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Yah. Back when your view was limited to XP or Vista, maybe.

Have a look at this link . You'll find that the state of support for Microsoft's ISO installs, both their OS and App suite/server stuff, have changed for the better since you've last checked. As A. Coward already said, just "download the ISO" already. You do have access to a valid license, don't you? You say that you don't? Oh, really? Really, really? Hmmmm.

Did they buy someone who actually makes something while I wasn't looking?

No one of great importance for their stock price.

What you have missed is Azure, Microsoft's server (i.e. cloud) hosting operation. Not only is it profitable, but rapidly growing. MS can barely keep up with demand, despite the fact that it's a competitive market with Amazon AWS and other solutions as well.

Azure in turn is also helping to sell a lot of server/business software. So while the consumer market is soft for MS, their business sales are booming, and hence the reason their earnings and overall valuation are so high.

https://support.microsoft.com/...
Out of memory problems are because Microsoft is stupid. I don't know what Microsoft should really be doing but using the information at that link helped lots.

Wine is an emulator and it's not an emulator. You can run a Windows executable on the runtime or you can compile Windows source code and run it as a native executable. The latter would be more useful for things like porting games.

The performance of an application ported through WineLib is going to be identical to the performance of the Windows binary running through Wine. So WineLib is no more and no less useful for games than it is for any other application.

What WineLib does buy you however is lots of complications with the compilation toolchain as soon as your code depends on Microsoft-specific C++ features like the omnipresent #import directive, Visual C++ project files (even with winemaker), or the MFC, etc. Things get complex pretty quickly if you also have third-party libraries or use other languages like Visual Basic or even C#.

Wine is an emulator and it's not an emulator. You can run a Windows executable on the runtime or you can compile Windows source code and run it as a native executable. The latter would be more useful for things like porting games.

The performance of an application ported through WineLib is going to be identical to the performance of the Windows binary running through Wine. So WineLib is no more and no less useful for games than it is for any other application.

What WineLib does buy you however is lots of complications with the compilation toolchain as soon as your code depends on Microsoft-specific C++ features like the omnipresent #import directive, Visual C++ project files (even with winemaker), or the MFC, etc. Things get complex pretty quickly if you also have third-party libraries or use other languages like Visual Basic or even C#.

@Anonymous Coward: "I've been using win 10 for well over a year and it has never reset my browser. I'm sure his friend opened Edge and clicked yes to the "make this your default browser" dialog. Every browser has these popups. This is a non issue in my opinion."

It's understandable why you would want to remain anonymous.

"you can set Firefox as the default web browser but not really the option on the update to by pass it." Joy Kemprai - Microsoft

Yes, yes, MS playing musical chairs with browsers is a perennial favorite of those who live in the Windows world. But there is something waaaaaaaaay more important that needs to be fixed before fixing that: Indexing with Network Drives.

For the curious (or for those who are wondering what the current status of this bug might be): https://social.technet.microso...

"Problem creating/renaming a folder on a network share with Win10 Anniversary Update (Error 0x8007003B)"

Control Flow Guard (CFG) is a highly-optimized platform security feature that was created to combat memory corruption vulnerabilities. By placing tight restrictions on where an application can execute code from, it makes it much harder for exploits to execute arbitrary code through vulnerabilities such as buffer overflows. CFG extends previous exploit mitigation technologies such as /GS, DEP, and ASLR. This feature is available in Microsoft Visual Studio 2015, and runs on "CFG-Aware" versions of Windows—the x86 and x64 releases for Desktop and Server of Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 Update (KB3000850). We strongly encourage developers to enable CFG for their applications. You don't have to enable CFG for every part of your code, as a mixture of CFG enabled and non-CFG enabled code will execute fine. But failing to enable CFG for all code can open gaps in the protection. Furthermore, CFG enabled code works fine on "CFG-Unaware" versions of Windows and is therefore fully compatible with them. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

Note I said most. There is one....

Nice. Thanks for the info!

And typical Microsoft. Some of the limits appear to be utterly capricious and designed for the sole purpose of limiting the usefulness of "economy" versions of their various OSes.

