It would be really nice if Microsoft kept some of their products in a consistent working, high-quality state.
As a long-term OneDrive (SkyDrive, Windows Live Mesh, FolderShare) user, it has been really disappointing to see features come, go, then come back. I can't upgrade operating systems or even update the app without fear of losing critical features.
For example, being able to transparently access networked (not locally downloaded) files used to be super easy, then it went away, and is now apparently coming back.
Similarly, Windows Live Mesh had really good versioning, a really useful remote access service, and really cool collaboration tools. Then it went away and has never been replaced.
OneDrive used to have 25Gb storage for free; that was a really good deal. Then it went to unlimited storage for Office users, but then they stopped that for no good reason.
tl;dr I'm not going to be a OneDrive customer for much longer. Microsoft makes it really hard to be a fan of their products. :(
You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.
I blame them just like most of the other data hoarders are blaming them. One or two guys shit in the pool and got the whole thing canned. You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.
You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.
No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of organizations outside of Microsoft that have a non-laughable chance of estimating A) cost of online storage to microsoft B) number of users C) distribution of storage used by their userbase D) cost of bandwidth E) typical bandwidth profile of users F) how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on storage as a loss leader.
And then there is the un-estimateable wildcard: G) what number will "sound too big" to sysadmins and/or PMs once they see it on their metrics dashboard.
"Unlimited" is a scam to avoid vocalizing the secret maximum and hoping that users have more conservative estimates of the secret maximum than it's actual value.
And there is a huge incentive for users to guess conservativly at the maximum, because as soon as one person doesn't everyone else will blame them for "shitting in the pool and getting the whole thing canned"
> No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target.
I don't think that matters.
> "Unlimited" is a scam
Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.
Why should we accept imprecise nonsense just to provide companies with a marketing opportunity.
Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well.
However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.
There is a strongly utilitarian argument to not allowing such false statements.
It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity.
Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims.
Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable.
You don't have to go to unlimited. For example, I had 25GB space. I used 10. They reduced it to 7.
Here's what a sane person would do: retain the 10GB. Disallow any further upload while usage is above 100% (Dropbox doed this).
No, this isn't what Microsoft is doing. I used to think one drive was unaffected by all the bs surrounding one drive for business but no. This is a dysfunctional company.
Now that I think about it, it gives me pause about why I should even consider Microsoft technology like dot net core. They'll find some way to screw you over even if it doesn't benefit them to do so.
> Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month
That's actually just nonsense. Well, of course you can't get a million dollars worth of anything for 5 dollars. But the question is not how many dollars worth of whatever you can get per dollar (that's one dollar, duh), but how much of whatever you can get. And how do you find out how much that is? You look at market prices. You look at what offers there are in the market. Now, if the offers in the market only specify a price, but not what you get for it, you can't actually find out what a unit of whatever is worth.
> just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of.
That's a bullshit comparison. Buffets don't offer unlimited food, they offer as much as you can eat, which is very well constrained by basic human physiology and metabolism. "Storage for your data" has no such inherent limit, but completely depends on what you happen to use it for. "Unlimited" is not the same thing as "limit not specified as an explicit number".
You can certainly qualify unlimited service for reasonable use.
There was some UK court case where the ruling agrees with what you said. However, both then and now I disagree with it.
The reason is it is absolutely wrong in terms of language:
unlimited - without limits
reasonable use - use limited to a reasonable amount
The other problem is that reasonable is not a number. Everybody has a different reasonable. This is the same as saying a service has a secret limit which you won't be told about.
Why not just say there is a 5GB limit? That would be clear, fair and not at all misleading.
It can also be unlimited if the host limits the upload rate, such that the more data uploaded the slower the rate. Reasonable usage won't be affected, just the outliers.
I feel that's what CrashPlan does, over the last few years I've rarely gotten over 500 KB/s upstream, although with my LTE router I regularly get 4-5 MB/s.
As long as the integral of rate limiter tends to infinity, rather than something less, the storage is unlimited. It is not relevant how long it takes to get there.
But how literal to the definition do you go before you cease to be reasonably practical? "Unlimited" is an abstract absolute concept. Nothing in existence can ever be unlimited, looking out to, say, the heat death of the universe.
In the end, it's a marketing term meaning "we don't arbitrarily set a numeric limit like 50GB", not that it can never possibly under any circumstances run into any kind of physical or practical limit.
