There's a big difference between Windows communicating with application service providers that the user has made an explicit choice to trust (OneDrive, Cortana, and publishers of live tiles) and the browser's phishing filter sending every URL you visit to an organization that works closely with the MPAA.
From your own link:
Torrent trackers freak out over perceived Windows 10 anti-piracy measures
Based on extremely thin evidence, several private torrent trackers believe Microsoft is setting up for a big piracy crackdown in Windows 10.
---
Well let me know if it turns out to be true, as it stands, it seems like a lot of fearmongering...
That being said... If you're downloading stuff you shouldn't be, why are you complaining? Stop that crap, it is stupid.
The problem is that each PC manufacturer is also "a for profit business," and many PC manufacturers have made a business decision not to cooperate with operating system businesses other than Microsoft.
Two points.
1. They have tried it, multiple times... I know Dell twice in the past 15 years has tried selling systems with Linux on it, and stopped due to various problems.
2. What other "operating system businesses"? Linux isn't really a "business", more a loose collection of various builds of varying degree of compatibility.
And thus you have the problem. If HP or Dell goes and sells a PC with Linux on it, ok, what flavor? Lets say it is Linux Mint. Fine, then the customer downloads a program that is meant for Ubuntu. Now what happens when it doesn't work?
"Indeed. While what this article reveals is somewhat disconcerting, a lot of what MS mentions in its privacy policy is stuff that the product needs to function as intended (i.e. OneDrive, various Live Tile apps / etc) and people are just fearmongering the hell out of it."
That is a quote from one of the comments below the article you linked to. I think it is a fair point, much of what Windows is doing is providing the connected online services that come with Windows, that didn't come with Windows 7 before it.
---
I suppose part of the difference is that I've simply accepted a 24/7 connected online world and that to have the rich services provided for free, tradeoffs have to be made. One of those is that my computers will be talking to MS computers on a regular basis.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with this.
That being said, if you want your computer to NOT talk to MS, then yes, I'd agree that should be an option, with the understanding that you'll lose a lot of function of Windows due to things like OneDrive, Cortana, live tiles, etc. not working without it.
But perhaps MS doesn't want to offer that option, or they are trying to make it harder to obtain to push everyone to being connected. Well, they are a for profit business, I can't fault them for that.
This reminds me of my Mother, who is happy with her old feature flip phone and doesn't want to change. She fought tooth and nail leaving Windows XP, wasn't happy about it at all. She has Windows 7 on her computer now and doesn't want Windows 10. Not because she is afraid of it or cares about the telemetry, but because she doesn't want change. The very concept of OneDrive hurts her brain. She is 71 years old, so frankly she's done making changes and that is of course her choice.
But technology moves so quickly, it can be hard to just put the brakes on and say, "ok, I'm happy here, I'm getting off the wagon". Which was fine to do before 24/7 online everything. Your 386DX-25 can continue right on happy running DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 until the end of time and it doesn't care that it is 2015 and the world moved on.
But that isn't really true of more recent versions of Windows on more recent computers that expect to see an Internet connection.
I'm typing this message on the above laptop. I paid $349 for it from Amazon.
It has a nice Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HDD (which I swapped out for a 512GB SSD for $131), a 1080p 15.6" display, a DVD burner, and many hours of battery life. It also isn't too heavy, comes with Windows 10 already on it (no upgrading!), and for anything other than games or serious image/video editing, is plenty fast enough.
What Mac would compete with this machine?
None.
Exactly, that is why Mac doesn't have much market share either.
AS PRESIDENT, SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS WILL REDUCE INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY BY:
1. Demanding that the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share in taxes.
That sounds wonderful, except... what is their "fair share" of taxes? There has to be a number attached to that, not just a slogan. And you can't just demand they pay more in taxes, you have to change the tax code, which is another mess.
As president, Sen. Sanders will stop corporations from shifting their profits and jobs overseas to avoid paying U.S. income taxes.
How is he doing to do that? By just telling them to and waving his finger at them? That isn't how it works. By asking Congress to pass a law saying, "you can't shift your profits and jobs overseas"? That is too vague and wouldn't stand up in the courts, it has to be more specific.
It is a wonderful sounding campaign slogan that means nothing.
