Slashdot Mirror

Here's an article for you:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/...

You keep pointing at consumer stuff; that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about business software like ERP.

Here's another (somewhat old though):
http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

Google for "SaaS lock-in"; there's countless IT industry articles talking about this. Many seem to think it's not a big problem though acknowledging there's a lot of concern about it, and the general advice is to warn people to make sure your ERP vendor lets you have access to your raw data and download it at any time, preferably with direct DB access or at least CSV downloads.

SUBDOMAINS/DOMAINS/HOSTNAMES INVOLVED:

choice.microsoft.com
choice.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
cs1.wpc.v0cdn.net
df.telemetry.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com
i1.services.social.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com
oca.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
pre.footprintpredict.com
redir.metaservices.microsoft.com
reports.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
services.wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
settings-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
sqm.df.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com
sqm.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
statsfe1.ws.microsoft.com
survey.watson.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com
telecommand.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
telemetry.appex.bing.net
telemetry.appex.bing.net:443
telemetry.microsoft.com
telemetry.urs.microsoft.com
vortex.data.microsoft.com
vortex-sandbox.data.microsoft.com
vortex-win.data.microsoft.com
watson.live.com
watson.ppe.telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com
watson.telemetry.microsoft.com.nsatc.net
wes.df.telemetry.microsoft.com

STOPPING THE SERVICES ASSOCIATED WITH IT:

run cmd as administrator

sc stop Diagtrack
sc delete Diagtrack

SCHEDULED TASKS ASSOCIATED WITH IT:

Everything under "Application Experience"
Everything under "Autochk"
Everything under "Customer Experience Improvement Program"
Under "Disk Diagnostic" only the "Microsoft-Windows-DiskDiagnosticDataCollector"
Under "Maintenance" "WinSAT"
"Media Center" and click the "status" column, then select all non-disabled entries and disable them.

*services.msc:

"Remote Registry" to "Disabled" instead of "Manual".

THE UPDATES THAT CAUSE THIS (allegedly on Win7 too):

KB2505438 (Although it claims to fix performance issues, it often breaks fonts)
KB2670838 (This update often breaks AERO on Windows 7 and makes some fonts on websites fuzzy. A Windows 7 specific update only, do not install IE10 or 11 otherwise it will be bundled with them, IE9 is the max version you should install to avoid this.
KB2952664 (Windows 10 Upgrade preparation)
KB2976978 (Windows 10 Upgrade preparation)
KB2977759 (Windows 10 Upgrade preparation)
KB2990214 (Windows 10 Upgrade preparation)
KB3021917 (Windows 10 Upgrade preparatioon + Telemetry)
KB3022345 (Telemetry)
KB3035583 (Windows 10 upgrade preparation)
KB3044374
KB3068708 (Telemetry)
KB3075249 (Telemetry)
KB3080149 (Telemetry)

APK

P.S.=> I've gathered that mostly from here (/. folks who checked as YOU did, good job), this report by Czech folks -> http://localghost.org/posts/a-... & this article also http://www.infoworld.com/artic... THAT LAST ONE IMO IS EVEN MORE INTERESTING THAN THE FIRST ONE, as it involves Win7 too...

... apk

I first heard about it here:

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

If you google with keywords like windows 7 and telemetry, you should find everything you need. There is also a list somewhere of all the various microsoft servers you need to block access to from your router. (Windows Firewall ain't good enough cause these tools *bypass* Windows Firewall) I can't remember where I saw that list... only that it was shockingly large.

3021917 (update for Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program
3068708 (update for CEIP and telemetry)
3080149 (update for CEIP and telemetry)
3075249 (telemetry)
2990214 (Windows 10 upgrade) (I suppose this isn't technically privacy. And Microsoft claims you actually need it; your choice whether to believe them. Also, 3044374 for Windows 8.1.

http://arstechnica.com/informa...

The thing is, it's not just Windows 10. If you regularly update your machines, Microsoft has already added additional telemetry tools to Windows 7 and 8.