For example, Windows 10 Home x64 has aN upper RAM limit of a paltry 128 GB, yet Windows 10 Pro and above have upper RAM limits of (a still paltry, but much more reasonable) 2 TB.

Why? They're undoubtedly the same codebase. So why, other than to deliberately limit the usefulness of the cheaper "Home" edition?

Note I said most. There is one....

Check for yourself, open task manager as an administrator on any Windows 7 computer and more often than not you will see svchost.exe consuming a full CPU core and 1GB+ memory.

Oh, I have. Using Process Explorer. I've never seen that, and I've checked on over 20 machines in the past 2 years. Your anecdote is bullshit, but it makes Microsoft look bad so it gets modded up. Never the less, I've booked marked your account and you can be sure I'll keep track of your trolling in the future.

Bah, I forgot how this works. Okay, so you use that link to identify which update is a rollup or security only, and follow its link. In the linked page will be a link to the Microsoft Update Catalog which is filtered to display that update.

Security-only updates are labeled "security only", as seen here for the months of December and January:

http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=3205394
http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=3212642

Bah, I forgot how this works. Okay, so you use that link to identify which update is a rollup or security only, and follow its link. In the linked page will be a link to the Microsoft Update Catalog which is filtered to display that update.

Security-only updates are labeled "security only", as seen here for the months of December and January:

http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=3205394
http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=3212642

Bah, I forgot how this works. Okay, so you use that link to identify which update is a rollup or security only, and follow its link. In the linked page will be a link to the Microsoft Update Catalog which is filtered to display that update.

Security-only updates are labeled "security only", as seen here for the months of December and January:

http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=3205394
http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=3212642

Bah, I forgot how this works. Okay, so you use that link to identify which update is a rollup or security only, and follow its link. In the linked page will be a link to the Microsoft Update Catalog which is filtered to display that update.

Security-only updates are labeled "security only", as seen here for the months of December and January:

http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=3205394
http://www.catalog.update.microsoft.com/Search.aspx?q=3212642

• 1. That the software tools (like Tensorflow or Microsoft's own CNTK http://blogs.microsoft.com/nex...) are free and open source
• 2. That it can be used on commodity PCs (with GPUs)
• 3. That the education is free (there are many, many free online resources like MOOCs that teach machine learning principles)
• 4. Even datasets used to train deep neural networks are free (Imagenet, Pascal VOC 2012, MS COCO, Youtube 8M).
• 5. Even the latest academic scholarship is quickly published publically to ArXiV while sitting in the traditional academic publishing pipeline.

Machine learning is still heavily an academic discipline, but it's never been easier for a layman or business to use and benefit from the technologies.

The good news is that security updates are provided independent of the rollups if you're willing to install them manually:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/22801/windows-7-and-windows-server-2008-r2-update-history

Captha: extras

Maybe this is the stuff I've seen?
https://support.microsoft.com/...

Usually the "This update fixes yet another gaping hole that will allow anyone to take over your computer" blurb contains a reference to a vulnerability ID like "MS17-004," and then it's on you to go searching for the detailed bulletin. It's a pain in the ass but the details are out there.

Microsoft’s description lists the feature as a mode to let a PC make gaming the “top priority to improve your game’s quality.”

So basically Microsoft is taking the following Windows API call that's been around forever and marketing it as a new feature: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

Brilliant Microsoft marketing, just absolutely brilliant...

My office computer is set to lock on wake and lock on screensaver, and some days I'll forget to win+L and come in to work the next morning, wiggle the mouse to wake the monitor, and the computer will not be locked.

This isn't new to Windows 10, either. My 8.1 laptop, when I open the lid there's a 50/50 chance it will automatically unlock itself. I open the lid, the screen turns on to the clearly labeled "This computer is locked" screen, which will then sometimes within a second or so slide up automatically without me touching a thing.

If it happened every single time then obviously I fucked up on the configuration, but when it only sometimes works, I'd like to know what the hell is going on.

Better story here: http://arstechnica.com/informa...

The screenshot was a future possible local settings panel, the "web-based privacy dashboard" is here https://account.microsoft.com/...

