Author Topic: Windows is getting disgusting  (Read 212756 times)

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Offline rdl

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #450 on: August 25, 2016, 02:49:13 pm »
You can't pull out the tin foil hat images if it's true.

I sure can, because while M$ do collect info so do tens of thousands of other companies as soon as you're doing anything on the web. The point is that if you're here, MS is probably the least of your worries. It's just laughable how everybody screams to evil M$ while being completely oblivious to the rest of their surroundings... W10 gave such a good opportunity to point the finger at that people suddenly completely forgot about the rest, even when it's orders of magnitude above.

When I look at it I see that now that they consider users' feedback and how their product is used they're finally fixing things that should have been done long ago - that's the whole point of it.

The big difference is that those "other companies" are somewhere you have to make an active decision to go. It's your choice. Windows 10 is an OS, it's always there snooping into everything on your computer and anything it can access on your local network. It's not under your control. Those "other companies" you visit on the internet do not have the same privileges.
 

Offline Kilrah

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #451 on: August 25, 2016, 02:58:50 pm »
The big difference is that those "other companies" are somewhere you have to make an active decision to go. It's your choice.
Not at all.

Every single click you make online can be (and is) logged, tracked and forwarded to any number of entities anywhere in the world without you having any clue about it nor being able to find the info should you want to. It's not in your control either, unless you don't go online at all. Guess what, if you don't go online at all with W10 it won't supply info either  ^-^
 

Offline suicidaleggroll

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #452 on: August 25, 2016, 03:01:32 pm »
You can't pull out the tin foil hat images if it's true.

I sure can, because while M$ do collect info so do tens of thousands of other companies as soon as you're doing anything on the web. The point is that if you're here, MS is probably the least of your worries. It's just laughable how everybody screams to evil M$ while being completely oblivious to the rest of their surroundings... W10 gave such a good opportunity to point the finger at that people suddenly completely forgot about the rest, even when it's orders of magnitude above.

When I look at it I see that now that they consider users' feedback and how their product is used they're finally fixing things that should have been done long ago - that's the whole point of it.

Not even close to the same thing.  Those companies online don't have root access to your personal computer with loggers recording every keystroke you make, anywhere, for any reason.
 

Offline suicidaleggroll

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #453 on: August 25, 2016, 03:03:21 pm »
The big difference is that those "other companies" are somewhere you have to make an active decision to go. It's your choice.
Not at all.

Every single click you make online can be (and is) logged, tracked and forwarded to any number of entities anywhere in the world without you having any clue about it nor being able to find the info should you want to. It's not in your control either, unless you don't go online at all. Guess what, if you don't go online at all with W10 it won't supply info either  ^-^

There's a huge difference between recording mouse clicks on websites and recording every file you write, every key you press, and every word you speak within range of the microphone on your computer.
 

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #454 on: August 27, 2016, 09:37:10 pm »
My first post using the new PC.

I installed Wireshark and was going to start looking at the packets to control my National Instruments Ethernet GPIB adapters.   I had all the BS crap I thought disabled but the OS keeps making recommendations about some stupid candy ass game it thinks I want to play.   When I fired up Wireshark there was a fair amount of traffic.  See attached for one packet. 

IE was not running, nor was anything else for that matter.  The data in the packet is very strange.

Quote
Most of the time when you go to the hospital its a game of hurry up and wait.  You rush to get the medical attention you need, and then wait for what see....

Doing a search on the phrase I get the following

http://labviewni.com/category/medical/

I was impressed they could target what they thought I may be interested in, even though Explorer was not running.   The IP address they were targeting was 23.220.240.123.   This is not National's but rather seems to be a company called Akamai Technologies.   I started reading on them and ..... wow.   

No wonder MS wanted me to give up XP...

Offline GEuser

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #455 on: August 28, 2016, 12:54:49 am »
 joeqsmith , i have seen that stuff before too , that Akamai has often come up too and a couple of well known others , Norton is another i can think of atm .

