Microsoft Moves To New Windows Development Cycle (windowscentral.com) 122
Microsoft is shifting to a new engineering schedule for Windows which will see the company return to a more traditional three-year release cycle for major versions of the Windows client, while simultaneously increasing the output of new features shipping to the current version of Windows on the market. Zac Bowden writes via Windows Central: The news comes just a year after the company announced it was moving to a yearly release cadence for new versions of Windows. According to my sources, Microsoft now intends to ship "major" versions of the Windows client every three years, with the next release currently scheduled for 2024, three years after Windows 11 shipped in 2021. This means that the originally planned 2023 client release of Windows (codenamed Sun Valley 3) has been scrapped, but that's not the end of the story. I'm told that with the move to this new development schedule, Microsoft is also planning to increase the output of new features rolling out to users on the latest version of Windows.
Starting with Windows 11 version 22H2 (Sun Valley 2), Microsoft is kicking off a new "Moments" engineering effort which is designed to allow the company to rollout new features and experiences at key points throughout the year, outside of major OS releases. I hear the company intends to ship new features to the in-market version of Windows every few months, up to four times a year, starting in 2023. Microsoft has already tested this system with the rollout of the Taskbar weather button on Windows 11 earlier this year. That same approach will be used for these Moments, where the company will group together a handful of new features that have been in testing with Insiders and roll them out to everyone on top the latest shipping release of Windows. Many of the features that were planned for the now-scrapped Sun Valley 3 client release will ship as part of one of these Moments on top of Sun Valley 2, instead of in a dedicated new release of the Windows client in the fall of 2023.
Starting with Windows 11 version 22H2 (Sun Valley 2), Microsoft is kicking off a new "Moments" engineering effort which is designed to allow the company to rollout new features and experiences at key points throughout the year, outside of major OS releases. I hear the company intends to ship new features to the in-market version of Windows every few months, up to four times a year, starting in 2023. Microsoft has already tested this system with the rollout of the Taskbar weather button on Windows 11 earlier this year. That same approach will be used for these Moments, where the company will group together a handful of new features that have been in testing with Insiders and roll them out to everyone on top the latest shipping release of Windows. Many of the features that were planned for the now-scrapped Sun Valley 3 client release will ship as part of one of these Moments on top of Sun Valley 2, instead of in a dedicated new release of the Windows client in the fall of 2023.
Perhaps more disturbing... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Is their change of Windows terminology from "operating system" to "client."
Disturbing, but not surprising. The writing for that has been on the wall since at least the advent of Office 365, and probably much earlier.
With the advent of Windows 10, Microsoft effectively already owns your Windows computer. Now they're just being more open about their ownership because it's a fait accompli and they have no further reason to hide the fact.
Re:Perhaps more disturbing... (Score:5, Informative)
change of Windows terminology from "operating system" to "client."
Their servers have long had a different cadence and naming schemes than the client, or "desktop" OSes. But feel free to read whatever sort of ominous foreboding you like in that term. It's a long and storied Slashdot tradition, after all.
Re:Perhaps more disturbing... (Score:4, Insightful)
Their servers have long had a different cadence and naming schemes than the client, or "desktop" OSes. But feel free to read whatever sort of ominous foreboding you like in that term. It's a long and storied Slashdot tradition, after all.
Go ahead and ignore history, it's a long and storied Slashdot tradition, after all. For some reason, especially when it comes to Microsoft. They used to call the flavors of NT server and workstation. Calling workstation "client" is a massive change. The very point of the PC is that the workstations are peers, capable of running software in their own right, rather than being mere clients to a more powerful server. The shift from Mainframe to PC was explicitly about moving processing away from the server to the desktop. Relegating them to "client" status is a huge downgrade.
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It seems to be about further integration of their cloud services. Windows 11 tried to take away the option to create a user account during installation that wasn't linked to a Microsoft online account. Cloud features are baked into the OS.
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Go ahead and ignore history, it's a long and storied Slashdot tradition, after all. For some reason, especially when it comes to Microsoft. They used to call the flavors of NT server and workstation.
Perhaps you're thinking of the "workgroups" flavors of client OS?
"Workstation" was used somewhat interchangeably with "Client" starting with the NT kernel.
The head developers of the NT kernel were previously DEC engineers, where the client/server model used in the PDP/VAX world was long solidified before Microsoft existed.
I still have a few boxed copies of NT 3, 3.5, and 4 up on my shelf as mementos.