This is what their web-based privacy dashboard looks like https://account.microsoft.com/...

Ars has a better story that makes it clear there are two parts, the dashboard above, and OS level system controls that disable certain types of data being sent in the first place:

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

Just because an article "clearly states" something doesn't make it gospel, unless you're watching Fox, then obviously I defer to your religious preferences.

for engineering purposes, not ads

While the engineering purposes are valid I'm fairly sure that Microsoft are happily exploiting the commercial value of that data too.

They're pulling far too fucking much data for it to be purely engineering anyway.

Here's what their website says:

To help us decide which services are working well and which need improvement, we pay attention to how people use Windows. We can spot patterns in the problems our customers have, understand the cause, and fix the issues quickly. We can also focus our resources on upgrading the things that people use the most, and to improve or even retire those that don’t get used. This data, collectively called ‘telemetry’, can also help us understand gaps in our services so that we can help people use Windows more effectively.

When people choose to turn on location services, we get to improve our location services by collecting information about the location of mobile phone masts and WiFi access points. This information is stored in a database without data identifying the person or device from which it was collected.

https://privacy.microsoft.com/...

Now if your position is that they lie in their privacy statement this becomes a different matter.

This seems to be another article trying to put Microsoft in a better light on privacy than reality.

1) What is the option for Diagnostics other than "Full"? If it is "Basic" or "Enhanced" that is still quite a lot of data sent to Microsoft (configuration data including the network which includes WiFi and network connections and IP addresses, software and hardware installed, and performance and reliability data including usage information). Even the "security" level that is available in Enterprise and Education includes data from the Malicious Software Removal Tool which can include confidential data.

I won't be happy with Windows 10 privacy until there is an "Off" option or "Ask before sending data" option and no data is sent without consent. If the Malicious Software Removal Tool asks before sending data and shows me what it is going to send so I can verify that it isn't confidential data before sending, that is fine. As long as I can just say "No" if I don't have time to verify it at the time also.

It looks like one can disable sample submission for Windows Defender (Settings > Update & security > Windows Defender > Sample submission), but not for the Malicious Software Removal Tool.

2) As stated above, why is it Web-based? Does it require a live account?

3) Is there a simple way to disable all of Cortana's data gathering? Cortana is a privacy disaster:
https://privacy.microsoft.com/...

4) Are they updating the Windows 10 terms of service/privacy policy to specify that data is only sent with consent? They probably can't even do that with the current Diagnostic options. The terms of service for Windows 10 are a privacy nightmare compared to Windows 7.

Is it to much to ask for a simple option in privacy that limits information sent to Microsoft to license key verification? Microsoft would also get my public IP from Windows Update in their server logs. Anything more than that I want to have control over.

However, C#, like Java, is wedded to a virtual machine with Just In Time compilation.

"Typically, apps that target the .NET Framework are compiled to intermediate language (IL). At run time, the just-in-time (JIT) compiler translates the IL to native code. In contrast, .NET Native compiles Windows apps directly to native code."

Unofficially, any Windows user can get Windows 10 LTSB if they want. Microsoft offers ISO images with Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB as part of its 90-day Enterprise evaluation program. You can download the ISO file-be sure to select "Windows 10 LTSB" instead of "Windows 10" when downloading-and install it on your own PC. It'll function normally for 90 days, after which it'll begin nagging you to activate Windows. But Windows 10 is perfectly functional even without activation, so you should be able to use it as long as you like without entering a product key. You'll just have to put up with nag screens.

Oh, here comes another stuck-up arrogant jackass techno-weenie. We can all tell by the "you need to educate yourself" horseshit. Third party drivers and filesystem filters eh? Oh, well guess what? Those aren't an issue on my system because I know how to see them. I'm a sysadmin and a multi-platform programmer, not a moron that can't find the "any" key.

This is a widely reported problem.

