i’m sure the free market will solve this. we just need to wait for a new company to pop up, make a new operating system, ensure windows programs are properly emulated, convince the majority of people and businesses to use it, and then use its new monopoly for good.
Free market ideas always sounded like cartoon level intelligence to me. Some kind of a perfect world where everyone acts morally and people are well informed and chooses the right companies etc.
its really absurd. it becomes even stupider when considering that many of these assumptions allow mathematical models to be built on top of them, and then those models are treated with such importance and authority. but then they sometimes also get the math wrong. i remember learning a while back that part of the 2009 housing crash was caused by faulty mathematics laid ontop of these weird economic assumptions.
the part im talking about is:
The paper, generally referred to as the Dahlem report, condemns a growing reliance over the past three decades on mathematical models that improperly assume markets and economies are inherently stable, and which disregard influences like differences in the way various economic players make decisions, revise their forecasting methods and are influenced by social factors.
the first part refers to a kind of "smoothness assumption", where they approximate the bumpy, jagged graph with a "smooth" curve that is easier to analyze. but it turned out the bumps were there for a reason. oops! the second part of the quote then says that in addition to the faulty smoothness assumption, there were quite a few important things the model flat out ignored
It doesn't require people to act morally, it requires them to act according to their long term self interest, assuming they are... immortal. And we all know human beings are omniscient and immortal. So no problem. /s
But that's not how it works. Free market ideas don't expect a perfect world, they instead expect an imperfect one. You don't need everyone to make food decisions, you just need enough people to make good decisions so the market caters to them.
It's the same idea as democracy, you don't need every voter to make a good choice, you just need a plurality. As long as enough people make decent choices enough of the time, democracy works. The free market is just democracy, but with money instead of votes.
In both cases government has a role. I think governments should add in longer term costs to the market, but in a way that preserves choice as much as possible (i.e. carbon taxes instead of carbon limits). I think governments should educate the population to increase the chances that they'll make good decisions at the polls.
In the specific case of Microsoft, things were competitive until the government looked the other way WRT antitrust law. There's a lot of shady stuff that happened in the first couple decades that Microsoft existed, yet they largely got a free pass.
Listen, I want to give the above a shot (It's an idea I've had for a while) but it doesn't just happen, it's very very far from easy, and obnoxiously expensive. Might be cheaper and easier to get to the Moon than to tear down M$' monopoly at this point.
they are making harder to change the default browser on windows, and broke workaround by chrome and firefox too.
they don't let you uninstall edge in easy way or without a third party software.
if you download another browser from edge they try to persuade you in to giving edge a try.
they are planning to set edge as the default browser on teams.
they don't give you an easy way to open with another browser the internet result from the windows search bar, they broke EdgeDeflector many times indeed.
Haven't installed fresh windows in a few years but I distinctly remember the past few times I installed Windows 10 I had the weirdest issues trying to download Firefox or chrome, like the webpage or download button was broke. I had to get my browser through ninite
“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications
"""unintended"""?
How do you implement shit like this by mistake and push it out to be executed on people's computers by mistake?
I would use Linux if my primary reasons for using a computer worked properly. Games are a lot better these days than it was and always improving so there is light at the end of the tunnel in that respect but Traktor DJ software not so much.
As far as I know the only alternative on Linux is mixxx and that was just no where near as good the last time I used it. Maybe it is time to try it again......
If you're hanging onto Windows for just one app, you could try running it in a virtual machine. I do that for a few work-related apps that have no Linux/web versions and it works great.
You could also dual boot, if VM performance doesn't quite cut it.
The fact that Microsoft's constantly more aggressive use of their OS platform to artificially push their search and cloud platforms hasn't triggered multiple huge antitrust cases is a pretty dire indicator of how little regulators are willing or able to safeguard the public from monopolistic behavior by large tech companies.
If you're thinking of the EU, it's probably just the vogonlike bureaucracy, so in about the time that Windows 12 comes out, they'll be ready. Can't say it bothers me, if Microsoft is attempting to take marketshare from Google, though.
Getting out of the Google frying pan and into the Microsoft fire is in no way better. Both options are exploitative anti-user monopolies, and both Chrome and Edge are the same browser engine under different corporate skins that aggressively violate your privacy in numerous ways for their own gain.
Guys, I keep reading this, but it's not the same thing. At all. You don't want to get Google's crap? You don't visit their crap websites. There are so many websites in this world to visit to avoid Google's crap. You just don't type anything with google on it in your address bar. The only way to avoid Microsoft's crap is to install another operating system in your desktop or laptop. It's just not the same thing. At all.
Microsoft should be forced to do what they have forced Google to do in Android. At least where I live, in EU. Ballon tips to have the option to use another browser and an option to disable Edge and all the crap asking all the time to use Edge. Like the android ballon tip and the option we have to at least disable Android Chrome.
I fully agree, as a person who actually likes windows, and who's career it made in IT support, I'm sick of this BS they're pulling. I want people to like windows (except Win11, fuck Win11) because is some ways it's really awesome, but that'll never happen like this.
Major difference: Android is open source and Linux-based. Everything is made up of components z which are quite close together, but can be separated. In Windows everything is glued together. You can't separate it. You can't remove explorer.exe (Windows' window manager) and replace it with another. You can replace your android Launcher, and you can replace your Linux desktop environment. Heck, you can even install a tiling window manager on the MacOS, Apple's locked down desktop OS!!!! But not on Windows.
Slack successfully made Microsoft stop bundling Teams in Microsoft Office through an anti-competition complaint. I'm surprised Google lets them get away with abusing the Windows product as a platform for promoting a search engine. My best guess for why they don't is that the promotion isn't working.
“We are aware of these reports and have paused this notification while we investigate and take appropriate action to address this unintended behavior,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications, in a statement to The Verge.
I wasn’t alone in thinking it was malware, with posts dating back three months showing Reddit users trying to figure out why they were seeing the pop-up.
Microsoft even had to backtrack on plans to force the Chrome default search to Bing for businesses installing its Office apps.
After all, Google runs similar notifications on its webpages to get people to use Chrome or it’s annoying YouTube premium spam.
That could be in the form of the price of a laptop that has a Windows OEM license baked in, or a product key if you built your own PC.
Windows is an important productivity tool for many people, and shouldn’t be treated like a cheap streaming box loaded with ads.
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Ok yeah external hard drive makes sense ! I used windows only for my univ work , they needed Ms office for their reports etc , office 365 basically but since its over now ,I can use the apps I want
At the moment I use Windows 10, in the past Windows 7 also along with Kubuntu and others. I think that W10 is the last usable OS from M$, because of this I am not going to update it to W11, the following W12 and the online version for monthly subscription, are going to gradually take over the user's sovereignty over their own PC, with absolute control over it. I am going to continue W10, the gutted version that I use, until support ends in 2025 (probably 2026-27 due to the large number of users), then we will see what there is then as an alternative. Maybe I'll install some distro in dual boot in the meantime, but being online 99% of the time, where the OS used is irrelevant, it doesn't bother me that much at the moment.
Anyway I don't use Google or Bing for obvious reasons and none of their services.
I have been using Linux Mint in recent years, however the most recent version is quite buggy. It has regressed to 2014 levels of usability and I'm thinking about switching. The last LTS version worked great, best ever in fact. Not sure what explains the difference.