Suspicion and Anger Towards Microsoft Rises After Windows 10 Search Failure (forbes.com) 173
Earlier this week, searching in Windows 10 was broken, "with a black bar showing where search results should be, even for those who tried to perform a local search of their files." Microsoft issued a fix and blamed the issue on a "third-party networking fiber provider".
But unfortunately, Microsoft's fix isn't working for everyone -- and that's just the beginning. Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shares Forbes' report: Second, and more worryingly, Microsoft's explanation doesn't add up and it has prompted serious questions to be asked about how the operating system works and what personal data it is sharing. Popular Microsoft pundit Woody Leonard led the charge, writing: "If you believe that yesterday's worldwide crash of Windows 10 Search was caused by a bad third-party fiber provider, I have a bridge to sell you."
In an open letter to new Windows head Panos Panay, Susan 'Patch Lady' Bradley was similarly sceptical, noting that today "we all found out that our local search boxes are somehow dependent on some service working at Microsoft." She attacked the company for a lack of transparency and gave it a maximum 'Pinocchio score' for a lack of trust... Similarly, Engadget writer Richard Lawler revealed that users were now trying to hack the Windows 10 registry to disconnect their local file searches from Microsoft servers "and I can't say I blame them after this episode. Microsoft owes users a better explanation than this and should make sure it's impossible for offline features to get taken out when the cloud is having an issue."
In fact, Forbes writes that "the aforementioned Windows 10 registry hack appears to be the only 100% fix for this issue and it also disconnects Bing and Cortana online services from Windows 10 search."
And then on Saturday the Windows Latest blog also noticed that Microsoft's release notes for Windows 10 20H1 Build 19035 reveal that Microsoft is apparently now delaying the roll-out of a widely-anticipated "Optional Updates" option. "It appears that the new Optional updates experience will come out in October/November 2020, not this spring as previously planned."
But unfortunately, Microsoft's fix isn't working for everyone -- and that's just the beginning. Long-time Slashdot reader Futurepower(R) shares Forbes' report: Second, and more worryingly, Microsoft's explanation doesn't add up and it has prompted serious questions to be asked about how the operating system works and what personal data it is sharing. Popular Microsoft pundit Woody Leonard led the charge, writing: "If you believe that yesterday's worldwide crash of Windows 10 Search was caused by a bad third-party fiber provider, I have a bridge to sell you."
In an open letter to new Windows head Panos Panay, Susan 'Patch Lady' Bradley was similarly sceptical, noting that today "we all found out that our local search boxes are somehow dependent on some service working at Microsoft." She attacked the company for a lack of transparency and gave it a maximum 'Pinocchio score' for a lack of trust... Similarly, Engadget writer Richard Lawler revealed that users were now trying to hack the Windows 10 registry to disconnect their local file searches from Microsoft servers "and I can't say I blame them after this episode. Microsoft owes users a better explanation than this and should make sure it's impossible for offline features to get taken out when the cloud is having an issue."
In fact, Forbes writes that "the aforementioned Windows 10 registry hack appears to be the only 100% fix for this issue and it also disconnects Bing and Cortana online services from Windows 10 search."
And then on Saturday the Windows Latest blog also noticed that Microsoft's release notes for Windows 10 20H1 Build 19035 reveal that Microsoft is apparently now delaying the roll-out of a widely-anticipated "Optional Updates" option. "It appears that the new Optional updates experience will come out in October/November 2020, not this spring as previously planned."
Offline (Score:5, Insightful)
What happens the day your OWN internet connection is down and you need to do a search for something locally?
Is Windows 10 really just a dumb terminal to a bunch of services running on the internet, because it's certainly starting to sound that way.
Re:Offline (Score:5, Informative)
Windows search works fine offline. Even Microsoft isn't dumb enough to break common use cases like laptops on a plane.
The problem is when it's online and it fetches some bad data from the server. Apparently a timeout because the server is down kills your local search results too.
