Slashdot Mirror

The Playstation is really a device for facilitating game DRM. There is no way in heck to do the same thing with a pc.

Yes there is, it's called Windows 10 genuine malware edition and the ISO is available for download here for free. The only thing stopping you from running this piece of software is the fact that you have to agree to the EULA (don't bother reading this it's to much trouble, just trust Microsoft to do no wrong) and enter your license code (you can also use your Windows 7 or 8/8.1 license code) . It is also recommended that you click on the "quick install" icon, afterall Microsoft knows what are best settings for the user.:-)

Few links from a quick Google search
How to use Windows 7 to lock down removable media and keep your computer safe
Allow only known usb devices - Gentoo Wiki

See also Plug and Prey: Malicious USB Devices

The license have to be shown to the buyer before purchase to be valid.

For a PC sold online, a conspicuous notice should be sufficient: "Use of this product is subject to acceptance of software license agreements and online service terms of use. If you do not agree to Windows terms, do not purchase this product."

Where does the EULA *MICROSOFT* produces say "it" being the entire computer, most of which is not theirs?

I don't have the Windows Vista EULA handy, but the Windows 10 EULA states:

By accepting this agreement or using the software, you agree to all of these terms, and consent to the transmission of certain information during activation and during your use of the software as per the privacy statement described in Section 3. If you do not accept and comply with these terms, you may not use the software or its features. You may contact the device manufacturer or installer, or your retailer if you purchased the software directly, to determine its return policy and return the software or device for a refund or credit under that policy. You must comply with that policy, which might require you to return the software with the entire device on which the software is installed for a refund or credit, if any.

Key words: "which might require you to return the software with the entire device on which the software is installed"

Here's the Microsoft KB article linking to native NVMe support update for 7 and 2008 R2. I personally just loaded the samsung driver myself during install. There are absolutely no issues with NVMe in Windows 7, and I wish people would stop spreading this FUD.

Update to add native driver support in NVM Express in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2

No disrespect intended to MojoKid, but this story about Microsoft being unable to optimize pre-Windows 10 Operating Systems for older processors is outright nonsense.

I've been working with the "Windows NT" family of operating systems [i.e. the codebase that Microsoft developed after they grabbed all the VMS OS Programmers from Digital] since NT3.51. Since that OS release, as this Microsoft Knowledgebase article shows https://support.microsoft.com/... Microsoft's 32-bit [and now 64-bit] Windows offerings included a proper Hardware Abstraction Layer. In other words, it is possible for Microsoft to replace the HAL for Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 with one that is entirely compatible with these latest Intel and AMD chips. In fact, this story is almost laughable, given that the HAL was designed and conceived specifically to allow for seamless transition between successive generations of processor platform.

For example, Microsoft Windows NT 3.51 actually introduced support for the PowerPC processor [the Motorola/IBM design that evolved into the CUBE processors that are found inside PS/3s]. In order for Microsoft to be able to support NT3.51 on two hugely different processor architectures, they needed a way of maintaining a very complex codebase easily. The HAL was the answer. By abstracting away the details of the low-level hardware and having the basics of the OS "Windows Services" call an internal API, Microsoft made it possible to maintain a single block of source code [above this watermark] that was then compiled down onto each architecture. This is the whole point of abstraction layers.

This is an old Microsoft trick, previously used to great effect with the "DirectX" scam, in which Microsoft would wait for a new generation of GPUs, then introduce a new edition of DirectX to take account of the enhanced functionality of the GPU silicon, only to not back-port that DirectX release to older OS versions [thereby forcing gamers to upgrade]. Over the last few years the gaming market has shifted away from PCs and on to either consoles or portable devices [tablets and phones], so there is less demand for gaming on PCs: consequently, Microsoft needed a new incentive to force OS upgrades - and this is it.

Microsoft would love for you to forget about the HAL. The problem is that the world has moved on. 10, 15 years ago, the Wintel hegemony relied upon new Windows features to drive the latest generation of hardware sales. All that is now upside down. People don't care about the OS; they are using portable or cloud applications anyway, so now the "wow factor" is driven by the latest generation of hardware - see what effect new Apple product has. Microsoft have learned from this, so now they are using new processors as pull-through to forcibly migrate users on to Windows 10, to try and discourage them from porting their retail license copies of Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 onto latest-generation hardware.

