Go read about instruction set architectures, and the differences between ARM (what nearly all phones use) and x86 (what nearly all desktops use), then come back and explain how you intend to fix it. Apologies for assuming you knew what you were talking about before; I didn't mean to talk over your head like that.
Eh... the CE version of Win32 was so close to that used by 9x or NT that some apps would work after nothing harder than a recompile to ARM. Others took some work, probably some #ifdefs, but there were definitely programs that were on both platforms.
The UI, on the other hand, was pretty desktop-esque. People appear to have universally hated it. As in, usually there's *some* dissenter, somebody who will say "No, I liked it that way"... but I have yet to hear a single person say they like the WinMo UI.
The only other thing that comes to mind for "run desktop apps on a phone" would probably be Maemo... it was simply Debian Linux recompiled for ARM and running a small-touch-screen-targeted window manager. Any Linux software that was available as ARM-compatible source code, or that had ARM binaries for Linux (Flash, at the time, for example), could generally be persuaded to run on that platform; a lot of it was available directly from the package manager.
It still didn't do very well in the marketplace, although many believe that's the fault of Nokia failing to position it correctly and push it hard enough.
My initial thought too... but it doesn't actually cost anything, Besides,/. is a logical place to talk about things like a new development tool, even for a platform that we all love to hate.
As of a month or two back, you can use any "Microsoft Account" (FKA Live account, FKA Passport, etc.) to dev-unlock a WP8 device. It's restricted to only two sideloaded apps at a time (I guess they're paranoid about piracy?) but that's enough for development if you don't work on too many projects in parallel (and if you do, then you can get the "normal" license, which was down at $19 for a while but may have gone back up at some point).
You do still need the dev tools, which is a rather big download and only runs on Windows, but they are free, and now so is the dev-unlock.
It was called Windows Mobile. It did all right in the market, back in the days when only serious nerds and corporate executives had smartphones. It crashed and burned when iOS came out, despite being technically a vastly more capable OS than early iOS versions. Android was the nail in the coffin.
You mean, aside from the fact that Win8 "Modern" (the interface formerly known as Metro) apps are allowed to be sideloaded? That enabling sideloading can be done by anybody with Admin access to the machine in question, even on the otherwise-locked-down Windows RT (yes, Admin is available by default on RT)?
MS would surely *like* that cut, but they aren't locking out alternative distribution... although admittedly they are discouraging it.
At least in WP's case, the updates come from MS themselves. There are (supposed to be) limits on how long the carriers / OEMs can hold back updates as well. But yeah, for most users the updates won't come as fast as they should.
Also, if people (not managers, but hobbyists, students, and bored IT folks on their own time) learn RHEL-like distros, then that means there are more people who are familiar with the environment. That in turn means more software targeting that environment, a bigger talent pool for companies to hire from, and greater mindshare.
Better for RedHat to 50% of enterprise Linux and 40% of those users paying than 100% of the users of a distro with only 10% of the enterprise Linux market. More marketshare is pretty much always good.
One can easily imagine a scenario where some startup hires a bunch of guys who "know RedHat" and set up servers using Cent. As they grow and start needing additional support and enterprise-targeted features, though, who are they going to turn to? Switching to RHEL is going to be less disruptive than pretty much any other option at that point, right?
There's spyware out there that turns on your webcam (without turning on the indicator light, incidentally) while the machine appears to be in sleep mode. It would be entirely possible for this to happen while the machine appeared to be off entirely too, unless you unplugged it. Hell, there's been stories about such spyware right here on Slashdot; laptops and iPads that were issued to students and then used to spy on them in their bedrooms, for example. Just because it doesn't wake up when you wave at it doesn't mean it *isn't* watching you...
Don't get me wrong, I think that the NSA would love to get their hands on that data. If I ever buy or receive an Xbox One (I have never yet bought myself a console, even a handheld; my 360 was a gift, as was my old GameBoy) it will be a potential concern. On the other hand, I already have that concern about my phone. I can't stop it from acting as a tracker (tower triangulation) short of disabling the cellular radio, and it doesn't even have indicator lights for when the cameras or mic are in use. I use it anyhow (while digging into its guts in an attempt to ensure there's nothing in there that I dislike too much) because it's too damn useful. I haven't turned on my 360 in weeks, so clearly I don't find it to have an equivalent degree of usefulness, but I do turn it on (and connect the Kinect sensor) at times. Oh, and it's only occasionally connected to the Internet (for example, at the moment, it is not).
