 13 is only $1,000. It has a lower resolution screen, but a newer gen processor and 10% more battery.
----
Fundamentally, Apple products carry a premium price. Some non-Apple products also carry a premium price (see the Surface Book as a good example). But that doesn't mean the "Apple Tax" (higher margins) aren't real, or that there aren't comparable products without it.
Again, the lineup is being refreshed today, so this may all change. But the Mac Pro is the typical perfect example of this -- you can build or buy a more powerful, smaller, faster PC including licensed Windows 10 Pro for much cheaper than a Mac, literally just a small fraction of the Mac Pro's current price.
Not sure I agree on the cell phones at all. I have plenty of relatives who are very satisfied with their Moto Gs and for whom the alternative would have been an iPhone at 3x the price.
If you want equivalent specs then sure, the prices are going to be similar but that's the whole point, with Android (and a PC) you've got a wide range of _choices_ on many parts of the specifications/price spectrum. With Apple you've got far fewer.
The same goes for laptops where you listed three different manufacturers.
So what you're saying is comparable hardware costs the same no matter if its Android or Apple, the difference is Apple doesn't make low-end devices.
That is literally exactly what I said. If a Galaxy S8 and an iPhone with the same hardware costs the same price, there is no such thing as "the apple tax". None. Can't happen. They cost the same. The only difference is that Apple doesn't make anything cheaper, but google "best laptops 2017" and guess what? They all cost the same as a Macbook.
So as it turns out, Apple's prices are comparable with their direct competitors. Ergo, the Apple tax doesn't exist.
I originally said "It's almost like "the apple tax" doesn't exist and people are just mad that Apple doesn't make cheap low quality products"
You replied "Not sure I agree on the cell phones at all."
Your justification for that was "Apple's prices are comparable with their direct competitors for similar specifications but they just don't provide a low end."
It is a complete non-sequitur to say they're charging you a premium to buy a high-end device if you want a low-end one. They charge exactly the same for exactly the same. Not a tax.
Fact: Apple's prices are competitive with comparable devices.
Fact: Apple only competes in the high end market.
Not fact: Apple forces you to buy their products even if you can't afford it.
For the target of the sku you'd be looking at Mac Pros which are uber expensive and have not been updated for ages also the GPU options are limited compared to a wintel workstation if you want to use CUDA etal.
Laptops are an second pc for work station users sorry a MacBook "pro" is marketing speak.
>
I'm told Apple laptops are too expensive, so I ask which Windows laptop I should get and I'm told a Surface, a Thinkpad X1 Carbon, an XPS 13... all of which are exactly comparable in price with a Macbook.
My ThinkPad is easy to repair (already did a small repair myself), has support for a docking station (currently I don't need it, but a friend loves it), has an ethernet port (I won't buy a laptop that has no ethernet ports), allows one to buy a battery (or even buy a larger battery if I prefer one), allows me to add additional RAM myself if I conclude that I need more, ...
Because he still needs to run Windows in a VM in order to get Outlook and Adobe software. I wouldn't necessarily call it a perfect choice for him, but its worth considering if those apps are important to you.
Elementary has potential but it has a LONG way to go. I noticed a lot of issues around installing really anything that didn't come with it. I don't think I was able to get Chrome on it, for example, at all.
Elementary feels like it was cobbled together to look gorgeous (and it does), but zero thought was put into performance and stability. I would take literally any other Ubuntu-derived distro over Elementary any day
I think your concern is actually going to be the same on all platforms. these days we work in a lot of repos. a lot of services that depend on services. almost every one I work in now has its own environment set up. each Python project has its own version of Python. Java projects can share a jvm but get all their own jars. a few services only run in docker locally so it can do further set up. with this in mind, I don't see anything running natively for work anyone. it's always going to be packaged up in a manager/container/vm. the times I do have service specific stuff at an OS level it's actually bad and bites me later on
LVM thinly provisioned "virtual sized" logical volumes. This is how I'm installing non-linux VM's these days. Neither virt-manager nor Boxes will see them, but you can use virsh to edit the path to the LV.
