f13.net

For lack of a better place to post this topic, I'm starting a thread for it. Please merge or whatever if there's a better place.

I just installed Windows 8 Customer Preview. I can't begin to explain the level of facepalm I'm feeling here. Its essentially Windows 7 with a stupidly large and moronic tiling that won't navigate well at all with keyboard and mouse.

Issues so far:

A) It hides basic stuff like programs (you can find you 'apps' by going to 'search'), but they're apps now. Way to try to be hip MS, but honestly, you could have stuck to conventional lingo here.

B) Your mouse pointer isn't working like a finger swipe, no matter what I try to do. I have to hover in corners and hope that the right menus appear, then scooch over and hope the menu doesn't flit away.

C) Don't put basic control panel stuff under Apps please. They are not Apps. Task Manager isn't an App. Command prompt isn't an App.

The sad bit is that after all the flash and hoodingbiddlywangboom is over and done, you get dumped to a routine Windows 7 desktop, sans confusion buttons, like, say, the CLOSE APPLICATION button. Had to Alt-F4 out of a bunch of stupid widgets to get back to 'normal'.

This reminds me a bit of those hipster fixed gear bikes. They're trying to look like less is more, while crippling you.

Consoleization hits your PC OS, now in Windows 8.

They're trying their hardest to make a universal OS for the future that will work across many platforms; from the desktops to laptops and tablets to phones, much like how Android/Chromium via Google is trying to do, and also can be found with Apple, as they're slowing but surely converting the Mac OS to iOS.

This really shouldn't come as a shock, IMO.

The hardware just isn't there yet. No one has touchscreen computers yet, and won't for years. Never mind that we all still have to type. And lets not mention that every 'app' out there still requires the precision of a mouse; your fat fingers aren't going to navigate excel columns well, never mind stuff like Autocad.

This is rather debatable these days.  While most of the people here and gamers at large would never touch one of the newer all-in-one PCs with touchscreen, the average joe-consumer has been buying them up left and right over the last couple years as their popularity as grown.  Individual tower sales have fallen, and the market for tablets, smartphones and slim-to-touchscreen laptops has replaced it.

It's only a matter of time.

While I agree that home use of touch interface has grown and is likely to overshadow desktops, I'm thinking of office and institutional use. I know for a fact that my school's not insubstantial civil engineering department hasn't adopted a single touch interface device. Well, we have one tablet laptop that all professors claim to want to use, yet remains largely untouched because it has a learning curve of approximately 15 minutes. And that's with a tablet pen.

Engles points out what I was mocking, Luckton.  You can have my AutoCAD when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers and it will NOT work with a touchscreen interface.  It requires too much precision and wankery to do with fingers/ lightpen what is much more easily done with the mouse.

Though I'd really prefer to be doing stuff in Revit.. which, coincidentally, would work better with a pen & tablet interface.   Revit (Or any 3d Parametric) being the default drafting & design program is at least another 10 years off, however.  (And, I note, Zealots have been saying they're the inevitable future - just around the bend - for ~25 years now.)

Such requirements aren't about casual users of fad consumer devices.  It's about the business needs of every construction, manufacturing and design professional on an international level.

Windows 8: the return of Vista.

It's the Metro UI from Windows Phone 7. The Xbox 360 has it now too* but that's after it came out for phones. So it's "phonelizaton" not "consolelization".

* kind of, it's a weird hybrid at the moment of old and new UIs

I wasn't ready to coin a new term so I went with one we'd all become familiar with.  Yours is more correct, I'm aware.

It seems the strategy of skipping every other Windows version will remain true.

I liked the microsoft approach to having standard file/edit menus across their applications in the old days.  Now when people ask me to fix their pc's I spend longer looking for the menu or tool than I do fixing the problem, it's really annoying.  If there's no file or edit menu then I hate whoever is responsible, sorry but there it is.

This isn't purely down to me being an old git, there most be hundreds of thousands of people who's first impression of a new OS is, I want to fucking kill someone.  I liked the old file search, now there's a stupid simple search that you need to build a query into, add/remove programs is now programs and features, I detest that someone decided I should know that.

Yeah, Windows 7 seems to be a pretty damn good, stable OS (as Windows goes). What little I've seen of 8 tells me they are really jealous of Android.

 :crying_panda:

Being primarily a gamer on the PC, I get the impression that Win 7 will keep meeting my needs, don't think I'm going to upgrade this time.