He will create a progressive estate tax on the top 0.3 percent of Americans who inherit more than $3.5 million
Ahh, double taxation, tax it when you earn it, tax it when you die. Estate taxes are evil, but putting that issue aside, the really wealthy people don't pay them anyway, they put their money in trusts and corporations and "non-profits", and those don't "die" to be taxed in that way.
2. Increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2020. In the year 2015, no one who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty.
That sounds great, sure, why not... of course, it will just cause stuff to cost more, but it helps in the short run, so sure...
Of course, what is NOT SPOKEN there is that while people who work 40 hours a week might not live in poverty, far more people WON'T BE WORKING AT ALL, so there is that.
Raise the wages and I have far more incentive to bring in robots or offshore my work or figure out how to get more work out of existing employees.
Don't be shocked if 10 years from now there are only two employees in your average McDonalds, both paid over $15/hr, because robots are doing all the work.
Raising min wage doesn't actually solve anything, it just makes the numbers bigger. The real trick is to make people's work worth more, but that doesn't fit neatly into a 15 second sound bite so they don't talk about that.
What about "Mission Accomplished" parties held by GWB in the first year of the war?
Yes, that was pretty stupid and it showed how the wrong people were in charge.
Not Bush, I'm talking about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield.
The first attack and taking of Bagdad was wonderful, but they had no plans beyond that. Stupid...
Colin Powell was correct, "you break it, you've bought it". We should have gone in with plans to run the country the way we ran Germany and Japan after WWII. The Iraqi army should not have been disbanded, we needed their help maintaining order.
You're missing the point... Saddam actually used chemical weapons, he had a history of them, known possession of them, etc.
So it was not unreasonable to think that 20 years later, he would still have them.
The irony is that we largely did get them all and he didn't have much once we invaded, but we didn't know that at the time. Saddam was an idiot, had he come clean, he could have avoided the whole mess.
these are the exact same people who fell for the lies of the last republican president and went to war
Actually, I don't believe that Bush lied, I think he had a combination of bad intel and people within the CIA and DoD who wanted war.
He should have been listening to Colin Powell and Condi Rice, not Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield.
Frankly, if I were Commander in Chief, I'd listen to Colin Powell LONG before I'd listen to Dick Cheney. Colin Powell was a General, he served our nation and understood the military and military issues. Cheney is a businessman who doesn't know squat about military stuff.
As President, I would pay far more attention to uniformed service members who had spent decades in the military over civies in suits, at least when it comes to war stuff.
On the plus side, self-driving cars will require a level of software security that existing cars don't.
You talk about accelerating to 100mph, but keep in mind the brakes always work, they are required to, and they are required to be able to overpower the engine.
You can also always turn off the car, and if you have keyless, press and hold the button for 4 seconds, that kills the power (much like it does in your locked up computer).
But a self-driving car? That needs some serious security.
Untrue. Plenty of people want it, but it isn't offered because the manufacturer puts its own interests first.
Citation needed...
---
The irony is that you think GM is putting sat radio into cars because they don't want to sell cars. If GM thought they could sell more cars by keeping it out, they would.
OnStar used to be a real cost and was offered only in more expensive vehicles and higher end trim lines. Now the cost is trivial and at some point becomes cheaper to just make standard equipment rather than an option.
This is not unlike how air conditioning used to be optional, but is now standard because the cost of including it has dropped to the point where it is more trouble to build one car with it and one car without it. It is easier and cheaper to just build all cars with it. The same has become true of OnStar.
(And its own interests are hooking the gullible into providing an ongoing revenue stream, and having the rest of us pay for that too, so as to avoid having to stock two different options.)
Putting aside your issues with OnStar, stocking two different options isn't free. That costs real money. It is likely in 2015 that the cost of stocking vehicles with and without OnStar would exceed the cost of just putting it in everything.
So the question is, are you ok to actually pay $50 more for a car without OnStar, than one with it, to offer you the choice? You might say yes, but I doubt very many people would. Most people would likely say, "sure, put it in if it is free, so long as I don't have to use it (and they don't)".
Ok, so you'd like your $3 back that sat radio added to the cost of your car?
Fair enough, if you made that a condition of the sale, I'm sure the sales manager would take $3 out of his pocket and hand it to you to close the sale.
You're leaping over dollars to pickup pennies, sat radio adds a trivial cost to the price of your car. That is why it has become all but standard in just about everything these days, other than $11k econoboxes.
You can get that car for about $11k, or even less if you haggle well or they have rebates...
For $11k, it doesn't have all those options that bother some people.
