OT Windows 10

Sell stuff and make a profit? Whooda thought.

I just played a couple of games to see the ads. I saw none. Yes, there is an opportunity to upgrade, but that was under the menu. I mentioned befor I bought card games from goodsol.com and paid a one time fee and have the game on a few computers. It is better than the MS version anyway, I can play faster.

Don't know either way.

Nokia was pretty dead before MS bought it. I don't blame MS for their decline. Apple and Samsung killed them. BTW, how is your Blackeberry holding up?

Their Surface tablet has seen some success,

I've seen the Surface and like it. I'd even buy one if it did not look like a cheap plastic toy. Would to well in Toys-R-us for $9.99

It gives me a hint, but it is not hard evidence.

Actually, no.

I can appreciate that, but while you may be 100% correct, it is still supposition, not fact. Yet.

I avoid Facebook, but I have heard about the ads.

I agree the probability is strong, but I have no ads on my Start Menu. I can get my email on the Yahoo page and yes, it is loaded with ads. I could not tell you what they are for as I ignore them.

Subscription software is far from a new idea. IBM was charging by the month for their mainframe OS when Gates made the original DOS deal.

No doubt. And like most enterprises, can easily afford them.

When the PC went public, all that changed. Now the corps that be are trying to put the I-now-own-it buying public on the same pay plan. I suspect more resistance from granny Growler and Ronnie Rub-One-Out. But, maybe not. Ppl are changing to mobil devices which have always been subscription. Perhaps it's no big deal to the gullible masses.

nb

| > The devices part is all but kaput, | > given that they've managed to entirely destroy Nokia, | > which used to make 40% of all cellphones, and that | > the Windows/Metro smart phones have been a near | > total failure. | | Nokia was pretty dead before MS bought it. I don't blame MS for their | decline. Apple and Samsung killed them. BTW, how is your Blackeberry | holding up? |

I've wondered what was up with that. An MS executive took over at Nokia. I thought maybe the plan was that he'd sell out to MS. Sort of a trojan horse CEO. But I know someone who used to work there and he said the Nokia people generally wanted him. The only sensible explanation I can think of is that MS believed they could step into being a third company in a phone triopoly if they had the Nokia infrastructure, patents, etc. There's been speculation that they could have made it work if they'd immediately gone to Android and dumped Metro. I don't know. I get the sense that the whole story is not public.

I'm afraid I don't get the Blackberry joke. :) I know they're in tough shape. The connection? Personally I don't use cellphones. I have a Trachpone, paying $20/3 months, which I use as a portable phone booth and to relate to cellphone addicts who no longer even know how to answer a doorbell and expect visitors to call from the front porch instead. (!) Aside from that, I can read maps, don't use Facebook, have no interest in game diddling, and don't want to carry a tracking collar that charges me $100+/month for the privilege.

In addition to all of that, I quite enjoy the luxuries of time and space. Cellphones tend to collapse all that. Everyone and everything is imminent. I don't want to take a walk -- around the neighborhood or around a wilderness -- and have someone be able to interrupt me. I'm "out". I went out for a reason. I want to look at the trees and have some solitude. With a cellphone there's no more going "out". That feels tragic to me.

| > | > So it's mostly services. They're not mentioning | > software anymore. Microsoft used to be the biggest | > *software* company in the world, and they no longer | > advertise that as their product. Shouldn't that tell | > you something? It's not only their ads. It's also their | > official stated position to their media and shareholders. | | It gives me a hint, but it is not hard evidence. | >

You deleted the link -- one of many -- to their official statements. What constitutes evidence if not official statements? Of course they could change course if things change. But as of now they're a services company.

| > | > Microsoft started all of this back in 1998. The Active | > Desktop theme was meant to put ads on the Desktop. | > Remeber the Channel Bar? | | Actually, no. |

All OEM windows used to come with a rectangle on the Desktop, full of ads. The only one I remember was Disney. Each ad was a "channel". They called that rectangle the Channel Bar. The whole idea was ludicrous. I'm not surprised that you never noticed. It was an idea ahead of its time. Or perhaps behind its time. Bill Gates was widely celebrated as a genius at the time, for "turning the corporate ship on a dime" to adapt to the new importance of the Internet. All he really did was to blend Explorer with IE, put ads on the Desktop, and generally try to make it look like windows was online. (The "Active" part of Active Desktop was that folder windows and the Desktop itself were techinaclly actually webpages. People were invited to stick something like a Disney ad to an area of the Desktop, where one could then presumably get the latest news and ticket prices for Disney's child exploitation extravaganzas.) By the time XP came out, Active Desktop was gone and instead of making Windows look like a browser they were trying out Fischer-Price style 3-D techno- kitsch "skins". The Internet was assumed by that time. They didn't need to train people that computers and Internet went together. On the other hand, the Internet has also become more integrated, as they did with the stupendously idiotic idea of searching online when you look for a file on your computer.

| I agree the probability is strong, but I have no ads on my Start Menu.

