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The Unintended Consequences of Free Windows 10 For Everyone
Ammalgam writes: Microsoft seems to be really driven to pushing over a billion people to the new Windows 10 platform as soon as humanly possible. In the latest push to make this happen, the company has basically decided that (somewhat off the record), pirates can come in the side door and it really doesn't matter what the state of their Windows license is, they can get Windows 10 for free. To get deep into the weeds on how this is happening, you have to read Ed Bott's excellent article on ZDNET – "With a nod and a wink, Microsoft gives away Windows 10 to anyone who asks." However, on Windows10update.com, Onuora Amobi asks whether the cost benefit analysis has been done and if this deluge of new members will have a detrimental effect on the Windows Insider Program.
Anyone is invited. You beta-test = your payment is a free license.
That sounds like the front door to me, not some questionable/obscure side door.
That man really needs to be more careful with what he says. He keeps contracting the C-level guys at Microsoft that work for him, and he even contradicts himself pretty often. I know he was hired just because he's friends with Obama, and that gives Microsoft a lot of influence in the White House, but he is just in way over his head.
Whether the CBA has been done? Are you fucking serious? If there's one thing Microsoft has done, it's the CBA. Whether it's based on well-founded assumptions is another question.
However, if you actually tunnel down into that article, they don't actually speculate about the CBA at all! They actually just show that they don't understand what they're talking about. Here's what the relevant paragraph from TFA actually says:
This all comes down to cost benefit analysis. Hopefully someone at Microsoft has done the analysis and decided that it makes more sense for the company to open the gates wide than it does to preserve the integrity of the Insider Program.
The author goes on to speculate that "if hundreds of millions join the Insider Program just for Windows 10, their participation and active feedback levels will be tremendously low" and that "It will make it a lot harder for Microsoft to nurture and mine this group for good information because the data sample size will grow exponentially." But this is a lot of cockery that shows that the author doesn't understand data reporting. Most low-quality information will be readily characterized; the users will have given incomplete or terse information, for example, and you can simply "throw away" any such reports unless they pertain specifically to an issue you care about — in which case, someone is going to loot the database specifically for problem reports which are relevant to the case at hand. And presumably, if the quality is going to suffer so badly, Microsoft already has a significant corpus of higher-quality problem reports to compare new ones against to determine whether they're worth looking at.
However, the author has also apparently missed the full import of the Windows 10 experience program, which has unprecedented levels of snoopery built into it. Now that Microsoft has gone through the hardcore cadre, they open the floodgates to the general population so that they can collect more automated testing data. As users attempt to run their programs on Windows 10, Microsoft gathers crash reports that tell them not just what users are running, but how to shape Windows 10 to serve the majority as regards backwards compatibility.
TL;DR: Everything about the idea that Microsoft hasn't run the numbers on this thing is stupid.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
A large majority of home users running Windows with zero patching because they don't want to pay for it sounds like utopia to you?
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
Well, I'll tell you the problems with a subscription model.
First off, it's a nuisance. I've bought a new PCC which came with an OS. It's a done transaction. I have no intention of then providing my credit card and billing information to Microsoft. It's just not happening.
And then there's the expectation that eventually it becomes extortionware -- nice OS you have, shame if something happened to it if you stopped paying us.
Again, not happening. We just don't trust companies to not screw us over. Especially not Microsoft.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Shame you used that juvenile term "fanbois". Otherwise you make perfectly reasonable arguments here.
systemd prevented my computers from booting
And, swallowing stderr and ignoring nonzero exit statuses makes it very hard to troubleshoot. Most daemons have good error messages as to why they don't start, so it's frustrating when there's no way to see them except to start the daemon by hand. A simple typo in a config file can lead to hours of frustration since the error message isn't logged in the journal.
I recently switched to Debian 8 after Red Hat left most of my servers unable to boot after upgrading since it no longer includes support for software RAID at boot. The fix is easy if you know how. Just add this line to /etc/dracut.conf:
add_dracutmodules+="mdraid"
And, reinstall your kernel package. Red Hat must have had a lot of customers complain because they knew exactly what to do before I even finished describing the problem. Try troubleshooting a systemd problem while you can't even mount root. That was painful.
Tried it on two machines, no issues. It really sounds like your hardware is borked if you need to do major fixes every month. I and many others have been running 7 and 8.1 for years without issues.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Can you elaborate on that? I'm a home user, how do I get a free Windows 8.1/7 licence from Microsoft? You said they were giving them away to people who ask...
