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Microsoft Adding More Ads To Windows 10 Start Menu (theverge.com)
Microsoft plans to double the number of promoted apps in Start menu. The change, which is scheduled to come with the upcoming Anniversary Update to Windows 10, will see the promoted apps count rise to 10. Tom Warren, writing for The Verge: Some promoted apps are pre-installed, but Microsoft notes that they can be fully uninstalled and any promoted items removed from the Start menu. Microsoft has not revealed exactly why the number of promoted apps is doubling, but it's likely that the company is using it as another method to attract developers to its Windows Store.
Where do I go to bend over?
Just install Classic Shell
Candy Crush and Twitter already re-install themselves every time I update the OS. It's a trivial powershell script to remove them again but how many more will re-install themselves every time I update after this garbage is added. Installing apps I haven't requested ONE TIME is already too many fuck this nonsense no one is ever going to use your proprietary app store, Microsoft, give it up please.
Microsoft notes that they can be fully uninstalled and any promoted items removed from the Start menu for now
There. Fixed that for ya. If there's anything Microsoft taught us lately, is that whatever they say or promise cannot be trusted.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
With stunts like that, pushing ads and apps on people and everything, why does it still cost something to get Windows 10?
Put the damn ISO on your website, unlock the damn activation/serial/whatever thing and you'll get more users.
You want a proprietary OS? You got it.. What you are looking at is the future of proprietary operating systems. Their purpose won't be to facilitate your work; that's only a nuisance. Their purpose will be to tag and track you, and then do whatever it takes to profit off that information.
MS finally got me to switch back from Linux from a host OS to a guess one. It was stable, secure, gorgeous, ran smooth without winrot of XP, and was a great but boring desktop OS to get work done.
As an IT professional I need to use the latest and greatest to keep my skills up and not look incompetent when an executive for example in a conference room needs help on his Windows 10 tablet etc.
Win 8 was fine except the GUI and artwork. I upgraded kicking and crying because I needed to learn Hyper-V. Windows 10 my God is just terrible. Re0imaged my system 4 times already due to bugs. If you run a sfc /scannow it will corrupt ESSENT database. Only a re-image can fix it. No DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth will make it worse! Acutally it will complain about the source files. Put on your installation cd and it will break Windows 10 as it will put outdated .dll's back. It is Vista quality.
Windows bright white windows titles ARE TERRIBLE. I enabled color in settings but I do not like how it looks. The icons on the taskbar pinned are too freaking SMALL. Oh, that is right I should have a gigantic start screen and pin down "My documents" "My downloads", etc. Under Windows 7/8.1 if you install Office 2016 it will actually put the icons there for you pinned in the taskbar. MS is forcing it's view of tiles and running cell phones on computers for familiarity hoping us old farts who hate change will want to use Windows Phones. YEAH RIGHT.
I am not an MS hater anymore. But man, Windows is bad again after it finally stopped sucking. The only good thing about MS is visual Studio and Office. I suppose I like tablet features and Netflix and Hulu apps on the road or on a 2nd monitor if I want to watch Star Trek while I work etc. But, man Windows 10 is years off.
Do not get me on the schziphrenic gui either. Now with 3 UI's which include a hamburger menu.
But MS is making it worse by forced upgrades, spyware, and now ads. I do not want 10 anywhere near my computers! But I need them for Hyper-V for my MS certifications so what choice do I have?
Windows 10 is going to be the next XP sadly after 3 short years. Sigh. I hope if we all yell enough MS will mature it and change by 2019 when Windows 7 goes EOL and we are forced to use it.
http://saveie6.com/
...or does anyone else also think that ads have NO PLACE being in the freaking operating system?
Unless your programs aren't on the dock, then launching programs is a pain. It's why I put the application folder on the dock.
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
Looking at this, and at the current state of the intertubes, I'm ready for 2020 when every computery thing grinds to a halt, submerged by advertising, rapacious cookies, marketing AIs and yet-to-be-imagined commercial interest mechanisms.
User: clicks link or menu item. Computer: Waiting for ads.cloudystuff.porno, waiting for targeted.butuseless.something, ah! Popup: I see you're running a cleaner, have you cleaned your teeth today? Try xxxx.whitestuff.com -> Connection timed out please try again etc. etc.
The only way around this may be islands of 'useful' non-profit intra-tubes with sharp spikey firewalls. Everything else will be commercially saturated.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
"Microsoft plans to double the number of promoted apps in Start menu."
Well if they do this just 3 or 4 more times it'll be promoted apps all the way down.