It's perfectly OK for Microsoft to do this. It's their code. They can do what they want. I'm not going to rail against them for making a decision that they have a perfect right to make.

What I most definitely DO object to is the deployment of specious half-truths as justification.

I don't think anyone disputes that notion. However, there IS a product lifecycle with most, if not all, commercial software. As such, mainstream support for Windows 7 ended January 13, 2015, with extended support for January 14, 2020. Basically, all features were frozen on or before the end of mainstream with security patches still being offered through till 2020.

As for Windows 8 - January 9, 2018 mainstream - January 10, 2023 extended. Though, if you have Windows 8, there isn't much of a reason not to upgrade to Windows 10.

Windows 10 - October 13, 2020 mainstream - October 14, 2025 extended.

If you have any questions, please refer to the following links:

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

I don't think anyone disputes that notion. However, there IS a product lifecycle with most, if not all, commercial software. As such, mainstream support for Windows 7 ended January 13, 2015, with extended support for January 14, 2020. Basically, all features were frozen on or before the end of mainstream with security patches still being offered through till 2020.

As for Windows 8 - January 9, 2018 mainstream - January 10, 2023 extended. Though, if you have Windows 8, there isn't much of a reason not to upgrade to Windows 10.

Windows 10 - October 13, 2020 mainstream - October 14, 2025 extended.

If you have any questions, please refer to the following links:

https://support.microsoft.com/...

https://support.microsoft.com/...

After all, while Win10 will have those performance improvements, they will most likely be negated by all the spyware bullshit installed by the integrated adware/data mining system.

For those that are interested you can get Windows 10 - genuine malware addition here . It is also recommended that you do the quick setup because Microsoft knows what settings are best for you. Yes, you to can bare your soul to the world. Afterall it's for your own good. :-)

I assume it can be fixed out of the regular user-interface if one really want it.

I doubt companies HAVE to deal with this shit for machines which absolutely can't have it.

These seem pretty bad since they kinda disable it, I know know if anything have changed with Anniversary update (previously I could at-least pick a date and time when I wanted to upgrade - I'm not allowed to any longer.)
http://www.forbes.com/sites/go...

Seem like when a restart has been scheduled one can go in and change Restart options to a different day now too under update status. I don't seem to be able to have that the default though.

No idea if this old tips work:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/d...
http://answers.microsoft.com/e...
http://tweaks.com/windows/6573...

I'm not sure the later actually work, then again considering the number of hits and that it should be possibly somehow for some people to actually refuse it ...

Guess if nothing else one could block the network connections to Microsoft for checking for updates ..

Why does everyone continue to trot this out? It's completely false, and has been since the first uEFI systems shipped.

Please show me a motherboard or non-tablet OEM system that doesn't allow you to turn off Secure Boot. They don't exist outside of Windows RT devices that basically don't exist anymore. Microsoft even publishes documentation on how to turn it off. You can even turn it off on Microsoft's own Surface Pro hardware. Surely if Secure Boot was about locking out other operating systems, they would have done it on their own god damn hardware?

Stop spreading FUD.

You were saying?

Operator overloading per se is not good or bad. Or rather it's inherently good, because it lets you implement various number-like data types as libraries, and there's no way any language is going to implement everything that someone might need in the base language itself (think rational numbers, complex numbers and quaternions, ranges, sets, vectors and matrices etc).

What can be bad is a particular use of operator overloading where it's not supposed to be used. This is not specific to operators - method overloading can be similarly misused, as can inheritance and many other features.

C++ iostreams are an unquestionable example of bad design in that regard, but it's rather telling that this example, which dates back to, what, late 1980s, is still the one cited - because there aren't really any other examples of prominence. C# also has operator overloading, for example, and that makes it possible to define Decimal, Complex etc as library types - but it doesn't use it for streams (or any other weird stuff where the behavior is non-obvious).

.NET had "decimal" since the very first release in 2001. The actual type predates .NET even - Decimal in VB6 is the same exact thing, and it corresponded to DECIMAL structure (and the corresponding VT_DECIMAL variant subtype) in OLE Automation, which is still usable from regular Win32 apps. If I remember correctly, that, in turn, was an implementation of some early IEEE spec for decimal floating point.

