Windows 10 EULA: Microsoft can killswitch your unauthorized hardware and pirate games

[WearySky]

[shaddack]

It’s already happening with The Cloud. Tie too much to The Cloud, and you’re on the mercy of the cloud operator to not revoke your account.

Then you get an uphill battle with the Customer Support.

[Mausium]

You don’t need cloud services to use Windows 10, thankfully.

[shaddack]

Yet. The trend is spreading. Everything for rent, everything for remote access, no actual power left to the users themselves.

[Jehovazilla]

@popobawa4u

Not as daunting as people who feel entitled to simply buy and use things without knowing how they work. It lowers the bar of curiosity and personal responsibility. I am as egalitarian as they come, but if people refuse to put in the effort to learn and use their systems, then it (computer) is not for them.

A part of me really agrees with this, but a part of me really doesn’t. As a geek, I do highly value having at least baseline knowledge of the things I use (from computers, to cars, to toasters). But on the other hand I think there is a fair bit of elitism in expecting the same from everyone. There also is a bit of a cultural lens here, I grew up with personal computers, I HAD to know how they work in order to use them. But if I give a computer to a kid now, that knowledge isn’t necessary. You can boot up Windows/OS X, and compute away just fine. Not a command line, or “load “program”, 8, 1” in sight. I would argue it should be this way, not everyone wants to be a casual geek, much less an engineer.

@popobawa4u

The other option is to have computers be simply an appliance, administrated remotely by benevolent dictators who you don’t quite trust.

I think there is a middle ground. Microsoft’s spyware isn’t there to make the computer more useful for people who don’t understand computers, its only there to benefit Microsoft. Computers were non-tech people friendly before iOS walled gardens, sanctioned spyware, or ubiquitous cloud mumbojumbo. You being a product, and user friendly are different things. We need something as robust as OS X, Windows, or Linux, but as simple as OS X or Windows, without the corporate overlord.

[daneel]

More money in selling your data to advertisers repeatedly than a one-off sale of an OS to you.

I doubt that a price high enough to offset that exists where people would pay it.

[Mausium]

It’s not, though. Integration of services you don’t need, none of those features are essential. They’re all opt-in.

I’ll be worried when the software stops being available outside of SAAS but not otherwise.

[ItoKagehisa]

@Jehovazilla

There is no middle ground. If push came to shove, I could be back running my favorite flavor of Linux in a weekend, with some growing pains (Lightroom, gaming, a music player that doesn’t completely suck), but is this true for my parents? Or people like my girlfriend who just want an “information-toaster” that’s compatible with everything she needs to throw at it, and doesn’t give two shits about nerdy-computer-stuff, or dipping into CLI, repositories, or permissions?

I second the recommendation of linux mint. Ubuntu failed at the exact, precise moment that the default location for window management buttons moved from the top right to top left. It’s been steadily downhill from that millisecond forward. However, for your girlfriend you’d probably be best off purchasing a pre-loaded linux laptop.

You’ll be happy to know that there are several music players that don’t suck at this point, although some of them (the Squeeze suite that Logitech nearly ruined, for example) have significant barriers to entry. Debian derivatives like Mint and Ubuntu typically have a decent selection of music players that work as painlessly as anything MS or Apple sells, right out of the box. (And usually they’ll support .FLAC natively, which is awesome.)

@shaddack

It has a major plus - config files are editable plaintext, and there is no monstrosity like the Registry.

Unfortunately this is no longer true. Samba has a registry, and so do quite a few other programs (although I think only the Samba Team is honest enough to say so flat out). FreeIPA (which Red Hat is NOT willing to admit exists to be an AD stand-in) has internal config in the db. Even those programs that do have editable configs are more and more often titanic hairballs of badly designed and poorly parsed XML.

There are still great linuxes out there, but there are also lots of crappy ones. Some of them are actually worse than the better BSDs! It’s easier for most people to just give up and buy Windows or Mac.

[Jehovazilla]

@ItoKagehisa

Ubuntu failed at the exact, precise moment that the default location for window management buttons moved from the top right to top left.

I remember that hubub very well. It was back when I still frequented Slashdot, and it was as if the actual apocalypse happened. Though, to be honest, you could still move them back, so it wasn’t that big of a big deal (I using OS X as well, at the time, so it made my life a bit easier since I generally switched the controls anyway). To me Ubuntu died with Unity, but the symptoms were bundling services and having deals with Amazon. I think it was Amazon, it could have been something Dumb like Yahoo (take that Firefox, switching my search provider to Yahoo without my permission) Unity was the definition of egotistical software, especially since it was basically incomplete beta software when they decided to use it replace Gnome. Granted, it WAS better than Gnome 3 or Gnome Shell, or whatever mobilized crap Gnome wanted me to use, which was also incomplete beta software that was used to replace a perfectly useful, mature bit of software. Reinventing the wheel.

