Yeah, I know a bunch of people that had the 10 upgrade forced upon them. Making it a default "Windows Update" is certainly one way to get your adoption stats up!
And various stories have been proven. Including my friend who just wanted to use their computer, remembered to always click 'No' when it asked, and lost operation of her Wi-Fi card when she returned from a bath and her Windows had silently upgraded to Windows 10. I verified the behaviour after rolling it back, denying its request to update, and then letting the computer sit still for less than an hour.
I used to doubt too, whether it happened on its own or whether people made mistakes. Even back then, I believed if so many people can be made to make the same mistake, then it's more like they've been duped than that they all just happened to make the same mistake. Now, when I saw it happenning right in front of me, I was furious.
Enlighten me: Someone clicked in typical "just ok everything"-mode on "update to Windows 10" and ... surprise ... it updated to Windows 10. Dark pattern? I don't see it.
People like latest and greatest things, so they see a pop-up "Hey, Windows 10 is here! Click here to upgrade!". And the person is like "SWEET! GIVE IT TO ME!". After 1 hour of upgrading, user is back in Windows 10, "Damnit, some of my shit ain't working! Goddamn automatic upgrade!"
> Initial sales figures from Microsoft show its new operating system Windows Vista made a splash in its debut. In the first month of Windows Vista’s general availability, sales exceeded 20 million licenses, more than doubling the initial pace of sales for its predecessor, Windows XP.
It's fun to see how they spin things like an Iraqi defense minister. No matter what's happening, it's the best X ever! (X=december, absolute sales, relative sales, adoption rate, market share change...)
Mine got updated through a specific application and never heard of Windows 10 update through Windows Update, let alone a forced one. The only forced thing was that the update application came to tray automatically and stayed there until I opt-in.
"Nope! This isn't a container either. It's native Ubuntu binaries running directly in Windows."
"Oh, and it's totally shit hot! The sysbench utility is showing nearly equivalent cpu, memory, and io performance."
Full access to all of Ubuntu user space inc. apt, ssh, rsync, find, grep, awk, sed, sort, xargs, md5sum, gpg, curl, wget, apache, mysql, python, perl, ruby, php, gcc, tar, vim, emacs, diff, patch...
And most of the tens of thousands binary packages available in the Ubuntu archives.
Is there any way this is bad? I am honestly having a hard time not getting thrilled over it. I want to be cynical and worried, but hot damn this seems awesome. Getting that alphabet soup of utilities to be useful natively on Windows without Cygwin or `git bash` is a pain (and usually lags out of date; nevermind the startup lag too).
Just having curl, md5sum, and apt alone is a thrill and a half!
Being able to run Linux binaries natively on Windows is nothing new.
CoLinux did it somewhat poorly but garnered a bit of popularity.
http://atratus.org did it too. FreeBSD (and maybe the other BSDs?) have first party Linux emulation which isn't entirely trivial, as you still have to write effectively the same stuff. (ELF binaries to be interpretted on a COFF/PE binary platform for Windows; the FBSD guys wrote an entire layer that maintained the SysV COFF a.out standard while concurrently allowing you run the more modern ELF binary standard circa version 4.3.)
Windows also has had first party access to all of those utils via the `gow'[1] package. In ConEmu it looks pretty nifty too. (Not that you really need it since the whole MSbuild chain is now 100% open, but yeah not having to fight against Cygwin and mingw32 for hours as one had to 10 years ago is quite nice.)
I wonder how the Cygwin people feel? It would seem to me, and I'm a very long time Cygwin user (from before Red Hat bought them), that it makes Cygwin obsolete.
After seeing some really impressive stuff, I cannot wait to test this stuff on my own! I mean seriously, a retail Xbox One as a devkit? That is so amazing I can't even comprehend it!
Is that finally ready to go (I haven't been able to check out the links)? That's been basically known to people who follow game dev news that it was an upcoming feature since a little before the console launched, it's just been nothing but a promise up to this point.
