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smaragdus wrote:Microsoft kills off independent software vendors by foisting its products on users that are in no way better

Good post, thanks.

Eugene Kaspersky's blog post has consequences- Russia Starts Microsoft Antivirus Investigation After Kaspersky Complaint.

smaragdus wrote:Russia Starts Microsoft Antivirus Investigation After Kaspersky Complaint.

There's a broader move in Russia against Microsoft (and against Western companies in general). We should probably expect that to continue.

More on the thread topic however is how Microsoft appears to be moving away from it's own command-prompt. I suspect it'll stick around in some format, but some of the instructions and how-tos listed here on the site will stop functioning as written.

Microsoft now joined Linux Foundation. So what is its next move? Build portable software?

Might be... we even made a topic discussing that: https://www.portablefreeware.com/forums ... =1&t=23188

smaragdus wrote:Eugene Kaspersky's blog post has consequences- Russia Starts Microsoft Antivirus Investigation After Kaspersky Complaint.

Seems like a sound intelligence gathering strategy. Windows 10, get all the hooks in, lock out Anti-virus competitors and have free reign of every system with your software on it.

Chris Capossela wrote:We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective, but finding the right balance where you’re not stepping over the line of being too aggressive is something we tried and for a lot of the year I think we got it right, but there was one particular moment in particular where, you know, the red X in the dialog box which typically means you cancel didn’t mean cancel

So many jokers in this world...

joby_toss wrote:

Chris Capossela wrote:We know we want people to be running Windows 10 from a security perspective, but finding the right balance where you’re not stepping over the line of being too aggressive is something we tried and for a lot of the year I think we got it right, but there was one particular moment in particular where, you know, the red X in the dialog box which typically means you cancel didn’t mean cancel

So many jokers in this world...

IMO, Microsoft already went too far earlier than that, when they removed the explicit "No thanks" button. It created the illusion that declining the upgrade is not possible.

Microsoft Reduces the Amount of Telemetry Data Collected from Windows 10 PCs

I'm still not sure if a MS account is mandatory or not for being able to change those "security" settings in the near future...

Latest Insider builds allow Windows 10 Pro users to postpone arbitrary updates:

https://www.pcper.com/news/General-Tech ... st-Holiday

Scott Michaud wrote:One feature that might be lauded by our readers is the ability to temporarily pause updates. This one came in on build 15002, and it gives users an option to delay any update that will cause a restart for up to 35 days. Unfortunately for some, this will be restricted to Windows 10 Pro and above, because Microsoft still does not trust that Windows 10 Home users will not ignore updates then complain about how insecure Windows is when a 9-month-old worm hits them.

Some more not-great Windows news:

* Microsoft is crapping on it's own operating system as a means to encourage upgrade. Win 7 "does not meet the requirements of modern technology, nor the high security requirements of IT departments", said Markus Nitschke, head of Windows at Microsoft Germany. (source)

* Gartner doesn't have warm projections for win10 growth.

* There's now a Win10 cloud OS intended to compete with ChromeOS. As it appears to be arm-based, I don't think any of our software will run on it.

I bet that MS envisions a "closed" OS in their future, running only their apps (and maybe apps from devs that buy the right to use their OS)! It might be a distant future, but I'm pretty sure about my feeling...

PCGamesN benchmarked the Game Mode feature (an upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update feature that attempts to improve gaming performance).

The results are highly inconsistent. At best, Game Mode greatly increases frame rate consistency. In particular, in the Rise of the Tomb Raider test, with GameDVR on (simulating background load) and the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060 GPU, minimum FPS was 9 without Game Mode and 33 with it.

However, at worst Game Mode hurts performance instead of improving it.

Dave James wrote: By turning Game Mode on when you’re running the GameDVR feature you’re losing between 13-23% and 9-15% gaming performance on the AMD and Nvidia cards respectively.

That’s a massive drop. A massive, unjustifiable drop. I’d be fine with Game Mode simply failing to work, not boosting frame rates, but when it manages to utterly castrate them I’m definitely not sold.

https://www.pcgamesn.com/microsoft/wind ... erformance