Damn, and my usual PC upgrade path is going to have me getting a new PC in about two years so that I get to switch from awful Vista to awful Windows 8.  Do you think I should just buy a copy of Windows 7 to install when the time comes?

Honestly, I'd reserve judgement till they are closer to release. I wouldn't be surprised if they have to create a 'disable stupid ass tile gui' function for many a user, at which point you'll be left with Windows 7 anyway.

Calling programs 'apps' happened a while ago in OSX land. I had to buy 10.7 in the app store, so even the OS is an app.

While I'll be sticking to 7 at home, 8 does have some interesting possibilities as a kiosk machine at the library.

For a touch interface Windows 8 seems fine.  For a actual keyboard / mouse setup it is just painful to use .  It just feels unfinished with certain aps opening under the desktop while others are pretty stripped down.  Unless I buy a tablet or something touch based I will probably not upgrade and if I buy a new pc I will probably downgrade to 7.

I think the decision not to support all the windows administration tools under the windows 8 ARM version was a even worse choice though.

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/02/windows-8-for-arm-will-lack-enterprise-management-features.ars

The true bullshit move from Microsoft will be when they require Windows 8 in order for DirectX 12 to work  :why_so_serious:

Since I've seen comparatively few games even using DX10, never mind DX11 (hell, NVidia cards don't even support DX11 yet, and they're still the bulk of the market), I won't worry about DX12 for another...6 years?

--Dave

:headscratch:

Okay, I take it back, their very bleeding edge cards now support DX11.  I was confused because the merely bruised edge card (GTX260) I just bought for the wife only supports 10, while the bargain-basement passive-cooling ATI card (5450) I bought for my daughter supports DX11.

I think your definition of bleeding edge differs from mine.

Isn't the GTX260 nearly 4 years old?

I loaded the demo on my work computer and... yeah.  The UI is failing to impress me for a non-tablet device.  For tablets?  Sure, great.  Looks swell.  But Windows 7 is smooth as glass with a keyboard and mouse, while 8 simply is not.

The more I hear about this the sadder I am for the day when XP is no longer supported and I'm left having to choose some other shitty OS from MS...

..... or you could just go to 7 and see that MS actually did create a better than XP operating system.

The only thing missing from 7 that was easy to accomplish without buying extra software is SteadyState functionality. And that is not needed unless you are like Sky or myself and have to keep dozens of public access stations free of cooties.

The rest of the OS is so much better on every level. I actually loathe having to work on XP now.

Sure they did!  Windows 2000 was great! ;-)

7 wasn't out when I built my latest computer back in 2008 (it came with Vista and I forced XP onto it).  Since it's doing so well playing all my games, I have had little incentive to update it.  I'm just not into trying out all sorts of OSes and hacking around on computers anymore in my spare time.  I like coming home and having my computer ready to do what I want.  Looks like I'll have to obtain a copy of 7 before it goes away...

I run Win7 64, stripped down to look and feel like XP.  It's nearly perfect and I have no reason to change until MS decides to stop supporting it. 

As others say, that will be a sad, sad day.

Where is the window 7 hate? It's a good OS. People were saying that pretty clearly before it launched and they ran a $50 promo. Those two in combination were the death knell of XP. Along with 7 not sucking, of course.

As far as bleeding edge, a solidly middle/low range card from two years ago (my first gtx460) is not.

Chimpy, darn you for mentioning that. Straight to heck. Looking at a combo of Deep Freeze and WinSelect, but that's $70 to poorly replicate something we get free. If I had a windows server, I guess I could set up some GPOs, but with a lot on my plate, welp, there it is.

edit -  Wait, I do have a regret about moving to windows 7. I didn't think I'd need more than the home version, so now I'm thwarted in my low-hanging fruit remote session plans.

Two and a half.  I didn't say it was "bleeding edge", it has about half the performance of the 590, which is the latest.  I don't buy cards less than a year old, let someone else spend twice as much for 20% more performance.

--Dave

That's like saying that a Toyota Camry has half the performance of that new Ferrari. 

Okay, maybe that's going too far.  But a GTX260 was only middle-of-the-pack 4 years ago.

The rule of every-other Windows release holds true.

Win 95; pass - we still had Windows 3.1/MS-DOS and that's what all the games played in anyways.

Win 98; do it - Windows support for games was becoming more native, DirectX was hot, and the genre as a whole was stepping up.

Win Mil; pass - Hai u guys!  Let's try and make Windows 98 look and feel like Windows 2000!   :uhrr:

Win XP; do it - Other way around, derps.  Make Windows 2000 look and feel like Windows 98, with the flexibility and support to boot.

