How Microsoft Built, and Is Still Building, Windows 10
An anonymous reader writes with this Venturebeat story about how Windows 10 is different from previous versions because of the way it was designed, including 15 public preview builds, and how much work is still being done. Windows 10 for PCs arrived two weeks ago. Thankfully, we don't need to wait years to say this will be a Microsoft operating system release like no other. The most obvious clue is not the fact that Windows 10 was installed on more than 14 million devices in 24 hours, that you can get it for cheap or upgrade to it for free, nor even that it ships with a digital assistant and a proper browser. No, the big deal here is that Microsoft is turning its OS into a service, and that means as you read these words, it's still being built. For the next few years, we'll be getting not just Windows 10 updates and patches, but new improvments and features. This is possible because Microsoft built this version very differently from all its previous releases.
I hope you got money for running this advertisement, Slashdot.
...is that all the reasons to choose Windows 10 over the competition, i.e. that it was a desktop operating system rather than a cloud service which required you to give not the slightest shit about your privacy (you did nothing of consequence) and a fast, always-on Internet connection (and you worked nowhere interesting), have gone.
That's it's privacy nightmare for those with the inclination to give a damn.
since it's a service now we'll get to pay annually again and again instead of buying it once and having it 'til we're sick of it?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Windows 10 isn't "built very differently" from Windows 8. Microsoft has always had the attitude of "F' it, ship it, we'll fix it on the road." -- Now it's just a "service" so they can proudly say it. Gheesh...
make; make install?
Is the datamining crap turned off in the Enterprise edition of Windows 10?
If they can provide me with an OS that boots consistently...
What in their long history of OS's leads you to believe this one is different from all its predecessors?
How much did MS pay for this bit of astroturfing, or are you an MS intern, not getting paid at all?
Big news - learned from mistakes!
I for one am very happy that the Win8 Metro shit is dead and buried, as well as the other things that we were told more than ten years ago "are already in Longhorn", but now are real instead of hype trying to one-up Apple.
The content of your emails, your voice, your browsing history, everything you do with your PC is uploaded to Microsoft (and a copy goes to NSA too, of course). Every antivirus software would label Windows 10 as a spyware if it weren't made by Microsoft. And no, you cannot turn it off completely, Microsoft's bad faith is proven by the fact that the default settings are all anti-privacy, not to mention that you cannot be sure that a closed-source OS does what it says:
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
No. People criticise microsoft because Windows 10 is disappointing and they seemed to have chucked privacy out the window. MS reached their peak with Windows 7 - a good OS most people would agree - and MS itself seemed to be changing and focusing more on customers than just on their bottom line. Yeah well, more fool us on that latter point.
>>...and I knew I could trust them.
This part is especially funny, in light of the recent Ars Technica article about how Win10 continues to send stuff to MS, even after you tell it *not* to.
Trust, it's a two way street...
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
FTFA:
That's right, it's a new feature that Microsoft is able to offer a specific group of people a given set of builds. You know, what all the Unix distributions we know have been able to do since time immemorial? You can even create your own builds. Just create a new repo and add it onto the end of the list, with newer versions of packages. Done! Microsoft physically couldn't do that until right now? That's pathetic, just like the rest of their package management functionality.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Subtle trolling takes too much thought - we hire out to foreigners who speak the language well enough to recognize patterns and send out the appropriate canned troll/astroturf message.
Did I just share a company secret?
That is all.
Microsoft is turning its OS into a service, and that means as you read these words, it's still being built.
No, it means that Windows 10 is banana-ware: Not ripe at time of purchase.
..has really done down. These guys might as well hang a flashing neon TROLL or SHILL sign above their posts nowadays its so obvious. Whatever happened to the subtle trolls (yes they did exist) that had - on the surface at least - had very convincing arguments?
Perhaps they weren't trolls at all, and simply had different opinions than you do. They were subtle and had convincing arguments, yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls. Why is that?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
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Just can't stand Microsoft anymore... they are not developer focused anymore.
They really began to annoy me with DRM, and the force feeding of Metro Dung in 8 and the worlds most annoying start menu in 10.
Windows is not a tight environment either (like Mint 17.x) where you have full control on what runs on your PC... too much background activity in Windows. Probably data mining all our personal information for their marketing department.
In fact they are so annoying, even free isn't tempting anymore - Linux Mint 17.x is the sweet spot now.
"They were subtle and had convincing arguments, yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls. Why is that?"
How about first you explain why so many people are fond of straw men.
Nope, not disappointing. You can turn any of the 'new' privacy-invading features off. Like you have to do when you install Ubuntu and disable all the Amazon search integration shit.
