“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications
“”“unintended”“”?
How do you implement shit like this by mistake and push it out to be executed on people’s computers by mistake?
The fact that Microsoft’s constantly more aggressive use of their OS platform to artificially push their search and cloud platforms hasn’t triggered multiple huge antitrust cases is a pretty dire indicator of how little regulators are willing or able to safeguard the public from monopolistic behavior by large tech companies.
If you’re thinking of the EU, it’s probably just the vogonlike bureaucracy, so in about the time that Windows 12 comes out, they’ll be ready. Can’t say it bothers me, if Microsoft is attempting to take marketshare from Google, though.
Getting out of the Google frying pan and into the Microsoft fire is in no way better. Both options are exploitative anti-user monopolies, and both Chrome and Edge are the same browser engine under different corporate skins that aggressively violate your privacy in numerous ways for their own gain.
Even if Edge was marginally better than Chrome (it’s not), allowing monopolistic practices simply for the sake of slightly evening out a corporate race to the bottom is not a good standard. The actual solution is a browser like Firefox that actually has some remote respect and business interest in user privacy, and to aggressively litigate both Microsoft and Google for the use of their dominant service platforms to cross-promote their other products to captive audiences.
Broadly: Constructing their hardware so it’s impossible to repair or upgrade by anyone but them (or at all), then lobbying against any attempts to legislate the ‘right to repair’.
They actually support right to repair laws. The joke is that they will make their hardware so difficult to repair that they are the only ones who can do it.
My favourite is making the nvme drive accessible, but soldering the actual memory controller to the mainboard, so this ability to swap the drive is utterly useless to us.
Well the latest development is that Apple is now going to support the current right to repair bill in California, but people are rightfully suspicious that they’re going to get some loopholes written in or otherwise neuter the bill.
Linux suffers from being a patchwork of hobbyists updates, corporate additions, and patchy distro support. When it comes down to it, if you have an issue, you either have to solve it on your own or hope and pray the elitists on StackOverflow are in a good mood.
“Patchwork” sounds like a good way to describe Windows as well. Or at least it was when I was a Windows 10 sysadmin and there were two different settings menus to do everything.
Apple and Microsoft support aren’t exactly awesome, either, unless you’re a big business with deep pockets. At least with Linux, the system is open, so if there is a way to solve my problem, someone has almost certainly found it already and added it to Arch Wiki or Stack Overflow or something.
I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I’m thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.
They need to ask the question “will you ever choose to use a Microsoft browser?” and then remember the answer and stop the nagging. For me the answer is no.
Isn’t modern Edge chromium based? I’d understand using Edge back when it was using it’s own technology, as much as I hate Microsoft internet browsers, it allowed for optimisations such as better battery life on laptops. But using chromium based Edge, I don’t understand it at all. Who wants to use Microsoft flavoured chrome? Yuck.
They had to switch to chromium because web devs like myself just didn’t take the extra time to make a second set of style definitions to work with their stupid engine. Firefox still has some issues here and there with inconsistent styles but it’s not that bad. Edge used to just be a nightmare for style compatibility. So I would just put up a notice saying edge wasn’t supported and save myself the trouble.
I think the “upsell” (Lord help me for calling it this) is that it integrates with Office365, or in a corporate environment, AD. So by provisioning it once you have every component interconnected. If you’re used to Edge at home you will not be hesitant to want to use it at work. To say nothing about getting non-corporate home users into Bing and, ideally, Microsoft’s OpenAI-ified Bing.
“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications, in a statement to The Verge.
I wasn’t alone in thinking it was malware, with posts dating back three months showing Reddit users trying to figure out why they were seeing the pop-up.
Microsoft even had to backtrack on plans to force the Chrome default search to Bing for businesses installing its Office apps.
After all, Google runs similar notifications on its webpages to get people to use Chrome or it’s annoying YouTube premium spam.
That could be in the form of the price of a laptop that has a Windows OEM license baked in, or a product key if you built your own PC.
Windows is an important productivity tool for many people, and shouldn’t be treated like a cheap streaming box loaded with ads.
The original article contains 654 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
i’m sure the free market will solve this. we just need to wait for a new company to pop up, make a new operating system, ensure windows programs are properly emulated, convince the majority of people and businesses to use it, and then use its new monopoly for good.
Listen, I want to give the above a shot (It’s an idea I’ve had for a while) but it doesn’t just happen, it’s very very far from easy, and obnoxiously expensive. Might be cheaper and easier to get to the Moon than to tear down M$’ monopoly at this point.
Free market ideas always sounded like cartoon level intelligence to me. Some kind of a perfect world where everyone acts morally and people are well informed and chooses the right companies etc.
But that’s not how it works. Free market ideas don’t expect a perfect world, they instead expect an imperfect one. You don’t need everyone to make food decisions, you just need enough people to make good decisions so the market caters to them.
It’s the same idea as democracy, you don’t need every voter to make a good choice, you just need a plurality. As long as enough people make decent choices enough of the time, democracy works. The free market is just democracy, but with money instead of votes.
In both cases government has a role. I think governments should add in longer term costs to the market, but in a way that preserves choice as much as possible (i.e. carbon taxes instead of carbon limits). I think governments should educate the population to increase the chances that they’ll make good decisions at the polls.
In the specific case of Microsoft, things were competitive until the government looked the other way WRT antitrust law. There’s a lot of shady stuff that happened in the first couple decades that Microsoft existed, yet they largely got a free pass.
the problem is that not enough people make “good decisions”, partly because of how exhausting and time-consuming it is to carefully analyze and consider all the options for every facet of life. for example, there are lots of people who don’t want to switch to linux because they think its tedious to pick a distro, learn a new operating system, and find replacements/workarounds for software that doesn’t work out of the box on linux. now imagine having to do that for every single aspect of life. how do you pick your toothpaste and deodorant? do you carefully examine all the options each time you go to the store, or do you have a brand you pick without thinking about it because it works fine enough?
another problem with free markets is the inherent progression towards monopolies. this can be seen most readily with the so called natural monopolies (monopolies that emerge because of an extreme barrier to entry). how much choice do you have when it comes to your electricity provider? if they do something you don’t like, what can you do other than complain to a politician or move to a new region? aside from natural monopolies, we also see a progression towards monopolies because of inherent efficiencies of producing at scale.
there are other problems as well, such as corruption/lobbying, companies lying to the public, using psychology to manipulate people (link may not be the best source on the subject).
partly because of how exhausting and time-consuming it is to carefully analyze and consider all the options for every facet of life
And that’s solved with trusted sources. I personally don’t analyze what toothpaste I get, I ask my dentist or look for the support by the American Dental Association. I don’t analyze every car on the market to make a decision, I ask mechanics for opinions and buy the cars they see in their shop the least (or look at defect rates and whatnot that are publicly available). For video games, I read reviews from sites that have given me good advice in the past.