I highly recommend dropping it. Switching to a reliable cloud storage from OneDrive is an amazing experience until you reflect on time wasted trying to make 1drv work or waiting for it to start working properly.
OneDrive and Dropbox have been totally opposite experiences to me, heaven and hell. Also after more than a year with OneDrive I passionately despise it. It truly is Internet Explorer of cloud storages.
They did at one time offer UNLIMITED!
Nothing but “Bait~n~Switch”.
Any business that offers “UNLIMITED” anything that incurs costs has:
1. planned an exit excuse: “It was being “ABUSED”, or
2. does not mind going out of business.
They said people were abusing the "UNLIMITED" to justify lowering the allowed storage limit in order to start charging. So for Outlook.com they lowered it to 15 GB, why not say 500 GB? Because it would not generate the revenue stream they could have at lower storage limits. Then they prompted you to either signup to keep it at 15 GB, or if you missed the deadline, it will go back to 5 GB.
What is in the future? Be prepared when using their apps, it won't be long, and it is already happening, that the only place you can store your files that you create is on their cloud space. So be prepared if you need your data when say you are on vacation out in the boondocks! It happened!
Remember their corporate motto, “cloud first, mobile first,…………. Consumer last (ad lib)”!
“Your Data Belongs to U$!”
>I can't upgrade operating systems or even update the app without fear of losing critical features.
I don't use Windows a lot myself but you're not the first person I hear voicing this concern and postponing updates to avoid risking breaking something critical. This is a very bad precedent for Microsoft to set. At least it'll keep the ransomware and antivirus devs busy.
> Then it went to unlimited storage for Office users, but then they stopped that for no good reason.
That was brief and sadly disappeared. However OD is still cheaper than DropBox for 1TB of storage and comes with Office. I'd still mark that as a pretty good deal since most people are required to have Office around.
I remember livemesh 8yrs ago?, it was going to be the future with its own ecosystem and all these other glorious promises, unfortunately its sync often deleted files and sometimes sync would hang for days. Everyone I know moved to dropbox at this point and most* havent looked back (*Im not a dropbox user).
Same thing with Streamload.. but they actually lost user's data.. then renamed the company.. and then it went bankrupt. I can say the say thing about moving to CrashPlan (also offering unlimited) and not having looked back. 8TB accumulated over the last 4 years and counting.
Well, Google is winning in a lot of areas that Microsoft used to dominate... so they are just trying to imitate their rival. However, a better imitation might be to suddenly discontinue the product without warning.
I'm a big fan of Spideroak Hive.I mostly use it to sync my work files (everything except source code) between my desktop and laptop. I really like the fact that the files are encrypted and according to them can't be retrieved without my password. Sync.net is a similiar service that has a better UX but sadly doesn't have a way to ignore specific patterns, which I need to certain directories.
For reference on the ReFS part, everywhere I have read about it mentions it’s for servers. Just like ntfs was when it started out. Guessing when it becomes more main stream, it will probably be supported then...
And people whining about people whining. Reality is that they do force telemetry, people aren't opting out because they can't and they are complaining amongst themselves because Microsoft doesn't care.
As far as I can tell, Microsoft told nobody. A blog post and an email to OneDrive users would have sufficed, neither of which use telemetry or happened.
Yeah it's impossible to get reliable statistics without using sleazy tactics to force every single one of your users into your spying 'telemetry' oh wait it isn't. Microsoft has a bazillion customers, their statistics will be fine if 99% of all users disable their spyware.
Last, I don't know, four releases of Windows were comically bad. This is when you no longer swear but just laugh in amazement.
I would argue that from their last 6 releases (starting with Windows ME) they only had one success, that is, Windows XP, and even that one they had to rethink with SP2.
(Just bought my wife a Windows 10 laptop... Sigh...)
Maybe the wife values staying with what she is used to over quality and he values his relationship over being right?
Especially since windows is a lot more of an acceptable choice when you have a free administrator on call to set it up, paper over any annoyances with whatever workarounds are available, and keep it running.
My comment was merely trying to highlight that the operating systems he would perhaps hold in high regard are in fact the definition of comically bad for non-technical users.
These users are the majority, and so it's a stretch to call an OS that has captured that market so entirely and completely comically bad. I would argue that it makes it the best.