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& MS didn't test this scenario? :(
Re:Offline (Score:5, Interesting)
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This kind of thing will happen more often as storage and services move to the Cloud. There used to be a clear demarcation line between local and remote files, but companies seem intent on erasing that line altogether. The fact that bad server data could cause a local search to fail, is just a symptom of the drive to turn consumers' devices into dumb terminals. Corporations want to be the gatekeepers, and therefore the controllers, of all of everyone's data and computing power.
Microsoft forced Windows 10 on
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Not gatekeepers. Tollbridge operators. $10 a day if you'd like to cross the 'net and visit your data.
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What happens the day your OWN internet connection is down and you need to do a search for something locally?
Everything keeps working. Windows works just fine without internet and detects the presence of internet connections quite frequently. The problem here was that everything worked except for one service.
Re:Offline (Score:5, Funny)
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Uh, I use it, but once loaded, it has NEVER been back on a network since.
That is the ONLY way I can guarantee up time, security and lack of interference in my work.
My GUESS is that eventually Windows will be programmed to come up with a dialog box that says something like
"Jim, you can't stay away from us for so long. You must reconnect to the internet within 1 hour or your hard drive will self destruct."
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I should have said " ... Once I loaded Windows 7, ..."
I have never trusted Windows, period. I only use it for a key program that ONLY runs on Windows, or I would not use it at all.
I have wondered whether Windows running in Parallels on a Mac keeps track of Mac OS use. But I don't use Parallels, so I'm not going to work to find out.
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You've been warned long enough: don't use that OS.
It's a good thing major Linux distros would never send your searches to their servers for mysterious and creepy reasons, right?
Wait, what's that you're saying [fsf.org] RMS?
Ubuntu, a widely used and influential GNU/Linux distribution, has installed surveillance code. When the user searches her own local files for a string using the Ubuntu desktop, Ubuntu sends that string to one of Canonical's servers. (Canonical is the company that develops Ubuntu.)
This is just like the first surveillance practice I learned about in Windows. My late friend Fravia told me that when he searched for a string in the files of his Windows system, it sent a packet to some server, which was detected by his firewall. Given that first example I paid attention and learned about the propensity of "reputable" proprietary software to be malware. Perhaps it is no coincidence that Ubuntu sends the same information.
Maybe hcs_$reboot you learned the wrong lesson here. Just maybe?
Unlike Windows users... (Score:3, Informative)
Unlike Windows users the Linux community have ample alternative distros, granular control over their machines, the source code to their OS and freedom to fork.
MSFT are simply evil and their supporters delusional. shills, or delusional shills. Never defend them.
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Sorry, I like being productive at work. Been using MS products for that reason since DOS 4.
Linux used to have an 8% share of the desktop market, now it's only 3%. Why is that?
Translation: I can't be productive at work without using a handful of applications that only run on Windows (well, some of them run on MacOS, but not all), and I don't really have a choice because that's all IT supports, so I've learned to eat Microsoft's shit and tell people it tastes great.
What a person needs to be "productive at work" varies greatly from one individual to the next. For desk jockeys that spend most of their time in Excel or Word, Windows is the obvious default (and MacOS fills the bill qu
Re:Offline (Score:4, Insightful)
Nahh, it's more like this. You little shitheads wont let us spy on all your searches via BING, fine, fuck you, we will spy on all your searches via the operating system and fuck you and your privacy. It looks that bad, seriously Windows anal probe 10, your privacy their property to be sold and traded as they wish and fuck you very much.
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Re:Offline (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really, no.
Re:Offline (Score:5, Informative)
You should watch the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley [wikipedia.org].
Apple thought they'd plundered Xerox PARC, (in `79) but as Bill Gates said in the movie: "We got there first, Steve, we stole it first!"
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Ummm ... maybe, but Steve did a much better job of presenting the results. Got it right the first time, not after 3.1 attempts.
Dumb people (Score:5, Funny)
How can you implement an algorithm for searching files without an Internet connection? It ain't possible. To search a file, you first need to upload the file to the Cloud, have a cloud microservice perform the search and then send the result back to the local file. Stupid Boomers!
Re:Dumb people (Score:5, Funny)
You sound like an experienced Node programmer.
