If Canonical keeps their release cycle of an LTS version every two years, it might be a lesser PITA than the forced updates on Windows10.
You could take every second LTS version, 4 years apart, and probably have less troubles than with Windoze. Right now, there is a Win10 company laptop behind me that has mysteriously "lost" WLAN a while ago. It also says in Settings => Windows Updates that it cannot search for updates because it is not connected to the internet. Actually it is on Ethernet right now and I'm downloading a set of offline updates on it. Our company admin told me that shit like this sometimes happens with Win10 updates, it "forgets" about some hardware which then becomes unavailable.
At first glance, Canonical is only matching the 10 years Microsoft used to promise for Windows, counting extended support. But if you look closer, Microsoft already is weaseling out of some edge cases (the latest Intel CPUs and AMD's Ryzen on Win7).
So I'd bet on Ubuntu 18.04 being a safer option than Windows 10 for a system you want to keep for a long time. Let alone that Ubuntu 18:04 was released almost three years after Windows 10. So even if both companies keep their 10 year promises, Ubuntu 18:04 is the better long term option from today's perspective:)
Especially in the low end market, most people buy CPU and board together and keep the combination for quite a while. By the time thy want a new system, the whole platform tends to be obsolete and it makes more sense to replace CPU, board and perhaps the RAM together.
I'm playing older games on an older AMD system. Can't complain. BTW, the percentage of new games that actually work well with weak graphics is not so bad anymore. There is the whole e-sports genre and some MMOs. Personally, I have discovered Crossout a while ago. Works well even on an old Radeon HD 6670 with 1GB VRAM.
Calling AMD CPUs Entry-Level in general would be insulting, but they certainly have some decent offerings at low price points. Especially the APUs. The AMD Ryzen 3 2200G can compete on CPU performance with the Pentium Gold and offers better graphics performance, replacing a low end graphics card. Adding up all components for similarly capable systems, the AMD wins in price, even if it is a little more expensive by itself.
Except that, unless [...] 4. Windows doesn't decide to fuck with your backup drive, too (which has to be continuously connected if you want to satisfy requirement #3).
I am still trusting/optimistic that Microsoft does not maliciously fuck with backups on a different partition or drive. If they ever do that and it becomes publicly known, even die-hard Microsoft fans in industry and administration would find it difficult to justify further use of Windows.
I'm curious what you call a platform where you give someone money in the expectation that they will give you a product in return, if not a store.
In big business, perhaps a convention of startups and venture capitalists?
The startups want money but cannot give an absolute guarantee of delivering, as they may run into unforeseen problems with their unconventional products. The venture capitalists are aware of that, but they have enough hope of getting something valuable that they accept something like a 50% failure rate (for example).
Creating graphics was one of Limit Theory's intended innovations: Procedural graphics and asset design. What we have seen on the forums was a bit blocky and would have needed more refinement, but it showed that having your graphics created by an algorithm is not impossible.
Neither do I remember that many Win7 updates getting pulled...
But it is not only/. covering them more, these bugs are also reported elsewhere. It seems to me that the quality of Microsoft QA is slipping. Especially with Windows 10. With Windows 8 the GUI was super annoying, but the foundation seemed as solid as in 7.
On my system, "Documents/My Documents/Personal" is mostly empty and unused as far as documents I (intentionally) save go. Some automatic, temporary saves still go to the special folders but I never rely on those. When I'm done with my work I always save to my data folders on D:\. Which are not redirected to.
I don't actually think Microsoft would screw up its desktop OS deliberately
IMHO the big screw up was the GUI change between Windows 7 and Windows 8. And such a massive change does not happen by accident.
Conspiracy theory time: My guess is that Microsoft believed (correctly) that the relevance of the desktop would decline in the future, and (incorrectly) that they could train their desktop user base into being familiar with the Windows Phone UI and liking it, by shoving the same UI down the throat of the Windows 8 users.
That did not work out so well. Windows 8 was widely hated and Windows Phone tanked anyway. And, perhaps out of an inability to admit a mistake, Microsoft never fully reinstated the old UI.