Feel free to take your condescending attitude and spaces before exclamation points and shove it all forcefully up your asshole. :^)

Oh, here comes another stuck-up arrogant jackass techno-weenie. We can all tell by the "you need to educate yourself" horseshit. Third party drivers and filesystem filters eh? Oh, well guess what? Those aren't an issue on my system because I know how to see them. I'm a sysadmin and a multi-platform programmer, not a moron that can't find the "any" key.

This is a widely reported problem.

Feel free to take your condescending attitude and spaces before exclamation points and shove it all forcefully up your asshole. :^)

Apparently, yes.

https://rewards.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/aboutus

I have no problem accepting "points" for work, so long as those "points" are prepended by a $ symbol.

Yaz

Notably, I have already "learned something new" as I have been using Windows 10 for quite some time already, so on that note you may feel free to shove your condescending manner where the sun doesn't shine. The onus is on you to prove that your beloved new shiny interface is better than the one it replaced because you made the original claim of superiority. You have refused to back that claim with specific points, so we can safely assume you don't have any points to raise in favor of your position. However, my position is easily defended, so I will gladly do so now...not for you, but for other readers that are actually interested in a discussion on this subject.

Windows 7's Start menu consists of two columns. The left column contains frequently used and user-pinned programs, with optional sub-menus to open recent documents and perform common tasks associated with that program. Windows 10 has replaced this with pinned tiles and a "frequently used" section at the top of the full program list. The sub-menus for common tasks and recent documents are completely gone. Recent documents are now accessed via File Explorer and the view of these files cannot be grouped by associated program at all.

Pinned tiles take up a large amount of screen space and are the most distant items from the Start button, increasing the amount of movement needed to reach the desired application. This is worse on low-resolution screens since less pinned tiles can be shown and the user may have to scroll in addition to moving the mouse over more distance. While the tile target size is somewhat larger than a pinned Start program in "large icons" display mode, the extra distance and two-dimensional layout cancels out the benefits of the larger target due to requiring a longer (and therefore less accurate) motion to reach.

Pinned and frequently used programs on Windows 7's Start menu can be changed from to "use small icons," increasing the density of what can be pinned there without reducing target size horizontally. Pinned tiles reduced to the equivalent size are reduced in both dimensions and lose their text labels completely, reducing target size to 1/4 (requiring more focus from the user to accurately hit) and forcing reliance on the icon alone to quickly select the desired application. Icons are hard to get right and only enhance usability under specific conditions and "A user’s understanding of an icon is based on previous experience. Due to the absence of a standard usage for most icons, text labels are necessary to communicate the meaning and reduce ambiguity." Hovering over the tile will reveal the label via a tooltip, but this is not sufficient as each tile would have to be hovered over by the user to read all of them whereas displaying text labels for everything enables the user to scan quickly for the name they're interested in.

Windows 7's Start menu has a customizable right-hand column which comes with these (mostly sensible) defaults: User's home folder, Documents, Pictures, Music, Games, Computer, Control Panel, Devices and Printers, Default Programs. The lack of the Downloads shortcut by default is problematic, but the ability to add it exists in an intuitive location. The utility of some options is highly debatable but since they're fully customizable the user can choose new defaults that are more sensible to them. Regardless of what programs (the left column) a user might want to use, all but the most novice users will inevitably need to reach their home folders, the Control Panel, and internal, optical, and external storage media under Computer (aka This PC on Win8+) on a regular basis. Windows 10's Start menu does not provide any of these as first-level shortcuts. Windows 10 provides by def

The only way they could know that is if they're spying on everyone who uses Windows.

Am I wrong? Is there some other, totally consensual and benign way that they could know this?

There is no need for speculation. Microsoft's documentation states that the mandatory Basic telemetry in Windows 10 includes "App usage data. Includes how an app is used, including how long an app is used, when the app has focus, and when the app is started"
(source)

Uh...that's exactly what they did. Or are you joking? https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-...

Looks like the post was just edited to include the article.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...

Windows 10 brings a Linux subsystem to the table. It's almost out of beta & supposedly runs everything at native speeds.

Found the Bedlam DL3 survivor!

