Windows 10 is spying on almost everything you do

[LarrylLix]

Thanks Pete!
 
I still haven't been enabled to update to Win10 on my desktop system. Right now I am running it on a 1.66GHz single core Netbook, that MS didn't want out there, with bad 1024 x 600 video. Everything scrolls off the bottom of the screen and you can't access (or see)  OK and Cancel buttons. grrrrrrr..  All this stinkin' Java Skunked stuff runs so slow on Win 7 & 10 anyway. It takes 2-3 minutes to load any page with animation advert crapola. grrrrrrrr...again.
 
Anyway, I guess I should encourage the update to W10 of my desktop with my 3.2GHz 8 core AMD system. I was invited months ago? I can't wait to see what it will do for it from Win 7, now that I have tested w10 on this little system. I am impressed.
 
From the glimpses I saw of Win8 I am glad I avoided it. Odd glimpses made me shudder withal those rectangular boxes all over the desktop. Afraid of changes? Yeah, been around too long and tired of the constant learning curve just to disable all the fluff one more time.
 
Oh look!...my Win 3.11 system finally booted and looks almost like some Linux distro! 

 

[pete_c]

Here it is running on an Intel Baytrail 64 bit with 2Gb of Ram.  Only thing is that it runs at 32 bits on a 32Gb MMC.
 
You reminded me of looking for a very old HA box that ran on Windows 3.1 and used a CP-290.  I am not sure though after all of this time that it will boot up.
 
Thinking it was a seiko or something similar running on a 286 computer with maybe 128Kb of RAM.

 

[Waynedb]

 
Oh look!...my Win 3.11 system finally booted and looks almost like some Linux distro! 

I see you hate Linux, I like that you can easily custom tailor it to suit whatever purpose you need.
I never had to go through pages of crap to opt out privacy invading junk on a Linux install.

And Windows 3.11 was probably the first Windows version that didn't completely suck but it was
still built on top of one of the worst OS ever. The stupid memory problems with Dos and early versions
of Window were a joke.

 

[Waynedb]

 
You reminded me of looking for a very old HA box that ran on Windows 3.1 and used a CP-290.  I am not sure though after all of this time that it will boot up.
 
Thinking it was a seiko or something similar running on a 286 computer with maybe 128Kb of RAM.

128k wouldn't be enough ram for Windows 3.1

 

[pete_c]

Yeah here mostly using Ubuntu 14.04 server / LTS.  Works for me. 
 
Maybe it is two 128k sticks.  I will check.  Homeseer at one time ran on an overclocked Netier tiny PC AMD laptop style CPU. 
 
Yup; remember here loading up the Novell network drivers piece by piece.  Windows 3.11 didn't last too long. 
 
Lots of little floppy disks to install Windows 3.1.

 

[LarrylLix]

I only hate a few hundred of the different distros of Linux since there is no consistency of style or compatibility from one to another. Linux people love to make things as cryptic as possible. I hate to bash it but maybe the command parser can't handle words longer than 5 or 6 characters? Maybe there are just so many versions f versions they ran out of real words?
 
Linux reminds me of MSDos 2.0 with the user having to type blindfolded. Maybe in another 10-20 years it will have a GUI that is user friendly or at least documented somewhere.
 
I remember back in the early 80s running a Unix workalike and at 2 MHz ran circles around the MSDos/Win crap at 33 MHz, at least using the Intel redefined clock brag to reflect microcode speed. I loved that O/S even right down to having to write my own HDD, floppy, and serial port drivers for it. That was the days when pipes and filters were actually useful. Now as a computer user not flashing LEDs and playing 1 bit music who cares to work on such a low level O/S?
 
Now I will don my redhat and sudo (saddle up and drop off)

 

[pete_c]

Yup; in the 80's got a bit into ML programming and personally used whatever whenever.  I am thinking now I did get the little Netiers/terminals running MS stuff (and Windows) with very little memory.  That said I also used them to run multiple serial ports stuff with a very simple linux / unix based OS.  It was a single purpose device with a command line prompt and very functional.  Most of the Unix stuff that I played with in the late 90's in to the 2000's just worked for 20 plus years and never needed anything other than sometimes a hardware update.  I do recall having issues with an old Sun solaris box playing well with a new cisco network.  Box worked just fine though at the time.
 