It’s often a lot easier to figure out who to trust than it is to figure out which products to buy. And with a free market system, there’s a lot of competition both at the product variety side, as well as the product review side, so bad products tend to die and good products tend to succeed. It’s not perfect and it takes time to work, and sometimes the market needs governments to step in when the process gets messed up (e.g. manufacturers exerting control over the review process through bribes, intimidation, etc).
inherent progression towards monopolies
This is almost exclusively due to cronyism. For example, ISPs form monopolies by getting regulations passed that discourages new competition, and then sue whichever groups are left so that entering the market costs more than they could hope to earn back. Or companies like Microsoft violate antitrust laws or other anti-competitive practices (i.e. requiring PC manufacturers to pay for Windows/DOS even on PCs that don’t ship Windows/DOS, artificially making third party web browsers slower due to blocking APIs, etc), yet they get off with relatively little consequences (AMD v Intel is a counter-example, where the lawsuit was substantial). And so on.
In your example about electricity providers, that’s because the deals are made between the power company and cities, not between individuals. I think people would likely be better off if there was actual competition there. Basically, the city would maintain all of the electricity infrastructure in the city, and individual citizens could choose between providers based on cost, eco-friendliness, service, etc, and the cities would require a certain level of power quality (cleanliness of signal, stability of generation, etc). So if you’re getting ripped off, it’s because of cronyism between the power company and your city/county.
Maybe electricity is a poor option for this (idk, I’m not an expert), but it seems to work pretty well for ISPs. In my area, the city owns the network and you buy service from private companies, who then pay the city a certain amount to maintain the network. If your ISP sucks, you pick another one that offers service on the network, which is a pretty smooth process.
Capitalism works best when you expect selfishness and have the government set and enforce rules. If something cannot feasibly be offered in a competitive fashion, the government should step in and provide it as a public good. Some other things I think should be government-provided:
ambulances - IMO, if a paramedic decides that you need an ambulance, it should be billed to the city/county/state; this also goes for emergency care until you’re stable enough to make a choice as to where to continue care
city utilities - I can’t pick my garbage company, have competing sewer and water lines, etc
transit - roads, rail, etc should all be publicly owned and operated in the interests of reducing congestion and improving public needs
If something could be competitive but isn’t, that’s a case for antitrust to step in.
corruption/lobbying, companies lying to the public, using psychology to manipulate people
Those happen regardless of structure. It happens a lot in autocracies, democracies, and everything in between. It seems to happen less in smaller communities, which is why I prefer to have each level of government be as small as possible while remaining effective.
rupert murdoch (among several others working at fox news) knew the 2020 election was not stolen, but pushed the narrative anyway because they didn’t want to upset their viewer base
The only overlap with the free market is that we have a mix of trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources. I count Fox News and CNN both as relatively untrustworthy and always look for second or third sources if anything seems a bit surprising. For example, Fox News claimed the election was stolen with few facts, CNN and a bunch of other sources said it wasn’t, along with a bunch of facts. So I don’t believe Fox News.
Just think how much worse it would be if the government were in control of the media. We could potentially have those numbers flipped, with the majority believing that the election was stolen.
i appreciate the well thought-out reply. i disagree with some of the things you’ve said but respect your reasoning and level-headedness. i’m going to (generally) quote the first line of each paragraph so you can more clearly see what i’m replying to, but my responses are intended to address the whole paragraph.
And that’s solved with trusted sources. I personally don’t analyze what toothpaste I get, I ask my dentist or look for the support by the American Dental Association.
you may be a bit of an anomaly then. this page gives an overview of consumer behavior and how companies are able to influence peoples decision making. it also links to this page listing ways in which consumer behavior tends to be irrational, often being influenced by their moods, what their friends buy, and also by marketing techniques.
putting that aside, let’s suppose that everyone did behave rationally and only bought things recommended by experts. wouldn’t this be much more work for everyone than simply letting the experts pass regulations on which products can be sold? wouldn’t it be nicer if you didn’t have to consult an expert each time you bought something? if instead, you could have some faith that anything on the shelf was a good option?
It’s often a lot easier to figure out who to trust than it is to figure out which products to buy. And with a free market system, there’s a lot of competition both at the product variety side, as well as the product review side, so bad products tend to die and good products tend to succeed.
i’m not so sure it is easy to find out who to trust. this article you linked is a good example of that: 40% of people had a hard time finding out who to trust in regards to the 2020 presidential election, something that arguably is way more important than something like which brand of toothpaste you buy. it might be tempting to write those people off as unreasonable, but keep in mind that would mean saying 40% of the population is unreasonable.
next, i’m not sure i agree that bad products tend to die. i understand “good” and “bad” can be subjective, which makes this topic a bit more complicated, but you yourself have said fox news is relatively untrustworthy. i think it would then be reasonable to say they are “bad” news organizations. despite this, they were the most watched news network last july and i dont think they’ll die anytime soon. there are many other examples of this: companies like EA, comcast, nestle, etc, who many people have disliked for years, continue to do well economically and show no signs of dying.
This is almost exclusively due to cronyism.
this is actually part of my point: cronyism is part of the free market. if companies are incentivized to compete with each other britannica defines the free market as “an unregulated system of economic exchange, in which taxes, quality controls, quotas, tariffs, and other forms of centralized economic interventions by government either do not exist or are minimal”. in an unregulated system with minimal interventions where companies are supposed to make money above all else, why wouldn’t they influence legislation, sue other companies out of existing, and all the other things you mentioned?
In your example about electricity providers, that’s because the deals are made between the power company and cities, not between individuals.
i’m not sure about electrical grids (texas comes to mind but that arrangement seems much different the situation you’ve outlined), but from what i’ve read, britain’s current arrangement is (at least a bit) similar to what you’ve outlined. we can see how that’s going. but i want to make clear that i understand you expressed apprehension about applying a private model to the electrical grid, so this is more of a minor point.
Capitalism works best when you expect selfishness and have the government set and enforce rules. If something cannot feasibly be offered in a competitive fashion, the government should step in and provide it as a public good.
this is something i agree with. i would add a few more things to your list (such as housing, all parts of healthcare, public transportation, among others), but i can acknowledge that certain things could work fine if they worked in the private sector with government regulation (eg video games and movies). i also agree with you that we need much more action when it comes to enforcing antitrust laws.
It happens a lot in autocracies, democracies, and everything in between. It seems to happen less in smaller communities, which is why I prefer to have each level of government be as small as possible while remaining effective.
i completely agree. it’s something that can happen in government as well as the private sector, and does seem to happen less in smaller communities. this is a very hard problem to solve, and i’m not sure it can be completely solved. i think having a good education system reduces the risk of corrupt people coming into power, but that only helps to reduce the problem. that being said, things are very bad in the current system. this kind of corruption and manipulation is allowed in the private sector: most of the time it’s either legal or it’s illegal but the consequence is a very small fine.
