Microsoft

Windows 10 upgrade prevents guy from checking out of hotel

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1zf8xx6jDR-14
Here we go again.

I don’t know what’s more stupid, the IT’s at the hotel disabling Windows Update so this doesn’t happen, or Microsoft for not thinking of all the doom and gloom people have to put up with when having to deal with their pushy OS.

“My hotel can’t check me out because their computer decided to just go for it & is currently in the middle of updating itself to Windows 10,” he said.

It’s pretty bad when Hotel California has fewer restrictions. I mean you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave. Maybe Microsoft got the idea from The Eagles, but like every other idea they’ve stolen they got it bassackwards.

Halo 5 is coming to Windows… kinda

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Yep, not the entirety of Halo 5 but it’s forge.

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’re bringing this same spirit of creation and collaboration to the PC later this year with Forge – Halo 5: Guardians Edition for Windows 10. Best of all? It will be absolutely free. In addition to the evolutions already present in the mode on Xbox One, Forge – Halo 5: Guardians Edition for Windows 10 will include some exciting new features designed specifically with PC users in mind, including:

  • Keyboard & Mouse Support – For the first time ever, Forgers will have the option of using a keyboard & mouse allowing for more precision control than ever before.
  • Increased Resolution – Support for multiple resolutions including 4k.
  • Test and Play with Friends – Enlist the help of Friends to help build, test, and play your Forge creations on Windows 10.

  • Build on Windows 10 and Publish to Xbox One – Experiences built on Windows 10 can be published to and played on Xbox One, opening the doors for countless new experiences to be enjoyed by players all over the world.

Wow! You mean a keyboard and mouse have more precision than a controller? Wow, congrats Microsoft… It only took you guys over a decade and a half to figure that one out but, better late than never right?

It’s a good thing I’m not really interested in the Halo series, because once again they’re making Halo an exclusive to the Windows 10 platform. Much like when Halo was released during the Vista era in an attempt to convince users to upgrade from XP. Sorry, but El Dewrito kinda already beat you guys. Plus it’s not limited by what version of Windows you run. 😛 Watch, Microsoft will probably come along and find some way to remove them from the face of the earth…

Farewell to Project Spark

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The Grim Clipper
The Grim Clipper eagerly waiting to touch Microsoft’s next product.

I remember when a former co-worker of mine tried to get me to check out Project Spark. It was a Windows 8/XBone exclusive, and it didn’t strike me as a good reason to ditch Windows 7 (like most OS exclusives being released today). Looks like I’m not really missing out on it either since Microsoft and the studio responsible for this game will be pulling the plug on it.

“This was an extremely difficult decision for our team that we do not take lightly,” Team Dakota community manager Thomas Gratz said in a statement. “When Project Spark transitioned away from active development last fall, many of our team members moved to other projects within Microsoft Studios. While this means there have been no layoffs at Microsoft, it also means it’s simply no longer feasible to continue the behind-the-scenes work involved with keeping Project Spark up and running with meaningful updates and bug fixes, so we have come to this hard decision.”

I’m not sure about the logic behind this. There are games on other platforms that haven’t been touched in years by developers… so why does Project Spark have to be taken off the market? Seems rather short sided to me, and good reasoning not to back anything heavily backed by Microsoft especially going by their track record. Giving up on their smartphone, giving up on Win 8 and going straight to 10, giving up on shipping a Kinect with the XBone because of the creepy requirements, closing the studio responsible for Fable after basically telling them to completely rewrite the new fable, oh… and of course:

ss-grim-reaper

Of course this doesn’t bother me at all. I learned a long time ago not to invest too heavily into Microsoft’s products, it’s much more painless that way.

I’m not sure this is how Microsoft wanted to advertise their latest OS

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One of the many reasons I’ve held off from upgrading to Windows 10 is the fact that I don’t have control over when updates occur. Some say that it isn’t so bad, but clearly they haven’t been in the middle of something when it decides that it wants to restart. Some strange occurrences have been taking place recently, from upgrade prompts showing up on local weather reports to PC Gaming streamers getting hit with updates, Microsoft is getting more of the wrong publicity.

Windows-10-Flom-compressor

This guy (who already runs Windows 10) had his game session interrupted by an update even after changing the settings. I would be seriously pissed if that happened to me, especially if I was working on a project or Streaming for my friends. Of course, we all know Microsoft’s love for PC at this point, otherwise this would have been fixed before or not long after release.

Today’s weather forecast: UPGRADE BITCH!!!!