Ubuntu is pretty usable these days and Windows just isn't.
Are you going to pretend Windows 8 made any sense?
Windows 10 now has everything twice:
It has half of apps with full-res and half with old and ugly stretched fonts.
It has two control panels! One old and one new.
It even has two browsers, both from Microsoft.
It's like everything they ever blamed in Linux, but without even having good excuses. Come on.
The fact that every laptop comes with Windows 10 proves that nobody cares anymore whether the produce is useful or not.
"You can buy a laptop. Whatever you get, it's with Windows. It's not very good but that's what you're getting. Are you buying or not?"
Come to think of it, Windows laptops are comically bad too by themselves. Wide screens that nobody asked for. Cheap plastic of casings. Unreasonable thickness. General ugliness.
I flew the coup on OneDrive when they reneged on their promise to provide unlimited storage. They still charged me $50 for the months that I signed up on the basis of that false promise.
Speaking of reneging, remember the time they told their users that they would be lowering their storage to 5GB? Now, I'm not sure of the exact reason why they needed to do this, but you quickly lose confidence in their capability as a cloud provider when they need to start clawing back storage from users.
Meanwhile Google has been offering their users 15GB and additional storage bonuses for completing tasks such as your annual security checkup.
> remember the time they told their users that they would be lowering their storage to 5GB
They did this - to users who had bought Windows Phones advertised with 15 GB (plus 15 GB which were being given to everybody in 2015, total 30 GB).
Kicked back to 5 GB as of Jan. 2016. Except those who knew to ask by Dec. 2015 to an email circulated in forums (as a concession to protests). Those kept their quota.
Asking about lost quota later to MS support was unfruitful - the techs were ashamed but had their orders to not budge an inch.
(Personally saw both outcomes - keeping and losing, for different users - directly.)
Weirdly, I got more space when they went free. I think I signed up on my Android for OneDrive to store my "camera roll" which gave something like 25GB free. I used that storage briefly to store/share .wav files for my band's EP, which took up a couple GB. When OneDrive announced their downgrade to 5 GB, they gave a free year of Office 365 to anybody that was currently using more than 5 GB. I think that expires later this month, at which point I will NOT be re-subscribing. It's miserable trying to maneuver around these cloud services; I'm sticking with Resilio Sync.
I have much more trust in a company's product if it's their main source of revenue. Dropbox would probably die if they lost all their desktop users, but there's really no reason Microsoft even cares about this.
Anecdotally, OneDrive lost my changes to an essay twice, so I will certainly never use it again.
Originally you had no backups OOTB. Now I think you can restore deleted files for a month, or longer if you upgrade. This might be enough for your use case.
The OneDrive syncing client has never worked properly for me since Windows 8. Just crashes and restarts, despite attempting all the fixes described online officially and non.
onedrive, onedrive for business, onedrive app - Same name not the same product!
every one of them with different UI, different settings and never works without a failure. Try sharing a folder between team mates in office365. In dropbox it just appears to every team member. In office365 you need onedrive for busines (the regular onedrive that comes with Windows 10 won't show it) and then it appeas as a sharepoint folder the user.
So confusing, So not working.
Actually, that was only the case temporarily. For ...reasons... (I think it was the SkyDrive legal complaint?) the product rename happened before the client was technically consolidated.
Since January, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business use the same client and (on o365/SP16FP1) the same infrastructure & API. If you're using the old ODFB client that was bundled with old versions of Office, you should upgrade. The old ODFB was terrible, and MS has been trying to get rid of it for years. (If you're using an old version of SharePoint 2013/2016 to host OneDrive locally, you should probably patch that too.)
The new client is OK. But it's too late for me. MS have burnt me so many times with OneDrive/SkyDrive/Mesh/Windows Live/FolderSync at this point that I'm now an avowed Dropbox/Resilio user, and I won't be looking back for many years.
A similar consolidation will be happening with the new Skype/Skype for Business clients. They broke my TV's skype camera to make that happen, and it's still not happening. I've switched to Hangouts/FB Messenger. The main reason these transitions are taking so long is: (a) all the on-premises customers create backwards compatibility hell (b) complete confusion around authentication and (c) they doesn't seem to be very good at delivering good software.
The "OneDrive app" is a Windows 10 app store app, similar to the iOS and Android apps.
