Technology

I’m helping a friend of mine writing a long essay

I think the authorities refer to this as a manifesto after locating it.

Kill Bill Gates

the fuck?

Because I have to use Teams.

When they switched the window exiting x button on the "upgrade to windows ten!" Notification to accept the installation rather than just exit the notification.

I'd been exiting that window every day to set up our work computers, as our point of sales solution didn't support the newer version of windows.

My horror when our shop doors open and the screen turns to "updating to windows 10"

We basically lost a day of sales since we had to do thing sans POS.

When I told the owner that I definitely didn't accept the installation, he called Microsoft which told him I must have accepted the installation.

• The disaster that was Vista (increased system requirements, "vista capable" lawsuit)
• Trusted computing controversy
• Secure boot
• Decision to remove the Start button in Windows 8
• UWP apps - about how bloated they are
• Replacement of lightweight win32 apps to bloated UWP (eg Sticky Notes, Notepad, Photo Gallery etc)
• The new Settings applet and the deprecation of the old Control Panel
• Complete removal of certain Control Panel applets, with no GUI replacements
• Deep integration of Explorer.exe from Windows 8 onwards, making it near-impossible to have a complete shell replacement (affecting the third-party shells such as BlackBox)
• Locking down of OS features in the name of "security" (eg requiring a hack to apply custom themes)
• Aggressive nagging to upgrade to Windows 10 (including forced upgrades)
• Windows Update: specifically, how it hijacks your PC
• Windows Update can sometimes remove Linux as a bootable option
• Lack of a rolling release model
• Aggressive telemetry and user data collection
• Increased bloatware and unwanted features
• Ads in Start Men and File Explorer
• Print Nightmare bug mismanagement
• Bug that caused the deletion of user documents
• Microsoft Pluton
• Forcing new Windows users to sign in with a Microsoft Account, requiring a hack to use local accounts
• The constant push towards Microsoft cloud services, which are not only a privacy nightmare but have hidden costs and is unreliable (eg frequent outages, lack of troubleshooting features, clunky)
• Microsoft Intune sucks and isn't a replacement for SCCM, in spite of them claiming otherwise
• Constant product renames (eg: SCCM > MECM, Azure AD > Entra ID etc)
• Forcing driver apps to be distributed and updated via Microsoft Store
• Microsoft Store
• Artificial TPM and CPU requirements for Windows 11 (planned obsolescence)
• Removal of useful features from Window 11 (eg: taskbar customisation options)
• Forced integration of services such as Teams
• Fake Bing ads targeting Chrome users, pushing Adware/PUP
• Malware-like popups in Windows 11 for Bing
• Microsoft Teams (specifically: it's UI, and how bloated it is)
• Claiming that .NET MAUI is cross-platform, when you can't build Linux apps with it
• Microsoft PowerShell on Linux is a joke
• Lack of Microsoft Office for Linux, in spite of Microsoft claiming to love Linux
• Lack of VBA support in Office 365 browser apps
• Limited BIOS features in Surface Laptops
• Microsoft support is horrible, even their premium enterprise support sucks
• Microsoft News Portal posting factually-incorrect, AI generated articles

The set the standards, and then break them. They have been doing this since early versions of Office.

They don't finish porting old applets to new Windows before they release another new Windows.

They unfairly use their market position to push their products and services. Edge, Onedrive, Teams, etc.

Windows Updates, need I continue?

You need a chapter on "Microsoft and Kerberos". They adopted Kerberos for Active Directory and at the same time literally wrote the Kerberos RFC saying specifically how to use it across a large enterprise.

Then they didn't implement it that way.

They intentionally made it so that Active Directory doesn't follow the Kerberos standard they they wrote. So if you follow the standard you won't actually be compatible with Active Directory. It's one of their more subtle, "Embrace Extend Extinguish" maneuvers. Most people don't know about it because the only company impacted at the time was Novell (and they won their legal stuff against Microsoft... with a settlement).

For me it's the monopoly. Because of their domination they can push whatever change they want because people is locked in to their services and must accept it.

And well kinda independently I don't mind vscode that much, but github until a few weeks was able to show much better info on the home page than now.

Dirt on Microsoft

#Microsoft

Ugly, clunky, inelegant.

Windows = designed by engineers.

Mac = engineered by designers.

They kneecapped Linux in the early days because they were afraid of what people accepting FOSS as a standard would do to their profits.

They also killed Atom text editor in favor of VSCode.

Embrace, extend, and exterminate, 'nuff said. They can fuck off with their shitty business practices.

I hate them because they invented Proprietary Software at a time that all software code was shared between hobbyists and built upon freely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists#Open_letter

Bill was a big part of how proprietary software became a thing (and not just "a thing", but "the default") in the first place. Just think what the world would be like today without that particular form of artificial scarcity.