.NET had "decimal" since the very first release in 2001. The actual type predates .NET even - Decimal in VB6 is the same exact thing, and it corresponded to DECIMAL structure (and the corresponding VT_DECIMAL variant subtype) in OLE Automation, which is still usable from regular Win32 apps. If I remember correctly, that, in turn, was an implementation of some early IEEE spec for decimal floating point.

Every other tech that is somehow competing has server drawbacks. I don't see anyone doing enterprise software in Python, C++ or C#/.Net ...

If you don't see anyone doing enterprise software in C++ or C#, you haven't looked hard enough. There are thousands of companies doing exactly that. Heck, go check out any job search site.

One particular trap that you may be falling into is assuming that your local market is representative of other places. Some geographic regions can become locally locked in to some tech that dominates the market in that region - Java, Delphi, VB, you name it. These come and go, though, and of course, being local, they don't necessarily correspond to the bigger trend.

An no other 'ecosystem' is as dynamic and moving quickly as Java is

I have no idea what your definitions of "dynamic" and "moving quickly" are, except that they clearly aren't mainstream.

In terms of moving quickly, Java is the laughing stock - they took several years to implement lambdas, for example, and they were overtaken even by C++ in the process, being pretty much the last mainstream language to get them. Even then, the result is a crapshoot due to the lack of reified generics, requiring tons of interface definitions to cover a very basic subset of functions taking/returning primitive values while avoiding boxing and the associated perf issues.

In terms of dynamic, obviously, Java can't really compete with a true dynamic language like Python. But even C# leaves it far behind in that regard, with opt-in duck typing.

thanx to ByteCode and ByteCode morphing technologies.

Bytecode is an implementation technique predating Java by 30 years or so, and is used by most VMs out there. Including C# and Python. C# ramps it up a notch by providing AST-like expression trees as a first-class data type, which can be inspected and changed at runtime before they get compiled to bytecode.

Stuff like Annotation processing, Byte Code Weaving, Hibernate, AspectJ etc. simply don't exist in such abundance outside of the JVM ecosystem.

Every single thing that you've listed exists in other ecosystems. In some cases it's direct ports of the same projects even. As for abundance, who needs that in the enterprise? What people want is a single stable implementation that everyone can standardize on.

Standards, like servlets etc. only Java has that.

Care to list a single ISO or ANSI standard that defines Java language or VM?

C++, for example, is standardized by ISO, both the language and the standard library. An older version of C# the language (sans standard library) is also an ISO standard.

And who uses servlets in 2016, anyway?

People who don't grassp that Java (the platform) is the most solid and most flexible and most avangard platform for anything around software, simply should not work in the software business.

People who don't grasp that creating a religious cult around a piece of software is a bad idea shouldn't work in the software business.

Every other tech that is somehow competing has server drawbacks. I don't see anyone doing enterprise software in Python, C++ or C#/.Net ...

If you don't see anyone doing enterprise software in C++ or C#, you haven't looked hard enough. There are thousands of companies doing exactly that. Heck, go check out any job search site.

One particular trap that you may be falling into is assuming that your local market is representative of other places. Some geographic regions can become locally locked in to some tech that dominates the market in that region - Java, Delphi, VB, you name it. These come and go, though, and of course, being local, they don't necessarily correspond to the bigger trend.

An no other 'ecosystem' is as dynamic and moving quickly as Java is

I have no idea what your definitions of "dynamic" and "moving quickly" are, except that they clearly aren't mainstream.

In terms of moving quickly, Java is the laughing stock - they took several years to implement lambdas, for example, and they were overtaken even by C++ in the process, being pretty much the last mainstream language to get them. Even then, the result is a crapshoot due to the lack of reified generics, requiring tons of interface definitions to cover a very basic subset of functions taking/returning primitive values while avoiding boxing and the associated perf issues.

In terms of dynamic, obviously, Java can't really compete with a true dynamic language like Python. But even C# leaves it far behind in that regard, with opt-in duck typing.

thanx to ByteCode and ByteCode morphing technologies.