Win Vista; pass - The reset button on the aging windows kernel was needed, but even still, either it wasn't in the oven long enough or they forgot to turn the oven on in the first place.

Win 7; do it - Oh hey, someone figured out how to turn on the oven  :why_so_serious:

For Windows 8, the trend will probably hold true.  Will probably be awesome on those touchscreen all-in-ones, tablets, and phones.  Everyone else?  Not so much, me thinks.

We are testing out Clean Slate right now. Deep Freeze costs 40 bucks a year per machine and while we have a considerably larger budget than you guys, we don't have 5k extra a year floating around. Another product called PC vaccine looked promising when I was doing research.

We use GPOs extensively but even using those and roaming profiles, you still don't get the protection from malicious things like having the disk restored to the previous state on reboot/logout. Microsofts answer to that is a laughable "you can restore from an image nightly!"

Windows 7 is fine and I've used it since beta, but the only compelling reason I ever saw to upgrade was x64 support. I've never seen any advantage to it over XP. So far, everything I've heard about Windows 8 is a trainwreck. The compelling reason to have a desktop PC or laptop is that it's not a tablet or phone.

Our system level folks were using Clean Slate for a while, not sure why they switched. We were using the Gates stuff (all our PCs were Gates granted at the time) and I just followed that path through SteadyState. With the Macs, we went with MacShield, same folks who did the Gates PCs. Recently, they lagged way behind and didn't even have a 10.6-compat version, so that's why we're with Faronics now, when I went looking for a 10.6-compat, they already had a 10.7-compat. Just makes sense to stick with one company imo.

Well, if you follow the rule that every other Windows OS is a trainwreck, they're certainly due for one with Windows 8. :oh_i_see:

It sounds like they are doing some strange Metro overlay with a legacy desktop underneath. Reminds me too much of early Windows running on top of MS-DOS.

And yet that's basically what it is.  It's MS's way of trying to bridge people over to the new UI, which will probably be in full effect come Windows 9.

Going back to my earlier post, the kind folks Reddit appeared to have made a picture out of my earlier timeline

(http://i.imgur.com/Ur6jX.jpg)

 :awesome_for_real:

God, ME was just such crack of the devil's ass bad. I still marvel that that OS made it to retail.

I don't really remember 95 being shit, unpolished but not shit. Part of it might be that it was my first computer, rose tinted glasses and all that.

I actually already install my stuff into a folder called "apps", partially because it's easy to write and spaces in folder names make me uneasy, and partially so I know that anything that shows up in "Program Files" is something I didn't ask for. I'm ahead of my time!

:Love_Letters:

Except 95 wasn't shit, and that list completely skips 2000, which was solid, and superior to XP until after SP1.  XP at release was not good.  Not shit, but not worth upgrading from 2000 for.

2000, while awesome, was never considered an 'end-user/joe consumer' OS.  That gaming companies decided to throw in support for 2k was a blessing from the game devs, not a MS mandate.  I agree with what you're saying, but 2k isn't on the list because we weren't really supposed to have it  :why_so_serious:

95 was alright, Vista is ok, slow to startup but with all the annoying shit turned off it's not much different to xp (but can support a lot more RAM).  I like 2000, 2003 & 2008 server editions too.

Vista is cancer.

Well I paid for it, so I'm getting my money's worth, besides I'd have to shift about 10 vm's to a new OS and I can't be arsed just because it's slow to start.

I never had the problems with Vista that everyone else seems to have had, even at the office.

Going to have to violently disagree here.  95 ran like dog shit, was horribly unstable, and overall poorly designed.  98 leaps and bounds more stable and workable.  Windows 2000 pro was indeed good (but as mentioned, wasn't actually meant for the normal end user, though I ran it for years), but it was still blown away in every single way by XP, which was rock solid. 

Also had problems with, and hated vista.  Windows 7 is magnificent though, and crushes XP.  Seriously, the stability of 7 is amazing.  A fraction of the crashes and software/hardware issues I had running XP.

I've been noting the apparent "every other windows release is dogshit" trend for years now, and it doesn't seem to be abating.  I'm sure Windows 9 will be very nice.

Vista really wasn't that bad.  When it came out the hardware manufacturers had been a pile of lazy assholes and didn't have drivers ready, despite having at least a year's heads-up about the new driver architecture.  Then peoples' shiny new Vista machines couldn't work with anything and they blamed the OS instead of the people whose job it was to make drivers for it.  For most intents and purposes 7 is Vista, just with a better UI.  Nothing major under the hood changed.  I've set up some new Vista installations recently and everything went perfectly smoothly now that drivers are easily available.