No need for pesky files or personal stuff, it'll be nothing more than a dedicated ad platform.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Windows started out as a convenient wrapper for Dos, and now we're here. We have updates that are non-negotiable, apps that are installed by default, integration with a video game console, and an entire ecosystem of advertising built-in to the UI. Theres powershell, Linux BASH, and ssh as well as a talking assistant.
after 197 mergers or takeovers in its history its taken Microsoft just 15 years to pedal themselves to an early grave, and windows 10's schitzophrenic laundry list of things it seeks to achieve for the user is an excellent barometer of the companies 'significant changes' after Ballmer was quietly hustled out to the parking lot. There really isnt any direction, but a very obvious pattern.
1. a trend emerges, catches on, and becomes a hit.
2. Microsoft, four years later, creates its own version of the product or technology at the center of the trend.
3. The product, (zune, windows phone, market) is brutalized for three or four more years while microsoft keeps it on X-Box revenue life support.
4. MS quietly shuffles the technology under the rug four more years later, abandoning and alienating nontrivial numbers of users and sacking the entire division that once handled the product.
Hololens, minecraft, the self driving car, surface, phone, cloud -- these are all things that have existed better and cheaper in many cases than microsofts version yet still unaccountably exist as a microsoft offering seemingly just out of spite. Bing was a 7 year attempt at a hostile takeover that is entirely powered by yahoo engine patents and screen scrapes from Google and it still hands out some of the least meaningful or relevant garbage results. The walk-in microsoft store is a godless abortion of over-illuminated copy-paste from whatevers going on in an Apple store, and its performance is so dismal its being rolled into Best Buy stores as a kiosk.
So the question still remains. after 15 years, where the hell do you want to go today, Microsoft? because everywhere isnt a direction.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Why are people so up-in-arms over the ads in Windows 10, yet, they don't even blink an eye at the ads you get on the XBOX, even with a Gold subscription? It's the same shit - if you're paying for something, there should not be ads.
Ten years ago this would have appeared to be a post from The Onion. I can't believe this is really happening.
I dumped Windows 3.1 for Mac and later Linux, and I haven't really looked back since. Sure I bump into windows now and then, but I don't feel like I've missed out on anything.
But this takes the cake. How ridiculous can you get? They must have seen the writing on the wall and decided to go out with a big hurrah.
Why should I need third party software to restore functionality? This is broken by design. When support for 7 ends I will probably ditch it.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So if I buy a retail kit it will not show advertisements?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
one that actually understands content inside packets and rewrites them or ack's, back to the sender, that all is peachy and fine but does not forward the packet to the end host.
basically, SDN but meant to HELP people and not just fuck with them. and yes, some SDN in the industry is for evil purposes (I used to work for a company that was big into SDN...)
I have not heard of anyone having a smart(er) firewall that can reject the MS forced updates. I think there is a need for one.
guys, go make one and you'll make bank. no end user wants to HAVE to take forced updates. and clearly, this filtering now has to run off-box. to really work, it can't be on the same metal as the win10 system.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Am I reading this right? I can actually pay Microsoft to install applications on millions of PCs without the owners'... I mean "users'" permission?
Tell me again why ANYONE finds this acceptable?
There aren't enough chairs being thrown these days.
It's not free. There's a limited time free (and more or less mandatory) upgrade for users of Windows 7 and up, but anyone buying a new computer is paying for it, And while it's nice of them to offer the free upgrade to Windows 7 users, people running Windows 8 are kind of entitled to the upgrade, given how crappy and short-lived Windows 8 was (Windows 10 is more like Windows 8.2).
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Yet another false pedanticism.
Remember, people; the dictionary is only a list of known uses of words. It isn't an exclusive list, just a list of stuff that is known.
So even if the dictionary agreed with you, you'd be wrong. But it doesn't.
In English we have lists of known words, and style guides. There aren't any rules, other than that if it isn't clear what the meaning is, then that is non-optimal. It is easy to write something that sucks, or is meaningless, but much harder to write something that is "wrong." But a false pedanticism is a sure a good try.
. There aren't any rules, other than that if it isn't clear what the meaning is, then that is non-optimal. It is easy to write something that sucks, or is meaningless, but much harder to write something that is "wrong." But a false pedanticism is a sure a good try.
There are plenty of rules of English language usage.......
English Grammar Rules
Finding Nouns, Verbs, and Subjects
Subject-Verb Agreement
Clauses and Phrases
Pronouns
Who vs. Whom
Whoever vs. Whomever
Who, That, Which
Adjectives and Adverbs
Prepositions
Effective Writing
Punctuation Rules
Periods
Commas
Semicolons
Colons
Quotation Marks
Parentheses and Brackets
Apostrophes
Hyphens
Dashes
Ellipses
Question Marks
Exclamation Points
Other Rules
Capitalization
Confusing Words and Homonyms
Writing Numbers
and that's just SOME of them.. So what is this version of the English language you speak of with no rules?