As I’ve said before, I’m not upgrading until they get rid of that problem, and a bunch of other problems… Until then Windows 7 and CentOS work swimmingly.

How the internet corrupted an AI

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p4NtiY8

Apparently while I was minding my own business today Microsoft released an AI on twitter targeted at teens, young adults etc as an experiment. After not even a full 24 hours they had to shut the bot down after it became a racist, sexist asshat. The last thing it uttered was:

yishkd9shm75aygh6klk

There are many more examples that you can find here, here and here.

I can’t fault Microsoft for this, after all this was an experiment. An experiment that shows how corrupt asshats can corrupt a machine. Brought upon by racists, sexists and anything else you could think of. I also find it interesting that you don’t really see much from the other side of the spectrum. The bot had plenty of love of Trump, Hitler, Gamergate etc but nothing much about teh ebil feminists, Hillary, gay pride etc. I mean, they say feminists and gay people are ruining our world, you’d think they would have control of Microsoft’s chatbot within seconds! 😛

Microsoft surprised me with an unexpected update

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So I pretty much spent most of my day today relaxing on the couch playing some FPS games, streaming from my desktop. Well, after I decided I was done I wandered back to my desk to find that my system is ready to install Windows Updates! Which is really bizarre because I have Windows Update set like this:

UpdateSet

Yet I was seeing this:

Updated

I was really worried that Microsoft somehow forced Windows Updates to activate in some sort of recent update that I installed a week ago. However upon checking specifics on the update itself it was for one item… KB2999226 From September 15th of last year… For the C Runtime? WTF Microsoft?

I restarted my system and everything was fine. I immediately looked in services and checked Windows Update, nothing. They were disabled, set to off as per usual. So I’m not sure what to think. Did an update not install last time? Or did a program I use detect that C Runtime was out of date, hence triggering the update? Did it really connect up to Microsoft to grab that one update for whatever reason? Either way this beyond any form of strange I’ve ever seen… I’m definitely glad it wasn’t Windows 10 being shoved on the system. I have all kinds of custom settings and software that would have been severely compromised.

Because when you think of GDC, you think of erotic schoolgirl dancers.

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microsoftdancer

Microsoft’s timing couldn’t be better. 😛

Hours after hosting a “women in gaming” luncheon at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft threw a party with scantily clad dancers in school girl outfits. It wasn’t a good look, and the company has since apologized.

Of course they did pull out Phil Spencer Bot to offer up apologies about the whole thing. Because he’s done a great job so far keeping up the company image. I always love reading his stuff. In fact, lets embark on this journey together. 😀

How we show up as an organization is incredibly important to me.

Yes, and your company’s message has been loud and clear… Annoy the fuck out of people to use your new products.

We want to build and reflect the culture of TEAM XBOX – internally and externally – a culture that each one of us can represent with pride. An inclusive culture has a direct impact on the products and services we deliver and the perception consumers have of the Xbox brand and our company, as a whole.

Inclusive, we want everyone to flock to our walled garden. That includes you, ladies.

It has come to my attention that at Xbox-hosted events at GDC this past week, we represented Xbox and Microsoft in a way that was absolutely not consistent or aligned to our values. That was unequivocally wrong and will not be tolerated.

We’ll remember to buy male dancers next time… in tiny miniskirts!

This matter is being handled internally, but let me be very clear – how we represent ourselves as individuals, who we hire and partner with and how we engage with others is a direct reflection of our brand and what we stand for.

If they were trying to reflect the Microsoft brand I’d say Mission Accomplished. Having read many posts by all kinds of virgin man children gamers from all corners of the internet I’d say you know your target audience quite well! Hell, a small portion of said audience seems to think you’re doing a great job.

When we do the opposite, and create an environment that alienates or offends any group, we justly deserve the criticism.

Your money is important to us too. All inclusive!

It’s unfortunate that such events could take place in a week where we worked so hard to engage the many different gaming communities in the exact opposite way. I am personally committed to ensuring that diversity and inclusion is central to our everyday business and our core values as a team – inside and outside the company. We need to hold ourselves to higher standards and we will do better in the future.

Yes, higher standards. Like making sure Windows 10 gets put on as many computers as possible with or without your consent.

You know. I don’t think this would have been as big if they had regular dancers and maybe included some male ones too… But that would probably creep out the guys at the conference, and we can’t have that… can we?

Felt a little vintage today.

