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What I retain from all this is:
-Microsoft is able to make gorgeous looking design.
-Microsoft seem to forget more and more how it was good at designing functional UIs in the past. Windows was and might still offer the best UI there is, but from maybe Windows 2000 or XP, it went mostly downhill in many ways, even if they added a few nice things here and there.
-Microsoft seem to think they must emulate the inferior functional interface of their small market share competitors (vs the desktop and laptop PC market) just to look contemporary, to remain relevant. Why can’t they do the best of both worlds? It’s like Firefox copying Chrome thinking people will find them more interesting because they remove UI features their users loved and unfortunately betting that privacy will be enough of an incentive to keep or gain users.
-There is a difference between cluttering the UI with useless things and removing advanced features. I am for a clean UI, but it needs to offer an easy way for basic users to do what they want and a complete set of features for advanced users, with an ability to use shortcuts or customization options to add frequently used items somewhere else. Preventing power users from using a functional Start Menu or taskbar serves nobody. Lambda users don’t mess with that. Power users get angry.
-Settings need to be easily found in one giant place, with redundancy some other places acceptable, but no scattering of settings in different unusual places without a mirror in the normal settings spot. Windows 11 seem to improve on that. You need to be able to see all Windows settings and choose everything you want in a dedicated space, organized.
-Microsoft should abide by the click rule: is there a way to do the same features with the same number or less mouse clicks for a frequently used feature? If no, then it is not a great idea. If it is a feature frequently used by some users, maybe make it customizable so it can be added to a place where it is quicker to access.
-Microsoft pretend Windows 11 is designed to diffuse a sense of peace and whatever in a sea of crazy changes and distractions. The irony is Microsoft is responsible for those with their two times a year release schedule, which they reduced to one time a year with Windows 11, which is still too much for many. They also bloat the OS with mindless ads, sleazy marketing tactics to push bing or prevent you from easily choosing your default browser. Oh, the coherence!
-Windows was by far and is still the productivity desktop of choice. It is not great at security although they have very competent people on the security front. They seem to be going in that direction of being more secure, but it still has the legacy hindering those efforts. Windows should focus strategically on its core business, productivity and flexibility, while working on ease of deployment and security, then it would secure its position even more in the market as the no nonsense choice for serious work. They can switch the look to keep mass appeal, but not hinder productivity while doing so. The more Microsoft makes it annoying to deal with Windows, the more Apple and its new chips, less hassle experience for some and simple, beautiful interface can be attractive. I worked on the ugly classic look of Windows 7 for years because the classic theme was better for identifying the active window.
What Windows need is more customization and an easy way to save and copy settings from one computer to another. That way, advanced users could easily make a smarter set of settings targeted to their audience and simply dump them on others computers. I do that with registry scripts, but it is not user friendly. There are many things from the newer Windows versions I need to repair to get back to a productive state and I don’t think it is because I am a dinosaur. Group policy is incomplete. You need registry hacks to switch many settings quickly without going into the UI. You shouldn’t have to rely on images to deploy a fresh Windows and push sensible settings onto it, whether you are a home user that reinstalls or a SMB business user.
To give examples:
-I want to open an explorer Window on This PC so I can see drive instead of the stupid quick access when pressing WINDOWS+E because I only use this to reach drives, relying on search for finding documents and folder hierarchies otherwise or using one of the few shortcuts to my documents or pictures on the taskbar’s quicklaunch bar. Windows in its default state now needs more clicks to do all kind of things.
-The search tool since 10 is inferior to Windows 7’s one and it often needs more clicks to reach what you are looking for.
-The taskbar is awful after Vista, I need to tweak it to get back the view where I see what Windows are open and what is in it, to avoid clicking or hovering, wasting time to see what I am looking for. I need to re-enable the quicklaunch bar to have icons on the bar to quickly start apps (yes I could use keyboard shortcuts, but users click so that’s better for my users). It would be nice to be able to assign shortcut keys to quicklaunch icons with a vanilla Windows version. I like Windows showing in the taskbar, because they don’t move. You get used to have this third window you are working on there and you go there when you need it, you don’t alt-tab, look where your window is right now among the high number of open windows, just to find it.