How is that different?
Because with Windows 10 as a "service" they can choose to remove that ability at any time?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I love the virtual desktop feature - Didn't Linux have that like 20 yrs ago? Hmmmmm
Hope there aren't any open source patent violations!
*** Don't be dull.***
For various reasons, I run multiple OS's. I was part of the recent wave of upgrades to WIN-10 because I have to anticipate what my accounting clients are going to run into when they upgrade which they tend to do without warning.
I personally think MS is just assuming that people will run through the process without thinking much about privacy settings and security issues on the other side. I'm a wee bit OCD about that, but the public I try to work with isn't even when they're told to be careful. I'm still baffled by the number of systems I deal with that have either no antivirus or outdated versions, no firewall, etc. Let's face it, if MS gains marketing data in exchange for a "free" upgrade, most folks won't complain. What I'm also concerned about from a practical manner is the fact that various support builds are going to be pushed though without the option of deciding when to install meaning that various drivers that worked earlier are suddenly off in the ozone upon restart.
There is also the matter of when, where, and how MS will acknowledge problems with the OS. For example, the Edge browser seems to have some real issues integrating with printing which simply aren't there when you switch back to IE-11 which fortunately hasn't been removed (yet), but only disappears from view.
MS's view of the future which they've been fairly clear about is a device-spanning OS that they're going to drive and I think that's one of the main things to keep in mind with WIN-10.
We have met the enemy and he is us - Pogo (Walt Kelly)
You can't turn all of them off. Even turning cortana off still results in your computer contacting MS's servers. You can't use a proxy to get around it either, several programs bypass your proxy. You can't use hosts file either, many dlls have built in IP addresses. The only way to keep 10 from contacting MS is to have your external firewall block it from those addresses.
Also, this Ars article is everything /. wishes it still was: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-when-told-not-to-windows-10-just-cant-stop-talking-to-microsoft/
No more the farce of forcing users to run on the upgrade treadmill. Just keep handing over the money.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Not sure if troll. I don't disagree with many of your preferences, but there are options out there. Use MATE (a fork of GNOME 2) and Chrome/Chromium. Use Fedora, which seems to have SystemD figured out and working well. Wait, Edge? You are a troll.
[System alert: keywords detected]
You want to buy a boy? You sick bastard!
Its been almost a month now since I got 10 on this 8 computer. I have a 7 computer and it would not even attempt to get 10 until a couple of days ago. It still fails on every attempt to download 10. I have a vista computer and I am grateful that they will not allow me to upgrade it to 10. I used to use real player to download video off the internet. Ever since I installed 10, I get the message that there is no video on this page even though I am watching it play. My internet speed is suppose to be around 30 megabits per second but it is not fast enough to get me a good quality experience when watching a lot of video. Even cnn video is not good enough for me as it is jerky a lot of the time. So I like to download some video and play them on my television set. It works a lot better there. My vista computer still works with real player. I would think that if someone provides free video they would appreciate when someone downloads that video rather than making them download the video multiple times.
Yes, since Windows 7, Windows has been a pretty fine operating system. This coming from a VERY long time Linux guy (1995/Slackware). I supported Windows 3.11 thru XP, till I retired in 2010, and at that time, my home systems were on Windows 7, but I decided I was tired of MS and moved all my systems to Linux (KUbuntu, thank you very much). When 10 started with the previews I decided to try it out in a virtual machine, but now thats it released, and all the "spy-ware" thats being found embedded in it, I'm not gonna recommend it to anybody, rather suggest they stay on 7 or 8.1.... Fuck MS
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
yup... MS has shot themselves in the foot with this one.. If a technical user wants to turn off all of the privacy-destroying crap, then MS has ZERO business ignoring said users wishes.. This had to be said ...... FUCK YOU MS!!!
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
The Ubuntu/Amazon thing you allude to is ONE LITTLE thing that is trivially easy to turn off, and once you're turned it off, it STAYS OFF..
The MS/Windows 10 thing is multiple keyloggers/uploads of any video from a webcam/uploads of voice data from your microphone, and this continues to happen EVEN WHEN YOU TURN THESE FEATURES OFF....
If you can't see the difference, you're braindead...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Nope, not disappointing. You can turn any of the 'new' privacy-invading features off. Like you have to do when you install Ubuntu and disable all the Amazon search integration shit.
How is that different?
It's really bad that one has to explicitly turn off things. At any point Microsoft can introduce a new evil feature and the user must be knowledgeable enough to go turn it off, or else he is screwed.