So that market does exist, but what the OP above you wants is a middle ground car with just some nice features, but not others, and almost no one wants that, so no one builds it.
There is also truth to the fact that building the same car, one with sat radio and one without, can actually cost more than just building them all with it...
It costs money to change the configuration, to have different parts on hand, to have 2 build sheets in the factory...
What does it really cost to add sat radio to a car? A few dollars? The radio itself is just a computer these days, that is software so the cost is developing the software, not installing it. Then you have an antenna, but you need that for GPS anyway. Oh sure, you might not want nav, fair enough... but I'm willing to bet a lot of those cars have the antenna installed anyway, because it is easier and cheaper to build them all one way, with a GPS antenna, than it is to have 2 build sheets.
It is quite possible that there would be no effective price difference if they were forced to build a car without it, since they otherwise wouldn't build that configuration, so they have to add the cost of another build sheet to the production line, offsetting the $3 worth of parts needed to put sat nav in a car.
Last time I went to buy a car (2010) I was told by two different dealerships (Hyundai and Ford) that requesting anything was no longer "a thing"
Then you need to find a new dealership...
When I ordered my 2015 GMC Yukon XL, I sat down with the dealership's order guy and we went through the order form on the computer together, picking out the exact options and order codes that I wanted. It was easy since I had already looked up online what I wanted and had that info with me.
6 weeks later, the truck showed up at the dealership, just as ordered, and they sold it to me for the price we agreed on at the time I ordered it (about $750 below dealer invoice).
It has been awhile since I've actually bought a car off a dealer lot, my last three vehicles were ordered. You can still do this.
So you're OK with MS forcing telemetry updates on your PC which send all your keystrokes to MS servers?
I am, actually... that doesn't bother me because MS isn't sitting there watching me type and caring about me specifically. They also aren't trying to steal my CC info or hack my computer.
They are asking for more information so they can improve future versions of Windows. This is a "Good Thing".
If I did anything special or secret, if I did something that competed with Microsoft, then yes, I'd turn some of that stuff off and setup a hardware firewall to completely block MS telemetry info.
Since I don't, I don't care.
Just how much abuse does it take for you to abandon that platform?
It isn't abuse, and that you would use such a term implies a bias that you're unable or unwilling to look past.
The Tech Preview had that stuff turned on and it couldn't be disabled, but in the released version, it can be. Either at install or later.
Plenty of places on the web talk about how to turn off the keylogging and other tracking stuff, if that bothers you.
Where it WOULD be abuse and wrong is if MS hid it in such a way as to try and do it without telling you, and then did things with the info that hurt you.
Windows 10 is superior to Windows 8 and MS is giving it away for free.
I'm sure there is someone, somewhere, due to some strange set of specific circumstances, that needs to stay on Windows 8.
Except for HIM, everyone else should take the upgrade and go to Windows 10. This is the most painless, easiest, and trouble free Windows upgrade I'd ever seen.
I have never, ever done an upgrade before on my main production machine. I've always clean installed. Frankly, I used to clean install every year or two, just to keep Windows running nicely. This time, nope... My Windows 7 install was 5 years old, it had a LOT of stuff added and removed over the years, several hardware changes including a motherboard change.
Windows 10 upgraded right over it and if anything, it runs better than Windows 7 did. Not a single problem, and I've got a LOT of hardware attached to that machine. 4 printers, 3 monitors, a dozen hard drives and SSDs, and multiple other USB devices. Everything worked perfectly at the first reboot.
I've since upgraded another dozen machines, ranging from a Core2Quad testing machine to a several year old AMD laptop to a HP touchscreen tablet. Total number of problems upgrading a dozen machines of various ages and hardware? Zero.
I've been doing this a long time, since before Windows 3.0. I'm sure someone, somewhere has had a problem with Windows 10, but I've never seen an upgrade go this cleanly.
It is almost "Apple like" in the way it... wait for it... "It just works..."
Get over your anger and try it, you might discover that you like it.:)
Why should a casual user need to invest that much time and effort into avoiding these problems, when they can just use an OS that doesn't have them?
First, there isn't exactly a lot of time and effort involved in Windows these days. Don't browse to unsafe sites, don't click on everything that pops up, and leave Windows updates running.