For example. Create a new VM, and just have it create a dummy LV that you can throw away later (I actually keep a 4MiB one around just for the purpose of having something virt-manager will see and select).
Create the virtual size LV:
sudo lvcreate -V 50G -T thintastic/vg -n windows
Then 'virsh edit daisy' and find the disk section.
Change the path from /dev/vg/dummy to /dev/vg/windows, save it. Now start the VM normally, and it'll use that thinp LV just fine. So the neat thing about that is, you give 50G to Windows, but it's only going to suck up from the VG what's actually being written to disk from Windows; i.e. an installation involves about 15G of writing, so it will only take up 15G of the VG pool's extents. The other 35G are still in the VG pool.
You could make the virtual size LV 500G and Windows will see it as 500G, even if it's only backed by 75G of VG. Obviously if you hit 75G of writes, the virtual block device spits out ENOSPC and then presumably Windows gets pissed that it doesn't in fact have 500G to play with. But what this means is you make the LV as big as you would practically ever want it to be, without having to second guess and go "well if I give all that space over to Windows, now I can't ever use it for anything else without it being a hassle of fs resizing and repartitioning".
Also fstrim commands on NTFS will cause previously deallocated space (file deletions) in the LV to be returned to the VG for other use. It's actually more efficient doing this than fs resize.
I find NTFS on either qcow2 or raw disk on top of a file system means a bigger performance impact than just handing the VM its own virtual block device in the form of an LVM LV. It is easier to move file backed VM's around, like if you have to do a backup-restore. But so far I just backup the user data onto my NAS or cloud, and expect if I have a hardware failure I'm rebuilding the VM from scratch.
All of this is exactly why I love my Mac. Native unix capabilities with the ability to use the big names (Adobe, Microsoft Office, etc.). I have an RDP to a laptop under my desk for anything Windows-related that needs a physical machine, but I live on my Mac.
A Native to MAC unix environment almost all unix developers will be deploying to Linux so having a slightly different Unix is actually a risk, as is local development as opposed to a proper dev /test /prod set up
Nonsense. You can have both - a local dev environment where you sandbox test your changes, a "proper" dev environment running Linux, a test environment running Linux that matches production, and a production environment.
When you sandbox test your changes in your local dev you also quickly learn which pieces of your code are non-portable or non-standard.
And your deploying on MAC hardware? Serious developments have identical hardware for dev and test to that used for prod. Its all about removing risk.
I have worked at places were the dev test and prod systems where brought from the same sun production run so that the systems where identical down the rev of the motherboards, our networks and sysadmin said he would have liked to buy all the Disks (DASD) from the same production run as well.
Did you read my original comment which specifically mentions that development, test, and production are all matching?
That you write and test the code before moving to the "proper" development environment running Linux gives you a chance to ensure you're not writing Linux-specific code in cases where portability at least a passing concern (read: unless you're developing platform specific firmware).
I do the same but I also have VMWare Fusion for when I feel like doing Windows development. I created shortcut keys that match Xcode, so instead of [End], I use Cmd ->, etc. and they feel quite natural.
What "power user" means today seems to be something different than before --- essentially, users who just use more of the features of the OS, in the way these companies want them to; notice that "more configurability/customisation" is not mentioned at all, whereas that would be what I expect as a "power user" (the old type) myself.
On that note if they would do updates without forcing restarting it wouldn't be as horrible. Maybe a softer approach is "logout and log back in to see updates" on Linux unless it's a Kernel update I usually don't need to restart, just logout (in some cases that's not even needed just reopen the program and keep going). Of course if you're on Slackware you may just sit with the same files for years :) At least I did, (it was my first distro) so Windows needs updating improvements heavily. Also don't slow down my whole OS while they're downloaded / being processed.
Not wanting Ads I can understand - you've paid for Windows (and in some cases Surface hardware) and you don't want to be the product - but why do you dislike telemetry? I'd rather Microsoft know what crashes the OS (and why apps die) in the real world and fix it.
