A lot of not-that-old computers don’t meet the system requirements for Windows 11.

And by “not-that-old” I mean serves the limited purpose it was built for 8 years ago and is still working perfectly fine.

Hardware is lasting longer, users are less demanding.

OK Looks like my little MS Surface is going to be running Linux.

Best summary;

The whole problem with Microsoft in general is that they want to be Apple. They want their own hardware & software ecosystem that they rule over with absolute power. But culturally they’re not Apple, they’re a child that needs 24/7 adult supervision. They can’t and won’t do security, their track record of handling all types of incidents is abysmal, and they’re absolutely terrified of making any changes that might mildly inconvenience enterprise customers. They want all the benefits of controlling their own ecosystem, but will take on exactly zero of the responsibilities. They literally cannot be trusted to secure their own ecosystem and the EU for sure knew this.

https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/112837847830156923

The unaccountable 3rd Party market that is built around MS is what caused the issue.

No OS is 100% secure, but as soon as you allow 3rd Party vendors to fuck around at the kernel level, they get much less secure.

Microsoft is to blame for allowing these fucktards kernel-level access. There were other ways they could have enabled third-party intrusion prevention software without giving away keys to the city.

There was a System component called Microsoft Defender that made all other AV obsolete.

Obviously, this caused a lot of European AntiVirus vendors and Intrusion Tool vendors to get upset so there was a court case to prevent Microsoft from bundling Defender with Windows for corporate customers.

Microsoft is arguing that if it wasn’t for the Court Case artificially opening the market to incompetent vendors, the problem wouldn’t have occurred.

Windows has had some major security flaws over the years but ever since Vista, (and before that XPSP2), they have made a concerted effort to fix them. This has caused quite a few compatibility issues for programs that (ab)used these security flaws due to lazy or malicious programming.

I’ve always insisted that Defender is the best AntiVirus and Intrusion prevention solution for any Windows Machine.

MS has a vested interest in making sure nothing bad gets publicised about their OS. As long as the threat exists, (and barring regulatory restrictions) MS will maintain the best intrusion prevention and detection features.

The AntiVirus industry has a vested interest in scaring people into continuing to pay their subscriptions. There are even some conspiracy theories going around that some AV vendors actually pushed viruses into the wild that they could intercept but their competitors couldn’t.

Apple Computers have a reputation of not having viruses (even through they do) partially due to the Security/Obscurity myth and partially because they lock down macOS and have tightly integrated in-house virus detection. The other reason is that their user base is almost exclusively End-User Retail, which is not currently a profitable target.

I used to write my Computer Science assignments in DocBook (XML). It would amaze the assessor’s when they said they wanted a PDF or PostScript or HTML or whatever and I would spit out a document custom formatted for whichever platform they wanted.

Then they would ask for it in Word DOC and I would be screwed.

I had Corel WordPerfect for Linux.

You could modify the SGML codes to create documents that were compatible with all other versions of WordPerfect and MS Word, but he features that were supported in the document format, but not in the software.

For instance, I could change use more than the 16 colours that the Word for Windows UI allowed you to use, even though the displayed correctly in the WYSIWYG editor and printed correctly.

The problem is that they are not actively asking permission.

They are technically legally asking permission through the EULA, but nobody reads these.

Apple do this differently, they require the user to opt in for each of their services, and except for a pitiful amount of storage, the user has to pay for a useful amount of storage. This makes the user the customer, instead of the product. They could make it easier to roll-your-own “cloud” storage by NAS, but I assume that it isn’t worth their effort.

This is one of the things I love about the Lemmy community. No one wants to argue, every one can be passionate about their opinions, but still respect other people’s passion.

I used Linux back in the 90s as my primary OS. They were simpler times. Since then I have used BeOS, various versions of Windows and (primarily) MacOS.

I am seriously thinking of going over to Linux as my primary OS because of all the TechBro “AI” bullshit that Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Google are trying to ram down our throats.

The bottom has dropped out of the OEM software licence market. Microsoft have to find a different way of making money. Their loss-leading hardware sales have not borne fruit so they are getting desperate.

All they have left is services, which means that the only way the can actually make money is selling out their customers private information.

There is a difference between destroying looms, corrupting LLMs by feeding bad data and causing an uprising like the Butlerian Jihad of Dune or the Second Renaissance of The Matrix.

There are legitimate uses for vehicle telemetry being stored by the vehicle and uploaded to the manufacturer.

Identifying unexpected behaviour under certain driving conditions and being able to contact emergency services in an accident are two important examples. Remote diagnosis in the case of a breakdown is another.

None of these uses include selling the data to third parties or using the data to create a profile of the vehicle owner.

They all do. Google search is one big primitive Digital Assistant. Apple’s Siri is less functional than its predecessor Voice Control. Amazon’s product recommendation algorithm and Alexa are also successful digital assistants.

Meanwhile the YouTube algorithm, Netflix, and Metas recommendations are notoriously frustrating, pumping out irrelevant recommendations and obfuscating constant that you actually want to consume.

Microsoft haven’t had any effective Digital Assistants to date and must they feel like they are being left behind. Their attempts to emulate successful product from other companies are either unnoticeably irrelevant or laughably bad. Even the terrible content recommendations of Netflix and YouTube keep people hooked.

https://mastodon.social/@sdw/112203918268779518

Actually Indians.

Step one: start Chroming. Eventually you get so high (kill enough brain cells) that you chrome with blue paint instead. That is called Edging.

This is why they are doing it. They fear that Linux/MacOS/ChromeOS is eating their lunch. The problem is that their approach to preventing anyone else from eating their lunch is to make Shit Sandwiches.

‘Data Detectors’ in MacOS are just as bad. Just like how sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, sometimes a string of numerals is just a string of numerals.

It is not a phone number or a flight number or a ticket number, it is just a string of text that happen to all be numerals.

I asked Apple Support how to disable data detectors in Preview (MacOS’s native PDF and image viewer) so I could highlight some part numbers without MacOS trying to make a FaceTime call and they told me to use Adobe Acrobat instead! The problem is that Acrobat is worse.

Please don’t call them AI. They are “Language Learning Models” (or “Spicy Autocorrect” if you want to be cheeky).

Copilot is no more “intelligent” than Clippy from Microsoft Bob in 1995. It just appears to be to people who also have low intelligence.