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Stupid Boomers!
You mean the same people who designed UN*X systems that do not have this issue ? Or the 'original cloud' which was renting out one mainframe processing/disk/'network' to many clients ? That has since been replaced by the 'cloud' ?
Those systems were far more stable than anything now. You are pointing your finger at the wrong group of people, try pointing a Wall Street instead
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renting out one mainframe processing/disk/'network' to many clients
And charging for CPU clock ticks. Yeah, I remember the bad old days... the PC was supposed to get us around exactly that. Put the CPU in the hands of multiple users, you pay for and own the machine, and you no longer have to worry about cost per CPU cycle. And somehow we're coming full circle again. Everything old is new, and the big boys want their damned rental income back.
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You did get that they were making a joke, right?
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I've found that, if you can put up with a bit of badinage, Linux support via distro fora is far more helpful than anything provided by MS. MS support is via the "community" and is dominated by what apparently are bots that produce essentially the same answer to every question: delete everything that isn't MS, reboot, reinstall Windows. If you can guess where "service bulletins" are published about specific things, the information can be useful, but there seems to be no organized way of finding them.
This story is weird. (Score:5, Insightful)
A lot of people are all upset over things that seemed like "givens." Windows 10 has a widely-promulgated reputation for spying on users. Microsoft's ability to do so is spelled out very clearly in the EULA.
People are surprised that local search has a phone-home dependency. Maybe that specific fact hasn't been widely promulgated, but is seems completely unsurprising. "But wait, I didn't know you shared THAT!" This surprise makes no sense. Windows 10 watches your every move. That is one of its primary functions. The occasional feature that breaks when its on-line dependencies break should be taken as par to the course. It's just another bug, and Microsoft will fix it, then things will get back to normal.
I realize that not everyone is a technician so not everyone can connect the dots here....but really....being surprised to learn that Windows 10 shares your data with Microsoft is like being surprised that people drive fast on the Autobahn.
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Re:This story is weird. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, I'm unclear why anyone would be baffled by this. Win10 is clearly a cloud-based, SAS platform which delvers ads for non-enterprise users.
Consumers just rolled over and took it, in part because Apple out-priced a sizable percentage of the population, and Google snagged the bottom third or so with their equally bad Chromebook. Unless you know Linux exists, you're SOL.
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So it's official that FreeBSD is dead?
Re:This story is weird. (Score:4, Funny)
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Yep. You can get a Ubuntu computer from Dell. Can you do that with FreeBSD?
I was talking about consumers here, not nerds.
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This search "bug" also affected enterprise users.
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Even if you actually do know Linux exists, it's very unlikely that after experiencing abuse from all other sides the typical user would have any patience or good faith left to try it.
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Yeah, I'm unclear why anyone would be baffled by this.
Because it works perfectly fine offline. Disable the wifi on your laptop and try it, you can still use Windows Search no problem. In fact it's better because it doesn't give you all the Bing bullshit, just your local stuff.
So it came as a bit of a shock when Microsoft had an apparent network issue and it broke. You would expect it to notice that the server was unavailable or sending bad data and simply go into offline mode, but instead it gives you a black bar and no results.
The secondary issue is that even
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I'm trying to come up with a use case where the 20+ year old functionality of windows search being LOCAL, and only LOCAL would in any way, shape or form be improved by firing up a third rate, has been search engine.
Really shouldn't need to hack the registry, or install a third party tool to have search function the way it has for literally decades. If a shill/employee of MS is reading this:
If I wanted to do a web search, i'd open up a browser (And no, it more than likely wouldn't be Edge. Stop it. Edge is
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> Consumers just rolled over and took it
Did we?
Remember back in 2015 or so when Microsoft was literally forcing people to upgrade by downloading Win10 onto their machines without telling them or asking first?
Remember when they were literally giving Win10 away for free?
Remember when they stopped fully supporting modern CPUs, making it impossible to install older versions of Windows on new hardware without hacks?