Second, Linux is not plug and play for the average consumer, far from it. You have a biased view, simply by being on SlashDot in the first place, however... you can give a Windows 10 USB stick to my mother and she could install it on a bare metal computer. You put it in a USB slot, turn the computer on, it installs. When it finishes, all the drivers are installed, she logs into her MS account, it asks "do you want to set this up like your old machine?", she says yes, it then looks just like her old machine, complete with Windows apps and Start menu.
On top of that, the UI in Windows (8+) is completely unusable
Ahh, no it isn't... I've had Windows 8.1 on multiple machines for some time now, it works just fine. Boots right to the desktop, don't even see the start screen.
Most of those machines are on Windows 10 now, very nice overall.
they all spy on you too
I don't think the word "spy" means what you think it does... They collect usage information to improve the quality of their product. Knowing that XYZ program is run on 42 million PCs means that they need to add it to their testing suite for new releases. Knowing that ABC program is only run on 300,000 machines means they don't.
Knowing how their customers use their OS improves the future quality of the OS. This is a "Good Thing".
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere there was a *woosh* heard...
You of course missed the point, but that's ok...
It used to be, they have cleaned up their act in recent years...
Do we know one way or another if Mars has coal, oil, and natural gas underground the way Earth does?
I too use a flip phone, mostly because smartphones still cost much more per month to operate.
$30 a month for unlimited everything is too much?
https://www.metropcs.com/30-ph...
There's a big difference between Windows communicating with application service providers that the user has made an explicit choice to trust (OneDrive, Cortana, and publishers of live tiles) and the browser's phishing filter sending every URL you visit to an organization that works closely with the MPAA.
From your own link:
Torrent trackers freak out over perceived Windows 10 anti-piracy measures
Based on extremely thin evidence, several private torrent trackers believe Microsoft is setting up for a big piracy crackdown in Windows 10.
---
Well let me know if it turns out to be true, as it stands, it seems like a lot of fearmongering...
That being said... If you're downloading stuff you shouldn't be, why are you complaining? Stop that crap, it is stupid.
The problem is that each PC manufacturer is also "a for profit business," and many PC manufacturers have made a business decision not to cooperate with operating system businesses other than Microsoft.
Two points.
1. They have tried it, multiple times... I know Dell twice in the past 15 years has tried selling systems with Linux on it, and stopped due to various problems.
2. What other "operating system businesses"? Linux isn't really a "business", more a loose collection of various builds of varying degree of compatibility.
And thus you have the problem. If HP or Dell goes and sells a PC with Linux on it, ok, what flavor? Lets say it is Linux Mint. Fine, then the customer downloads a program that is meant for Ubuntu. Now what happens when it doesn't work?
http://www.skype.com/en/downlo...
Lets say the HP Linux customer wants to install Skype. Which version does he download and install on Linux Mint?
I see multiple versions listed there, including TWO versions for Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and OpenSUSE, and one marked Dynamic.
If you go to the Windows page for Skype, there is one button to click and no choices:
http://www.skype.com/en/downlo...
Because it knows what to do. That one button works for Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8, 8.1, and 10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
China recognizes neither same-sex marriage nor civil unions.
"Indeed. While what this article reveals is somewhat disconcerting, a lot of what MS mentions in its privacy policy is stuff that the product needs to function as intended (i.e. OneDrive, various Live Tile apps / etc) and people are just fearmongering the hell out of it."
That is a quote from one of the comments below the article you linked to. I think it is a fair point, much of what Windows is doing is providing the connected online services that come with Windows, that didn't come with Windows 7 before it.
---
I suppose part of the difference is that I've simply accepted a 24/7 connected online world and that to have the rich services provided for free, tradeoffs have to be made. One of those is that my computers will be talking to MS computers on a regular basis.
Honestly, I don't have a problem with this.
That being said, if you want your computer to NOT talk to MS, then yes, I'd agree that should be an option, with the understanding that you'll lose a lot of function of Windows due to things like OneDrive, Cortana, live tiles, etc. not working without it.
But perhaps MS doesn't want to offer that option, or they are trying to make it harder to obtain to push everyone to being connected. Well, they are a for profit business, I can't fault them for that.
This reminds me of my Mother, who is happy with her old feature flip phone and doesn't want to change. She fought tooth and nail leaving Windows XP, wasn't happy about it at all. She has Windows 7 on her computer now and doesn't want Windows 10. Not because she is afraid of it or cares about the telemetry, but because she doesn't want change. The very concept of OneDrive hurts her brain. She is 71 years old, so frankly she's done making changes and that is of course her choice.
