- My sentiment also. In particular, the New York City Taxi & Limousine Commission operates its own illegal "police force" to prevent entrepreneurs from competing with medallion cabs. It has been known to illegally kidnap people who drop off their spouses at JFK or LaGuardia, accusing them of operating a taxi service.

Note my corrections. You are going to have to cite some serious evidence of your claims because your tinfoil hat...or Uber shilling...post is pretty outlandish.

While true they have come in the way of updates that can be uninstalled: https://gist.github.com/xvitaly/eafa75ed2cb79b3bd4e9

Further Win 7 does not include any of the Win 8 UI elements. Trying to mash a touchscreen UI onto a desktop OS. As well as since you don't have the "tile" elements you are not being served ads nativly on your desktop or start menu. (They did sneak the Win 10 upgrade ad into the Systray but since there is no MS Edge for Win 7 you don't see the ads that pop up there on Win 7.)

Win 7 does offer control on how your updates are done. Not a native option for non-enterprise Win 10 users.

Finally I've yet to see any real hardware issues with Win 7 that this blog post purports. The very closest thing that I will say is that there are some new Win 8+ kernel SSD bits of functionality that you can't get with Win 7 at all. However those bits of functionality are not a dealbreaker to me, an avid SSD user, by any means.

I've got uBlock as an extension for my tablet's Mobile Firefox install. It works preventing ads. However the performance hit is pretty steep compared to the native YouTube app.

Also I've not seen many people mention that streaming services, for me mainly Twitch, is a thing now? For me I use both with regularity. Seems pretty obvious that if the live streaming services like Twitch gaining market share that will eat into YouTube.

Overall I view that as a good thing. We need less monopolies in the computer world.

Ok, sounds like you addressed the usability, logistical, and other tech issues about Win10 at your place of business.

However you did leave out the elephant in the room aka "Telemetry" and its related security issues. That kinda is a big thing and I guess you and those in charge just view it as a non-issue?

That is just normal Cxx level who can be the biggest asshole as to establish dominance within a meeting bullshit.

And given that Jobs was a known asshole it is pretty unremarkable that such a culture would form at Apple.

If it were not for dirty tricks like forced telemetry, a forced touchscreen UI on a desktop OS, and the removal of tools/applications in Windows (Media Center and the backup that they later did put back in just off the top of my head.) people would move to a new version of a Windows OS without the need to pull the Windows 10 level shenanigans.

Windows Vista was even poised to be another success for MS but they botched that up so people stuck with XP. The idea that people want to stay with an older OS is only because MS has had such a terrible track record. Release a solid desktop OS for desktops and it will be used. Release garbage and duh, people are going to stick with the older version that is proven.

Someone upvote the AC to let the lofty 4 digit UID guy know that he needs to take a refresher course in digit counting.

I want to 2nd that /. has always had some fluff as its content. And props to wannabe to remind us of when K5 existed and was the answer to /. "going soft".

It could very well be a slow tech news day. Talking about how marking droids, or trashing them if you so prefer, is a time honored tradition so why not have a thread about it.

The most annoying thing about Windows is there is a ton of places where program data can be stored: The program's own directory (Program Files, Program Files (x86, and of course if you or the program is installed somewhere else), some place in the My Documents folder and variations on that same theme like My Games, in the User App Data folder, or even just in the User directory (I'm looking at you VirtualBox!).

And even if you happen to track down all of the program data files there is a high likelihood that some of your program settings were stored in the registry anyway so you are just going to lose those.

I've gotten it down to a science for my Windows reinstalls but it takes some doing.

Fact vs reality.

I've been a part of /. for many years now. One of the better parts of it was that we, the collective we, tried to keep things fact based. We up-voated things that were based in fact and downvoated things that were not...as well as the other stuff that had to get downvoated too.

And that other stuff exists. It is the noise that seeks to distract those who can't focus. It is the the noise who seeks to divide people. It is noise but it is not without purpose.

If you can get beyond the noise then you get to the actual issues. And I'm afraid there is no real debate here. There is one party that has declared science as something that they do not believe in. Not in any real regard. To them facts are as malleable as their own agenda. Whatever suits the given day will do.

I am no huge fan of either party. I've been without one for many years now. However if anyone who thinks that News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters is something that can do without facts and science...I just can't understand.

