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Windows 10 Passes Windows XP In Market Share
An anonymous reader writes: Six months after its release, Windows 10 has finally passed 10 percent market share. Not only that, but the latest and greatest version from Microsoft has also overtaken Windows 8.1 and Windows XP, according to the latest figures from Net Applications. Windows 10 had 9.96 percent market share in December, and gained 1.89 percentage points to hit 11.85 percent in January. Maybe it will jump even faster soon, but not necessarily for the best of reasons.
Because they're kind of forcing people to update, whether they want to or not.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Windows 10 surpassed XP back in October.
It has now passed every OS other than Windows 7.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Unfortunately this is no a limbo contest. Crossing such a low bar of an obsolete unsupported os installs with a flag ship os that older os try to force on you is not impressive.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Many websites are blocking Windows XP as it doesn't support stronger than SHA-1 certs so the numbers will be skewed. Win XP clients will be invisible to Net applications metrics.
Microsoft is forcing people to update, which makes these numbers meaningless. The only people who arn't going to update are the ones with the knowledge to block it.
This is like saying murders are way down, but ignoring to mention that you've put the entire population in straight jackets.
The fact that despite these strong-arming efforts, they're *still* only just now surpassing XP and Win8, says a lot about how much people don't want this latest and not-so-greatest OS.
I feel bad for Microsoft developers. When I tried the OS, I actually *liked* it. But then Microsoft had to go screw everything up with their OS-as-a-privacy-killing-service bullshit.
I actually use both. I find Windows 10 a well-made OS, finally catching up to Linux at current. It's usable and reasonable, although I had to go into the installer and modify the boot.wim and install.wim file because it was hard-freezing my CPU at boot. Had to remove the GenuineIntel_mcupdate.dll file out of system32 (it was inserting invalid microcode). This is still a problem on the current Windows 10 release.
I use Linux a lot more, but Ubuntu doesn't support ASP.NET development. Mono installs pretty broken, and monodevelop is horrendously unusable. Besides that, I wanted Windows for Unity 3D.
The Microsoft graphics stack still has some bugs, enough for OpenGL rendering of 2D canvases to stutter and spit when trying to use graphics applications. Things like Krita work better on Linux, although Wacom driver support is slightly better on Windows. ArtRage works decent, too, but only on Windows.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
I feel bad for Microsoft developers. When I tried the OS, I actually *liked* it. But then Microsoft had to go screw everything up with their OS-as-a-privacy-killing-service bullshit.
I've been reluctant to install and use Windows 10 because I'm not sure where the authoritative guide to ensuring I'm not leaking info to Microsoft and the internet. I've done it on a machine and not been displeased other than the vague feeling of unease.
But back then Microsoft was only evil to competitors, not their customers. Now, who knows if we are the customer or the product.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
The problem here in the US is that we have neither free market health care nor socialized health care, but rather the bastard offspring of the two combined. The result is not the best of both worlds, but the worst of both worlds: the socalized part serves only to corral the sheep into the shearing barn, where the "free market" part is free to gouge them into financial ruin. The end result is that in the US, medical expenses are the #1 cause of bankruptcy -- and that's by design, my friends. All by design.
It's like claiming more people have health insurance when you force them to hand over their money to a private company whether they want to or not.
Do they have health insurance? Then it is true regardless of your political feelings on the matter. Forced or not is a separate issue.
I'm about as thrilled as most people around here regarding Windows 10 but the market share numbers are what they are. Frankly I don't really see anything in Windows 10 that is truly better than Windows 7 as far as I'm concerned, though it is a damn sight better than Windows 8/8.1. Hell I still use some XP machines and other than some security concerns I'm mostly fine with XP.
Of Slashdot posts...either the poor lad's working around the clock or Whipslash and the others are posting using the Tim profile.
I understand that these things take time, but guys, if you could avoid posting Windows 10 non-stories every 5 minutes that would be an improvement.
Microsoft is forcing people to update, which makes these numbers meaningless.
No it doesn't. The numbers are what they are. It's not a measure of voluntary vs involuntary use. Market share is an objective fact regardless of the reason for it.
The fact that despite these strong-arming efforts, they're *still* only just now surpassing XP and Win8, says a lot about how much people don't want this latest and not-so-greatest OS.
No, it says a lot about how people shop on the Windows platform. Most people upgrade their OS when they buy a new machine. If what you have works then there is little reason to upgrade. I still have Windows XP machines here in my shop that will only get upgraded when they die. No reason to replace them as they work fine for their intended purpose. Windows 10 could be the most amazing operating system to ever grace the earth and I still wouldn't upgrade these machines because there is no gain to be had.