Because telemetry is potentially not only the core dumps and performance metrics, but also all sorts of potentially sensitive information - like a data derived from the user input (keyboard , voice or pen - this data is said to be anonymized but AFAIK no one had audited this) or list of installed applications. Knowing that something is crashing or performing badly is one thing, knowing what I'm doing with my computer is another.
Telemetry can be done right by letting end-user to see an example of the data that's going to be sent and then also audit the actual reports that were sent. Transcribed into a human-readable format with some comments about what the values mean - I can see the binary data myself, thanks. And a way to opt out if the data is found to be actually sensitive.
Basically, an opt-out switch and "sure, but give me a full transparency report" mode that a "power user" can optionally access if they happen to care. This is rarely the case, and not the case with Windows.
While I am (probably) just as against this kind of opaque bulk data aggregation, there is an argument to be made that they could be analyzing the data you provide on their end and storing the result (e.g. "how many users did X" is not a question you could anonymize on the end user machine, but they still might discard anything other than perhaps a hash to prevent duplicates, and thereby not be able to answer the question of who said what later.)
I agree with the desire for complete transparency in data shared, but eventually this will run afoul of a number of practices which rely on cat-and-mouse games where one side doesn't have complete information (an obvious example being precisely what sorts of data Windows Defender uses/sends for malware found by heuristic, presuming it doesn't just ship the entire binary off), to say nothing of the conspiracy theories that would arise every time they ever added some kind of data collection.
I don't have a good answer for this friction in general - complete transparency would only fly until a piece of malware that circumvented every heuristic and strict rule caused a major incident, whereas nearly complete opacity is where we are now.
(There's also the conflict of their lack of recurring revenue for Windows 10, which is why I'd anticipate them eventually at least floating the option to disable the "end user data as payment" harvesting for an annual fee, but...)
Except the "new Microsoft" has publicly lamented the fact that they aren't capturing the same personal information for targeted advertising that Google and Facebook were. They've also stated that Windows 10 would "fix" that. Telemetry that captures keystrokes and pumps line-in audio back to home base was the way to do this.
There were earlier articles that talked about the frequency of audio dumps (every 30 minutes) but I wouldn't call them as reliable sources as Ars or Microsoft.
I couldn't find the older articles about how Ballmer was complaining that they were missing out on the personal data gold rush that Google and Facebook were experiencing.
Those are interesting links but they don't support your assertion that Microsoft's big envy is for the kind of ad targeting data FB and google posses. The only related content I saw were the mentions of Cortana, and Cortana is not just a terrible way to chase advertising dollars, it's actually a way to unseat Google's dominance in tech precisely because it breaks the viability of advertising as a business.
Google's entire business is built around selling the presentation of unwanted information around the organic content you want. That works great in a visual medium where the extra information requires no more of your time and only minimally more of your attention. Alexa and Cortana and Siri shift that interaction to audio where it becomes incredibly difficult to insert even a tiny fraction of the surrounding ad content search engines used to deliver visually. Alexa and Cortana and Siri break google's business model because they break the ability to spam customers with ancillary information, and they can do that because neither Amazon nor Apple nor Microsoft derive the bulk of their revenues from ad sales. This is a battle of business models, not a quest for the other guy's business model.
So yes, Microsoft is building Cortana, and no, Cortana isn't about becoming an advertising powerhouse it's about blocking their two ad-fueled competitors (the best discussion I'm aware of of google's efforts to fight back against this agent-driven threat to their ad-based business model is [0] )
> You can't disable telemetry completey. Some people want it, some don't. Let the user decide.
I would be curious how many users want telemetry sent to Microsoft. It seems the two largest buckets, by far, would be those who don't care and those who don't want it.
I want your (all yalls) telemetry data sent to Microsoft, so my Windows crashes less. As an aggregate, the worlds telemetry data has an extremely positive impact on me.
The problem with opt in is that most people, where most crashes occur, would never read what the prompt says asking them to send the data, they would just press the x in the corner because a dialog box popped up they didnt ask for. "What did that box say. I dont know. Why did you close it. Because I didnt want it."