You are right about the subscriptions though. It's all about driving people to the Windows Store, and making that into the kind of cash cow Google Play or Apple's store is.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
But this would be *gasp* a SUBSCRIPTION plan!!!
No, this would be a maintenance contract not a subscription plan.
Under a subscription plan, you stop paying, it stops working. Under a maintenance contract, it keeps working, you just stop getting updates.
In any event, MS would be ill advised to open source anything. As soon as they do, they are no longer the only source for updates, and once they are no longer the only source for updates, they will no longer be the *best* source for updates, since it is likely that a young upstart company with some intelligence behind it is going to be able to run rings around MS. The only advantage MS has is exclusive access to the source code. If they give that up, its sayonara sucker.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
They keep using 'Windows as a service' and 'supported lifetime of the device' which strongly hint at subscription.
On the financial side, they have done something with a strong hint about what they means: they declared they will defer a license revenue purchase and only count a part of it a year until the projected useful life of the hardware device is over. So they need to come out and be explicit, but it seems nothing really changes from the customer side and they play accounting tricks to transform their revenue to resemble a subscription offering.
So all signs currently point to Windows 10 being more of the same. Their upfront price is large enough and in pracitce gets thrown out with the hardware it was running on.
So they gussied up some fancy accounting and marketing and suddenly they look like they are a 'free' platform to customers and subscription to investors. Nothing however really changed in any real fundamental way.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The toshiba laptops in my supplier's catalogue nearly all come with "Windows 7 32/64bit pre-installed. Also supplied with Windows 8/8.1 media"
Now, why would Toshiba go to the extra effort to pre-install what is effectively a downgrade, unless 1. customers are demanding it and 2. it's a selling point - "you don't have to downgrade, we've already done it for you!"
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
Stop being retards.
Make windows 10 FREE for home or personal use. Purchased License required for anything else, it's really brain dead simple and protects your income stream as business licensing is 90% of your revenue from the OS. You will still charge DELL and HP and others got the OEM licenses if they want it pre-installed on their computers. AS they would not dare to sell a PC with no OS installed to the drooling masses.
But home users that have an IQ above 60 that can install it on their own? give it to them for free and utterly destroy the piracy of your OS.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
> make their whiny cause seem relevant instead of just ignorant.
As usual, the systemd fanbois use personal attacks to defend systemd rather than fixing problems. Linus was right about how you guys ignore bugs. I love systemd, but I am ashamed to be associated with such an immature group of angry children. You are acting like an angry child. How about we attack the problem instead of just lashing out and attacking the messenger?
Or, for the same amount of effort and frustration, just install one of the Linux variants and try an OS where at least you don't get charged for the privilege of being abused...
Nice idea, I keep seeing people saying that...
But Linux doesn't run Windows programs and there are a LOT of Windows only programs.
Until that changes, Linux isn't an option...
Whey would you have a bad judgment on Kingston Memory when you've never had one fail??
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
I just switched to FreeBSD and I'm kicking myself for not doing it years ago.
Jails are exactly what I've been looking for for most of my 'virtualization' (Separate containers for different apps). The separation with /usr/local/ is strict. Ports and pkg cover all of my software needs.
I just built a Kodi HTPC with FreeBSD as the OS. It supports Nvidia VDPAU video acceleration. Transmission and an autostarting VPN is in its own jail.
Plus ZFS on root file system. I've moved the same ZFS poolbetween 3 different OSes (Solaris, ZFS on Linux, FreeBSD) in the last 7 years. Hard drives just get replaced and and the pool enlarges. I think I started with 250 GB drives and it now has 5-2TB drives. I haven't lost a file since then. It'll make a great set top box.
Is Microsoft worse than any other major OS vendor, or even any other major software vendor?
New versions of OS X seems to have fairly severe issues like wifi not working at launch, and Apple has a much smaller range of hardware to target. Linux occasionally throws out some critical data destroying bug by mistake (remember the EXT4 thing with config files?)
Microsoft really screwed up with trying to extend DOS into a 32 bit system, and then again by failing to realize that ordinary users would be running highly networked operating systems, but that was all more than a decade ago. XP was what, 2002? These days, apart from annoying UI changes (just like Gnome/KDE/OS X/iOS/Android) they seem to have mostly sorted themselves out, and certainly don't seem to be any worse than other vendors.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The only real reason is if she plans on keeping it past 2020, when extended support ends for Windows 7. Which is pretty unlikely if it's not upgraded to 8GB. Or, if there's a business reason to buy new software which then requires newer Windows (because of being badly coded).