Windows 8.1: So it's, er, half-speed ahead for Microsoft's Plan A Following approximately one year after the release to manufacturing of Windows 8.0, which incorporated some radical changes, based around a new tablet platform running alongside the traditional desktop environment, Windows 8.1 is a critical release. Most Windows users have not warmed to the platform variously called Metro, …
I don't see many cerebral things with Windows 8.x. I mean why do I have to search for Excel when I know bloody damn well where it is ? Oh, and the thing with searching everywhere is even more patronizing for the poor Windows user. Heck, I don't see it that difficult to know if stuff I'm searching for is on my PC or on the Internet even if I might not know the precise location.
well, with The MS-Basher Who Shall Not Be Named now properly banished, there is a decent chance we actually WILL see restrained, thoughtful, and cerebral debate. A very, very SLIM chance but a chance nonetheless...
Unfortunately, the MS shills (no, not the ones that he claimed were shills, the real ones) are still here, so it is just time before one of them makes the retarded arguments pushed by MS shills and blowing up the comment section again.
Though it could be that they're basically the evil version of the Eadon troll, as one of them at least has been trolling the space related articles as well...
They could have left his old comments on there - turned his profile into a shrine of sorts... a cautionary tale for future commentards.
http://forums.theregister.co.uk/user/34672/
How come he got deleted anyway?
Troll icon... in remembrance.
"But how does that greatly differentiate him from the authors of these articles promoting how great the New! and Improved! version of Windows is?"
They get paid to say that, and it's usually trivial to ignore them. He dumped his crap all over, so that it was hard to avoid him, and, worse, he dumped his crap into places which had absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft. I am not particularly fond of Windows (I usually use a Mac) but I could, and did, see where he blatted utter nonsense. And then blatted that utter nonsense again, and again, and again. If he had been more accurate, or if he had accepted correction and then been more accurate, then I would have been most annoyed at his having been banned. As it is, well, perhaps he will learn from this, and reform. Doubt it, though. His type rarely learn anything even after being whacked a few times by the Cluestick of Destiny.
Good grief! They really modded his arse. I have to say that it really takes stamina to piss off Vulture Central to that degree - heaven help us all. I would be guilty of a considerable degree of hypocrisy if I attempted to pretend that he will be much missed although the sight of his entire "oeuvre" being replaced by "this post has been deleted by a moderator" was, to say the least of it, eerie.
"although the sight of his entire "oeuvre" being replaced by "this post has been deleted by a moderator" was, to say the least of it, eerie."
All the other sheep found Barry truly irritating, for his insistent "BAAAAAAAA". Then one night the wolves took Barry, leaving not even a few strands of wool. The other sheep thought they were pleased, but the absence of Barry was strangely disquieting, particularly to those who had Baa'ed most loudly that they wouldn't care if Barry were eaten by wolves.
Before GUI (Graphical User Interface), user interfaces didn't really have a name, you just had a bunch of things (keyboard, mouse, light-pen, touch, wheel, card-punch, tape switch...), and only used the ones that made sense. With the iPad touch has become the big input interface, but iPad & Android are still graphical, you still touch on-screen objects. Wi-8 is different because it is the first mainstream interface where the touch gestures have no graphical equivalent.
Swipe from right for charms bar, swipe from left to switch-app, swipe up for menu, point mouse to corners are all touch oriented, with no graphical equivalent, and it's all counter-intuitive because we've all become graphical oriented.. and won't go back 30 years to the CICS "this is the way it works, get used to it" world.
restoring the graphical "start-button" is a start, but also need to follow WinPhone "settings" app and "..." graphic for context menu... we're not luddites or thickies, it's not us, its them.. and they still haven't learned the lesson
only in New Zealand does a TUI make sense as the only interface
We need a People's Trial of Ballmer and throw him in the nearest live volcano for taxing our stupidity with the slowest Live Tiles ever imagined since the Commodore 64. Instead of axing workers why not axe Windows!