You're factually incorrect in one very simple example: families who have multiple gamers who like to play different games at the same time were pretty happy about the ability to share purchases across multiple consoles for simultaneous play. Even Steam - generally considered the "least DRM-ish" DRM platform, doesn't allow that (unless use offline mode, at which point a lot of stuff will stop working for SteamWorks games). I have no personal use for that feature, nor do I feel it was worth the always-on requirement, but to some people it was a mighty fine carrot. XBOne pre-orders were bad, they weren't zero.
I'm really curious why you think that people getting sacked from a company doesn't make up for the fact that those people said stupid things, in terms of that company's (still pre-release) products. I mean, what was MS supposed to do, fire them out a cannon into the sun?
Oh, and Windows Phone is third place in global marketshare, beating both several OSes that were there before it and several that have come since its release, and is still climbing. Yeah, it's still in the single digits; I'm not claiming it's a huge success. But it's not the colossal failure you imply, either. In fact, I'm not even sure what part of it supposed to be "screwing over the customer" like you claim. Win8 has it's Start screen, RT has its lockdown and inability to run legacy apps (the general opinion among people who own one, at least on XDA, seems to be that the Start screen makes sense on a tablet; I therefore assume you're complaining about the lockdown), but I'm not sure what your beef with the phone is...
First of all, I never derided the command line. I grew up on DOS, mostly; I have six terminal interfaces open at the moment on my home machine (one powershell, four cmd, one bash; it would be nice if at some point soon Microsoft discovered tabbed terminal emulators). Nor did I deride Linux, at least not for its command line (I usually have more bash than cmd shells running, right now is a bit weird because I have several different VS command prompts open).
Considering that Start search lets you use program shortcut names or executable names, and will find partial matches, it's actually a lot less guessing than a command line, and hardly blind at all.
As for "what apps are installed", well, that's just a ridiculous complaint. Are you seriously suggesting you can determine whether a given random, uncommon, third-party program is installed faster by looking through a menu hierarchy than I can by typing the program name? For that matter, If you really must hunt (because you don't know what will be installed at all, for some reason), I think a flat list of all installed programs would be a lot easier to look through than a menu hierarchy when you don't even know what you're looking for...
Shill for MS? Ha, hardly. I work in the same metropolitan area as them, and I'm active (as a security researcher) in the jailbreaking / hacking community for some of their more locked-down systems, but that's it. If I were expecting MS to pay me for what I write here, I would probably spend less time pointing out how boneheaded their attempts to lock down RT are, for example.
Also, it absolutely is for Microsoft to say what the most efficient way to use a operating system is. That's kind of inherent in the fact that they make them, including the default interface for them. Just as the Explorer desktop replaced Program Manager, so has the Start search slowly replaced the Start menu for launching programs. You are welcome to disagree, of course, and install an alternative interface. You can also avoid using the OS entirely, but that's rather like cutting off your nose to spite your face, given the other features it comes with.
As for "the fiction..." bullshit, that's quite obvious to anybody who has ever tried working that way; I don't even type quickly (~30 WPM) and I can literally launch a program before the Start menu (or Start screen, for that matter) finishes appearing on the default animations. It's not even about Win8; I've been doing things this was since Vista. Using XP is a complete pain in the ass because of it, actually.
You have as much right to respond to me as I do to you. I nonetheless invite you to display at least a pretense of politeness when directly addressing other people, but I won't be surprised if you can't manage that either.
Because, you know, retroactively removing features from purchased hardware, suing people who try to work around those restrictions, and leaking your account details through absurdly careless security... that shows real love for your customers, right?
Out of curiosity, what PC/phone/tablet do you have? Does it have a camera on it? Does it have a microphone on it? Does it have a permanent Internet connection? Do you completely disconnect it from power when not using it?
How do you know it's not spying on you?