Windows 2000 was build off Win NT wasn't it?

I think Windows 95 was the "can we even do this" version. It was the first use of Windows as an operating system as opposed to a cooperative multitasking  command interpreter replacement. So no wonder it was crap.

I also have to say I have never had any problems with Vista, but I did wait until after SP1 to get it and my hardware is so far from the bleeding edge that the blood has completely dried up and scabbed over by the time it gets to me.

I really think they should have delayed a year or two and figured out a way to get existing windows apps working in Metro. Regardless if you like metro or not, you are forced to use it for your start menu and having to go back and forth is fucking jarring and makes everything seem disjointed.   There's just no cohesion in the whole user experience.

PRESS S FOR THIRD PARTY STORAGE DRIVERS

Fucking NT.

Compared to win 3.1, win 95 was an improvement.  You can't say that about ME and Vista.

Yes, and XP was built off that.


If they don't put out something, all those corporates that bought the volume license with the adage that they'll get the next version at a discount if they paid a little extra now would be null and void, meaning there would be little to no incentive for those corporates to do the same thing again.  Besides, they gotta keep up the Jones now that it's not just Apple on the radar.

I skipped 3.1 and stayed on DOS through that period. I think I may have booted into 3.1 to play Civ 1 Win.

98 was decent, but 98SE was the thing until XP SP1. Prior to Windows 7, you were nuts to adopt a version of Windows before the 1st service pack, no matter how good it ended up being.

I actually ran Win 2000 RC2 at home for about six months without any major blow-ups back in the day. I was a rebel.

Ran Vista at home for a couple years and never had an issue related to the OS, so you're not alone.

3.1 - 95 - 98 - 98SE keeps the chain then. ;D

2k was a great OS, but then I came from NT which was a solid OS, but not so great for gaming.  XP I never adopted until SP2 or 3.  Win7 I didn't pick up until after SP1 either, but that was because XP was just awesome that late and I had no reason to switch.

Considering ME was some bastard child of 98 and 2k, and should be striken from the history books, I'll stick to liking 2k.  It may not have been meant for home use, but it was superior to anything prior to service packed XP.

Vista.  Gods.  Maybe people who knew how to use computers were fine with it, but give it to end users trying to run it on hardware that was iffy running XP and it was a nightmare.  I never met a Vista system I didn't want to throw out the window within ten two minutes.

ME and Vista are the really shitstains.  I have a suspicion that 8 is going to be the worst of the lot. 

Bolded for emphasis.  That was the other problem for Vista's release.  It and 7 both more or less require a multi-core processor and two gigs of ram, minimum.  Microsoft was retarded and put out claims that it only needed one gig.  That was a lie.  It can function on one gig, sure, but not worth a damn.  And then you had people trying to run it on even worse.  At the time Vista hit the shelves, you needed a relatively badass computer to handle it; anything mediocre and it would punish you.  Now even the low-end computers are powerful enough to run it easily.

I think their guidelines were with 1 GB you had to turn off Aero, and with that off those machines did tend to run it fine in my experience.

The difference between my laptop with 2 gig and my daughter's with 1 gig on Vista were literally night and day, in terms of performance (they otherwise had identical CPU's and graphics).  The problem with Vista was that 2+ gig was not standard when it came out, and they pushed hard with their licensing to make the vendors put Vista onto systems that really couldn't handle it.

--Dave

Well the slow thing does annoy me and I haven't wiped this in over 2 years.  So I'm thinking of upgrading to Windows 7, one of my work laptops has it but I can't play about with that one.

Looking at prices it seems around £130 for 64 bit ultimate, which I'm finding difficult to justify to myself.

Found this site (http://www.software4students.co.uk/Software4Students__Am_I_Eligible-article.aspx) which apparently makes me eligible(being a parent) for Ultimate 64-bit Edition Upgrade (which I presume I'd be able to do a clean wipe install on) for £60, only the deal ends at the end of March and it seems way too good to be true.  But they've been linked to by MS (http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/students/software4students/default.aspx), so now I'm confused.  Anyone know anything about this?

edit, spelling.

Cool thing about being employed by the Buy More a couple years ago was the learning curriculum they offered employees, both through Buy More and the vendors.  MS's training site ran a deal where if you did and passed through their brainwashing training modules and passed, they'd send you a copy of 7 Ultimate for free + shipping/handling  :awesome_for_real:

Mildly back on topic, Ars has an article on how to use Win 8 with a mouse (http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2012/02/getting-started-with-the-windows-8-consumer-preview.ars).

