This. Love my 16:10's. Getting harder and harder to find, so can only hope they keep holding up.

Ars Technica was present at the announcement, and the Q&A afterward was both insightful and confusing. They clarify the free upgrade to Windows 10 as follows (emphasis mine):

It seems to me Microsoft is still keeping the details close to the vest. So, for my money, the jury is still out for what happens in a year.

Still, as a strategy to get people to move off Windows 7 in a hurry, this is pretty good. You'd only wonder what would have happened to the XP user base if Vista or 7 had been free. On the other hand, this Windows 10 ecosystem is a really big gamble, and Microsoft desperately needs developers to make their platform compete against iOS and Android. Based on that, giving the first taste away free is a pretty ballsy move.

I only hope they don't try to recoup some of that lost revenue by filling Windows 10 with trackware and clickbait, forking out tons of your personal data to Bing servers because, well, that's where the action is.

Kinda, not quite right.

Just checked at https://epbfi.com/internet/, 100 Mbps is $57.99... not free, but not bad. Triple-play goes for $132.82. It ain't Sweden, but not awful.

And whereas Bob the Politician would like campaign funding for keeping his job (would that be a part-time or a full-time job, by the way? term limits? what's the pay? does he really give a shit about keeping that job in a local city council?), he can get a lot more campaign donations by getting into bed with commercial internet providers with deeper pockets then some small-change locals.

And while one state's corruption laws vary from another's, a politician putting his friend (or relative) in charge of a government program, and then receiving campaign donations back, is at least easy-pickings for a local TV eye-team investigation report. Taking such a man's seat in the next election would be like shooting a fish in a barrel... just run on a campaign of anti-corruption and eliminating government waste. I'll bet Frontier or Comcast would be happy to pay for printing up your campaign signs.

And don't think customers who get service from Frontier don't send money through the Council's hands. Be it through fees or taxes, the City gets paid. Always. The only difference is whether there are shareholders who get a piece of the action.

When Comcast runs the Internet, a substantial cut of the profit goes to shareholders, and another cut goes to expanding territory and growth, again to please shareholders to thereby drive up stock price and raise the value of the company, further increasing the wealth of the shareholders. When the City sets up its own internet, all profit goes back to the City to be redistributed by the Council, maybe to upgrade equipment, maybe to fix roads or schools, maybe as a local tax cut.

If the City Council's internet starts to suck, well, the customers are also voters, and they can replace a politician, maybe with the guy next door. On the other hand, if Comcast starts to suck in a town where there's no competition, customers can call customer service and wait on hold until they go insane. Comcast has enough customers that they don't have to listen to any customers. They only have to listen to shareholders... that is, shareholders with enough voting stock to threaten the sitting Board of Directors (currently, their stock price is $55.81, for just one little share; you can look up how many shares you'd have to buy to get anyone at the company to listen to you).

The point is, if you're a Chattanooga customer, and you're upset, you have a lot better chance of someone giving a shit than if you're a Comcast customer. Local politicians can fuck things up, sure, but unless the local politician is aiming to move higher to state of federal office (where the money is), then he's got to live with you, and probably would just as well keep you happy and off his lawn. A board member or senior management in Comcast, on the other hand, will never give a shit about who you are or what you think of your service, ever, unless maybe you start a class-action lawsuit, or a local broadband initiative in your home town. Then, you'll hear from their lawyers.

Hmm. I'm not aware of any municipality where ONLY the government is PERMITTED to run an ISP (that might turn out bad, sooner or later). Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm only aware of Big Telecomm complaining that they can't COMPETE with municipals, service for price, which results in an EFFECTIVE local government monopoly. I don't think this is a bad thing, because I think it would only last so long as the government-run ISP didn't suck.

If and when it does start to suck, a commercial competitor would be in a good position to offer a better product, even at a premium price, and if the politicians tried to make it difficult for them (and why would they? they can't legally profit from it) the commercial entity could sue, they would win, and you would have your competition and things would get good again.

But they can be effectively exclusive, if the cost to build out is too high or an existing franchisee or operator makes it difficult to share resources. In my town, the simple answer is that one carrier was here first, which means a competing carrier would have to rely on revenue from customers who switch in order to justify a complete build-out. Not a great gamble, no big bucks here, particularly in the short term, so they don't bother, and we suffer under an effective monopoly.

I mean, if someone's willing to set up a competing service for free, there's no exclusivity rule to stop them. But I'm not holding my breath.

No. This, at least, is unsubstantiated FUD.

From Forbes.com:

A quick google search of Chattanooga and broadband turned up multiple articles agreeing that their local internet deployment has been a roaring success, particularly in bringing a new wave of business and revenue to the city.

Not every city is successful, but that's no reason for states to prohibit them from trying, if nothing else to give the monopolists an incentive to improve their crappy race-to-the-bottom service.

Well, kinda there is. The 10th amendment expressly reserves for the states any powers not specifically specified by the Constitution to the Fed. On the other hand, your local municipality only has powers as outlined by your state constitution. Typically, any city is completely subordinate to whatever state it happens to be in, but states, and therefore cities, have rights over the Feds unless the Constitution specifically says otherwise (most often, by virtue of the commerce clause).