Each one has a number of fancy certificate style papers inside that are titled "Client Access Licenses", or C
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Re:Perhaps more disturbing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything post Windows 7 has been more and more on the path of making the user a victim rather than a customer. Even Vista and Win 7 started on that path, but after that it just went down the drain.
The simplicity of Windows 2000 might look boring to some, but there weren't much overhead in that OS. The biggest time waster there was the solitaire game.
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Re: Perhaps more disturbing... (Score:1)
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Since Windows for "regular" PCs switched to the NT core the system internals have been in each version an evolution of the previous version's. AFAIK there's no whole rewites of large parts of the O
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Is their change of Windows terminology from "operating system" to "client."
Indeed. Somewhere between ominous and menacing.
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In client/server computing hasn't the term "client" always been interchangeable with the terms "workstation" and "desktop"?
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You don't get this is about killing local applications and the PC as an open platform.
Basic electronics 101 : Two or more computers linked together in a network become and behave as a single computer. The whole point is to remove software ownership by moving ot signed binaries, embedding drm in the operating system to kill piracy. They want to lock down the PC and treat files as "property"
Everyone in the tech industry saw the internet as the end of the PC and a way to enforce america's draconian copyrigh
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>Fast forward 20 years and none of the absolutely batshit ramblings that article is screaming about has happened
What do you think steam and mmo's are you idiot? How idiotic is it to "shut down a game" or have its multiplayer disabled? All games form the 90's still work because their networking code comes inside the game idiot moron.
The game is self contained like Unreal 2003, 2004, Quake 1-3, warcraft 1-3, and starcraft 1. You don't seem to get buying any client-server program means you're being defra
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can we just be clear that the reason you are ranting and raving about this is because you are the "fucking dumb" person who has bought into it and is now all butt hurt about it.
if you dont like mmos then dont play mmos you fucking spastic.
No you fucking moron, in an internet enabled society ALL software can be split into two sets of files, you lose control of your PC and are constantly being spied upon because you can't audit the code, it's the ultimate security risk, you don't grasp the whole thing was to back end every big budget PC game instead of giving you the complete software, it's fraud plain and simple but I don't expect people who want to buy broken software when there is NO reason for any PC game or OS, or app to be programmed in
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https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~rja14/tcpa-faq.html [cam.ac.uk]
Meh, more garbage spewed by people who can't "do". Just more whining and complaining, maybe if they spent less time bitching they could actually build something. Where is the free and open PC, laptop, smartphone, tablet, wearable, VR, AR? Either an also-ran that is a decade or more late to market or non-existent. The complaints about everybody else come thick and fast but the innovation? Not so much.
Nobody gives a shit about this stuff because the authors are just as useful as the crazy preacher shouting on the street corner that the end is nigh, End of the world! 21 December 2012! lol!
\
That's because you're morons who like buying broken shit and being treated like garbage, thanks for giving birth the OS that spies on you and applications that pre-maturely become obsolete for no reason, the whole point of trusted computing is to create artificial media and content monopolies to jack up prices artifically.
A new Windows version? (Score:4, Informative)
Wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be the last major Windows version? Will anyone trust Microsoft again?
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Wasn't Windows 10 supposed to be the last major Windows version?
No. I believe one engineer said that at one presentation at some dev conference.
Will anyone trust Microsoft again?
Did they ever? It seems like their OS has been getting progressively worse, terrible error messages like "Something went wrong" with no added context, how am I supposed to Bing for a solution to that? (lol, j/k nobody uses Bing). Along with those annoying forced restarts mean even when I do occassionally use Windows I'm left wondering whether it was always this bad.
But it's not like you would trust any company to make broad swee
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No, the VP of the windows team at Microsoft said it.
Mind you he isn't working at Microsoft anymore. Strange isn't it that a company changes strategic approach when the people responsible for strategy change.
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No, the VP of the windows team at Microsoft said it.
I'm referring to this:
"Right now we’re releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we’re all still working on Windows 10." Which was said by Jerry Nixon at a developer conference [theverge.com].
Who is the VP of the Windows team that said it?
Apple too? (Score:2)
Wasn't MacOS X supposed to be the final name? :P
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There's no such thing as trust in a company. There is only trust in people, and precisely zero people who enacted the policy of Windows 10 being the "last major version" are still working at Microsoft. Even if they were still there it doesn't matter, Windows isn't even made by the same department anymore, and is now headed by Surface and Devices
I'm sorry but if you thought that any statement from any company is absolute for all eternity, it only speaks to your intelligence, not to Microsoft policy or "trust
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Linus also said there would be no reason to every change the 2.4/2.6 versioning scheme for the kernels.