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

What really sucks for me is that I *like* Windows 10. I run it in a VM on my Mac, and I've noticed an immediate performance improvement, especially with boot ups.

But from all the media reports, it looks like Windows 10 is turning into a conspiracy theorists bukake dream. And unless there is very little backlash to this, I can see Microsoft easily porting the rest of their privacy invading tools to their previous OSes.

.
When I start up my PC in the morning, the hard drive just grinds away for about 5 or 10 minutes, and the CPU is sluggish. At first I thought it was an A/V scan, so I removed my A/V. No effect.

Then I stumbled upon the InfoWorld article, and removed the Windows Updates that were mentioned in the article. The scanning stopped. Until I did a Windows Update earlier this week. And I had to remove once again the offending updates.

What in the world is going on in Redmond?

exploiting a Linux kernel made for free by volunteers

Corporations like Red Hat, Suse, IBM, Texas Instruments, Linaro, Samsung, Oracle, and yep, even Microsoft, all contributed to Linux. In fact, corporate contributions now stand at about 80% of all submissions, according to the Linux Development Report. The notion that Linux is made exclusively by a bunch of unpaid volunteers is simply not true. It started out that way, but it has a lot of corporate support these days.

In case you're wondering, Google was the 8th most prolific Linux kernel corporate contributor in 2014.

Also it used to be that I did the same, I would verify, or at least look at each update before installing them... This was before there was 20 updates every week. Now I just let it do everything automatically, and I'll deal with it if something ends up going awry. Odds are MS will deal with it in the following update anyway, which is probably the idea.

Funny. I used to do that on Win7, right up until the point when a "high priority" update installed adware for Win10 and re-enabled telemetry that I had explicitly disabled.

I rolled back the offending patches and re-disabled the telemetry-related tasks in Task Manager, and all was well. Under Win10-as-a-service, I would not have been able to roll back the spyware patch.

The link - http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

If you really prefer a Chinese boot on your neck to the USAians boot on your neck, I suggest you move to China and find out what the place is really like.

The link - http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

Other views of the same issues:

1) Backwards compatibility on Xbox One. That is better described as a "business practice" that reverses the extremely destructive previous intentions. Anything else would have killed the Xbox.

2) A change to the subscription business model. Microsoft and Adobe and other companies are testing how much customers can be abused. Now, instead of selling a product, they are trying to take additional control by only renting it. Eventually that abusive business model will collapse. Yes, until then it may be profitable.

3) To the cloud! The "cloud" is based on cloudy thinking. Many managers who don't have sufficient technical knowledge believe using another company's computers will save money. Instead, over several years they will create vendor lock-in. Using another company's computers may be a good way to provide a backup in case of widespread failure at a primary site. It is not a good sole method. Also, anyone wanting to use another's company's computers would contract with Amazon or Google. Microsoft has a long history of wacky management. (See my earlier comment.)

See the InfoWorld article: In a cloud outage, no one can hear you scream.

4) .NET goes open source. It is impossible to know whether that will increase Microsoft's income. It may just lower the rate of decrease of income.

As if there aren't people on both sides for and against it.

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...
http://time.com/3578255/conser...
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
http://www.politico.com/story/...

http://www.infoworld.com/artic... Get a Clue AC. Everything is not as clear cut as you believe. Think Wall Street. Data centers were flooded dumb ass. Onsite backup is no good if under water.

Actually, your view is a bit dated, as 80 percent of Linux contributions are paid by corporations. The days of Linux being a hobbyist product are long behind us.

FUD.us.

These are similar in style and lack of ethics or engineering rigor to the manufactured "compatibility" that got an ISO standard published despite the shrieking of every sensible, competent, non-Microsoft funded voter at the conference. Numerous attendees and members of the IFC committees resigned in protest, and even Microsoft is incapable of following the actual spec. The result is that Microsoft continues to violate the spec they sponsored even in their own software, but bureaucrat without technical awareness or who were already buying Microsoft products can check off "standards compliant" on their checklist of software requirements.

