This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background.
MS is getting really pushy. They probably see the GPT stuff as their ticket to beating Google in search so they are pushing it as hard as they can to get as many users as they can.
I just click "turn off". I don't trust LLMs - all their knowledge is learned from the unreliable internet then you add hallucinations on top of that.
I was wondering if I could make a fake one, just add an appropriate icon and change its label to say something like 6000°C Nuclear Holocaust
Dude, if you ever make this, post it to HN. I'd install that on my computer in a heartbeat.
The stories on there are so bad. Like, borderline conspiracy thinking / conservative media gossip rag stuff. I can’t believe Microsoft puts their company name behind the content that shows up. (Though I’m in Australia. Maybe the people in charge of that content have no idea how bad it is here).
I leave it there and I've been a SWE for over 20 years.
I just like seeing what the temperture is at the moment. So I know how to dress if I was dare to go outside.
The news being part of it though, on HOVER, is a nightmare. They need to stop that ASAP.
Turning on 'reduce updates' just has the taskbar display the weather and not change to some random stock ticker of a company you don't care about or whatever other item of interest they feel like showing.
How true that is depends on the type of software. Web browsers, for instance, don't have an incredible number of meaningfully different options. I can no longer find one that sufficiently meets my needs at all.
Because they are scared of breaking things.
Also, most people actually do change defaults: style and theme.
They are usually quite colorful and this is not the standard.
What did you replace Windows with?
Haiku probably ... s/
The only real alternative option with most hardware is linux. And when the use case is browsing the internet and you are there to help them unstuck a broken update, things should be fine.
Then, they changed the button layout and put a "install" button where the close button was, and she installed it without realising. Some bits of hardware weren't supported in Windows 10 and I had to go around and mess around with drivers, which I failed at.
So, she's been on Fedora since. Considering all she did on Windows was light browsing in Firefox and many hours of Pysol, she barely even noticed the switch.
You weren't around when they were threatening linux with patents and forcing OEMs to not deliver PCs without a Microsoft operating system preinstalled then?
>Of the two lists of Microsoft patents disclosed by MOFCOM2, one was a list of 310 patents which included 73 "standard-essential” patents (SEPs) for smartphones; 127 patents which are “implemented in Android”; and 110 “nonstandard-essential” patents and applications (non-SEPs). This list is referred to as Annex “B” by Microsoft.3 The second list is identical to the non-SEP set minus one issued patent, U.S. Patent No.7,111,039. This list is referred to as Annex “A”.
https://www.m-cam.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/patently_ob...
This is a very strange statement!
But thanks - appreciate the link. Not sure how the "media player in the taskbar" got in there, but that's patents for you.
This is anti-customer and needlessly fraught with legal implications.
Of course it seems aligned with their hallucinations-enabled OpenAI investment.
How much of this is just attempts to feed GPT4?
Tangential, but this made me reflect on how "good"/"nice" Ballmer, and Ballmer-era MS, was in a very relative sense. This is slightly startling considering how my mental image of either Ballmer or MS is not great. But now looking back it does feel like relentless anti-competitiveness lessened a bit during that era, and lot of good stuff happened then. Windows 7 probably will go down in history as the pinnacle of traditional desktop Windows, MS giving up on IE gave room for Firefox and (unfortunately also) Chrome, lot of previously proprietary stuff got documented and published (SMB and Office formats comes to mind), and there were some nice product developments.
In contrast Gates era Microsoft was very much characterized by strong-arm tactics and throwing their weight around. And now Nadella era feels very aggressive again, pushing the company forwards no matter what; in some ways maybe less vindictive and direct than Gates, but still definitely not nice.
All of them were present at MS when they pulled their 'millions of lines of code' bullshit in an attempt to kill Linux and harm FOSS.
These days, that's all gone. I don't feel any pressure to use Windows, and I don't see MS doing various legal shenanigans to try to destroy Linux. I'm able to do what I want and not worry about MS much at all. It's very different from the earlier eras that way.