If it's finally released, awesome. That's a major reason why I decided to get an Xbox One over PS4. I made games with XNA on the previous system, so I'm excited to finally get to start developing on the Xbox One.
Looks like Unity is the engine Microsoft picked this go around to support Xbox One development. Maybe XNA will be resurrected at some point, but I doubt it will be anytime soon.
XNA was nice and fun to program with, but I think Unity is generally a better game engine, it's still C#/.NET development, the base version of Unity is pretty open and free now, and you're not locked into "The Microsoft Platform" with it.
So overall I'm pretty satisfied. I could probably even quickly port some of the XNA code over with minimal changes (not the graphics, unfortunately. Assumed a fixed size 2D viewport for all my layout and animation code, which was a mistake).
Any retail Xbox one as a devkit, yikes that's awesome.
I remember the days of the tens-of-thousands-of-$ devkits. Probably won't have the extra memory but that only really matters if you're building something right up against the memory size barrier.
Siri, Cortana, Google Now and others..Software agents are finally here. When I got my first notifications from Google Now some years ago it was the first time my phone actually felt smart.
If Microsoft and others can figure out good ways to open these to the developers I bet this will be pretty big thing.
Actually, I was talking about this kind of too-deliberate-to-be-true and trying-too-hard-to-look-cool atmosphere at Microsoft events, not about Bryan Roper's style in particular.
Well they chose him to represent them for a reason presumably, and it may be related to his ability to speak well. He's a little over the top but not to a fault in my opinion. It's close though.
You missed the idea. He was discussing that even complicated programs (and games) can be converted to use Windows 10 features (i.e. modern desktop) flawlessly without breaking existing code. He wasn't talking about replacing Steam.
Well, since the game is no longer married to Steam at that point, my users would be losing Steam's achievements, mods and matchmaking. Am I not understanding that right?
Those were mods from SteamWorks? Sorry, I didn't catch that part. I still genuinely wonder why I would want to convert my app into a "modern desktop app".
Sandboxed security.
Easier install/uninstall.
Backup/restore.
Live tiles and notifications
Downloadable from the Windows Store (which means it will show up in Cortana search results when searching for it, even if it's not installed)
Ability to use excellent new WinRT API's
Deep linking
Share to other apps easily (e.g., post to Facebook)
No SLI or CrossFire
VSync is Always On
Always Borderless Fullscreen Mode
No Modding
No .exe File (and No Steam Controller)
No Overlays
Mouse Macros Won’t Work
No Clear Refund Policy
Only for Windows 10
And that applies to anything running as a "Universal App". This seems very anti-customer, and a great reason to buy elsewhere (or, well, encourage piracy through bad policies/technical limitations). What is Microsoft doing to ameliorate these significant issues?
Edit: Really now? Some of those issues were addressed during the video(still no transcript), yet many others still stand. So one takes a karma hit for asking tough questions?
They covered a lot of those -- SLI and VSync will get fixed in a May update, they showed off mods for Age of Empires II, they talked about overlay support.
> They covered a lot of those -- SLI and VSync will get fixed in a May update, they showed off mods for Age of Empires II, they talked about overlay support.
Unfortunately, I've been around the block and then some. I've heard the empty platitudes of promises for X and Y features, yet later on it's considered inconvenient to implement. But as of right now, SLI and VSync are broken.
I did see the AoE2 mods. Having not played that game, I took those mods to not actually modify the base executable. In other words, it appears you can load in-game mods, but absolutely verboten to touch the 'executable'... because there is none in any usable form.
I'm not sure I'd be comfortable running mods that binary-patched the exe, anyway. Outside of a few old, old, abandonware-type games that never had bugs fixed, I'm pretty sure the overwhelming majority of game mods just swap out assets, data, and some scripted logic.
Yes, for the majority of users, removing the ability to arbitrarily change an .exe is a massive feature of UWP over conventional Windows, as it closes off a lot of attack vectors for malicious software.
Yeah, I know a bunch of people that had the 10 upgrade forced upon them. Making it a default "Windows Update" is certainly one way to get your adoption stats up!