The only overlap with the free market is that we have a mix of trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources.
the overlap with the free market is that news organizations are incentivized to pander to their viewers, which is what the thing about fox news showed. they played the election fraud narrative because they didn’t want to upset their base. this is because from an economic perspective, the viewers aren’t the “buyers”. the advertisers are the “buyers” and the viewers are the product. in the context of this example, this means that it’s “bad” to say the election wasn’t stolen because it could result in fewer viewers, resulting in fox news having a “worse product” in the eyes of advertisers.
Just think how much worse it would be if the government were in control of the media.
don’t get me wrong, i completely agree that things can get very bad when the government is in control of the media. controlling the media is one of authoritarians’ favorite pastimes. my goal in bringing up that point was to show how free market principles can be inherently at odds with journalistic integrity. in a capitalist society, journalistic integrity will take a back-seat to economic pressures.
In other words, we’ve selected a biased sample that doesn’t align with averages.
We can also look at income. Democrats love to point out income inequality, but real median income has been going up. Yes, poverty exists and some people probably have too much money, but most people are getting wealthier over time.
Individuals aren’t important when talking about trends. Enough people choose their toothpaste based on ADA markings that the ADA marking is worth getting. Individuals may not care, but enough do that bad products tend to fail.
letting experts pass regulations
Regulators consistently don’t act in consumers’ best interests.
Look at ISPs, which have been able to cement a monopoly because they could get enough regulations in place to prevent competition (and tie up those who try with lawsuits). Or look at consumer electronics, we ended up in a duopoly of CPU manufacturers largely because of patents (again, another form of regulation).
Look at COVID restrictions, where we gave up liberty and hamstrung our economy with little to show for it. See Florida vs California COVID results) (latimes is biased in favor of California):
“One might’ve expected that the Floridas of the world would’ve done tremendously worse than the Californias of the world, and they did worse, but modestly worse, and there’s something to be learned there.”
The discussion here is interesting, but my point isn’t to say one response was better or worse, but that sometimes the experts get things wrong. They expected a very different outcome than what happened. My state, for example, was somewhere in that middle. Here’s roughly what we did:
schools closed until the end of the school year, and then parents were allowed to choose remote school or in-class instruction for the next school year (we choose remote)
stores needed to post public health notices and I think were required to have employees wear masks, but store policy was optional when it came to customers (most implemented social distancing controls)
official recommendation to wear masks, but no mandate
I think this is a reasonable approach. We listened to the experts, but let the public ultimately decide what they wanted to do. A lot of people made stupid decisions, but most wore masks, and most workplaces and stores implemented more strict controls than required.
I think experts should absolutely weigh in, but in most cases, we should let the public ultimately decide. Individuals are irrational, but the masses tend toward rationality, though there’s an argument to be made for specific cases like Tyranny of the majority (protecting minorities is one major function of government imo).
Sure, but only if your main concern is journalistic integrity. They are a “good” entertainment organization in that people enjoy watching them. The problems arise when people assume they are neutral, which is irrational.
Fifty-seven percent say their own news sources are biased, and 69% are concerned about bias in the news others are getting.
…
Three in four people (70%) worry that owners of media companies are influencing coverage. They also suspect that inaccuracies in reporting are purposeful, with 52% believing that reporters misrepresent the facts, and 28% believing reporters make them up entirely.
So I think the market is doing it’s job of helping people see biases in news reporting. Whether people actually want unbiased news is another story. And I don’t think we necessarily need unbiased news, provided people understand the bias of their preferred news source and have options with different biases.
cronyism is part of the free market
I’m going to have to disagree here.
A truly free market only exists when there is no government intervention whatsoever, so any government involvement necessarily makes the market less free. However, when we say “free market,” we usually mean the government enforces separation between organizations to prevent cabals and other forms of backroom deals to promote competition and reduce the barrier to entry for newcomers to the market.
So with that definition of a free market (one with a set of rules to encourage competition), cronyism is by definition not part of the free market. In other words, any form of anti-competitive behavior is an abuse of the rules and thus an indication of governmental failure in crafting and/or enforcing the rules.
But you’re right, if we’re talking about the free market in the anarchist sense.
britain’s current situation
From my understanding, that’s a monopoly granted by the government (as in, they control the complete water system), which isn’t at all what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the city being the provider (i.e. they own the pipes), and private companies being suppliers. If a private company can meet the standards of the city and provide the same good more efficiently, they can sell it to the city.
For example, let’s discuss electricity. If someone decides to invest in solar power, they can sell that to the city, who will then distribute it to the rest of the grid. If someone else makes a hydroelectric dam, they could sell power generated that way to the city. And so on.
If there’s only one company that can realistically provide a service, the city should build their own supply so there’s competition. Private monopolies should never exist because that is antithetical to the concept I outlined above about a free market.
housing
A lot of the problem with housing is government getting in the way. The mere fact that NIMBYs prevent higher density housing is enough for me to distrust government here. People with influence will stand in the way of progress, if they’re able to.
The reason suburbs are everywhere is because of zoning rules that only allow single family homes. If we instead allowed mixed zoning in more places, we’d see more lower cost housing, increased supply, and more use of mass transit due to higher population density.
healthcare
A lot of the problem here is lack of transparency in the system. I asked for a quote for a routine operation for my kid so I could compare options, and we had to call multiple people, most of which couldn’t even give me a range, much less a quote.
There’s a ton of cronyism going on between pharmaceutical companies, care providers, insurance companies, and probably regulators that keeps prices high. Here’s what I think we should do:
make emergency care a public good - if a paramedic recommends an ambulance, it and all associated emergency care should be free, until you’re stabilized
make health insurance something individuals deal with - bills go to the patient, who then submit claims to insurance, and insurance is limited in the complexity of their policies (i.e. can’t allow/deny individual medicines or providers)
require all rates to be made public where possible, and have care providers’ insurance handle deviations - an appendectomy costs $X, and the care provider is responsible for anything unexpected
insurance should not be tied to employment - employers can offer plans, but those plans must be exchangeable for cash and not terminate with employment
provide cash to those below a certain income level so everyone can afford medical insurance - for those who are rejected or who must pay some unreasonable amount for insurance, the government may choose to provide other plans (e.g. Medicare or Medicaid)
require insurance companies to provide long term insurance options that cannot be cancelled by the insurance company and can only increase in price with inflation
In general, I want health insurance to work more like auto insurance, but it should also be completely reasonable to not have any health insurance at all.
However, the system we have now is worse than universal healthcare due to the rampant cronyism. I’m worried that universal healthcare will have similar cronyism, but it’ll at least be spread across taxpayers.
All the big corps get a free pass because of money and power, and this is why free market doesn’t work.
Democracy doesn’t work either since media is owned by big corps as well. People can only know what they are allowed to know. If you are rich and powerful, you manipulate the media and you manipulate entire elections and decisions.