Don't expect me to be accurate as this other stuff has been found over the years and on different platforms , quite often (but not lately w7 as i have give up being interested) in the past i have looked deep inside the hard drive with some specific software to see what was poking around of course spending hours and hours doing so , i was amazed at some of the stuff that was found , long rants by someone's? but obviously a programmer and some actually claiming MS or suggesting , stories and generally weird ones too , several back and forth conversations between what looked like insiders? of MS , in some embedded MS files little quotes and snippets of so called wisdom , and some pictures that i know i have never seen on the net or looked at ever , and all in all most was never download by me with my knowledge or seen or ever even known about!

One had to really drill down into the Hard drive as all that stuff was not visible or accessible in a normal way , the machines over the years to me were always "safe" , never had a issue with virus/Trojans and would be deemed relatively clean , yet there was all that useless? stuff just sitting there hidden away .
Soon
 

Offline crispy_tofu

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #456 on: August 28, 2016, 12:28:22 pm »
Personally, I haven't seen any mayor improvements since WinXP. It's mostly just eye candy.
How about Aero Snap (introduced in Vista, where you can snap windows to the sides of the screen or make it full screen)? That's quite useful, although there's pretty much nothing else noteworthy (does anyone even use Aero Shake? ...) ...  :)
The fact it's there, doesn't mean it wasn't possible in WinXP.
There are tons of 3rd party applications who can do all these kinds of things.
That's true, but they're mostly extremely buggy and just don't work as well as the one in Win7 or even Vista... :-\
 

Offline Delta

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #457 on: August 28, 2016, 01:46:38 pm »
Personally, I haven't seen any mayor improvements since WinXP. It's mostly just eye candy.
How about Aero Snap (introduced in Vista, where you can snap windows to the sides of the screen or make it full screen)? That's quite useful, although there's pretty much nothing else noteworthy (does anyone even use Aero Shake? ...) ...  :)
The fact it's there, doesn't mean it wasn't possible in WinXP.
There are tons of 3rd party applications who can do all these kinds of things.
That's true, but they're mostly extremely buggy and just don't work as well as the one in Win7 or even Vista... :-\

Ubuntu MATE did that when I upgraded to it - it was extremely annoying!  Fortunately I was able to disable it...
 

Offline rsjsouza

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #458 on: August 29, 2016, 05:55:33 pm »
I was impressed they could target what they thought I may be interested in, even though Explorer was not running.   The IP address they were targeting was 23.220.240.123.   This is not National's but rather seems to be a company called Akamai Technologies.   I started reading on them and ..... wow.   
Akamai, is a company that you can hire to host files across the world - i.e., if your file server is in one geographical location and you want to speed up file transfers in another part of the world you can hire them and they will allocate server storage, synchronize and reroute any data requests.

I suspect they don't scrutinize what data is being served. Therefore it may be possible that a company whose servers were hacked may automatically synchronize its data in all other servers hosted by Akamai which will fool you into believing they are the ones spewing spyware. Not sure, though.

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Offline crispy_tofu

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #459 on: August 30, 2016, 10:50:46 am »
Dropbox just discontinued support for Windows XP, which is another nail in XP's coffin...  :(
 

Offline dannyf

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #460 on: August 30, 2016, 11:34:55 am »
"There are a million of free CAD programs"

To most people, that would be reason no 1 to not use any of those  "free" programs.
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https://dannyelectronics.wordpress.com/
 

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #461 on: August 31, 2016, 02:00:41 am »
After spending several days working out how to control my PCI board, I was pretty confident that I could pull the plug on the old P4 XP box.  Just needed to do a few simple tasks ... or so I thought. 

How do you take something as simple as email and screw it up??  I use different incoming/outgoing ports for SSL with 3DES.  It appears MS removed the ability to change them. 

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/insider/forum/insider_apps-insider_mail/how-to-set-pop3-and-smtp-server-port-addresses-for/2433a934-08de-4b9f-a1c6-1f2ff60c942d?auth=1

Offline joeqsmith

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #462 on: August 31, 2016, 03:00:02 am »
Managed to get it working...   

