Windows 8

[Fordel]

You have to admit, the theory looks pretty cool though!

[ghost]

Of course Mac has it all worked out and you just push a button on your mouse to have all that shit pop up.  Then you hit a button on your mouse and it goes away. 

[Sky]

Not anymore, 10.7 makes it more iOS-y, where the dashboard slides in from the left and you have to hit the key again to slide it back off the screen.

But hey, 10.8 this summer! Because 2012 needs eights. At least with MS you generally don't have to worry about focred obsolescence quite so much.

[Thrawn]

Of course Mac has it all worked out and you just push a button on your mouse to have all that shit pop up.  Then you hit a button on your mouse and it goes away. 

But they probably have that copyrighted and threatened to sue anyone that makes anything similar. 

[ghost]

I made it all work out by making sure that I never, ever hit that button on my mouse.  I don't like all that shit.  It's cumbersome.

[Salamok]

I remember a guy telling us with a straight face all about our new windows 2000 servers and how we'd never, ever, have to reboot them.   

I had one go for like 4 years just to see if it could - and it could! (It wasn't anything important, otherwise I'd have been applying updates of course.)

Wasn't the max up time on NT 4.0 something like 35 days?  It has been a few years but I seem to recall something of the sort, so even prior to the first service pack win2k was a hug improvement to NT 4.

[Kitsune]

I made it all work out by making sure that I never, ever hit that button on my mouse.  I don't like all that shit.  It's cumbersome.

How can you avoid it?  There's only one button on the mouse.   

[Sky]

How can you avoid it?  There's only one button on the mouse.   

The funny thing about that old joke is that the newest mac mouse technically has no buttons...but it's also a multi-touch device. Once you get used to swiping through pages and 4-axis touch scrolling...other mice seem primitive.

[ghost]

By using the track pad or the magic mouse.  

[Arthur_Parker]

Wasn't the max up time on NT 4.0 something like 35 days?  It has been a few years but I seem to recall something of the sort, so even prior to the first service pack win2k was a hug improvement to NT 4.

Not for service pack 6 NT4, we had some up for years too, 2000 was a lot better but it really depends if you do anything on it or not.

[Salamok]

Wasn't the max up time on NT 4.0 something like 35 days?  It has been a few years but I seem to recall something of the sort, so even prior to the first service pack win2k was a hug improvement to NT 4.

Not for service pack 6 NT4, we had some up for years too, 2000 was a lot better but it really depends if you do anything on it or not.

I just vaguely remember having to manually reboot NT 4 servers on nearly a monthly basis as they would hang if left up for much longer than that, while there is some merit to the every other version is crap theory (ME and Vista) I think many people are looking back with some rose colored glasses.  I am truly amazed at how robust microcomputers and computing in general has become in a relatively short period of time.  Although, I do have some fond memories of the days when my only function was to keep the house of cards from flying apart.

[ghost]

Wait.  Are you saying that Vista and ME weren't steaming piles of shit, relative to other MS releases?

[Numtini]

I ran ME for a year and never had a problem. As far as I'm concerned 95-ME are just one OS with three names. They all crashed constantly, but I never noticed any of them crashing more than any other.

Vista on the other hand was hideous. When it released I couldn't get drivers for some pretty common printers and I've never had application compatibility issues like I did with Vista, not even when we went from the DOS based 9x to XP.

[Kitsune]

I couldn't get drivers for some pretty common printers

Hewlett Packard's fault.  I had a scanner that was only about six months old when Vista came out, a brand new model, and rather than put out Vista drivers they announced that they were canceling support for the scanner.  About six months after that, they put out drivers, so apparently enough people gave them shit that they reluctantly got some people on it, but that was definitely HP being douches instead of Microsoft.

and I've never had application compatibility issues like I did with Vista, not even when we went from the DOS based 9x to XP.

Programmer's fault.

Vista and 7 both had a stupid-simple rule: Write your program to let the OS handle file and memory access.  All the viruses out there eating XPs lunch do so because they circumvent the OS and just write whatever they want to your drive or memory.  Vista stopped that, for very good reasons, and there's no compelling argument for why any program short of some anti-virus or system utility programs would ever need to access every part of the system memory or your windows directory.  Microsoft then informed the programming world of this change, far ahead of Vista's release, put out a free open test of Vista to let programmers test their stuff before release, and you still have companies that didn't get off their asses to patch their programs.

[Salamok]

Wait.  Are you saying that Vista and ME weren't steaming piles of shit, relative to other MS releases?

No I was saying they are but to use that as the basis for every other odd release being a steaming pile of shit is a stretch.  Even Vista (which deserved it's bad rap) managed to get itself sorted out by the time w7 came out, I would say it's biggest problem was developers were not given enough time and/or underestimated the impact Vista would have on their software by the time 7 came out most of that had been resolved.  If there were no Vista and 7 came out at the same time in it's place it would have been just as chaotic.  Obviously 7 is a much better user experience to Vista even w/o taking this into consideration but many people still would have been cursing it.

[Sky]

But that's kind of what happened with 95->98 and 2k->XP. The OS itself wasn't horrid (ok, 95 was pretty bad but I hated 3.1 enough to like it ok) but it took a while for 3rd party support/drivers/service packs/ direct x/etc to get up to speed. I'd say it's more that movement to a 'new' platform sucks for the first year or two and then a 'fixed' release comes out and they move on to developing the next 'new' platform.

I imagine windows 9 will sort out the bridge between mobiles and traditional OS a lot better than 8 will.

[Kitsune]

Oh yeah, 7's UI is insanely better than everything that came before it.  I liked Vista fine, but still upgraded to 7 on all of my computers on day one.  As it stands right now, 8 is going to need to do a lot of changes to its UI before I'd consider giving up 7 for it.