After a while, you actually see how all these systems are manipulated dally.
Our democracy in the US has lasted ~250 years despite all the nonsense from the rich and powerful. So I think enough of the voting public pays attention to keep things afloat. It has been a slow march downward imo, but nothing unrecoverable.
I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but the US seems to go in cycles. That’s how democracies seem to end up working, the public gets annoyed enough and demands change, so things get better for a time and then slowly get worse. Then the cycle repeats. It’s basically two steps forward, one step back, repeat ad infinitum. Just think, 100 years ago we got women’s suffrage, and now that’s a given and we’re fighting over abortion and equal pay. 100 years before that we were fighting over literal slavery. Some years down the road, we’ll likely take those as a given and be fighting over something else.
Democracy works, it’s just a messy process that can take a while. But it has worked so far pretty well.
It doesn’t require people to act morally, it requires them to act according to their long term self interest, assuming they are… immortal. And we all know human beings are omniscient and immortal. So no problem. /s
But it doesn’t, it just requires people to act in their short term self interest, and government’s role should be to ensure the long term costs are included in current market prices. So things like Pigouvian taxes and regulations should increase short term costs for things with long term costs.
The problems we see aren’t problems with capitalism (capitalism is working as expected in serving short term interests), the problem is with governments not doing their job in accounting for longer term costs.
its really absurd. it becomes even stupider when considering that many of these assumptions allow mathematical models to be built on top of them, and then those models are treated with such importance and authority. but then they sometimes also get the math wrong. i remember learning a while back that part of the 2009 housing crash was caused by faulty mathematics laid ontop of these weird economic assumptions.
the part im talking about is:
The paper, generally referred to as the Dahlem report, condemns a growing reliance over the past three decades on mathematical models that improperly assume markets and economies are inherently stable, and which disregard influences like differences in the way various economic players make decisions, revise their forecasting methods and are influenced by social factors.
the first part refers to a kind of “smoothness assumption”, where they approximate the bumpy, jagged graph with a “smooth” curve that is easier to analyze. but it turned out the bumps were there for a reason. oops! the second part of the quote then says that in addition to the faulty smoothness assumption, there were quite a few important things the model flat out ignored
For you and me maybe. For most people it is. And even if we can do it, if we use specific software that work only on windows we have no option. Windows is a monopoly like Android is for a reason. Because most people for specific reasons can’t avoid them. Microsoft should be forced to do what they have forced Google to do in Android. At least where I live, in EU. Ballon tips to have the option to use another browser and an option to disable Edge and all the crap asking all the time to use Edge. Like the android ballon tip and the option we have to at least disable the crap known as Android Chrome.
Guys, I keep reading this, but it’s not the same thing. At all. You don’t want to get Google’s crap? You don’t visit their crap websites. There are so many websites in this world to visit to avoid Google’s crap. You just don’t type anything with google on it in your address bar. The only way to avoid Microsoft’s crap is to install another operating system in your desktop or laptop. It’s just not the same thing. At all.
Microsoft should be forced to do what they have forced Google to do in Android. At least where I live, in EU. Ballon tips to have the option to use another browser and an option to disable Edge and all the crap asking all the time to use Edge. Like the android ballon tip and the option we have to at least disable Android Chrome.
I fully agree, as a person who actually likes windows, and who’s career it made in IT support, I’m sick of this BS they’re pulling. I want people to like windows (except Win11, fuck Win11) because is some ways it’s really awesome, but that’ll never happen like this.
Major difference: Android is open source and Linux-based. Everything is made up of components z which are quite close together, but can be separated. In Windows everything is glued together. You can’t separate it. You can’t remove explorer.exe (Windows’ window manager) and replace it with another. You can replace your android Launcher, and you can replace your Linux desktop environment. Heck, you can even install a tiling window manager on the MacOS, Apple’s locked down desktop OS!!! But not on Windows.
I am sorry but this doesn’t make sense. Chromium is an open source software and in no way is glued together with any operating system. Unless you want to glue it. They can just have edge WebView2… glued with the os the same way google has to use android webview when a webview is needed.
Microsoft back in the days was forced to… unglue… Internet Explorer. And they managed to do it in a browser that was… glued in the first place. No OS has to glue anything no matter the source of it being open or closed. Unless they want to glue.
Microsoft btw just… managed to unglue… Teams from Office… this is way more difficult to do. They will find a way to unglue Edge lol.
Commenting on c/Piracy doesn’t exclude I pay for software, indeed I payed for 3 windows licenses two with the costs of my 2 laptop and one I payed my self in my custom built pc. (And I’m only counting windows 10 licenses because the count would be much higher if I counted windows xp,vista,7 and 8) and that was my only and one comment on every piracy related community.
Edit: the same people force you to have a windows license and a driving license, but one get checked more than the other that’s it.
Illegal or not, most of the people out there never installed their os, because they buy a device with an os preinstalled and indirectly they buy the license for windows.
Debatable, considering all that’s stopping you from using it for free is a watermark and lack of personalization options.
Plus, I’m using the Windows 10 Education key my college gave me, and my Windows 7 Home key from way back in the day would work too, as well as the Windows 8 key that came with my Surface Pro 3. The cost feels like a formality tbh.
While I agree with your general point, how is it illegal? If I download the ISO from windows, install and keep using it without activation? They aren’t blocking me from using it and I haven’t circumvented any prevention they have in place. What’s illegal here?
If they make it easy for you doesn’t mean it’s legal.
It’s illegal to use windows without a license.
As even stated in the license you agree before installing the os, this one, on section 5 Authorized Software and Activation.
You are authorized to use this software only if you are properly licensed and the software has been properly activated with a genuine product key or by other authorized method
My first one was a random floppy distribution off an ftp server. I then tried SuSE off a CD-ROM and then went with Red Hat for a while. Then Debian, now Ubuntu. Tried FreeBSD but didn’t stick. Probably Debian again next. I always prefer Debian on the server though.
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“”“unintended”“”?
How do you implement shit like this by mistake and push it out to be executed on people’s computers by mistake?
The unintended part was people noticing and it making it into the news cycle, everything else was very clearly exhaustively planned and intended.
“I slipped and programmed a pop up. Whoopsiedaisy”
It was the intern!!!1!1!!
The fact that Microsoft’s constantly more aggressive use of their OS platform to artificially push their search and cloud platforms hasn’t triggered multiple huge antitrust cases is a pretty dire indicator of how little regulators are willing or able to safeguard the public from monopolistic behavior by large tech companies.
If you’re thinking of the EU, it’s probably just the vogonlike bureaucracy, so in about the time that Windows 12 comes out, they’ll be ready. Can’t say it bothers me, if Microsoft is attempting to take marketshare from Google, though.
Getting out of the Google frying pan and into the Microsoft fire is in no way better. Both options are exploitative anti-user monopolies, and both Chrome and Edge are the same browser engine under different corporate skins that aggressively violate your privacy in numerous ways for their own gain.