So, the servername:port seems to be the correct format.  Appears to require access to the calendar.  Make sure to reset the PC!  I had stored my password for the account and Mail kept asking for it every time I would try a different test.  After the reset, it now seems to know. 

I did not find anything on how to select the algorithm.  It must be smart enough to figure that out....

Now that I can at least send and receive, I notice no more drag and drop for attachments.  Is it really this bad? 

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/apps_windows_10-outlook_mail/windows-10-drop-n-drag-window-mail-attachment/a2ad94f6-c478-461a-81a4-29f9278c2e6c?auth=1

Offline rdl

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #463 on: August 31, 2016, 04:25:18 am »
This person has a good point:

Quote
Microsoft, for God's sake, could you please provide these "engineers" with at least some fundamental instruction? The reason the Windows 10 Mail App doesn't allow drag and drop is because it doesn't possess that capability.

Meantime your "engineer" is on here advising people to take their installation apart bit by bit, costing them I would bet more than an hour of their time, and everything he recommends is wrong. It has to be wrong because THE PROGRAM DOESN'T HAVE DRAG-AND-DROP CAPABILITY! Shame on you.

From what little I've seen, the "help" people get from Microsoft forums is a joke.



 

Offline botcrusher

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #464 on: September 26, 2016, 11:23:07 am »
I tried going on said Microsoft forums to help people I solved a few people's problems, but then some of the powers that be would ignore my perfectly good answer and send users on a wild goose chase. God forbid I once tried to get help I kept getting bounced around things I either already told them clearly that I had tried, or ridiculous solutions that are not related at all

"I have an SSD with no specific driver, the UEFI can boot it, and Linux is happy with it, but I can't for the life of me get windows 10 to even acknowledge It's existence. Just in case, I even ran a round of windows defender and malwarebytes."

"Have you tried the malicious software removal tool?"
 :rant:
 

Offline Cerebus

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #465 on: September 26, 2016, 12:00:15 pm »
I tried going on said Microsoft forums to help people I solved a few people's problems, but then some of the powers that be would ignore my perfectly good answer and send users on a wild goose chase. God forbid I once tried to get help I kept getting bounced around things I either already told them clearly that I had tried, or ridiculous solutions that are not related at all

"I have an SSD with no specific driver, the UEFI can boot it, and Linux is happy with it, but I can't for the life of me get windows 10 to even acknowledge It's existence. Just in case, I even ran a round of windows defender and malwarebytes."

"Have you tried the malicious software removal tool?"
 :rant:

Sounds more like a Turing test with the possible outcomes:

  • Microsoft Nazi Twitter chatbot
  • Trained monkey
  • Microsoft Accredited Technician

I'll grant that a couple of those are almost indistinguishable but the original Turing test was meant to differentiate quite subtle differences.
Anybody got a syringe I can use to squeeze the magic smoke back into this?
 

Offline Howardlong

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #466 on: September 26, 2016, 12:37:34 pm »
I tried going on said Microsoft forums to help people I solved a few people's problems, but then some of the powers that be would ignore my perfectly good answer and send users on a wild goose chase. God forbid I once tried to get help I kept getting bounced around things I either already told them clearly that I had tried, or ridiculous solutions that are not related at all

"I have an SSD with no specific driver, the UEFI can boot it, and Linux is happy with it, but I can't for the life of me get windows 10 to even acknowledge It's existence. Just in case, I even ran a round of windows defender and malwarebytes."

"Have you tried the malicious software removal tool?"
 :rant:

I agree, I had misplaced hope that Microsoft's own employees (or those they subcontract to) would have actually added value on their own community forums rather than just repeat the script of a 12yo to run a random flavour of the month adware removal tool.

The quality of software from Microsoft has definitely taken a dive. If I wanted to spend half my life wondering into and around a maze of deeper and deeper rabbit holes in an OS and ecosystem around it built on quicksand, I'd be running Linux as my preferred daily driver OS. Worse, Microsoft force their updates on you: at least you get a choice with Linux.

