[OT] Microsoft now auto-downloading Windows 10 onto windows 7 machines

(I find it hard to believe that even MS could be that stupid

It's being compared with the Apple/U2 thing. I've got Windows Update disabled for the next little bit, till all this Dr. Evil crap gets sorted out.

Microsoft is going back to its central expertise, namely strong-arm tactics based on market dominance. This time they're doing it directly to the end users, though, whereas it used to be just the big customers.

It's a desperation move. I predict it will not end well for them.

Visual Studio 2010 on XP works fine, and seems to predate all this stuff. Download yours while you can!

The idea of renting an OS for a machine I paid for does not compute.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

That's probably the safest short term solution and what I've been recommending to my customers. There's about 11 more months for users to upgrade for free, which is a very long time in computah biz. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for Microsoft to issue a statement or even recognize that there's a problem.

Maybe. I see it a bit differently. Microsoft's biggest customer is the government. The government could easily switch to Apple, Google Cloud, or Open Source if it were so inclined and had a good reason. My guess(tm) is the MS was given the choice of either complying with the governments unstated demands, or lose their biggest customer. As an added bonus, I'm sure they reminded MS of the Justice Department anti-trust suite of 2001, which was really just a remind that MS should contribute its fair share of its profits to various political campaigns, but got out of hand when Bill Gates refused to cave in and comply. I'm sure the present MS regime doesn't want a repetition of that fiasco. Of course, I have no proof of any of this, but it does sound rather good at parties and gatherings.

It does compute if you want to eliminate most of the IT department and consider a computer more of a throw away device, than a long term investment. I would have little difficulty producing a comparison between throw away machines, running pay as you go software, in a cloud computing environment, compared to the currently convention ownership model, where you pay for almost everything at the front end. While retro-computing may be functional and cost effective at this time, I can only speculate what might happen should MS decide to break every link with their past.

The easiest example of how it works is the comparison between Office

2013 and Office 365. Office 365 can be installed on 5 machines. If you have 5 machines of any type (tablet, desktop, laptop, phone, etc), the price for each machine is about $20/year. Meanwhile, Home and Student is $140 and should last about 5 to 7 years before it become bit rot sets in: At an optimistic 7 years, that's the same $20/year per machine as Office 365. So, if you plan to keep your machine more than 7 years, then Office Home and Student is the least expensive (ignoring time value of money). However, if you have 5 machines and rotate computers like clothes, Office 365 is cheaper.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

Assuming your own data is without value. Mine is more important than that, and of course Open/Libre/whatever Office is free.

(Myself, I use LaTeX.)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

Have you ever seen the government do *anything* in IT easily? Please note the health care fiasco. And don't forget the recent break-in and theft of government data.

Hillary set up her email server without too much trouble.

MS and accomplices don't want your clients valuable data. They want to know what you've been buying, doing, selling, using, etc so that they can sell you more of the same. Google, Facebook, and such have been sifting though your browsing for years. Microsoft just wants to join the fun. While there's a chance that they may get some of your proprietary information that might be under NDA or contract, it's probably not intentional, which of course doesn't help you explain the security breach to the client. I'm lazy and just encrypt the stuff I don't want leaking. Mostly, I use TrueCrypt, which has unfortunately been abandoned by its mysterious developers. There are other encryption programs.

What bugs me is that with all the snooping, sniffing, tracking, monitoring, telemetry, and spying, the various advertisers still can't figure out what I would be interested in buying. The ads that appear on almost every web page are well off the mark. When I actually buy something, there's invariably an advert trying to sell me something similar or identical, which makes no sense since I just bought one and am unlikely to need another. I'm seriously wondering if any of this spying is really effective at selling products.

I previously used Nroff, Troff, and Groff. I haven't done that for many years and am not sure I remember all the dot commands. I've never tried LaTex. I still use vi (or vedit) when on Unix/Linux boxes. These days, for formatting documents, I use whatever word processor icon I find first on my messy desktop. It's usually Wordpad.

I just fix computahs, I don't use them (much).

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

No, they haven't. See e.g. DuckDuckGo, IXquick, StartPage, etc. I'm not on social media. I also use VPNs, which helps as long as your browser isn't too easily fingerprinted.

Not so. Their new EULA specifically says that they can look at _anything_ on your hard disk, and disclose it to anyone, if they think it's 'necessary'. The others just look at what you explicitly send using their services. That difference is enough to give spooks wet dreams.

Good luck with that, if the OS is sending it all off somewhere while you're logged in.

Talk about luxury problems.

I'm happy that that works for you. It isn't very suitable for things with lots of equations.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 

160 North State Road #203 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

hobbs at electrooptical dot net 
http://electrooptical.net

My favorite government IT fiasco was the handling of the FBI virtual case file mess: In my never humble opinion, the real reason for the multiple failures is that every contractor, sub-contractor, and supplier was first and formost dedicated to insuring that the system would be highly proprietry thus guaranteeing their revenue stream in perpetuity. Obviously, if the system worked on initial delivery, there would be no further need for their services. Making something that actually functioned was probably last or not on their agendas.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558

On Fri, 11 Sep 2015 19:19:53 -0400, Phil Hobbs Gave us:

Then it is Mozilla doing it and Google, because I have been FOOLy profiled and get directed SPAM all the time.

I got an L-Com catalog the other day in the mail and haven't bought anything from them in years. The place I worked at, yes. But me personally, no.

Search a few things up on ebay or amazon or google, and the cockroaches come out of the woodwork to crawl all over you in your sleep, just like an NYC apartment.