All the forced upgrades hardly matter in the long run. Windows 10 is gaining market share in the same way that Windows has always maintained a high market share: Forcing their OS onto the computers people buy. The same with Apple. Look at google's ChromeOS. As soon as it was pre-installed, people bought it. Otherwise, nobody would have cared. This is the main reason Linux isn't widely adopted on the desktop. Barely any PCs or laptops come pre-installed with Linux. If it had been, all the hardware compatibility issues with Linux would gradually vanish (at least to the level of Windows issues), because they will have already been worked out before anyone buys the machine. Microsoft has everyone locked into their ecosystem so deep, their software doesn't even have to be any good. Right now they are just in a war against the ghosts of their past. In the end, they will win.
Well, back then, Linux actually was better than Windows.
Nobody has to own a car. Obamacare is a tax on existence.
Please find me a single person who never uses health care and incurs no cost to the system. Go ahead, I'll wait.
Actually no I won't because there is no such person. EVERYBODY uses the health care system whether they want to or not and therefore everybody should have some skin in the game whether they want to or not. Every other civilized country in the world has figured this out. Auto insurance and health insurance are not and never will be the same because not everybody needs to drive or own a car.
It really is the same as Obama boasting about how many people signed up on Healthcare.gov.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
Many websites are blocking Windows XP as it doesn't support stronger than SHA-1 certs so the numbers will be skewed.
But not enough to matter.
We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of HitsLink Analytics and SharePost clients.
The network includes over 40,000 websites, and spans the globe.
We 'count' unique visitors to our network sites, and only count one unique visit to each network site per day. This is part of our quality control process to prevent fraud, and ensure the most accurate portrayal of Internet usage market share.
The data is compiled from approximately 160 million unique visits per month.
The information published on www.netmarketshare.com is an aggregation of the data from this network of hosted website traffic statistics.
In addition, we classify 430+ referral sources identified as search engines. Aggregate traffic referrals from these engines are summarized and reported monthly. The statistics for search engines include both organic and sponsored referrals.
These statistics include monthly information on key statistics such as browser trends (e.g. Internet Explorer vs. Firefox market share), search engine referral data (e.g. Yahoo vs. Bing vs. Google traffic market share) and operating system share (Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux market share or even the iOS market share vs. Android) The data is made available free of charge on a monthly basis that includes monthly usage market share and trends for browsers, operating systems and search engines.
I would like to see some examples of sites which are blocking XP and draw numbers on the scale of, let us say, Amazon.com, CNN, Fox News, Disney or Universal Studios.
How did you get windows 10 to only use 6GB HD space after install and updates?
The computer I'm writing this on is a windows 7 laptop the windows folder is 62.6GB. As it happens I have a few machines running windows 10 all up to date:
A Lenovo win10 bare install 8.84GB
A Dell upgraded from win8 9.49GB
A Hp upgraded from win8 15.9GB
A Hp upgraded from win8 21.8GB
Windows seems to like space on a old sony vaio VGN-UX490N after reinstalling windows vista from recovery iirc it only had 3GB free space.
Sure you can use nlite and strip out everything but the calculator but still?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Several of my newer Intel XP based laptops have died suddendly, (no bios, no beep), meanwhile nearly all of my AMD based systems, + plus older intel PGA socketed systems still boot up(15-20 years) run older OS's.(WIn 95, Linux) with no issues.
I suspect Intel is well aware of these LGA socket lifespan issues, and that's why they're switching to all BGA soldered in processors(2016).
.
I was called to a friend's house to fix his PC. He has downloaded and installed the Windows 10 update on his Win 7, HP-1100 series box. The box itself is completely stock because my friend doesn't know much about the inner working of PCs.
Either way, Windows 10 refused to see the CDROM/DVD drive, which, being HP, is I believe is also a lightscribe burner. But I digress.
Hardware manager took a long time to find, but once found, was useless. It's not that it didn't recognize the hardware due to a lack of driver, it's as if the hardware physically did not exist. You couldn't even force Windows to try looking for it because it claimed there were no hardware problems.
So, I go to HP's website to try and find a driver that would force Windows to admit a CD drive existed. HP's site offer to diagnose my PC's problems. I let it. Animated graphic cycles for what seems like a day, and then I get the wonderful message "An error has occurred, please try again later" Bullshit -- this has probably never worked, but HP won't admit that. I try and manually find the driver based on the Box's model.
There are no drivers available for this machine. At least, nothing for Windows 10. How is this possible?