Did have a little project to convert the enterprise desktop to either Wintel / Red Hat.  It went to embedded XP (HP terminals). I personally liked the embedded Linux terminal for pure meat.  That said the support just wasn't there for it.  (~60-100k clients).  Internationally though thinking it went to the embedded linux terminal anyways. Over the years had a few like this and it always went to Wintel over Linux (for the clients) for the desktop and Linux / Unix for the management of whatever (well because it never broke).
 
@wayne you have me looking at the tiny windows whatever computer that I used for home automation in the days of Windows 3.1.  I am curious what it was and how much memory it had.  I am not sure if it will boot up or not.  I don't even know why I saved it.

 

[pete_c]

OK...it is a Seiko-Epson 486 computer.  It does boot up.  BIOS battery was dead but looks to be dated 1995. 
 
It is running Windows 95 first generation and control panel shows it has 16Mb. CMOS shows 160Kb of memory which is probably the 16Mb of memory.   The device also has a battery slot and a large DC external power supply.  It looks to be a POS machine as it has some 6 serial ports on it.  Thinking that is why I used it for automation.  It has first generation of Homeseer on it and another automation program that I used in the 1990's.
 
Around a bit before that did purchase a color screen NEC laptop computer that ran Windows 3.1?  (purchased a case of these at the time).  They were nice little computers.
 
Must be very first Homeseer automation box I used.  I noticed that the network drivers loaded piece by piece.  So it is not a Windows 3.11 / 3.1 machine.  It is first generation Windows 95.  It booted up which freaks me out a bit.
 
 
Here are some screen shots...
 

 
 
Here is the computer.

 

[LarrylLix]

Brings back nasty memories. The easiest way to get the LAN working in MSDos was to run Windows, let it set it up, and then disable the GUI bootup. This was always a hard to find line in the boot files.
 
I ran HC2000 X10 HA software and your screen sort of reminded me of that. Things haven't changed much to my ISY994i using a very similar interface with the pulldown menus driven code. I always wanted to just write my own VB drivers (I did) and then just write the PLC level stuff in VB code. VB checks most of the syntax anyway. I would have full freedom to do loops,  while, and case constructs. I never did get that X10 driver figured out when resets came at me. The spec didn't ever seem to agree with what the bridge threw back at me. It still works as an X10 traffic monitor though. LOL

 

[pete_c]

Yup; here first '86 DOS machines that I played with were heavy computers ...thinking they were AT&T...didn't do much with them as they were really slow....mostly played with the Amiga computer 1000 as it ran circles around anything that I saw at the time...but I did see them being used in office type environments ....beginnings with Lotus and Wordperfect that ran in DOS at the time....concurrently at the time played with unix based terminals which were a bit faster than networked Novell terminals running some propietary DOS software..big difference though between that simple Unix terminal and a PC running Novell...too big...one of my projects though related to getting folks off terminals (banking industry) and on to PC's...eventually I had to force it but just removing the terminals and cutting the cables to said terminals around 93/94.  I did the same in the EU around last part of 1998...(forcing the removal of terminals moving to PC's). 
 
I do recall the direct approach where as I had to push to the manager as it was no longer his choice. 
 
I just physically removed his terminal and told him to use the PC or go home ...hated doing that kind of stuff....but I had a bigger stick back then....
 
Back to the OP....
 

The core issue is that Microsoft designs for user convenience and features first, and security is somewhere in the also ran. They have improved dramatically over recent years in some regards, but they continue to make default behavior risky, rather than making people CHOOSE risky behavior.  Because, frankly, most people prefer that.

 
Personally the whole "what you can't see" or explain works wonders.....sometimes....good or bad...
 
Now a days it is just a matter of convenience and using the KISS principal as what you don't see always does provide a warm and fuzzy no matter what...well and the dark side of this is.....

 

[Waynedb]

Pete, I looked up Windows 3.1 minimum ram and it was 1 megabyte.

That Commodore Amiga 1000 was the first computer with a real multi-task operating system and with all its custom chips it made the PCs from IBM at the time look like crap, Commodore was way ahead of the game but badly run, at one time Steve Jobs begged Commodore to buy Apple for something like $150K.