"Onedrive for business" is the shittiest product you can get to sync files, it even manages to be worse than Onedrive. It has an absurdly long list of file extension it does not want to sync and does not work well at all with slow connections. Most of the time you get random conflicts and nothing works. USB Keys are more efficient than "onedrive for business".
I just did a greenfield deployment of Windows Server 2012 R2 for a big virtualization environment, and ReFS was supposed to be ideal for that kind of application. Everyone I talked to about it told me it was a bad idea, mostly because the supposed gains in certain virtualization operations wasn't worth risking being the first sucker to find a corner case in refs.sys. Also, no data recovery tools support it outside of experiments.
I don't use ReFS in production, only for personal use, but Win 8.1/Server 2012 R2's version of it should never be deployed in production.
If you're interested in ReFS, use Win 10/Server 2016 instead. Microsoft has made a lot of updates and changes to the codebase, including ones to prevent data loss. They're now essentially pitching Storage Spaces+ReFS as a Microsofted ZFS.
I don't want to keep paying Onedrive any longer. But Dropbox is very expensive (becuase the only plan is 1TB). I want to avoid google drive because I know they will kill it randomly. What else is there?
(I work on supporting Google Drive, and I also use it outside of work a lot as well).
Also - I saw in another earlier post you mentioned some issue about DriveFS and SecureBoot - feel free to reach out to me if you're still having issues with that?
Whenever I try to install DriveFS on my Win10 PC with SecureBoot enabled it says "This application is not currently supported on Windows 10 Anniversary Version 1607 or later with secure boot enabled."
Plenty of Google services have been killed/deprecated, even when they were widely used and popular. Google reader, hangout, gtalk, come to mind. I'm wary of getting burned again.
So I have decided I will never use any google service for something that I really need to rely on. I have a throwaway gmail for giving out to all kinds of spammy websites. I use google photos for backup but also do a full backup on Onedrive. I have a play music subscription but that's not very sticky anyway, I can switch to Apple music at the first sign of trouble.
Also, if you work for google, I'm surprised you think there is no precedent for google discontinuing stuff! It's literally a meme at this point.
It seems to be a bit of an internet meme, but as another poster noted, the original logic seems to have been lost, and it's now simply cool to quote the meme.
You say plenty of Google services have been killed - and you cite 3. But only 1 of those has actually been killed.
Google Reader was shutdown - this is somewhat personal, as I was a bit lover of Google Reader as well. However, there was 12 months of notice for the deprecation, there were provisions for migration/exporting all your data - and there were reasons mentioned at the time for why it was deprecated. Basically, the writing was on the wall for RSS for a long time before that.
Hangouts wasn't discontinued...in fact, I use it as my main chat application currently (both in my personal life, and at work).
GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements - same contacts, same chat history, same platform. Everybody was basically just migrated across wholesale, and got some nice new features to boot (e.g. group video calls).
I don't know, Google reader is still not up. What logic is lost?
> Hangouts wasn't discontinued
It is abandoned, which is worse than dicontinued. No new features, some features have been removed. Apparently it's "enterprise" focused now.
> GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements
Wrong. Read up about this tiny thing called federation. Hangouts is a small, walled-garden subset of gtalk. And even hangouts is deprecated now (at least for consumers). Now if you're a consumer and want to use a google service for chat, you have allo. Allo is a dumbed down subset of hangouts. No multi-device support, no web app, no voice, no sms integration, no video. It has stickers though. Guess some people are fine with that. I'm not.
> GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements - same contacts, same chat history, same platform. Everybody was basically just migrated across wholesale, and got some nice new features to boot (e.g. group video calls).
Because they killed a few products that a vocal minority loved, it's a meme that Google products are killed off. Like many memes, the underlying logic is lost, and it's now cool to quote the meme.
106 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 175 ms ] threadAs a long-term OneDrive (SkyDrive, Windows Live Mesh, FolderShare) user, it has been really disappointing to see features come, go, then come back. I can't upgrade operating systems or even update the app without fear of losing critical features.
For example, being able to transparently access networked (not locally downloaded) files used to be super easy, then it went away, and is now apparently coming back.
Similarly, Windows Live Mesh had really good versioning, a really useful remote access service, and really cool collaboration tools. Then it went away and has never been replaced.