I was unwilling to take apart the machine to find the type of CD drive it is (assuming HP had marked anything), so, with little choice left, I had Win 10 degrade itself back to Win 7.
After 30 minutes of that; we were back to Windows 7 and the CD drive worked as expected.
Windows 10 is a piece of shit, and it's apparently an unsupported piece of shit. Why are there no drivers or any way to force Windows 10 to look for a common piece of hardware? a CD/DVD drive? That's like not recognizing a mouse.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
What are we talking about?
Because windows and more linux distros than I would like are now heavily slanted toward users with touch screens. That's fine if you have a touch screen but even microsoft had to admit windows 8 is crap without a touch screen and while windows 10 does a lot to address the problems I still don't like it as well as 7. But I'm probably not the typical user as I personally don't care if the UI looks like windows NT just as long as it doesn't lag every time I open a window for some fancy graphic effect someone thought looked pretty. Gnome was pretty lightweight a few years ago but last I looked it had as much shiny as KDE. I'm not sure what happened there. It's like firefox being near indistinguishable from chrome from a distance. And now they are ripping out themes support so it stays that way...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
My mom too. When windows 95 came out I was 10 years old, reports of the evil Microsoft product "phoning home" were all the rage. Literally, my mom was seething with anger about this. How dare companies collect data about her usage habits! How dare the NSA sniff for packets! Here we are, 2 decades later, and Microsoft is still evil for collecting user data. The NSA is eye of Providence, and war... war never changes.
The Amish
What about them? They go to hospitals, they use medicines, etc. They require health care just like everybody else. The fact that they try to do it as much as possible within a community does not mean they do not participate in our health care system. Their church acts very much like a private group health insurance program that they all pay into.
Not everyone believes in private insurance.
So what? Ideology regarding private versus public insurance is irrelevant. Everybody uses health care whether they want to or not and therefore everybody needs to pay into the system to the extent they are able. Health care is a basic human right and nobody should be unable to get treatment because they are poor. We all need it sooner or later so we all should pay. Most sensible countries have solved this problem with a public health care system. The US has gone a different route (mostly for idiotic ideological reasons) but the result still needs to be that EVERYBODY pays whether they like it or not.
No.
When words cease to mean what they were intended or traditionally understood to mean, people with working brains find a new lexicon. We have a name for language that continues to circulate at the hands of the disengaged: cliche.
If the minds of the disengaged have any taste (lazy though it be, to be sure) they stock their cliche pantry with Shakespearean cliche. What the hell is a "salad day" anyway? Doesn't matter. The Bard didn't become the Bard by coining phrases that later flip tits up and float to the top of the scum pond, there to rot in the hot afternoon sun.
"Market share" is a phrase created by bean counters, subtype "venal" and is in fact principally circulated by the venal beancounter's venal beancounter: advertising men.
For example, my household is probably numbed among the vbvb as a "cable cutter", this though I have not resided anywhere with a working cable service for nearly thirty years, and that was an entire four month term at university, before which my family used this contraption called an "antenna", the kind you could see from the other side of the valley. A large, rusty pipe wrench lived full time at the bottom of the pole, seeing as, weather permitting, we could sometimes pick up Bellingham, and thereby upgrade in a scandalous moment from The Beachcombers to The Love Boat. David Suzuki on The Nature of Things would soon wrench us back to our senses, such being the paucity of science coverage in those times, good bad or ugly (Suzuki being a uneven trail mix I tended to score as "all of the above").
By this point in my young life I had passed judgement on television as mode of knowing shit about anything, hence the my thirty years in the un-television wilderness (and counting).
Nevertheless, to a moral certainty, I am surely categorized as a "cable cutter" (hey, we didn't say when).
Yes, those fucking vbvbs. We all know the drill.
Microsoft 10's "market share" is a fresh, tender patty of the same basic construction, whose turbid run off is additionally clouded by the chocolate-flavoured Ex-Lax served up by Windows Update.
Secondly, there is a key point to understand about how vbvbs do basic arithmetic.
Those least able to shuffle off the mortal coil of an undesired Windows 10 upgrade are the most important people to count. Your value in this pendant statistic is inversely proportional to your capacity to successfully wipe your own ass. These people are everything you want in a community of unwitting Guinea pigs to beta test suspect patches you are withholding from enterprise (tetchy, uptight people who actually know the difference and who, like Gandalf, only lose their shit precisely when and where they mean to).
Which brings us to "caveat emptor", the original market creed, and durable cliche of the highest Imperial coinage.