It's something they're euphemistically calling "suggestions". Supposedly it can be disabled, but by default it will advertise various things like software that you could buy, "from time to time". I gather that means that they're going to start slow.

| I can get my email on the Yahoo page and yes, it is loaded with ads. I | could not tell you what they are for as I ignore them. |

Well, at least you don't mind companies rifling through your email to show you targetted ads, so the privacy issues with Win10 probably won't bother you overly much. :)

I have WinXP Solitaire on Win10. I often play Las Vegas 3-card draw with cumulative scoring. Tells me how my mind is working. Like you I don't see ads - anywhere. In fact I don't see any reference to Cortana or Edge on the Start Menu. The start menu has only my apps, and Win apps of my choice. I've permanently removed the bundled apps that came with Win10 using the Powershell. There's instructions on the net how to customize just about everything Win10. You gain about 1 gig by removing them. I haven't kept good stats, but it appears that Win10 is slimmer than Win7-8 by multiple gigs. That's always my goal with any OS, since I image a lot, and with Win10 my images and restores run in under 2 minutes. Fast imaging means you don't resist doing it. My Win10 looks like Win7, which looked like WinXP. So far I've gone from tepid to pleased with it. Of course, I've spent some hours tweaking it.

Just that Nokia, like Blackberry ws left in the dust when new technology came along. I don't hold MS responsible for their decline, nor did they do much to help it. Technology is really a risk as it movrs so fast. Huge companies have died in the past few decades. Digital Equipment, Data General, replaced by a $900 desktop PC. Facebook killed MySpace and it may also die when a new fad comes along.

Never had a name brand PC such as from the big box stores so I must have missed it.

I can use any one of the email programs, but the web allows me access from any computer. Advertising is the price of convenience.

The whole plan was to sell the Windows Phone, which was not well received. Low market share means developers are reluctant to target the platform. A lack of apps further discourages purchases.

Ballmer and Elop were pushed the Nokia acquisition, and Nadella was against it. Ballmer was shown the door. Elop 'retired' in June with Nadella making the proper noises. New broom sweeps clean and Nadella wasn't shy about writing down Nokia even if it did result in a bad quarter.

The Symbian platform was losing market share to Android but was still the leader until 2010. They were still ahead of iOS in 2011. The switch to Windows Phone immediately dropped them below Blackberry. Windows did recover a little ground in 2013 while Blackberry continued to slip away.

Could Symbian have retained significant market share? We'll never know.

Which is why you should get a new phone every two years if you are on a 2 year contract plan. Because even if you don't you are still paying the subsidy.

Verizon now has a plan where you own your own phone and the service is $10 to $25 dollars cheaper depending on your data plan. I did the math and the subsidy plan was a cheaper plan for me. YMMV. Also you should be sure you want to stay two years. For me Verizon has the best coverage so it was a no brainer.

You're kidding.

Yes, you can use C# without the .NET framework but like C without libraries it won't get you too far. When Miguel de Icaza started the mono project it was sort of a grey area but after MS released CLI specifications to ECMA it became the morphed into what Xamarin is today. Even early on, I could move C# code to Linux, compile, and run.

With the MS flair for confusion, .NET is the runtime but it is integrated into all the VS languages. Some I don't use like ASP.NET, but most of my new work has been in C#, whether it's command line utilities, web service interfaces based on WCF, or just plain old Windows services.

The only people who think .NET is dead are the tin foil wearing Java fanboies :) I've got a couple of those working for me. I'll do bug fixes in the Java product to keep my hand in. but I'm mostly a C/C++/C# programmer, with a little JavaScript for both client side and server side work.

It's interesting that Charles Petzhold loathed MFC to the point his early 'Programming Windows' focused on using the API directly and skipped MFC entirely. When C#, implying the .NET Framework came out, he embraced it and said it's what MS should have done the first time.

More or less. I've never worked with VB other than dipping my toe in and wondering where the hell the code was. I never got into the Forms thing.

Tell me about it. We still have people working with an IDE from the last century. I don't have much choice. I do a lot of ESRI stuff and the ESRI Developer SDK's usually require the latest, greatest Visual Studio to even install.

I've got an ancient book, 'The Essence of OLE with ActiveX' I think. The author said he decided to write the book after he went to a Microsoft seminar and the instructors were stumbling over their feet. It gets into all the low level stuff that thankfully eventually got buried.

Debacle isn't quite the word. Like I said, I work with the ESRI ArcObjects library and at one time their language of choice was C++. Nothing like dealing with _variant_t and _b_str all over the place to figure out what the hell a VARIANT or BSTR really is.

ESRI, btw, pretty much dropped C++ form their documentation and examples when C# came along. They'd also been using VBA for extensions to their tools and moved on to Python.

The older I get the higher level of abstraction I prefer. Writing fifty lines of boilerplate code to get something done with C++/COM versus one line in C# is a no brainer. Working in C I've even been known to pass JavaScript to Windows Script Host because I can instantiate an object in one line and send it off to do its thing.

Yeah, we got a lot of mileage out of an applet which runs in an ActiveX control in IE. I've got to admit that being able to dump a data file to disk from a browser is damn handy. HTML5 do allow for writing to disk but it's so sandboxed I haven't figured out how to get my hands on the data yet.

