Sorry, I don't know anything about BitLocker. But if we're talking about getting Windows 7 with a new PC, I think it's fair to say that's a relatively minor limitation compared to everything you'd get stuck with moving up to 8/8.1/10, and you can still get Win 7 Enterprise on your new PC if it's an absolute must-have for your particular needs.

From your own source:

The consumer Win 7 Home line isn't generally shipped preinstalled any more, but the Win 7 Pro line used by power users, small businesses and the like is still available in the normal way, with many suppliers offering it if you ask.

We can only hope. For a long time, Microsoft has been the business you turned to when you wanted to get stuff done. They were notable for not having the effectively enforced upgrade cycles of Apple, Google, and most of the major Linux distributions, and instead provided systems you could count on using, with support for essential bug/security fixes, for periods measured in years or decades, not months if you were lucky. I want that Microsoft back, and they would surely get more money from me and my companies than the Microsoft we have today is going to.

About the only quibble I have with what you're saying is "stop updates". Instead I'd like it to be easier to customize updates. I don't want to miss patches. Once I've got a setup I like, I want it to stay the same except I want security issues patched. I want to be able to segregate security patches from "features". Also, I'm not sure why Windows 8.1 has this whole business of working on the update while it's in the shutdown process. That's really annoying if I'm shutting down to go away for a while, or because of storm activity. I want to shutdown NOW. Not in 10 minutes. Also, don't auto-shutdown or nag me. Just put a RED WARNING security patch update icon on the task bar or something. I know it's there. I'll do it when I'm done with other stuff.

There is nothing "free" about Windows 10, and I predict this will come back to bite Microsoft like Vista and whatever that "Metro" thing was.

I don't use Ubuntu, but this offers great potential for them, and for the average non-tech savvy computer user, it offers the "cleanest" experience.

In densely populated areas, the logical endgame is for devices to create their own mesh networks, independent of any active networking you might provide to them. Then all it takes is any path from your device to the mothership for your data to leak.

Homes with built-in Faraday cages and their own internal repeaters with firewalls for signals you actually want to let through is one possible technological response, but obviously worthless the moment someone creates a path outside the cage, for example by ever leaving the house.

A more practical alternative would be finally passing laws to regulate this area and protect privacy in meaningful ways in the context of 21st century technology, while still allowing beneficial applications of these technologies for those who don't want to be digital hermits. Given the modern reality that even if you opt out of everything those around you might not, the most reliable ways to prevent abuse of data by corporations are to ensure that it is not profitable to do so and/or the executives responsible for setting the policies will go to jail as a result.

If you are a "user" on a system using Enterprise, you surf at the will of your administrator. If you run Enterprise at home, YOU control all these things.

Total Commander.

Heh, sounds like Windows 3.1 or VMS. :)

By the time you finished with all the lawsuits/etc the addresses wouldn't be useful. We need to get past IPv4. Putting it off for another few months won't help that.

That said, there are a lot of things about IPv6 that are rather annoying. There aren't really a lot of good DHCP options if you want to use NAT, and if you don't want to use NAT then anytime your router prefix changes the external IPs of all the hosts on the network change. That is a fairly big change from how things work today, and I think most early adopters don't notice because they tend to have static IPs, but that is unlikely to be the case once it is mass-adopted.

I hope that what you're missing is the businesses that supply professional laptops will continue to offer them with Windows 7 and no junkware for the foreseeable future. They'll cost more than all the consumer junk that is subsidised by pre-installed promo junk and spyware and so on, but if you want a system that actually works in your interests, someone will probably sell you one at a viable price unless some sort of legal agreement actively prevents it.

I also hope that this is finally the must-get-worse-before-it-gets-better moment for all the nasty recent trends of never-finished software, built-in spyware in everything, and subscription everything. Something as big as Windows screwing as many people as it's presumably going to screw might actually bring enough people to their senses that the industry reconsiders the path it's been following lately.

As I've commented before, I don't see Microsoft themselves changing course again as long as Nadella is at the top. He is exactly the guy the board hires if this is what they want to happen. However, given that Win10 is already looking less appealing than Win8 and people are still only just finding out all the ways it's a mess, the current generation of leadership at Microsoft may be short-lived if they can't turn avert the impending train wreck very quickly.

You have been punished for being dense enough to use Windows Explorer.

And that's because Windows and not Autodesk how, exactly?

Logical fallacy: appeal to popularity. But I'm willing to bet I've got orders of magnitude more Score: 5 comments than you do in any case.