Let's suppose in Roman times you buy a pig in a poke. You take it home, release it from the bag—no surprise to you, since you checked carefully, it really is a baby piglet of sound mind & body—and you feed it the many different kinds of root vegetables that were not yet regarded as fit for human consumption, until the bacon is practically hanging in folds from its oversized rump. Then one dark and rainy night, a woman next door with more than the socially acceptable number of facial warts and moles twitches her nose and your domestic pig metamorphs inside your dwelling into a 600-lb toadstool (one with no prominent swollen bulboe labelled "drink me" to reserve the spell).
I am a great deal more than pretty much certain—one does not bet upon the Roman character lightly—that to the Roman mind, this scenario goes a great deal past caveat emptor, and well into lynch mob territory.
A "market" is a human institution where the receiver of the goods makes a dangerous but informed decision and then
Does windows 10 have ip over firewire support? I know vista doesn't
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
32-bit is much smaller than 64-bit, for one thing.
That's how my HP Stream 7 is using only 23 GB in its Windows 10 partition, and I have Office and Olive Tree Bible reader on there as well as my standard Ninite.com freeware.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Nah, actually very comforting.
As long as the market share is low, there's no reason to worry that malware will find its way onto Linux. Like any software, it's a business. Infections happen where people are who are using it. Nobody using Linux on a desktop, no worry that it would become a target platform.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
There you are, I was just talking about you.
Are the MS domains responsible for spying on customers in your hosts file?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It still is.
Though, admittedly, that got easier in the past few years.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Worse, even. They can't even cram it down everyone's throat.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Many??
Correct. It's not often advertised, but most states allow you to post some sort of bond, often in the sum of required insurance levels, instead of getting insurance.
Basically, if the state policy adds up to $300k of coverage, you put $300k into the bond and you don't need to pay for insurance otherwise.
I don't read AC A human right
The grand flaw in your argument is that you are taking a moral stand that you expect others to just accept.
The person you replied to is not asking for society to spend money on him, so he isn't much interested in the bill for any of it.
You're suggesting that since you value such things, he should have to pay for it, wanted or not.
---
Last year I have health insurance, my out of pocket cost was under $100. The cost to society was far higher, but I can't control that, only what I spend myself.
This year, my cost rose to over $350 a month. I no longer see value at that price. So I dropped insurance.
I completely understand your point, and the purpose of the ACA requiring me to buy insurance, it is to pay for those people who do get sick. But just like the cost to society, that is beyond my control.
$350 a month for a product I don't use is a bad deal for me. It begins and ends there.
Now I know what you'll say, "sooner or later I'll need it". Yes, that might be true, but I'll take my chances at age 40 that it won't be this year.
That $4k+ per year will go a. Ice way towards funding my retirement, 10 years of that, plus interest, will be a nice chunk of money when I'm 65.
Unix and linux are for morons. Come on guys get with the f*ckin program.
Ok then, I guess, according to you, I'm a moron then, since I don't use ANYthing on my computers besides Linux. But though I'm a moron, I'm
a thousand times more intelligent than *you*... Of course, that goes without saying since you don't have the balls to post without hiding behind
AC...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Hey Sparky.. you'd lose that bet BIG time... I tried Windows 10 for a couple of weeks on a spare system, and all I could think of, was HOW THE FUCK ANYBODY can use this crapfest.. I went back to Linux and reformatted the Windows 10 disk.... shudder
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
It's the single best one I've found so far. And the creator is constantly updating it to keep up with the changes Microsoft has been making.
It also has a monitoring mode where it stays in memory and warns you if Microsoft re-enables the updates.
You are permitted to phone Donald Trump before answering.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Plus It's also a great way to get a Pirated copy of 7 to become a legit one. Works great if you have the right kind of pirated windows 7.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
That's only $90 in overages if your on vzw @ $15/GB I can't imagine why anyone would have a problem with that ;-)
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
not that Win 10 passes XP, but that XP still has such a huge market share and this moment only is now and not like a week after you launch anything at shitty sales.
In the interest of comparing apples to apples all systems I listed with the exception of the windows vista machine are 64bit and the sizes listed are the windows folder by itself.
32bit windows systems are pretty rare now days. Plus I really like having more than 4GB of ram.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
If you using 7 or 8 the telemetry stuff is being backported and applied to your OS.
If you aren't sure how to prevent 10 from leaking info, then you aren't sure how to prevent 7 or 8 from leaking info either, and not upgrading isn't really a win for you.
This is my current go to:
https://www.safer-networking.o...
If any one has any criticism of it, I'm definitely listening.