They fight dirty. Take a good look at what happened in Massachusetts to the CIO who demanded software have actual API's so that people would be able to read documents in the future. They did a political hatchet job on him.

          http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

"Like an abusive partner, Microsoft says it 'loves' Linux -- when what it means is that it desperately needs Linux .. While Microsoft doesn't appear to have crowed much about its victims since Hoeft & Wessel two years ago, its strategy of shaking down Android users with broad threats seems to be continuing unchanged" ref

I think it's important to understand that the .NET JIT compiler should probably be considered more part of the .NET *runtime*, not necessarily part of the development platform for .NET. Since they want to port .NET to non-Microsoft operating systems, it makes sense to utilize LLVM to target those platforms for the JIT compiler rather than trying to write a new one from scratch. They needed a solid compiler to accompany their open source .NET platform for it to be a more complete open-source solution. Moreover, they've been extending Visual C++'s support for alternative platforms like Android, so it also makes sense that they'd be gaining expertise with LLVM.

It's probably not the end of their proprietary compiler, or even necessarily an indication they're thinking this way, but it may make more sense for them to utilize LLVM so as to target a larger number of platforms. They just recently rewrote their own .NET compiler a couple of years ago and released it as open source, so it's sort of odd to see a new project so soon. I'm guessing they figured it would be more work to extend that project to support all the platforms they're releasing CoreCLR for than using LLVM. Hard to say.

Also, there's still the native compiler, used for C/C++, and they've been sinking an enormous amount of development resources into making it compliant with the recent advances in those languages, so it also seems unlikely they're going to toss that work.

##

Story ---> The new Windows is to be called "Windows 10", inexplicably skipping 9. What's funnier is the fact this was "predicted" by InfoWorld over a year ago in an April Fools' article.

"The reason is simple:

Call it windows 9 - the 12 announcement stories are lost among the weak wash of windows 9 speculation

Call it windows 10 - cheap gimmick to make people think they have to upgrade to what is essentially windows 7, and 24 more stories all commenting about how they chose a different fucking number

Fuck microsoft."

- https://www.reddit.com/user/fe...
- http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

##

Story ---> BusinessBill Gates: Bitcoin Is 'Better Than Currency'

"Fuck you Bill.

If you hadn't used our own tax dollars against us, holding back the internet for ten years, we might have had bitcoin a decade earlier, IMAGINE how many more learning developments we would have had.

SO FUCK YOU BILL. FUCK YOU.

Reasons Bill Gates is an asshole:

1. Trying to force linux out of the market for decade and a half with FUD, SCO lawsuits, targeting small companies and putting people out of work
2. Poisoning the well of hundreds of open source projects (see Halloween documents)
3. Stealing hundreds of billions of tax dollars worldwide with illegal bribes and FUD spread to councils and governments
4. NSA backdoors into the windows code
5. Keep pushing the windows 95 source code as a 'new product' every two years
6. Trying to destroy the console competition by using cash-cow money to buy into exclusives and create and anti-consumer market - exclusives don't benefit consumers
7. Trying to kill off openoffice, also poisoning the well of open office - disrupting development and communications.
8. Holding back the internet development for a decade, because they wanted to maintain their "SLoC" business model
9. Using NSA funds (your tax dollars) to buy skype for an ungodly amount, as an accounting trick, immediately rewiring the peer-to-peer technology of skype to push all calls into a NSA backdoor datacenter of 10000 machines that route all calls (google it)
10. Becoming patent trolls the last years
11. Being SHIT. Making shit products, being lazy - not creating something good and exceptional.
12. Faking upgrade requirements for YEARS on office - pushing broken formats, broken compatibility, lying to 99% of their user install base about needing to upgrade their shitty office suite.
13. Tying direct X versions to windows versions for no reason (proven by overriding flags) to force people to buy new hardware / licenses for no reason
14. Forcing OEMs to change netbook configurations, forcing them to stay slow, low resolution and sub full-size keyboard - basically forcing prices higher on hardware for years - otherwise they'd withdraw licensing to them
15. Forcing countries to pass certain sales laws on operating systems through lobbying
16. Forcing resellers to sell computers with a windows license, stopping the ability for small stores to supply ready-to-run linux products for fear of not being able to any windows machines people might want
17. Not innovating for decades, then trying to buy into search and email - because they were deliberately holding back the internet to stop it diminishing their desktop
18. Internet Explorer 6
19. Internet Explorer 7
20. Internet Explorer 8
21. Internet Explorer 9
22. That disgraceful way they screwed around with open standards, flip flopping and finally using it as yet another excuse to force people to upgrade (file extension changes)
23. Buying into opengl patents to hedge their bets on directx, trying to keep gaming exclusive to windows through lock-in
24. TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS of damage, LOST JOBS caused by millions of worm infections caused by WIDE OPEN APIs in outlook - N

