To moderators: Please disable the forum behaviour where editing a post twice in a small period of time completely removes the post and sends it away for moderator approval - which takes a couple of days.
@Satoru said:
Win 7 is not going to be supported on newer intel architectures. Which means you’re going to have to be on Windows 10 soon because any new computer you buy right now WILL NOT RUN windows 7.
That false idea was just a part of Microsoft’s pro-Windows 10 propaganda. And I’m sure that Microsoft paid both AMD and Intel hefty sums of cash to not release chipset drivers for Windows 7 for their newer CPUs. But, the good news is that an x86 processor is going to work with an OS that is designed to run on the x86 instruction set, which includes everything going all the way back to MS DOS. New Intel and AMD CPUs are still running on the x86 instruction set, and that isn’t going to change with future Intel and AMD CPUs - and if it does, then Microsoft will have to re-write their OS to work on a different instruction set. Therefore, regardless of what Microsoft has tried to suggest to people through dishonest marketing, new Intel and AMD CPUs will work fine with Windows 7.
@Augustusman said:
Google does the same.
They don’t, though. When you use an online service, you’re choosing to enter somebody else’s environment and make use of their tool. But what Microsoft does is probe your own personal and private offline desktop spaces, gather data on what you do in them, and then send reports to Microsoft servers about it. The difference is the same difference as taking something from your own house as your own and selling it, versus taking something from somebody else’s house and selling it. One is your right, the other is theft.
There is a new (since the previous 3 - 5 years) trend in monetizing people’s data. And like other just-arising societal phenomena, it has a wild west stage, where people act like anything goes, without discretion or limitations. But, eventually, the understanding of what it all means sinks in, and then things become regulated. I expect the same to happen with what Microsoft, and some other companies are currently doing with what is essentially data-theft, and profiting off of crime - because property laws already establish some pretty strong arguments against unilaterally taking what belongs to a person (such as data generated by a person’s PC hardware, processing capability, electricity…).
What Microsoft is doing in Windows 10 is data-theft, and software piracy, and equivalent to somebody installing malware on your PC that utilizes your paid-for electricity, your personally-owned PC hardware and software licenses, and your system’s processing power to bot-mine Bitcoin, which then gets sent to a secret Bitcoin wallet that can be accessed by the person who installed the malware on your system. Do you think it is legal for you to bot-mine off of Microsoft’s servers? No, it isn’t. And if a person is caught doing such a thing, Microsoft will sue that person, and they’ll likely go to jail for vandalism and theft, amongst other things. And the money they make off of doing such would be a crime that is called Unjust Enrichment. Well, Microsoft is likewise guilty of Unjust Enrichment via their data-mining people through Windows 10.
Also, concerning what Microsoft versus Google do, in June of this year, Google announced they will stop scanning people’s emails to look for data they can mine to turn a profit. However, Microsoft’s Privacy Statement says that Microsoft will not only scan people’s emails, but will gather readable contents of emails and documents, and also collect portions of audio and video recordings made in Windows 10, as well as anything that passes through Microsoft services such as One Drive.
@Augustusman said:
Win7 will be history… I din see why give to them support specially for gaming.
While Microsoft in particular don’t want to give support for Windows 7 (because they want to push people to Windows 10 where they can exploit people’s OS usage for profit), I think that Windows 7 is going to linger around for longer than Windows XP has.
While Windows XP and Windows from Vista and onward run on very different core architectures, everything since Windows Vista is still mostly running on Windows Vista at the core. That’s why what runs on Windows 7, for the most part, should run without issue on Windows 10, and is also why whatever runs on Windows 10 is likely to also run on Windows 7. The biggest exception is where Microsoft has put up artificial restrictions, such as UWP or DirectX 12, which Microsoft has done not because these thing need Windows 10 for anything, but because Microsoft just want to push people to use Windows 10 because of all of its inbuilt data generation and collection processes that Microsoft uses to make money off of Windows 10 license owners.
Normally, Microsoft would release a new OS every certain number of years to get a revenue boost for the company. But, since Windows 7, Microsoft hasn’t had a lot of stuff that’s important to add or change to the Windows OS. That’s why Windows 8 was such a weak offering (with a bizarre removal of the desktop - change for change’s sake), and is why people didn’t really go for it. Windows 10 is mostly the same deal (although not as much), but it represents a major shift in Microsoft’s core business strategy: Instead of making money primarily off of people buying Windows 10 licenses, Microsoft is making money from every little action people do in Windows 10, by way of usage data generation and collection. And this is why Microsoft offered Windows 10 free for a year (it’s actually still free, via either using Windows 7 or 8 key during Windows 10 installation, or via other avenues Microsoft has left open), and also why Microsoft forced the installation of Windows 10 on millions of PCs without their owners’ permission.
This is also why Microsoft has called Windows 10 their last Windows OS (I’m sure that’s just marketing, and that Windows 10 won’t actually be the last Windows OS) - because, so long as Microsoft has turned daily PC usage into a money generator for them, they don’t need to rely on license sales for profit from their OS division.
So, Windows 10 is a repackaged Windows Vista / 7 / 8, for the purpose of getting Microsoft’s spy / data-leech tools on people’s systems, so that Microsoft can perpetually make money off of people running Windows without having to produce, market, and sell a new OS every few years.
And, because Windows Vista, 7, 8, and 10 are all built on Vista, when you’re running Windows 10, you’re mostly still running Windows Vista.
To reference data posted in another location, when Microsoft’s support for Windows XP ended in April 2014, Windows XP still held about 26% of the desktop market share, according to Netmarketstat. And Windows 7 held 49% of the desktop market share, at the same time.
Right now, Windows 7’s market share remains at 49%, while Windows 10 holds less than 28% of the total desktop market share. And in the previous year, Windows 10 gained just 5% market share, with those gains coming from drops in Windows XP and Windows 8.1’s market shares, and not from a shift in Windows 7’s market share.
Now, the thing with Windows 10 being essentially a repackaging of Windows 7 and 8 with tons of bloatware and data-mining tools built in, is that it means Windows 7 is going to continue to be a modern OS for about just as long as Windows 10 is a modern OS. Because, for the most part, they’re the same OS - with different furnishings and administrator manageability (with the latter actually greatly favouring Windows 7).
Sure, Microsoft can add new features to Windows 10 to separate them, but DirectX 12 isn’t one of them, because Windows 7 has Vulkan support - which is the open-sourced variant of the same graphics technology as DirectX 12, and is likely to be preferred over DirectX 12 by developers, other than Microsoft, precisely because it is open-source, and because it is multi-platform and available for XP, Vista, 7, 8(.1), 10, Linux, and Android, whereas DirectX 12 is only for Windows 10 (and Xbox). DirectX 12 got a head start over Vulkan in readiness for implementation by developers, but in the past year, some game developers dropped implementation of DirectX 12 into their games in favour of Vulkan. Cloud Imperium Games, who are making Star Citizen, is one of them.
@Fetandrey said:
I don’t understand those Win10 haters. What are you doing here? Do you really think that all your whining here will make Microsoft change their mind and release AoE:DE on Win7? Don’t count on it.
People have questions and have a right to express themselves. I don’t see anything wrong with that.