OneDrive used to have 25Gb storage for free; that was a really good deal. Then it went to unlimited storage for Office users, but then they stopped that for no good reason.
tl;dr I'm not going to be a OneDrive customer for much longer. Microsoft makes it really hard to be a fan of their products. :(
You can't stretch the definition of unlimited. There is literaly no amount that would stretch it. If you advertise unlimited storage, you are bending the truth, since there is no such thing as unlimited disk space. I don't see how anyone can blame the data hoarders here. Where I live, if you advertise for something that you cannot deliver, it's called fraud and you can get sued for it. I just don't see why they feel the need to lie to customers like that.
No, you can't. Because reasonable is a subjective moving target. There are maybe a handful of organizations outside of Microsoft that have a non-laughable chance of estimating A) cost of online storage to microsoft B) number of users C) distribution of storage used by their userbase D) cost of bandwidth E) typical bandwidth profile of users F) how much money Microsoft is willing to spend on storage as a loss leader.
And then there is the un-estimateable wildcard: G) what number will "sound too big" to sysadmins and/or PMs once they see it on their metrics dashboard.
"Unlimited" is a scam to avoid vocalizing the secret maximum and hoping that users have more conservative estimates of the secret maximum than it's actual value.
And there is a huge incentive for users to guess conservativly at the maximum, because as soon as one person doesn't everyone else will blame them for "shitting in the pool and getting the whole thing canned"
I don't think that matters.
> "Unlimited" is a scam
Baloney, everyone knows you can't actually get a million dollars of storage for $5/month just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of. I have unlimited checking and it's not a scam but there are obvious limits, if I wrote a million checks for 1 cent they would either close my account or change the terms. Writing a million checks is not a reasonable use case though, that would be me shitting in the pool.
Unlimited SOUNDS better than any given number because it says you wont have to worry about usage. If you said 5TB of usage this might have the same connotations for most users however it doesn't communicate this fact as well.
However once you start playing games with language. Saying one thing in large print and the exact opposite in the fine print or depending on what different people think is reasonable it becomes harder to define what is permissible.
The former: if everyone just played along and used things reasonably we would still be benefiting from cheap storage.
The latter: stop playing games, "unlimited" is an unacceptable lie and we will push you into admitting it.
It devalues the products of people that aren't bullshitting you. Say with fake-unlimited the "real limit" is 4TB before they start terminating you, but a different provider provides 5TB of capacity.
Because the former is allowed to outright lie, there is no way for the latter to effectively communicate that they are in fact offering a better product, instead they too have to make a bullshit "fake unlimited" claim to compete. Now because nobody has to actually back their claims with anything, they are infact massively incentivised to cut the "real storage" limits, because it will cut their costs, and they can still keep making the same claims.
Its a market for lemons[1] race to the bottom, and everyone loses, producer and consumer because scamming liars cannot be reliably assessed beforehand. So consumers lose faith in the entire market segment, and providers offering actual legitimate services become unsustainable.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons
Here's what a sane person would do: retain the 10GB. Disallow any further upload while usage is above 100% (Dropbox doed this).
No, this isn't what Microsoft is doing. I used to think one drive was unaffected by all the bs surrounding one drive for business but no. This is a dysfunctional company.
Now that I think about it, it gives me pause about why I should even consider Microsoft technology like dot net core. They'll find some way to screw you over even if it doesn't benefit them to do so.
Edit: sane
Ubuntu is a fine OS.
Oh and I've given up on anything named one drive forever. The time am can't be trusted with anything worth anything.
That's actually just nonsense. Well, of course you can't get a million dollars worth of anything for 5 dollars. But the question is not how many dollars worth of whatever you can get per dollar (that's one dollar, duh), but how much of whatever you can get. And how do you find out how much that is? You look at market prices. You look at what offers there are in the market. Now, if the offers in the market only specify a price, but not what you get for it, you can't actually find out what a unit of whatever is worth.
> just like the people at buffets know you can't just scrape $1K of food into the trash without the buffet getting shut down. There's always reasonable use limits on "unlimited" that any customer is aware of.
That's a bullshit comparison. Buffets don't offer unlimited food, they offer as much as you can eat, which is very well constrained by basic human physiology and metabolism. "Storage for your data" has no such inherent limit, but completely depends on what you happen to use it for. "Unlimited" is not the same thing as "limit not specified as an explicit number".