Story ---> The new Windows is to be called "Windows 10", inexplicably skipping 9. What's funnier is the fact this was "predicted" by InfoWorld over a year ago in an April Fools' article.

"The reason is simple:

Call it windows 9 - the 12 announcement stories are lost among the weak wash of windows 9 speculation

Call it windows 10 - cheap gimmick to make people think they have to upgrade to what is essentially windows 7, and 24 more stories all commenting about how they chose a different fucking number

Fuck microsoft."

- https://www.reddit.com/user/fe...
- http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

Assuming you're not a troll, I feel sorry for you - you're going to have a VERY hard time in programming life if you can't understand something as simple as C++

C++ "simple"??? I have a hard time not believing you're the troll. You must be a genius.

Even Rob Pike thinks it's too complex. (You may remember Rob from such hits as "Unix" and "Plan 9." He also wrote The Unix Programming Environment and co-wrote The Practice of Programming with Brian Kernighan, the "K" in "K&R C.")

I read "sledgehammer" as "security nightmare". It's sort of sad when something completely eclipses Adobe Flash for sheer number and seriousness of security issues. As of a year ago, Java accounted for over 90% of all recent web-based exploits. It's a real problem, because so many enterprise applications rely on old and insecure versions of the Java runtime. It may be that security issues are what actually ends up completely killing Java on the client - besides the simple fact that the trend is simply moving away from plugins because of their inconvenience and proprietary nature.

Maybe you need to leave the comforting confines of mom's basement more often. Here's one from about six months ago. It affects Windows 7, 8.1 and Server 2008:

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

I don't think you are familiar with the controversy surrounding him, but a quick google search dug up a rather good summary of the situation:
http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

The people involved are always important because the people involved will:
1. Shape how the project evolves.
2. The life of the project is usually dependent on those primarily interested in it staying interested in it.
3. A project needs to take criticism into account and look for opporunities to improve. Completely ignoring all critcisim could be ignoring fixes you could make now that could make things a lot smoother and avoid problems in the future.

Also I'm not defending SysV :P

Microsoft reported a 128 percent year-over-year growth for Azure and its other commercial cloud services, including Office 365 for business. Home users of Office 365 (now numbering 7 million, Microsoft says) also edged up 25 percent over the last quarter.

In some ways the Office 365 figures are more significant than the Azure numbers, since they hint that one of Microsoft's most intractable customer groups -- users of the desktop, on-premises Office suite -- can be transformed incrementally into cloud users, and from "transactional purchasing to annuity" (read subscription) customers. Microsoft has made wise moves in that area, such as offer more granular Office 365 subscription deals for small businesses. The basic Business SKU, which includes the full Office desktop apps, is now $8.25 per user per month for up to five devices per user.

Microsoft reported solid Q1 gains with Azure and Office 365, but the payoff from its mobile efforts may still be a long way off [oct 24, 2014]

I am surprised he wrote this article, as he wrote another piece stating that Javascript for everything is the future of programming. http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

This isn't merely useless, nor just bad, it's completely misleading. For it may look like he's giving the high-level, the author appears to have no depth to draw on to say more than the shallowest things. As such, he's presenting pond scum, not the high points from an expert deep sea fisher.