[Arthur_Parker]

Wasn't the max up time on NT 4.0 something like 35 days?  It has been a few years but I seem to recall something of the sort, so even prior to the first service pack win2k was a hug improvement to NT 4.

Not for service pack 6 NT4, we had some up for years too, 2000 was a lot better but it really depends if you do anything on it or not.

I just vaguely remember having to manually reboot NT 4 servers on nearly a monthly basis as they would hang if left up for much longer than that, while there is some merit to the every other version is crap theory (ME and Vista) I think many people are looking back with some rose colored glasses.

I was supporting hundreds of nt4 servers until just a few years ago, I don't miss them at all.

[Thrawn]

Got a chance to play a bit with the consumer preview today at work.

I"m not sure I get all the hate for the lack of a start button.  If I want to find a program in Win 7 I hit the Windows key, type what I'm looking for, hit enter.  If I want to find a program in Win 8....I do the exact same thing.

[MuffinMan]

What's a Windows key?

[Sky]

What's a Windows key?

Ditto, I've never used it and remove it from my keyboards so I don't hit it by mistake while gaming.

As far as the start menu goes, eh. I'm not married to it. Moving to Steam, I tend to launch games by rt-clicking on its icon on the taskbar/dock and have a few non-steam apps in the taskbar. With my XP machine, I used to keep a link to a folder of shortcuts that I could rt-click and have access to pretty much everything.

[ghost]

Well yes, computer savvy people may not be married to the task bar, but what about the other millions of technological morons that have been using this thing for years?  Big changes will lead to big headaches in the corporate world.

[Arthur_Parker]

Windows 7 is loads better than my old Vista install, I stand corrected from earlier.

[Thrawn]

but what about the other millions of technological morons that have been using this thing for years? 

They have a bunch of big buttons to just click on now in the new UI.

(I'm not saying 8 is great or anything, I've barely used it yet so I'm just commenting on my like 30 minutes of playing with it.)

[MuffinMan]

Well yes, computer savvy people may not be married to the task bar, but what about the other millions of technological morons that have been using this thing for years?  Big changes will lead to big headaches in the corporate world.

I'm not sure businesses will ever even switch to 8. I'm on XP and IE6 right now.

Edited to add: It wouldn't surprise me if the Enterprise edition nixed Metro, maybe not all together but it seems like it would be more traditional. If I had to use a UI like that at my work I would stab myself and/or others.

[Sky]

Well yes, computer savvy people may not be married to the task bar, but what about the other millions of technological morons that have been using this thing for years?  Big changes will lead to big headaches in the corporate world.

Sure, I know that all too well as someone who has to answer the 'where is the print thingy' to hundreds of people used to File>Print when they changed Office to the big button format. Which I imagine will now be going away in the next version.

Consistency would be nice if they want people to keep upgrading. It's third only to compatibility and usability imo.

[HaemishM]

I'm on XP and IE6 right now.

Goddamn you. Goddamn you to hell. 

[ghost]

Most people don't like change.  Once they've learned something they don't want to go back and relearn everything.  Also, big buttons and computers tend to scare people.

[tgr]

Well yes, computer savvy people may not be married to the task bar, but what about the other millions of technological morons that have been using this thing for years?  Big changes will lead to big headaches in the corporate world.

I switched to 7 because of the task bar. If they hadn't improved it the way they did, I would still have been using XP.

[fuser]

Most people don't like change.  Once they've learned something they don't want to go back and relearn everything.  Also, big buttons and computers tend to scare people.

One of the biggest problems for Win7 acceptance a tech friend had was the changes of the Control Panel under Windows 7. He lost it and reinstalled XP after he was unable to find how to uninstall a program. I have some gripes like the networking adapter preferences is buried down too but that one gob smacked me.

[Trippy]

Yes that view sucks. Fortunately the All Control Panel Items selection will show them all like you would see in XP. However, Microsoft in its infinite wisdom decided to move/rename some of the familiar control panels from XP. E.g. the Add/Remove control panel is now the "Programs and Features" control panel.

[MuffinMan]

That was the biggest thing I had to get used to as well. I still stumble around in the control panel when I have to go in there because I don't know where anything is. Part of that is because I'm barely in there, which speaks well for Windows 7 ultimately.

[Kitsune]

I was in a seminar, I don't remember if it was for Vista or 7, but it was one of the MS dog and pony shows where they show off features to the IT crowd.  The guy doing the presentation pulls up the control panel and asks the audience, "Okay, so you open the control panel in XP, what's the first thing you do?"  "SWITCH TO CLASSIC VIEW" roars a couple hundred IT nerds in one voice.  "Yeah, exactly," the guys says.  "But in (vista/7/whichever), we don't want you to do that.  Here's why: We have a search box in the control panel that actually works now.  So now when you type whatever it is you want to change the settings for in the search box, it immediately pulls up every relevant control panel option for you."

And he was right.  Ever since then, I've been able to get to what I wanted in the control panel faster just by using the search box than by clicking through the icon view.  Another thing the guy said that I never would have believed had it not been shown to me was that the help button on the start menu actually provides useful help.  I was so used to completely ignoring the help section that it wouldn't have occurred to me to even try to consult it, but it actually is helpful now.

[Sky]

I have to support public laptops, so I'm used to navigating the various control panel layouts. But I mostly prefer the old classic view list, because it means I don't have to guess and I don't have to type. Because random internet user's keyboards are gross. The mouse is, too, but at least that leaves me one clean hand free for facepalming.

The XP/Vista/7 default one is a fun kind of 'ehh, I think they hid it here...' game.

[MuffinMan]

You should check out my work keyboard for grossness. My "A" key was stuck the other day from what looked like a giant ball of earwax underneath it.