Posted on 06/05/2016 8:31:16 AM PDT by Utilizer
When you're stuck in the middle of the Central African Republic (CAR) trying to protect the wildlife from armed poachers and the Lord's Resistance Army, then life's pretty tough. And now Microsoft has made it tougher with Windows 10 upgrades.
The Chinko Project manages roughly 17,600 square kilometres (6,795 square miles) of rainforest and savannah in the east of the CAR, near the border with South Sudan. Money is tight, and so is internet bandwidth. So the staff was more than a little displeased when one of the donated laptops the team uses began upgrading to Windows 10 automatically, pulling in gigabytes of data over a radio link.
And it's not just bandwidth bills they have to worry about.
"If a forced upgrade happened and crashed our PCs while in the middle of coordinating rangers under fire from armed militarized poachers, blood could literally be on Microsoft's hands," said one member of the team.
"I just came here recently to act as their pilot but have IT skills as well. The guy who set these PCs up didn't know how to prevent it, or set a metered connection. I am completely livid."
(Excerpt) Read more at theregister.co.uk ...
This thread being another (quite legit, you understand, but nevertheless) tale of woe, largely populated by anti-MS/anti-Win10/pro-Linux comments, I figured I'd skip over it for the list. So begging your pardon but I'm gonna let it slide.
That said, please don't hesitate to ping me on anything -- even more Win10-woe threads :-) -- but for a little while I'm on the lookout for anything that comprises GOOD news about Win10. There's gotta be some somewhere other than microsoft.com.
Because in less than two months, the gate slams shut on the free upgrades, and you just have to know there will be plenty of juicy threads along the lines of "All this crap and they want me to PAY FOR IT TOO?!?"
Gotta get more popcorn. Between this and the elections, I'm plumb out already!
No worries, mate. You know how it is here as well: what critical CAD/CAM programs I have simply MUST be run under a normal ‘doze OS or they crash so I must run it at times despite running Linux for everything else.
I also have to support people who use the ‘doze OS in their home (or occasionally, Small Business Environment) and need the occasional helping hand.
Ye gods! I just counted and there are seven desktops and three laptops I am working on at this time that are configured for ‘doze -although some do have the dual-boot option installed and can boot to various Linux OS as well.
Even have a couple of Sparc machines here, believe it or not!
Anyways, I did not put the thread up to bash on Win10 or MS in general, but to warn others about some of the unpleasant actions others are experiencing concerning the increasing pressure to “update” to Win10 on their machines -in many cases like-it-or-not!
Sorry to hear you have been pressured in the manner you have, but it seems some people simply can not take some constructive criticism in their lives it would appear.
Hope you get back to posting soon!
Cheers!
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