And this is pretty bad, given that infoworld says about themselves:

InfoWorld is the destination of choice for technology decision makers and business leaders who seek expert, in-depth analysis of enterprise technology.

while the TFA says about the author:

Peter Wayner is contributing editor at InfoWorld and the author of more than 16 books on diverse topics, including open source software, autonomous cars, privacy-enhanced computation, digital transactions, and steganography.

I'm loath to seek out his writing, in fact fairly convinced to stay well away, while at the same time morbidly curious just how bad his "more than 16 books" will misinform.

I don't think any of the languages you've mentioned are ones people would consider one of those "vogue" kiddie languages. Scala, D, Swift, Everything on this list, is not something I would tell a child to start learning, and then bet a career on.

That said, use the right tool for the job! PHP is absolutely a great idea for a webpage, which is, by it's very nature, a scripted entity. With much pain, C *can* do it, but there is a better tool, already. PHP - and just about every other scripted language is written in C/C++. So is the JVM. It's all just (another) layer of abstraction, in the end.

  But, when it comes to kernels, firmware, and just about anything embedded - C should be near the top of your list. It's not the most popular language, but it's steady. It sits nicely on top of only assembly language - and thus, is easily used on any (and almost every) hardware-architecture there is.

"The evidence suggests Microsoft "loves" Linux the same way abusive partners "love" their spouses -- a deep need in one area of the relationship that changes nothing elsewhere." Besides, didn't we hear all this changing of heart stuff before?

- http://www.infoworld.com/artic...
- http://ostatic.com/blog/system...

Any corporate executive traveling will have encrypted communications from their company as a matter of course.

This post is nothing but a weak attempt at Kaspersky marketing.

I just read this on the weekend: The icky part of tech support: Porn and other NSFW surprises

Which has a wonderful bit of text in it:

In a survey published last year by software vendor ThreatTrack Security, 40% of tech support employees said they'd been called in to remove malware from the computer or other device of a senior executive, specifically malware that came from infected porn sites.

Would you care to revise your opinion of corporate executives?

In discussions around the Web in the past few months, I've seen who run Linux on their laptops and maybe a VPS or home server.

- there is a link on words "an overwhelming level of support of systemd from Linux users" - and that prompted me to click on that link (in clear violation of /. codex) because I was hoping to see who are these people that overwhelmingly support systemd? (apart from Lennart himself, that is).

All I got was a blog by Paul Venezia claiming that there is "an overwhelming level of support of systemd from Linux users". The links proving that claim are suspiciously missing. The blog itself seem to be be more on the skeptical side too.

So unless I see an overwhelming level of support of systemd from someone that matters and someone who knows what he talks about, then I'm not inclined to take that statement at face value.

It was SkyDrive, until they had to rename it due to a lawsuit from British broadcaster BSkyB

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

Interesting? Just for stringing together memes? Well lets break down his meme spewing shall we? We have living in the past, a very old classic and fav of Pogson, we have the ever popular works for me, and of course blaming the user which brings up its free so you can't complain. Oh and I fucking LMAO that the VERY FIRST POST was the ever hilarious battle cry of the FOSSie masses, the ever popular why do you hate free software, because if you don't slurp every drop of koolaid, including that shoved by an employee of the company trying to jam an SVCHOSTS into Linux for its own gain why you MUST be part of an organized attack on FOSS...ROFLcopter the amount of crazy is just too much LOL!

MSFT is really under the gun to show they can produce quality. This is why competition is great for us and why we should pat ourselves on the back for pushing MSFT towards anti-monopoly standards. Google's Android releases keep looking better and better. Apple has their own embarrassments. MSFT has to do the software process to get it right and they know they can't afford another Win8 / Vista / WinME. We can always use Linux which is getting better and better every day. They are giving away Win8 now for $65 WITH A TABLET. (that's how bad it is.)