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windoze

Dug out Win 3.11 and did a DOSBox install just for some old nostalgia.

win31

So far I haven’t run into problems. I copied the install onto my laptop just so I can troll people during my lunch break. :v

I did come up with an idea, to install this onto a thumb drive to take to work. Then plug it into our main Windows 7 Machine and just launch DOSBox in fullscreen mode (with a more tame looking Program Manager and color scheme of course). That would make for a fun April Fools day prank. :v

But so far it’s been fun just poking around in it again for old times sake. I plan to locate some more games for it, ready to record for YouTube if need be. I’ll probably copy this over to Linux DOSBox for my own amusement next… after I reinstall CentOS.

Microsoft wants to make an Upgradable Console

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I thought I’d be done talking about the latest Microsoft hooplah that’s been taking place, but the other day not long after talking about Microsoft’s attempt to get everyone to go over to their UWP platform I read an article that forced my head to hit my solid oak desk. Microsoft wants to make the XBox One an upgradable device.

“We see on other platforms whether it be mobile or PC that you get a continuous innovation that you rarely see on console,” he said. “Consoles lock the hardware and the software platforms together at the beginning of the generation. Then you ride the generation out for seven or so years, while other ecosystems are getting better, faster, stronger. And then you wait for the next big step function.”

I can only speculate at this point, but knowing Microsoft the XBox One’s upgrade path would probably consist of starting out the consumer with what one would consider bottom tier hardware, and give them the option of upgrading using Microsoft’s proprietary hardware. Basically the Mac of PC Gaming, only with a Mac at least you can still mod games far more openly than you can with Microsoft’s proposed walled gardened ecosystem.

Even other people, such as the CEO of Epic (makers of the Unreal Engine) has spoken out about how foolish this is.

“Unless Microsoft changes course,” Sweeney says, “all of the independent companies comprising the PC ecosystem have a decision to make: to oppose this, or cede control of their existing customer relationships and commerce to Microsoft’s exclusive control.”

Meanwhile on the Microsoft side:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX (user experience) required.”

Really? Then how come there are two different versions of the new Tomb Raider floating around with Microsoft’s being the one with issues such as missing features from the Steam release? If you buy The Witcher 3 from GOG or Steam for example, you won’t notice a difference. Same with most Steam and Nonsteam games as they both use the same executable and get the same updates. Microsoft’s method fragments the PC Gaming ecosystem by making dev’s choose between UWP and the more traditional means of developing a game, and consumers go over to yet another application (and OS if they haven’t moved to 10 yet) to grab these titles.

This move isn’t Boneheaded, it’s XBoneheaded.

Oh, and on a funnier note I had to change the brackets around user experience. In the original article they used [] instead of (). If I left the quote in it’s original state it would have read as:

“The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer, that can be supported by any store. We continue to make improvements for developers; for example, in the Windows 10 November Update, we enabled people to easily side-load apps by default, with no UX [user experience] required.”

Yeah, I’m happy with my current gaming experience thanks. 😛

Oh look, another Microsoft post.

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Microsoft

Well, it must be that time of the year again where Microsoft dusts off the Phil Spencer bot to talk about how totally involved Microsoft wants to be in the PC Gaming market. Or sorry… I mean how totally involved Microsoft wants everyone to move to Windows 10 to partake in GFWL 2.0

PC Gamer held an interview with ol Phil, the guy known for telling people about their focus on engaging PC Gamers since 2014 and not really doing much about it… UNTIL NOW!

I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming.

Oops, he misspoke. Let me correct that:

I look at the work we’re doing on the platform as an enabler for us becoming relevant in PC gaming… By trying to make Windows 10 and our App Store relevant.

Fixed for accuracy.

There are games I was talking about earlier, like Ashes of the Singularity, a fast-paced RTS game—probably not the best controller game, and I want to make sure those games are great.

Don’t worry Phil. I hear Ashes of the Singularity runs great with the Steam Controller, even if you have a nonsteam version! You just need the exe and…. oh right.

What I want to make sure is that gamers on our platforms, you feel like you have access to as many games as you can, and as a developer you feel like you have the tools and service to reach as many gamers as you can.

As usual Microsoft continues to be unfashionably late to the party. Steam kinda beat you to that… years ago. They even tried to get you guys on board and you pretty much laughed at them and went off doing your own thing. Hell, GOG’s store is becoming great enough to compete with Steam. Meaning even they can go to town bitchslapping your sorry excuse for a store.

