The GREAT ANNIVERSARY UPGRADE, much touted by MS to get folks to sign up before the offer ended, turns out to be ......  a weekly upgrade with not much new or better stuff in it.

WINDOWS 10 SO FAR  
MS has created an OS version that allowed them to dump all support for all older Windows versions, allowed them to churn the basic hardware drivers and break a goodly number of older machines and to totally locked users into a nightly upgrade/inspect system that is actually empowered by MS to DELETE USER INSTALLED DRIVERS AND SOFTWARE off the users machine at MS's whim. (and it can also delete alternate OS partitions now)

Now MS is choking "their" machines with ads that make "their" machines run like crap, and you are stuck with it.

Congrats, you are a real "wiener" in this MS upgrade contest .....


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Folks just figured out what the anniversary surprise really was ......

https://www.google.com/?ion=1&espv=2#q=users+say+Windows+10+anniversary+updat...

Microsoft has just attempted to purge those nasty alternate OS items cluttering up your hard drive.    Locking, removing Grub boot data tables  and in some cases deleting entire partitions seems to be the common thread here.   So what happened to me yesterday wasn't a one off item by any means.

This is sad, but it is "historically typical" for MS to do arrogant stuff like this "by accident" and to apologize for it after the fact.

   

The ever unapologetic Microsoft issues a "fix" for the Anniversary Upgrade brouhaha  --  a special GO BACK screen to be used within 10 days of the Anniversary Upgrade.





Why is this just a band-aid slapped over a cancer sore?
It cannot undo the partition damages nor can it undo the new wave of driver damage that is being done by the Anniversary Upgrade.



Brother Printer is emailing all registered Win 10 users with a special happy note:

Brother sent out an email indicating that their customers may need to uninstall and reinstall your printers/scanners after this upgrade.

Why?   MS replaced your Brother installed (correctly working) drivers with "other non-working MS drivers".   Brother is tired of this and is sick of getting machines returned because of MS's endless frick ups.

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/software/operating-systems/windows-10-annive...

Win 10 Anniversary Upgrade head lady speaks with forked tongue last week about " but also we don’t ship a build unless we know we can upgrade from that build to the next build without any issues.”



“There are many ways to do it,” she said, referring to releasing Insider updates instead of full builds. ”So we’re trying a lot of different things in-house to see what makes sense for PC versus phone, what makes sense for Fast Ring versus Slow Ring. In terms of what we were working on last week, it was a little bit of that, but also we don’t ship a build unless we know we can upgrade from that build to the next build without any issues.”

Sweetheart, you lied out of your pretty teeth last week, didn't you?


Cortana curtailed

Another problem is happening to Windows 10 users who have successfully installed the upgrade, only to find that Cortana has been banished from their system.

One Microsoft community forum denizen posted that: "Cortana worked perfectly before AU [Anniversary Update], but after AU it just disappeared. All Cortana settings are missing."

And others replied that they faced the same issue, plus we've seen further complaints elsewhere on the net about Cortana being ditched by the update.

Gordon Kelly at Forbes gets out front again, releasing secret internal MS source info that says MS intends to complete the door-less walled garden wall soon, throw out the Linux trash and start charging the $7-$10 per month for the Walled Garden World maintenance fee.

Note now that MS will now TURN OFF YOUR SYSTEM RESTORE, trash entire partitions off your machine, deny you very basic things like Cortana and cut your roll back rights down to only 10 days ..... yep, something's up, alright.    

Hey, you ain't paid for using that there Cortana girlie, buddy .....   get'cher hands offa that digital cupcake, creep,  lessen you done paid Satya to fondle her !!


     

It is so much better than MS's products that MS has actually put "somewhat some true, but a lot of false" warnings and such INTO THEIR OS ITSELF to try to tell you not to use it.

The EU is getting ready to yank on MS's leash over doing such tricks, as MS is committing "actions in restraint of trade" by throwing FUD bombs at their competitors, especially for false warnings items that they were stupid enough to write inside their OS itself.