I very strongly suspect there is a correlation between Microsoft laying off of testing staff and the drop in quality of their software. Their model of using the Insider Program is misplaced as (a) participants will be unlikely to put the previews on bare metal, so drivers are not going to be properly tested if at all, (b) end users have little visibility of release notes so don't know what to target in testing and (c) the use case for almost all of those on an Insider Program is going to be a fresh install, not an upgrade, which is the use case for a very significant proportion of the real user community.

This is why, for example, stuff like webcams stopped working with Skype or OpenBroadcaster, very few knew of the change to functionality/implementation, or what the impact might have been.

I am spending longer and longer mending Windows nowadays, and frankly I now have quite a bit more sympathy and understanding for those who jump ship to Linux as their daily driver than I did a year or two ago.
 

Offline setq

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #467 on: September 26, 2016, 01:14:47 pm »
That's about it actually. Quality has declined. Not that there was any to start with but as a Windows user for about 24 years now it hasn't got any better. This increases friction and therefore drives up cost and removes hair, which I'm getting short of now. I like hair. It keeps my head warm in winter which is rapidly approaching.

As a 50/50 Linux/Windows guy, the friction is horrible on the windows side of things compared to Linux. Typical example of today's friction: Microsoft's download site is shitting a veritable brick every 5 minutes. So in this case, I've got to deploy build host machines via Ansible from Linux onto Windows. So we use Chocolatey which is a poorly conceived and implemented copy of a Linux package manager to bridge that awful gap in windows, because everything else is Linux. Don't even mention Powershell DSC which is a joke. To install the Windows 7.1 SDK, we tell ansible to tell windows to install it. This navigates an http based protocol (WinRM) to talk to the target windows machine, which fires up a CLR VM with powershell in it, which runs a whole stack of crap that fetches a file from microsoft download site, checksums it and runs an exe with some command line parameters. This in turn pukes out a few hundred MSI files on disk and proceeds to install them. An MSI file is a database with some files in it. Each of these fires up a windows service and talks to it via COM and proceeds to tell that to do things in a privileged execution mode. Eventually it dumps about 100,000 files on disk and screws the registry up for a bit. That is if the following conditions are satisfied: a) the person who maintains the chocolatey definition actually cares any more, b) they haven't issued an update which has screwed up WinRM again, c) microsoft haven't reorganised their download site again, d) various random problems caused by the sheer complexity of the above, e) it hasn't been rebooted since an automatic update we didn't ask for and has been turned off, f) if it errors, someone actually bothers to handle it as every single package installer does something different and surprising.

But alas, no, not today. We're greeted with a checksum failure because Microsoft's download site is just chopping off connections left right and center. This is fed back through the stack of the above as the following: "Error installing windows-sdk-7.1" which is returned as successful because every layer has different error handling semantics.

So off our software goes and builds on this fresh stack of poo and throws because it can't find the SDK dependencies.

So after deciphering logs galore, I hit the download site with firefox and the problem is apparent:



4.5 hours elapsed so far. Each attempt takes around 1 hour to complete when it does work. This is money down the pan. Lots of it. I'm quite expensive as is AWS kit that is sitting there doing diddly squat.

Compared to CentOS "yum groupinstall 'development tools'" and wait 2-3 minutes that works every time, thousands of times over, because of mirroring, engineering and sensible design.

And that's where the quality problems are.

The completely offensive bit is they spend so much money on marketing and being loud to try and drown out the house of cards their products exist on top of and people keep buying that because Ballmer has gone and Satya is the second coming so it's the new Microsoft. Nope. Same turd, different glitter.

I think the general end user, even power users aren't subject to the experience of having these sorts of friction problems being amplified many times over as well by having lots of windows infrastructure to look after. The complexity is O(n!)
« Last Edit: September 26, 2016, 01:19:08 pm by setq »
 

Offline eugenenine

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #468 on: September 26, 2016, 06:57:00 pm »
For me the quality went up through w2k but then started down with XP.  There were several things that worked in w2k that XP couldn't do reliably.  Thats what moved me to linux.
 