One shitty thing can be better than another shitty thing.
Even if Edge was marginally better than Chrome (it’s not), allowing monopolistic practices simply for the sake of slightly evening out a corporate race to the bottom is not a good standard. The actual solution is a browser like Firefox that actually has some remote respect and business interest in user privacy, and to aggressively litigate both Microsoft and Google for the use of their dominant service platforms to cross-promote their other products to captive audiences.
MS screwing us with software. Apple screwing us with hardware upgrades. Linux out there taking all survivors
Wait what’s apple been up to?
Broadly: Constructing their hardware so it’s impossible to repair or upgrade by anyone but them (or at all), then lobbying against any attempts to legislate the ‘right to repair’.
Check out the work of Louis Rossmann for details.
They actually support right to repair laws. The joke is that they will make their hardware so difficult to repair that they are the only ones who can do it.
Only very recently, and people are rightly suspicious of their motives: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/apple_california_right_repair/
Oh I thought this was something new they were doing. Same old shit they’ve always been up to. Got it
My favourite is making the nvme drive accessible, but soldering the actual memory controller to the mainboard, so this ability to swap the drive is utterly useless to us.
Well the latest development is that Apple is now going to support the current right to repair bill in California, but people are rightfully suspicious that they’re going to get some loopholes written in or otherwise neuter the bill.
An article: https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/24/apple_california_right_repair/
LOL what are they not up to?
To put it very succinctly: they want to control you and your very expensive hardware that you buy from them.
Linux suffers from being a patchwork of hobbyists updates, corporate additions, and patchy distro support. When it comes down to it, if you have an issue, you either have to solve it on your own or hope and pray the elitists on StackOverflow are in a good mood.
Honestly, every OS kinda sucks.
“Patchwork” sounds like a good way to describe Windows as well. Or at least it was when I was a Windows 10 sysadmin and there were two different settings menus to do everything.
Control panel and Settings, right? It got on my nerves as well.
Don’t worry, MS is planning to fix that soon I’ve heard. They’re just going to get rid of control panel and continue to dumb down Settings
Yet almost every os in the world relies on some sort of “hobbyist” updates. Including windows.
Not wrong, but all this feels like a minor inconvenience compared to choosing between Arasaka and Militech.
Apple and Microsoft support aren’t exactly awesome, either, unless you’re a big business with deep pockets. At least with Linux, the system is open, so if there is a way to solve my problem, someone has almost certainly found it already and added it to Arch Wiki or Stack Overflow or something.
I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I’m thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.
When does it stop being “malware-like” and end up being just malware?
They need to ask the question “will you ever choose to use a Microsoft browser?” and then remember the answer and stop the nagging. For me the answer is no.
It’s Internet Explorer time all over again.
Isn’t modern Edge chromium based? I’d understand using Edge back when it was using it’s own technology, as much as I hate Microsoft internet browsers, it allowed for optimisations such as better battery life on laptops. But using chromium based Edge, I don’t understand it at all. Who wants to use Microsoft flavoured chrome? Yuck.
They had to switch to chromium because web devs like myself just didn’t take the extra time to make a second set of style definitions to work with their stupid engine. Firefox still has some issues here and there with inconsistent styles but it’s not that bad. Edge used to just be a nightmare for style compatibility. So I would just put up a notice saying edge wasn’t supported and save myself the trouble.
Internet Explorer is still the best at messing up style definitions and CSS. Never seen anything like it.
Opera browser is the worst of the chromium based browsers in that regard I find.
I think the “upsell” (Lord help me for calling it this) is that it integrates with Office365, or in a corporate environment, AD. So by provisioning it once you have every component interconnected. If you’re used to Edge at home you will not be hesitant to want to use it at work. To say nothing about getting non-corporate home users into Bing and, ideally, Microsoft’s OpenAI-ified Bing.
It’s all very nasty work.
Chaotic good?
Chaotic bad!
Yeah but Chrome bad too!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications, in a statement to The Verge.
I wasn’t alone in thinking it was malware, with posts dating back three months showing Reddit users trying to figure out why they were seeing the pop-up.
Microsoft even had to backtrack on plans to force the Chrome default search to Bing for businesses installing its Office apps.
After all, Google runs similar notifications on its webpages to get people to use Chrome or it’s annoying YouTube premium spam.
That could be in the form of the price of a laptop that has a Windows OEM license baked in, or a product key if you built your own PC.
Windows is an important productivity tool for many people, and shouldn’t be treated like a cheap streaming box loaded with ads.
The original article contains 654 words, the summary contains 155 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Does the same behavior appear with DuckDuckGo, or other alternatives?
Never metioned in the article, and it’s a “feature” only spread to a close number of people.
i’m sure the free market will solve this. we just need to wait for a new company to pop up, make a new operating system, ensure windows programs are properly emulated, convince the majority of people and businesses to use it, and then use its new monopoly for good.
Listen, I want to give the above a shot (It’s an idea I’ve had for a while) but it doesn’t just happen, it’s very very far from easy, and obnoxiously expensive. Might be cheaper and easier to get to the Moon than to tear down M$’ monopoly at this point.
deleted by creator
Someone misses reddit
Can we please not do that here?
Free market ideas always sounded like cartoon level intelligence to me. Some kind of a perfect world where everyone acts morally and people are well informed and chooses the right companies etc.
But that’s not how it works. Free market ideas don’t expect a perfect world, they instead expect an imperfect one. You don’t need everyone to make food decisions, you just need enough people to make good decisions so the market caters to them.
It’s the same idea as democracy, you don’t need every voter to make a good choice, you just need a plurality. As long as enough people make decent choices enough of the time, democracy works. The free market is just democracy, but with money instead of votes.
In both cases government has a role. I think governments should add in longer term costs to the market, but in a way that preserves choice as much as possible (i.e. carbon taxes instead of carbon limits). I think governments should educate the population to increase the chances that they’ll make good decisions at the polls.
In the specific case of Microsoft, things were competitive until the government looked the other way WRT antitrust law. There’s a lot of shady stuff that happened in the first couple decades that Microsoft existed, yet they largely got a free pass.
the problem is that not enough people make “good decisions”, partly because of how exhausting and time-consuming it is to carefully analyze and consider all the options for every facet of life. for example, there are lots of people who don’t want to switch to linux because they think its tedious to pick a distro, learn a new operating system, and find replacements/workarounds for software that doesn’t work out of the box on linux. now imagine having to do that for every single aspect of life. how do you pick your toothpaste and deodorant? do you carefully examine all the options each time you go to the store, or do you have a brand you pick without thinking about it because it works fine enough?
another problem with free markets is the inherent progression towards monopolies. this can be seen most readily with the so called natural monopolies (monopolies that emerge because of an extreme barrier to entry). how much choice do you have when it comes to your electricity provider? if they do something you don’t like, what can you do other than complain to a politician or move to a new region? aside from natural monopolies, we also see a progression towards monopolies because of inherent efficiencies of producing at scale.
there are other problems as well, such as corruption/lobbying, companies lying to the public, using psychology to manipulate people (link may not be the best source on the subject).
something that i personally find to be a great example of how the free market works in practice: rupert murdoch (among several others working at fox news) knew the 2020 election was not stolen, but pushed the narrative anyway because they didn’t want to upset their viewer base.