Do you have any idea what a paranoid idiot you sound like? If the NSA wants to spy on people through consumer electronics, they don't need people to buy a new $500 device that hasn't even been released yet to do it. Even if it wasn't built into your iPad or Android phone or Thinkpad laptop or whatever when you bought it, they could have slipped it into a software/firmware update years ago. Being paranoid about the Xbox's Kinect sensor, when posting to a US-company-owned site hosted on the public Internet by servers located in the USA, under a signed in account no less... how? How does that even *vaguely* make sense? Hell, we *know* there's spyware out there that uses the camera on your computer or tablet, without even showing an activity light. Why aren't you freaking out about that? Unlike the XbOne, it's actually something that's already happening!
The 360's CPU is still pretty powerful, by modern standards. Emulating PPC isn't *too* hard, but going from what, eight hardware threads at 4GHz x64 to six hardware threads at 3.2GHz PPC... that's not going to be easy.
Totally agreed on the XNA games, though. Last I checked they were still waffling on that one. Original Xbox would be relatively easy (don't forget the need to emulate the old GPU too; unlike the CPU that's not just a matter of taking one piece of the current GPU and under-clocking it. Console games are built very exactly to their target hardware), but they may think the market just isn't big enough to be worth it.
You already realize that the xbox is technically able to send everything it hears AND sees out to the internet, and worse that its on 24x7 even when the unit is 'off'
This makes it different from any mainstream desktop (and most laptops) with a webcam from any point in the past decade... how, exactly? Let's take, oh, iMacs. They have webcams and mics. They have permanent Internet connections. They are plugged in, and may still be doing something at a low level, even while appearing "off" (sleep mode, etc.). They run software / firmware which is closed source, which you can't personally audit, which is built right into some of the chips on the hardware, chips whose schematics you don't have...
OH NOES! APPLE IS TEH BIG BROTHER!
Seriously, this whole "Kinect is spying on you for the NSA!" meme is, and I will not mince words, idiotic. As in, "the kind of thing only an idiot would think." On the offhand chance that they for some reason wanted to do this, there are already tons of ways they *could* be doing it, without requiring you to go buy new hardware either.
If you're that worried about PRISM and so forth, how the hell did you manage to post to Slashdot, and why did you do it under a logged-in account?
And when they saw nobody wanted it, they sacked the guy responsible and changed the policies. You're right, you will "never have this" because it's *NOT THERE ANYMORE*! You didn't have to compromise on anything; they went back on all that stuff you said you hated... you win! We all do!
Well, unless the cold hard facts of market data show that "nope, actually, potential customers didn't care whether the restrictions were there or not; sales weren't affected."
Seriously, this is like explaining things to a five year old. You're sticking to a decision made in situation X, even though X is now gone and the basis on which you made that decision is invalid.
Car analogy time: you're driving along, going faster than the lane next to you. Suddenly some giant truck in that lane (going a good bit slower than you) turns on their signal and starts to slowly merge into your lane. If they cross the divider, they'll cut you off, probably even clip your bumper. You hit the brakes and the horn at the same time, make angry gestures out the window, etc. The truck stops trying to get in front of you, and returns to the middle of its lane. You keep on driving and pass the truck; the driver waves at you as you go (politely, not rudely). At what point here would a reasonable, rational person let off the horn? Because you are still leaning on it and shouting at the driver, even though he never even crossed the divider.
You realize you're posting on a website that operates in the USA, right? If the NSA wants to know about you, they can do it already. You aren't even posting "anonymously"; your ID has probably already been correlated with anywhere else you used it, and any other accounts you used on other sites that you accessed from the same IP address while it was assigned to the same modem, plus a bunch of filtering to determine when you were using a shared connection what parts were or were not actually you.
Seriously, you use the public Internet, and you're worried that a camera (which can be trivially easily disconnected from its console, disconnected from power, disconnected from the Internet, or have a box put in front of it when you aren't using it) might record you in your own home, or worse yet, the home of somebody who you probably communicate with regularly? Oh, the horror!!
Seriously, that's tinfoil-hat-grade reasoning. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of PRISM or similar either, but the only way you're going to stay out of it is either to go completely off the grid (way, way too late for that) or get it ended via policy. That's the approach I'm taking.
Removal of PS2 backward compatibility, and of OtherOS, yes.
Furthermore, that led (slightly indirectly) to PS3 games "needing" their own DRM, because a bunch of irate hackers who flet they should be able to use the features they paid for went and tore the console's so-called security a new one. Getting the ability to run pirated or "hacked" games was just a by-product of, and far easier to achieve than, getting the ability to run Linux back. However, it led to a massive uptick of game piracy cheating in online games, so developers (or at least publishers) started locking down games with PC-game-like DRM instead of relying on the console to take care of blocking such things, as it had done before.