For what its worth, I've upgraded my main PC to 10 now, and after a few customizations to basically shut off cortana, web search from the start menu, live tiles, and other crap, I'm pretty happy with it.
There are quite a few real improvements.
Staying on 7 over the privacy didn't make sense given they were rotting the privacy in 7 as well. And if I'm going to run something like spybot on 7 ... then I figured I might as well run it on 10.
Check his page. It does cover a lot of ground, including cleansing various registry entries, deleting win10 if it's already been downloaded, etc.
Like I said, it's the most thorough one I've found so far, and the dev is actively keeping up with events and responding accordingly.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I tried Windows 10 for a couple of weeks on a spare system, and all I could think of, was HOW THE FUCK ANYBODY can use this crapfest.
Ok.. I'll bite... what was the problem? I mean, it boots to the desktop, i have my usual apps pinned to the desktop (remote desktop, thunderbird, outlook, excel, firefox, visual studio, teamviewer, etc...)
I launch less common stuff via the 'search' box on the desktop. (from powershell, to cmd, gimp, to notepad++, etc...)
Its quick and efficient at launching programs. The desktop environment is perfectly adequate. (I prefer it to OSX; and think its on par with Cinnamon and other popular Linux window managers)
I've also got a macbook pro laptop, and its perfectly serviceable as well. I like it because its sturdy and light, and the battery lasts forever with how I use it. I just use it for remote desktop, email, and web.
I ~also~ use linux, but it hasn't become my primary desktop mostly due to:
windows isn't expensive relative to the hardware so its not an expense i'm looking to avoid.
Plus I use steam (games), excel/outlook (work), and visual studio (work); which linux doesn't support well.
I can understand the objection to Win10 on some the principled grounds -- Microsoft's general business practices, its not free software, and especially the telemetry issues, etc. But I simply can't understand the objections on pure usability "HOW THE FUCK CAN ANYBODY USE THIS CRAPFEST". Windows 8 had its irritating issues, windows 10 has some dumb defaults out of the box, but otherwise the user experience is fine.
Anyone coming from Linux, or comparing to linux should have no difficulty whatsoever tweaking windows into submission.
When I see a post like yours I presume your simply pre-disposed to hate it for reasons unrelated to the actual experience of using, then install it so you can really hate it properly, and then uninstall it so you can boast how much you hated it. But I'm open to hearing your actual criticisms.
sjbe wasn't arguing whether or not the AC should be costing people money, just that AC is.
Actually, he was arguing that since the AC would need healthcare sooner or later, they had an obligation to pay for it now.
Or to put it another way, sjbe was arguing that since the AC might cost society *something, someday* the AC had an obligation to pay towards everyone's health care today.
>> It's usable and reasonable...
You didn't read the EULA.
aaaaaaa
>> windows 10 has some dumb defaults out of the box, but otherwise the user experience is fine.
getting spied on, and forced upgrades is what you call "user experience "?
aaaaaaa
That's not catching up to Linux at current. That's catching up to Linux circa 1997.
Log in or piss off.
getting spied on, and forced upgrades is what you call "user experience "
I don't actually "experience" those.
First, I've installed a telemetry blocker (Spybot anti beacon is the one I went with, and I started using it BEFORE upgrading to 10 since the telemetry was backported to 7/8) to block and disable those elements. So to the best of my knowledge its not spying on me.
Second, even when they were running efore I blocked them, they didn't contribute anything to the "user experience". They were silent, and invisible. That's pretty much the definition of something one does not "experience".
You (and I) may object strongly to the telemetry, but its still not part of the "user experience" as in a thing that the user actually experiences.
Plus... as noted... it can be blocked.
As for forced upgrades it didn't force me to upgrade. I explicitly opted in. And again, how is that part of the experience of using it, at best that's the experience of getting it from a previous version, that some small number of users have experienced. (although from what I can tell, most if not all of them did actually opt in... and then after opting in couldn't figure out how to back out. The final page of the upgrade wizard in particular is "schedule it for sometime in the next 3 days" and "do it now" without a "oops i fucked up and now I want to back out completely" option, at least not that i noticed. And I'm willing to concede that that final window SHOULD have a "Cancel entirely" button, but you still had to opt to upgrade before you get to that window.
Only if you're surfing online with them.
Likewise stats don't count embedded or industrial applications.
Bloody Windows and no way to troubleshoot this.
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
My "day job" is working for a major retailer, a couple of weeks ago they told us they'd finally had to upgrade all their systems from XP to 7. Given their size that's a substantial drop in market share for XP, but I have no reason to presume they are the only one to finally be upgrading. So did 10 pass XP, or did XP pass 10 going the other way?