It could be argued that the initial fault was using Windows 10 at all;) But the part about the cloud backup was obviously sarcastic...
And to get serious for a moment, things like these are why I back up my files from time to time. I also have them outside the usual, Microsoft-designed scheme for storing user data. The original reasons were
- I want them close to the top level of the file system, not down below three more layers as in C:\Users\Lonewolf666\Documents.
- I want them on a separate partition I can copy as a whole, and that is not impacted if I nuke my C:\ drive for some reason.
But now I see they are much less likely to be hit by stuff like this as well. One more reason.
linux is (with sufficient care in selecting a laptop model for maximum hardware compatibility with chosen distribution), perhaps, so is windows (10 is only barely 'worse' than current iterations of osx), depending upon usage and required applications.
Windows 10? Perhaps if you spend 99% of your working time in your application of choice, so you don't have to interact with the Windows GUI much. Which is still quite a bit worse than that of Windows 7. I have the misfortune of having to use it on the job these days.
So yeah latency is a problem, but we already have the solution in hand: Cheap, powerful local computing! Why exactly would we walk away from silicon everywhere when it is so useful, and we know it works, and it's a surefire cure for the latency issue?
The "cheap local hardware" is something the industry would have to compete with. So far, that part is paid for by the player. With the streaming approach, publishers need would set up servers at a overall comparable cost. There would be some cost advantage due to not all people playing at the same time, but on the other hand server class hardware tends to be more expensive.
Overall, I have my doubts this will work out financially even if the tech problems are solved.
I got firstname.lastname@gmx.de and for a while, I frequently got mail that was obviously not meant to me. Stuff like invites to meetings, invoices... Eventually, one of the incoming mails contained a snail mail address, and I was able to contact the other guy through that.
Turns out he has actually the same firstname.lastname but @gmx.net. Apparently people were too sloppy to closely look at the address. They just went "oh, GMX" (which is a popular free-mailer here), and put the suffix.de in the address. Hence the mail coming to me.
Once I reached him by snail mail, he told people about the difference between gmx.net and gmx.de, and the amount of misguided mail slowed to a trickle. With one notable exception though: The support of O2 was too stupid to understand the issue and failed to adjust the mail address. So the O2 invoices kept coming to me. That is one provider I cannot recommend due to the sheer stupidity of their support guys.
Microsoft has one choice, and only one, to achieve significant penetration with Edge: open the source. There is nothing else that will help - nothing.
Even that is not guaranteed. Open source Edge would have to compete against the equally open source Firefox. With people who only care about "free as in beer", the competition is Chrome. These people seem to be the majority. Chrome is based on open source Chromium, and there is a privacy-oriented fork of that called Iron. Sounds good but has little market share (I have not tried it out myself yet, so far I'm content with SeaMonkey;)
Perhaps it is illegal (a question for a lawyer) and Apple just relies on people not bothering enough to sue. I had a similar case myself: When I ended my telephone contract with the Deutsche Telekom, they failed to pay back the balance of the account, despite me reminding them. It was 14,60 Euro. Not enough for the hassle to go to court over, although I'm pretty sure I would have won. But I remember the incident, and if anyone asks me I'm telling Telekom is a shit provider and why.
That's why some countries have legislation against that sort of semi-hidden clauses. Germany for instance. Besides, if the word "Sale" is displayed prominently and Apple's option to "retract" the content is only somewhere in the small print, the two directly contradict each other. So in court, the judge would have to decide which takes precedence. Common sense might say the "sale" that was written in big letters in the ad.
Unless some law explicitly forbids disassembling, reverse engineering... Of which there are too many. Our parliaments have been far too generous to the industry lobbies.
Telling people to avoid these chips is borderline retarded.
True enough. Most people who are choosing their own hardware components care enough to want something better anyway. To me, the AMD Ryzen 5 2600 would look good if I needed something Right Now.