Instead, the difference these days seems to be that MS is the enemy of its own customers (or should I say "users"?). If you use Windows, MS will make your life hard with all this built-in malware and advertising. But if you're like me and you simply don't use Windows, you never see this stuff, except when people complain about it on forums like this, or if you have the misfortune of having to deal with a relative's PC.
Personally, I like this new era much better. I'm able to easily opt out of MS's shenanigans by simply installing Linux. When other people gripe and complain about that stuff, it falls on deaf ears here. ("but but but... I need to play $game on my PC!!!") I feel the same way as when sports fans complain about how much they're getting raped by the media companies so they can follow their favorite team.
By contrast, Gates was "Embrace! Extend! Extinguish!" and Nadella is "Data! Data! Data!"
I miss Ballmer.
"The PM role is unique to Microsoft and was actually created in response to developing software that is more usable and at the same time pushes the state of the art of technology. So when we talk about PM at Microsoft, we're talking from a perspective of creating and evolving the role over the lifetime of the PC industry."
"Program managers got started at Microsoft while developing Excel for the Macintosh. [...] a new role was created in Program Management with the explicit goal of partnering with development and working through the entire product cycle as the advocate for end-users and customers."
https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~xwangsd/courses/w23/readings/PM%...
Committing corporate espionage, which is what their software does now, on the other hand, makes me not want to use them at all. I have agreements with customers about protecting their data, how can I use software that steals everything I put into it and sends it to MS? This is a much bigger deal. (Although I agree you could argue their earlier anticompetitive practices gave them the monopoly that allows them to run their current criminal spying empire unchecked)
Since you didn’t expect respect or decency before, their management culture doesn’t value that, and accordingly doesn’t treat you with it now.
After all, if you tolerated poor treatment before, why wouldn’t you now?
Microsoft was always bad to competition, but not really to customers. (backward compatibility till eternity)
That changed a lot. Tracking and ads build into the OS? No thank you.
Today?
Where were you when it's 'free' OS' was 'phoning home' or during it's behemoth days in the 90s-2000s when it forced the most pro-business Government (US) to essentially break it up when it was using it's monoploitic practices too far for even them?
I have to use Teams and just logically assume all of what was said or talked about exists on some server somewhere for the employer, LEO or intelengence agencies to retrieve; if Snowden has taught us anything is that M$ is the darling child of the Intelligence agencies in the US for a reason.
Using M$ outside of a (forced) work environment is literately like asking to be tracked, monitored of your own accord. Nothing they do should be presumed to be secure until proven a length to be otherwise. It's very likely why it's so bloated and runs terribly, they are optimizing no for UX but for it's real business model: spying.
Sadly, and with only a slight tinge of despondence: I've given up on preaching about FOSS to the masses, but with stuff like this it's like asking why people sign up for death cults, it alwasy ends in: Humans just being Humans.
If you feel adventurous you can eventually transcend dual boot to a VFIO setup that helps to keep your bare metal protected from Windows entirely.
It completely owns that market. There’s macOS and iOS I guess, but they’re not generally available to install on third party equipment.
Linux, sadly, is just not at all a consumer OS and never became one. The security model alone is an unfixable disaster (and many have tried over the years).
Surely you are talking about Windows... :-)
It's executable by default, opens up in something like Eddie and just asks for a password.
Nothing about Linux is really more secure than windows other than the fact it is a small target.
You literally just described an .exe or .msi.
Not sure what the example proves. The simple fact you can compile your kernel, have a strong model with Linux SE, it's just another ballpark.
Besides the fundamental aspect that Microsoft are telemetry kleptomaniacs, one OS assumes the user machine does not belong to the user, and Microsoft knows better. Linux assumes it's your machine and nobody else.
You can have your own hardened and lighter Linux kernel, with less surface exposure, while with Windows you start with whatever version version of Cortana Microsoft would like to push that week on it's users...Plus all the other unnecessary components that create an almost infinite opportunity of attack vectors.