With municipal broadband, however, things get really twisted. It's not the Feds who are trampling on local efforts to set up public broadband... the states are doing the trampling, perhaps because the states are easier and cheaper for big telecom to lobby, and the Feds are trying to use the authority of the FCC to preempt the power of the states to squash what local authorities want to do within their community. Follow?

Lots of the successful municipal internet projects grew out from local municipalities that already own and run their own electric grid. Since they already own the poles and other conduits for carrying cables, along with trucks and technicians and other infrastructure for supporting them, running fiber is easy. But this makes Big Telecomm upset. Competition takes money out of their pockets. So, they lobby the states to restrict it.

So, in this case, the Fed is a city's or county's best friend, because its state wants to shut down what the citizens wanted to do for themselves. Either the FCC comes to the rescue, or the city has to go it alone in the state capitol against a very very wealthy powerful lobby whose money can easily make the difference between winning and losing in a state election. Suck it up. Sometimes, the Feds are the only friends you've got... if they have the authority, that is, and if big lobby has anything to say about it, they don't.

Not if Windows 10 is as tied to using OneDrive and other Microsoft services as the Development Preview is now.
And Live Tiles has got to go, too. Such distracting, marketing, productivity-killing click-bait has no place in the office (or the start menu).

Wish I had points to mod you up. Makes me want to rent this again.

But it kinda is about mobile... taking marketing and design attention away from the desktop. The old saying goes, "rob Peter to pay Paul". Microsoft is, at best, neglecting the desktop and at worst making it suck, in order to support and even market their mobile platform... a mobile platform that nobody except Microsoft has any reason to care about.

I couldn't care less about Microsoft mobile. Between iOS and Android, there's not anything I see missing. If Microsoft would simply target and support those platforms for their Office/Exchange ecosystem, they might do pretty darn well. What's the need for yet another platform and OS, except blind greed for some pie-in-the-sky cashola App store?

What I do care about is the desktop, cause that's where me and most of the rest of the world get their work done. And it's not just that Microsoft is blatantly attempting to use their desktop penetration as a billboard to advertise and acclimate a captive audience the new mobile product... bolt a Start Screen and some touch capabilities and Metro compatibility on to Windows 8 or 10 and there probably would be no problems. What's so exceedingly frustrating, maddening, is what they arbitrarily, unilaterally take away.

They chose to yank the Start menu because, well, they just did. Drop a bunch of essential control panels and preview apps, even mail, and replace them with Metro apps because, well, there it is. Just like with the Ribbon in Office, they just chose to yank out the "File Edit etc..." menus because, well, who cares why, users will just get used to it. Aero? Gone, without even an option to get it back, along with a lot of other customization options, because, what? A little transparency made some tablet out there run out of battery? People actually believe that?

I'd compare it to GM coming out with a control stick on all models instead of a steering wheel, because you know, it's better, but that doesn't go far enough 'cause we don't have to drive a Chevy. More like the IRS choosing to collect our tax returns in Latin from now on because, well, Latin is so classic. You can opt out until extended support for English runs out in 2020, but eventually English will be gone and you'll be doing it the new way or nothing.

And just like with Vista, there are plenty of shills, loyal members of the Ballmer-Youth declaring it's all great and get used to it and it's wonderful. I don't understand these people. They're either getting paid by Microsoft, or they never actually USE Windows desktop for anything except as a launching pad for Steam or Chrome. For games or web-surfing, fine. You probably don't miss the Start menu and never really see much of the desktop-metro mess. Probably don't notice how ugly the boxy, non-Aero window decorations are, either, cause you're always in full-screen.

But if you actually have to get work done, have 5-20 windows in 4-8 different apps up simultaneously? For that, the Windows 8, 8.1, even 10 is an inexplicable step backward where Windows 7 works just fine and will continue to work until 2020, by which time Microsoft is either gone or putting out Windows 14. Maybe by then they'll have stopped making such stupid decisions and release a Windows 7.1 like they should have in the first place.

Agreed... but far easier said than done. Like secure e-mail or messaging, mature straight-forward backup solutions just don't exist.

My company was hacked with cryptoware, and thanks to automatic backups we only lost a day or two of data. But that's because we have staff and resources dedicated to taking care of these things.

How's mom and pop gonna do this? Macs have Time Machine, but even that requires an external drive for that single purpose. When buying a laptop or desktop, the average Joe, student, or grandmother doesn't think to plunk down another $100 for an external drive whose only purpose is insurance against "what if".

And again, that's with Apple's Time Machine, which is the closest thing to set-it-and-forget-it backup/restore I know of, particularly because it comes bundled ready-to-go with OS X. Windows, to my knowledge, has no comparable built-in product, nor do I know of any 3rd-party product that is easy enough to have saved grandma from cryptolocker. Seriously. Have you ever tried to support "old" people, like your uncle or the senior partner? They not only routinely use terrible passwords (e.g., their home phone number), they're PROUD of it. They'll look you right in the eye and tell you that nobody in the world is going to bother to hack little old me.

and don't think that makes it their problem and they deserve what's coming to them. If it's your boss or grandma, it's your problem.

Windows needs a turn-key backup/restore solution, out of the box. And as long as I'm pipe-dreaming, PC's are each sold with a second hard drive accessible only to the backup/restore app and can't be wiped even by administrator without entering a key. Or maybe there could be some cloud-based solution - nothing ever goes wrong with those.