Bytecode is an implementation technique predating Java by 30 years or so, and is used by most VMs out there. Including C# and Python. C# ramps it up a notch by providing AST-like expression trees as a first-class data type, which can be inspected and changed at runtime before they get compiled to bytecode.

Stuff like Annotation processing, Byte Code Weaving, Hibernate, AspectJ etc. simply don't exist in such abundance outside of the JVM ecosystem.

Every single thing that you've listed exists in other ecosystems. In some cases it's direct ports of the same projects even. As for abundance, who needs that in the enterprise? What people want is a single stable implementation that everyone can standardize on.

Standards, like servlets etc. only Java has that.

Care to list a single ISO or ANSI standard that defines Java language or VM?

C++, for example, is standardized by ISO, both the language and the standard library. An older version of C# the language (sans standard library) is also an ISO standard.

And who uses servlets in 2016, anyway?

People who don't grassp that Java (the platform) is the most solid and most flexible and most avangard platform for anything around software, simply should not work in the software business.

People who don't grasp that creating a religious cult around a piece of software is a bad idea shouldn't work in the software business.

Do you still have to use that horrible Mono implementation on Linux?

You don't. However, .NET Core has a more limited standard library - in particular, it doesn't include anything GUI-wise out of the box. I would imagine that existing libraries like Gtk# will be ported to it soon enough, but from Microsoft's perspective, its primary purpose is to run server-side code - web apps and services - and various associated command-line infrastructure tooling.

Have they added support for decimal numbers yet? .Net has had support for decimal numbers for quite a few years now (At least since 2003). It comes in really handy for doing applications dealing with money, which quite a lot of applications deal with. Floats and doubles don't work well with currency values as they can't hold exact decimal values for many commonly encountered numbers. There are work arounds like using integers to store the number of cents, and using classes like BigDecimal, but both of those have quite a few drawbacks.

Apple doesn't have factories in China. Apple does subcontract manufacturing to Pegatron, the same company that make the Microsoft Surface. The same Pegatron that Microsoft is extorting the Android tax from. 'China Labor Watch' most probably a front for the Microsoft organization. ref ref ref

It won't stop malware from being installed but it will sure show you where it's at (root-kits iffy).
https://technet.microsoft.com/...

If you use a Mail reader like Forte Agent: Options unhide Microsoft entries, and save resources by disabling all of MS's email sub systems (and there are many).

It will also show any files missing (mostly Codec's),

But well worth running (as admin) often.

I haven't run an AV in ages, I put a lot of trust in my HOSTS file, and autoruns just to keep check.

You forgot checksumming and verification after transfer.....You have something on the other drive after the transfer, you wont know what until you verify it.

It is usually a good idea to have a decent file-system on your backup disk. FAT and ExFAT are just not good enough and have you ever read the the disclaimer on NTFS?

Personally, I would rather use ext4 which is actually used for professional databases and data that you don't want to see corrupted. Of course, you are quite right in stating that you should always check your backup data by doing spot recoveries or checks using checksums such as md5.

I have actually seen so called professional backups that were written by, well "hacks" and while all the database infrastructure was backed up correctly the most important thing the database was not. Needless to say when the hard disk failed (yes they did not use RAID) it was very easy to get back the infrastructure although that could easily be got back from first principles but the most important part, the database was missing.

I always think the most important question to ask when people want to backup their data is "How much do you think your data is worth?"

From https://support.microsoft.com/... :
"Reduces the network connections on a Windows system that doesn't participate in the Windows Customer Experience Improvement Program (CEIP)."

I recommend that you read this instead: https://technet.microsoft.com/...

How to fix your PC: http://www.ubuntu.com/download...

How do I run MS Office and Adobe CC on that?

Oh! you mean the free genuine green parrot editions of MS Office and Adobe CC?

Well, you can use "Wine" or a virtual machine running Windows 10 genuine Malware edition which you can get here for free.

Of course why anyone would run Powershell on Windows when it runs natively on Linux...

"...and then those crazy ports started showing up on PCs."

For the record, PCs had USB ports in "1996," 2 years before the iMac. An update to Windows 95 added USB support.
https://support.microsoft.com/...