There was some UK court case where the ruling agrees with what you said. However, both then and now I disagree with it.
The reason is it is absolutely wrong in terms of language:
The other problem is that reasonable is not a number. Everybody has a different reasonable. This is the same as saying a service has a secret limit which you won't be told about.Why not just say there is a 5GB limit? That would be clear, fair and not at all misleading.
I do think that there should be segmented contracts with numerical ranges in to avoid idiots.
In the end, it's a marketing term meaning "we don't arbitrarily set a numeric limit like 50GB", not that it can never possibly under any circumstances run into any kind of physical or practical limit.
Where do you live, and how was OneDrive advertised there? Just curious.
OneDrive and Dropbox have been totally opposite experiences to me, heaven and hell. Also after more than a year with OneDrive I passionately despise it. It truly is Internet Explorer of cloud storages.
2. Work median usage per customer
3. Set new limit below median
4. Profit
Now you don't have to deal with r/datahorder users.
I don't use Windows a lot myself but you're not the first person I hear voicing this concern and postponing updates to avoid risking breaking something critical. This is a very bad precedent for Microsoft to set. At least it'll keep the ransomware and antivirus devs busy.
Such a surprise they started just forcing upgrades..
That was brief and sadly disappeared. However OD is still cheaper than DropBox for 1TB of storage and comes with Office. I'd still mark that as a pretty good deal since most people are required to have Office around.
"Why the hell are you collecting information about what file system types I privately run OneDrive on M$!!"
Why, indeed.
> The FCU includes a huge revamp of OneDrive's functionality to make the use of local and remotely stored files virtually seamless.
I'm assuming it makes heavy use of that.
Last, I don't know, four releases of Windows were comically bad. This is when you no longer swear but just laugh in amazement.
I would argue that from their last 6 releases (starting with Windows ME) they only had one success, that is, Windows XP, and even that one they had to rethink with SP2.
(Just bought my wife a Windows 10 laptop... Sigh...)
Especially since windows is a lot more of an acceptable choice when you have a free administrator on call to set it up, paper over any annoyances with whatever workarounds are available, and keep it running.
These users are the majority, and so it's a stretch to call an OS that has captured that market so entirely and completely comically bad. I would argue that it makes it the best.
Ubuntu is pretty usable these days and Windows just isn't.
Are you going to pretend Windows 8 made any sense?
Windows 10 now has everything twice: It has half of apps with full-res and half with old and ugly stretched fonts. It has two control panels! One old and one new. It even has two browsers, both from Microsoft.
It's like everything they ever blamed in Linux, but without even having good excuses. Come on.
By your definition Bach is terrible and boy bands are awesome.
The fact that every laptop comes with Windows 10 proves that nobody cares anymore whether the produce is useful or not.
"You can buy a laptop. Whatever you get, it's with Windows. It's not very good but that's what you're getting. Are you buying or not?"
Come to think of it, Windows laptops are comically bad too by themselves. Wide screens that nobody asked for. Cheap plastic of casings. Unreasonable thickness. General ugliness.
Chromebooks are laptops. They don't come with Windows 10.
MacBooks are laptops. They don't come with Windows 10.
I've not seen a single Chromebook in my life and Macs are exclusively for web programmers.
So Windows 10 is what you get, one might call it BrezhnevOS or PutinOS.
If you bought a Windows one just because you are unaware of alternatives, do more research :)
If you care about GNU/Linux on laptops research properly who is selling them.
Turns out, what gets sold is barely usable, due to OS mainly.
I start to dig why chromebooks ever a thing. Because having nothing other than browser is better than having Windows.
I know because it keeps starting up whenever I transfer files from a Centos Samba share despite every restraining order I've tried to issue.
Of course only the Group Policy editor can stop it and that did't come with the forced Windows 10 Home edition update shoved up my hard drive.
So now, in a complete turning of the tables, I'll have to wait for it to start up and then it will tell me to go f*ck myself.
Meanwhile Google has been offering their users 15GB and additional storage bonuses for completing tasks such as your annual security checkup.
They did this - to users who had bought Windows Phones advertised with 15 GB (plus 15 GB which were being given to everybody in 2015, total 30 GB).
Kicked back to 5 GB as of Jan. 2016. Except those who knew to ask by Dec. 2015 to an email circulated in forums (as a concession to protests). Those kept their quota.