> The problem with opt in is that most people, where most crashes occur, would never read what the prompt says asking them to send the data, they would just press the x in the corner because a dialog box popped up they didnt ask for. "What did that box say. I dont know. Why did you close it. Because I didnt want it."
You're describing a UX issue with the worst possible way this could be implemented. What chafes me is not that I'm not asked for permission for every crash report, but that I don't have the option to disable crash reports at all.
So would pressing the x mean that the user agreed to this? If it's unclear, I'm drawing that conclusion from all those Windows 10 upgrades where that were the case.
> "What did that box say. I dont know. Why did you close it. Because I didnt want it."
That's right, because all these unsolicited prompts and notifications are a waste of people's valuable time. A well-designed OS should aggressively keep quiet, stay out of the way, and err on the side of user privacy.
Your Windows crashing is an issue strictly between you, Microsoft, and the makers of whatever software and hardware you were using when the crash occurred. Absolutely nothing to do with anybody else.
Telemetry is this close to being apparatus for spying; a court order (secret or otherwise) could strip whatever anonymization MS is doing, say, for specific IPs or even whole regions by geography. Poof: keystrokes in real-time, available to state actors. Wouldn't that be grand?
Developed capacity may not equal intent, but if you can be ordered to do secret work and make it so anyway, the distinction is irrelevant.
That's exactly right - I'm happy to let my OS provider know when things break with the hopes that they fix them, but sometimes I don't want to do that, and I'd rather be asked every time or have a global setting to decide than be defaulted to opt-in.
I think it needs to be opt out. Most users AREN'T power users. They want their computer to work consistently, like an appliance. That requires that the vendor has information about the status of the device.
As long as you're clearly informed about what kind of information it's collecting and you can turn it off (and ideally tune it) it's fine with me.
The opt in piece is important because you need large amounts of data to detect emerging issues. It lets you distinguish between flukes and trends. This enables the quality of service that the user expects.
Why does working consistently like an appliance require the OS provider to know the state of your device at all times? Our appliances have functioned well for decades without this capability and clearly don't need this senseless data collection for the sake of data hoarding. Yet every manufacturer of every product is jamming it in wherever they can. Fridges, cars, dildos, you name it, it's got telemetry or people trying to implement it.
It is simple, data is becoming worth something because you now have the ability to analyze all the data you could ever collect. And so, everybody naturally jumps on the wagon because of the inherent profit motive.
If a computer was an appliance, you would buy it and it would never need to phone home. Now we both know that there is some need for updates and it might therefore be a good idea to classify computers as something other than appliances.
> One might argue that replacing 3d party libraries isn't doing the "core parts" better, it's just being bloated.
First, they're not "replacing" anything. Printing, image acquisition, font rendering, advanced tracing (ETW), authentication and directory (Kerberos), remote access, internationalization, etc. are core OS services. Second, I recently installed Win10 on a machine intended for embedded use. All this "bloat" took ~10GB of disk space, compared to the most plain, cheapest OVH installation which used 2.5GB of disk space and doesn't deliver nearly 1/4 of the features that Windows does.
So which "bloat" are we talking about?
> Moreover, it's being bloated without choice because most people just use the included version so alternatives don't get to thrive.
If the OS-provided version is well thought-out [1] (APIs since Vista seem to be), why would I want an "alternative" that, even if it provides exactly the same functionality, isn't integrated with the rest of the system? (Thankfully, systemd is attacking the integration aspect.) Linux is full of "almost does the job" alternatives, as exemplified in [2]. Thank you, but I'll choose the OS-provided facility, not the least because it vastly simplifies deployment.
[1] EDIT: "Well though-out" is not the same as "easy to use". My impression is that C-level APIs are designed for performance and flexibility first, ease of use comes second.
> Linux is full of "almost does the job" alternatives, as exemplified in [2].
So is Windows. For example, you mentioned Kerberos. Only the Windows implementation is so limited, that you can authenticate against one realm only. What if you need tickets from more realms? In Windows, tough luck.
And no, you cannot replace the Windows Kerberos implementation with another security provider.
ha. They did that even for enterprise. But in truth they did that following Apple's footsteps. There are several projects documenting all that new versions of osx phone home data leaks. It's a ton of data and every single start up is just fine giving macbooks like it's candy for the employees.
