Hacker News Reader

Comment by XorNot | Hacker News Reader

So how does this explain why Windows 10, which I have paid like $150 for per license, is now infested with ads, tracking and online presence - and close to impossible to buy without that. They aren't even trying to put a $ figure on what they think it's worth - because they can't be stopped from doing it.

There is no implied agreement, it's exactly as stated.

View on HN

What I don't undestand, even Win 10 Pro has XBox and candys all over the place .. serious in a pro version?!? With the terrible EULA it all felt just like a joke to me and I deleted all my Windows installations and I'm Linux only now at home. I'm not using Linux because it is free. I have 4 unused Win10 Pro licenses at home now. But I just can't say yes to the EULA. So I dumped them all. In the late 90s I also bought Linux distros, because I was not able to donwload those over a 33.4kb modem. So it is not because it free or it cost something. It is about freedom.

The XBox game bar is useful for work actually - it is easy to make videos of bugs or how to use app with it.

I like using Nvidia Shadowplay to do any video recording on my screen.

I can do the same thing on linux and macos without the app being an ad.

Is there anything specific in EULA that stands out or overall it's bad for their users?

> I have 4 unused Win10 Pro licenses at home now.

Why don't you sell them?

Windows license forbids to resell them (or was, last time I checked). Fortunately due to the local law I can ignore this paragraph but not everyone can.

Because it's not about the money. And who knows I might wanna use one on a VM in future. The last new notebook I made flat without even save the installed Windows first.

Get Win LTSB. That's the most sane version.

You have to almost cheat to get an LTSB license as private person. This would be an option, if I could buy a such license official.

I guess someone could argue that it only costs $150 because of the ads. Windows 95 cost well over twice that when it was launched (inflation adjusted). Maybe in the same way that airfares are way cheaper than they were in the 90s, but with much crappier included service.

Let’s be honest though. Windows is supported through OEM licenses. M$ (yeah, I’m dusting this off here, due to the context) isn’t strapped for cash.

scrapped -> strapped

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I’m on mobile. Whatever

How many more copies of windows 10 were sold compared to Windows 95?

How many more engineers work on Windows 10 compared to Windows 95?

I don't think that many. Afaik they closed some teams and replaced them with some automated Tests and stuff. So it's not unthinkable that there were eben less engineers on win10 than on winXP.

They're = being leaches. Sure Windows 95 is expensive, but so were PCs. If you look at inflation adjusted OS prices, you'll see significant declines that reflect a lot of competition:

- Windows 95 was $210 in 1995: $370.94 in today's dollars.

- Windows XP was $199 in 2002: $297.78 in today's dollars.

- Windows 7 was $159.99 in 2009: $200.75 in today's dollars.

pretty sure I gave like $50 for a license for win95

Certainly the costs in the 90s were tied directly to physical distribution and comparatively lesser market demand. Whereas nowadays digital distribution is king and market demand is ubiquitous. I'd consider those factors to be responsible for driving prices down before I'd give a multinational corporation credit for allowing me to use their product (that I paid for) in return for pervasive advertising.

Windows 95 had a suggested retail price of $209.95

https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/?date=19950607&slug...

This magazine from 1995 had a CD full of stock images for sale for $18.98

https://the-avocado.org/2018/03/16/lets-read-pc-magazine-jul...

So I don't think the physical distribution was a large percent of the price.

> This magazine from 1995 had a CD full of stock images for sale for $18.98

..."for 100 stunning photos on each CD-ROM. $18.98 each" [1], just in case anyone else wanted to square the comparison in proper context.

[1] https://i0.wp.com/the-avocado.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03...

Maybe I attribute too much value to the costs of physical distribution. Either way, my point is that I don't think in-app advertising is the sole driver of the price point we see for Windows today compared to the price point we saw in the 90s.

I find it hard to accept the explanation that in-app advertising is the tradeoff I get when buying a tech product at a given price. Either it's free and it serves me ads, or I pay for it and I get to opt-in to ads if I choose.

It's the same argument for Smart TVs. These companies know they can have their cake and eat it too.

A music CD has very similar physical distribution costs, and those often sold for less than 20$ if memory serves.

Ok, so why isn't there an option to just buy the thing at its actual cost without the subsidy and without ads? Are they unable to put a $ value on how much the ads will garner them over, say, a 3-year period?

FWIW, I have Linux Mint on all laptops at home, including the ones used by the kids and the elderly, even though I've already paid for the Windows 10 license by virtue of having purchased them default installed.

> Ok, so why isn't there an option to just buy the thing at its actual cost without the subsidy and without ads? Are they unable to put a $ value on how much the ads will garner them over, say, a 3-year period?