Corporations that buy those things in bulk better have some IT department who can advise them. If not, their problem. And a cheapskate, 2nd choice CPU might actually be more than sufficient for their office needs. Besides, they would not listen to us anyway.
All currently supported feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions (versions 1607, 1703, 1709, and 1803) will be supported for 30 months from their original release date. This will give customers on those versions more time for change management as they move to a faster update cycle.
All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of September (starting with 1809) will be supported for 30 months from their release date. This will give customers with longer deployment cycles the time they need to plan, test, and deploy.
All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of March (starting with 1903) will continue to be supported for 18 months from their release date. This maintains the semi-annual update cadence as our north star and retains the option for customers that want to update twice a year.
All feature releases of Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro, and Office 365 ProPlus will continue to be supported for 18 months (this applies to feature updates targeting both March and September).
So if you develop anything using "feature updates", your guaranteed support time on Windows 10 shrinks to 30 months on Enterprise and 18 months on Professional and Home. The Microsoft website does not say if security updates will be supplied longer than 30/18 months for those features. I guess the original promise of 10 years' updates for Windows 10 LTSB keeps the change in policy away from the feature set at release for now.
For comparison, Canonical is promising 5 years of "security and maintenance updates" for their LTS versions of Ubuntu. Red Hat even promises 10 years as part of the "basic" product, although Red Hat Linux appears limited to enterprise environments. Plus even longer support for extra money.
It seems Microsoft is finally less willing to promise long therm stability than at least two prominent Linux vendors. One might argue that this was already the case in practice, but now it is official in the support policies of Microsoft vs. Canonical and Red Hat.
Well, I've seen it used in medical equipment. Despite Microsoft saying in the EULA that it is not for use in such environments. That is yet another level of mission-critical.
Slashdot Mirror
Only in this case a reboot does not help.
If Canonical keeps their release cycle of an LTS version every two years, it might be a lesser PITA than the forced updates on Windows10.
You could take every second LTS version, 4 years apart, and probably have less troubles than with Windoze. Right now, there is a Win10 company laptop behind me that has mysteriously "lost" WLAN a while ago. It also says in Settings => Windows Updates that it cannot search for updates because it is not connected to the internet. Actually it is on Ethernet right now and I'm downloading a set of offline updates on it.
Our company admin told me that shit like this sometimes happens with Win10 updates, it "forgets" about some hardware which then becomes unavailable.
At first glance, Canonical is only matching the 10 years Microsoft used to promise for Windows, counting extended support. But if you look closer, Microsoft already is weaseling out of some edge cases (the latest Intel CPUs and AMD's Ryzen on Win7).
So I'd bet on Ubuntu 18.04 being a safer option than Windows 10 for a system you want to keep for a long time. Let alone that Ubuntu 18:04 was released almost three years after Windows 10. So even if both companies keep their 10 year promises, Ubuntu 18:04 is the better long term option from today's perspective :)
Especially in the low end market, most people buy CPU and board together and keep the combination for quite a while.
By the time thy want a new system, the whole platform tends to be obsolete and it makes more sense to replace CPU, board and perhaps the RAM together.
I'm playing older games on an older AMD system. Can't complain.
BTW, the percentage of new games that actually work well with weak graphics is not so bad anymore. There is the whole e-sports genre and some MMOs. Personally, I have discovered Crossout a while ago. Works well even on an old Radeon HD 6670 with 1GB VRAM.
Calling AMD CPUs Entry-Level in general would be insulting, but they certainly have some decent offerings at low price points. Especially the APUs.
The AMD Ryzen 3 2200G can compete on CPU performance with the Pentium Gold and offers better graphics performance, replacing a low end graphics card.
Adding up all components for similarly capable systems, the AMD wins in price, even if it is a little more expensive by itself.
Except that, unless
[...]
4. Windows doesn't decide to fuck with your backup drive, too (which has to be continuously connected if you want to satisfy requirement #3).
I am still trusting/optimistic that Microsoft does not maliciously fuck with backups on a different partition or drive.
