Is this some kind of late April Fools joke that I'm too "Linux" to understand?

[james_s]

Most people don't have an IT department, most smaller businesses don't either, people need to be able to use a computer productively without relying on a competent IT department.

As far as needing to keep everything updated for to prevent botnets and such sorry I don't buy it. I would almost believe that was their motivation if they only forced security patches but they force everything. Also for all the hassle they cause, these heavy handed forced updates don't do anything about the attack vector that is by far the most commonly exploited and that is the user. It is incredibly easy to trick the average user into installing something and then it's game over, no way to patch that. Being so heavy handed annoys people into finding ways to disable updating completely. Microsoft bungled this whole thing big time and it's a bit silly the way some people apologize for them and defend these actions. There is NO excuse for this behavior. The customer is ALWAYS right, period.

[bd139]

Actually in IT the customer has a massive dick dangling between their eyes 99% of the time.

The only worse trade for user error is medicine.

[james_s]

That's irrelevant, the customer paid the money, things are done their way, technology must bend to their needs and desires, not the other way around. End of story.

[Buriedcode]

Nazi is a common expression in English for someone who unfairly pushes their own beliefs, values or rules onto others. For example someone who's continuously picking on another person's grammar, may be referred to as a grammar Nazi. It has nothing to do with gassing people, fascism or anti-Semitism.

I've never quite understood that.  Calling someone a "grammar nazi" for correcting someone using incorrect grammar, implies that a "nazi" is someone who does things correctly, which is offensive.  Granted I'm sure they don't actually mean a national socialist, but it's a fine example of the increasing use of hyperbole.  Same with the word "literally" used to add emphasis. I guess I'm one of those grammar people who gets annoyed by the misuse of words.  I'm not proud of it, but I can't help it

[james_s]

I've never quite understood that.  Calling someone a "grammar nazi" for correcting someone using incorrect grammar, implies that a "nazi" is someone who does things correctly, which is offensive.  Granted I'm sure they don't actually mean a national socialist, but it's a fine example of the increasing use of hyperbole.  Same with the word "literally" used to add emphasis. I guess I'm one of those grammar people who gets annoyed by the misuse of words.  I'm not proud of it, but I can't help it

No sense in analyzing a figure of speech too deeply. A nazi is a fascist, a fascist is authoritarian, an authoritarian is someone who tells people what to do and how to do them. It's common to refer to someone who is overly bossy/rude as being a nazi, it's just an expression, I'm sure there are expressions in every culture/language that don't make a lot of logical sense under scrutiny. Yes it annoys me too when people use poor grammar, so what? It's not that big of a deal.

[ElectronicSupersonic]

Let me throw in a HIGHEST GRADE HARDCORE TIN FOIL HAT conspiracy theory in here. 

Microsoft has its agent undercover in some of most popular Linux distributions development teams to f...k 'em up good and proper in order to discredit (Linux OS) ant thus eliminate a competitor. Such a "theory" may come to mind seeing how poorly done some Linux distros are.

[bd139]

That's irrelevant, the customer paid the money, things are done their way, technology must bend to their needs and desires, not the other way around. End of story.

Nope. You meet in the middle or fail.

[apis]

If it was a healthy free market then it would be true and prices would reflect production prices. But since MS have a monopoly they set the rules and can charge whatever people are willing to pay. If someone had a monopoly of food they could serve people maggots and charge an arm and a leg for it.

[blacksheeplogic]

That's irrelevant, the customer paid the money, things are done their way, technology must bend to their needs and desires, not the other way around. End of story.

Nope, they abide by the terms of the sale/contract & licenses. They only get to chose BEFORE the purchase not after.

[james_s]

That's irrelevant, the customer paid the money, things are done their way, technology must bend to their needs and desires, not the other way around. End of story.

Nope, they abide by the terms of the sale/contract & licenses. They only get to chose BEFORE the purchase not after.

Yes, so? Where did I say otherwise? This is precisely what I did. When Win10 was offered I said no, MS kept pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing and I kept saying NO, and today I'm still saying NO. I am the customer, I demand that the product be flexible enough to meet my needs or I don't use it, simple as that, and unlike in the past there are other viable options today. Win10 does not meet my needs and as long as MS continues to put their needs before my own, I will not purchase it, period. The presumptuous condescending attitude and hubris angers me more than any specific fault in the software of which there are many. 

[james_s]

Nope. You meet in the middle or fail.