Doesn't have a damned thing to do with Windows or binary files, it has to do with the fact that Debian has been made Red hat's bitch by way of ex RH and Ubuntu employees taking over the board. For those that want to know what systemd is REALLY about its about cloud computing, specifically RH is pushing cloud computing like mad and systemd is gonna end up being a "SVCHost" for Linux dedicated to managing cloud computers.

This is one time me and the FOSSies are actually on the same page, as just like windows 8 was forced from on high and gave the users a big fat greasy finger so too is systemd being pushed by corporate with exactly zero fucks given about what the end users want. Ironically despite all this "empower the user" talk Linux has always had this is one case where Windows users had more power thanks to the ability to vote with their dollars, thus getting Win 8 shitcanned in favor of a much saner and nicer Win 10. But this does not mean that all hope is lost in Linux land, it just means you are gonna have to organize and SCREAM BLOODY MURDER and refuse to take this bullshit. You especially have to organize all the volunteer coders and get them to walk away, because losing all that free labor and forcing Red Hat and friends to pay for every single dime's worth of work is the ONLY way most of you can hit 'em in the pocketbook. those of you that run non cloud based servers can of course tell them you will no longer use their products but considering how much time and money you have invested in your servers I really don't see that happening.

Finally you need a rally cry, something simple and catchy and on message to focus the narrative and rally the troops, a "fuck beta" for systemd if you will. And since old Hairy will ALWAYS stand for the users allow me to give you one as a show of solidarity in your plight. Its simple, concise, on message, and sums up in a single simple sentence WTF is wrong with systemd..

SYSTEMD...Its the Metro of Linux!

As I see it for the corporate world, the server in the cloud is the way to go. It is just like outsourcing the data centre to IBM, CGI or other operations organization. It will be cheaper, it will not require a diesel generator and a computer wing, or expensive system admins or rooms of backup tapes and those couriers picking up and returning backups daily.

The server is going to be an appliance. Only if you work for the cloud company will you retain your career in Linux

Try this on for size: Lewis's First Law of Metrics: You get what you measure -- that's the risk you take.

Restated: "Be very careful what you measure; it will improve, probably to the detriment of everything else."

Doesn't have a damned thing to do with Windows or binary files, it has to do with the fact that Debian has been made Red hat's bitch by way of ex RH and Ubuntu employees taking over the board. For those that want to know what systemd is REALLY about its about cloud computing, specifically RH is pushing cloud computing like mad and systemd is gonna end up being a "SVCHost" for Linux dedicated to managing cloud computers.

This is one time me and the FOSSies are actually on the same page, as just like windows 8 was forced from on high and gave the users a big fat greasy finger so too is systemd being pushed by corporate with exactly zero fucks given about what the end users want. Ironically despite all this "empower the user" talk Linux has always had this is one case where Windows users had more power thanks to the ability to vote with their dollars, thus getting Win 8 shitcanned in favor of a much saner and nicer Win 10. But this does not mean that all hope is lost in Linux land, it just means you are gonna have to organize and SCREAM BLOODY MURDER and refuse to take this bullshit. You especially have to organize all the volunteer coders and get them to walk away, because losing all that free labor and forcing Red Hat and friends to pay for every single dime's worth of work is the ONLY way most of you can hit 'em in the pocketbook. those of you that run non cloud based servers can of course tell them you will no longer use their products but considering how much time and money you have invested in your servers I really don't see that happening.

Finally you need a rally cry, something simple and catchy and on message to focus the narrative and rally the troops, a "fuck beta" for systemd if you will. And since old Hairy will ALWAYS stand for the users allow me to give you one as a show of solidarity in your plight. Its simple, concise, on message, and sums up in a single simple sentence WTF is wrong with systemd..

SYSTEMD...Its the Metro of Linux!

I don't mean to pick on these few, but they're indicative of a larger trend toward users who appear to believe that reading manuals and learning OS internals is bad, and we should plaster over all of that mumbo-jumbo with a nice, sleek -- and completely opaque -- management layer. For example: systemd.

I believe this thinking is pretty much in line with Microsoft's train of thought back in the early 1990s. This is an end-user mindset -- this has nothing to do with servers, and certainly not enterprise-level servers. This "learning is hard" mentality is very damaging for Linux as a service platform.

