If your biggest complaint is that there are ads in some areas of the solitaire suite then just spend the $1 per month for the next 10 years and you'll be back to where you were paying for windows before. You can even write it off if you're a business as an expense instead of a purchase.

Better, take the $170 for Windows xp/7/8 pro and invest it. Every month you should make about $1.70 in returns. Take that $1.70 and get solitaire every month for life. Take the other $0.70 and every other month buy yourself a nice ad free version of the apps you want for $1.50 like MetroTube. Most ad supported apps in the store also have an ad free version you can buy outright.

Meanwhile the Microsoft Store Based business model works great. All of your purchases are instant. No more filling out a shady as hell paypal form and waiting for a cd key to arrive. No more trying to find virus free freeware on Downloads.com which then ends up installing a firefox extension to spy on you. No more installing tiny applications which may or may not solve the problem you have and may or may not add a rootkit to your system. The Store is safe, it's well sandboxed by the WinRT APIs. It's cheap, since most apps are more like $1.50 instead of $9.99. It's convenient, you just search and all of the apps are in one place, you don't google and hunt through their poorly designed 1980s BBS inspired website. All of the libraries and packages are included no hunting for dependencies. And yes there are some ad supported apps, but I'm fine with that because I believe in developers being able to make a livelihood but sometimes I'm not willing to actually buy an app outright. I'm more than happy to look at a reasonable amount of ads in an app if I don't feel like spending the $0.99 for it. And when I do feel like spending a couple dollars to support an app it's bought outright 99% of the time and I can install it easily on all of my computers without registration or DRM or any bullshit.

There is a really really obvious reason Microsoft gave away Windows 10 for free. They take 30% of all apps sales.

Give me a break. Solitaire is still free and *ad-free*. That's right I said Ad-Free, because it is if anyone actually bothered to open Solitaire on Windows 8 or Windows 10. If you want to play Windows XP, Windows 2000, Windows 98, Windows 7 solitaire aka Klondike solitaire it's still free and it's still completley ad free.

They also added, in spite of everybody here being entitled little brats, 5 other versions of solitaire like Spider solitaire and freecell. If however you want to try out one of the "Daily Challenges" you may use the curated, daily content for the outrageous price of watching an ad.

God, Slashdot has really hit a new low. God forbid an app, that can be uninstalled is included with a free OS that gives you 5 games for free but offers one tiny bit of premium content in exchange for an ad.

If your tin foil hat paranoid brain can avoid clicking on the daily-challenge button you get multiple high quality card game apps for nothing. Or you can right click on the app in your app list (because it's not even pinned to your start menu by default) and click "Uninstall". Lord have mercy! The pain and trouble! Oh my!

They aren't tracking your surfing habits more than google. They're tracking them exactly the same. The OS isn't scanning the contents of your files and applications and uploading them. Put simply this is some of the most rediculous FUD I've seen in nearly all of Slashdot's anti-Microsoft FUD. Which is saying a lot.

For fuck's sake, Solitaire is not part of some master scheme to spy on you. In fact of all of the large tech companies Microsoft is the one most actively avoiding ads to pay for their products and instead choosing for subscriptions.

Isn't it possible that these features are needed to help the app work better? If your phone is running hot and low on battery maybe it'll update its map less frequently.

No, I upgraded last week. RTM has been out since July 15.

Fuel up in your garage? Personally I find the idea of charging off of any electricity source enormously appealing as well. I'm not saying I would charge up off of a solar panel on a mountain top, but it's a cool feature to know that you could theoretically setup a small hydro generator on your property and drive pretty much indefinitely without needing a massive global petroleum infrastructure to keep driving. That notion has green appeal, it has libertarian appeal, it has national security appeal and it has zombie apocalypse aficionado appeal. All the major demographics.

Really? I guess that handful of futurists who could forsee it must have been rocking Palm Treos in 2002. Or maybe they had a pocketPC in 2000.

I was browsing the internet (through my PCMCIA dial up modem) on a PocketPC and running apps and playing games on the touchscreen in 2001. Obviously a cellular connection would have been desirable but at the time bandwidth was terribly constrained however it wasn't like anybody had any trouble thinking "Well if cellular internet is slow today, eventually we'll get at least dial up or DSL speeds."

If futurists didn't see Smartphones coming they were stone dead blind.
 

You're completely missing the economics of car ownership. Whatever you are spending, the car company can spend too. Car services are currently grossly overpriced but it's only a matter of time before they become competitive.

If the total cost of ownership is $3,000 per year (insurance, payments, gas etc). You can spend that or a corporation who can write it all off as an expense can also spend the exact same. If you are careful about model/make they can be careful.

Theoretically you could set up a 'car service' corporation and spend exactly what you spend today but funnel it through a corporation. Some people do stuff like this for airplanes. So at very worst they should match your car ownership expenses. If they charge a profit then that percentage is how much you miss out on. But counter to the profit angle is also the utilization angle. My car is about 8% utilized. That means there is a 92% opportunity for a company to spend about what you spend and then have your car spend the other 92% of its life earning revenue. That's a massive opportunity to not just compete with ownership but actually beat ownership on price.

I imagine you haven't seen any indication since you probably never bothered looking, spending 2 seconds googling or even care.
http://cdn.nirmaltv.com/images...

It's smart enough that when I detach my keyboard from my Surface it switches to tablet mode. But it's not smart enough to know whether I want to be using keyboard and mouse or I want to be touching the screen. It used to be far more aggressive but that annoyed users when it tried to be 'smart' and switched when people didn't want it to.

You're correct that they could theoretically do anything they want, however when Edge was first released to Insiders you couldn't access LocalHost files (aka .html files on your desktop or a local Apache server). The Public APIs have a checkbox for "local host" so I took that to mean that they were working from the public developer defaults in their compiler options.

Also since Edge is intended to run on all universal windows platforms I assume they're going to avoid API hooks which might not be available (like shell access or COM which might not be available on Windows Mobile). Adding hooks back into Win32 means they have to have those same hooks available to Hololens etc.

No. I very clearly stated that they technically can but they evidently chose not to write their new application for a product that has reached END OF LIFE and whose successor is FREE. That's a perfectly sane decision. "hey bob should we backport our new free product to people who refuse to accept our free upgrade?" "Fuck no!" "Yeah I didn't think we should either just checking."

It's as easy to backport Edge as it is to port Chrome from Linux to OSX. You don't see Apple releasing Safari for OS 9. Safari no longer works on OS 9 because supporting an OS which has been End of Life'ed is ridiculous.

Microsoft Developed the Browser using WinRT which doesn't exist in Windows 7. Both Mozilla and Google had to rewrite their browsers to support Android and iOS. That didn't just magically happen they had to devote a lot of resources to using the Android and iOS APIs. This is no different. Microsoft is moving away from Win32. Win32 had a good 20+ year run but WinRT should eventually displace it. If they didn't write Edge for WinRT developers would cry foul and say "If WinRT isn't good enough for you why should we adopt WinRT?!" Edge is a Universal Windows Application so that means it runs on: Windows Desktop, Windows Mobile, Xbox One (this fall), Hololens and Windows IOT. In other words they did write it so that it could be easily portable... among windows 10 devices.

Probably won't be. It's written currently for WinRT which obviously Windows 7 doesn't support and the reason Microsoft is giving you a *free* upgrade to Windows 10. So it would be a pretty radically different web browser, comparable to writing Safari for iOS vs OSX.

I still run the Zune software and have a Zune Subscription. I don't know what you're talking about, because I'm still enjoying my 10 free songs per month!