Naturally for Linux, the open source code, makes for a more transparent process, even if I don't subscribe to the idea that more eyes on the code, correlates directly to higher safety.
The fact that deb extension is associated with an application (I don’t know what Eddie is) does not make deb executable. It’s like Winzip opening a zip archive on double click in Windows: yes, the file is opened, but no untrusted code has been run (assuming, Winzip is installed already and is considered trusted).
Linux is more secure because it has a much smaller attach surface. Even from the kernel interaction perspective, the number of syscalls in Linux is much smaller than in Windows, they are in a way more primitive and easier to audit. But the biggest distinguisher is lack of DCE (or MS) RPC - in Windows it’s ubiquitous, available both locally and sometimes over the network with various ways to access it (named pipes over SMB, DCE over TCP/IP, even over NetBEUI, over HTTP in some cases) which makes it hard to secure (Windows firewall is very complex as a result). Finally, Windows Carrie’s enormous amount of legacy and Microsoft is not interested in fixing it (they would rather push you to “cloud”).
Combination of code complexity and large attack surface makes Windows less secure that competition (although Pottering seems to be working on fixing it).
- sandboxing
- root of trust hardware encryption
None of the above can be enforced at a distribution level, and where these features are opt-in they’re significantly underdeveloped relative to Windows/macOS/ChromeOS as no-one is using them in significant numbers.
I’m not even sure you could find any amount of FOSS advocates to even get on board with notarization let alone get it implemented.
You could maybe enforce protected folders at the distribution level but I don’t know if anyone could really trust a feature like that if it wasn’t implemented in the kernel directly.
I suspect that the kind of company that uses Teams is just not very interested in critically evaluating Microsoft or competitors (relative to companies that are evaluating specific Microsoft products as one-offs). They're already bought into an ecosystem whose main strength as a collection of mediocre (or worse) software is that it is integrated with all the other mediocre software in the collection. If they don't 'trust Microsoft', where does that leave them? So they 'trust Microsoft', and that's the end of that.
For example, if Bob at ABC Company is working on an MS Word doc, yes, Microsoft can steal that data. But it's worse when Teams is on a corporate network, because maybe Bob has a Teams meeting, pulls up the Word doc, discusses it with coworkers Sarah and Bill, and now Teams tracks the doc, the conversation, who was in the conversation and what the conversation was about. It tracks the email conversation that follows. All of this is proprietary information. Teams has handed Microsoft the internal working projects, context, thoughts and strategy of ABC Company.
https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/07/22/m
21 years ago: "It is difficult enough already to engage Gabriel in a discussion of security or Digital Rights Management, and spelling Microsoft M-dollar sign is probably the best way I can think of to get your mail deleted. He might even have a rule that does it now, I haven't asked. When Ross Anderson penned his now famous Palladium FAQ, which reads somewhere between a toaster manual and grim speculative fiction, you will note that he never deploys the dollar sign, because he would like to be taken seriously."
But I think all these different divisions just act radically different within microsoft. What is absolutely certain is that the Windows team cannot be trusted, as they have shown repeatedly.
GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet. I'm sure one day it'll happen; statistically it's more likely than not. But what's the point in pre-empting it, exactly?
> GitHub has not broken my trust in them yet.
I abandoned GitHub as soon as MS bought it, but I think my choice was a good one. If I hadn't, then I would have felt betrayed by the copilot stuff.
The real danger. (almost unironically though)
I can switch OS, Office is almost obsolete with google + free stuff, their browser/software is terrible and never used, Github(yikes, well, git works..), LinkedIn(and nothing of value was lost).
So we really are at the whim of M$ when it comes to Github and Minecraft. Scary. But hey, I used to be obsessed with Nintendo games, and now people have Zelda clones so I don't need to pay games that are graded on the Nintendo Curve.