Go ahead, kids, spackle over all of that unsightly runlevel stuff. Paint over init and cron, pam and login. Put all of that into PID1 along with dbus. Make it all pretty and whisper sweet nothings about how it's all taken care of and you won't have to read a manual or learn any silly command-line stuff. Tune your distribution for desktop workloads. Go reinvent Windows.

"You Have Your Windows in My Linux"

Apr 1, 2013
[This is an April Fool's story. It is fiction, not fact even though it contains facts. --Ed.]
If you've been looking forward to Windows 9, the OS that will fix what Windows 8 got wrong, you're in for a surprise: There will be no Windows 9. Instead, Microsoft announced it will proceed directly to Windows 10.

It seems that joke wasn't so far fetched yet ;-)

From InfoWorld, April 1, 2013:

If you've been looking forward to Windows 9, the OS that will fix what Windows 8 got wrong, you're in for a surprise: There will be no Windows 9. Instead, Microsoft announced it will proceed directly to Windows 10.

"The Windows 9 internal beta was a phenomenal success," said Microsoft PR rep Cheryl Tunt. "I mean, it blew Windows 8 out of the water, and as we all know, Windows 8 is nigh flawless. After discussion at the C level, Microsoft has decided it will not mess with success and will leave Windows 9 exactly as it is. As such, work is now getting under way on Windows 10, which should see a public release."

http://www.infoworld.com/artic...

Truth stranger than fiction...

This submission was made by snydeq who may or may not be Paul Venezia, but certainly appears to have a clear vested interest in frequently promoting Paul Venezia's column and other articles from Info World on a nearly weekly basis.

Considering the overwhelmingly poor quality of the vast majority of Info World's trade rag (slang trade magazine), where most of the better "articles" (i.e. aka "filler," the stuff between the ads) tend to be cribbed from vendor's white papers, don't seem to merit being frequently promoted at Slashdot unless there is a financial arrangement in place, in which case the ethics of journalism would indicate that such a financial arrangement should be disclosed to readers.

Not that I'm suggesting Slashdot considers itself involved in journalism, regardless of the usage of the terms such as: articles, submissions, and editors in the Slashdot vernacular. I will mention that the US FTC publishes March 2013 disclosure guidelines for sponsorship, marketing, and promotions.

This is a perfect example of why Microsoft should go back to doing Service Packs and not these seemingly random "feature updates" that have become the norm with Windows 8.x and Office 2013 (non-MSI / "click to install"). There's no standard codebase anymore and feature updates are just being installed willy-nilly, with no real support window for delayed installations. (At least with a SP, you had a year to test & work around a problem before MS pulled the support plug). This is another reason why companies don't want Win8.x--kernel-level updates with only a few days warning. (Articles were still talking about "Windows 8.1 Update 2" as recently as 2 weeks prior to August's Patch Tuesday). I'd hate to be an NT administrator fretting over all my 2012R2 installations right now.

Instead of getting a SP for Windows 8, we now have 8.1. Instead of getting SPs for Windows 8.1, we now have 8.1 Update 1 and 8.1 August Update. We have updates that come through the "Store" app. This is one of the reasons (granted, not the primary one) why the uptake of Windows 8.x is now slower than Vista's uptake some ~2 years post-RTM, and why Windows 7 is gaining market share, at the expense of XP and Vista. Companies don't want this model and the headaches that go along with it.

So, for Win9, just go back to a Service Pack model and make everybody happy. Yes, SPs cost a lot of money to put out, and yes MS ends up looking old-school, but the rigor with testing is (presumed to be) significantly higher than some rushed, "little" update. Windows 8.x is broken, and Microsoft keeps pitching a newer, faster cycle of feature updates, but this just proves they are incapable of properly handling such a model... Microsoft: you are not Apple, and you don't have to try to emulate them.