Nope, I get my way or no deal, period. Win7 works almost exactly the way I like it to, with a few tweaks it's a fantastic OS. Linux is very close to meeting all my needs and is also extremely flexible, I can tweak it just the way I like. There's no meeting in the middle, my needs are the only thing that matters, a company wishing to have some of my money can deliver something that meets my needs or no deal, how they work that around their business model is their problem not mine. I'm the guy with the money and I'm under no obligation whatsoever to give them any.

[bd139]

You have to meet Linux in the middle too.  I'm sitting here on a xubuntu box for ref. Watch what happens when you have weird VPNs, platform specific software, laptop power management. I had to compromise on those in the end.

You can't bulldoze your way through - it's a life of pain. I did it for 10 years until I realised I was an idiot.

[soldar]

If it was a healthy free market then it would be true and prices would reflect production prices. But since MS have a monopoly they set the rules and can charge whatever people are willing to pay.

You know, 15 or 20 years ago I would have been more sympathetic to that opinion but I do not think anyone can say MS has a monopoly in the sense that there are no other options. They may have a huge segment of the market but that does not necessarily make it a monopoly.

Twenty years ago everybody was talking about how MS had a dominant position that it was impossible to have any hope of competing with them because they were so big they would just crush you. Then Google came along and made a ton of money and with that money made Android and Android and iPhone crushed Windows mobile which never really was a serious competitor. Now there are more devices using Android than using Windows. Now, they are different OSs for different devices but in a way they compete because many people are doing on their mobile devices what they would have been doing on a computer years ago.

If anybody today is "the monopoly" it's Google and not MS.

Linux could be a competitor for the desktop OS market if Linux itself was not so divided. The good thing about Linux is that anybody can change it to suit their needs and that is also its weakness. It is too divided and every edition is half baked. It is not that Windows is better than Linux, it is that Linux is not even trying. If there was more of an effort to standardize, develop and promote Linux I think it could very well be serious competition to MS.

Apple certainly has a segment of the market.  So I do not think we can properly say MS has a monopoly. I also think MS weight in this general market is diminishing and MS has already seen its best days. They will have to reinvent themselves (something they have done successfully several times in their history) or shrink into oblivion.

There were companies like Kodak, IBM, Nokia, Sears Roebuck, etc. which seemed to be invulnerable in their time but all declined, maybe not necessarily because some competitor offered the same product but because the market had moved on to other things.

[mnementh]

I had to tell Windows 10 to piss off 3 times in a two hour period just this afternoon. It doesn't matter what you tell it. So when I finally was done doing what I was doing, I went ahead and told it to do it's stupid update and reboot. Interesting, it only took a couple seconds and was rebooted. What's really annoying is trying to figure out what you need to go back and fix because W10 definitely reverts changes you make. 

Yeah... I've gotten in the habit of running ShutUp10 every week or two now, just to see what datamining they've turned back on. This (and a few other bits of maintenance) is the price of not having paid for an OS upgrade since I dumped XP/64-bit back in the ought-somethings for Win7. 

You guys whining about this seem to have completely missed the mark. You all bitched and moaned about what previous versions of Winblows COST; either in cash outright or in revenue-generating bloatware. Their new business model, since they are now a "cloud company", is the datamining everybody takes for granted with Chrome & Furkbook. The only difference is they cut out the middleman.

Win10 is NOT Enterprise-class or even especially reliable software; it is trialware pure and simple to keep the great "something-for-nothing" masses who EXPECT Windows to come with their new PC hooked on the M$ ecosystem. If you look at it any other way you are yourself at fault. It is the loss-leader they produce to keep their Enterprise-class offerings and cloud services relevant.

Meanwhile, they pioneer VR and Visual Recognition to the tune of millions in R&D, then hand out the Kinect and AR APIs for anybody to use just to get somebody creative to write something... ANYTHING... using this stuff... and everybody's so effing afraid of the big bad wolf they let it all flush down the drain until Furkbook buys out Oculus and turns one of the visionary products of VR into a fucking 4chan chatroom. 

I've never cared much for the heavy-handed business tactics MS uses; but I wouldn't be in their shoes for all the bits in China. Just by dint of what they represent, no matter WHAT THEY DO there's going to be a huge segment of either the general public or the tech republic that are outraged. 

No wonder they've adopted an attitude of: "Fuck 'em if they can't take a joke... and fuck 'em if they can take a joke. Just fuck 'em."

mnem


Grammer Police