Last week, Microsoft silently changed Get Windows 10 yet again. And this time, it has gone beyond the social engineering scheme that has been fooling people into inadvertently upgrading to Windows 10 for months. This time, it actually changed the behavior of the window that appears so that if you click the “Close” window box, you are actually agreeing to the upgrade. Without you knowing what just happened.
Previously, closing this window would correctly signal that you do not want the upgrade. So Microsoft didn’t change the wording in the window. It didn’t make an “Upgrade now” button bigger, or a non-existent “don’t ever upgrade” button smaller. It pulled a switcheroonie. It’s like going out to your car in the morning and discovering that the gas pedal now applies the brakes, while the brake pedal washes the windshield. Have a fun commute!
The violation of trust here is almost indescribable. It’s bad enough that Microsoft has been training Windows 7 and 8.1 users–i.e. most Windows users–to not trust Windows 10 because of this horrible, unstoppable advertisement. But now they will not trust their own sanity because all they’ll remember is that they dismissed the advertisement by clicking the Close windows box. Why on earth did Windows 10 just install on my PC?!?
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Regular Human Basketball
Powerhoof, the creators of Crawl, put out Regular Human Basketball back at the end of May 2015 and I just found out about it:
It’s local multiplayer, for 2-10 players, and it really is an explosively ordinary game of basketball, with absolutely nothing weird going on and DEFINITELY no giant robotic death machines!
It looks very fun and regular humans can freely download it on itch.io for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Definitely don’t download it if you’re a giant robotic death machine.
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Upgraded Playstation 4 Rumors Confirmed by Sony
Speaking with the Financial Times’ Tim Bradshaw, Sony’s Andrew House confirmed the rumors of an upcoming upgrade to the Playstation 4:
Andrew House, president and global chief executive of Sony Interactive Entertainment, told the Financial Times that the “high-end PS4” would be more expensive than the current $350 version.
“It is intended to sit alongside and complement the standard PS4,” he said. “We will be selling both [versions] through the life cycle.”
The new console, which is codenamed “Neo”, will target hardcore gamers, he said, as well as consumers with a 4K television set looking for more high-resolution content.
You should probably still hold off on buying one since pricing information (beyond that it will be more expensive) and other details were not revealed, and won’t be announced at E3 next week.
It’ll be very interesting if this is the final console generation for a long time and we end up with a more iPhone-like annual or bi-annual console upgrade cycle that maintains software compatibility.
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The Katering Show
Somehow I’ve never posted about The Katering Show, a comedy cooking show featuring a “…food intolerant and an intolerable foodie.” Lets remedy that and you can watch the entirety of their first season on YouTube.
The show is amazingly funny if you enjoy British or colonial-british humor.
Unless you’re in Australia and have access to iView, which I assume is a koala bear reenacting a show for you, season 2 of The Katering Show is only available in the US through a new (pay, with a free trial available) service called Fullscreen.