You need more than that. From Microsoft's DirectX Graphics Infrastructure (DXGI) documentation:

As displays support greater ranges of color and luminance (e.g. HDR), apps should take advantage of this by increasing bit depth. 10-bit/channel color is an excellent starting point. 16-bit/channel color may work well in some cases. Games that want to use HDR to drive an HDR display (a TV or Monitor) will want to use at least 10bit, but could also consider using 16bit floating point, for the format for the final swap chain.

... too.

If you don't believe me just visit for example: https://www.microsoft.com/en/m...

So we really have now for a while many Snapdragon products running Windows 10. Is just not the Windows 10 that's hard to run...

I don't know what the marketing apes were thinking.

Time between reboots has so much to do with what is installed and running - my clean Win10 machines only reboot when updates make them do it

This is one of the many reasons why I don't run Windows 10 because when I get updates on my Linux machine I get to choose when I install them and if required when I reboot. Even if I choose to install updates they don't interfere with what I am currently doing. I also have had this freedom for years.

BTW. I do have Windows 10 installed in a virtual machine (legitimate license). I actually used the Windows 10 ISO which is a free download from Microsoft and is 4.2GB so I would recommend getting it for recovery purposes if you really want to run Windows 10. The installation is quite simple and quick although I would strongly recommend using the advanced setup rather than the quick install.

When I say use the advanced setup when installing from the Win 10 ISO you will see many settings that are by default turned on which would be the case with the quick install. Whether you choose to turn off those settings is up to you although I personally find they tick all the boxes for the definition of malware . Even if you do lock the machine down you still have to go into the registry (oh! yes everyone knows how to edit this) and even then you may not get everything. Third party software (if you trust them) can help but they still may not get everything.

Even after you think you have locked down Windows 10 if you use tools like Wireshark and/or Etherape and you will see that Windows 10 loves to chat with outside machines (Owned by? You guessed it Microsoft) which may not even be in the same country you live in.

What is interesting is the install of Windows 10 is over 5GB which is really bare bones (ie. no applications like Office .. etc) compared to my Fedora 25 desktop with over 2,200 packages (includes Multiple browsers, Office suites, Multimedia, CAD, Statistical and Scientific packages) and is only 7.2GB and all my packages get updates when available without me having to manually search for them. Even when I get updates most of the time a reboot is not needed although if I get a new kernel a reboot (when I decide) takes about 60 seconds and that includes logging in and starting my preferred applications (SSD's are great).

I was under the impression that the name "Edge" came from <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge"> used to disable legacy document mode in Internet Explorer.

Of course Edge is struggling, its not yet got a good plugin system, and by extension no decent ad blocker yet.

Actually, it does have extensions, albeit just a tiny selection (although it does include Adblock Plus). That said, even going to a page without ads I still find Edge to be an appallingly slow browser. I just can't stand to use it. It is slow to load, slow to open even simply web pages, and it lacks basic features that every single desktop browser has like F11 to enter full screen mode. (Didn't that start on Internet Explorer?)

If I ever have to open something in a browser that isn't one of the other three that I have loaded, I always choose Internet Explorer rather than Edge. I'll give them credit for trying to shake off the problems that IE had, but I consider Edge to be version 0.1 and not yet ready for real use.

See subject: 'Free ram = enemy of performance' = bullshit & MS patching Vista over aggressive caching proved it https://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=445832&cid=22346044/ + source https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/markrussinovich/2008/02/04/inside-vista-sp1-file-copy-improvements/#commentmessage/

So again: TRUSTING the OS maker alone as you suggest for per application CPU scheduling, timeslicing, & memory mgt.? NOT ALWAYS A GOOD IDEA!

APK

P.S.=> Yes, PhD's make mistakes (I've caught the article author in Mark Russinovich making them as I noted in rookie hardcodes in pagedefrag.exe & yes, free memory which too much caching etc. causes fragmentation that halted Exchange Servers (& a program I DESIGNED freed them up, so did MS' clearmem.exe)... apk

Priority one critical system stuff like NTFS
Priority two whatever the user wants to do.
Priority tree whatever else needs to be done indexing can go fk itself if a user is active.