Conclusion:
The only way we have a little chance of signaling Microsoft their approach to software development is insane is to not buy into it. I won’t run Windows 11 in production for a while, until it gets better than 10 in terms of quality/stability or until 10 runs out of support.
If enough people reject the OS, they will have to look into why and stop arrogantly or mindlessly prevent people from customizing their experience or change settings as much. Maybe they will look into adding more function into design, thinking in terms of productivity and not just look. They might have listened a bit with Windows 11, reducing the number of feature updates and cleaning the interface, they just didn’t do such a good job with the feedback and forgot to not create more hassle at the same time when people want another browser, for example. Let’s hope they won’t think Windows is dead because people don’t rush to upgrade but realize they just need to get better at releasing quality software from the start and focus on productivity.
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I agree with you Susan that a zero day targeting SMS or iMessage or Safari might break the defenses, but having an antivirus on top would likely not have blocked this since there is more chance than an unpatched vulnerability at Apple is not known from antiviruses either.
So unless there is something I didn’t get from your answer, keeping your Iphone up to date is the best advice before adding an antivirus, plus maybe rebooting your phone regularly like you suggest although it is not clear how much it helps because it might work only with certain type of malware that didn’t exploit a vulnerability to go very deep.
My point is I am not sure how a blacklist operated antivirus add to the protection of an already pretty safe platform when it is patched. Maybe it can help avoid a generally known bad web site where there could be a new zero day today, but I don’t know how often people go to known bad web sites and they would have the bad luck of stumbling on a zero day at the same time. If a zero day is too large scale, it will be found quickly. Targeted attacks are more successful if they are less visible. Those vulnerabilities are not on blacklists.
If we were talking about other type of proactive defenses like what EMET did on Windows to reduce the risk of a successful buffer overflow and other type of attacks at a general level, then it would be different, but no such antivirus exists on IOS since low level access is not granted so they seem to be condemned to reactive measures using blacklists, which is pretty poor as a protection for emerging threats.
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Some people commented that Duckduckgo’s search results are from Google. In the past and from what I found online with a quick search, it doesn’t come from Google at all.
Maybe that is why I got frustrated with them quickly after trying it for a few days a while ago.
Excerpt from Wikipedia :
“DuckDuckGo’s results are a compilation of “over 400″ sources, including Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wolfram Alpha, Bing, Yandex, its own web crawler (the DuckDuckBot) and others. It also uses data from crowdsourced sites, including Wikipedia, to populate knowledge panel boxes to the right of the results.”
Unfortunately, I don’t find that anything else comes close to Google.
That was a great article from Brian, again.
This might be a threat that could become even worse than email because normal users have a harder time identifying those search results they looked for as illegitimate than an unexpected email.
Using SRP like someone mentioned or hardened mode in Avast or an equivalent seems like a good idea to mitigate the risk in part. Again, Microsoft, why do you keep Applocker unavailable to Home and Pro version? Security shouldn’t be an option for big businesses only in your OS, especially when it involves no costly ongoing maintenance like it is probably the case for Applocker. If you can give Defender to everyone, sure you could include Applocker.
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It has been mentioned numerous times a very long time ago when Windows 10 was out and months later. This is not a surprise and considering you can upgrade to 11 with a machine meeting the requirements for free, the real question becomes more how many years of supported Windows can you run with a certain hardware.
You should be more offended by Office again reducing the period of support from 10 years before to 7 years for 2019 to 5 years for 2021, many people still preferring not to use an always changing subscription version. I think Microsoft wasn’t supposed to do another version after 2019, but I might be wrong. Apparently, it seems too many customers would be upset to have to subscribe to 365. I am one of those, but I certainly don’t appreciate the 5 years support. They probably hope to get everyone on subscription by then. They do not make it easy to order or even know there is a perpetual license for the casual user, from what I have seen on their web site.