If they ever do that and it becomes publicly known, even die-hard Microsoft fans in industry and administration would find it difficult to justify further use of Windows.
I'm curious what you call a platform where you give someone money in the expectation that they will give you a product in return, if not a store.
In big business, perhaps a convention of startups and venture capitalists?
The startups want money but cannot give an absolute guarantee of delivering, as they may run into unforeseen problems with their unconventional products.
The venture capitalists are aware of that, but they have enough hope of getting something valuable that they accept something like a 50% failure rate (for example).
Creating graphics was one of Limit Theory's intended innovations:
Procedural graphics and asset design. What we have seen on the forums was a bit blocky and would have needed more refinement, but it showed that having your graphics created by an algorithm is not impossible.
Neither do I remember that many Win7 updates getting pulled...
But it is not only /. covering them more, these bugs are also reported elsewhere. It seems to me that the quality of Microsoft QA is slipping. Especially with Windows 10. With Windows 8 the GUI was super annoying, but the foundation seemed as solid as in 7.
On my system, "Documents/My Documents/Personal" is mostly empty and unused as far as documents I (intentionally) save go.
Some automatic, temporary saves still go to the special folders but I never rely on those. When I'm done with my work I always save to my data folders on D:\. Which are not redirected to.
I don't actually think Microsoft would screw up its desktop OS deliberately
IMHO the big screw up was the GUI change between Windows 7 and Windows 8. And such a massive change does not happen by accident.
Conspiracy theory time:
My guess is that Microsoft believed (correctly) that the relevance of the desktop would decline in the future, and (incorrectly) that they could train their desktop user base into being familiar with the Windows Phone UI and liking it, by shoving the same UI down the throat of the Windows 8 users.
That did not work out so well. Windows 8 was widely hated and Windows Phone tanked anyway. And, perhaps out of an inability to admit a mistake, Microsoft never fully reinstated the old UI.
In particular, Backups When You Are About To Do Something Dangerous.
Such as upgrading Windows.
It could be argued that the initial fault was using Windows 10 at all ;)
But the part about the cloud backup was obviously sarcastic...
And to get serious for a moment, things like these are why I back up my files from time to time. I also have them outside the usual, Microsoft-designed scheme for storing user data. The original reasons were
- I want them close to the top level of the file system, not down below three more layers as in C:\Users\Lonewolf666\Documents.
- I want them on a separate partition I can copy as a whole, and that is not impacted if I nuke my C:\ drive for some reason.
But now I see they are much less likely to be hit by stuff like this as well. One more reason.
linux is (with sufficient care in selecting a laptop model for maximum hardware compatibility with chosen distribution), perhaps, so is windows (10 is only barely 'worse' than current iterations of osx), depending upon usage and required applications.
Windows 10? Perhaps if you spend 99% of your working time in your application of choice, so you don't have to interact with the Windows GUI much. Which is still quite a bit worse than that of Windows 7. I have the misfortune of having to use it on the job these days.
So yeah latency is a problem, but we already have the solution in hand: Cheap, powerful local computing! Why exactly would we walk away from silicon everywhere when it is so useful, and we know it works, and it's a surefire cure for the latency issue?
The "cheap local hardware" is something the industry would have to compete with. So far, that part is paid for by the player. With the streaming approach, publishers need would set up servers at a overall comparable cost. There would be some cost advantage due to not all people playing at the same time, but on the other hand server class hardware tends to be more expensive.
Overall, I have my doubts this will work out financially even if the tech problems are solved.
I got firstname.lastname@gmx.de and for a while, I frequently got mail that was obviously not meant to me. Stuff like invites to meetings, invoices...
Eventually, one of the incoming mails contained a snail mail address, and I was able to contact the other guy through that.
Turns out he has actually the same firstname.lastname but @gmx.net. Apparently people were too sloppy to closely look at the address. They just went "oh, GMX" (which is a popular free-mailer here), and put the suffix .de in the address. Hence the mail coming to me.