But it did take Apple's iMac to make USB popular. I owned a Mac G3 333 in 98 that did not have USB ports. Pro Macs didn't get USB ports until 1999. And for reference, the Compaq I just bought at an estate sale, which is from 1996( I collect old PCs ), has 2 USB ports.

And back to the topic. I own external USB DACs. My PC, Macs, and Android devices, all support USB audio. But unlike adding USB and getting rid of something obsolete like a Floppy-Drive( which could be added via an accessory of course ) this is really not the same as getting rid of a headphone jack IMO.

From this link https://blogs.technet.microsof...

"Also from October 2016 onwards, Windows will release a single Security-only update. This update collects all of the security patches for that month into a single update. Unlike the Monthly Rollup, the Security-only update will only include new security patches that are released for that month. Individual patches will no longer be available. The Security-only update will be available to download and deploy from WSUS, SCCM, and the Microsoft Update Catalog. Windows Update will publish only the Monthly Rollup â" the Security-only update will not be published to Windows Update. The security-only update will allow enterprises to download as small of an update as possible while still maintaining more secure devices."

So I am only going to apply Security-Only Updates. Download it from the Microsoft Update Catalog page, which can only be used with Internet Explorer. This will only be good for a currently patched PC starting in October.

http://catalog.update.microsof...

I also noticed this wording.

"From October 2016 onwards, Windows will release a single Monthly Rollup that addresses both security issues and reliability issues in a single update."

So I doubt it will include All optional updates, just security and reliability updates.

From this link https://blogs.technet.microsof...

"Also from October 2016 onwards, Windows will release a single Security-only update. This update collects all of the security patches for that month into a single update. Unlike the Monthly Rollup, the Security-only update will only include new security patches that are released for that month. Individual patches will no longer be available. The Security-only update will be available to download and deploy from WSUS, SCCM, and the Microsoft Update Catalog. Windows Update will publish only the Monthly Rollup â" the Security-only update will not be published to Windows Update. The security-only update will allow enterprises to download as small of an update as possible while still maintaining more secure devices."

So I am only going to apply Security-Only Updates. Download it from the Microsoft Update Catalog page, which can only be used with Internet Explorer. This will only be good for a currently patched PC starting in October.

http://catalog.update.microsof...

I also noticed this wording.

"From October 2016 onwards, Windows will release a single Monthly Rollup that addresses both security issues and reliability issues in a single update."

So I doubt it will include All optional updates, just security and reliability updates.

That can't be true - Win95 had a timer bug that locked up the machine if you ran it more than X days

No you remember wrong (or this was fixed by the Release B version in Europe). Win98 however could not survive many days without rebooting.

My memory isn't *all* bad :-) I was referring to this bug, which was only fixed for both Win95 and Win98 in 1999: Microsoft patch from 1999, thus Win95, in 1999, could not run for more than 49.7 days.

Agreed. It is pretty phenomenal that Linux runs on over 2 billion device. You're absolutely right on scalability: from cell phones all the way up to 99.4% of supercomputers. WOW.

Hopefully nVidia and AMD will continue to support OpenGL on the desktop so that Linux can continue to make inroads into high performance heterogeneous computing & gaming.

What's ironic is for MS to have once called "Linux is a cancer" to now admitting that they use it on 33% of their Azure servers!

* http://news.microsoft.com/byth...
* http://fossbytes.com/33-micros...

Not bad for the little OS that could. :-)

I guess its "professional" now that Microsoft uses it on 33% of their azure servers. :-) /me ducks

http://news.microsoft.com/byth...

There's an update to windows update that fixes this issue. I had the problem and installed the update and it corrected it.

https://support.microsoft.com/...

Microsoft recently released a fix for the issue of Windows Update pegging the CPU for hours here: https://support.microsoft.com/...

Ideas: (partly a re-post from Stop updating completely? Methods and comments)

1) Autopatcher and WSUS Offline Update: Use Autopatcher until Microsoft begins its new system of hiding even more completely what it is doing with its updates. Kvasio said to use WSUS Offline Update, another community driven solution.