Remember when what feels like every manufacturer on the planet just stopped publishing drivers
Happy with Windows 7 (Score:3)
Re:Happy with Windows 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
We're running Windows 7, and I'm terrified about giving up all of that control and moving to Windows 10.
Just move to Linux. If you're still on Windows 7 this late in the game, then there's a good chance Wine will run everything you need.
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If you're still on Windows 7 this late in the game, then there's a good chance Wine will run everything you need.
Sadly, it is still far from a 100% chance. Plenty of high-end business software -- the kind of thing with obnoxious licence management that you have to buy through authorised resellers and get it locked to X, Y or Z properties of your PC/network/company -- isn't going to play nicely with Wine. And with the increasing use of online and open source software, it's not unlikely that something like that would be the main thing forcing a business to stay on Windows in the first place.
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We'd happily move to open source, but there's no open source application that (even remotely) meets our needs, unfortunately.
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Wine doesn't run shit except the most basic programs and decade old games. Go ahead and try and run something big like AutoCAD or Pro/E it won't work.
Re: Happy with Windows 7 (Score:2)
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And you're right, Autocad isn't a common use case. But it's a standard example. There are hundreds or thousands of different specialized applications that a business might be using, and saying "They'll probably run on Linux" is ... well, you certainly need to test, but the way to bet is that they're incompatible.
That said, there's lots of Linux stuff that won't run on MSWindows, also. Different use cases. (This is probably why MS was/is building a Linux subsystem for MSWindows.)
But most Linux software i
Linux (Score:3)
>> I'm terrified about giving up all of that control and moving to Windows 10.
Don't be terrified. Move to Linux.
Here it is again ... (Score:5, Informative)
Forbes writes that "the aforementioned Windows 10 registry hack appears to be the only 100% fix for this issue and it also disconnects Bing and Cortana online services from Windows 10 search."
From my post [slashdot.org] on an earlier thread:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Search]
"BingSearchEnabled"=dword:00000000
"CortanaConsent"=dword:00000000
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I think that there must be more going on than that because the first thing I did -- ages and ages ago; over a year ago in the case of my laptop) -- on both of my Windows 10 computers (desktop and laptop) is apply those registry items because I hate Cortana and I hated getting web results mixed in with other stuff in my start menu. However, I was affected by the outage although things started working again after the computers were turned on after about 5-10 minutes (both computers use local user accounts as
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First thing I did when I ran into this "bug."
I bet they'll revert the changes people made to the registry with the next update to reenable Bing. When TF has anyone ever wanted Bing results from the internet when searching their own damn start menu? What a useless spyware feature.
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But if you use a web browser, you might mistakenly use the wrong search engine! Microsoft's duty is to protect you from that and make sure you only use Bing.
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Don't worry, if you accidentally install a browser that might not use Bing by default, Windows will helpfully warn you and tell you to use Edge instead.
Bye MSOSWhatever (Score:2)
I Do Not Use Windows Search (Score:5, Informative)
When my prior Windows XP PC died in 2013 and I had to get Windows 7 in my new PC, I quickly realized that the search application that came with Windows 7 was junk. I removed it from my Start menu.
For searching by name for a local file or folder, I use Everything from http://www.voidtools.com/ [voidtools.com]. For searching for a character string in a local file or folder, I use Agent Ransack from http://www.mythicsoft.com/agen... [mythicsoft.com].
By the way, for searching the Web, I use DuckDuckGo at https://duckduckgo.com/ [duckduckgo.com]. That search service asserts they do not track me or my search queries.
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Even in that case the built in search is terrible. Type the first three letters and its fine, type a fourth and everything disappears. Type the rest and maybe it will find what you typed. It's that bad.
Windows 7 for the win (Score:3)
Every day I keep my Windows 7 up and running is looking better and better.
Having to use W10 at work is the best example of what an abomination is and why not to use it.
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So edgy
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Every day I keep my Windows 7 up and running is looking better and better.
Yes it is.
- Sincerely, totally not evil hackers.
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The trouble with arguing against Windows 7 based on security is that it's not obvious that Windows 10 really is less risky overall.