That's the classical problem with ad-free subscription models: You remove all the people with cash to spare from your advertising pool, thus decreasing its value. At that point you might as well make the product ad-free for the people not paying as well.

Windows 11 is more invasive than 10. Why? Because all the anti-privacy bullshit on Windows 10 worked and nobody complained...

We can call this situation the "Fuck yourself" pattern, where you give money to companies so they can innovate in new ways of fucking you.

They pay for it but they aren't able to connect the dots. Have you looked at the developer community of MS frameworks lately? Seems like a ghost town. Of course this is not the only reason, but for quite a few developers it is. I dropped .net completely because it isn't worth developing against a badly behaving OS. I am very sure the ad income doesn't recoup the loss in trust at all.

Or my $1600 LG OLED which takes screen captures by default and sends them to ad tracking cloud servers.

Get one from EU (or with EU firmware) and it does not by default. Good side effect of GDPR.

I'd be sandboxing that shit real quick.

That's the real fuck you pattern right there. When they make you pay for it handsomely, build a moat with questionable practices so third parties have a hard time, make it part of the cultural context so that people expect it to be the "normal" or "baseline" system, and then there's still ads.

While I don't like Windows 10 telemetry and other shady diagnostics services that lurk in the background, I've never seen any ads "infesting" the OS at all, and I'm online almost all day. Which part of Windows displays ads?

I use windows on my gaming PC, don't really have a problem with ads to be honest.

The company you purchased from decided to do it that way. If you don’t agree just don’t buy into it, or create a competitor. Did the license you bought said it would have no ads?

What part of windows is infested with ads?

Most of those are manageable or can be disabled, but it can become annoying:

- Start Menu showing suggested apps (the infamous Candy Crush)

- Task bar shown weather and news

- Lock screen sometimes showing ads

- Sometimes, with updates, new things are installed that auto-launch and prompt you to, e.g., buy an Office subscription.

Don't forget:

- Constantly nagging about using browsers other than Edge

Facebook and/or Microsoft can choose to charge you for their content as well as serve you ads. Serving you ads doesn't exclude you from paying for content if that's that's what they choose to do. I believe there's versions of Kindle and other such devices that are cheaper because they have ads. Windows would be more expensive if they didn't serve ads.

The single killer feature of windows, unrivaled by Mac or Linux, is playing video-games.

Expensive professional software is often available on Mac.

Probably the target market for windows evolved to become people who tolerate advertising (or at least that's what PMs at M$ think).

Half the price is paid in the license fee. The other half is a lifetime of ads exposure.

The killer feature of Ryan Air is that it costs £10 to get to a stag party in Malaga, for people who are too blitzed to care about comfort, basic customer service, getting hijacked by foreign governments, etc. The difference is, there are still professional-grade alternatives to Ryan Air, and the company you work for isn't going to make you fly them for business every day. (If they do, you should really quit).

Blaming Ryanair for getting hijacked? That is harsh. Personally, besides the dark patterns during booking, I find little functional difference between Ryanair and the likes of Aer lingus when traveling .

The difference being air travel is highly regulated, as should be surveillance marketing.

Ryan Air makes their seats out of recycled portapotties. The owner repeatedly lobbied for standing room in the back, coin slots on the toilets, and to remove the requirement for seatbelts since "if it goes down, they're all dead anyway." The one time I flew Aer Lingus (in coach, NYC to Dublin via Shannon) I had a fantastic breakfast that still ranks as one of my favorite airplane meals. Sure it cost hundreds of dollars more but once you're in the hands of an airline unfit to transport animals, you wish you'd spent the money.

> remove the requirement for seatbelts since "if it goes down, they're all dead anyway."

I mean, he's got a point here. Surely if we actually wanted plane passengers to survive crashes they'd have something more substantial than lap belts? I'd have thought, as a simple laymen, facing the seats backwards would make any impact far more survivable than crouching in the insane way that the "safety pamphlet" suggests?

I mean, no one's said he was technically wrong about the crash situation. Although lap belts do occasionally stop people from fracturing their skulls on the ceiling of the plane or flying into the passenger beside them.

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/travel/ryanair-ceo-seat-bel...

I just want my corporate overlords to at least pretend not to have a wanton disregard for human life. Is that so much to ask?

[edit] on the other hand, the best thing for the Spanish about having a standing section on Ryan Air flights would be the passengers would get their brawling out of the way before they make it to the pub.

Airliner seatbelts primarily exist to restrain passengers during turbulence.

This is the correct answer. Lap belts are there because under unexpected conditions planes can and have[1] suddenly hit turbulence pockets where they plummet 10 or so meters in an instant. The effect is anyone unbuckled gets slammed into the ceiling.

