You don't need to use the built in apps or the built-in tuner; a lot of people don't.
Unfortunately, giving them access to anything resembling an Internet connection means the apps can still do whatever they like, and we are rapidly reaching a point where that Internet connection might be provided wirelessly without the knowledge or consent of the owner. Unless you plan on building a Faraday cage around your home or moving to the middle of nowhere, any "smart" devices you have are going to be a threat to your privacy and security soon, whether you like it or not.
The sooner we have regulations that at least require full disclosure of things like sensors and phone-home behaviour in these devices and impose liability and laws that impose meaningful penalties for security/privacy violations on the manufacturers and supply chain, the safer we will all be.
And while the first year of sales for Windows 7 was just the tip of the iceburg, with the free period and forced upgrades over Windows 10 adoption is likely to drop off steeply. Of course it will still gain ground, but that will in all likelihood be driven almost entirely by new PC purchases.
The Steam survey offers some interesting data. This is for gamers, who we might reasonably assume have more powerful and newer systems and are more willing to upgrade than the average home user. Look at the DirectX chart and see how rapidly Win10 gained market share for about the first six months after its launch, and how little it has moved since then. Those figures only distinguish Win10 from pre-Win10 for DX12 cards, so it's certainly possible that there are conflating factors (they show Win10 having nearly half the market overall now) but if the early rush and then a drop off like that are at all representative of the wider market then MS could have a real problem here.
Dell were certainly still defaulting to Windows 7 in their online configuration tools for ordering business laptops as of last week.
Elsewhere in the recent discussions, there has been an interesting observation that OEMs are apparently only allowed to preinstall 7 for a few more months, and after that it looks like there will still be downgrade rights but you'll be on your own and get your machine with Win10 preinstalled whether you like it or not.
This could set up an interesting stand-off between the big business OEMs and Microsoft much sooner than the Win7 EOL date, possibly as soon as October this year.
To be fair, quite a lot of the other 79% will be professionals. You wouldn't expect most large organisations to migrate to a new OS within a year of its release, and in the specific case of Windows 10, the Enterprise and Education variants seem to be very different products to Home and Pro, so big business and government might move later without the same concerns that the little people like us have.
I totally agree that the 21% figure is awful given the heavyhanded approach Microsoft have taken to pushing 10 on existing users and the fact that it's now the default OS preinstalled on most off-the-shelf consumer PCs, but we shouldn't overstate the case. It's damning enough already...
Windows is stable & fast desktop OS and it's easy to write applications for it.
Though less than it used to be. Visual Studio is also full of online-connected junk these days. Why do I have to "sign in" to the free Community edition again? How many different privacy policies now apply having done so, and where does any of them say in black and white that Microsoft won't, for example, upload parts of my commercially sensitive source code to any of its online services along the way?
Say what you will about Ballmer, but Windows developers were treated with a lot more respect in his time.
I'm wondering whether this will actually happen. Every business supplier we work with still assumes 7 by default for work machines, and that makes sense because almost everyone I know in business still wants 7. If MS try to strong-arm the likes of Dell and HP into not selling what their customers actually want, I don't know who's going to win, but sign me up for a ring-side seat.
Well, I don't have hard data to hand, but it's obvious that you're dramatically underestimating the scale of the embedded software industry. Don't feel bad, almost everyone who's never worked in it does.
The reason I say it's obvious is that you have the common misconceptions that Linux-based systems represent the majority of embedded development and that most embedded software could be written by a single person. While Linux is certainly gaining popularity for some larger and more powerful devices today, there's a huge amount of things that don't use Linux but do run code, and some of those devices have code bases running to millions of lines and large development teams working on them.
You're probably reading this on a screen. Are you also wearing a digital watch? Did you turn off an alarm system when you got to work this morning? Is there a phone on your desk or in your pocket? Is there an air conditioning system in your office? A microwave in the kitchen? How many different components that run their own firmware do you think are inside each of those systems?
Those are just a few obvious ones you can probably see right now. Once you get into more complex systems like industrial infrastructure or cars, the numbers are much bigger still, often with many different programs running as part of the overall system.
A methodology that relies on GH and SO posts is likely to be strongly biased toward new web-based and open source development.
Certainly. It's hard to believe that just looking at embedded development alone, C isn't some number of orders of magnitude larger than JS by almost any useful metric I can think of: number of different projects, number of project-users, number of lines of code written, number of lines of code executed, number of different architectures/platforms supported by the language, number of developer-hours, etc.