Media Center was actually developed for XP (though only available there as an OEM install) and was included with several editions of Vista as well. Its hardly new to Win7 (you didn't outright say that, but you did imply it).
Not that this damags your point in any way, I just wanted to make it clear that WMC wasn't a "flash in the pan" sort of thing that was developed and quickly dropped - it's now about a decade old and has been on four different major Windows releases.
I like how you're perfectly aware of the exactly one time in console history that something like what you describe happened, and you're also aware of who did it... and presumably also therefore aware of the backlash they took over it, right down to having the root trust of their console's security ripped apart by irate hackers looking to reverse the restrictions.
And yet, you think that the next company to try it will be a *competitor* of the only one to have done it so far? The company who benefited massively from Sony's colossal blunder? Microsoft may have underestimated the backlash against their initial plans, but they know full well what the consequences would be if they retroactively returned to them. Yet, apparently you think that they're already planning to do it, despite the obvious consequences they would face?
What the hell would make you assume that? Does logic just not exist where you're from?
If it's all about what MS wants, and they don't care about what the "consumer" wants (I really prefer the term "customer", but whatever)...
Then why did they reverse all those anti-consumer policies? That's not the action of somebody who doesn't care. They did not, in fact, say "this is what we're making, deal with it." I mean, that's quite self-evident, because that's *not* what they're making!
Here, let me make it more plain to you: what could they have done to *more clearly* have listened to people's reaction to their original plans? I'm really curious. Short of a literal design-by-public-opinion, which would never be practical for something this big, I mean. (This may shock you, but there are people who were actually excited about the original plans, because always-on connection means multiple people can play online games on the same account in one household - something even Steam can't do.)
You always (well, since the always-on was dropped) could have disconnected the sensor when not gaming. The difference is now that you can disconnect it even when gaming, if the game doesn't need it. A small change, in my opinion, but still a good one.
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Go read about instruction set architectures, and the differences between ARM (what nearly all phones use) and x86 (what nearly all desktops use), then come back and explain how you intend to fix it. Apologies for assuming you knew what you were talking about before; I didn't mean to talk over your head like that.
Eh... the CE version of Win32 was so close to that used by 9x or NT that some apps would work after nothing harder than a recompile to ARM. Others took some work, probably some #ifdefs, but there were definitely programs that were on both platforms.
The UI, on the other hand, was pretty desktop-esque. People appear to have universally hated it. As in, usually there's *some* dissenter, somebody who will say "No, I liked it that way"... but I have yet to hear a single person say they like the WinMo UI.
The only other thing that comes to mind for "run desktop apps on a phone" would probably be Maemo... it was simply Debian Linux recompiled for ARM and running a small-touch-screen-targeted window manager. Any Linux software that was available as ARM-compatible source code, or that had ARM binaries for Linux (Flash, at the time, for example), could generally be persuaded to run on that platform; a lot of it was available directly from the package manager.
It still didn't do very well in the marketplace, although many believe that's the fault of Nokia failing to position it correctly and push it hard enough.
My initial thought too... but it doesn't actually cost anything, Besides, /. is a logical place to talk about things like a new development tool, even for a platform that we all love to hate.
As of a month or two back, you can use any "Microsoft Account" (FKA Live account, FKA Passport, etc.) to dev-unlock a WP8 device. It's restricted to only two sideloaded apps at a time (I guess they're paranoid about piracy?) but that's enough for development if you don't work on too many projects in parallel (and if you do, then you can get the "normal" license, which was down at $19 for a while but may have gone back up at some point).
You do still need the dev tools, which is a rather big download and only runs on Windows, but they are free, and now so is the dev-unlock.
Yes, you can. The studio auto-generates source code for you, which you can edit, add to, etc.
It was called Windows Mobile. It did all right in the market, back in the days when only serious nerds and corporate executives had smartphones. It crashed and burned when iOS came out, despite being technically a vastly more capable OS than early iOS versions. Android was the nail in the coffin.
WinMo can't even come close to running the full Office suite. RT can (and does, out of the box).
You mean, aside from the fact that Win8 "Modern" (the interface formerly known as Metro) apps are allowed to be sideloaded? That enabling sideloading can be done by anybody with Admin access to the machine in question, even on the otherwise-locked-down Windows RT (yes, Admin is available by default on RT)?
MS would surely *like* that cut, but they aren't locking out alternative distribution... although admittedly they are discouraging it.
At least in WP's case, the updates come from MS themselves. There are (supposed to be) limits on how long the carriers / OEMs can hold back updates as well. But yeah, for most users the updates won't come as fast as they should.
Still, it's a lot better than on Android.
Also, if people (not managers, but hobbyists, students, and bored IT folks on their own time) learn RHEL-like distros, then that means there are more people who are familiar with the environment. That in turn means more software targeting that environment, a bigger talent pool for companies to hire from, and greater mindshare.
Better for RedHat to 50% of enterprise Linux and 40% of those users paying than 100% of the users of a distro with only 10% of the enterprise Linux market. More marketshare is pretty much always good.
One can easily imagine a scenario where some startup hires a bunch of guys who "know RedHat" and set up servers using Cent. As they grow and start needing additional support and enterprise-targeted features, though, who are they going to turn to? Switching to RHEL is going to be less disruptive than pretty much any other option at that point, right?
There's spyware out there that turns on your webcam (without turning on the indicator light, incidentally) while the machine appears to be in sleep mode. It would be entirely possible for this to happen while the machine appeared to be off entirely too, unless you unplugged it. Hell, there's been stories about such spyware right here on Slashdot; laptops and iPads that were issued to students and then used to spy on them in their bedrooms, for example. Just because it doesn't wake up when you wave at it doesn't mean it *isn't* watching you...
Don't get me wrong, I think that the NSA would love to get their hands on that data. If I ever buy or receive an Xbox One (I have never yet bought myself a console, even a handheld; my 360 was a gift, as was my old GameBoy) it will be a potential concern. On the other hand, I already have that concern about my phone. I can't stop it from acting as a tracker (tower triangulation) short of disabling the cellular radio, and it doesn't even have indicator lights for when the cameras or mic are in use. I use it anyhow (while digging into its guts in an attempt to ensure there's nothing in there that I dislike too much) because it's too damn useful. I haven't turned on my 360 in weeks, so clearly I don't find it to have an equivalent degree of usefulness, but I do turn it on (and connect the Kinect sensor) at times. Oh, and it's only occasionally connected to the Internet (for example, at the moment, it is not).
You're factually incorrect in one very simple example: families who have multiple gamers who like to play different games at the same time were pretty happy about the ability to share purchases across multiple consoles for simultaneous play. Even Steam - generally considered the "least DRM-ish" DRM platform, doesn't allow that (unless use offline mode, at which point a lot of stuff will stop working for SteamWorks games). I have no personal use for that feature, nor do I feel it was worth the always-on requirement, but to some people it was a mighty fine carrot. XBOne pre-orders were bad, they weren't zero.
I'm really curious why you think that people getting sacked from a company doesn't make up for the fact that those people said stupid things, in terms of that company's (still pre-release) products. I mean, what was MS supposed to do, fire them out a cannon into the sun?
Oh, and Windows Phone is third place in global marketshare, beating both several OSes that were there before it and several that have come since its release, and is still climbing. Yeah, it's still in the single digits; I'm not claiming it's a huge success. But it's not the colossal failure you imply, either. In fact, I'm not even sure what part of it supposed to be "screwing over the customer" like you claim. Win8 has it's Start screen, RT has its lockdown and inability to run legacy apps (the general opinion among people who own one, at least on XDA, seems to be that the Start screen makes sense on a tablet; I therefore assume you're complaining about the lockdown), but I'm not sure what your beef with the phone is...
First of all, I never derided the command line. I grew up on DOS, mostly; I have six terminal interfaces open at the moment on my home machine (one powershell, four cmd, one bash; it would be nice if at some point soon Microsoft discovered tabbed terminal emulators). Nor did I deride Linux, at least not for its command line (I usually have more bash than cmd shells running, right now is a bit weird because I have several different VS command prompts open).
Considering that Start search lets you use program shortcut names or executable names, and will find partial matches, it's actually a lot less guessing than a command line, and hardly blind at all.
As for "what apps are installed", well, that's just a ridiculous complaint. Are you seriously suggesting you can determine whether a given random, uncommon, third-party program is installed faster by looking through a menu hierarchy than I can by typing the program name? For that matter, If you really must hunt (because you don't know what will be installed at all, for some reason), I think a flat list of all installed programs would be a lot easier to look through than a menu hierarchy when you don't even know what you're looking for...
Shill for MS? Ha, hardly. I work in the same metropolitan area as them, and I'm active (as a security researcher) in the jailbreaking / hacking community for some of their more locked-down systems, but that's it. If I were expecting MS to pay me for what I write here, I would probably spend less time pointing out how boneheaded their attempts to lock down RT are, for example.
Also, it absolutely is for Microsoft to say what the most efficient way to use a operating system is. That's kind of inherent in the fact that they make them, including the default interface for them. Just as the Explorer desktop replaced Program Manager, so has the Start search slowly replaced the Start menu for launching programs. You are welcome to disagree, of course, and install an alternative interface. You can also avoid using the OS entirely, but that's rather like cutting off your nose to spite your face, given the other features it comes with.
As for "the fiction..." bullshit, that's quite obvious to anybody who has ever tried working that way; I don't even type quickly (~30 WPM) and I can literally launch a program before the Start menu (or Start screen, for that matter) finishes appearing on the default animations. It's not even about Win8; I've been doing things this was since Vista. Using XP is a complete pain in the ass because of it, actually.
You have as much right to respond to me as I do to you. I nonetheless invite you to display at least a pretense of politeness when directly addressing other people, but I won't be surprised if you can't manage that either.
Because, you know, retroactively removing features from purchased hardware, suing people who try to work around those restrictions, and leaking your account details through absurdly careless security... that shows real love for your customers, right?
Out of curiosity, what PC/phone/tablet do you have? Does it have a camera on it? Does it have a microphone on it? Does it have a permanent Internet connection? Do you completely disconnect it from power when not using it?
How do you know it's not spying on you?
Do you have any idea what a paranoid idiot you sound like? If the NSA wants to spy on people through consumer electronics, they don't need people to buy a new $500 device that hasn't even been released yet to do it. Even if it wasn't built into your iPad or Android phone or Thinkpad laptop or whatever when you bought it, they could have slipped it into a software/firmware update years ago. Being paranoid about the Xbox's Kinect sensor, when posting to a US-company-owned site hosted on the public Internet by servers located in the USA, under a signed in account no less... how? How does that even *vaguely* make sense? Hell, we *know* there's spyware out there that uses the camera on your computer or tablet, without even showing an activity light. Why aren't you freaking out about that? Unlike the XbOne, it's actually something that's already happening!
The 360's CPU is still pretty powerful, by modern standards. Emulating PPC isn't *too* hard, but going from what, eight hardware threads at 4GHz x64 to six hardware threads at 3.2GHz PPC... that's not going to be easy.
Totally agreed on the XNA games, though. Last I checked they were still waffling on that one. Original Xbox would be relatively easy (don't forget the need to emulate the old GPU too; unlike the CPU that's not just a matter of taking one piece of the current GPU and under-clocking it. Console games are built very exactly to their target hardware), but they may think the market just isn't big enough to be worth it.
You already realize that the xbox is technically able to send everything it hears AND sees out to the internet, and worse that its on 24x7 even when the unit is 'off'
This makes it different from any mainstream desktop (and most laptops) with a webcam from any point in the past decade... how, exactly? Let's take, oh, iMacs. They have webcams and mics.
They have permanent Internet connections.
They are plugged in, and may still be doing something at a low level, even while appearing "off" (sleep mode, etc.).
They run software / firmware which is closed source, which you can't personally audit, which is built right into some of the chips on the hardware, chips whose schematics you don't have...
OH NOES! APPLE IS TEH BIG BROTHER!
Seriously, this whole "Kinect is spying on you for the NSA!" meme is, and I will not mince words, idiotic. As in, "the kind of thing only an idiot would think." On the offhand chance that they for some reason wanted to do this, there are already tons of ways they *could* be doing it, without requiring you to go buy new hardware either.
If you're that worried about PRISM and so forth, how the hell did you manage to post to Slashdot, and why did you do it under a logged-in account?
And when they saw nobody wanted it, they sacked the guy responsible and changed the policies. You're right, you will "never have this" because it's *NOT THERE ANYMORE*! You didn't have to compromise on anything; they went back on all that stuff you said you hated... you win! We all do!
Well, unless the cold hard facts of market data show that "nope, actually, potential customers didn't care whether the restrictions were there or not; sales weren't affected."
Seriously, this is like explaining things to a five year old. You're sticking to a decision made in situation X, even though X is now gone and the basis on which you made that decision is invalid.
Car analogy time: you're driving along, going faster than the lane next to you. Suddenly some giant truck in that lane (going a good bit slower than you) turns on their signal and starts to slowly merge into your lane. If they cross the divider, they'll cut you off, probably even clip your bumper. You hit the brakes and the horn at the same time, make angry gestures out the window, etc. The truck stops trying to get in front of you, and returns to the middle of its lane. You keep on driving and pass the truck; the driver waves at you as you go (politely, not rudely).
At what point here would a reasonable, rational person let off the horn? Because you are still leaning on it and shouting at the driver, even though he never even crossed the divider.
You realize you're posting on a website that operates in the USA, right? If the NSA wants to know about you, they can do it already. You aren't even posting "anonymously"; your ID has probably already been correlated with anywhere else you used it, and any other accounts you used on other sites that you accessed from the same IP address while it was assigned to the same modem, plus a bunch of filtering to determine when you were using a shared connection what parts were or were not actually you.
Seriously, you use the public Internet, and you're worried that a camera (which can be trivially easily disconnected from its console, disconnected from power, disconnected from the Internet, or have a box put in front of it when you aren't using it) might record you in your own home, or worse yet, the home of somebody who you probably communicate with regularly? Oh, the horror!!
Seriously, that's tinfoil-hat-grade reasoning. Don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of PRISM or similar either, but the only way you're going to stay out of it is either to go completely off the grid (way, way too late for that) or get it ended via policy. That's the approach I'm taking.
Removal of PS2 backward compatibility, and of OtherOS, yes.
Furthermore, that led (slightly indirectly) to PS3 games "needing" their own DRM, because a bunch of irate hackers who flet they should be able to use the features they paid for went and tore the console's so-called security a new one. Getting the ability to run pirated or "hacked" games was just a by-product of, and far easier to achieve than, getting the ability to run Linux back. However, it led to a massive uptick of game piracy cheating in online games, so developers (or at least publishers) started locking down games with PC-game-like DRM instead of relying on the console to take care of blocking such things, as it had done before.
Media Center was actually developed for XP (though only available there as an OEM install) and was included with several editions of Vista as well. Its hardly new to Win7 (you didn't outright say that, but you did imply it).
Not that this damags your point in any way, I just wanted to make it clear that WMC wasn't a "flash in the pan" sort of thing that was developed and quickly dropped - it's now about a decade old and has been on four different major Windows releases.
I like how you're perfectly aware of the exactly one time in console history that something like what you describe happened, and you're also aware of who did it... and presumably also therefore aware of the backlash they took over it, right down to having the root trust of their console's security ripped apart by irate hackers looking to reverse the restrictions.
And yet, you think that the next company to try it will be a *competitor* of the only one to have done it so far? The company who benefited massively from Sony's colossal blunder? Microsoft may have underestimated the backlash against their initial plans, but they know full well what the consequences would be if they retroactively returned to them. Yet, apparently you think that they're already planning to do it, despite the obvious consequences they would face?
What the hell would make you assume that? Does logic just not exist where you're from?
If it's all about what MS wants, and they don't care about what the "consumer" wants (I really prefer the term "customer", but whatever)...
Then why did they reverse all those anti-consumer policies? That's not the action of somebody who doesn't care. They did not, in fact, say "this is what we're making, deal with it." I mean, that's quite self-evident, because that's *not* what they're making!
Here, let me make it more plain to you: what could they have done to *more clearly* have listened to people's reaction to their original plans? I'm really curious. Short of a literal design-by-public-opinion, which would never be practical for something this big, I mean. (This may shock you, but there are people who were actually excited about the original plans, because always-on connection means multiple people can play online games on the same account in one household - something even Steam can't do.)
You always (well, since the always-on was dropped) could have disconnected the sensor when not gaming. The difference is now that you can disconnect it even when gaming, if the game doesn't need it. A small change, in my opinion, but still a good one.