If true, however, it is very problematic and of questionable legality (e.g. unintended HIPAA data disclosures etc).
Apparently people will have to start to invest in configuring outbound firewalls on their network to prevent various phone-home operations.
And of course there is no word from the horse's mouth (Microsoft) at all on ANYTHING related to this. Silence is always worrying.
You don't need to bust open the codebase itself to figure out what comms are occurring. You can stage your own MITM attack against yourself with a couple of home made SSL certificates and a router you have the ability to install your own software on.
Look at the context to decide if someone is using it to imply something is bad/evil/scary, in this case you cannot draw that conclusion. The OP is clearly just using it instead of italics.
Unless you can just install a local certificate and proxy it.
It's all "for your security", of course.
Linux, through Ubuntu, is (IMO) now ready for the prime time.
Guess I'll stick with 8.1 for now even though it is shit.
I have been able to put Unity on the back-shelf because it's just a hobby for me. I have been experimenting with Phaser / PIXI / P2 + ScalaJS in the meantime while I wait for the Editor to come to Linux, which will hopefully happen in the near future [1].
As for actually playing games, a surprising amount of the ones I try have been ported over to Linux already. For the rest, I use Steam Live Streaming from a Windows 7 box which works pretty well. Steam can even stream non-Steam games (blizzard ones for example). I tried using it to stream the Unity Editor, but it was just too clunky for my tastes.
1: http://blogs.unity3d.com/2015/07/01/the-state-of-unity-on-li...
It's not ready for home users, it's not ready for most businesses, it's not ready for anyone except a small number of users.
I'm sure the argument will come that most home users only need a web browser, so the software selection isn't a problem, but at that point you might as well just use Chrome OS and get something that actually works.
Audio still doesn't work on my installation. It can work if I kill Flash or pulseaudio---sometimes---or if I restart my browser or entire machine---sometimes. But it's an atrocious state of affairs to expect end-users to debug basic functionality like that, and they end up having to because there isn't a "Geek Squad" local-service ecosystem to take a malfunctioning Linux machine to (with your own customized distro install) where they can just "make it work."
It's not just a software problem---it's an ecosystem problem. Both in terms of the service / support sector and in terms of the software creation sector (the fact that there isn't just one answer to "How do I do audio on Linux" is absolutely maddening to someone used to writing software on a Mac / Win monoculture [http://braid-game.com/news/2008/08/misc-linux-questions/]).
Once it gets increased adoption more niche and paid for software will naturally migrate.
I say this as a Linux hating Windows lover who lasted 3 hours before reverting Win 10 back to 8.1 on my gaming machine and changing my wifi password, and I plan to never go to Win 10 or any Windows products again.
If it's not ready for a seasoned software engineer, it's definitely not ready for my mom.