I think there are a real two factors that today differentiate what I consider PC and console gaming. One is input. We’ve said we’re going to support keyboard and mouse on console, and clearly you can plug a controller into a PC, so that’s not a trump card, but PC games have to—PC games can support keyboard and mouse, console games today usually don’t and for the most part can’t. The other thing is the play space itself. I’m usually closer to my monitor, it’s a smaller screen. All these are ‘usually’s. And my TV experience on a console, I’m further away, it’s more of a communal play experience. If I take my PC and I HDMI it into my television, and I use my wireless dongle to play with controllers, is it now a console or a PC?

I gotta hand it to him. He really has a way of stating the obvious. He sounds like he could just empty his bowels in amazement if he also found out you could store more than 1 TB of games on the average PC Master Race gamers system.

I think you could kind of get into scenarios where the hardware specs kind of overlap, probably at the fundamental level, or the hardware capabilities overlap enough where the differentiation kind of blurs. But the console experience is a dedicated gaming hardware device that is very appliance-like, instant on, ability to basically do one thing, which is play games, very well.

Really? Fascinating. Lots of people have instant on gaming systems these days too thanks to SSD’s. They make great boot drives, and you can even have more than one mechanical hard drive for storage. Mindblowing amirite?

PC is a multi-purpose device. I love that people play games on their PC. You see a ton of people playing games, even on Windows 10 already.

Good job! Gotta shoehorn Windows 10 in there! After all you guys have been doing a bang up job trying to shoehorn it into peoples Windows 7/8 updates.

But it also can do Outlook and load Photoshop and browse the web. So there are some fundamental differences about the hardware between the two that I think will always mean there are differences between console and PC gaming, and I want to embrace those differences, not try to get rid of them.

YouDontSayBlackWithTextSS

Thanks for clarifying. I was worried you were going to take away the ability to use Photoshop and the internet etc etc etc. I cried for weeks mourning the possible loss and much like a shining beacon of wisdom you confirmed that you are going to let us do computer things on our computers. Thank you Microsoft, thank you…

We talked about Halo Wars, we’ve talked about things that… it’s not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna wait and see.’ We’re in, right. We are in, and we want to make sure that PC gamers are able to play PC games that we can go build. I love investing more in PC games. It would be nice to invest in some very tried-and-true PC genres when we think about that, of, ‘hey, let’s go and build some great PC games as part of our portfolio.’ But no, the Quantum Break thing is definitely not a, ‘hey, we’re gonna try this out and see how it does.’ From the top of the company on down, we’re committed to making sure gaming is great on Windows, and we think first-party content has a role to play there.

Gaming was great on Windows. Anyone remember how often Microsoft released new versions of Direct X? From 1995 to 2003 we went from Direct X 1.0 to Direct X 9.0b. Then they kept using 9.0c for from 2004 to 2008 because gamers had better performance on 9c than 10 under Vista, which was maintained between 2006 to 2009. Then from 2009 to 2013 they developed Direct X 11. Then in 2015 they announced Direct X 12 because they needed something new to move people to a shitty operating system so that people could forget about Windows 8. Yeah, PC Gaming is important to Microsoft these days. We went from having a new version practically every year to having to run on the same API’s for over a decade. I feel your love Microsoft…

Phil: Yeah, well, we obviously have the same list, and maybe even a little longer than what the community has brought up around Rise of the Tomb Raider. Certain things will happen very quickly in terms of, like, mGPU support and stuff where there’s no policy, it’s just us working through the timeline of implementation. VSync lock, kind of the same thing. There’s specific reasons that it’s there, but it’s not something that’s kind of a religion on our side that this has to work. Modding, we’re focused on modding even on console with, like, Fallout. We obviously own Minecraft, we understand the importance of modding, and making sure that we support that in the PC ecosystem is critical to UWA success. Our goal is to make UWP [Universal Windows Platform] the best platform for game developers and gamers to support, but we know we’ve got room to grow.

Things would go better for Microsoft if they didn’t try to shove people into their own little world. Heck, even PlayStation is finally jumping on the Streaming bandwagon. Soon people will be able to stream their PlayStation games onto Windows and even Mac (No love for Linux though), and with Steam we already have the option of streaming from one system to another regardless of OS. Meanwhile you have to own Windows 10 if you want to stream your games from the XBone.

They are not Pro PC Gamer, they’re pro PC Gamer for Windows 10… and the fact that they’re using games like Gears Of War to lure people over to their new OS is absurd. They pulled this shit with Halo back in the Vista days and it failed miserably. Microsoft never learns.