A few fab highlights:

The top right 'hot corner' brings up the 'charms'. The top left 'hot corner' brings up the application switcher.

To close an application, put the cursor at the top of the screen, at which point it may turn into a hand. It may not, depending on your definition of 'top'. Then drag the whole thing to the bottom of the screen to close it. If you drag it to the side, it 'snaps' it. Not sure what snapping is yet.

Windows + V = Toast Cycling. Ya, not sure either.

Finally, my favorite quote:

"Remembering that the charms exist is central to the Windows 8 experience."

Mouse handling of the UI is very likely going to change for the RC. WDP was a little easier to use, due to consolidation of the important things into the hot-zoned start button. None of that four corner shit. In this regard, it's a regression. But since everyone's going up the rails about the new ways, I'm sure they'll be changed.

Anyway, a lot of people are bitching because mostly their habits have been broken.

On the bright side it seems like performance of Windows 8 is freaking amazing.  I was watching my coworker run through a bunch of stuff with it in Parallels without any visible slowdowns.

Ultimate isn't worth it, w7 pro is barely worth it.  Pretty much the only things I can think of possibly needing to upgrade from w7 home edition to pro are if you need to remote desktop into the machine and/or you want to run Microsoft's crappy virtual server.

Or if you want to join a domain (which I don't really know why you would on a personal machine.)

Thanks for the info.

Edit to add, convinced, I don't see anything in ultimate that I need, so ordered pro for £40.

Home Premium is limited to 16GB of RAM and 1 processor socket (no core limit), and does not have built in drive encryption or XP mode.

But none of those things are an issue for 99% of home use.

Where the hell from ?

At least with Windows 8, you'll only have nine trim levels to choose from. Nine, fuckers. (http://windows8beta.com/2012/03/exclusive-windows-8-sku-revealed-in-consumer-preview)

to be fair most of those exist in 7.  the only versions added look to be the enterprise ones.

There are 5 SKUs for Win7 in the NA/EU market:

Starter
Home Premium
Ultimate
Professional
Enterprise

The Professional Plus looks to be yet another way to nickel and dime the idiots that didn't switch their server architecture to Linux already.  In essence, if you need to do certain things at an OS level (that an ordinary user would never need to do), you'll have to pay MS an extra premium to unlock them for you.  But just for fun, you may not find out that you can't do them until you try to migrate stuff currently running perfectly well on XP or 7 Pro into Windows 8 (after your suits signed a blanket license that requires the migration because it looked cheap).

--Dave

Uhh I'd expect the difference to be more features such as storage spaces

According to this article from 3 days ago (http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Windows-8-SKU-Professional-Enterprise-Starter,14824.html) Windows 8 seems to have 6 SKUs:

That's just what HP might be selling.

If you are running your servers on workstation OSes you have problems a lot deeper than "you didn't switch to Linux."

Cause best buy and all other retail are going to sell so many more editions than HP?

Mahrin, can you try to be a little less vague? Or are you just speculating at this stage? What features are being 'switched off' in 8 that aren't in 7? Are you talking about dual booting or something else?

:facepalm:

These people http://www.software4students.co.uk/default.aspx

They're just 3 SKUs. For some reason, Microsoft seems to want to save 20 cents per box by not supplying both 32bit and 64bit media. A key for a specific SKU works with both bitnesses. Actually, my Windows 7 "Commemorative Edition" (beta gift  :why_so_serious: ) has two discs, for 32bit and 64bit.

I'm surprised to see a 32 bit version.

Same, I'm surprised theres not a "legacy"(like fundamentals) SKU to eliminate it from the major codebase. Win7 had to delay due to most of the Atom based netbooks were 32bit only and they even built the Starter SKU for them, but today even the EOL Diamondville Atoms are all 64bit.

I just watched a video of Win8 in action.  This is utter crap.  I can't imagine my office trying to upgrade from Win7 into this travesty.

I remember when 2000 came out and M$ were claiming that it was build for both the home and buisness envroment. The problem was it was fuck awful. Seriously, it was crashing every 2 hours. One of the reasons they released Millenium was to distract people away from the horror that was 2000 before the first service pack, and bury the cleaims that it was supposed to be a united OS under 7 feet of concrete.

XP was also horrific before they fixed it, which took them over a year. In the job I had at the time I had to Service users that were buying XP computers and we had to put it into our service code that we would not support Win XP. I remember once spending 3 days just trying to get 2 win XP computers to even see one another on simple hub network, let alone talk to our win 2000 architecture.