There have been so many problems caused by Microsoft themselves in terms of both stability and data leakage that remaining on Windows 7 and staying away from all of that malware-esque behaviour might actually be safer, even taking into account the obviously increased risk of a serious vulnerability in Windows 7 no longer being patched.
Particularly if your Windows machine isn't d
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So transfer it to a VM and run it within a Linux host. Take a snapshot occasionally in case something bad happens. I'm going to do it soon.
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Re:Windows 7 for the win (Score:5, Funny)
I know what you mean. Having edges around windows so you know where they end, fonts which which don't fade into the background, scroll bars you can find in an instant, no Clippy-like intrusions getting in the way when you want to do something. Yes, definitely old fashioned being able to find what you need without interference.
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But which scary menu? Is it one of the new ones in "Settings"? Is it one of the shadow ones that were in Settings or are supposed to be in Settings real soon but you'd never guess how to get to without searching? Is it one of the old control panels? Is it one of the settings that's in two different places where if you don't switch them both off it still silently does what you told it not to? Or is it something that can only be achieved with gpedit.msc?
Win10 configuration is as disjointed as old linux withou
Cloud dependancy (Score:2)
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Microsoft needs to come to terms that 25% of Windows users still don't trust Windows 10
Frankly I'd seriously doubt the sanity of ANYONE who actually TRUSTS MS, and I would suspect that the 25% quoted would be more like 95% or more...
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It works fine offline. I've used Windows 10 offline almost since its start, simply by putting the system behind a proxy, and not sharing the proxy settings with Windows itself. It thinks it has no internet (even the "activate windows" logo starts appearing after a while).
It can't update, it can't send or receive data, tiles donot work, Cortana doesn't work, and more such blessings.
Just use MS for computer games (Score:2)
Do real computing on a real OS.
Office won't auto-save unless to cloud (Score:2)
Office has a regression as well -- unlike decades of auto-save to the local drive, now Office refuses to auto-save locally. The feature only works if you are on their cloud.
I'm done with Microsoft.
Cortina or file search? (Score:2)
Cortina searches the web, but that is the expected behavior - it seems to be explicitly a web search function (which I never use) . Does file search also go to the web? That would be much more serious.
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Yes, it seems as though by default that same web search is also executed on local searches but only if it detects a working connection to their servers, so that it can spy on even your local searches completely transparently. Then everyone found out about it today because something went wrong and it detected a working network connection when there actually wasn't, so even local searches were hanging on a network timeout. I guess this was all clearly stated in the TOS too, just nobody thought Microsoft wou
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The problem isn't so much that the Windows search box searches the web as well as local content (and hence sends searches to Bing) but that Microsoft has made it difficult (or possibly impossible) to disable that feature and make the Windows search box local-only unless you edit the registry.
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It always seemed pretty transparent that these searches were going to MS, because they always had a bunch of crap unwanted web results inline...
Easy solution (Score:3)
1) install Windows Subsystem for Linux
2) Install your favorite distro
3) Install slocate
4) Set up a cron task for slocate_updatedb
Easy peasy.
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Search Everything (Score:4, Informative)
I use a program called "Everything" from https://www.voidtools.com/ [voidtools.com]. It creates a local index of your entire local drive, so you can search THAT.
Works pretty well, actually.
Noobs are surprised and water is wet. (Score:2)
Clueful users know Windows AKA "Facebook OS" is what it is so they either avoid it completely or use it as little as practical. We understand Windows is sometimes inflicted on us by people who don't know better or care, but we don't foolishly expect it not to be a data-mining unreliable mess.
Windows, like /b, was never good. It beceme a de facto standard not through virtue but through MSFT market machinations.
Never noticed (Score:2)
Who still uses Windows search? It rarely finds anything, even when you search for an exact file name.
How is this supposed to work? (Score:2)
Most of my computing is done off-line, on air-gapped systems. How does search work then? Does it fail/hang up for minutes waiting and then time out?
We don't have any Windows 10 machines yet, but I am not sure how we could use them, since they won't ever be connected to external servers.