Things change.
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Perform common tasks on a freshly installed Win2k machine and then try to do the same on a virgin Win10 and we'll discuss which is faster afterwards, in case you're still sane and able to talk coherently after trying it on Win10.
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there are a subset of people that will always bitch about the "new shiny"
the rest of us enjoy ourselves and live our lives unaffected
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Exactly! If you know what program you want to run then just type it in, that workflow works regardless of which OS you are using, it works whether you have a GUI or not, it works even if the computer you are using has had its Applications/Start Menu/Task Bar/Dock/Desktop/etc customized in a way you aren't familiar with.
People who can only work efficiently on one specific version of one particular OS with its default setup because of its specific UI paradigm are a bit of a lost cause. Such people that are ti
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What Windows 10 needs most of all is a consistent, intuitive, logical, easy to use, and customizeable UI. Right now it's a locked-down mix of metro, Windows 7, and some eccentric abstract artsy-fartsy design with monochrome blue undifferentiated wireframe icons in the settings and control panel sections.
This applies to the majority of apps and applications today. For the love of dog, use what worked in the past instead of being lazy and just copying terrible UI designs from the arts departments at Google
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Changing things under-the-hood, I.e. things that the end-user cannot immediately identify a clear difference in, doesn't convince users that the updates are required. If anything it's "yet another KB123456789 number being applied to the computer." The end-users wouldn't care for such things and they never have. Mostly because those KB numbers had a tendency to break workflows or the software that
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I'm confused, is Win10 supposed to be the good or the crap release?
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Yes.
Forcing new features? (Score:4, Interesting)
So instead of declining to upgrade to the new Windows with features I don't want, they can push them out in "security" updates that install without asking me.
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They are not features they are "experiences". Get with the in-spin.
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So how dim do you think the designer of that experience was?
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It's closer to truth, considering that a feature is generally a good thing while an experience can be good or bad...
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Don't want it? Don't buy it.
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They keep trying to do this again and again, telegraphing to the whole world what it is they really want to do.
At this point, it is your fault for buying into the Microsoft Way. You don't get to say you were somehow tricked or blindsided into buying something and then they change it up on you. You bought into knowing full well that this is what they do.
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Is there a way to run the library of common desktop software that pretty much everyone in first world has at this point without doing windows?
So unless you're claiming that this entire library is "Microsoft Way", in which case that combination of words has very little to do with Microsoft and therefore an obvious lie by obfuscation, people aren't buying into Microsoft. They're buying into being able to run all their old software out of the box with ease.
In before "year of linux on desktop" and "just emulate
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Most people don't even use the advanced features of Office. Most people just use the barebones features that's already available in LibreOffice, hell, even Google Docs.
If you use Windows mostly for games, then: why do you care about all the things forced on you? Don't use them. Play your games.
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Because unlike the hypothetical monofactoral individual that doesn't exist anywhere, most people are multifactoral in their preferences for pretty much everything. They use their personal computers to do actual general personal computing. Everything from office tasks to browsing the internet, to watching videos, to listening to audio, to browsing social media apps, to gaming, to whatever random weird stuff they happen to be into.
And windows since after 7 has been more and more about getting in your way so t
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The people who complain the loudest about these things are the people working in the IT department because they are the ones digging around the OS settings all the time and setting group policies or whatever. The users just login and open the program they are wanting to use, they don't use a computer to use the operating system, that's what IT support staff do.
If you use Windows mostly for games, then: why do you care about all the things forced on you? Don't use them. Play your games.
Exactly! Log in, open your game or game launcher and you're set. Once you have loaded the game you wouldn't even know what OS (or version of the OS)
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Sure but what are you going to do? Switch to Linux?
If you have a problem there the response is "You're an idiot for choosing the wrong hardware!" or "You're an idiot for choosing the wrong distribution!" or "It's all Lennard Pottering's fault because of systemd!" (whoever the fuck that guy is) or "You're an idiot for thinking you can do personal computing on a personal computer running Linux!".
I like and use Linux and I sort through the problems when they crop up, which they inevitably do because of the var
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So instead of declining to upgrade to the new Windows with features I don't want, they can push them out in "security" updates that install without asking me.
Exactly. What's even more fun are all the apps that you uninstalled, and...they're baaack with the next update. Just for grins, I started my Win10 (Edu) VM that I use for testing. It hadn't run for 3-4 weeks, so among other things the 2022-07 "cumulative update" was pending. Sure enough, the update re-installed Minecraft, for whatever bizarre reason.