To put this in some kind of perspective, 50,000 lines is quite large for the front end of a modern web app, but 50,000,000 lines is quite small for all the firmware in a modern car.
You're talking about a fundamentally different situation to the rest of us here.
In your example, a remote service on which some functionality depended was disabled. Obviously anything that depends on some remote facility can be affected by changes there, regardless of changes to the local machine. This is a real danger of the kind of always-online systems we have today, and it can be (and certainly has been) abused by developers, but I don't think it was what the rest of us were talking about in this particular discussion.
What we were talking about before was whether Microsoft could forcibly affect a Windows 7 system itself to disable functionality, analogously to the Windows 10 updates that started this discussion. The only change to a local machine in your example appears to be via a software update, which you can choose not to install on Windows 7, while not everyone on Windows 10 has that option, short of actively circumventing Microsoft's system.
The Anniversary update for Windows 10 is particularly troubling, because up to now the only way to restore some of the control that earlier versions of Windows offered (notably including controlling Windows updates themselves) on Windows 10 Pro has been through group policies, and Microsoft have now demonstrated that they are willing to remove even that control mechanism if it suits them.
Can you be more specific? I've been using and managing Windows 7 machines for as long as there has been Windows 7, and I have yet to encounter any mechanism by which Microsoft could forcibly uninstall something without my consent.
Perhaps the Win10 Pro users will qualify for a refund of some percentage of the $0 they paid for their free upgrade.
Then again, perhaps not, since unlike previous versions Microsoft have made no secret of the fact that they can and will force updates onto Win10 systems, and that the user is required to accept them, and that some of those updates may change or remove functionality instead of adding it.
I agree with you that many of us are no longer the teens or 20-somethings who continue to buy tickets.
I'm just not sure I agree with you on the not being numerous enough to matter. Apparently there are enough of us with enough disposable income to keep the home theatre industry going. I suspect we're also more likely to pay for genuine content, given a convenient source and inoffensive pricing, than younger viewers.
You don't beat piracy by trying to force people into a worse experience. You beat piracy by giving the people what they wanted all along, conveniently and at a fair price.
Audience = Whoever in the household wants to watch
Sometimes my wife and I enjoy the same things. Sometimes one of us wants to watch something that doesn't particularly interest the other. Adults don't necessarily all want to watch family movies with the kids (again). If we have friends over, we just buy extra food and drink before the show.
A decent cinema has a big screen and good sound, but the experience with a high-end home system these days is close enough that if the movie is any good at all you're not going to notice.
For me, as someone with less free time but nicer stuff than I had 20 years ago, the only compelling advantage of a big cinema these days is that they still get the movies when they release, which means you can watch them before some [expletive deleted] spoils everything. Waiting for the Blu-Ray to come out (or some online streaming service to offer it, if that's your thing) takes an eternity, and it's an entirely artificial barrier that exists only to prop up cinemas that are otherwise losing relevance.
Personally, I would pay significantly more than the cost of a cinema ticket to have an actual, my-own-copy Blu-Ray of a film or show (or a DRM-free download from a fast, legal source) to enjoy in the comfort of my own home as soon as I want it.
Flash hasn't been a favoured form of malware transmission for years. There are much easier targets these days, with click-to-play protection for plug-ins now being the norm in all major browsers.
Meanwhile, millions and millions of people still benefit from Flash apps every day, and all of those people are going to lose out.
Flash isn't any sort of standard except in the limited sense that it is used on a lot of web sites.
And, until recently, more widely available and consistent across platforms than just about any official web standards other than HTML 4, CSS 2.1 and HTTP. In other words, Flash was a standard in the only way that really matters: it worked the same almost everywhere. Which, by the way, is far more than can be said for many of the new shiny toys that are supposed to replace it.
It's a proprietary, closed source plugin and application; the precise opposite of a standard.
Well, for one thing, that isn't anything like the precise opposite of a standard.
As for proprietary, closed source, and running as a separate process, have you looked at how HTML5 video works on iOS lately? Or the uses of EME, which is now a W3C standard? Or the number of different encodings you need to create to do something as simple as playing a video across most browsers in 2016, compared to the exactly one you needed with any number of Flash video players before?
This so-called "standard" exists solely at the whim of one company, Adobe, and they can do whatever they wish with it without regard to its users or anyone else.
How is that fundamentally different to all the major browsers pushing substandard HTML5 features instead because Google decides Chrome will do so and everyone else apparently feels the need to emulate them? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (except that now you can't even see what the old boss was like any more because all the records are inaccessible).