"a platform designed from the beginning for touch control."
I don't know what your talking about, but it's not Windows 8. As soon as you need to do something that's not included in Metro (like the control panel) your back in Windows 7 and it's clear Metro is tacked on after the fact, not designed from the beginning.
I've more then once plugged a mouse into my crappy surface (glad they included that full size USB port) because touch was hopeless for what I was trying to do.
"If you are tinkering in the control panel you are not the sort of user Microsoft are after"
No. But perhaps you're the kind of person who is paid to fix the problems those users are having. Problem is you're left sitting there swearing at the clunky piece of shit instead of actually fixing it.
The primary gets up my nose quickly. I may be old-fashioned, but I prefer remembering where I left things, and simply moving directly to the right location (cd under linux, or multiple clicks in windows explorer). If I forget, I just use find/grep in linux, and search when on windows (after berating myself for forgetting ;-) ).
I find hiding the "complexity" of a file system from me just annoys me. Others may like it of course.
Please note that the opinion expressed above is solely the opinion of the author, and not necessarily the opinion of those with other opinions
This gets to me, Unity is the same.
See in my everyday life? I only search for things if I can't remember where I put them, or if I can't remember where they are.
When I'm in Tesco, if I want beans, I go to the beans. In the house, if I need spanner, I go to where I keep my spanners. Every week when I'm out in the car, I go to the petrol station to get petrol.
I don't search for any of these things - I just go to where I know they are. The only time I search is when I don't know where something is, and it always takes longer than when I know where I put the damn thing.
I would like the same to be true on my fekking computer, Mr Ballmer.
I'm also not a fan of search spanning my machine and Bing. I either want to search my machine, or the internet. I cannot remember ever having had searching both at the same time be a use case I actually needed.
I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that it can be disabled, but still.
(The author's use case of wanting it to search in calendars seems pretty wild to me too.)
Me neither. Frankly based on past experiences, I think this is a security nightmare.
My mother, being somewhat naive about the internet, once made the mistake of allowing an MS search to be expanded to the internet. It seems she thought she had saved a picture of my brother's then girlfriend under the name "special girl." (In point of fact it was saved under one of those camera generated names and she had used one of those catalog programs to give it that as a descriptor.) You can well imagine the outcome of this mistake. I was unable to clean off the resulting malware and wound up doing a full clean install, starting from fdisk IIRC.
Search always assume that you can remember the name of what you're looking for. Humans are *much* better at spacial memory; so it's considerably easier to remember where something is than the name of it. My win7 has the classic shell interface (set up in an XP style) and I can get to anything on the machine in seconds; irrespective of whether I can remember the name of it or not (usually not...remembering shit is the computer's job).
What M$ seems to be missing out on completely is that windows is not the work itself; it's the vehicle you use to get there. You just want it to operate the system; make available the tools you want to fire up; then get the fuck out of the way. WIn8 -to continue the vehicle analogy- may have an awesome paint job and be suitable for RHD and LHD conditions; but the 83-speed gearbox is in the back seat; the steering wheel is hidden in the glovebox and there's 3 anchors and a parachute hanging off the back.
Also; given all the XBox One news of late; I have to admit that -being the same company- I'm getting some trust issues over the directions they're headed. Definitely don't want those sorts of shenanigans on a work machine. My machine is fucking mine; and fuck what the EULA says.
"the 83-speed gearbox is in the back seat; the steering wheel is hidden in the glovebox and there's 3 anchors and a parachute hanging off the back.
made me laugh out loud (which in a house that had been otherwise silent for over an hour scared the daylights out of the cat, thanks a lot...pardon me while I fetch the stepladder and attempt to detach the feline from the ceiling.)
Check next to the cat food, that is where the coffee(and later the Pizza), moved last time my local numpty had a move around.
Meanwhile the nuke is for.....
HEY!! BALMER !!! YOU ASS!!!
WHERE ARE MY NESTED FOLDERS???????