But technology moves so quickly, it can be hard to just put the brakes on and say, "ok, I'm happy here, I'm getting off the wagon". Which was fine to do before 24/7 online everything. Your 386DX-25 can continue right on happy running DOS 5.0 and Windows 3.1 until the end of time and it doesn't care that it is 2015 and the world moved on.
But that isn't really true of more recent versions of Windows on more recent computers that expect to see an Internet connection.
For a satisfied user of iOS looking to switch from Windows, I recommend a Mac.
So would I, if they had reasonably priced Macs to pick from.
Since they don't, that really isn't a choice for most people.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/produ...
I'm typing this message on the above laptop. I paid $349 for it from Amazon.
It has a nice Core i3 CPU, 4GB of RAM, 500GB HDD (which I swapped out for a 512GB SSD for $131), a 1080p 15.6" display, a DVD burner, and many hours of battery life. It also isn't too heavy, comes with Windows 10 already on it (no upgrading!), and for anything other than games or serious image/video editing, is plenty fast enough.
What Mac would compete with this machine?
None.
Exactly, that is why Mac doesn't have much market share either.
He makes a heck of a pitch anyway... Shame he isn't running for King. Then he could do some of it.
https://berniesanders.com/issu...
AS PRESIDENT, SENATOR BERNIE SANDERS WILL REDUCE INCOME AND WEALTH INEQUALITY BY:
1. Demanding that the wealthy and large corporations pay their fair share in taxes.
That sounds wonderful, except... what is their "fair share" of taxes? There has to be a number attached to that, not just a slogan. And you can't just demand they pay more in taxes, you have to change the tax code, which is another mess.
As president, Sen. Sanders will stop corporations from shifting their profits and jobs overseas to avoid paying U.S. income taxes.
How is he doing to do that? By just telling them to and waving his finger at them? That isn't how it works. By asking Congress to pass a law saying, "you can't shift your profits and jobs overseas"? That is too vague and wouldn't stand up in the courts, it has to be more specific.
It is a wonderful sounding campaign slogan that means nothing.
He will create a progressive estate tax on the top 0.3 percent of Americans who inherit more than $3.5 million
Ahh, double taxation, tax it when you earn it, tax it when you die. Estate taxes are evil, but putting that issue aside, the really wealthy people don't pay them anyway, they put their money in trusts and corporations and "non-profits", and those don't "die" to be taxed in that way.
2. Increasing the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $15 an hour by 2020. In the year 2015, no one who works 40 hours a week should be living in poverty.
That sounds great, sure, why not... of course, it will just cause stuff to cost more, but it helps in the short run, so sure...
Of course, what is NOT SPOKEN there is that while people who work 40 hours a week might not live in poverty, far more people WON'T BE WORKING AT ALL, so there is that.
Raise the wages and I have far more incentive to bring in robots or offshore my work or figure out how to get more work out of existing employees.
Don't be shocked if 10 years from now there are only two employees in your average McDonalds, both paid over $15/hr, because robots are doing all the work.
Raising min wage doesn't actually solve anything, it just makes the numbers bigger. The real trick is to make people's work worth more, but that doesn't fit neatly into a 15 second sound bite so they don't talk about that.
Nothing in life is "completely reliable", but I get what you're saying.
At least they are doing a recall and fixing it. :)
What about "Mission Accomplished" parties held by GWB in the first year of the war?
Yes, that was pretty stupid and it showed how the wrong people were in charge.
Not Bush, I'm talking about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield.
The first attack and taking of Bagdad was wonderful, but they had no plans beyond that. Stupid...
Colin Powell was correct, "you break it, you've bought it". We should have gone in with plans to run the country the way we ran Germany and Japan after WWII. The Iraqi army should not have been disbanded, we needed their help maintaining order.
You're missing the point... Saddam actually used chemical weapons, he had a history of them, known possession of them, etc.
So it was not unreasonable to think that 20 years later, he would still have them.
The irony is that we largely did get them all and he didn't have much once we invaded, but we didn't know that at the time. Saddam was an idiot, had he come clean, he could have avoided the whole mess.
these are the exact same people who fell for the lies of the last republican president and went to war
Actually, I don't believe that Bush lied, I think he had a combination of bad intel and people within the CIA and DoD who wanted war.
He should have been listening to Colin Powell and Condi Rice, not Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield.