I don't see HBI saying anything of the sort. They're saying that browsers discontinuing support and thus making content on the Web inaccessible to their users is a bad thing.
And they're absolutely right.
The trend for modern browsers to drop support for any standard more than five minutes old, and in doing so cut off huge amounts of valuable content developed over multiple decades, is exactly the opposite of what the Web is supposed to be about.
Never underestimate the value of a large existing customer base. Many of the largest and most successful businesses in tech today got there by amassing a critical mass of customers in the right place at the right time, and then using that scale as a lever to reach economies of scale and degrees of bargaining power that no smaller competitor could rival.
FWIW, I also think the audio streaming comparison you seem to be implying is a little unfair. Audio streaming services aren't just replacing listening to broadcast radio, they're replacing buying records and tapes and CDs as the primary way many people enjoy audio recordings. Licensing to commercial radio stations very cheaply or even at a loss was viable because exposure on those radio stations drove sales of permanent copies. It's unrealistic to expect that a streaming service that basically exists to replace those sales could offer the same kind of flexibility to much the same market for an entire catalogue of music at anything close to the licensing fees that commercial radio stations used to pay, if they even paid at all.
Indeed. When I went to school, we used to learn a story about a boy and a wolf. It didn't end well for him, and one of my biggest concerns about the whole terrorism paranoia thing is that our governments are making exactly the same mistake.
None is exactly what additional protection we'll get from the EU after Brexit.
Though we'll still be a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is independent of the EU, has its own court, and does not have the associated political shenanigans the UK pulled in relation to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights that is at issue here.
Voting the parent a troll seems rather unfair. It's a pretty accurate summary of the problem for Netflix: the gaps might not be their fault in some cases, but they're still the ones asking their customers for money and providing a disappointing experience in return.
I'm a little surprised they aren't in a position to play hardball in some of these cases. There aren't that many places that are going to show reruns of older TV shows and generate significant extra licensing revenues from it, and it seems like if they insisted they would only work with rightsholders who would licence shows in their entirety on a long-term basis, they could turn that into a marketing advantage over any competitors who did not.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't need to use the built in apps or the built-in tuner; a lot of people don't.
Unfortunately, giving them access to anything resembling an Internet connection means the apps can still do whatever they like, and we are rapidly reaching a point where that Internet connection might be provided wirelessly without the knowledge or consent of the owner. Unless you plan on building a Faraday cage around your home or moving to the middle of nowhere, any "smart" devices you have are going to be a threat to your privacy and security soon, whether you like it or not.
The sooner we have regulations that at least require full disclosure of things like sensors and phone-home behaviour in these devices and impose liability and laws that impose meaningful penalties for security/privacy violations on the manufacturers and supply chain, the safer we will all be.
"Microsoft is fucking over anyone who puts another OS on their computer."
You misspelt "Windows 10" as "another OS" there, friend.
And while the first year of sales for Windows 7 was just the tip of the iceburg, with the free period and forced upgrades over Windows 10 adoption is likely to drop off steeply. Of course it will still gain ground, but that will in all likelihood be driven almost entirely by new PC purchases.
The Steam survey offers some interesting data. This is for gamers, who we might reasonably assume have more powerful and newer systems and are more willing to upgrade than the average home user. Look at the DirectX chart and see how rapidly Win10 gained market share for about the first six months after its launch, and how little it has moved since then. Those figures only distinguish Win10 from pre-Win10 for DX12 cards, so it's certainly possible that there are conflating factors (they show Win10 having nearly half the market overall now) but if the early rush and then a drop off like that are at all representative of the wider market then MS could have a real problem here.
Dell were certainly still defaulting to Windows 7 in their online configuration tools for ordering business laptops as of last week.
Elsewhere in the recent discussions, there has been an interesting observation that OEMs are apparently only allowed to preinstall 7 for a few more months, and after that it looks like there will still be downgrade rights but you'll be on your own and get your machine with Win10 preinstalled whether you like it or not.
This could set up an interesting stand-off between the big business OEMs and Microsoft much sooner than the Win7 EOL date, possibly as soon as October this year.
To be fair, quite a lot of the other 79% will be professionals. You wouldn't expect most large organisations to migrate to a new OS within a year of its release, and in the specific case of Windows 10, the Enterprise and Education variants seem to be very different products to Home and Pro, so big business and government might move later without the same concerns that the little people like us have.
I totally agree that the 21% figure is awful given the heavyhanded approach Microsoft have taken to pushing 10 on existing users and the fact that it's now the default OS preinstalled on most off-the-shelf consumer PCs, but we shouldn't overstate the case. It's damning enough already...