I have never been able to uninstall some things like the "Xbox Game Bar" - I suppose that's a critical system service?
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New Features (Score:4, Insightful)
while simultaneously increasing the output of new features
Apart from putting more advertising. insisting you create an account, and rearranging the screen into windows what new features has Microsoft added to windows in the last 10 years that an average user would use?
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I wonder how much extra bandwidth is consumed where I work (1000's of computers) just because of this new widget?
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It's typically the Home versions that gets crap like this. Enterprise editions have a lot more control over the experience on their workstations, like mandatory updates and telemetry. Pro users are somewhere in the middle, with a few more advanced features, but less control over operational details than Enterprise.
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You usually have that functionality in the home editions, too, because MS can't be assed to actually push a castrated home edition (how could you function as their QA department if you didn't get the same OS that they want to sell?), what's missing is the tools to actually use that functionality.
Thankfully there's third party tools that provide it.
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What has your phone provided but minor improvements over 10 years? Overall operating systems matured.
I would say Windows 11 vs 7 I would say we have better security and power management and device drivers which are more modular and crash less and a browser which doesn't suck and is actual HTML and CSS compliant!
For IT professionals we have MS terminal, wsl, hyper-v, ssh, and real cut and paste support for command prompt, and can edit Linux files in Notepad finally.
Compared to Win10 I would say win11
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that an average user would use?
Yeah, Windows changes in the past decade are all surface level. There's not been any changes under the hood. No new APIs, no kernel changes, no security model changes, no bug fixes, no changes to networking, or Bluetooth stack, nosirreee /sarcasm.
In other news I booted my Linux server the other day and it dropped me to a command prompt. Clearly there's been no development in Linux since 1994.
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No new APIs
On the contrary, Most of the new Windows 8+ APIs just get mapped to older ones under Wine with a bit of translation between the two. (Pretty much any api.windows.random.name.dll that's come out in the last few years.) I'd love to see if some "Windows 10 only" apps / games would actually run on Windows 7 if Wine's thunk dlls could be ported over.
no kernel changes, no security model changes, no bug fixes
The security / bug / kernel fixes could be applied to any Windows version. Microsoft just doesn't want to support Windows versions whose version number is less tha
Start Menu programs (Score:1)
New features (Score:2)
Oh God, not another (fr)agile bullshit. We know agile is like this. You start with a toilet, and then you get various people to throw shit on it, hoping that it will eventually, through incrementalism, become a glorious pyramid. Instead, you end up with a steaming pile of disparate shit that will collapse on its own weight.
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That was a near miss. Cleaning a spit out pile of root beer float off my laptop would have been a disaster.
Not that I disagree with anything you said.
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Very succinct. I like it.
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Nonsense. It's not *that* good.
To be honest, Agile sucks for any project beyond a small to medium sized application (A few dozen different pages with limited functionality).
Stand-ups = BA and PO micromanagement.
Two week production cycles = "do it fast" not "do it right"
Git check-ins = "You didn't put enough spaces after your comments" and the host of other Git "There's a conflict. Go fix it yourself and fuck you, we're not TFS, we're not going to help you."
Team retrospectives = "Biweekly criticism from man
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I think you're saying that agile bullshit is like diarrhea.
Sure you're not talking about waterfall?
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Not disagreeing with you, but let's remember that Agile was something of victory over CMMI and other heavy industrial processes which tended to collapse under their own weight at the onset. With Waterfall, crappy software was routinely delivered late and over budget (I believe I read it was ~60% something of projects). There are still plenty of useless people/vendors/products trying to get into developers' way, but I feel we're making progress as an industry (for instance, think about how cloud, containeriz
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think about how cloud, containerization, CI/CD, etc., have eliminated/outsourced/refocused/scaled the work of sysadmins/etc).
Cloud) Made everything dependent on a fast, reliable, and high-bandwidth internet connection. (Pick two) Also mandated annual subscriptions that get more and more invasive and nuanced with each passing year. (Creating middlemen that extract further wealth from the consumers that the subscribing companies will pass the costs onto.) Also encouraged companies to completely disregard internal reliability (downtime means everything stops working along with everyone dependent on you) and dump their secret sauce
Opinion (Score:2)
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Sounds to me like they're doing it both ways. The once-every-three-years-dot-oh version upgrade and periodic feature pushes every few months. In other words, more opportunities to break things in an operating system that's perpetually in beta.
Corporate America is not going to like this (Score:2)
It is a very big expensive pita to just switch thousands and sometimes tens of thousands of desktops with a limited skeletal desktop support crew of just a few employees.
