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    tomman In the next episode of "War On 32-Bit": Micro-Soft is phasing out 32-bit Windows 10 licenses to OEMs:
    https://tech.slashdot.org/story/20/05/14/148254/microsoft-takes-step-toward-phasing-out-32-bit-pc-support-for-windows-10

    I want to feel sorry for you, dear 32-bit user.

    I really want to.

    But if you're masochist enough to run Win10 on 32-bit hardware, chances are you're already having a truly miserable experience on such a setup. And if that's your case, MS is already doing you a favor by not letting you do so anymore on your next new prebuilt PC.

    As much as I love to run new stuff on old hardware, this is Windows. You've been able to buy 64-bit x86-based personal computers for at least the last 15 years! If your internal Line-of-Business multimillion$$ crapplications won't work under Win64, it's time to lock them down inside virtual machines. Sure, it will be hard to convince Upper Management and the beancounters that spending money to let go the 16-bit legacy for good, but they will thank you next time they can't get 486s off eBay at sane prices, or when you get hit by ransomware due to outdated software.

    Next time I enter a bank or a supermarket, I do not want to see your fancy new i5 Thinkcentres or Optiplexes running bare metal Win32 (WOW64 is fine), thanks.
    ndiddy
    Posted by Kawa
    That's literally a feature in the Win7 calculator.

    oh
    kode54 I'm supposedly a millennial, yet when I had money, I bought several expensive phones over the years, unlocked up front, free and clear. Now that I don't have much money any more, I just stopped buying new shit constantly. The only things I rent are either network services or hosted infrastructure. I don't rent physical devices.

    I suppose my family house could be considered a rental, though. We technically "own" it, but we have to pay a monthly mortgage payment. All the stuff inside it is owned, free and clear, though. Even the 2003 Dodge Neon, which was purchased used from a dealership, where it had served a year since its production as a rental car. This pattern follows the same after our previous car, which was a 1987 Ford Escort, purchased in 1988. Both times, with cash up front.

    The Escort was damaged due to a collision with a motorcycle driver who veered into oncoming traffic around a blind curve. They did survive their encounter with us, but our car was dented severely. We actually had to "total" out the car after that, since the cost of the damage far exceeded the current value of the car. We never did bother to repair it, but ended up with an all new license tag for it. It was probably worth about $250 in trade in value against the Neon.
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by tomman
    If boomers are made by Toyota, we're in deep trouble then.

    I've seen how much abuse can a Toyota withstand. Those things literally run FOREVER, yo.

    Genom Corp.

    They're still pretty damn tough, though maybe not Toyota-tough.
    tomman If boomers are made by Toyota, we're in deep trouble then.

    I've seen how much abuse can a Toyota withstand. Those things literally run FOREVER, yo.
    CaptainJistuce Boomers are of japanese make.
    ‮strfry("emanresu") Is it Canadian?
    No?
    I rest my case.
    CaptainJistuce If you WANT to be a homicidal robot, that's your call.
    ‮strfry("emanresu")
    Posted by CaptainJistuce
    OK Boomer

    I'd rather be a Boomer than a Canadian.
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by sureanem

    I'm not going to dignify the other millennial's brash personal attacks with a response.


    ‮strfry("emanresu")
    First off, the rental economy - and from the link you posted, the most rented item on that graph is furniture - all of the items on that graph are physical items, as clearly stated for the major reason of either trying it out or of temporary usage, and largely because millennial don't have alot of cash to purchase with. It doesn't even mention netflix or google anywhere.

    Sure. Netflix and Spotify do not qualify as a rentals, so of course they wouldn't be listed in such an article. But the "pay a small monthly fee and you get zero-margin-cost access to the library" model is gradually (well...) displacing the "buy it once and own it" model. It's only the next logical step to replace the fee with ads. Why? Because hedonistic purchases are painful. If people have to pay for a movie in order to watch it, this is pain. Having a Netflix subscription isn't - to use it should if anything be pleasurable according to sunk costs, and when the payment is due it obviously makes sense to pay for something you actually use.

    You're right about millennials not having too much cash, and it's quite easy to see why and who's to blame. Still, the point stands, they choose this socially harmful activity, even if it is out of poverty. You wouldn't absolve a drug addict of blame for robbing someone, so how could you argue an activity they're enthusiastically consenting to is not something for which they can be blamed?

    Secondly, The move to subscription based monetization has always been something chased after by shareholders, and its imposition was top down. To say its a model anyone wanted is lazy thinking. No one wanted to be stuck in a multi-year contract to own a phone, no one wanted a rolling release version of Windows.

    Yet they do it. They freely chose to get a phone for a 'cheap monthly payment of $49.99'. They had the option not to, and buy an unlocked phone instead - in America, you can even buy SIM cards without having to present ID. Yet they didn't. Why? Because they preferred abstracting away the payment. They are the ones who have committed a moral transgression and who ought to take the blame for it, not the market.

    Thirdly, adding ads to wordpad is basically taking an item someone owns and renting it with no compensation going to the owner - because software licenses let them. Or are software licenses something new Millennials lusted after?

    That is bizarre - how do they own Windows or WordPad?
    funkyass Talk about the tail wagging the dog.

    First off, the rental economy - and from the link you posted, the most rented item on that graph is furniture - all of the items on that graph are physical items, as clearly stated for the major reason of either trying it out or of temporary usage, and largely because millennial don't have alot of cash to purchase with. It doesn't even mention netflix or google anywhere.