These are priorities stuff still runs just a bit slower than it normally does IIRC windows already does this to a point.
*checks*
Yeah it's done this since at least as far back as windows XP
https://www.microsoft.com/reso...

Although It's only a slight priority difference so it's not usually noticeable.

Microsoft does not intend to gather sensitive information, such as credit card numbers, usernames and passwords, email addresses, or other similarly sensitive information for Linguistic Data Collection. We guard against such events by using technologies to identify and remove sensitive information before linguistic data is sent from the user’s device. If we determine that sensitive information has been inadvertently received, we delete the information.

They admit that they might accidentally harvest your bank's username and password but are magnanimous in that they will toss that info into a bit bucket. This has got to be very illegal but MS seems too big to prosecute and can now do whatever the fuck it wants.

The language changed for one big reason, that being making strings work properly - i.e. without magic encoding and decoding, silently losing characters or worse. This was a much needed change for anyone except for those assholes who 1) use a language for which ASCII is good enough, and 2) don't care about anyone else, and don't care if their code breaks on non-ASCII locales.

Unfortunately, it was also a breaking change, but there was no way around it. And since they already had one breaking change, they figured they might as well clean up the rest of the language and the core standard library - which they did with great results.

As far as developers sticking to 2.7 - some do, true. And some people still stick to VB6, and keep demanding that Microsoft brings it back. I suspect the "Python 2 forever!" crowd will eventually end up in the same boat - we're getting close to a similar timeframe, at least. In the meantime, anyone who is actually following the ecosystem knows that all the major libraries and frameworks are now available on 3.x, most smaller libraries are as well or else have replacements (often API-compatible), and the overall trend is that 2.x usage keeps declining, and 3.x usage keeps trending up. So, painful as the transition has been, the community had powered through it, and reaped the rewards in form of a better, cleaner language.

A few of the many, many articles:

Windows 10 is possibly the worst spyware ever made. Quote: "Buried in the service agreement is permission to poke through everything on your PC."

Microsoft has no plans to tell us what's in Windows patches. Each update is a black box, and it's going to stay that way.

Leaks show that Microsoft writes release notes, so why can't it publish them? The lack of documentation of Windows' updates is a baffling move on Microsoft's part.

Microsoft's Software is Malware. Malware means software designed to function in ways that mistreat or harm the user.

How Can Any Company Ever Trust Microsoft Again?

NSA Backdoor Exploit in Windows 8 Uncovered

Microsoft Gave the NSA Direct Backdoor Access to Outlook, Skype

Microsoft [lack of] Privacy Statement

Here's how to Block Windows 10 "Spying"

KB3163622

How did you find out the fix, and how long did it take you to find the fix?

I spent several months looking for a solution. Windows 10 identified my SSD as a USB device, which didn't make sense as it booted from SATA. When I remembered that I cloned the HDD to SSD via a USB adapter, I figured it was a registry setting and searched for USB-related registry settings. One of the KB articles for "Windows to Go" is posted below.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2778881

I'm not sure I 100% understand this (but then it was Dr. Feynman who said that if you think you understand quantum mechanics then you don't)... but I read this 2002 paper by MS research that gives a method of transforming biprime factorization into an optimization problem. Optimization problems are exactly what D-Wave's quantum annealing machine can do (very well)... so doesn't this kind of break RSA? Can somebody point me to the place where I can learn that I'm wrong and can start trusting RSA PKI again?

Does any 1 addon do all this?

A single addon can do this, yes.

Tell me, how do those addons UPDATE hosts WHEN YOU NEED ADMINISTRATOR PRIVELEGE TO DO SO?

Generally they all end up calling write() in the end.

Plus there's still the fact an addon can't block another BAD addon

Sure it can, it can force the load order and override loading.

You'd HAVE TO RUN THE BROWSER AS ADMIN/ROOT

Have to -- KEK! You're not really that knowledgable on how to access hosts files, are you?

Off the top of my head, I can think of many alternatives, such as you could change the permission on the file, you could use a helper, you could setup security context overrides for the modifying executable and the file, fusefs binds etc.

You've lost, Agent Smith (Kowalski).