Thousands upon thousands of tickets and devices not working and angry executives who blame the lowly IT manager for metrics behind his control and budget for all the issues that up during the process.
And for what?
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I know of two Fortune 500 companies that will go/have gone all web-app/virtualized windows app server to get rid of Windows on the client. Basically all you need on the client is a modern browser. The motivation is that the updates were hugely expensive and they just had enough of throwing out all employee laptops every few years because the new MS crap had (again) new idiotic requirements.
Don't force updates. (Score:1)
The most stable version of Windows (Score:5, Interesting)
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have you seen the problems with malware associated with Windows after version 7
I've seen they have been patched but Windows 7 has not. What's your goal here? To eventually have a system so out of date that viruses won't run?
Do us a favour antivaxer and unplug your cesspool from the internet.
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Writing this from 7 ultimate. [imgur.com]
Would I have it face the internet? Fuck no, but I wouldn't allow most things to. My pfsense box is under 24/7 attack and is the only thing facing the outside world.
100% agree with the OP.
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Do us a favour antivaxer and unplug your cesspool from the internet.
Not an antivaxer (all boosters up to date). Anti Microsoft maybe, but they earned it. (you spelled favor wrong)
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Same here. I still use it and will do so unless something major comes along. But in that case, a patch may well come along with it. As most vulnerabilities these days are on application side anyways (for stand-alone machines), the important things continue to get updates. And that the MS AV gets monthly updates on Win7 as well shows that they clearly knows they cannot simply abandon it as they have done before with other versions.
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Windows 7 was the last good version, and it was the only version of Windows that, using the defaults, actually looked better than its predecessor since Windows 2000.
10 is tolerable, but aside from the improved Task Manager, and it's been quite improved, there are almost no user-facing changes that are improvements, and a whole lot of things that are significantly worse. I miss Windows 7. I can't imagine ever saying that about any current or future Windows version for the rest of my life.
Yes, but most people shouldn't run it. (Score:4)
Yes, malware is always a threat regardless of your platform, but that still doesn't mean it's a good idea to run an unpatched system. It's like saying car thieves are always a threat, so what's the point of inconveniences like locking mechanisms when they can just break the window and hotwire it? Yes, malware's a problem even on patched systems, but you make it a lot easier to be compromised running an unpatched system. There are plenty of things you can do to mitigate security concerns, but most people considering their options aren't going to do those things.
If you don't care or you think your security is up to snuff, that's fine, your security is your business. I just don't think you should be proselytizing your way of doing things. For the vast majority of people, it's a terrible idea, and for the remainder, it's at the very least a questionable one. My recommendation to people in general is, if you can't beat Win10/11 into submission and make it behave the way you want (which is what I do), strongly consider migrating to an alternative like Linux or OS X.
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I agree, 7 was peak Windows... (Score:2)
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Finally a replacement for the MS meme (Score:2)
So finally "Win10 is the last Windows version" joins "640k is enough".
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My take is it was a direct lie get people to switch over, nothing more.
MS does "engineering"? News to me (Score:2)
The work samples I have had so far were between "cobbled together partially tested amateur stuff" and "It compiles, ship it!".
In related news, what has become of "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows"? Was that just a lie to get better adoption? Looks like it in retrospect.
All those Moments (Score:2)
Updating the "Fresh Coat of Paint" Cycle... (Score:1)
This is, again, nothing more than a Fresh-Coat-of-Paint cycle every 3 years with Spackle security updates and a Touch-Up Mode. The kernel doesn't change, it's still way too easy to pierce the veil of AV products, stability issues are just as unstable as 1995, and this is all just userland BS where they say, "Hey! A new weather app! We're pushing Microsoft Teams! Give us your money!" Bugger off, Nadella. I'll stick with my Windows 7 until Firefox or Chrome no longer works there.
Experiences? (Score:2)
Seems to me that they just want to list more than one thing, so not just new features, they have to push the experience of using those new features as something special on its own. Probably due to so some weak market research about how millennials liked to talk about having experiences instead of things. Which probably doesn'
That is NOT 'agile' (thank goodness!) (Score:1)
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As long as they don't break support for Open Shell, I'm good with that. Well, they will break it, but hopefully not so bad the boffins at Open Shell can't fix it in a few days.
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Redhat 4.2 is much faster in a VM than Ubuntu 22. I wonder why....
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I do recall that it was faster to copy files over the network on Server 2003 running in a VM on a Windows 7 machine than on Windows 7 itself (i.e., the version everyone actually liked, including me), running on bare metal.