>> First, I've installed a telemetry blocker ....
So you definitely experience it.
You have to put on a kludge to block an unwanted feature. This burns your time, and you are not even sure the kludge fully works.
aaaaaaa
It was a refutation of the AC, who said he would not pay for healthcare and not receive any. Since AC is quite likely to need expensive health care at some point when AC can't or won't stand on principles and refuse, AC is likely to incur considerable health care expenses where AC wants to or not. Since the contrary was the main basis of AC's argument, AC's argument is invalid.
This isn't the equivalent of the Ace Attorney video game series, where beating a murder charge requires coming up with solid evidence that a specific other person committed the murder. It's possible to refute an argument without supplying an ironclad argument for something else.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So you definitely experience it.
You have to put on a kludge to block an unwanted feature.
Semantics at best, a one time install step during the initial install is irrelevant to the regular daily user experience.
Furthermore, I ALSO have do that kludge with windows 7 and 8. So its nothing specifically to do with the windows 10 experience. Its certainly not a reason to stay on Windows 7.
At best it's a reason to switch to Linux; but that's a far larger investment of time and a much more significant adjustment, and one that comes with significant other sacrifices.
This burns your time
Yeah, 15 seconds plus or minus. I can deal with it. Installing and tweaking an OS takes some time. Linux and OSX each have a bunch of post install steps I have to take to correct defaults that I dislike. Switching off windows isn't going make an iota of difference there.
and you are not even sure the kludge fully works.
Of course. Certainty is for fools.
But I am pretty confident it works, and my own investigations and packet traces have been reassuring. If windows is updated to open a new hole I have confidence it will be caught and plugged in short order by the community around this tool. And its not the only tool I use to secure my network.
Its a balancing act. I use several things that run on windows. Some I might find a suitable replacement for, but not all of them. Some of those I might be able to get working adequately on WINE, but that is no less a kludge and some things still won't run. Perhaps the rest I could run in a Virtual Machine... accomplishing what exactly? Now I get to maintain Linux AND Windows on this system? That seems like a real time saver.
Since AC is quite likely to need expensive health care at some point
"Need" or "want?
Those are two different things... Or are you suggesting that the AC has lost all free will and can't turn healthcare down?
AC is likely to incur considerable health care expenses where AC wants to or not.
That is society's problem, not the AC's. If society doesn't want to incur those costs, then we can switch to not treating all comers, regardless of ability to pay. That is a different choice, one we aren't likely to make.
But we could.
Regardless, you aren't going to convince the AC of anything with your moral argument of what he/she should or should not do, they don't really care.
As a society, we have made the choice not to let people die in the streets because they haven't made adequate provisions for health insurance. It would be immoral dehumanizing, and unhygienic. AC has made the choice to live in that particular society.
Also, there are times when we don't have free will, due to incapacitation of some sort or another, and those are the cases where we are most likely to need expensive medical treatment. They aren't predictable, either. If AC gets into a bad accident, we'll say not AC's fault, and is unconscious and seriously injured in other ways, AC is going to be hauled to the emergency room and receive some very expensive medical attention before AC can choose to refuse it.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
As a society, we have made the choice not to let people die in the streets because they haven't made adequate provisions for health insurance. It would be immoral dehumanizing, and unhygienic.
And in fairness, I tend to agree with that decision.
AC has made the choice to live in that particular society.
Have they? We no longer really live in a world that gives people that choice. The world is full, there is nowhere *new* to go that doesn't have governments and "society".
I didn't pick to be born here, or live here. I don't have unlimited freedom to move to any nation on Earth, they don't have to accept me. And even if they did, they have their own rules that I might or might not agree with.
Unless you're suggesting that the AC has the right to kill themselves if they don't like "our rules"? If not, then what are you suggesting? Because honestly, I can't see that they got much of a say in any of it.
Also, there are times when we don't have free will, due to incapacitation of some sort or another, and those are the cases where we are most likely to need expensive medical treatment. They aren't predictable, either. If AC gets into a bad accident, we'll say not AC's fault, and is unconscious and seriously injured in other ways, AC is going to be hauled to the emergency room and receive some very expensive medical attention before AC can choose to refuse it.
Yes, I get that. Would you suggest some type of registration system that allows him to op-out in advance? Or perhaps we treat him anyway and just eat the cost, since that was our choice to not refuse treatment on the basis of money?
May I further suggest that if you wish to take the moral stand that we should not refuse treatment on the basis of money, that we also should not allow for-profit health insurance or for-profit doctors/hospitals? That it should be more like the fire department or police, we all pay for it, but we all get it free of charge to the person?
