Embrace(check), extend(check), and extinguish(?)
https://eugene.kaspersky.com/2016/11/10/thats-it-ive-had-eno...
Obviously Kaspersky isn't open source, but the tiger's stripes certainly haven't changed.
Also, Microsoft bundling Windows 10 upgrade malware into its security update channel has turned me off Microsoft, probably forever. Still don't understand why installing 10 after being told not to isn't a CFAA violation.
Windows Server has controllable updates and reboots. Win 10 - is a client OS and wasn't designed with the same level of hardening and shouldn't have the same uptime requirements.
The challenge is convincing the general public of this; people want a Ford Fiesta with the speed and features of a Audi R8, meaning they want the best of all worlds at reasonable cost and no penalties.
By forcing updates on clients, MS has eliminated a generation of machines being owned by various botnets. They've also made it relatively cheap to get a server in Azure should you have a temporary need for uptime (like a research project for a week).
That aside, some portions of those updates are bad (like removing functionality, pushing telemetry, etc), but the overall strategy of auto updating isn't a bad idea if they can convince people to adjust to it and use Server when they need stability.
Having a limit on the number of antivirus products a computer has makes sense, antivirus software often causes conflicts with other antivirus software, and a large amount of security software on a PC causes it to run very slowly, as duplicated scanning efforts take up a majority of drive performance on the slow 5400 rpm hard drives shipped with most consumer PCs today.
To be clear: Antivirus companies have acted like a plague on Windows computers for a long time. They use scare tactics to convince people to spend money on placebo-effect tools that rarely protect them from the type of malware they actually are likely to encounter.
One of the favored strategies is to bundle on new PCs with a short trial, and then tell people they won't be protected unless they subscribe. People aren't told that if they just remove the third party product that was preinstalled on their PC, they'll have perfectly serviceable antivirus.
That isn't to say Windows 10 doesn't have issues that still bother me, but let's just say that Kaspersky crying about them doesn't bother me much.
Will you help wine devs with some source code?
Please continue moving in this direction. There's still a ways to go.
Of course there's still the licensing situation of FAT32, ActiveSync, etc - it's hard to interoperate when the other party will only speak restricted protocols.
We should be very careful with Microsoft.
In Microsoft's case, many people believe they keep showing their true colours from time to time.
On a side note, I'm also displeased with microsoft's products I'm almost forced to use. Can you imagine that uninstallation of Visual Studio 2015 from SSD takes 20 minutes? And it doesn't even fully uninstall it. Windows updates are no better. Really makes you wonder if it's still 1998 at Microsoft.
> I have lost all trust in them, they have to gain it back and can only prove themselves with actions now
Question: what actual actions could they take that would cause you to change your mind about them?
But I not against Microsoft in particular. They are rich and powerful. It would be good, if they are really good guys now. I give them a chance to prove themselves. But i don't expect much.
>what actual actions could they take that would cause you to change your mind about them?
Maybe start making good products? What more can they do? And going back to "new blood" point again, do you think noone in Visual Studio devteam noticed that uninstallation taking 20 minutes? I'm 100% sure that there is guy who did, but he just cannot do anything. He have no power to change things. "It's working now somehow, so don't even think about touching it." And everything is like that at Microsoft.
And that whole telemetry stuff in win10. Every single option (telemetry/internet search/ads etc) is turned off, yet i open up wireshark and still see it calling home every time i type something in start menu. It's like they don't respect me and think that i'm stupid. Why it has to be this way?
"We are different now, but we are still the same." And nothing has changed. Pretty sad.
When I first joined Microsoft, it was prior to the launch of Win8, and I saw a lot of complacency throughout many parts of the company. I found it frustrating, because I came from an open-source background on the Java stack, and I wanted to see more innovation.
In just a few years, things have changed dramatically, and that is because the market has changed. As others have said on this thread, Windows is no longer the key to Microsoft's business success, it is the ecosystem of products that Microsoft sells.
That is why there have been all of these cultural changes, because the industry has shifted, and there are some really smart leaders at Microsoft (e.g. Scott Guthrie) who realize that we have to change to stay viable.
So, the terrible practices you once saw just don't even make sense anymore. Microsoft is being challenged in every market it operates in, which means that we're forced to innovate. This turns out to be better for everyone, including employees like me. (I came from an academic research background, and I'd never want to work somewhere that was happy with the status quo.)
And yes, the Visual Studio 2015 uninstall takes a really long time. Some installs also take forever. They've made a ton of improvements in the new preview VS 2017.
The reason this wasn't done previously was not that a few engineers couldn't change things (though sometimes that is true), but rather that it was a hard engineering problem. It's easy to think that a big company has infinite resources, but the reality is that you can't build a product with too big of a team (see: Mythical Man Month), so you have to choose what you focus on. If you were to ask most customers, they'd rather have new features than have a better installation experience. That is, until the install experience got in people's way.
I don't work on anything related to the Windows client, so I can't speak to the telemetry, but what you're describing does sound pretty annoying. It is all anonymized (I know this because I'm familiar with the privacy reviews that all code has to go through), but I can see the case for wanting to opt out completely.
Obviously, one post is not going to change your mind (and I'm not looking to do so), but I'd suggest you look at leadership and philosophy changes, not just individuals.
That's what worries me the most. The "cool" guys won't stay there forver. You can never now who will be the next.
Go visit the VS2017 thread. You'll see that install/uninstall is much faster now.