I remember I really wanted an Amiga when it came out but bought the Atari ST because it was much cheaper while still a quite capable machine in its day, the Atari ST and later TT were very common in Germany for Business, my brother built a hardware interface and wrote a CNC control program for an Atari ST to make a CNC mill that was used to make aluminium cases for an enduro racing computer he designed. I still have that old mill in my workshop but the CNC setup was removed.

 

[pete_c]

@Wayne
 
Ahh...OK so that Seiko is running on 16MB and the CMOS is showing 16000Kb of memory...
 

 
Here I am amazed that it is still running and booted up....
 
Recall using Windows 3.1/3.11 computers in banks at the time.  I don't recall now if I was running first generation of MSSQL on WIndows 95 these days...but did connect to my little personal AS400 using Rumba which did connect to the back end of Ford at the time...in banking first overdraft systems used mysql screen scrapes of the back end systems using Rumba (well too attachmate).  I got involved a bit with that stuff and signature storage stuff to the back end mainframes using PCs on the front end...
 
Relating to Commodore had a first gen BBS running on a Commodore Pet computer in the early 80's.  Built a hardware phone line switcher with Ventel modems tapped in to a bunch of pay phone lines (phone company didn't see this for a bout a year)  Also had the C64 predecessor then the C64.  At the time I did learn how to take over a telephone trunk line...easy stuff from anywhere in the world (found out)....
 
I did purchase a few Amiga computers which I really liked.  Bought an Amiga toaster and played much with it.  My sister's father in law was the engineer at the time for a television station in Chicago and introduced them to the Amiga Toaster stuff.  My first tour of the television station equipment was like a museum tour as they used much stuff from the 1950's and 1960's.  They used to do business reports all day with a wooden numbers device behind the announcers (very mechanical financial numbers). They went digital with the Amiga Toaster.  It was probably one of the first television stations to do this in the country (channel 26 at the time).  Well too we (helped for fun) used a C64 at the television station with a tape drive program moving the satellite dishes and managing the downlinked video programs stuff.  I did modify one Amiga and I still have it in a large tower with added memory cards and SCSI drives which I used to use the Amiga Toaster around here some place....

 

[Waynedb]

The newtek Video Toaster and an Amiga were used in TV stations all over the country for many years after Commodore went away, Newtek is still around making hardware and software, all the best 3D graphics software pretty much started on Amigas, 3d studio did evolve out of Tom Hudsons work on Atari computers but Newtek Lightwave and Maxon Cinema 4D started on Commodore Amigas along with many others. I owned only one Amiga but never had a Video Toaster, I did always want one.

 

[pete_c]

Yeah trying to recall my first tour of the television station in Chicago...I laughed while walking through the television station ....mostly about how they could actually produce television shows with such antiquated expensive junk at the time....they were the first television station in Chicago to use the Amiga Toaster and I personally didn't see the cable companies or other Television stations in Chicago using the Amiga Toaster until a couple of years later...saw Amiga Guru (Amiga BSOD)  errors on Jones cable at the time more than once a day....
 
..here purchased the Amiga Toaster / Amiga 2000 on a lark of sorts amazed with the stuff I could do on it...well then showed my sister's father in law how to use it in the television station for regular commercial stuff...around the same time also recall a tugboat engineer writing and using a C-64 for navigation on a barge traversing those Chicago canals....never really new who he was...other than one day just coming up to me and dragging me over to a barge at 10 PM one night....wierd experience....well now also recalling a once a month wine and cheese meeting (mostly though we did computer stuff while eating cheese and drinking wine)  with some interesting folks from Northwestern / UofC (astromers) and helping writing one DB using a C64 for this guy....well remember now cuz I called him about once a month after he retired until he passed away...now also recalling getting in to that BUD and first DTV stuff and using a whole Canopus (thinking I spent coin on the stuff) recording set up just to record movies and stuff....much later though...(90's?)

 

[Waynedb]

I had a BUD here until just a few years ago, was amazing what you could find up there in the early days, When digital broadcasts started I got the Digital 4DTV and later got the RS5000 HD mod that could record over USB, the software could control the receiver.