After all, the police and fire departments do not send a bill for their services. Neither is driven by profit. They exist to serve all of us.
Microsoft has been pulling more and more firewire support with each version of their OS, so I doubt it. If anything, I bet Firewire works better in Vista than it does in 10.
Morality gets a lot more complicated when there's no lawless frontier, yes. However, AC lives in this society and benefits by all sorts of things we do as a society, and really can't pick and choose what AC wants and what AC doesn't want. If given the choice, I'd opt out of paying for the war in Iraq and the two new sports stadiums in my city, but it's all part of living in a society that has created a government that does a lot more good things than bad. I'm much better off, net, with the government. I take advantage of the stuff the government offers to me. That, in my opinion, creates a responsibility to pay back somehow. Also, it is possible to live in this country and be effectively out of government control, and some people do, as long as they don't give the law a good reason to come after them, and AC was not giving any sign of opting out as much as AC could.
I do believe AC has the right to commit suicide, but that has nothing to do with social contracts or anything like that. However, morality doesn't exist completely devoid of real-world considerations (I don't think any branch of ethics does), and so we have to deal with the morality of the current world.
To answer this question intelligently, I have to know what we mean by "we". I don't think there's a rule in society that somebody doesn't disagree with. We have rules against killing other people without good reason, and I know at least one anarchist who doesn't think there should be such a fixed rule. (He's a very moral guy, and isn't going to kill another without darn good reason, so he's not just trying to justify his own inclinations.) If we're talking about we as a society and government, we need to realize that there are dissenters, and what to do about them. We have to compel participation to some extent, to avoid the free-rider problem.
When we have decided we have such-and-such a right, I don't see that it matters much whether we get it publicly or privately. As a homeowner in this city, I have the right to water, sewer, natural gas, electrical, telephone, garbage pickup, and education services to name some of them, since that's what the appropriate governments have decided. (I do have to pay directly for most of them, but there are some provisions to provide some of these services under some conditions if the resident can't pay, and there are some I do not directly pay for.) The water and sewer service are provided directly by the city, and I am billed for these. The natural gas, electricity, and telephone connections are provided by private companies who operate under government regulation, and I pay these separately. Garbage pickup at least used to be provided by private companies under contract to the city (it may have changed recently, and I would not necessarily have noticed), and is billed separately. Education can be provided by the public school system, and there are charter schools that receive government funding, and this is straight from property taxes. It all works reasonably well.
Health care can work well under all of these systems. We do have to let practitioners make good money, or we aren't going to have enough, so we do have to allow something like for-profit doctors.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
However, AC lives in this society and benefits by all sorts of things we do as a society, and really can't pick and choose what AC wants and what AC doesn't want.
That is true, to a point... You can move outside of a city and county school area and cut your housing tax obligations by a lot, just as an example.
I live in a major city, my property tax bill is substantial. While I don't *LIKE* it, I understand it and pay it without serious complaint, because it buys me civilization. If you came to me tomorrow and said "we want to raise your annual property tax bill by $1,000, but we will pass a law requiring class sizes be cut to 1 teacher per 10 students", I would pay it in a heartbeat, without complaint.
So there ARE things I'll pay for, but I also get that not everyone would agree. People who have no kids would probably not like the above very much.
As a homeowner in this city, I have the right to water, sewer, natural gas, electrical, telephone, garbage pickup, and education services to name some of them, since that's what the appropriate governments have decided.
It may just be a word choice, but I think it is worth pointing out that you actually don't have the *right* to those things, you have the privilege to pay for them. You don't have to buy your *rights*. If I don't pay my water bill, they turn off the water.
I don't have to buy my freedom of speech, for example.
Health care can work well under all of these systems. We do have to let practitioners make good money, or we aren't going to have enough, so we do have to allow something like for-profit doctors.
I don't consider a doctor's paycheck to be "for-profit", at least no more than the paycheck of anyone who works for the government. I'm more thinking of the billions of dollars insurance companies and large hospital systems make.
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If the Government decided tomorrow that Blue Cross/Blue Shield was going to run national health care, fine. Then everyone gets it without having to fill out endless forms and pay a bunch of fees. It is just paid for by our taxes, and it could be like a regulated utility.
What I DO object to is being forced to shop for private products and services that I may not want, that come with a lot of expenses and conditions attached, that I didn't ask for.
If Bernie Sanders gets his way and raises taxes to provide Medicare for all, with no charge to have it, I'm ok with that actually.
Maybe that seems strange to some, but it works for me.