    Secondly, The move to subscription based monetization has always been something chased after by shareholders, and its imposition was top down. To say its a model anyone wanted is lazy thinking. No one wanted to be stuck in a multi-year contract to own a phone, no one wanted a rolling release version of Windows.

    Thirdly, adding ads to wordpad is basically taking an item someone owns and renting it with no compensation going to the owner - because software licenses let them. Or are software licenses something new Millennials lusted after?
    ‮strfry("emanresu")
    Posted by funkyass
    the link you posted doesn't come close to supporting your assertions, nor does it have anything to do with inserting ads into wordpad.

    It does, although it's by more than one step.

    Millennials are unwilling to pay upfront payments for goods. Instead, they prefer to get it for 'free' (at zero marginal fiscal cost), or by renting it. See the article I linked, or just look at the proliferation of such services (Google, Spotify, Netflix, phone carriers' financing deals, etc)

    Updating software by selling a discrete new version is thus millennial-unfriendly. Therefore, companies, such as Adobe, Microsoft, and Google, switched to rolling-release models.

    However, this also kills the monetization. They thus have to find an alternate revenue source: either through subscriptions or monetization. Since nobody wants to pay for the OS (historically, it was bundled by OEMs - with the death of Moore's law this is less profitable) on a monthly basis, ads are the only choice.

    This would not have happened if selling new versions with useful changes were a profitable business model. It was only with the death of 'user pays for product' that software shops found it more profitable to so brazenly harm their users. Before that, there was at least some alignment of incentives - Microsoft didn't act in bad faith to cripple Windows 7, because they wanted to make a product people wanted to pay for, and Windows 8 was the beginning of the decline.

    So, yes, people ostensibly do complain about spying. But the fact still remains that they use Facebook and Windows 10 of their own volition and give enthusiastic consent to it, and perhaps more importantly, would not pay for it if offered the choice. So it really is their own fault.
    Nicholas Steel Wordpad lost all value the instant Microsoft added support for more Line Ending formats in Notepad. Also we got Office 2016 through my dads work a few years ago so we just use that if we need a more comprehensive product and we also use https://www.officeclassicmenu.com/en/download.php to restore access to sensible menus.
    funkyass the link you posted doesn't come close to supporting your assertions, nor does it have anything to do with inserting ads into wordpad.
    ‮strfry("emanresu")
    Posted by creaothceann
    Posted by sureanem

    Would it be crude to say it's because the millennials don't want to shell out any money to buy things

    Yes, because that would not just be millennials.

    This is a well-known trend, though. It is mostly the millennials driving this development, even if some non-millennials presumably also happen to have such proclivities. Look at their extreme enthusiasm for Google and Facebook and whatnot in the early 2000s for example, or their somewhat milder enthusiasm over Netflix and Amazon in the mid-2010s. This was clearly not a trend partaken in by Gen X to an equally large extent, let alone the Boomers who nurtured a (arguably healthy) skepticism of technology.

    https://www.zerohedge.com/personal-finance/generation-rent-how-millennials-are-fueling-lease-dont-buy-economy

    I'm not going to dignify the other millennial's brash personal attacks with a response.
    CaptainJistuce
    Posted by tomman
    First MS ruined the calculator, by replacing it with some Metro UWP webshit.

    Now MS also is in the works to ensure your base OS install will ship with absolutely no usable applications:
    https://news.slashdot.org/story/20/01/21/1614225/microsoft-is-testing-ads-in-wordpad-in-windows-10

    Not that I care about Wordpad - if you need a texteditor for large files, there are plenty of them available, at several price tags. For Win32/64, portable editions included! And if you need to edit actual documents, LibreOffice is still free, if you don't want to contract herpes pirate pay for Office.
    But still, why bother injecting ads in base OS accessories!?

    I didn't knew Redmond, WA got relocated to Silly Valley, CA...


    Who even uses Write Wordpad? It has long been this thing that was either not good enough or way too much, depending on what you were doing. There was once a time when it was the right tool for the job, but that hasn't been true for many years.


    I'm not even dignifying Birdcock's ageism with a response.
    creaothceann
    Posted by sureanem
    Posted by tomman
    But still, why bother injecting ads in base OS accessories!?

    Would it be crude to say it's because the millennials don't want to shell out any money to buy things

    Yes, because that would not just be millennials.
    Kawaoneechan
    Posted by ndiddy
    The Win 10 calculator is much nicer than the Win 7 calculator, it has a mode where you can toggle individual bits in a number that I find very useful.
    That's literally a feature in the Win7 calculator.
    ‮strfry("emanresu")
    Posted by tomman
    But still, why bother injecting ads in base OS accessories!?

    Would it be crude to say it's because the millennials don't want to shell out any money to buy things, and instead try to get it stuff for 'free' and/or rent it?

    I mean sure, it's disgusting, but as they say, 'this is the future you chose'. You can't both have your cake and eat it. The people actively with informed consent of their own volition chose this, because they valued the flexibility, the same as with spying.

    Otherwise, Microsoft doesn't have a good revenue stream. In the age of digital download and auto-update, it makes zero sense to ship discrete versions when you could just continuously auto-update. It's like complaining about Adobe switching over to CC or Firefox's version "numbering" "system" or whatever. What did you expect?
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