As such I watch this upcoming election with trepidation. There seems to be a large segment of my countries population that does not care for facts and science, rather a cult of personality. I know history.

That is not a good road to go down.

The biggest issue is not the draw from the 6 pin connector from the PSU, rather the draw from the PCIe slot.

That draw is regulated by the motherboard and that is not a given that the mobo will not just roll over and die and maybe take some other system components with it along the way.

Heck if the mobo dies and you still even have the RAM and CPU surviving who knows if you can find a replacement for that CPU. Most times when my mobos have kicked it I've just gone ahead and upgraded my system.

Maybe that is AMD's master plan! We'll design a card that looks to kill motherboards and that way people will be buying more of our CPUs! (Evil Mr. Burns finger steeple.)

The best part of modern "support" is that it is a thinly veiled front for their sales pitches. Calling in to your cable company because your modem keeps rebooting? Well that is great lets troubleshoot that and while I'm at it did you know that we have a special on our internet speed upgrade!?

I once spent no less than 20m on the phone with my then cell phone carrier trying to reduce my total phone setup down from 3 lines to 2. There was no change go anything else, even the price, because the plan provided for 2 to 4 phones with shared mins. So it was not like I was even going to be giving them less money, but I'm damn sure that poor rep knew that their real metrics (not customer satisfaction but their sales numbers) would reflect that for my call I was going down a line.

Here is a list of what a current CSR job would like you to have:

        High School diploma or equivalent is required.
        Experience with computers, keyboarding is required
        Minimum 2 years of Customer service experience is preferred
        Minimum 2 years of sales experience is preferred
        Minimum 1 year of inbound call center experience is preferred
        Minimum 1 year experience in the hospitality industry a plus
        Demonstrated excellent verbal and written communication skills along with basic practical math, reading and comprehension abilities
        Ability to work a flexible schedule, including nights and weekends

Two years of sales experience. It took me all of 5m to find a job listing like that and there are plenty of them out there. And these people are the gatekeepers and support agents that you have to get past to get any real support.

Cars are not routers. Trucks are not CPUs. I can't run over someone with my overclocked desktop. I can't go at such an unsafe speed that I lose control and crash into others with my modified router.

Your analogy is wrong. We treat vehicles very differently because of what they can do. "We" the Slashdot crowd that understand that are not opposed to modifying things that can't go at speeds that can kill someone if operated wrongly. "We" instead understand that vehicles are something that need to be well regulated due to their nature.

You almost had a good comment there until that part where your really went off the rails. One of those two people has never held public office. The other was a mayor, a US Congressman, and a US Senator. Likely knowing more about the general complexities about running a government more than you ever will.

However you did do a good job in showing that your point, up until your own personal bias slipped in, about how trust in reporting can be very tricky. And when we are are on Social Media, which I suppose we can classify /. into these days, it gets even more so. We get people like yourself who mix in their own opinions with the facts and because there is some truth to the totality of what is said the whole thing can be viewed as acceptable.

Local data in the very real sense of keeping your personal data to yourself is a thing. Do I need to go on an NSA rant about how anything you transmit over the internet is compromised?

Further local data is just that local. If they go offline they have their backups right there. They don't have to worry about going online to put their data back in place. They can do it offline if needed.

I understand your arguments for server (cloud) data and have no problem with using server storage when it is appropriate. But we have the ability to have large amounts of data at our local fingertips. Why would I want to give it away when my 1st point is very real? If you could say that the NSA, and all other bodies, were not there then you might have a case. However you do not. The NSA and all the other things are snooping on your data right now. Thank you no.

Here is what you can do for now. Run Win7. It is a perfectly fine OS. Yes MS has packported the spyware, aka "telemetry", to the system and how do you fix that? You manually monitor your system(s) for what updates are on them. Use this script: wmic qfe get >C:\updates.txt

Run that batch file as admin and then search for KB3035583 (the Win10 installer) and KB3021917 (spyware) and if they are there remove them.

Is this annoying and bad? Yes. Is it doable on a large scale where you have to admin hundreds or thousands of machines? Likely not. But if you just need your own personal machine that runs a stable Win64 OS then Win7 still is a decent system and you can fix it to run just fine.

Let us all stop freaking out until we see how this shakes down after Win10 goes "not free" and see if Redmond has another epiphany like they did after Vista and releases a real OS again.