It's why if you're seated, it's recommended to be buckled in - the difference between one person slamming into the ceiling and 300 is pretty substantial.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=7391144&page=1

Consider that people survive in some crashes where the plane structure fails. There are no crashes where the plane looks fine, but people inside are dead. This means lap belts + bracing is actually a good approach. A more involved restrain means no bracing, which means more forces on the neck. It also means it's harder to get free, and quick evacuation is one of the main factors that save lives during an accident.

> A more involved restrain means no bracing, which means more forces on the neck.

Did you miss the GPs bit about facing the seats backwards? Then the whole backrest becomes your restraint. (I mean, most airplane crashes are forwards, right -- they don't get rear-ended all that often?)

I am no cheerleader for Ryanair... But most of your arguments don't really hold.

1. What's wrong with recycled seats? If you live in a city you are drinking recycled water.

2. Comparing a trans-atlantic flight to a short-haul one (which all Ryanair flights are) is not correct. Short-haul Aer Lingus is not discernably different to Ryanair.

3. Michael O'Leary is the king of free publicity. The fact that you heard about his "coin operated toilet" plan says it all. No-one ever seriously entertained standing room on airplanes etc...

And none of this has any bearing on the recent hijacking. I've flown many times with Ryanair and otherairlines, with small kids in tow, and there is little difference, because most of the hassle is down to security theatre at the airports.

1. The problem with recycled seats is that they're incredibly, intentionally uncomfortable. If the airline spent a little money to upholster them to the level of say an intercity bus, it would be grand.

2. I've never been on a short Aer Lingus flight so can't comment. But I've been on lots of short Iberia and Air France flights and never dealt with the discomfort of Ryan.

3. Same reason I don't buy a Tesla.

4. I'd hope a pilot of the Irish flag carrier would have phoned in to ask whether diverting several hundred miles to Minsk was the wisest idea. Glassdoor shows the average Ryan Air pilot making €66k/year versus €91k for an Aer Lingus pilot. And no doubt the hours and schedules are hideous. If you choose to entrust your family members' lives to a company that requires defense with all the above caveats to save a few quid - I hope you're spending it on a decent hotel.

I would pay twice as much upfront but that's not an option. So instead I pirate Windows 10 Enterprise which is an absolute dream OS for a prosumer.

I'd buy it but I haven't been able to figure out how to.

That's exactly what you do. Find a guide on buying LTSC through a Microsoft partner. It's expensive but you can effectively install it many times.

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2167558-explicit-inst...

Wait, you can actually do this legitimately??!?!?!

TIL how I'm going to be buying Windows from now on. I had no idea this was actually this accessible.

Pirating can sometimes be the simplest technical solution to some situations, but at the end of the day being able to point at a (set of) legitimately-acquired license key(s) is a bit like having a PhD, it squares everything off in a way that opens doors (or keeps doors open) that would otherwise be shut.

This is honestly wonderful news. $300 is entirely reasonable for a "clean", full-featured windows OS!

I'm on version 21H1 -- is this offered with the 2019 LTSC license? Or stuck with version 1909? I'm not sure that really matters for me personally - but sometimes it's confusing how this all works compared to the consumer editions. By confusing I just really just mean they don't seem offer this information upfront.

You'll have to reinstall anyway, since you can't "uninstall" the Store and stuff, it needs to not be there to begin with. LTSC ISOs are downloadable from MS. Its very similar to Server 2019.

To be fair, Windows 10 has been surprisingly satisfying in ways that I never imagined. Sure, Explorer still lacks tabs and a real bash is nonexistant, but macOS has gone downhill in other aspects anyway. I have an early 2015 MBP and I loved it. In fact, I loved it so much that every time it threw a problem at me I tried to find a workaround and fix it, even though I could easily switch to my Windows laptop. But the sheer number of problems that required weird workarounds ruined macOS for me. From simple problems like Bluetooth interfering with Wi-Fi and causing mouse cursor lags, to the OS not being capable of driving my 2k external monitor as fast as my Windows machine. At one point, I just said enough is enough, and switched back to Windows after 5 years. None of those problems exist on my Windows machine, and if anything, I've come to appreciate the effort MS put into creating a rock solid OS that just works and is not limited to any specific HW.

I read stuff like this but I've had zero problems with MacOS since I bought a mac pro a few back. Am I doing something wrong? How did you hit all these issues? I'm primarily a linux user but it's not like I'm hitting any problem with MacOS on my laptop or my "new" M1 mini.

What advertising is there?

Googling "ads in windows 10" shows lots of examples.

https://www.google.com/search?q=ads+in+windows+10&tbm=isch

Does that answer your question?

Also googling how to remove ads in Windows 10 shows a bunch of solutions.

From your link, it seems most ads are on live tiles. It's really easy to turn that feature off. (No one likes live tiles anyway)

Why do I see no ads in windows 10? Have you tried using WPD?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com