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I didn’t feel the article was instilling fear, to the contrary, but I agree with you that the title is click-bait, although it doesn’t bother me as it is not misleading click-bait asked in the form of a question. Click-bait that is not deceptive doesn’t bother me, it’s fair marketing in my book and often the author doesn’t even pick the title so you can’t blame him. I also don’t feel that Askwoody is desperate and trying by all means to capture an audience with such articles. Maybe it appears like that to you because you really dislike those subjects.
Let’s not confuse 5G’s metaphysical links to COVID-19 backed by no serious research with discussing the possibility that non-ionizing radiation that clearly raises the temperature of bodies in close proximity might possibly have a certain correlation to cancer by mechanisms not yet fully understood, if the methodology is sound. Even seeing science having a hard time backing any significant risk says something that I find useful, as whatever small correlation found might not have a practical impact in real life.
I respect your point of view about the content, though, which you are obviously allowed to dislike. For me, I was more annoyed by the articles in PC Mag when it became car and gadgets magazine for a while a long time ago. Long gone are the days where you would tear so many pages of your computer magazines thinking you should use that one day. I miss that.
I still see in tech publications discussions about legitimate health concerns over the use of tech such as blue light. To me, that is not off topic. If I wonder if I should buy an OLED tablet to use many hours a day, I find it interesting to know if it would emit less blue light than an LCD and if blue light emissions should even be a concern in the first place, unless there is a scientific consensus that it is not. Of course, writing constantly about EMF when nothing new came out from science isn’t good journalism.
Trying to research those possibly important subjects are hard by yourself and scientific evidence is often scarce. As long as it is done with rigor and there is a good reason to write about it, I like to read about those subjects.
We are both believers in science, knowing that science is made by humans. There is a difference between reporting serious science about a legitimate health concern, concluding that there are some dangers when there is none, creating click-bait and instilling unwarranted fear and covering completely ridiculous ideas based on esoteric physic except to debunk them. As long as we get facts and/or interview with experts, I’m in.
I still hope that you will find some value to your contributions greatly appreciated by many members here, which I am sure I am not alone doing so.
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I am surprised that you feel so strongly about this. I enjoy your contributions a lot in general and would be very sad to see you go. I respectfully disagree with you and hope you can just ignore what you don’t like for content without feeling the need to leave. I feel the need to present a different view in support of Brian.
As a curious person, I always welcome smart people bringing new information. In this case, I felt Brian brought something new that seems to be coming from reputable scientists? I tried to research the subject a bit myself a long time ago and came out only with about the same conclusion. I am glad that Brian clearly stated the importance of seeing risks in terms of absolutes and not only in percentages, which can be meaningless. Percentages are often used incorrectly when health issues are reported and this causes unnecessary fears.
I found this article very reasonable and useful, presenting what seemed to be a good account of where we stand now and even a few good tips to reduce exposure for those who are scared. His message seemed to be, don’t panic it’s much less bad than many other things if it is bad, but if you worry, here’s what you can do. His message seems to be that the risk is not really that big vs other risks, but why sleep with your phone close to your head if you don’t have to if we are still not sure that it doesn’t harm?EMF might not be the culprit, but in the case of putting the phone on your ears, maybe warmth could have an effect?
You seem to have a strong view against this, are you more of a specialist and could you give us more useful information that shows that there is no reason at all to even talk about this? I feel that Brian did the job I would have liked to do researching for myself, but better, and for lack of a better alternative, I’m willing to follow him. I never read a renowned specialist explains a summary of the actual science with an opinion so that us neophytes would understand it well enough to make appropriate choices. A long time ago, I read the following puzzling statement following a meta-analysis: they found nothing except for heavy users, which were defined as using their cell phones for more than 30 minutes per day. That wasn’t terribly convincing to see heavy users defined that way (maybe for the period reviewed 30 minutes was not as common) and then showing the conclusion was don’t worry, we can’t conclude anything except for those, so you shouldn’t worry.