What platform are you on that Linux is more stable, and what flavor are you using? I prefer Linux in everything but I am forced to use Windows and OSX for when I need to be guaranteed "the damn thing will work" - i.e. live coding, presentations, meetings, emergency hotfixes, etc.
That was my first thought as well. I was hoping for a high-end system that I actually own, but nope. Nobody will provide that.
Apple still provides the closest thing, at least on Mac. (iOS is another story.) Their telemetry is more minimal than Microsoft's, and it's possible to disable it in a way that hasn't changed much in some time. There's not much evidence Apple cares if you do so. I also trust Apple's security far more than Microsoft's.
So it has become quite a bit harder to do this, as the package names have changed in Win10 and some of the commands in the 1st PS script I found do not work anymore to remove the "updated" packages. No, I cannot think of an example off the top of my head. Also there are reports of some the "features" coming back after updates, etc. I have had to delete all the tiles on the start menu by hand. OneDrive is still in your face on most systems, etc.
MS is making it quite hard to just cleanly remove the crap / adware / telemetry they build in.
If you have a script that works well would you please mind sharing it with the rest of us.
The only place I have Windows 10 is on my Intel Compute keys for the media center running Kodi. One of these days I will get around to trying to get Linux to run on those devices.
While the name of big companies (Google, Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Dropbox, etc) got dragged through the mud, it only appears that these companies were responding to court orders and that "directly" in this context meant with cooperation of these companies and the courts. Companies are legally obligated to respond to valid court orders, issued from a normal court or secret court. See this slide[0], the fact that all data from those companies was going through the FBI instead of an NSA codename project, should tell you everything you need to know about the mechanism (i.e. legal, not technological).
The PRISM program seems to primarily be about hooking into telecommunication infrastructure (both in the US and abroad). Telecommunications companies were definitely complicit.
Does ReFS support native encryption like Apple's new filesystem does? What's keeping Microsoft from enabling encryption for all Windows users by default, other than nickle and diming them for it by forcing them to choose more expensive versions of Windows if they want full disk encryption?
Windows is pretty much the only OS left that doesn't support encryption by default.
Yes. And with suitable hardware Bitlocker actually uses the SSD encryption which is anyways enabled, so there's zero performance hit. The drawback is that not all modern hardware supports it [1,2]. For example the Samsung 960 series do not support this. Since Apple controls the whole stack, I would assume they are also doing this, but I'm not sure.
> BitLocker.... In what way does it come up short?
By forcing an escrow key linked to Microsoft and whomever owns the TPM on your computer.
By definition, backdoor keys and hidden users who can access encrypted content is just absolutely, horribly wrong. And there's no way to turn it off... Well, I'm sure someone will say there's 10 regkeys to change that might fix it on a specific version.
Still does nothing regarding the "trust" with the TPM.
They actually don't; not for Macs anyway - although that might be different for the models with TouchID. FileVault on the Mac is entirely software-based.
The TPM is pwned, by default. It's closed, secret, and as the AMT issuws showed, has a lot of software running in it with questionable security.
That's why the whole excercise is meaningless if you leave the keys on the device, and why you should put them on external hardware TPMs or key vaults. Even a YubiKey is better.
Now you just need a system that supports reading keys from such a device during boot.
False. You are given a non-default option to upload a backup of your Bitlocker key to Onedrive. By what evidence are you claiming Microsoft gets to decrypt the drive if this option isn't selected?
TPM and AMT are two entirely different technologies with entirely different classes of security concerns. The Intel management engine (which runs the AMT software) is effectively a separate CPU that runs full programs and has direct memory/hardware access, while the TPM is not.
The TPM is a PKI device, nothing more. It cannot take over your computer.
>MS encrypts your stuff with your AND microsofts key. Look for this "feature" by a if you forget your password, and log into OneDrive.
This statement is misleading. When setting up bitlocker, you have the option of saving your recovery key to onedrive. It's not mandatory or even the default choice.
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At this point, it's like she's just trying to justify her position.