Frankly, if I were Commander in Chief, I'd listen to Colin Powell LONG before I'd listen to Dick Cheney. Colin Powell was a General, he served our nation and understood the military and military issues. Cheney is a businessman who doesn't know squat about military stuff.
As President, I would pay far more attention to uniformed service members who had spent decades in the military over civies in suits, at least when it comes to war stuff.
Trump is an ego-driven crazy person, but at least he is fun...
What are the other options? Bush or Clinton? Bleh, more of the same...
Congress and the military would keep Trump from doing any real damage, and it would be interesting to watch...
On the plus side, self-driving cars will require a level of software security that existing cars don't.
You talk about accelerating to 100mph, but keep in mind the brakes always work, they are required to, and they are required to be able to overpower the engine.
You can also always turn off the car, and if you have keyless, press and hold the button for 4 seconds, that kills the power (much like it does in your locked up computer).
But a self-driving car? That needs some serious security.
Untrue. Plenty of people want it, but it isn't offered because the manufacturer puts its own interests first.
Citation needed...
---
The irony is that you think GM is putting sat radio into cars because they don't want to sell cars. If GM thought they could sell more cars by keeping it out, they would.
OnStar used to be a real cost and was offered only in more expensive vehicles and higher end trim lines. Now the cost is trivial and at some point becomes cheaper to just make standard equipment rather than an option.
This is not unlike how air conditioning used to be optional, but is now standard because the cost of including it has dropped to the point where it is more trouble to build one car with it and one car without it. It is easier and cheaper to just build all cars with it. The same has become true of OnStar.
(And its own interests are hooking the gullible into providing an ongoing revenue stream, and having the rest of us pay for that too, so as to avoid having to stock two different options.)
Putting aside your issues with OnStar, stocking two different options isn't free. That costs real money. It is likely in 2015 that the cost of stocking vehicles with and without OnStar would exceed the cost of just putting it in everything.
So the question is, are you ok to actually pay $50 more for a car without OnStar, than one with it, to offer you the choice? You might say yes, but I doubt very many people would. Most people would likely say, "sure, put it in if it is free, so long as I don't have to use it (and they don't)".
Ok, so you'd like your $3 back that sat radio added to the cost of your car?
Fair enough, if you made that a condition of the sale, I'm sure the sales manager would take $3 out of his pocket and hand it to you to close the sale.
You're leaping over dollars to pickup pennies, sat radio adds a trivial cost to the price of your car. That is why it has become all but standard in just about everything these days, other than $11k econoboxes.
Actually, that demand does exist...
Look at a Nissan Versa:
http://www.nissanusa.com/cars/...
You can get that car for about $11k, or even less if you haggle well or they have rebates...
For $11k, it doesn't have all those options that bother some people.
So that market does exist, but what the OP above you wants is a middle ground car with just some nice features, but not others, and almost no one wants that, so no one builds it.
While there is some truth to that...
There is also truth to the fact that building the same car, one with sat radio and one without, can actually cost more than just building them all with it...
It costs money to change the configuration, to have different parts on hand, to have 2 build sheets in the factory...
What does it really cost to add sat radio to a car? A few dollars? The radio itself is just a computer these days, that is software so the cost is developing the software, not installing it. Then you have an antenna, but you need that for GPS anyway. Oh sure, you might not want nav, fair enough... but I'm willing to bet a lot of those cars have the antenna installed anyway, because it is easier and cheaper to build them all one way, with a GPS antenna, than it is to have 2 build sheets.
It is quite possible that there would be no effective price difference if they were forced to build a car without it, since they otherwise wouldn't build that configuration, so they have to add the cost of another build sheet to the production line, offsetting the $3 worth of parts needed to put sat nav in a car.
Last time I went to buy a car (2010) I was told by two different dealerships (Hyundai and Ford) that requesting anything was no longer "a thing"
Then you need to find a new dealership...
When I ordered my 2015 GMC Yukon XL, I sat down with the dealership's order guy and we went through the order form on the computer together, picking out the exact options and order codes that I wanted. It was easy since I had already looked up online what I wanted and had that info with me.
6 weeks later, the truck showed up at the dealership, just as ordered, and they sold it to me for the price we agreed on at the time I ordered it (about $750 below dealer invoice).
It has been awhile since I've actually bought a car off a dealer lot, my last three vehicles were ordered. You can still do this.