When Brian wrote about batteries, I also found it interesting. It raised many questions, many of which are still unanswered in my book, about how manufacturers show or not the real battery capacity and the real world difference it makes to never charge above the 80% mark vs charging slowly above. I learned about why you really should try to avoid letting your phone discharge too much. The fact that we are not experts doesn’t mean we can find flaws in some logic, like it seems physicists found flaws in the definition of aerosol used by health scientist for years and which seems to have been finally explained and then corrected, at least partially. Paradigms shifts are notoriously difficult for some scientists and the arrogant attitude of “you don’t know what you are talking about” of some prevents them from revising some strongly held beliefs that in some cases are just that, beliefs that are just old enough to have become truths. Yes, as an expert in IT, I know it can be annoying to have someone questions everything you do when you try to help them, knowing it would be too long to explain, but I try to remain patient and explain what I can, being respectful, because I know how it feels to be on the other side.
I get that science might be difficult to understand from the outside, but also, I found many problems in scientific papers when I did study them carefully before and I wasn’t an expert. A long time ago, I wrote to two well-known (in their field) scientists to tell them about their mistakes, one dating from an important paper written more than 20 years ago and guess what? Both reacted very favorably. One old folk reached out to another old friend in their field and were happy that someone was still reading their papers carefully instead of just quoting the mistake over and over like I had noticed and they thanked me for finding it. Scientists makes mistakes, they are human. The idea is that science is supposed to be reproducible and it tries to evolve and correct course from mistakes, adjusting theories when new facts don’t conform to them. It is not a set in stone description of reality, neither a faith based immutable discourse. In reality, probably many don’t have time to verify everything in details and that is why you can see things like I did where everybody was quoting a mistake without having read it properly, no wonder I didn’t understand the quotation until I went back to the original article.
So for me, although this is very imperfect, articles like the one from Brian on batteries made me change the way I was seeing things and adjust my behavior slightly without going crazy, until more information is clearly understood. I also have a general idea of what to tell people who ask me questions. Maybe you say that is the problem because you spread false information on batteries as an IT expert. You might be right if Brian was that much wrong. But for lack of something better, maybe in many cases there is a potential for doing something useful without much downside if you don’t go too intense vs doing nothing.
I feel the same about cell phones. Exposing possible conflict of interests or apparent illogical means of testing to conform to regulations is also interesting from the outside because sometimes that is all we have if we don’t understand the inside.
If it didn’t make any difference, why would manufacturers test at one inch instead of how people really use their phone? This, to me, doesn’t make any sense. They could brag about respecting the limits (that’s all they claim they do, respect a limit set by others) without the one inch distance. When I read that, I understand implicitly that they don’t respect the limit below one inch. Is it that big of a deal? I don’t know, but it will make me curious to know, especially knowing how distance is important for exposure amount. I also understand businesses who might be overcareful to not claim anything and go for the lowest allowed claim, just in case. This doesn’t mean they are willfully trying to fool the public although that happens sometimes. Not every company is like some tobacco companies have been. One could wonder why in the first place they can test at one inch? This might be the real problem and that is not the companies fault, although one could argue that an ethical company should try to do better if they think legislation is not safe enough.
Now, Brian, how about those studies funded by the oil companies saying that the batteries in electric cars emit very strong magnetic fields next to your precious babies on the back seat? Will you research this subject for us? 😉
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This thread is very misleading about Thunderbird. Configuring Thunderbird is extremely easy. Moving an old Thunderbird profile to a new computer is too once you know how to do it. I just did it for friend and it was piece of cake.
The issue here was trying to import old mail from Windows Live Mail and answering many questions that were not related like should someone uses IMAP or POP3. Not sure you can easily import Windows Live Mail folders and messages in the webmail you mention either.
Thank you for sharing your experience, though, as choosing between a webmail or a local app to manage emails is an important question many of us might have to ask over the years for ourselves or others. The convenience of webmail is indeed a very attractive factor.
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