No. All datamining should be only enabled with my consent. In other words, it should be a whitelist, not a blacklist. I don't want to be turning knobs and plugging holes all the time.
There are several highly technical studies done of what Windows 10 does even after you've disabled all of the crap... Keylogger still sends your keystrokes to MS, if you have a webcam it sends video to MS, if you have a microphone it sends voice data to MS... EVEN AFTER YOU SUPPOSEDLY DISABLED these "features"... If this doesn't bother you, well. I don't know what to tell you... It sure the FUCK bothers me, and only reinforces my choice back in 2011 to switch all of my systems over to Linux....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
I used to like Debian, but sine switching to systemd with Debian 8, I've had all sorts of problems with it, and I've wasted too much of my time trying to debug stupid boot/init issues that just shouldn't happen in a stable release of any distro. ... I don't like to admit it, but Windows has come a long way. If they can provide me with an OS that boots consistently, ...
Are you really sure you want to exult Windows 10 because its booting "just works" when not even three days ago we had a story about a Windows 10 update (which cannot be turned off in Home edition, btw) that caused an unstoppable reboot cycle? http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
WindowsME didn't have any of the problems I had with 10. All agile and always changing with privacy nightmares. Great corporate OS who like things never to change and pesky updates adding elements of uncertainty. Different alright to irrelevent.
http://saveie6.com/
Linux is too glitchy and unpredictable to be a realistic competitor on the x86 desktop PC market.
You have infinite days to go back to Windows 7. You have 30 days to go back via the uninstall process.
I am posting this from LinuxMint. I mention this because I want to ensure you know I am not a shill. However, the FUD is absurd.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
It stops and just does not install the update. It goes through a few boot cycles first to try to install it. It is not unstoppable nor does it render the computer useless or anything. I am not even a regular Windows user and I know this.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
"They were subtle and had convincing arguments, yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls. Why is that?"
How about first you explain why so many people are fond of straw men.
GP stated "Whatever happened to the subtle trolls (yes they did exist)..," showing (s)he does in fact believe they were trolls, and then gave two pieces of evidence which I claim shows they weren't trolls at all. Please explain where you see a straw man in this argument.
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
The enterprise is going to be interesting with this stuff. If MS sends PII from Windows 10 to Microsoft, and an enterprise in the USA or Europe "upgrades" to Windows 10, then how can that enterprise continue to claim "Safe Harbor" certification?
I suspect that Microsoft is going to have to rip out all the privacy-destroying stuff before it can sell to a company that needs to be "Safe Harbor" certified.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Sometimes the "writing on the wall" is blood spatter...
sudo apt-get install edgebrowser-nonfree
That should do it for you.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
And here is a reply from Lynx. No, no I have no good reason for doing this. In fact, I am a bit sorry for having done this but, being me, I am going to do it regardless.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
I'm just glad they didn't totally abandon business customers. Running a constantly-changing OS is fine for a home machine that browses the web, makes Skype calls, and watches movies. It's even tolerable in some office situations where all the person is doing is Office documents with no systems interaction beyond email. When you build a software component on top of an OS, however, and come to rely on things working a certain way, that's where the Agile thing breaks down.
The company I work for sells a suite of middleware that relies heavily on some of the internals of Windows. Changing out anything is a risk that the product doesn't work as expected. It's one of those things where Windows Embedded might be a better choice, save for the fact that we need to run an actual end user system on top of this stuff. Microsoft's been really quiet about this, but it seems like the LTSB option is the closest thing to the old RTM/Service Pack model.
With all this building and rebulding and rebuilding the rebuilding, could Microsoft please fucking release a functional Windows 10 version of the RSAT tools?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
"This is possible because Microsoft built this version very differently from all its previous releases."
They will upgrade and update automatically including features, security and vital components,
So you can expect a lot of broken software to follow some updates.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I dissent. Win 7 is really annoying and lots of things that worked well in XP don't work in 7. E.g. the file search capability is almost totally useless. I would still be using XP, if it were not for the end of life issues, created by third parties who stopped supporting it.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.
They've been trying to get us back onto Terminals for two decades, looks like they might win this time.
If the public buys into a service versus a product, we can wave the white flag on any privacy we had left, and censorship
will be just another feature down the road (everyone forgot about the AOL browser I guess).
The rest of us will continue on linux and have 10/8/7 on secondaries to support our Clients, but hell if we don't crap
on it at every turn for being a Trojan Horse OS.
In Windows 10, OS Trojans you !
End of Line.
