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Even In Remotest Africa, Windows 10 Nagware Ruins Your Day (theregister.co.uk)
Iain Thomson, writing for The Register: When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades. The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link. And it's not just bandwidth bills they have to worry about. "If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft's hands," said one member of the team.This is not a one-off case. We're reading about similar incidents everyday. Automatic updates, accidental automatic update, and the humongous data that these updates eat are ruining user experience for many. These are real issues. It's been roughly a year since Windows 10 has been officially available to consumers, and Microsoft is yet to address the issue.
In the original reddit thread, someone mentioned that this was not available if the connection is seen by the OS as a normal Ethernet connection, and that most satellite connections presents them like this.
You know, if you're going to castigate, you *need* to read the story to avoid sounding... uncharitable.
"Uncharitable"? Fuck that - I donated two 1 year old laptops with Linux Ubuntu pre-loaded to a save-the-rhino group here in South Africa, only to find out a month later that they took their funds and purchased Windows 8 for those laptops. I'm sorry - donors get to complain when their donations are misused.
The laptop was donated. They have $0 hardware budget and $0 software budget. Their expectation (obviously mistaken) is that like other infrastructure, it should not change radically without direct user intervention or an act of God.
Regardless, *now* they know that it is not fit for purpose - are they going to change the OS (at a cost of $0) or are they going to attempt to shift the damn blame? I know where my money is on this.
Your insistence that people be knowledgeable about all the tools they use is, let's say, optimistic. And your inability to comprehend that these people might have more important things to do than become computer experts is...
When we hand people guns, medication, tools and farming tech, we actually do fucking insist that they know how to use 'em.
well it's interesting. Unless, of course, you *are* an expert is all of the infrastructure that you interact with on a daily basis, in which case you're just too awesome for us mere humans.
Like I said, now that they know that it is not suitable for their purpose, will they change the tool or change their purpose? You are working from the assumption that they did not know it was unsuitable - fine. Now, they *do* know. Lets see what they do.
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
Spend some more time around military command & control facilities. While the servers are usually Unix (Solaris), the client workstations are all Windows boxes. In my experience, they are USUALLY pretty stable. Some of the client software (C2PC) can be wonky, and since we use that to display our Common Tactical Picture, when it goes down yes lives are at stake.
Just this week I watched, 2 days in a row, as a briefer's laptop did a forced reboot countdown during his powerpoint presentation. "Um, ok....I guess I've got 15 minutes to get through this before my laptop restarts". This was during a planning conference for one of the largest Joint Exercises we do every year. And we're not even running Windows 10. I dread the day the Marine Corps is forced off of Windows 7.
I run Ubuntu at home (Lubuntu on my formerly-Win7 gaming rig and Backbox on my laptop), with FreeBSD on an old netbook so I can learn my way around it.