Perhaps many (most?) people still have contract phones, but we are doing fine with a couple of no-contract Google Nexus 4 phones on T-Mobile for $30 per month each.

And a year or two back I read a piece that suggested that if you talk up Apple products (for example) on Facebook, the next time you go looking for a new Mac online, you may see higher prices than someone who is not known to be an Apple fan.

Perce

| And a year or two back I read a piece that suggested that if you talk up | Apple products (for example) on Facebook, the next time you go looking | for a new Mac online, you may see higher prices than someone who is not | known to be an Apple fan. |

Weird stuff. I don't really see any of that because I block nearly all tracking aside from sites that might try to keep track of unique IPs. But I do hear stories. I imagine the companies are probably trying to play it down as much as possible. They don't want people getting frightened because they see a dandruff shampoo ad every time they scratch their heads.

I had an interesting lesson in that recently from my neice who's in tech. She uses Facebook and just about everything else one could think of: Foursquare... Twitter... But she was complaining about customized search -- how she and a friend could put the exact same search terms into Google at the same moment and get very different results. Before that I hadn't thought about how much the tracking is warping what the Internet actually is for the people using it. With just a few exceptions like Wikipedia, people are dealing with commercial entities that are watching them in real time and trying to be what those people might want to buy.

It is a little spooky. If I go to news.google.com there is the 'Suggested for You' stuff. Tonight it's telling me Steve Earle is playing Tuesday at World Cafe live in Philadelphia. Fine and good but I'm more interested in when he'll be playing here next week. It also told me about Sinead O'Connor's free download of 'Foggy Dew'. I like the song and will grab it but from the preview I prefer the version she did with the Chieftains years ago.

At least the news items seem to be random and somewhat puzzling at times, but who knows?

Almost all the PCs I've had were brand names, eg Gateway, HP and I never saw a rectangle full of ads either. Some had some free software pre-loaded, eg for AOL or free AV software. Again M is full of baloney. Maybe some PCs did, but how that gets extended to all OEM PCs had a box called the "channel bar", full of ads, is just another example of the tin hat crowd.

Except that in my experience, the carrier only gives you about $100 or so towards the cost of a new phone, not the full price.

Verizon was my carrier and all they gave me towards a new phone was $100 every two years. Then, because I was on one of their lower plans, they reduced that to $50. Now I'm on Virgin Mobile with their prepaid plan. At the time I went over, V was still a lot more expensive. Now, most of the carriers have a prepaid plan for ~$35 a month, which includes unlimited V/T, and ~500MB of data. I agree, most people would be better off buying a phone and going with one of those plans. You can find all kinds of phones on Ebay at good prices. Also carriers typically have some refurbished ones, including new models, at decent prices.

Well, that is *your* experience. And you are talking about Verizon, not At&T. I paid $100 for my iPhone 4s plus the $18 upgrade fee. Before that I got a Samsung Sunburst for free and there should have been an $18 upgrade fee but AT&T screwed up and didn't charge me the $18.

I just checked and I can get an iPhone 5s for $99.99 plus the upgrade fee which has been increased to $45. iPhone 6 $199 plus upgrade fee. iPhone 6 Plus $299.99 plus the $45 upgrade fee.

Here is a screen shot for the iPhone 5s for $99.99.

On my last contract renewal Verizon fronted $350 of my free Kyocera's price (List $350). And Verizon fronted $450 of my wife's $200 iPhone 6 (list $650).

To find the Verizon subsidy just divide the money Verizon fronted by

Verizon loves those on a contract who go month to month when the contract expires, don't get a new phone, and continue to pay the subsidized price.

Lots of plans/phone companies to choose from if you don't like Verizon. You just have to select the best one for you (YMMV).

Agreed. If you can live with it you can get plans and phones for peanuts from many sources these days. When traveling I many times am the only one in my group with useable service. I have on occasion even given others with no service a WiFi hotspot so they can check their email. I'm willing to pay a little more for good service, unlimited talk/text, free roaming (US) and the data I need for the places I go. YMMV.

Well, that is *your* experience. And you are talking about Verizon, not AT&T. I paid $100 for my iPhone 4s plus the $18 upgrade fee. Before that I got a Samsung Sunburst for free and there should have been an $18 upgrade fee but AT&T screwed up and didn't charge me the $18.

I just checked and I can get an iPhone 5s for $99.99 plus the upgrade fee which has been increased to $45. iPhone 6 $199 plus upgrade fee. iPhone 6 Plus $299.99 plus the $45 upgrade fee.

Here is a screen shot for the iPhone 5s for $99.99.

My point was that the claim was made that you should just automatically get a new phone every two years because you're eligible again for a subsidized one. Per your own math, above, you're paying $145+ for a new phone, plus you're paying $20 or $30 a month more for a contract phone that comes with the bundled phone. If you want a new phone every two years and also want to pay the substantially higher contract rates that go along with it, that's your choice. But it's not free. Even the majors have no contract plans now where you can save $20 or $30 a month, but you don't get a subsidized phone. Do the math.