GP is not required to explain others' reasons for doing what they do. I suspect he was motivated by the fact that you wrote "Whatever happened to the subtle trolls (yes they did exist) that had - on the surface at least - had very convincing arguments."
A strawman argument requires that the person responding changes the proposition and then refutes the changed proposition rather than the addressing the actual point of argument. GP neither changed your proposition nor directly refuted it - instead he questioned your premise. You literally claimed that subtle trolls existed and had superficially convincing arguments.
All in all a poor attempt at a red herring.
"Please explain where you see a straw man in this argument. "
Go look up "straw man" then maybe you'll get a clue.
"A straw man is a common form of argument and is an informal fallacy based on giving the impression of refuting an opponent's argument, while actually refuting an argument which was not advanced by that opponent."
So genius, which bit of:
"yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls. Why is that?"
isn't a straw man to you?
I directly countered claims you specifically put forth, using your own "evidence", as explained above. That's not a straw-man. Maybe you are just trying to teach me what a troll really looks like, eh?
Three days from now?? Thats tomorrow!! ~Peter Griffin
All of it. Because I am literate. Let me illustrate:
The problem is one of your own creation -- they [the subtle trolls] are not all subtle trolls? "Subtle trolls (yes they did exist)" includes non-trolls? Because the last time I checked, when you craft a category based upon a combination of characteristics, everything within the category should have each of the characteristics. Hence all subtle trolls would be subtle and would also be trolls.
You're unintentionally conceding his point -- not all "subtle trolls" are trolls -- for reasons that you now recognize but are unwilling to admit. Properly labeling someone as a troll requires that you know their intent, yet if they're being subtle you pretty much cannot know their intent. There is no strawman because you yourself set up the category, and he's merely questioning your ability to accurately apply use it without being overinclusive.
Got it, non-genius? Or perhaps subtle troll?
I guess they will have a clean, no data spying, enterprise version, and a consumer version which is the current Windows 10.
There had to be a reason this was a "free" upgrade. The reason is all the service-selling and information-spying you get with it.
With 8 they stoppped making an OS for the users and started making one only for their interests
I sure hope so. I've always been a big Microsoft fan, .NET developer, Apple hater. But I upgrade my laptop from Win7 to Win10, then saw all the privacy invading stuff set by default, and converted back to Win7. Very disappointed in the current direction of Microsoft.
Nice try, quite amusing really. All bullshit however.
"There is no strawman because you yourself set up the category, and he's merely questioning your ability to accurately apply use it without being overinclusive."
He's not questioning it, he's putting forward a false postulation which he's then using to as a point of argument.
Now go learn english.
Back at ya, unsubtle troll.
I at least gave it a fair shake. I used it for about 28 days on my main computer just to give myself a chance to get used to it, just like I always try to do with a new OS. 29th day, Back to Windows 7 for me on this laptop. The macbook will stay with Mint for the foreseeable future.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
Okay, do this experiment. Install a Linux distro on any PC. From the very beginning, keep a notebook on every little glitch you meet over the months. Anything that you have to manually hack together, every bug report that you have to send, and every weird error message that occurs. You'd be surprised.
Look, I don't care a dime about the repetitious Secure Boot rants. They are a secondary issue. I first want proper QA on the Linux desktop.
You need to stop telling others what to do and start explaining your own arguments in your own words. As we've asked you repeatedly to do.
So far all we have is you claiming that all those people were sublte trolls and then running away from your own claims like poor and less skilled version of Donald Trump.
Are you truly this stupid??
"yet in your mind they were all definitely trolls"
Is a blatant lie and a straw man he's attempting to set up. Got it? Or do you need it written out it crayon with explanatory notes?
You brainless cretin.
Oh just fuck off with this OMG M$ $HILL!!!11 bullshit. I haven't had problems with Windows booting for over a decade. Small sample set yes, but it's entirely feasible.
Not since Millenium, eh?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
I guess they will have a clean, no data spying, enterprise version, and a consumer version which is the current Windows 10.
I expect the enterprise version will have one king hell hefty pricetag. I also expect all the data collected by the consumer version to be mined, resold, remined, resold again, repackaged, once more resold, ad nauseum. MS is going to have to make up for that revenue stream somehow or the stockholders will shitcan the front office fucks and install a new set that will. 'Free upgrade'? From Microsoft?
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Market uptake for this Windows is the worst ever and I think will level off at around what Windows 8 was.
The OS is a service! LMFAO. So you mean like some sort of system that allows me to operate my computer? A modular system of components that can be independently upgraded and improved? Like Windows 95?
And this is the winner: They can ship improvements to me without selling me a new OS. Really? Aren't they clever!
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.