That's not quite true. OEMs can still supply PCs with 7 preinstalled for a few more months.
Windows is stable & fast desktop OS and it's easy to write applications for it.
Though less than it used to be. Visual Studio is also full of online-connected junk these days. Why do I have to "sign in" to the free Community edition again? How many different privacy policies now apply having done so, and where does any of them say in black and white that Microsoft won't, for example, upload parts of my commercially sensitive source code to any of its online services along the way?
Say what you will about Ballmer, but Windows developers were treated with a lot more respect in his time.
I'm wondering whether this will actually happen. Every business supplier we work with still assumes 7 by default for work machines, and that makes sense because almost everyone I know in business still wants 7. If MS try to strong-arm the likes of Dell and HP into not selling what their customers actually want, I don't know who's going to win, but sign me up for a ring-side seat.
Seriously?
Well, I don't have hard data to hand, but it's obvious that you're dramatically underestimating the scale of the embedded software industry. Don't feel bad, almost everyone who's never worked in it does.
The reason I say it's obvious is that you have the common misconceptions that Linux-based systems represent the majority of embedded development and that most embedded software could be written by a single person. While Linux is certainly gaining popularity for some larger and more powerful devices today, there's a huge amount of things that don't use Linux but do run code, and some of those devices have code bases running to millions of lines and large development teams working on them.
You're probably reading this on a screen. Are you also wearing a digital watch? Did you turn off an alarm system when you got to work this morning? Is there a phone on your desk or in your pocket? Is there an air conditioning system in your office? A microwave in the kitchen? How many different components that run their own firmware do you think are inside each of those systems?
Those are just a few obvious ones you can probably see right now. Once you get into more complex systems like industrial infrastructure or cars, the numbers are much bigger still, often with many different programs running as part of the overall system.
I'm not joking at all. The amount of firmware inside a modern car is insane.
A methodology that relies on GH and SO posts is likely to be strongly biased toward new web-based and open source development.
Certainly. It's hard to believe that just looking at embedded development alone, C isn't some number of orders of magnitude larger than JS by almost any useful metric I can think of: number of different projects, number of project-users, number of lines of code written, number of lines of code executed, number of different architectures/platforms supported by the language, number of developer-hours, etc.
To put this in some kind of perspective, 50,000 lines is quite large for the front end of a modern web app, but 50,000,000 lines is quite small for all the firmware in a modern car.
You're talking about a fundamentally different situation to the rest of us here.
In your example, a remote service on which some functionality depended was disabled. Obviously anything that depends on some remote facility can be affected by changes there, regardless of changes to the local machine. This is a real danger of the kind of always-online systems we have today, and it can be (and certainly has been) abused by developers, but I don't think it was what the rest of us were talking about in this particular discussion.
What we were talking about before was whether Microsoft could forcibly affect a Windows 7 system itself to disable functionality, analogously to the Windows 10 updates that started this discussion. The only change to a local machine in your example appears to be via a software update, which you can choose not to install on Windows 7, while not everyone on Windows 10 has that option, short of actively circumventing Microsoft's system.
The Anniversary update for Windows 10 is particularly troubling, because up to now the only way to restore some of the control that earlier versions of Windows offered (notably including controlling Windows updates themselves) on Windows 10 Pro has been through group policies, and Microsoft have now demonstrated that they are willing to remove even that control mechanism if it suits them.
Can you be more specific? I've been using and managing Windows 7 machines for as long as there has been Windows 7, and I have yet to encounter any mechanism by which Microsoft could forcibly uninstall something without my consent.
Perhaps the Win10 Pro users will qualify for a refund of some percentage of the $0 they paid for their free upgrade.
Then again, perhaps not, since unlike previous versions Microsoft have made no secret of the fact that they can and will force updates onto Win10 systems, and that the user is required to accept them, and that some of those updates may change or remove functionality instead of adding it.
The Schadenfreude is strong with this one.
I agree with you that many of us are no longer the teens or 20-somethings who continue to buy tickets.
I'm just not sure I agree with you on the not being numerous enough to matter. Apparently there are enough of us with enough disposable income to keep the home theatre industry going. I suspect we're also more likely to pay for genuine content, given a convenient source and inoffensive pricing, than younger viewers.
You don't beat piracy by trying to force people into a worse experience. You beat piracy by giving the people what they wanted all along, conveniently and at a fair price.
The most important attribute of my home setup:
Audience = Whoever in the household wants to watch
Sometimes my wife and I enjoy the same things. Sometimes one of us wants to watch something that doesn't particularly interest the other. Adults don't necessarily all want to watch family movies with the kids (again). If we have friends over, we just buy extra food and drink before the show.