Like others, I group my programs, I dont want EVERYTHING showing in one huge muddle.
+1!
If I wanted everything in one huge muddle, I would have bought a Mac. Yes, there's a market for this. Once upon a time MS understood that wasn't their market. And frankly, IF I find I want everything in a muddle and I'll let the OS sort it out for me, I think I'll buy a Mac. They seem to be better at sorting it out as well as differentiating their OSes.
It's a pity the option you're choosing is just so much slower than using 'search'.
If i want to launch an application on my Mac I have a few options. I can put it in the Dock so i can just move the mouse and click on the icon. I can open a Finder window, navigate to /Applications, scroll to find the application and double click on it.
Or i can use 'Search'. I press apple-space, type the first 2-3 characters of the applications name and hit enter. I can launch any application on my system in a few simple keypresses.
Similarly if I want to listen to an album I could navigate to my Music directory, go through my neatly organised hierarchy of <Artist>/<album>/<tracks...> and then play the album *or* i could just apple-space, type the first few letters of the album name and directly open the associated playlist or just jump right to that directory.
Sure, this feature falls under the 'search' category which you seem to hate so much, but for me it falls under the 'fastest way imaginable to open something' category, which is pretty awesome!
Yes, exactly the same for me....Name or any piece of meta data...The way the 'search' is implemented in OSX makes it much quicker than anything else to find, launch, edit, view, or whatever opposed to using a (file) browser of some sort...
Sure I can understand people wanting to organise and manage it themselves as that is what most are used to, personally I find it rather archaic as the 'views' of information sets can change depending on the activity.
I actually quite like it in Windows 8 and Unity...But neither seem as fast as Spotlight in OS X.
It's almost as if someone in Redmond saw Ubuntu 11 with Unity and thought they should copy it.
I'm with Mr Wilkinson - when I put a shortcut on the desktop I want it to stay there, not be automatically cleaned away just to keep the place tidy and make me search again.
Leave my pint alone as well.
Schlitz? I thought PBR was bog standard bottom of the barrel piss water. Unless of course you were a true sadist and opted for Iron City.
At least that's what I hear from regular beer drinkers. I don't often partake myself. I can drink 5 or 6 gin and tonics, but after 2 beers I'm ready to heave the technicolor yawn.
the reason is simple, MS want you to loose the ability to remember things like for example how bad the riben interface with its illogically ordered tabs made office 2007 or how Vista was sold on PCs which were not powerful enough to run it (like mu mums PC based on a semperon 300 processor and 512 MB of RAM)
they want this despite the fact that remembering were it is (instead of being able to find it by typing its name) can help develope (or at least slow deteriation of) your brain.
Microsoft (like most corporations, governments and groups of any kind) do not want people smart enough to think for themselves and ask why.
" how Vista was sold on PCs which were not powerful enough to run it (like mu mums PC based on a semperon 300 processor and 512 MB of RAM)"
Vista _will_ run on that machine. Well, it'll _crawl_ on it... I've seen Vista running on machines with 1 GHz Celerons. It wasn't pretty, but it worked. Just remember that one of the things it was supposed to work at was to make the users so frustrated that they'd abandon perfectly good computers (ick. I said 'good computer' somewhere near where I said '1 GHz Celeron'. Double ick.) and get nice shiny new ones, thereby improving the bottom lines of both Microsoft and its partners in crime.
> they'd abandon perfectly good computers (ick. I said 'good computer' somewhere near where I said '1 GHz Celeron'. Double ick.) and get nice shiny new ones
Microsoft listens to its customers. You are not its customers, the OEMs and retailers are, you are a customer of them.
Since the mid 80s Microsoft's customers had wanted, nay demanded, that each new version of software should require more, newer, hardware.
Windows seems to become slower as time goes on. This is fixed by a complete reinstall which recovers the original performance. Perhaps this too is deliberate with additional disk accesses being thrown in based on days since since install.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