More seriously, Tunic also draws upon newer Zelda titles as well as games outside the series. In addition, many 2D Zelda games have come out since the time of the SNES, not even counting re-releases like the recent remake of Link's Awakening.
Tunic doesn't just evoke Zelda aesthetically as a substitute for developing its own aesthetic! It's a loving homage to a series that absolutely materially inspired the core gameplay, too.
I haven't had a chance to really play Tunic yet, but I just get the feeling that calling it a Zelda clone is unfairly reductive to both. If Tunic and Okami are both Zelda clones, but not clones of each other, something needs reevaulation.
I'll take an up front cost any day over content gating/gambling/fomo.
"Veloren is a multiplayer voxel RPG written in Rust. It is inspired by games such as Cube World, Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dwarf Fortress and Minecraft."
"Veloren is fully open-source, licensed under GPL 3. It uses original graphics, musics and other assets created by its community. Being contributor-driven, its development community and user community is one and the same: developers, players, artists and musicians come together to develop the game. "
Not only that, but they delayed release for a year to fix bugs and polish TotK [1]. They deliberately missed the holiday '22 window for this! No one else seems to care about their games as much as Nintendo in terms of product quality.
[1] https://www.gamingbible.com/news/tears-of-kingdom-delayed-fo...
Huh?
> Zelda clones so I don’t need to play games that are graded on the Nintendo Curve.
hospitalJail is saying there are similar games out there, and that they don't need to play games from Nintendo that are unfairly rated well just because they're from Nintendo, despite a former obsession with Nintendo.
If we’re querying review bias it becomes inherently subjective so probably not much point in discussing it beyond that even if I disagree.
I’m unsure of anyone producing games of a quality and polish level that rivals Nintendo, but that’s subjective too.
like sub 20 FPS, empty worlds, 5 enemies with different skins(okay, factually there were 11 enemies, meanwhile MM had over 70 enemies), same story as the last 30 years, annoying combat mechanics, grindy crafting(food) mechanics.
But IGN said it was the greatest game of all time 10/10 and never mentioned a single issue. That is what happens when we grade on the Nintendo curve.
Google is also a privacy nightmare tho...
If MS did something super sketchy with Github, I suspect there would be an almost cambrian explosion of new tools to do with Github does.
Look at Richard Stallman, disliked proprietary software so much he spent his life fighting it even building large parts of an OS! Messing with Github would be like creating 100,000 Stallmans - and I don't think anyone wants that. ;)
Granted, there is a reason it got to that place.
It's pretty good. Otherwise it wouldn't have the userbase it has.
How that was pulled off in Electron is insane to me.
They took HTML, JS (well, TS) and CSS and sprinkled in some WASM (I think?) and you get that?
The result of essentially a "web app" is impressive, gotta give 'em that. And they started on it 12 years ago.
It is difficult to find some of the more awful practices nowadays but I was always amazed at just how far they would go, and a little impressed by the thinking, to undermine all opposition.
Microsoft is like an Alpaca, if they start getting friendly towards you, it means they are about to attack!
> This “feature” is insane and it makes me concerned about what Windows might be doing in the background.
Today? We've had almost forty years of being taught that Microsoft can't be trusted about what they're doing in the background.
They pay for "the service" to upload their trade secrets and literally everything to Microsft / the USA. OneDrive, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, etc etc.
And then boast about their high level of "security". The naivity is unbelievable.
I don't understand what you believe this gained you.
At this point, I prefer the UI of the web app (I tried switching back), and since it is a PWA, it behaves like a normal application.
Of course, Firefox has sync as well.
It was annoying enough for me to make the switch.
Never could be.
Then I switch to brave instead of edge and now I don't have overheating issue anymore. When I start edge it won't take many minutes before the laptop gets burning hot.
I guess the bloat has exceeded what the highest spec'd, top of the line, Lenovo laptop can handle.
I trust Microsoft far more than I trust Google.
Umm. Should someone tell them?