Even though your post is hard to read (to say the least) it contains many valid and worthwhile points, especially about Microsoft not being the only one collecting information on us.
But here's the problem. Yes, I can opt out of or block Windows 10 upgrades and backporting of telemetry to (in my case) Windows 8.1. I've done that. But then again, I'm a former computer professional, and I ought to be able to figure out how to do such things. (Disclaimer: at this point I very seldom boot to my Windows partition; I just don't want to deal with it on an ongoing basis.)
The average Windows user, though, is lured right in--- or maybe not even that, these things just happen to them. They don't have a clue how to deal with this and/or make it go away.
Are Microsoft's actions legal, based on EULAs and so on? I'm sure it's all legal but I certainly can't say it's ethical. Now you might respond, what company today is ethical? That's a very good question, but I think if we just let things go and don't demand ethical behavior, we're never going to get it. If we reward unethical behavior with our hard-earned dollars, what are we doing?
Yes, a lot of people are trapped and have no option but to run Windows, whether for mission critical apps, for Windows-only gaming, or just because it's hard to change your software infrastructure. Microsoft marketing has created lock-in that rivals that of public utilities and other legal monopolies. And as long as people keep buying their stuff, nothing will improve. On the contrary, they will feel more and more emboldened and empowered, as recent months have shown.
I can't wait until we are all forced to watch a 30 second ad before our program will start. Want to run Microsoft Word, Skype, or even a third-party app? You must watch a commercial that you can't skip, first.
Something you may not realize, is that because of the ubiquity of MS in the enterprise(which I also support), it makes replacing you with cheap Wipro outsourcing that much easier.
"Niche" skills with Linux(or anything besides MS) will allow you to keep your job longer.
But go ahead, keep on "doing the needful" and defending MS domination of the enterprise, and how every mom and pop shop on the planet is under their sway.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
"Candy Crush and Twitter already re-install themselves every time I update the OS."
Two questions about solving problems caused by Microsoft's apparent attempts to take complete control:
1) The average Windows user is not able to prevent Microsoft from having more and more control. But corporate customers don't want to spend the time to learn a new user interface. They like what is now known as Classic Shell.
Microsoft is, and has always been, sloppy with updates, often introducting new vulnerabilities. Also, the control that Microsoft calls "Telemetry" and the updates with hidden purposes are not acceptable to many people and corporations. So, it seems that Windows should not be installed on computers that have internet connections.
Would it be possible to give corporate users 2 computers? Windows 10 to run corporate software, with no internet connection, and Linux for checking email and using a browser? How would the 2 separate networks communicate in a secure way? Unfortunately, no one has provided a Classic Shell interface for Linux, and many programs used in corporations won't run under Linux.
The managers of Microsoft (like Monkey Boy, for example) have such limited social ability that they are not able to avoid being self-destructive. They don't see that taking control of everyone's computer will eventually have a very bad result.
Also, there have been reports that secret agencies of the U.S. government buy vulnerabilities. Are Microsoft and Adobe deliberately including vulnerabilities and selling them?
Apparently Microsoft is trying to imitate Facebook and Google because of the sharp drop in sales of PC computers. But Windows 10 is the Bing or Zune of operating systems.
2) Autopatcher has not begun supporting Windows 10. We need independent control over Windows operating system updates. How can we achieve that?
Let me be clear, I think pushing ads into the OS is pretty nearly the definition of dystopian and frankly obscene.
It is easy to block however:
http://bgr.com/2015/11/20/wind...
As CNET helpfully explained this week, you only need to follow a few steps to turn off ads:
Open the âSettingsâ(TM) menu
Click on âPersonalizationâ(TM)
Click on âStartâ(TM) at the bottom of the left-hand column
Find a heading labeled âoeOccasionally show suggestions in Startâ and turn the switch to the âOffâ(TM) position
BTW: take the opportunity while you're in settings to turn off ALL THE OTHER SHIT THAT'S ON BY DEFAULT in WIN10.
-Styopa
I understand that there are sometimes vulnerabilities that allow an OS to break out of the VM.
These are very rare and valuable. Much more so than a run-of-the-mill Linux privilege escalation exploit. You don't need a bank vault door on a house with glass windows.
The normal thing malware does when it detects a VM is immediately stop, or sometimes unhook itself, as a way to foil some malware detection engines and generally make life harder for security researchers.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.