On Fri, 03 Oct 2014 08:48:57 +0100, Joe User wrote:

The whole platform is now effectively becoming spyware. There's a subtle
(or perhaps not so subtle) change in the internetworking bioverse (that
is the sub-set of humanity that uses 'the internet' for 'Slimer and
...winston et al). It now seems that it is the rule that you need to
identify yourself in some way before accessing anything and the
aforesaid bioverse is now becoming so used to this that it doesn't seem
unusual or unreasonable. It's called social engineering and the
corporations are getting better at it all the time.

Indeedy. I installed the preview version of Windows 10 on a spare
machine yesterday, having had to create a Microsoft Account in order
to get to the webpage to download it, and found that it wanted me to
login with said account in order to install it too. From recollection,
this is the same as Windows 8, where there's a page during
installation that only offers two options - login with an existing
account or create a new one. A lot of people will be caught by this,
but once you know about it, the thing to do is choose to login with an
existing account, and on the *next* page, you finally get the option
to install without logging in to anything.

Then you try to use some of the supplied applications, and again it
wants you to login, just to use something ordinary like a calendar, so
you give up with all this nonsense and use your own.

Another annoyance is that it doesn't seem to be identifiable as an
operating system to a Linux installation program, which no longer
offers the option to install automatically alongside it, as it used to
with Windows 8 or any other system on the same machine.

Apart from that, first impressions of the look of Windows 10 is that
it's an improvement on Windows 8, but that's only because it's halfway
back to what we already had before, so it's debateable whether that
counts as an improvement at all.

Rod.