Apparently Microsoft approves of WSUS Offline Update. This is from the Microsoft web site: Update Offline Virtual Machine with PowerShell and WSUS Offline Update: Part 1

Update Offline Virtual Machine with PowerShell and WSUS Offline Update: Part 2

2) Windows on an isolated network: Don't allow any Microsoft operating system to have a connection to the internet. Use Linux on a separate computer on a separate network for internet connections. Use Bluetooth to communicate between the Windows OS network and the Linux network.

For Microsoft, convincing people that Windows is buggy is profitable. An article I wrote last year, Microsoft Windows XP "end of life", makes the point that Microsoft fixed 319+828+459=1,606 bugs in Windows XP since Windows XP SP1 was released. Now Microsoft says Windows XP is still too buggy to use. We have 16 computers running Windows XP and haven't had any problems. And software does not have an "end of life", it continues to do what it always did.

Do secret government agencies pay for vulnerabilities? Why do Adobe Flash and the Windows operating system have so many vulnerabilities? Do Adobe Systems and Microsoft sell vulnerabilities to secret government agencies and fix them when they are publicly discovered?

Get serious about recognizing abuse. Quoting this comment, with modifications: We've seen Microsoft's continuous stream of lies and incompetence... including a number of "bugs" and "mistakes" that appear deliberate.

Ideas: (partly a re-post from Stop updating completely? Methods and comments)

1) Autopatcher and WSUS Offline Update: Use Autopatcher until Microsoft begins its new system of hiding even more completely what it is doing with its updates. Kvasio said to use WSUS Offline Update, another community driven solution.

Apparently Microsoft approves of WSUS Offline Update. This is from the Microsoft web site: Update Offline Virtual Machine with PowerShell and WSUS Offline Update: Part 1

Update Offline Virtual Machine with PowerShell and WSUS Offline Update: Part 2

2) Windows on an isolated network: Don't allow any Microsoft operating system to have a connection to the internet. Use Linux on a separate computer on a separate network for internet connections. Use Bluetooth to communicate between the Windows OS network and the Linux network.

For Microsoft, convincing people that Windows is buggy is profitable. An article I wrote last year, Microsoft Windows XP "end of life", makes the point that Microsoft fixed 319+828+459=1,606 bugs in Windows XP since Windows XP SP1 was released. Now Microsoft says Windows XP is still too buggy to use. We have 16 computers running Windows XP and haven't had any problems. And software does not have an "end of life", it continues to do what it always did.

Do secret government agencies pay for vulnerabilities? Why do Adobe Flash and the Windows operating system have so many vulnerabilities? Do Adobe Systems and Microsoft sell vulnerabilities to secret government agencies and fix them when they are publicly discovered?

Get serious about recognizing abuse. Quoting this comment, with modifications: We've seen Microsoft's continuous stream of lies and incompetence... including a number of "bugs" and "mistakes" that appear deliberate.

I too have had new machines or fresh W7 installs that don't update. The best luck I've had is installing KB3102810
for 32bit:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
for 64bit:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...

Stop the Windows Update service before you run one of these as it can just stall out if you don't.

I guess the thing to do now is move all user doc folders to a NAS and restore the user machines from images on a regular basis. I too would like a list of MS IP addresses, mainly because telemetry...

This would be a great time for the Android x86 guys to shine.
What a bunch of asshats up there in Redmond!

I too have had new machines or fresh W7 installs that don't update. The best luck I've had is installing KB3102810
for 32bit:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...
for 64bit:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u...

Stop the Windows Update service before you run one of these as it can just stall out if you don't.

I guess the thing to do now is move all user doc folders to a NAS and restore the user machines from images on a regular basis. I too would like a list of MS IP addresses, mainly because telemetry...

This would be a great time for the Android x86 guys to shine.
What a bunch of asshats up there in Redmond!

Yes, that is a very old version of PowerShell that doesn't include that command. You can download the latest version as part of the Windows Management Framework. You can see the documentation for Invoke-WebRequest (where most of the examples are at the end).

Yes, that is a very old version of PowerShell that doesn't include that command. You can download the latest version as part of the Windows Management Framework. You can see the documentation for Invoke-WebRequest (where most of the examples are at the end).