Back before I had a kid, I voted for every tax increase for schools and libraries that came up on the ballot. There was a particularly large one to reduce class sizes, and I happily voted for it. Then, when my kid got old enough, class sizes were back to what they were. The story of my life: stuff I pay for tends to be gone by the time I personally want to use it. Oh well.
I was using "right" a little loosely there. There's stuff I have the right to buy, stuff I have the right to (public education for my kid, for example), stuff that happens that I'm billed for, stuff I have the right to do personally, and stuff I have no right to. Around here, I have the right to have an electric line run to my house, and the right to get power by paying the electric company. I do not have the right to buy fat-free mozzarella, and no grocery store is required to stock it. (Don't knock it; it's just fine on a pizza made on french bread.)
The idea behind the ACA is that the government creates a competitive market, and the only way this works is to get everyone to participate. It's a really clunky system, and I really prefer single-payer, but it's a move in the right direction.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Back before I had a kid, I voted for every tax increase for schools and libraries that came up on the ballot. There was a particularly large one to reduce class sizes, and I happily voted for it. Then, when my kid got old enough, class sizes were back to what they were. The story of my life: stuff I pay for tends to be gone by the time I personally want to use it. Oh well.
Yea, I hear you... When my 10 year old son started in school, class sizes were about 20 to 1. My 7 year old daughter now has 27 total kids in her class, for 1 teacher. In 2nd grade!
I'm not happy about this at all. That is way too high for that age, it shows in her work compared to my older son when he had fewer kids in class at that age.
My options however, are quite limited. I can home school him, or move. We live far enough outside of the city center that private school options are sparse and far enough away that it would be a challenge to get the kids to them every day. Doable, but moving would be easier.
If we move to another area that has lower class sizes, nothing assures me that will hold for any amount of time.
I was using "right" a little loosely there. There's stuff I have the right to buy, stuff I have the right to (public education for my kid, for example), stuff that happens that I'm billed for, stuff I have the right to do personally, and stuff I have no right to. Around here, I have the right to have an electric line run to my house, and the right to get power by paying the electric company. I do not have the right to buy fat-free mozzarella, and no grocery store is required to stock it. (Don't knock it; it's just fine on a pizza made on french bread.)
Fair enough... I just see "rights" tossed around like candy sometimes and I think people forget about what a "right" actually is. But clearly you understand, so moving on. :)
The idea behind the ACA is that the government creates a competitive market, and the only way this works is to get everyone to participate. It's a really clunky system, and I really prefer single-payer, but it's a move in the right direction.
I get the idea, and it sounds great on paper. But it only works if multiple companies are honestly competing for your business. At least in the case of Texas, that is largely no longer true.
I had coverage last year, it was about $90 a month out of pocket (with a lot more from our friends at Uncle Sam), and the coverage was decent, if you had a major medical emergency. We went through multiple primary care providers, trying to find one that could get us a reasonable appointment schedule. That is harder than you think when so few accept the insurance.
You see, Blue Cross/Blue Shield sells policies on the ACA exchanges, then they sell "other policies" off the ACA exchanges. My wife accepts the latter type, but not the former. If you have a healthcare marketplace policy, you can't go see her, she won't accept the reimbursement rates they offer. She gets nearly twice as much money from the non-marketplace policies.
Now the hospitals and emergency rooms don't get that choice, but my wonderful ACA exchange policy had a $500 co-pay for an ER visit. No big deal to me, but to a lot of people, that isn't affordable (it should be, but that is another conversation).
The family annual deductible on the policy last year was just over $11,000, with $5,500 per person. The co-pay was 20%, until the deductible was met. Those are not affordable to many people, and that was the silver plan.
The ACA sounds nice in principle, but I suspect as people try to actually use the policies and discover how much additional out of pocket you end up having to spend, combined with fewer doctors accepting the policies, you'll see a backlash trend. Sure, young people who don't use many medical services will take time to figure this out, but it will happen.
Side note: In case you were curious. My wife is cons
OK, you got screwed by how the ACA was put into practice. I hadn't realized the companies in Texas had managed to abuse it so badly. Around here, things seem to work a lot better. I've got a friend and a relative with pretty bad medical problems that are doing just fine with the ACA in Minnesota and Wisconsin. My priest friend in South Dakota tells me that she's very happy about the ACA and what it means for her poorer parishioners. (Texas has always wanted to do things its own way, which can be good or bad. Last I dealt with power generation, there were three big grids in the US: East, West, and Texas.)
I'm also on the same insurance I had before the ACA, which is superb.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes