I suspect that if they are found guilty, you (and anybody else with legit files lost) could build a class-action suit against the owners of the site for endangering the service they provided (which you may even have paid for) through intentional failure to comply with the law and their own stated policies.
That said, if this was your only copy of those files, I'm surprised you managed to build a coherent sentence in English. That's just insanely poor judgement.
Actually, if you read the charges, MU is accused of knowingly harboring pirated content despite takedown requests. It'll all come out one way or another in court, one assumes... but if that accusation is correct (frankly, this wouldn't surprise me; I've heard plenty of people complain about MU being slow or difficult with DMCA requests, and your post is the first I have ever heard to the contrary) then they are toast.
Symlinks and hard links to files are allowed for standard users. Symlinks to directories are not - too easy for a program that isn't aware of symlinks (and there are many in Windows-land) to get stuck in an infinite loop if you create a cycle in the directory tree. A member of the Administrators group (using high-privilege token, if UAC is enabled) can make symlinks to directories though (on the assumption that they know what they're doing).
Or... he's being sarcastic, and you are a fool. That list was basically a complete rundown of NTFS's newest or least-known features (some, like compression and EFS, have existed for over a decade). It was quite obvious, even without reading TFA, that some if not all of them were going to be cut from the new version.
Mind you, if you want me to use a filesystem that doesn't support transactions, it better have some other damn good perk. Compare what happens if a big file operation (say, copying a large directory tree) gets canceled mid-way on XP (no transactions) vs Win7 (transactions, I think Vista actually had them too).
Getting rid of compression and EFS just seems dumb. Yeah, neither is used as much as they should be, but the fix for that is user education, not feature removal. Both are valuable capabilities that, by integrating them transparently into the filesystem, are far more convenient to use than an external tool.
Hard-links make all kinds of sense, and even though NTFS now supports symlinks as well, there are definitely still places where hard-links are suprerior (specifically, if you plan on moving/renaming the "original" file).
Alternate data streams are actually used by a number of popular software packages (and, admittedly, no small amount of malware). EFS uses them too.
Quotas are just an obviously good idea for any kind of shared file server. I suppose they don't intend this new FS to be used in that kind of environment.
Seriously though, there really needs to be a well-recognized way to indicate sarcasm in text. Apparently, giving a feature list of NTFS as the supposed feature list of it's replacement wasn't obvious enough for some people, moderators included.
Windows also allows you to change the Open With association (and has for many years) but it's stored in the registry as a global configuration for the file type. It's not specific to any given file.
Why the hell are you using RD into the server to run a single command? Windows, even client and certainly server, already sports a large collection of command-line administrative tools that allow you to specify a target machine. Powershell can do this for just about anything. For GUIs, most of Microsoft's GUI tools (and some third-party) allow you to specify the target computer as well.
BATCH files? Wow, was your last time scripting anything on a Microsoft OS in 1995?
Go take a look at PowerShell. Aside from more verbose commands (for which it has tab auto-complete), it is in most ways superior to bash. I still use bash (yes, even on my Windows box) because learning soemthing new takes time and since I'm not in IT it's rare I need to script anything very low-level or complicated, but PS works quite well.
High petty crime rate and high levels of corruption in business do not necessarily go together, although I'll agree that this is something I'd be less surprised to see out of Kenya than, for example, Switzerland.
Funny, my IE9 install has Flash blocking and Ad blocking.
For Flash, I use the built-in Flash-blocking (site-wide basis, not the fine-grained of Firefox FlashBlock, but c'est la vie). Tools -> Manage Add-ons -> Shockwave Flash Object -> Remove all sites. It will now operate on a whitelist basis, not even loading the plugin until you approve the page. The prompt appears on the Information Bar (at the bottom of the screen).
Too annoying to have the Info Bar, or want to block *all* ActiveX proactively? Tools -> Safety -> ActiveX Filtering. Puts a little blue circle with a line through it in the address bar when content is being blocked. Click the circle, and you can enable or disable the filtering site-by-site.
For blocking ads, you can use the Tracking Protection feature of IE9. I actually use the block-lists from EasyList (the same folks who make the popular block list for ABP) as they have a script that automatically converts their block lists to IE's format, and IE will automatically update the lists if you subscribe to them. I also maintain a custom list on top of the EasyList subscriptions. Again, this can be disabled on a site-by-site basis using the little blue circle, or you can manually whitelist something on your personal list (will override the subscribed lists).
Eh, I ran XP as a standard user. Let me tell you, UAC (even on Vista) was a god-send. After the hell of RunAs (which can only be used on executables; if you wanted to do something like install a.MSI you had to manually elevate msiexec.exe and pass the.MSI as a parameter) I thought Vista's UAC was the best thing since multi-user Windows. I've used NT at least lightly since 4 and first used it primarily with 2000, but mostly as Admin because it was too much of hassle otherwise (sometimes as "Power User" - I'm sure somebody else remembers that group).
Through heavy tweaking of filesystem and registry ACLs, I got most software to run happily as standard user on XP, but you still needed to do RunAs as often as on Vista, and it was way more hassle each time. When Vista came out, I was actually able to reduce the amount of UAC relative to XP's RunAs, partially by applying what I'd learned making XP limited-user tolerable, and partially because I discovered you could force installers to run as standard user (provided they weren't trying to write to the Windows folder or anything like that) so long as there was a user-writable folder to install them into.
That said, Win7 is certainly a big step forward. It seems to have crossed the line of how much UAC the typical user (who has no idea how to reduce its frequency the way I did) is willing to put up with.
High latency is also a probelm for SSL, especially when it's used with protocols that require a lot of handshaking on top of the SSL handshake. I've used satellite links with latency approaching 2 seconds. A non-SSL web page typically started loading within 4 or 5 seconds (use ad-blocking and/or Opera Turbo and get much better performance due to fewer turn-arounds). It might take 15 seconds or more to finish, though, and I don't think that was bandwidth. HTTPS pages took 10 or more seconds to really start loading, and each additional element that was also over SSL took as long again. That was painful. Getting IMAP mail over an SSL connection took most of a minute (if nothing timed out - sometimes it could take several minutes to actually get usable throughput).
Mind you, that was not only satellite, but going halfway around the world (close enough, Nepal to the USA). "Local" satellite link latencies tend to be in the hundreds of miliseconds, but usually not the thousands.
Because the 360's GPU is 6 years old? The flight sim games have always pushed the bounds of GPU capability. While graphics comparisons are a big deal in almost all gaming genres, in simulationist games it's not enough to look pretty; it has to look realistic. The graphics chip on the Xbox 360 probably couldn't even play FS X at reasonable quality (in DX9 mode even, the chip doesn't support DX10 at all), much less its sequel.
The updates always come from Microsoft - they are actually downloaded (transparently, by the Zune software) from the Windows Update site.
However, Microsoft doesn't actually build the full updates themselves. They provide a basic kit that the OEM then customizes for their model - things like adding the required drivers for the hardware and system utiltiies, adding the built-in application packages for those utilities, and adding branding customizations and so forth. They then test those updates, a process which apparently takes weeks. It's a little surprising how long it takes for many updates, considering the simplicity of the customizations which the OEMs are permitted to make.
In theory, it should be a quick process, with the OEMs simply taking Microsoft's kit and sending back the update CAB file. In practice, even for simple updates which have almost no impact on the OEM (see 7392, a security update that revoked some bad root certificates and had no other impact), some phones got it before others. The OEMs can also push updates themselves (which still go through Windows Update) independently of the Microsoft-developed OS updates, or bundle their own updates into the Microsoft ones.
After the OEM signs off on an update, it can go out to open-market phones immediately, or to the mobile operators for a carrier-specific round of customizing and testing. This is where having an "unbranded" phone comes in handy (and, at least for the first significant update, a common tactic was to modify the phone's registry so it reported itself as non-branded and got the update before AT&T approved it).
Umm... IE9 has a built-in feature that works for ad blocking (and for external script blocking, though admittedly without nearly the fine-grained control of NoScript).
EasyList, the guys behind the most popular ad-blocking list for AdBlockPlus, already have a script autopmatically converting all their block lists to IE9's "tracking protection" list format, and it works fine.
When IE9 came out, it actually supported more of the HTML5 draft than any other browser (not a strict superset of all the other browsers, but still more). Care to point out what areas it's missing now? The only things I've seen that were problems ever are:
DOM local storage (coming in IE10, you can try it already). Websockets (actually are supported, but use an element with a vendor-specific tag since the draft was so very un-finalized at the time - IE10 supports them as expected)
I'm sure there are more; I don't do that much web dev these days. Nonetheless, it's still pretty good, and IE10 should be out within a few months (they've de-coupled it release schedule from Windows).
As for JS performance, WTF? At release, even Chrome could barely beat IE9, and it's only falled a few places in the rankings since then.
As for security features, do you have literally any idea what you're talking about? Here, let's take an example: JIT spraying. Explain to me why it's not important that IE9 has it and many other browsers still don't (such as a work-around that avoids it easily), and I'll accept taht you have some kind of a clue. Otherwise, you're just mindlessly bashing on something you don't even understand. Security mitigations are a *huge* deal, and nobody competent in the field, at MS or otherwise, will tell you differently.
Simple work-around: modify the ACLs on the install directory to allow the normal user to write to it. This can easily be scripted into a.CMD file (evolution of the.BAT script with NT extensions) that first calls the installer (as Admin) and then modifies the install-folder ACLs (as Admin). The program should then work as a standard user.
My folks have a 2+ year old netbook with a single-core Atom and 1GB of RAM. It runs Win7 just fine. The only problem is when they try and run a whole bunch of programs at once, and that wouldn't work any better on XP than on Win7. Those specs will pretty easily cover Win7-s needs - not with a huge margin, but but not borderline either.
You know, the whole "two people who bought..." meme would be a lot funnier in an article that wasn't about how ten thousand tokens for homebrew development sold out in just a few months. Let's break down that 10,000 to get an idea of what it really means, though:
These aren't needed for people who are already developers - they have legit developer accounts, which offer the same access plus submitting to the Marketplace. These people don't work for Microsoft - developer accounts are free to employees (I interned there and know some people who still work there). These aren't needed for people who were early adopters - the original ChevronWP7 Unlocker worked just fine for the first few months of after release. These aren't needed for everyday users - most of them will never have heard of homebrew or have any interest in dev-unlocking their phones. These aren't needed for LG device owners - their phones ship with a built-in registry editor that can dev-unlock the phones. These aren't needed for Samsung device owners (anymore) - WindowBreak does the same thing (though it only came out a few weeks ago).
What does that leave: People who want homebrew, who bought the phone months after release, who don't have developer accounts and aren't MS employees, and who aren't using LG (or now Samsung) phones. Since availability started on 4 Nov 2011 (http://www.chevronwp7.com/post/12328024419/chevronwp7-labs-availability), ten thousand such people have used the service.
What do you mean, locked out of the system? Use WindowBreak, then go install WP7 Root Tools (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1265321) using the free dev tools for app deployment. You'll have access to almost anything, limited only by what the dev of WP7 Root Tools has implemented so far. There are a handful of other apps out there that will also work, such as from http://touchxperience.com/ and elsewhere on the XDA-Devs WP7 hacking forum (http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=606).
WindowBreak is an easy way to "interop-unlock" a Windows phone. Interop-unlock means you can can install and run apps that call into high-privilege drivers, breaking out of their sandboxes. Immediately, that opens up a lot of potential, but it also means you can run code as TCB (the WP7 equivalent of "root" or "Administrator"). Apps like WP7 Root Tools take advantage of this to enable a wide variety of functionality, though the current version only enables doing so on Samsung phones (the high-privilege drivers being different from each OEM).
Incidentally, there are other ways to interop-unlock other phones. LG phones actually ship with a built-in registry editor that can be used to dev-unlock (install app packages) and interop-unlock (install high-privilege homebrew packages) the phones - there's absolutely no need for ChevronWP7 or the official AppHub account (which does the same thing, plus allowing you to submit apps to the Marketplace). HTC phones (the first-generation ones) can be interop-unlocked if they are already dev-unlocked. Their bootloaders can also be "unlocked" to allow custom updates (modify the current ROM) or full custom ROMs, with most of the latter having excellent support for homebrew (the kinds of changes that WP7 Root Tools can make being applied by default, obviously already being interop-unlocked, and having the ability to install app packages directly from the phone without needing a PC).
Nokia, Dell, and Toshiba/Fujitsu phones do not have known interop-unlocks yet, nor do second-generation HTC phones. People are working on this, though.
An operating system with more market share in its respective segment than Linux has on the desktop/laptop. Just because you don't care doesn't mean nobody does, and certainly doesn't excuse outright falsehoods in the title.
I realize it's fashionable to bash MS and all that, but HTC basically broke into the smrtphone market on WinMo, and while they are mostly known for Android now, they also make some of the better WP7 devices (including the only ones with unlocked bootloaders, although their latest ones appear to be locked).
They claim that the "Windows" and "7" parts are supposed to tie in with the success of Windows 7, while the "Phone" part is supposed to differentiate it. I think this is frankly quite stupid - it leads to more confusion than it does to riding the success of a mostly-unrelated product (they are both OSes, both can be programmed using.NET, and they have similar logos; similarities end there) - but they didn't ask me.
On the other hand, I have to ask if they asked anybody inside the company, either. I've met Microsoft employees who called it "Windows Mobile 7" (wrong, WinMo is discontinued and WP7 is quite different), "Windows 7 Phone" (wrong, it's really nothing like Win7), and even "Windows 7 Mobile" (at which point it was hard not to roll my eyes). If their own employees can't get it right, how the hell is the public expected to?
Hang on, with WP7 the instructions are a little more complex: 1) Don't install the Facebook app in the first place. 2) Don't enable the completely optional built-in Facebook integration.
Facebook makes some things easier, like automatically pulling pictures (and phone numbers, where available) for all your friends, or automatically including your Facebook events in the calendar view. None of what it does can't be done manually, though (and WP7 also supports other social networks, like LinkedIn).
Given your comments about a WinMo6.5 device with a capacitive screen running Android, I'm guessing you have an HD2. Have you tried the WP7 port for it? The hardware is almost identical to the HD7 (a "natively" WP7 device) so the drivers apparently work quite well, and its specs are sufficient. The unlocked bootloader is practically an invitation to port OSes and make custom ROMs for it - I know of at least four major OSes you can run on an HD2, and there are many ROMs - and it's an easy way to try everything without buying more hardware.
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I suspect that if they are found guilty, you (and anybody else with legit files lost) could build a class-action suit against the owners of the site for endangering the service they provided (which you may even have paid for) through intentional failure to comply with the law and their own stated policies.
That said, if this was your only copy of those files, I'm surprised you managed to build a coherent sentence in English. That's just insanely poor judgement.
Actually, if you read the charges, MU is accused of knowingly harboring pirated content despite takedown requests. It'll all come out one way or another in court, one assumes... but if that accusation is correct (frankly, this wouldn't surprise me; I've heard plenty of people complain about MU being slow or difficult with DMCA requests, and your post is the first I have ever heard to the contrary) then they are toast.
If the landlord is helping to launder the money that the tenant made by selling access to pirated content, yes, the landlord should be indicted.
Did you actually read TFA, and the links from it that cover thing like what the charges are and their justification? (Why do I even ask?)
Symlinks and hard links to files are allowed for standard users. Symlinks to directories are not - too easy for a program that isn't aware of symlinks (and there are many in Windows-land) to get stuck in an infinite loop if you create a cycle in the directory tree. A member of the Administrators group (using high-privilege token, if UAC is enabled) can make symlinks to directories though (on the assumption that they know what they're doing).
Or... he's being sarcastic, and you are a fool. That list was basically a complete rundown of NTFS's newest or least-known features (some, like compression and EFS, have existed for over a decade). It was quite obvious, even without reading TFA, that some if not all of them were going to be cut from the new version.
Mind you, if you want me to use a filesystem that doesn't support transactions, it better have some other damn good perk. Compare what happens if a big file operation (say, copying a large directory tree) gets canceled mid-way on XP (no transactions) vs Win7 (transactions, I think Vista actually had them too).
Getting rid of compression and EFS just seems dumb. Yeah, neither is used as much as they should be, but the fix for that is user education, not feature removal. Both are valuable capabilities that, by integrating them transparently into the filesystem, are far more convenient to use than an external tool.
Hard-links make all kinds of sense, and even though NTFS now supports symlinks as well, there are definitely still places where hard-links are suprerior (specifically, if you plan on moving/renaming the "original" file).
Alternate data streams are actually used by a number of popular software packages (and, admittedly, no small amount of malware). EFS uses them too.
Quotas are just an obviously good idea for any kind of shared file server. I suppose they don't intend this new FS to be used in that kind of environment.
Looks like you fell into the sarchasm.
Seriously though, there really needs to be a well-recognized way to indicate sarcasm in text. Apparently, giving a feature list of NTFS as the supposed feature list of it's replacement wasn't obvious enough for some people, moderators included.
Windows also allows you to change the Open With association (and has for many years) but it's stored in the registry as a global configuration for the file type. It's not specific to any given file.
Just thought I'd clear that up.
Why the hell are you using RD into the server to run a single command? Windows, even client and certainly server, already sports a large collection of command-line administrative tools that allow you to specify a target machine. Powershell can do this for just about anything. For GUIs, most of Microsoft's GUI tools (and some third-party) allow you to specify the target computer as well.
BATCH files? Wow, was your last time scripting anything on a Microsoft OS in 1995?
Go take a look at PowerShell. Aside from more verbose commands (for which it has tab auto-complete), it is in most ways superior to bash. I still use bash (yes, even on my Windows box) because learning soemthing new takes time and since I'm not in IT it's rare I need to script anything very low-level or complicated, but PS works quite well.
High petty crime rate and high levels of corruption in business do not necessarily go together, although I'll agree that this is something I'd be less surprised to see out of Kenya than, for example, Switzerland.
Funny, my IE9 install has Flash blocking and Ad blocking.
For Flash, I use the built-in Flash-blocking (site-wide basis, not the fine-grained of Firefox FlashBlock, but c'est la vie). Tools -> Manage Add-ons -> Shockwave Flash Object -> Remove all sites. It will now operate on a whitelist basis, not even loading the plugin until you approve the page. The prompt appears on the Information Bar (at the bottom of the screen).
Too annoying to have the Info Bar, or want to block *all* ActiveX proactively? Tools -> Safety -> ActiveX Filtering. Puts a little blue circle with a line through it in the address bar when content is being blocked. Click the circle, and you can enable or disable the filtering site-by-site.
For blocking ads, you can use the Tracking Protection feature of IE9. I actually use the block-lists from EasyList (the same folks who make the popular block list for ABP) as they have a script that automatically converts their block lists to IE's format, and IE will automatically update the lists if you subscribe to them. I also maintain a custom list on top of the EasyList subscriptions. Again, this can be disabled on a site-by-site basis using the little blue circle, or you can manually whitelist something on your personal list (will override the subscribed lists).
Eh, I ran XP as a standard user. Let me tell you, UAC (even on Vista) was a god-send. After the hell of RunAs (which can only be used on executables; if you wanted to do something like install a .MSI you had to manually elevate msiexec.exe and pass the .MSI as a parameter) I thought Vista's UAC was the best thing since multi-user Windows. I've used NT at least lightly since 4 and first used it primarily with 2000, but mostly as Admin because it was too much of hassle otherwise (sometimes as "Power User" - I'm sure somebody else remembers that group).
Through heavy tweaking of filesystem and registry ACLs, I got most software to run happily as standard user on XP, but you still needed to do RunAs as often as on Vista, and it was way more hassle each time. When Vista came out, I was actually able to reduce the amount of UAC relative to XP's RunAs, partially by applying what I'd learned making XP limited-user tolerable, and partially because I discovered you could force installers to run as standard user (provided they weren't trying to write to the Windows folder or anything like that) so long as there was a user-writable folder to install them into.
That said, Win7 is certainly a big step forward. It seems to have crossed the line of how much UAC the typical user (who has no idea how to reduce its frequency the way I did) is willing to put up with.
High latency is also a probelm for SSL, especially when it's used with protocols that require a lot of handshaking on top of the SSL handshake. I've used satellite links with latency approaching 2 seconds. A non-SSL web page typically started loading within 4 or 5 seconds (use ad-blocking and/or Opera Turbo and get much better performance due to fewer turn-arounds). It might take 15 seconds or more to finish, though, and I don't think that was bandwidth. HTTPS pages took 10 or more seconds to really start loading, and each additional element that was also over SSL took as long again. That was painful. Getting IMAP mail over an SSL connection took most of a minute (if nothing timed out - sometimes it could take several minutes to actually get usable throughput).
Mind you, that was not only satellite, but going halfway around the world (close enough, Nepal to the USA). "Local" satellite link latencies tend to be in the hundreds of miliseconds, but usually not the thousands.
Because the 360's GPU is 6 years old? The flight sim games have always pushed the bounds of GPU capability. While graphics comparisons are a big deal in almost all gaming genres, in simulationist games it's not enough to look pretty; it has to look realistic. The graphics chip on the Xbox 360 probably couldn't even play FS X at reasonable quality (in DX9 mode even, the chip doesn't support DX10 at all), much less its sequel.
The updates always come from Microsoft - they are actually downloaded (transparently, by the Zune software) from the Windows Update site.
However, Microsoft doesn't actually build the full updates themselves. They provide a basic kit that the OEM then customizes for their model - things like adding the required drivers for the hardware and system utiltiies, adding the built-in application packages for those utilities, and adding branding customizations and so forth. They then test those updates, a process which apparently takes weeks. It's a little surprising how long it takes for many updates, considering the simplicity of the customizations which the OEMs are permitted to make.
In theory, it should be a quick process, with the OEMs simply taking Microsoft's kit and sending back the update CAB file. In practice, even for simple updates which have almost no impact on the OEM (see 7392, a security update that revoked some bad root certificates and had no other impact), some phones got it before others. The OEMs can also push updates themselves (which still go through Windows Update) independently of the Microsoft-developed OS updates, or bundle their own updates into the Microsoft ones.
After the OEM signs off on an update, it can go out to open-market phones immediately, or to the mobile operators for a carrier-specific round of customizing and testing. This is where having an "unbranded" phone comes in handy (and, at least for the first significant update, a common tactic was to modify the phone's registry so it reported itself as non-branded and got the update before AT&T approved it).
Umm... IE9 has a built-in feature that works for ad blocking (and for external script blocking, though admittedly without nearly the fine-grained control of NoScript).
EasyList, the guys behind the most popular ad-blocking list for AdBlockPlus, already have a script autopmatically converting all their block lists to IE9's "tracking protection" list format, and it works fine.
When IE9 came out, it actually supported more of the HTML5 draft than any other browser (not a strict superset of all the other browsers, but still more). Care to point out what areas it's missing now? The only things I've seen that were problems ever are:
DOM local storage (coming in IE10, you can try it already).
Websockets (actually are supported, but use an element with a vendor-specific tag since the draft was so very un-finalized at the time - IE10 supports them as expected)
I'm sure there are more; I don't do that much web dev these days. Nonetheless, it's still pretty good, and IE10 should be out within a few months (they've de-coupled it release schedule from Windows).
As for JS performance, WTF? At release, even Chrome could barely beat IE9, and it's only falled a few places in the rankings since then.
As for security features, do you have literally any idea what you're talking about? Here, let's take an example: JIT spraying. Explain to me why it's not important that IE9 has it and many other browsers still don't (such as a work-around that avoids it easily), and I'll accept taht you have some kind of a clue. Otherwise, you're just mindlessly bashing on something you don't even understand. Security mitigations are a *huge* deal, and nobody competent in the field, at MS or otherwise, will tell you differently.
Simple work-around: modify the ACLs on the install directory to allow the normal user to write to it. This can easily be scripted into a .CMD file (evolution of the .BAT script with NT extensions) that first calls the installer (as Admin) and then modifies the install-folder ACLs (as Admin). The program should then work as a standard user.
My folks have a 2+ year old netbook with a single-core Atom and 1GB of RAM. It runs Win7 just fine. The only problem is when they try and run a whole bunch of programs at once, and that wouldn't work any better on XP than on Win7. Those specs will pretty easily cover Win7-s needs - not with a huge margin, but but not borderline either.
You know, the whole "two people who bought..." meme would be a lot funnier in an article that wasn't about how ten thousand tokens for homebrew development sold out in just a few months. Let's break down that 10,000 to get an idea of what it really means, though:
These aren't needed for people who are already developers - they have legit developer accounts, which offer the same access plus submitting to the Marketplace.
These people don't work for Microsoft - developer accounts are free to employees (I interned there and know some people who still work there).
These aren't needed for people who were early adopters - the original ChevronWP7 Unlocker worked just fine for the first few months of after release.
These aren't needed for everyday users - most of them will never have heard of homebrew or have any interest in dev-unlocking their phones.
These aren't needed for LG device owners - their phones ship with a built-in registry editor that can dev-unlock the phones.
These aren't needed for Samsung device owners (anymore) - WindowBreak does the same thing (though it only came out a few weeks ago).
What does that leave:
People who want homebrew, who bought the phone months after release, who don't have developer accounts and aren't MS employees, and who aren't using LG (or now Samsung) phones. Since availability started on 4 Nov 2011 (http://www.chevronwp7.com/post/12328024419/chevronwp7-labs-availability), ten thousand such people have used the service.
What do you mean, locked out of the system? Use WindowBreak, then go install WP7 Root Tools (http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1265321) using the free dev tools for app deployment. You'll have access to almost anything, limited only by what the dev of WP7 Root Tools has implemented so far. There are a handful of other apps out there that will also work, such as from http://touchxperience.com/ and elsewhere on the XDA-Devs WP7 hacking forum (http://forum.xda-developers.com/forumdisplay.php?f=606).
WindowBreak is an easy way to "interop-unlock" a Windows phone. Interop-unlock means you can can install and run apps that call into high-privilege drivers, breaking out of their sandboxes. Immediately, that opens up a lot of potential, but it also means you can run code as TCB (the WP7 equivalent of "root" or "Administrator"). Apps like WP7 Root Tools take advantage of this to enable a wide variety of functionality, though the current version only enables doing so on Samsung phones (the high-privilege drivers being different from each OEM).
Incidentally, there are other ways to interop-unlock other phones. LG phones actually ship with a built-in registry editor that can be used to dev-unlock (install app packages) and interop-unlock (install high-privilege homebrew packages) the phones - there's absolutely no need for ChevronWP7 or the official AppHub account (which does the same thing, plus allowing you to submit apps to the Marketplace). HTC phones (the first-generation ones) can be interop-unlocked if they are already dev-unlocked. Their bootloaders can also be "unlocked" to allow custom updates (modify the current ROM) or full custom ROMs, with most of the latter having excellent support for homebrew (the kinds of changes that WP7 Root Tools can make being applied by default, obviously already being interop-unlocked, and having the ability to install app packages directly from the phone without needing a PC).
Nokia, Dell, and Toshiba/Fujitsu phones do not have known interop-unlocks yet, nor do second-generation HTC phones. People are working on this, though.
An operating system with more market share in its respective segment than Linux has on the desktop/laptop. Just because you don't care doesn't mean nobody does, and certainly doesn't excuse outright falsehoods in the title.
I realize it's fashionable to bash MS and all that, but HTC basically broke into the smrtphone market on WinMo, and while they are mostly known for Android now, they also make some of the better WP7 devices (including the only ones with unlocked bootloaders, although their latest ones appear to be locked).
They claim that the "Windows" and "7" parts are supposed to tie in with the success of Windows 7, while the "Phone" part is supposed to differentiate it. I think this is frankly quite stupid - it leads to more confusion than it does to riding the success of a mostly-unrelated product (they are both OSes, both can be programmed using .NET, and they have similar logos; similarities end there) - but they didn't ask me.
On the other hand, I have to ask if they asked anybody inside the company, either. I've met Microsoft employees who called it "Windows Mobile 7" (wrong, WinMo is discontinued and WP7 is quite different), "Windows 7 Phone" (wrong, it's really nothing like Win7), and even "Windows 7 Mobile" (at which point it was hard not to roll my eyes). If their own employees can't get it right, how the hell is the public expected to?
Hang on, with WP7 the instructions are a little more complex:
1) Don't install the Facebook app in the first place.
2) Don't enable the completely optional built-in Facebook integration.
Facebook makes some things easier, like automatically pulling pictures (and phone numbers, where available) for all your friends, or automatically including your Facebook events in the calendar view. None of what it does can't be done manually, though (and WP7 also supports other social networks, like LinkedIn).
Given your comments about a WinMo6.5 device with a capacitive screen running Android, I'm guessing you have an HD2. Have you tried the WP7 port for it? The hardware is almost identical to the HD7 (a "natively" WP7 device) so the drivers apparently work quite well, and its specs are sufficient. The unlocked bootloader is practically an invitation to port OSes and make custom ROMs for it - I know of at least four major OSes you can run on an HD2, and there are many ROMs - and it's an easy way to try everything without buying more hardware.