And that’s solved with trusted sources. I personally don’t analyze what toothpaste I get, I ask my dentist or look for the support by the American Dental Association. I don’t analyze every car on the market to make a decision, I ask mechanics for opinions and buy the cars they see in their shop the least (or look at defect rates and whatnot that are publicly available). For video games, I read reviews from sites that have given me good advice in the past.
It’s often a lot easier to figure out who to trust than it is to figure out which products to buy. And with a free market system, there’s a lot of competition both at the product variety side, as well as the product review side, so bad products tend to die and good products tend to succeed. It’s not perfect and it takes time to work, and sometimes the market needs governments to step in when the process gets messed up (e.g. manufacturers exerting control over the review process through bribes, intimidation, etc).
This is almost exclusively due to cronyism. For example, ISPs form monopolies by getting regulations passed that discourages new competition, and then sue whichever groups are left so that entering the market costs more than they could hope to earn back. Or companies like Microsoft violate antitrust laws or other anti-competitive practices (i.e. requiring PC manufacturers to pay for Windows/DOS even on PCs that don’t ship Windows/DOS, artificially making third party web browsers slower due to blocking APIs, etc), yet they get off with relatively little consequences (AMD v Intel is a counter-example, where the lawsuit was substantial). And so on.
In your example about electricity providers, that’s because the deals are made between the power company and cities, not between individuals. I think people would likely be better off if there was actual competition there. Basically, the city would maintain all of the electricity infrastructure in the city, and individual citizens could choose between providers based on cost, eco-friendliness, service, etc, and the cities would require a certain level of power quality (cleanliness of signal, stability of generation, etc). So if you’re getting ripped off, it’s because of cronyism between the power company and your city/county.
Maybe electricity is a poor option for this (idk, I’m not an expert), but it seems to work pretty well for ISPs. In my area, the city owns the network and you buy service from private companies, who then pay the city a certain amount to maintain the network. If your ISP sucks, you pick another one that offers service on the network, which is a pretty smooth process.
Capitalism works best when you expect selfishness and have the government set and enforce rules. If something cannot feasibly be offered in a competitive fashion, the government should step in and provide it as a public good. Some other things I think should be government-provided:
If something could be competitive but isn’t, that’s a case for antitrust to step in.
Those happen regardless of structure. It happens a lot in autocracies, democracies, and everything in between. It seems to happen less in smaller communities, which is why I prefer to have each level of government be as small as possible while remaining effective.
The only overlap with the free market is that we have a mix of trustworthy and non-trustworthy sources. I count Fox News and CNN both as relatively untrustworthy and always look for second or third sources if anything seems a bit surprising. For example, Fox News claimed the election was stolen with few facts, CNN and a bunch of other sources said it wasn’t, along with a bunch of facts. So I don’t believe Fox News.
The fact that a number of people believed Fox News isn’t particularly important, what’s important is that most people didn’t believe Fox News. This poll states 55-58% believed Biden was the rightful winner of the election, and that’s with a heavy disinformation campaign.
Just think how much worse it would be if the government were in control of the media. We could potentially have those numbers flipped, with the majority believing that the election was stolen.
i appreciate the well thought-out reply. i disagree with some of the things you’ve said but respect your reasoning and level-headedness. i’m going to (generally) quote the first line of each paragraph so you can more clearly see what i’m replying to, but my responses are intended to address the whole paragraph.
you may be a bit of an anomaly then. this page gives an overview of consumer behavior and how companies are able to influence peoples decision making. it also links to this page listing ways in which consumer behavior tends to be irrational, often being influenced by their moods, what their friends buy, and also by marketing techniques.
putting that aside, let’s suppose that everyone did behave rationally and only bought things recommended by experts. wouldn’t this be much more work for everyone than simply letting the experts pass regulations on which products can be sold? wouldn’t it be nicer if you didn’t have to consult an expert each time you bought something? if instead, you could have some faith that anything on the shelf was a good option?
i’m not so sure it is easy to find out who to trust. this article you linked is a good example of that: 40% of people had a hard time finding out who to trust in regards to the 2020 presidential election, something that arguably is way more important than something like which brand of toothpaste you buy. it might be tempting to write those people off as unreasonable, but keep in mind that would mean saying 40% of the population is unreasonable.
next, i’m not sure i agree that bad products tend to die. i understand “good” and “bad” can be subjective, which makes this topic a bit more complicated, but you yourself have said fox news is relatively untrustworthy. i think it would then be reasonable to say they are “bad” news organizations. despite this, they were the most watched news network last july and i dont think they’ll die anytime soon. there are many other examples of this: companies like EA, comcast, nestle, etc, who many people have disliked for years, continue to do well economically and show no signs of dying.
this is actually part of my point: cronyism is part of the free market. if companies are incentivized to compete with each other britannica defines the free market as “an unregulated system of economic exchange, in which taxes, quality controls, quotas, tariffs, and other forms of centralized economic interventions by government either do not exist or are minimal”. in an unregulated system with minimal interventions where companies are supposed to make money above all else, why wouldn’t they influence legislation, sue other companies out of existing, and all the other things you mentioned?
in a free market, cronyism is just playing by the rules. this is probably the biggest reason why i don’t think free markets work. you can say that’s not right or it’s not supposed to happen, but it is what happens. it’s why we need regulation. another famous example of this was the book “the jungle”, which led to the creation of the FDA.
i’m not sure about electrical grids (texas comes to mind but that arrangement seems much different the situation you’ve outlined), but from what i’ve read, britain’s current arrangement is (at least a bit) similar to what you’ve outlined. we can see how that’s going. but i want to make clear that i understand you expressed apprehension about applying a private model to the electrical grid, so this is more of a minor point.
this is something i agree with. i would add a few more things to your list (such as housing, all parts of healthcare, public transportation, among others), but i can acknowledge that certain things could work fine if they worked in the private sector with government regulation (eg video games and movies). i also agree with you that we need much more action when it comes to enforcing antitrust laws.
i completely agree. it’s something that can happen in government as well as the private sector, and does seem to happen less in smaller communities. this is a very hard problem to solve, and i’m not sure it can be completely solved. i think having a good education system reduces the risk of corrupt people coming into power, but that only helps to reduce the problem. that being said, things are very bad in the current system. this kind of corruption and manipulation is allowed in the private sector: most of the time it’s either legal or it’s illegal but the consequence is a very small fine.
the overlap with the free market is that news organizations are incentivized to pander to their viewers, which is what the thing about fox news showed. they played the election fraud narrative because they didn’t want to upset their base. this is because from an economic perspective, the viewers aren’t the “buyers”. the advertisers are the “buyers” and the viewers are the product. in the context of this example, this means that it’s “bad” to say the election wasn’t stolen because it could result in fewer viewers, resulting in fox news having a “worse product” in the eyes of advertisers.
don’t get me wrong, i completely agree that things can get very bad when the government is in control of the media. controlling the media is one of authoritarians’ favorite pastimes. my goal in bringing up that point was to show how free market principles can be inherently at odds with journalistic integrity. in a capitalist society, journalistic integrity will take a back-seat to economic pressures.