Asking about lost quota later to MS support was unfruitful - the techs were ashamed but had their orders to not budge an inch.
(Personally saw both outcomes - keeping and losing, for different users - directly.)
Anecdotally, OneDrive lost my changes to an essay twice, so I will certainly never use it again.
Otherwise it is purely sync (not backup).
every one of them with different UI, different settings and never works without a failure. Try sharing a folder between team mates in office365. In dropbox it just appears to every team member. In office365 you need onedrive for busines (the regular onedrive that comes with Windows 10 won't show it) and then it appeas as a sharepoint folder the user. So confusing, So not working.
Since January, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business use the same client and (on o365/SP16FP1) the same infrastructure & API. If you're using the old ODFB client that was bundled with old versions of Office, you should upgrade. The old ODFB was terrible, and MS has been trying to get rid of it for years. (If you're using an old version of SharePoint 2013/2016 to host OneDrive locally, you should probably patch that too.)
The new client is OK. But it's too late for me. MS have burnt me so many times with OneDrive/SkyDrive/Mesh/Windows Live/FolderSync at this point that I'm now an avowed Dropbox/Resilio user, and I won't be looking back for many years.
A similar consolidation will be happening with the new Skype/Skype for Business clients. They broke my TV's skype camera to make that happen, and it's still not happening. I've switched to Hangouts/FB Messenger. The main reason these transitions are taking so long is: (a) all the on-premises customers create backwards compatibility hell (b) complete confusion around authentication and (c) they doesn't seem to be very good at delivering good software.
The "OneDrive app" is a Windows 10 app store app, similar to the iOS and Android apps.
They did that with Visual Studio too. On Mac it's basically some IDE to develop Ios and Android apps, while on PC you're getting the actual IDE.
And they do that with Skype too, where "Skype for business" is a completely different product that has barely anything to do with Skype.
Does anyone actually use ReFS in production?
If you're interested in ReFS, use Win 10/Server 2016 instead. Microsoft has made a lot of updates and changes to the codebase, including ones to prevent data loss. They're now essentially pitching Storage Spaces+ReFS as a Microsofted ZFS.
I use it to synchronise files across a range of devices - home NAS, phone, and laptop - and love it.
https://syncthing.net/
There's no precedent for something like that, and I can't see what motivation there would be to do such a thing either.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google).
(I work on supporting Google Drive, and I also use it outside of work a lot as well).
Also - I saw in another earlier post you mentioned some issue about DriveFS and SecureBoot - feel free to reach out to me if you're still having issues with that?
So I have decided I will never use any google service for something that I really need to rely on. I have a throwaway gmail for giving out to all kinds of spammy websites. I use google photos for backup but also do a full backup on Onedrive. I have a play music subscription but that's not very sticky anyway, I can switch to Apple music at the first sign of trouble.
Also, if you work for google, I'm surprised you think there is no precedent for google discontinuing stuff! It's literally a meme at this point.
You say plenty of Google services have been killed - and you cite 3. But only 1 of those has actually been killed.
Google Reader was shutdown - this is somewhat personal, as I was a bit lover of Google Reader as well. However, there was 12 months of notice for the deprecation, there were provisions for migration/exporting all your data - and there were reasons mentioned at the time for why it was deprecated. Basically, the writing was on the wall for RSS for a long time before that.
Hangouts wasn't discontinued...in fact, I use it as my main chat application currently (both in my personal life, and at work).
GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements - same contacts, same chat history, same platform. Everybody was basically just migrated across wholesale, and got some nice new features to boot (e.g. group video calls).
I don't know, Google reader is still not up. What logic is lost?
> Hangouts wasn't discontinued
It is abandoned, which is worse than dicontinued. No new features, some features have been removed. Apparently it's "enterprise" focused now.
> GTalk is basically Hangouts, with with improvements
Wrong. Read up about this tiny thing called federation. Hangouts is a small, walled-garden subset of gtalk. And even hangouts is deprecated now (at least for consumers). Now if you're a consumer and want to use a google service for chat, you have allo. Allo is a dumbed down subset of hangouts. No multi-device support, no web app, no voice, no sms integration, no video. It has stickers though. Guess some people are fine with that. I'm not.
How's that XMPP federation coming along?