Microsoft submitted video evidence during their Antitrust trial in the late 90's that had been edited together, but was being presented as unedited. i.e. they tried to pull the wool over the DOJ's eyes, because why not? https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-on-trial-ms-videotape-not-what-it-seemed/

They included IE4 in Win98 - that was seen as anticompetitive. Compare that to everything they do today. Or everything Apple does today (like, literally everything). It's shocking that something like including IE with win98 was worth pursuing, but yet everything since then was just how big business does big business.

They probably stalled computer evolution for two decades.

just created an account on Lemmy and this is the first thing that catches my eyes lol. great stuff. I would love to read it when it is done.

Because they keep on releasing Surface devices with less efficient Intel CPUs.

old article from 2010 about ms spreading fud http://blog.wolfire.com/2010/01/Why-you-should-use-OpenGL-and-not-DirectX

I still remember this specific article and it struck a nerve with me when I first read it.

I'm sure there are much older examples and also much newer examples but this one is always in the back of my head.

latest example I can think of off the top of my head is ms adding their bash compatible terminal or linux subsystem, not sure how it technically works, but it allows running bash scripts and I think linux terminal commands and tools to some extent. which sounds great on the surface for anyone who wants to do this and might bring some value to the eco system, but it makes me scared because I only see ms infiltrating foss and trying to make it their own and reducing the need to use linux at all, and I suspect eventually they will introduce new things that only works on windows and fragment things. even more scary I commented about this on reddit and only got downvotes. I guess I'll keep all my tinfoil hats for myself and not share with the rest of the class.

another example is xbox trying to buy up every game company and put playstation out of business, with their latest comment being about how they would want to buy up nintendo. I guess technically not ms, but pretty same to me.

Two things come to mind for me:

• one of the more recent issues I've had is the exercise in pain that is Teams for Linux when not using a corporate account

• second is that they looooove to build proprietary products to compete with existing ones in attempts to build their own "standard" that only works on their systems, thus crushing competitors. See: (early) MSOffice, Internet Explorer+ActiveX, DirectX

• Third: buying out products and removing compatibility. RAV antivirus was popular for Linux users as a fileshare/mail/etc scanner. MS bought it and shortly after killed Linux support

Read about Microsoft and standardazion of OOXML as ODF got standardized. Caution: rabbit hole

I don't particularly hate MS (yet), but I hate some aspects of it.

I hate windows. I'm not even sure if I'm objectively right but it does not even matter. GNU/Linux is just a superior software system. I hate how Windows is not Linux and find most things they do different stupid. I'm not going to make an exhaustive list here, but for starters:

• Windows, especially before 11, is so ugly. On Linux I can install themes, fancy WMs, entire DEs, etc etc. MacOS is famously overdesigned, never used but from what I hear it seems good too.

• Windows does not support links. They have some weird thing, but it's not the beauty of Symbolic and Hardlonks on Unix like systems.

• Backslash in paths. Come on. And yes I know regular slashes work most of the time nowadays, but the default is just bad.

• Multiple roots. C: D: and so on. Probably an okay design choice, but I like the UNIX way better.

• No central package Manager. There is windows store, and it's a step in the right direction, but it's not the same as apt, dnf, pacman and so on. Installing things is just annoying, every time.

• Terminal sucks on windows. I hate PowerShell with it's weird verbose syntax. Installed programs are most often not usable and I have to manually add them to PATH. Common things, like ctrl-d for EOF does not work.

There is probably much more than that. I find windows to just be a bad OS. And this is subjective, I know. Some people don't care, some even like windows better for some reason. It's probably not as bad as I feel it is.

Here is another completely h related thing: Microsoft naught Rare, a software studio that developed games for Nintendo. And oh boy, what games. During the N64 era, they made timeless classics like banjo kazooie, until MS bought them and drove them against the wall.

Turning my OS into an ad server is at the top of my list. Switched to Linux for everything I can.

Do Apple next!

The Halloween papers

Meh, hate the game, not the player. I've spent half a life and my whole career adjacent to MS, my anger about their products and practices has long since turned to cynical acceptance. Yes, they have over stepped the bounds of fairness and good taste many times, but I've seen other vendors do so much worse. If you don't like Microsoft products, advocate for something else. The bottom of the bottle is that Microsoft has a duty to pursue profit for it's shareholders, and some of that will be ugly. These days there are workable alternatives for everything they sell, which wasn't always the case.

Forced Windows OS patches were the final nail for me. One of them in the early days of Windows 10 Pro conflicted with graphics drivers and completely soft-bricked my PC.

Because they killed my boy.

Knifed him. He was just a baby.