In my house… I’m not buying preloaded anything, to be honest. I will drink too much beer, swear at lot, and install my own choice of distro on her computer rolling in whatever features seem the best.

As for music players, a year or so ago I tried pretty much every music player for Gnome and KDE, and… they all choked badly on my library of over 8k tracks. The better of them required about a day of set up to get the interface nice, and to remove features that, to me, were kruft. Many of them wanted me to go back to the days of WinAmp. And not of them were as good as iTunes (which sucks. A lot), much less something like MusicBee.

[caze]

As long as their corporate customers keep requiring a separation here you’ll never see them requiring cloud services, and I can’t see that happening any time soon.

[TobinL]

@caze

As long as their corporate customers keep requiring a separation

As someone who works in that environment what I see happening is still the cloud services just instead of using MSFT for Office365 directly you will be using it on the internal company version. But yeah it is not done by outside vendors for a plethora of regulatory and security reasons which is why I always go WTF at the whole bring your own device fad cause at least where I work security would have conniptions over that.

[ItoKagehisa]

I have over 7K tracks in FLAC format, losslessly ripped from CD or digitized from cassette tape, all simultaneously available through samba/netBEUI, DNLA, and squeezeserver*. I haven’t had any problems playing from my music library with any recent linux distros, but maybe there’s a hidden tripwire somewhere between your 8K+ and my 7K+.

* I no longer support Appletalk. But I have uploaded to Google’s music app!

[Jehovazilla]

Again, this could be better now, its been a year or two since I tried. But I ran the gamut of music players in KDE and Gnome, and either they couldn’t handle the library without chugging, or they were so user-unfriendly that they weren’t worth my time. To me a music player is about getting the hell out of my way and letting me listen to music. I don’t want to bother with grooming my directory structure, I don’t care about lyrics, pictures, concert tickets. I want basically iTunes (as of 2-6 years ago), without the bloat, bugs, and Apple. Its annoying, since even iTunes killed itself, I could live with the fact that 80% of its installed weight expected me to have every iDevice in the universe, but then they killed Party Shuffle (I loved that feature), and then made it harder to focus on just music and not movies/rentals/podcasts/toaster sales. Musicbee is close, but still full of crap I don’t want or need, and requires far too much set up, out of the box. On Linux, though, nothing is really close to MusicBee. Songbird was okay, but then they killed it.

[Daaksyde]

@Jehovazilla

Why the heck isn’t Linux there yet? […] Linux has been “getting there” for 20 years now, and it still has major gaps in programs that normal people want, while having a surplus of technical tools for programmers, scientists, and power-using nerds.

I’ve known a couple of non-technical people who actually tried linux and initially greatly preferred it because it’s cleaner, faster, and easier to use. But they ultimately switched back to Windows. Typically because games or other software aren’t available and/or it’s just generally so much harder to install things on Linux. Instead of ‘search web, download installer, double-click’, they have to learn package managers, several dependency managers, tar, make, and build commands, various programming and scripting languages, how to edit invisible config files with vi or emacs, etc.

Some linux programs still have instructions like ‘pipe this file to your favorite pager’ (which baffles normal people who haven’t used a beeper since the early 90’s (if ever) and wouldn’t know where to begin using plumbing to hook one up to their computer (PVC or copper pipe?) or why that would be needed). Worse are programs that depend on a library that requires python 2.x but is incompatible with 3.x while somehow also dependent on a python 3.x framework that is incompatible with 2.x; or those that require editing the C header files and recompiling because your directory structure is different than that of the original developer…

Sure, you can say “just stick to what’s in synaptic and pretend that’s the only software that exists in the world”. But they want something that’s not there and end up frustrated, trying to get obscure laptop drivers to work with Wine and/or setup VMs and emulators, then just switch back to Windows where they can simply install anything with a couple of clicks.

It might get easier, since people are becoming accustomed to being locked into walled-garden app stores. Linux package managers are functionally the same. But they don’t have all the proprietary software that people want. That’s a major hurdle for non-technicals.

[coherent_light]

“Windows 10: Let the Darkness In”