Once I reached him by snail mail, he told people about the difference between gmx.net and gmx.de, and the amount of misguided mail slowed to a trickle. With one notable exception though:
The support of O2 was too stupid to understand the issue and failed to adjust the mail address. So the O2 invoices kept coming to me. That is one provider I cannot recommend due to the sheer stupidity of their support guys.
Microsoft has one choice, and only one, to achieve significant penetration with Edge: open the source. There is nothing else that will help - nothing.
Even that is not guaranteed. Open source Edge would have to compete against the equally open source Firefox. ;)
With people who only care about "free as in beer", the competition is Chrome. These people seem to be the majority. Chrome is based on open source Chromium, and there is a privacy-oriented fork of that called Iron. Sounds good but has little market share (I have not tried it out myself yet, so far I'm content with SeaMonkey
Perhaps it is illegal (a question for a lawyer) and Apple just relies on people not bothering enough to sue. I had a similar case myself:
When I ended my telephone contract with the Deutsche Telekom, they failed to pay back the balance of the account, despite me reminding them.
It was 14,60 Euro. Not enough for the hassle to go to court over, although I'm pretty sure I would have won.
But I remember the incident, and if anyone asks me I'm telling Telekom is a shit provider and why.
That's why some countries have legislation against that sort of semi-hidden clauses. Germany for instance.
Besides, if the word "Sale" is displayed prominently and Apple's option to "retract" the content is only somewhere in the small print, the two directly contradict each other. So in court, the judge would have to decide which takes precedence. Common sense might say the "sale" that was written in big letters in the ad.
Until you get a stroke from all that stress...
Unless some law explicitly forbids disassembling, reverse engineering...
Of which there are too many. Our parliaments have been far too generous to the industry lobbies.
Telling people to avoid these chips is borderline retarded.
True enough. Most people who are choosing their own hardware components care enough to want something better anyway. To me, the AMD Ryzen 5 2600 would look good if I needed something Right Now.
Corporations that buy those things in bulk better have some IT department who can advise them. If not, their problem. And a cheapskate, 2nd choice CPU might actually be more than sufficient for their office needs.
Besides, they would not listen to us anyway.
Also in the linked article:
another link to a new support policy for Windows 10:https://wwwmicrosoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2018/09/06/helping-customers-shift-to-a-modern-desktop/. Quote:
All currently supported feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions (versions 1607, 1703, 1709, and 1803) will be supported for 30 months from their original release date. This will give customers on those versions more time for change management as they move to a faster update cycle.
All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of September (starting with 1809) will be supported for 30 months from their release date. This will give customers with longer deployment cycles the time they need to plan, test, and deploy.
All future feature updates of Windows 10 Enterprise and Education editions with a targeted release month of March (starting with 1903) will continue to be supported for 18 months from their release date. This maintains the semi-annual update cadence as our north star and retains the option for customers that want to update twice a year.
All feature releases of Windows 10 Home, Windows 10 Pro, and Office 365 ProPlus will continue to be supported for 18 months (this applies to feature updates targeting both March and September).
So if you develop anything using "feature updates", your guaranteed support time on Windows 10 shrinks to 30 months on Enterprise and 18 months on Professional and Home. The Microsoft website does not say if security updates will be supplied longer than 30/18 months for those features. I guess the original promise of 10 years' updates for Windows 10 LTSB keeps the change in policy away from the feature set at release for now.
For comparison, Canonical is promising 5 years of "security and maintenance updates" for their LTS versions of Ubuntu.
Red Hat even promises 10 years as part of the "basic" product, although Red Hat Linux appears limited to enterprise environments. Plus even longer support for extra money.
It seems Microsoft is finally less willing to promise long therm stability than at least two prominent Linux vendors.
One might argue that this was already the case in practice, but now it is official in the support policies of Microsoft vs. Canonical and Red Hat.
Well, I've seen it used in medical equipment. Despite Microsoft saying in the EULA that it is not for use in such environments. That is yet another level of mission-critical.