But you must understand, if MS cannot stop or reverse this trend, then they are gone inside of 3-5 years.    If you get it that the gloves are off now and MS is doing EVERYTHING they can to survive,  then you get where you are right now.




We are now 4 days past the Anniversary Update and MS's talking heads are saying that this was the last of the Year 1 Beta style updates (with all their fuzzy badness and general incompleteness).

What comes next is Enterprise Roll out  (and according to Forbes, the monthly maintenance fee suddenly appears).

Big Picture -- for someone who was happy on Win 7 this whole mess could have been avoided IF MS was acting like a decent OS provider.  

Instead, MS has lied and tricked their old customer base into locking themselves into the new MS Walled Windows Garden.

http://liliputing.com/2016/08/micron-unveils-3d-nand-flash-storage-smartphone...

Micron unveils 3D NAND flash storage for smartphones





Remember Samsung's new superfast (expensive) SSD type memory that was both LARGE CAPACITY and on a single ball grid array (solder in place) chipset?

Here is Micron's alternative, which is HUGE in capacity and small in size with no claims made so far for any increase in speed yet over the current existing NAND memory speeds.  

NAND is still much faster than SD cards, so it is still a good thing, but who needs a terabyte of memory in a smart phone?   When your phone is your PC you may need that much larger storage to carry your world around with you.

Good thing about this is PRICE AND FEATURE COMPETITION that will kick in now, is that Samsung has been getting very large "first out" price bonuses so far and now some real competition will whittle that down to "reasonable pricing" very quickly.

ALL OPERATING SYSTEMS will be much faster acting using this sort of memory.

And the good news is that your slim, modern looking phone will still be able to be your PC as this memory can also be laid down on its side, flat to the motherboard.



...... and if you are holding spinning platter hard drive company stocks (Seagate, Maxtor, etc.) it is time to sell them before they become worthless.

What is the state of the art on the REALLY cheap stuff .....

(or, can I really do this stuff for free like they promised ??)

I went to the FreedomPOP well and got a $29 bucket of very stinky water, which I worked on and over (and over again) until I had a functional (not good, a functional somewhat rain-barrel bad sounding) phone that would make calls and texts (no voicemail) that cost me ZERO $$$ ongoing, supposedly forever) -- but I do get a gig of tower data each month and a phone with "so so" sub-par voice reception all for a one time investment of $29 (and a large amount of bitching having to be done at various FreedomPOP folks that has to be repeated every month or so when they try to welsh on the deal).

Next, Google Fi --- I spent $249 up front for a 5x Nexus phone with 32 gigs of memory.  The Fi service is flawless at $30 a month (and I get back $9 every month in unused data reimbursement).    Best phone and service I have ever had, bar none.  It really is good stuff but it isn't free, it costs $30 a month less the monthly data rebate.

Google Fi believes strongly in WiFi, and the phone can work off of WiFi just dandy.   Google Fi also lets you put your call making tower service on vacation for up to 3 months at a lick if you should hit a place in your life where you don't need tower service (or to make or take tower calls).   Google wants you to be able to ditch your towers, they think towers SUCK.   Google intends to offer full internet and phone service to you and your home by long distance wireless before very long, and that will be nice when it finally gets here.  

When that comes, you'll need a new phone, I suspect.   Cost split between your house and your phones might actually be close to reasonable, too.

So I cut my tower stuff off and use the 5x as a mobile computer terminal at my bedside table, and I carry the rain barrel FreedomPOP phone for the like 1-2 calls a month I actually do make.  

Either one of my phones can ride up on the handlebars of my bike as my GPS.   Google has made the off line Google Maps GPS trick work really really well off of stored maps, and they now let you store your maps off line on removable SD card media.

I am currently paying out nothing monthly for having both a tablet and a phone and a bike GPS, with an acquisition cost of $229 for the entire package.


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The Really Cheap Gaming PC is still getting better, too.   I have finished re-doing my really cheap (separate gaming video card) Linux box with a Win 10 Steam based gaming partition, I can load Steam games both on the Linux side and the Windows side, with "MS restricted games" like Tomb Raider only working on the Windows partition side of things.