Why would we use it if it doesn't even have basic extensions like chromecast? I found an MS answer saying to use chrome! http://answers.microsoft.com/e...

. Windows 10 Home - no (easy) options to suppress automatic updates. Hrray for progress. They killed the Atom based Netbook / Nettop generation of PCs with updates to XP, too.

MS have a tool for that bud you can download from the ms linky.. just run it to show/hide updates

To temporarily prevent the driver from being reinstalled until a new driver fix is available, a troubleshooter is available that provides a user interface to hide and show Windows updates and drivers for Windows 10.

Microsoft windows update show hide utility

There was no performance issue - the problem was that multiple applications could not access the camera at once, and it was important to fix this.
Quoting:
" It was important for us to enable concurrent camera access, so Windows Hello, Microsoft Hololens and other products and features could reliably assume that the camera would be available at any given time, regardless of what other applications may be accessing it. "

https://social.msdn.microsoft....

Which is of great comfort to the owners of medical imagers that are now junk unless someone catches and rolls back the anniversary edition. There is claimed to be a fix in the pipe.

The nasty trick in this case is that they shouldn't have had to test against a zillion awful webcams to know that they had a problem.

The USB Video Class Spec and Microsoft's own driver for it defines support for both uncompressed and compressed video output; and for programs to negotiate with a UVC device to change video parameters.

The extra abstraction layer they added between the driver and the applications only supports one uncompressed format; and breaks if you try to negotiate for something different. That's not a weirdo edge case with somebody's ghastly rev. A product that never should have made it out the door; that's "break a substantial portion of a spec we used to support and hope everything turns out for the best". Not good.

Articles:

What I Hate About PowerShell

Is PowerShell really this bad?. Quote: "... the strangest mashup of Perl and VAX/VMS I've ever seen." Another quote: "... one of the most ass-backwards, lipstick on a pig, polished turd add-ons to the Microsoft stack in recent years."

Why Microsoft doesn't fix the long file name issues in PowerShell: Long Paths in .NET, Part 1 of 3. (Because the problem is in .NET.)

And don't forget the very poor writing quality of the documentation.

I always understood they said if they wanted to shutdown the activation servers, they would "release the keys", not that that would happen automatically at the end of the support period. As an example, Microsoft released a "sunset" edition of Money plus when they wanted to shutdown the activation servers for it.

https://support.microsoft.com/...

That would be because Windows 7 has been out of mainstream support (when they actively sell it) for more than a year.

And whose fault is that? Microsoft's. Let's put the blame where it lies. They want to (not so) slowly move people to OS-as-a-service. Older OSes don't suddenly stop working because they're out of mainstream support. Look at how many people are still running XP without a problem.

https://support.microsoft.com/...

That would be because Windows 7 has been out of mainstream support (when they actively sell it) for more than a year.

The annoying thing is, I'm getting a lot of SASL authentication attempts from Microsoft Azure IPs against the email address I used for LinkedIn. Microsoft's LinkedIn service leaked my email address and an ancient password, and lots of Microsoft Azure cloud instances are now busy attempting to login to that email account.

Aug 15 10:51:04 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: connect from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:07 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: warning: unknown[13.84.216.161]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: authentication failure
Aug 15 10:51:07 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: lost connection after AUTH from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:07 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: disconnect from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:07 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: connect from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:09 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: warning: unknown[13.84.216.161]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: authentication failure
Aug 15 10:51:09 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: lost connection after AUTH from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:09 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: disconnect from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:10 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: connect from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:12 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: warning: unknown[13.84.216.161]: SASL LOGIN authentication failed: authentication failure
Aug 15 10:51:12 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: lost connection after AUTH from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:12 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: disconnect from unknown[13.84.216.161]
Aug 15 10:51:12 mail postfix/smtpd[12561]: connect from unknown[13.84.216.161]

Yadda yadda. I report them all to Microsoft's CERT but despite the "thank you" emails, I wind up getting attacked from the same IPs day in and day out.

I'm prettys sure you are wrong,

My memory says that the keys used to sign the shims are only valid for x86 systems, not windows RT systems. I can't seem to find a good source for that now though I did find a mention in passing in https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-... . Furthermore everything I can find relating to linux on the surface RT relates to a recently found bug.