On a small scale looking at any given individual, sure. I make irrational decisions all the time. But on net, groups tend to act more rationally.
Look at politics, 68% of Americans support marijuana legalization and >60% disagree with Roe v Wade being overturned, yet both are hotly debated. So what happened? Our political process encourages divisiveness, so one party pretty much just rejects whatever the other party supports, and gerrymandering ensures that more extreme candidates make it to Washington.
In other words, we’ve selected a biased sample that doesn’t align with averages.
We can also look at income. Democrats love to point out income inequality, but real median income has been going up. Yes, poverty exists and some people probably have too much money, but most people are getting wealthier over time.
Individuals aren’t important when talking about trends. Enough people choose their toothpaste based on ADA markings that the ADA marking is worth getting. Individuals may not care, but enough do that bad products tend to fail.
Regulators consistently don’t act in consumers’ best interests.
Look at ISPs, which have been able to cement a monopoly because they could get enough regulations in place to prevent competition (and tie up those who try with lawsuits). Or look at consumer electronics, we ended up in a duopoly of CPU manufacturers largely because of patents (again, another form of regulation).
Look at COVID restrictions, where we gave up liberty and hamstrung our economy with little to show for it. See Florida vs California COVID results) (latimes is biased in favor of California):
The discussion here is interesting, but my point isn’t to say one response was better or worse, but that sometimes the experts get things wrong. They expected a very different outcome than what happened. My state, for example, was somewhere in that middle. Here’s roughly what we did:
I think this is a reasonable approach. We listened to the experts, but let the public ultimately decide what they wanted to do. A lot of people made stupid decisions, but most wore masks, and most workplaces and stores implemented more strict controls than required.
I think experts should absolutely weigh in, but in most cases, we should let the public ultimately decide. Individuals are irrational, but the masses tend toward rationality, though there’s an argument to be made for specific cases like Tyranny of the majority (protecting minorities is one major function of government imo).
Individual needs matter, and if you try to ensure everything is safe, you ultimately end up in a “least common denominator” situation. Most people eat too much sugar, but restricting it restricts the freedom of those who don’t have issues with it. Most people aren’t obese, but many are, so we’d likely restrict access to things obese people have issues with. Likewise with drugs, media, gambling, prostitution, etc.
Sure, but only if your main concern is journalistic integrity. They are a “good” entertainment organization in that people enjoy watching them. The problems arise when people assume they are neutral, which is irrational.
This poll indicates most people believe their chosen news sources are biased:
So I think the market is doing it’s job of helping people see biases in news reporting. Whether people actually want unbiased news is another story. And I don’t think we necessarily need unbiased news, provided people understand the bias of their preferred news source and have options with different biases.
I’m going to have to disagree here.
A truly free market only exists when there is no government intervention whatsoever, so any government involvement necessarily makes the market less free. However, when we say “free market,” we usually mean the government enforces separation between organizations to prevent cabals and other forms of backroom deals to promote competition and reduce the barrier to entry for newcomers to the market.
So with that definition of a free market (one with a set of rules to encourage competition), cronyism is by definition not part of the free market. In other words, any form of anti-competitive behavior is an abuse of the rules and thus an indication of governmental failure in crafting and/or enforcing the rules.
But you’re right, if we’re talking about the free market in the anarchist sense.
From my understanding, that’s a monopoly granted by the government (as in, they control the complete water system), which isn’t at all what I’m talking about.
I’m talking about the city being the provider (i.e. they own the pipes), and private companies being suppliers. If a private company can meet the standards of the city and provide the same good more efficiently, they can sell it to the city.
For example, let’s discuss electricity. If someone decides to invest in solar power, they can sell that to the city, who will then distribute it to the rest of the grid. If someone else makes a hydroelectric dam, they could sell power generated that way to the city. And so on.
If there’s only one company that can realistically provide a service, the city should build their own supply so there’s competition. Private monopolies should never exist because that is antithetical to the concept I outlined above about a free market.
A lot of the problem with housing is government getting in the way. The mere fact that NIMBYs prevent higher density housing is enough for me to distrust government here. People with influence will stand in the way of progress, if they’re able to.
The reason suburbs are everywhere is because of zoning rules that only allow single family homes. If we instead allowed mixed zoning in more places, we’d see more lower cost housing, increased supply, and more use of mass transit due to higher population density.
A lot of the problem here is lack of transparency in the system. I asked for a quote for a routine operation for my kid so I could compare options, and we had to call multiple people, most of which couldn’t even give me a range, much less a quote.
There’s a ton of cronyism going on between pharmaceutical companies, care providers, insurance companies, and probably regulators that keeps prices high. Here’s what I think we should do:
In general, I want health insurance to work more like auto insurance, but it should also be completely reasonable to not have any health insurance at all.
However, the system we have now is worse than universal healthcare due to the rampant cronyism. I’m worried that universal healthcare will have similar cronyism, but it’ll at least be spread across taxpayers.
All the big corps get a free pass because of money and power, and this is why free market doesn’t work.
Democracy doesn’t work either since media is owned by big corps as well. People can only know what they are allowed to know. If you are rich and powerful, you manipulate the media and you manipulate entire elections and decisions.
After a while, you actually see how all these systems are manipulated dally.
Our democracy in the US has lasted ~250 years despite all the nonsense from the rich and powerful. So I think enough of the voting public pays attention to keep things afloat. It has been a slow march downward imo, but nothing unrecoverable.
I can’t speak for the rest of the world, but the US seems to go in cycles. That’s how democracies seem to end up working, the public gets annoyed enough and demands change, so things get better for a time and then slowly get worse. Then the cycle repeats. It’s basically two steps forward, one step back, repeat ad infinitum. Just think, 100 years ago we got women’s suffrage, and now that’s a given and we’re fighting over abortion and equal pay. 100 years before that we were fighting over literal slavery. Some years down the road, we’ll likely take those as a given and be fighting over something else.
Democracy works, it’s just a messy process that can take a while. But it has worked so far pretty well.
And yet they call communism is too utopia
It doesn’t require people to act morally, it requires them to act according to their long term self interest, assuming they are… immortal. And we all know human beings are omniscient and immortal. So no problem. /s
But it doesn’t, it just requires people to act in their short term self interest, and government’s role should be to ensure the long term costs are included in current market prices. So things like Pigouvian taxes and regulations should increase short term costs for things with long term costs.