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I have begun working now on the SUPER cheap (totally free) Android PC project, which is any out of date machine (laptop or box) that can be told to boot from a USB drive.   The USB thumb drive contains Jide Android for x86 and has the rest of the drive (over 5 gigs empty) is enough to hold your entire Jide PC world so you can carry it all with you and run it off of any hunk of computing hardware that allows USB booting.  

Please remember, these same tricks would work with Linux and most smaller distros, but Android x86 is so very small and light that ANY old Intel processor that can bios boot off a USB stick is way overkill type strong for processor, memory and speed which tends to make Jide Remix run like a scalded dog on this grade of Wintel throw away equipment.

To make this project "more real" performance-wise I am using a really cheap ($5) 8 gigabyte USB 2.0 drive instead of the faster 3.0 grade of USB drive -- actually I was sorta thinking "Art Web style" equipment for something he could be mailed and he could just plug it in and use it after going into his bios just once to set up USB booting order.  

Not that many old crap style Wintel boxes and laptops support USB 3.0 anyway.


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Was able to download and install the Jide Remix OS for x86 software on the 8 gig cheapie USB stick.

Upon reboot, my Linux box (old Dell 780 off lease business machine)  attempted to boot and got most of the way through the boot process before faulting out (Remix OS was not expecting the separate AMD video card instead of the built-in Intel graphics, I suspect).    

Went over to my Win 10 machine and attempted a cold boot on that machine and Win 10 immediately DESTROYED the software on the stick completely -- MS does not approve of Linux or Jide OS or anything else touching "their" machine.     

I think Win 10 treated it like a trojan or virus attack.

I will wait until Jide comes out with the next iteration and give it another try.


     

Google is working with Qualcomm and other radio suppliers to share the specifics of the long range wifi radio back & forth system they are getting ready to implement.  Right now Loon requires a separate receiver for existing PCs as they lack any real form of long distance radio wifi type system.

Chromebooks, because they are built to a Google spec sheet anyway and must have the hardware they use registered and held stable by the mgf, are already getting the radio requirements and list of pre-approved radio suppliers that will be used in all new Chromebooks.    BTW, Chromebooks will be connected everywhere all the time using the new long distance WiFi system as it is currently concepted.

The vast majority of Android phones will likely come very slowly to the new radio specs as until the signals are out there in the wild most of the Oriental mgfs won't spend a penny on something that isn't needed for competitive purposes.

Qualcomm radios are built on the chip itself and that has proven historically to be the lowest cost system to use.  Qualcomm will adopt the new long distance WiFi standard easily as one of the many that their radios can currently receive and transmit to.   Then, as first in the market place again, Qualcomm will again get an ongoing premium for their chipsets.  

Mediatek will come along first of the Oriental chip suppliers, as Qualcomm will never keep any sort of advantage over Mediatek for very long -- Mediatek has their "beat Qualcomm" mantra humming in their head all the time.

AT&T is fighting this all the way here in the USA as they see their billions invested in "tower supremacy" being overcome and shortly made irrelevant by a tectonic sized technological shift.   But remember, AT&T is just a USA tower guy, one of 5 tower guys here in the USA -- not a real global player as such.

Google set out to disrupt the cell tower supremacy folks and to disrupt the cable TV "lock you in" boys and girls -- and they are moving right along with that.    Google Fi phones can turn the tower service OFF right now, the future Fi phones won't really need tower service except when running down the highway between points A & B.

Microsoft has got their garden walls built up all high and strong now and are EXCLUDING any and all intruders and any and all intruder tech, but that walled castle garden is going to get sort of lonely pretty soon as the old crusty Windows users (our generation) begin to die off.

 

People laughed at those LOON balloons when they came out, but that long distance Wifi tech is now coming to see you as part of Google Fiber.   I betcha every little Google sponsored hook up box for your PC or TV, yep, I bet all those little boxes also network (re-transmit) the long distance WiFi signals, yielding both better coverage and range inside buildings and neighborhoods.

Think scattered (light cabled) nodes inside large built up areas (with overlapping coverage) that gets multiplied and augmented inside large buildings and neighborhoods by the set top box re-transmitted coverage.