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Microsoft Donates Windows 8.1 To Nonprofit Organizations
An anonymous reader writes in with good news for Windows loving nonprofits and libraries. "Microsoft today announced the availability of Windows 8.1 for nonprofits. The move is an extension of the company's nod to the nonprofit community with the launch Windows 8. The announcement means eligible nonprofit organizations and public libraries can request Windows 8.1 through Microsoft's software donation program."
Now those non-profits will not have to look towards free alternatives such as Linux! True humanitarians.
will the FSF be signing up for this?
...rattlesnake ranchers donate dozens of specimens to local playgrounds.
it doesn't boot without EUFI!
Since when? I thought Windows 8.1's system requirements were the same as those of Windows 8, and that included allowing Vista-to-8 or 7-to-8 upgrades on non-UEFI systems.
I work with a charity that has access to the MS discounts and there is one authorized outlet for it, Tech Soup. MS has ALWAYS made the latest version available so this is nothing new. It is just an astroturfing post to try and drum up some good PR for the embattled and truly miserable OS.
That said why is MS so cruel to those in need?
As a tech who worked on many systems from DOS, Windows 3.x, Win95, Win95 w/ FAT32, Win98, Win98SE, WinNT4.0, and WinME, I can say that indeed WinME was the biggest pain in the ass to work on when there were problems. Win98 had issues of not powering off after shutting down. WinNT had issues of hardware compatibility, and all versions tend to forget about printers from time to time.
But when something went wrong, there were definite steps that technicians could do to resolve it. Microsoft decided that made too much sense, and with WinME they broke established procedures that worked quite well before that. It's been over a decade now, so I don't remember specifics, but it was a nightmare for a while. Then everyone moved on to Win2k or WinXP, and we all pretended WinME never existed.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
I've used every single version of Microsoft OS since DOS 3.2 and Win 8.x is by far the worst of them all. I'd *much* rather run Vista, it's that bad. Vista was immature before SP1 and the drivers weren't ready at RTM but now it's not quite as bad. WinME was mostly pointless and short lived. Win95 was a huge leap forward from MS-DOS and Win 3.x. DOS probably wasn't the absolute best for its time but it was cheap, common, good enough, and mainly far superior to what most people were using on 8 bit computers of the time.
Win 8.x is user hostile. It was the worst GUI of *any* operating system I've ever used in the last 15 years, literally. I'd rather use the UI from any previous version of Windows, or OS X, or GNOME/KDE/Unity... Hell, I'd even rather use iOS or Android over that! Nothing is anywhere near as bad, un-intuitive, nor gets in your way as much.
All this because they decided that they're now a "devices" company with Apple envy. Too bad nobody wants of those devices I guess. Meanwhile, they've given the finger repeatedly to their established user base: desktop users, businesses, sysadmins, developers and all. Of course people will turn to iOS and Android even more now. Win7 is the best OS by far IMO but that's where it seems end... I really enjoyed the last 25 years of MS products but MS put an abrupt end to it.
Yep.
I'm at a university and we do this all the time. IBM gave us 'millions' in software, that was a burned CD with some stuff on it (not my research group so I'm not really sure what exactly, but something related to distributed computing).
My group got a '4 million dollar' donation which was all of the source code for a project a small company had worked on for 10 years with 5 major versions.
Whatever that MSRP headline number was is what they could claim as a tax break. Didn't matter if it was absurdly unrelated to the actual value or not.
funny, I think android is about as bad as win95 or 3.x.
it sort of gets the job done, but its annoying and painful to try to work with.
I would not be so annoyed if android was the product of a 10 or 50 man company. but the 'mighty google'? I would expect nothing less than perfection and vision from such self-professed geniuses.
instead, there are stupid limitations and even cut/paste is annoying and difficult. want to grab an address from an email and locate it on a map? rarely works unless it fits an exact format of what an 'address' is supposed to be. more often than not, you can't click on addresses in email text. fuck! what a piece of shit.
face it, its a vehicle for ad delivery. plain and simple; just enough to do that mission yet not free enough to do what YOU want unless you root and go around things. yes, apple is worse, but they don't solely exist just to delivery ads. google is ONLY about ads, these days. if you get in their way, they fuck with you and make your life harder than it should be.
I remember old windows and how annoying it was compared to old vax/vmx, unix and other os's of the ancient era. android gives me the same 'damn, they could have made it great but they didn't' feeling.
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"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I ran Win ME for about 2 years, about the same time as I started using Linux (on seperate boxes). It did run with better uptimes/stability than Win 98 SE, so I think I'm agreeing with your "more reliable" opinion. I liked Win 98 well enough, especially SE. Storm Linux 2000 didn't seem all that impressive compared to either version of Windows around that time, but Linux gradually pulled ahead, at least in my book. I still support Windows boxes at work and for family, and liked XP (after the first Service Pack came out), and 7's not too bad, but for me, Linux has pulled ahead on several counts.
There were a few real things wrong with Win ME, even for its time. I like fancy desktops and skinnable programs, so I started running and designing skins for various freeware programs that could 'fake' "Alpha channel" transparency in 98, produce non-rectangular windows, and generally enhance Windows visuals - XXCalc, Sonique, Kjofol, early versions of Winamp, Beatnik Internet clock, several translucent notepad variants, little programs such as that. I learned to hack the Windows 98 registry to make the background behind icon text transparent, change the start menu clock fonts, and many other little tricks, mostly for the same reason, When ME came along, It broke a great many things along these lines in the freeware customization scene, even though it supposedly didn't have any significant advances in transparency rendering, by its own admission. Microsoft did so many strange things in the registry (changing an enormous number of variable types from numeric to Boolean, or vice versa, where it just plain wasn't sensible, or, even more often, telling developers that a variable was now of some type, but experimenting with it proved it wasn't.), I swiftly got the feeling they were trying to obfuscate the registry, (and for that matter DLLs and video support) just to make it impossible for third parties to work with them unless they had the financial status to become what Microsoft was starting to call Microsoft Trusted Partners. To me, it came off as petty, as though Microsoft felt insulted anyone was trying to change the desktop appearance that much.
After a few months, there were more serious freeware programs that started running into the same thing, I.e. there were early replacements for Windows Explorer that added some real functionality, such as multi-pane versions, or search tools that let the user do searches with the full range of regular expressions, or adaptations of most of the Berkeley UNIX command line tools, or drive defragmenting programs that ran about 800% faster than the stock Defrag. It seemed like every time Microsoft announced a patch for something, it broke some other functionality, far removed from what they said the patch was supposed to do, and adversely impacted these freeware programs. I don't know if Microsoft did any of that deliberately - but I do know that several of those programmers who stopped updating their freeware creations damned sure thought it was deliberate.
Who is John Cabal?
Get a Windows 8 license (Pro), download the appropriate Windows 7 Pro ISO from digital river.
Legal and efficient.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Absolutely right. Over the last decade or so, much of Microsoft's sales & marketing hasn't actually been done by Microsoft at all.
They haven't needed to.
"We're starting to receive files in formats we can't open" does it for them.
Historically, that resulted in Office upgrades; they're now using that leverage to push other upgrades (Office 2013 requires Windows 7 and Outlook 2013 requires Exchange 2007 or later). In the process, they're losing customers - Office 2013 starts to look like quite an expensive upgrade when you suddenly need to rip out your entire infrastructure
The first one is always free.
---- Booth was a patriot ----