A decent cinema has a big screen and good sound, but the experience with a high-end home system these days is close enough that if the movie is any good at all you're not going to notice.
For me, as someone with less free time but nicer stuff than I had 20 years ago, the only compelling advantage of a big cinema these days is that they still get the movies when they release, which means you can watch them before some [expletive deleted] spoils everything. Waiting for the Blu-Ray to come out (or some online streaming service to offer it, if that's your thing) takes an eternity, and it's an entirely artificial barrier that exists only to prop up cinemas that are otherwise losing relevance.
Personally, I would pay significantly more than the cost of a cinema ticket to have an actual, my-own-copy Blu-Ray of a film or show (or a DRM-free download from a fast, legal source) to enjoy in the comfort of my own home as soon as I want it.
Flash hasn't been a favoured form of malware transmission for years. There are much easier targets these days, with click-to-play protection for plug-ins now being the norm in all major browsers.
Meanwhile, millions and millions of people still benefit from Flash apps every day, and all of those people are going to lose out.
Flash isn't any sort of standard except in the limited sense that it is used on a lot of web sites.
And, until recently, more widely available and consistent across platforms than just about any official web standards other than HTML 4, CSS 2.1 and HTTP. In other words, Flash was a standard in the only way that really matters: it worked the same almost everywhere. Which, by the way, is far more than can be said for many of the new shiny toys that are supposed to replace it.
It's a proprietary, closed source plugin and application; the precise opposite of a standard.
Well, for one thing, that isn't anything like the precise opposite of a standard.
As for proprietary, closed source, and running as a separate process, have you looked at how HTML5 video works on iOS lately? Or the uses of EME, which is now a W3C standard? Or the number of different encodings you need to create to do something as simple as playing a video across most browsers in 2016, compared to the exactly one you needed with any number of Flash video players before?
This so-called "standard" exists solely at the whim of one company, Adobe, and they can do whatever they wish with it without regard to its users or anyone else.
How is that fundamentally different to all the major browsers pushing substandard HTML5 features instead because Google decides Chrome will do so and everyone else apparently feels the need to emulate them? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss (except that now you can't even see what the old boss was like any more because all the records are inaccessible).
I don't see HBI saying anything of the sort. They're saying that browsers discontinuing support and thus making content on the Web inaccessible to their users is a bad thing.
And they're absolutely right.
The trend for modern browsers to drop support for any standard more than five minutes old, and in doing so cut off huge amounts of valuable content developed over multiple decades, is exactly the opposite of what the Web is supposed to be about.
They probably could, but some customers will see that as trying to duck responsibility and pass the buck, which usually isn't well received.
Never underestimate the value of a large existing customer base. Many of the largest and most successful businesses in tech today got there by amassing a critical mass of customers in the right place at the right time, and then using that scale as a lever to reach economies of scale and degrees of bargaining power that no smaller competitor could rival.
FWIW, I also think the audio streaming comparison you seem to be implying is a little unfair. Audio streaming services aren't just replacing listening to broadcast radio, they're replacing buying records and tapes and CDs as the primary way many people enjoy audio recordings. Licensing to commercial radio stations very cheaply or even at a loss was viable because exposure on those radio stations drove sales of permanent copies. It's unrealistic to expect that a streaming service that basically exists to replace those sales could offer the same kind of flexibility to much the same market for an entire catalogue of music at anything close to the licensing fees that commercial radio stations used to pay, if they even paid at all.
Indeed. When I went to school, we used to learn a story about a boy and a wolf. It didn't end well for him, and one of my biggest concerns about the whole terrorism paranoia thing is that our governments are making exactly the same mistake.
None is exactly what additional protection we'll get from the EU after Brexit.
Though we'll still be a signatory to the European Convention on Human Rights, which is independent of the EU, has its own court, and does not have the associated political shenanigans the UK pulled in relation to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights that is at issue here.
Voting the parent a troll seems rather unfair. It's a pretty accurate summary of the problem for Netflix: the gaps might not be their fault in some cases, but they're still the ones asking their customers for money and providing a disappointing experience in return.
I'm a little surprised they aren't in a position to play hardball in some of these cases. There aren't that many places that are going to show reruns of older TV shows and generate significant extra licensing revenues from it, and it seems like if they insisted they would only work with rightsholders who would licence shows in their entirety on a long-term basis, they could turn that into a marketing advantage over any competitors who did not.