As for myself, so far my two Win8.1 installations (one x86, one x64) and one of 2012R2 in a VM are not showing problems from these updates... But I have only myself to blame for not waiting a few extra days. Of course, now MS will have to come up with an out-of-band fix (with even less testing) within the next ~3 weeks or will have to have 2 sets of patches for September's Patch Tuesday--one for those who haven't uninstalled these updates and one for those who have. Pure stupidity...

Hello,

I know that Slashdot loves to bash Microsoft, but calling it's monthly patching cycle "Black Tuesday" is pushing it. Black Tuesday was the name for the stock market crash that preceded the Great Depression, and for all the negativism about Microsoft, I have yet to hear of someone committing suicide over a Microsoft patch.

Frankly, using Woody "I'm a Windows victim" Leonhard as a source of information about Microsoft patches isn't a good idea, at least until he stops grinding whatever axe it is he has against Microsoft. Go read Microsoft's Security TechCenter if you want to know the patches are for, or at least blogs like ComputerWorld o ZDNet's r>Ed Bott, both of whom are more likely to put facts ahead of opinions. Even Paul Thurrott provides some good coverage, although I think he often is the opposite of Woody Leonhard, e.g.doesn't critical enough coverage.
Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

The French police seem to have had a good amount of success as well: http://www.zdnet.com/french-po...

There are probably always going to be use cases for the majority of users to be fine with Open or Libre office. Some specialized functionality in finance might merit excel. There is nothing I've found on Linux that easily replaces Visio or Project ( libre-project is fine for reading, but I've had many issues with creating them). It's what I use at home (lubuntu). At work, I do have to say I prefer Outlook/Exchange for integrated mail and calendar, but I could probably live without Word/Excel/PPT.

Here's to hoping Libreoffice and the other forks can continue to expand and refine their software.

Even in more developed countries there are often times more people using cell phones to access the internet than PCs. For instance Japan(article is a bit old, but I don't see the trend reversing). One of the big reasons is that in a lot of countries people don't take work home. If you don't take work home, then there isn't nearly as much of an impetus to buy a PC and use it to access the internet.

I suppose now we're wandering into fiddly terminology territory here...my point is that saying "TC is NOT a FOSS project, never was." without any further qualifications seems, if not outright wrong, pretty misleading (we do like to argue technical correctness around here). We're saying it's Free Software but not necessarily Open Software at this point, yes? If FS is a stricter subset of OS, it would seem to be that we've proved that TC *is* in fact FOSS, then.

Looking at the Wikipedia article reference for the most-relevant-looking statement from my previous post, all I found was the president of OSI saying "TC license is bad! Bad bad!!" without actually giving any details. I really expected more from that article. And since Google cache doesn't seem to have a link to the old TC license page, I'm having a bit of a hard time referring to the license itself. More research digs up verbiage that ambiguously states that TrueCrypt (the binaries? the source? both?) must also be distributed "freely" (as in free of charge I believe).

It has been explicitly stated* before that open-source software does not necessarily have to be free as in beer. So if costed distribution is fine, without-cost distribution must be, too. The TCL *limiting* distribution to without-cost is the issue? As mentioned before, the Free Software core tenets don't seem to have a problem with this on the face of them. I imagine RMS wouldn't be too broken up about it if forced-without-cost distribution were the norm, either.

I would still call TC FLOSS, but if OSI/FSF don't give their stamp of approval it apparently can't ever be FLOSS.

* by /. people

There is no army of Chinese hackers

Looks like you have not read about the NSA?

It's ok, there's still time to be cynical: perhaps they've just woken up to the fact that Cisco are hurting bad after they lost everyone's trust, and don't want to face the same downturn.

Seems like we're trying awfully hard to not notice that this is an Apple project.

Microsoft moved the drop dead installation date until August.

http://www.infoworld.com/t/mic...

Corporate Windows admins roared, and Microsoft backed off, pulling the patch from the WSUS update server regimen, fixing the WSUS-specific problems, and reinstating it eight days later all while simultaneously extending the drop-dead patching deadline for WSUS (and Intune and System Center Configuration Manager) corporate customers to August.