07.21.15
Gemini version available ♊︎Vista 10 Media SPAM is Getting Pretty Bad, and It’s Not Even Released Yet
Remember what Microsoft itself has said (in its words, click below for original PDF):
Summary: Microsoft and its minions (inside the media) pretend that Vista 10 will change the world, but technical folks from Microsoft say it’s not even stable and nowhere near ready
Vista 10 is nothing to be celebrated. It will mean yet more nightmares for software/web developers, even if they don’t use it at all. At my job I have already encountered people who use IE11 (Internet Explorer 11), which essentially breaks lots of commonly-used stuff (CKEditor for example). It’s like another IE6 and Microsoft makes matters worse by introducing another broken browser, in addition to Internet Explorer. According to The Register, this ‘new’ browser “is built on a fork of the Trident rendering engine that powers IE. Microsoft said it’s stripped out all that legacy code and, certainly, early benchmarks would seem to indicate it’s found a way to speed things up. But when it comes to the standards support developers are accustomed to, Edge reveals its Trident underpinnings.”
“Windows is getting more expensive, not cheaper. Pricing/tariff tricks are making it easier to entrap people, getting them ‘hooked’ (locked in) on Microsoft’s so-called ‘cloud’. The cost of being locked in is very high. Moreover, there is the cost of bad security.”So it’s basically the same rubbish under another name. It’s just marketing, much like “10″ itself (just a brand). Remember that Vista 8 objectively performed (in market terms) a lot worse than even Vista and based on what I hear about Vista 10 (from those working inside Microsoft), the zero-cost delusion around Vista 10 is there for a reason. Microsoft knows that it’s rubbish, so it is willing to give it away as a free ‘upgrade’ to existing users, hoping to game the so-called ‘adoption’ numbers. A lot of them might not choose to ‘upgrade’ (even at zero cost) because, as a Microsoft programmer told me a few days ago, Vista 10 still crashes a lot and it has hardware compatibility issues. Now we have this article from Brad Chacos telling us that Vista 10 won’t change much after Vista 8, except bundle it with more unwanted surveillance online, courtesy of the NSA’s leading partner in crime. “Don’t let that fresh new coat of paint fool you,” Chacos wrote, “Windows 10 may mask the nasty symptoms that made users shrink away from Windows 8, but it doesn’t cure the underlying causes. Windows 10 still advances most of Windows 8’s core missions—and those core missions are what made Windows 8 so controversial to many defenders of the traditional desktop.”
We remind readers not be fooled by the Vista 10 media flood (puff pieces all day long). Microsoft is paying a lot of money right now in order to manipulate/bribe journalists, as always (not to mention the AstroTurfing. As before, Microsoft does this by proxy, shielding itself from embarrassing litigation. Microsoft’s spammy barrage has already begun in CBS (see this ‘advertisement’ from Lance Whitney, who had worked for Microsoft media but did not disclose this conflict of interest). Vista 10 propaganda is going to get a lot worse in the coming days and weeks, that’s for sure. Regarding the forced software updates that we wrote about the other day, Mr. Pogson says that Microsoft “wants to control you by forcing upgrades which let in updates to everything, new “features”, even advertising on the hardware you own.”
Windows is getting more expensive, not cheaper. Pricing/tariff tricks are making it easier to entrap people, getting them ‘hooked’ (locked in) on Microsoft’s so-called ‘cloud’. The cost of being locked in is very high. Moreover, there is the cost of bad security. There are still back doors in there (Microsoft never changed its policy regarding the NSA) and back doors in Vista 10 are hardly even hidden because Microsoft’s ToS/EULA allows them to suck up (‘cloud’) one’s data. Windows is quite an hazardous OS. It used to be said that people believing Windows has back doors are “paranoid”. Now, those who say there’s none are viewed as stupid. When Vista 8 and prior versions (predecessors of “Windows 8″) were released Microsoft publicly bragged about NSA collaborations, even when the release (build process) was imminent. It says a lot, does it not? Prior to the NSA leaks Microsoft used to publicly pose with the NSA to brag about collaboration for ‘security’. This won’t happen with Vista 10 because the NSA is not popular and definitely not trusted anymore. Vista 10 will provide the latest and greatest back doors. The Register chastises GNU/Linux this week, saying that North Korea tracks GNU/Linux installations; well, even if true, they are copying Windows and OS X antifeatures, ‘innovated’ and ‘championed’ by the West. Outside of North Korea there are no such issues. On the other hand, The Register has just shown again that there are too many Windows back doors (having just been exposed to the public, partly thanks to Wikileaks), so Microsoft must fix them. It just can’t keep up.
“It’s 2015, and bad font files in webpages will still pwn you” if you use Microsoft Windows, says The Register. It hasn't been long since the last such flaw.
In summary, everyone should brace themselves for a lot of Microsoft propaganda, including puff pieces and overt lies, nonstop in the coming days. █
“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”
–Bill Gates, Microsoft
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