So you're OK with MS forcing telemetry updates on your PC which send all your keystrokes to MS servers?
I am, actually... that doesn't bother me because MS isn't sitting there watching me type and caring about me specifically. They also aren't trying to steal my CC info or hack my computer.
They are asking for more information so they can improve future versions of Windows. This is a "Good Thing".
If I did anything special or secret, if I did something that competed with Microsoft, then yes, I'd turn some of that stuff off and setup a hardware firewall to completely block MS telemetry info.
Since I don't, I don't care.
Just how much abuse does it take for you to abandon that platform?
It isn't abuse, and that you would use such a term implies a bias that you're unable or unwilling to look past.
The Tech Preview had that stuff turned on and it couldn't be disabled, but in the released version, it can be. Either at install or later.
http://arstechnica.com/informa...
Plenty of places on the web talk about how to turn off the keylogging and other tracking stuff, if that bothers you.
Where it WOULD be abuse and wrong is if MS hid it in such a way as to try and do it without telling you, and then did things with the info that hurt you.
Since they don't, and don't, it isn't abuse.
Force feeding? Lord you have some bias...
Windows 10 is superior to Windows 8 and MS is giving it away for free.
I'm sure there is someone, somewhere, due to some strange set of specific circumstances, that needs to stay on Windows 8.
Except for HIM, everyone else should take the upgrade and go to Windows 10. This is the most painless, easiest, and trouble free Windows upgrade I'd ever seen.
I have never, ever done an upgrade before on my main production machine. I've always clean installed. Frankly, I used to clean install every year or two, just to keep Windows running nicely. This time, nope... My Windows 7 install was 5 years old, it had a LOT of stuff added and removed over the years, several hardware changes including a motherboard change.
Windows 10 upgraded right over it and if anything, it runs better than Windows 7 did. Not a single problem, and I've got a LOT of hardware attached to that machine. 4 printers, 3 monitors, a dozen hard drives and SSDs, and multiple other USB devices. Everything worked perfectly at the first reboot.
I've since upgraded another dozen machines, ranging from a Core2Quad testing machine to a several year old AMD laptop to a HP touchscreen tablet. Total number of problems upgrading a dozen machines of various ages and hardware? Zero.
I've been doing this a long time, since before Windows 3.0. I'm sure someone, somewhere has had a problem with Windows 10, but I've never seen an upgrade go this cleanly.
It is almost "Apple like" in the way it... wait for it... "It just works..."
Get over your anger and try it, you might discover that you like it. :)
Why should a casual user need to invest that much time and effort into avoiding these problems, when they can just use an OS that doesn't have them?
First, there isn't exactly a lot of time and effort involved in Windows these days. Don't browse to unsafe sites, don't click on everything that pops up, and leave Windows updates running.
Second, Linux is not plug and play for the average consumer, far from it. You have a biased view, simply by being on SlashDot in the first place, however... you can give a Windows 10 USB stick to my mother and she could install it on a bare metal computer. You put it in a USB slot, turn the computer on, it installs. When it finishes, all the drivers are installed, she logs into her MS account, it asks "do you want to set this up like your old machine?", she says yes, it then looks just like her old machine, complete with Windows apps and Start menu.
It doesn't get any bloody easier than that.
On top of that, the UI in Windows (8+) is completely unusable
Ahh, no it isn't... I've had Windows 8.1 on multiple machines for some time now, it works just fine. Boots right to the desktop, don't even see the start screen.
Most of those machines are on Windows 10 now, very nice overall.
they all spy on you too
I don't think the word "spy" means what you think it does... They collect usage information to improve the quality of their product. Knowing that XYZ program is run on 42 million PCs means that they need to add it to their testing suite for new releases. Knowing that ABC program is only run on 300,000 machines means they don't.
Knowing how their customers use their OS improves the future quality of the OS. This is a "Good Thing".
I want to load Firefox, Python, a text editor, GIMP, GCC, GNU Make, and FCEUX onto a device that fits in my bag.
That is a very specific and unusual set of applications...
But fair enough... remind me why those don't run on Windows 10 again?
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You say you want the 10" size, but it sounds like you'd be a good candidate for a Microsoft Surface Pro 3.
If that is more than you want to spend, how about this:
http://www.amazon.com/Dell-11-...
$379 for a touch screen dual core machine with 2-in-1 features (it is a tablet and a laptop).