Is Windows imploding? (Score:2)
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I'd always wondered why things got slower... (Score:2)
It used to be that I could do a search on my computer (read: the entire HD) for some word in the filename or file endings, and I would get results in a reasonable amount of time.
Now my CPU can process data far faster, and both my bus system and the drive itself are much faster, and yet my ability to search for stuff locally has grown slower and slower.
Now I know why.
So, anyone have any decent open source alternatives to microsoft search? All I need is something that will index file names and do searches. I
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grepWin? https://tools.stefankueng.com/... [stefankueng.com]
Win7SP1 and later.
Windows 10 is spyware. Windows 7 Still Lives. (Score:2)
Windows 10 is spyware. People only need Windows for games and special Microsoft Office Macros. So long as those games and Macros work on Windows 7, people will run Windows 7. (Please don't talk to me about wine.)
The price you pay... (Score:2)
That's Odd - Nothing Happened (Score:2)
Search never went down for me. And I've had the "optional updates" section in Windows Updates ever since 1909 (which *was* an "optional update" itself in Pro). Not on Insider - commercial release.
Of course, I seldom use the search, and have web search turned off in settings (which also turned off Cortana and Bing, which was no great loss IMO). Might that have had something to do with it? In Pro at least, that's in the regular settings and doesn't require a registry hack.
Re:Whine (Score:5, Funny)
You could repeat yourself and people would complain.
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People complain about everything without thinking. You could cure cancer and people would complain. You could cure cancer and people would complain.
This is an unfalsifiable statement.
You knew what you signed up for when you bought Windows:
No, most have no idea.
no need to write another complaining article.
What is the point of posting messages whining about whining?
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People complain about everything without thinking. You could cure cancer and people would complain. You could cure cancer and people would complain.
This is an unfalsifiable statement.
It's not unfalsifiable, it's just really, really hard to test. Russell's Teapot is an example of something that is unfalsifiable, as are some intelligent design hypotheses: even with infinite resources, there is no possible test that could be done to falsify them.
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It's not unfalsifiable, it's just really, really hard to test.
Care to explain how it can be tested?
Care to offer an example where it fails?
Re: Whine (Score:3)
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You can't think of a way to test it? OK, cure cancer twice, if people don't complain, it is falsified. Seriously, you could have thought of that.
Assertion made was "People complain about everything without thinking". It was not "People complain about everything". Curing cancer was cited not to offer a means of falsifying the assertion rather as a means of highlighting "without thinking" aspect of the statement.
Issue at hand was never whether a complaint has occurred. Rather this was about attempts to link any complaint without limit to "without thinking" as means of enabling complaint to be derisively dismissed.
The only objective evidence to sup
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Assertion made was "People complain about everything without thinking".
That is falsifiable too, mate.
The only objective evidence to support your position offered was "You knew what you signed up for when you bought Windows".
That was not supporting evidence, it was a separate fact. It may be wrong, but it is certainly falsifiable.
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You knew what you signed up for when you bought Windows
No, actually you'd be surprised at how many people DON'T KNOW about Windows 10. I'm a retired sysadmin, used/supported Windows for 20 years, and when I retired in 2010, I dumped my dualboot Win7 install and went 100% Linux. Since then I've become the neighborhood tech support, and pretty much every neighbor I've spoken to when asked to look at their computer problem has been totally IN THE DARK about the spyware aspects of Windows 10. They, however, ARE 100% clued in about the fact that when Windows decides
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Skip is no longer there. I'm guessing too many people used it. Now, if you want a local account, you have to NOT connect to the internet when doing the setup, then say you want to continue to set up windows offline.
Above true for home version. Pro version still has the options.
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Browse History: does using FF or Chrome avoid that? Of course, Chrome collects the history and more too.
Searches and Commands: yeah, I kind of expect that.
Voice data: doesn't everything with voice recognition these days send it off to a server for processing and filing? Expected.
Text, Inking, and Typing data: can be turned off with settings, doesn't require registry hack. But of course, with it off handwriting recognition doesn't work. Possibly some other OCR applications might help, but they probably colle