The problems we see aren’t problems with capitalism (capitalism is working as expected in serving short term interests), the problem is with governments not doing their job in accounting for longer term costs.
its really absurd. it becomes even stupider when considering that many of these assumptions allow mathematical models to be built on top of them, and then those models are treated with such importance and authority. but then they sometimes also get the math wrong. i remember learning a while back that part of the 2009 housing crash was caused by faulty mathematics laid ontop of these weird economic assumptions. the part im talking about is:
the first part refers to a kind of “smoothness assumption”, where they approximate the bumpy, jagged graph with a “smooth” curve that is easier to analyze. but it turned out the bumps were there for a reason. oops! the second part of the quote then says that in addition to the faulty smoothness assumption, there were quite a few important things the model flat out ignored
Linux with FUTURE WINE is your solution
future wine is just the future versions of wine, specifically the one that will be perfectly able to run windows programs
Eh, I only use WINE to run games, I’ve been able to use native Linux stuff for everything else.
yea me too, it was just some info for other ppl
2024 is the year of the linux desktop!
I mean operating systems are free to be entirely honest
Not saying it’s okay in any way but Google does this with Chrome all the time on Amy Google page
It’s a lot easier to switch internet browsers than it is to switch operating systems.
Its really not though
For you and me maybe. For most people it is. And even if we can do it, if we use specific software that work only on windows we have no option. Windows is a monopoly like Android is for a reason. Because most people for specific reasons can’t avoid them. Microsoft should be forced to do what they have forced Google to do in Android. At least where I live, in EU. Ballon tips to have the option to use another browser and an option to disable Edge and all the crap asking all the time to use Edge. Like the android ballon tip and the option we have to at least disable the crap known as Android Chrome.
Guys, I keep reading this, but it’s not the same thing. At all. You don’t want to get Google’s crap? You don’t visit their crap websites. There are so many websites in this world to visit to avoid Google’s crap. You just don’t type anything with google on it in your address bar. The only way to avoid Microsoft’s crap is to install another operating system in your desktop or laptop. It’s just not the same thing. At all.
Microsoft should be forced to do what they have forced Google to do in Android. At least where I live, in EU. Ballon tips to have the option to use another browser and an option to disable Edge and all the crap asking all the time to use Edge. Like the android ballon tip and the option we have to at least disable Android Chrome.
I fully agree, as a person who actually likes windows, and who’s career it made in IT support, I’m sick of this BS they’re pulling. I want people to like windows (except Win11, fuck Win11) because is some ways it’s really awesome, but that’ll never happen like this.
Major difference: Android is open source and Linux-based. Everything is made up of components z which are quite close together, but can be separated. In Windows everything is glued together. You can’t separate it. You can’t remove explorer.exe (Windows’ window manager) and replace it with another. You can replace your android Launcher, and you can replace your Linux desktop environment. Heck, you can even install a tiling window manager on the MacOS, Apple’s locked down desktop OS!!! But not on Windows.
I am sorry but this doesn’t make sense. Chromium is an open source software and in no way is glued together with any operating system. Unless you want to glue it. They can just have edge WebView2… glued with the os the same way google has to use android webview when a webview is needed.
Microsoft back in the days was forced to… unglue… Internet Explorer. And they managed to do it in a browser that was… glued in the first place. No OS has to glue anything no matter the source of it being open or closed. Unless they want to glue.
Microsoft btw just… managed to unglue… Teams from Office… this is way more difficult to do. They will find a way to unglue Edge lol.
Let me send you to that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pagfXnqOyOE
And how painful it is to remove Edge:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xdFLL9f9sk
Edge is made to be a part of windows, and difficult, if not impossible to remove. It is currently possible, but for how long?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=pagfXnqOyOE
https://piped.video/watch?v=-xdFLL9f9sk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
@theshatterstone54 @olympus Yes, you can remove explorer.exe and run an alternative shell. I’ve done it.
How? Please, please let me know. That sounds like a fun project, and I’ve already got a Windows VM I don’t use.
@theshatterstone54 It basically a registry entry that you change.
superuser.com/questions/1016380/how-do-i-replace-the-system-shell-explorer-exe-with-another-process-in-windows#1016381
I’ve used litestep in the past for about 10 minutes.
litestep.net/
But there are others:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_alternative_shells_for_Windows
Okay, I was hoping this could pave the way to more tiling window managers on Windows, but it doesn’t seem to be the case.
But at least you don’t pay chrome, with windows instead you need to pay a license to use it.
need is an interesting word to use here
Using windows without a license is illegal.
This is like saying you don’t need to have a driving license to drive a car because the car doesn’t complain about it.
Windows licensing doesn’t have enforcement. If there weren’t police plenty of people would drive without a license.
Edit:
Commenting on c/Piracy doesn’t exclude I pay for software, indeed I payed for 3 windows licenses two with the costs of my 2 laptop and one I payed my self in my custom built pc. (And I’m only counting windows 10 licenses because the count would be much higher if I counted windows xp,vista,7 and 8) and that was my only and one comment on every piracy related community.
Edit: the same people force you to have a windows license and a driving license, but one get checked more than the other that’s it.
illegal doesn’t stop a lot of people from doing a lot of things
Illegal or not, most of the people out there never installed their os, because they buy a device with an os preinstalled and indirectly they buy the license for windows.
Debatable, considering all that’s stopping you from using it for free is a watermark and lack of personalization options.
Plus, I’m using the Windows 10 Education key my college gave me, and my Windows 7 Home key from way back in the day would work too, as well as the Windows 8 key that came with my Surface Pro 3. The cost feels like a formality tbh.
It’s illegal to do soo, not that much debatable.
Yes a formality that you pay every time you buy a pc with windows pleinstalled and it’s an asshole to refund.
While I agree with your general point, how is it illegal? If I download the ISO from windows, install and keep using it without activation? They aren’t blocking me from using it and I haven’t circumvented any prevention they have in place. What’s illegal here?
If they make it easy for you doesn’t mean it’s legal.
It’s illegal to use windows without a license. As even stated in the license you agree before installing the os, this one, on section 5 Authorized Software and Activation.
It’s always “unintended behavior” isn’t it?
But I already ditched google. For Firefox.
The article talk about google the search engine not the browser
Now having Linux install in my machine, I don’t have to deal with wins bs ever again. It’s great that I made the right decision 5y ago
Quarter century for me.
I’m not quite there yet, but getting close. I’m somewhere north of 15 years now.
You rockin’ Hannah Montana Linux?
My first one was a random floppy distribution off an ftp server. I then tried SuSE off a CD-ROM and then went with Red Hat for a while. Then Debian, now Ubuntu. Tried FreeBSD but didn’t stick. Probably Debian again next. I always prefer Debian on the server though.