Offline Red Squirrel

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #469 on: September 26, 2016, 07:15:34 pm »
I miss win2k, it was my favourite OS.  It was clean looking, fast, fairly lightweight, and functional. It was also quite stable.  When XP came out it was a bloated buggy POS, it took several years and service packs before it became good and not far after that time MS was trying to get people off it.   7 is decent, but 8 and 10 are a joke.    We don't talk about Vista.
 

Offline Howardlong

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #470 on: September 26, 2016, 09:13:33 pm »
Another thumbs up for w2k. Solid, and the first to support hot pluggable hardware. Almost everything since has been largely chrome polishing and irritatingly whifting around the furniture, like supermarkets move their aisles around.

Suffering Windows Server 2012 and 2012 r2 with the Modern UI is frankly pathetic, WTF Microsoft were thinking is beyond me. It's a server, it won't have a frikkin' touch screen. I noticed today the Server 2016 is out.

There are two types of users, content consumers and content creators. For content consumers, where surfing the web and writing the odd minimalist tweet and email, tablets and smart phones are well aligned. Content creators, though, use keyboards and mice and don't appreciate all that high DPI resolution screen real estate taken up with Duplo buttons. That means that trying to shoehorn two fundamentally different generalised use cases into one OS is likely to create a suboptimal compromise, and that pans out in the Windows 8/8.1/10/2012/2012r2 debacle.
 

Offline rdl

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #471 on: September 26, 2016, 09:46:30 pm »
NTFS Permissions.

Words fail me when I try to express how much I truly hate the very existence of this annoying garbage.

Access Denied
You don't have permission
Error. Could not change permissions.
Cannot delete. File is in use by another program.

All from a flash drive with "Everyone" having "Full control" and "Everyone" as the "Owner"

It's an obfuscated, convoluted mess full of contradictions and lies.

 

Offline rrinker

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #472 on: September 26, 2016, 10:05:45 pm »
8.1, and 2012 r2, are quite usable. I can't say the same for 2012 or 8.0. Biggest problem with 2012 is when remoting in to servers, trying to get to exactly the right spot to activate the charms bar - it's bad enough with local control but with the lag introduced via remote control, forget it. 2012 R2, you don't have to do that.

XP was the first time I actually did an upgrade of a Windows OS instead of clean install. Started with Win2K Workstation on that machine. And the XP install (upgrade) worked perfectly as long as I continued to use that machine, never had to do a wipe and reinstall, or any of that silly business people constantly say you need to do with Windows - I've never done that with ANY version of Windows in all the years I've used Windows.

 

Offline Red Squirrel

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #473 on: September 26, 2016, 10:35:11 pm »
NTFS Permissions.

Words fail me when I try to express how much I truly hate the very existence of this annoying garbage.

Access Denied
You don't have permission
Error. Could not change permissions.
Cannot delete. File is in use by another program.

All from a flash drive with "Everyone" having "Full control" and "Everyone" as the "Owner"

It's an obfuscated, convoluted mess full of contradictions and lies.

Honestly that is one of the few things I actually HATE in Linux that I prefer in Windows, the unix file permission system is a POS.  Want to have multiple groups of users with different levels of access to the same folder, want a streamlined set of inheritable permissions so if one user creates a folder/file all the other users have the proper access?  That's not happening in Linux without jumping through some hoops.  There is ACLs, but that's not native, so half the time it won't be supported/installed/enabled etc. So can't rely on that.

A well managed NTFS file structure can be a dream to manage - well managed is key word, it can be a mess too.  The key is to NOT assign users directly to folders, but groups, and avoid breaking inheritance (you don't even GET inheritance in Linux).
 

Offline Monkeh

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Re: Windows is getting disgusting
« Reply #474 on: September 26, 2016, 11:20:04 pm »
(you don't even GET inheritance in Linux).

.. yes, yes you do. That's what setgid is for, and ACLs can have inheritance.

Unix permissions and ACLs are quite powerful, they're just not clicky easy.
« Last Edit: September 26, 2016, 11:21:47 pm by Monkeh »
 


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