I still have XP SP3 on my gaming machine and dont see much reason to upgrade, but the Win 7 on my laptop is nice enough.

Win 8 is the future!

I thought you need Win 7 to do DX11 no?

Yes you do. I;ll think about it if and when i get a new graphics card.

You can use DX11 in Vista as well.

I finally got around to installing this. What a compete and utter disaster the interface is.

My favorite bit has to be how there's no way to restart it. Because you never need to restart windows or anything.

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.   :why_so_serious:

Oh my.  This is going to be a trainwreck.

Win 8 has a shiny new version of Hyper V. And you can't use it to manage the 2008 version of Hyper V.  :ye_gods: So of all the applications I needed for work, the one that didn't work and made it impossible to keep testing it on my desktop was a Microsoft one.

In terms of the interface, it's just constantly in your face and the switch between the desktop and the big black screen of squares is really jarring.

They are forgetting who their customers are.  Apple has already won the casual computer user.  They've already won the smartphone war (at least versus Microsoft).  Microsoft should be catering to businesses and that start screen does not accomplish this goal.  This could be as big of a fuckup as Kodak dismissing the digital camera.

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.)

I think that's a very good observation. The PC took and merged two markets: people who needed to do work and people who wanted to consume entertainment. And I'd say the market is currently dividing that again. I've had a chance to monkey with an iPad and it's useless for any sort of creative task, it's really just an internet "cable box" purely about consuming pre-created media. The PC is something you use to create stuff and MS seems to be determined to force a "consumer" interface onto a "creative" device.

Someone (maybe here, I dunno) said that MS has done a fucktonne of GOOD things with win8, internally, but for some reason they seem wholly determined to force the metro (or whatever they call their dumbass new UI) on us.

If they allow us to keep the 7 interface as a "classic" interface, then 8 may very well be worthwhile. If not, it'll be one to skip for most people I'm guessing.

Here's the fundamental problem.

Putting lots of boxes of info on your screen is flatly dumb.  

The theory:


The reality:


I don't look at my screen to see the weather, my playlist, an animated equalizer, a running RSS feed, CPU stats, and instant messengers.  I look at my screen to see whatever it is I'm working on.  Which I've maximized to fill the screen.  So I can see it.  And not be distracted by dozens of crap widgets all blinking at me.  If I had a secondary monitor plugged in, hey, sure, it'd be great to have the second screen all Tronned out with neon crap moving around and displaying pointless information to me, but otherwise my first act upon being confronted with an interface full of widgets is to cover them with windows.  The Metro UI is no different.  I don't give a damn about little orange squares listing how many photographs or emails I have.  It's useless information to me.

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

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.  :grin:

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

By using the track pad or the magic mouse.   :oh_i_see:

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.

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

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.

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.


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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

What's a Windows key? :why_so_serious:

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.

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.

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

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.)

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.

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.

Goddamn you. Goddamn you to hell.  :mob:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I'm usually a bit of a Microsoft booster (I even own a Windows Phone), but I can't help but feel they jumped the shark with this one.

I could kind of get it if the plan was to gradually phase out the desktop and have us work with the new environment uniquely. But Metro is missing too many things that are important for getting work done. For example, I don't get how I could possibly work without hierarchical folders. (Metro gives one level only.) I have literally dozens of projects on the go at one time, each in its own folder, and hundreds of archived projects that I may have to reactivate at some later point. Trying to do this with one level of nesting would be insane.

And the idea of being able to show only two apps at a time is fine on a 13" laptop, but silly on a 30" cinema display.

So desktop is going to have to be around indefinitely. The jarring shift between the desktop and Metro worlds is significantly increasing the complexity of the overall system. My mother in law is looking at a new computer, and I now realize she'd better get one before Win 8 ships, because I can't imagine explaining this dual OS interface thing to her.

I actually found myself browsing the Apple mac pages yesterday.

My dad is finally considering a mac, given all the little problems that have arisen over the years with his windows computers.

Mac is pretty nice.  I am largely convinced that the stability and usability stems largely from the fact that they severely restrict which hardware will run their OS, and thus they are able to make sure that drivers run the way they are supposed to.  One of the big issues with Windows is the shitton of different companies that make drivers that conflict with everything or don't run. 

I'm a little confused as to why MS isn't simply trying to update Windows 7 a little bit.  I'm a big fan of it, and even consider it preferable to OSX Lion in a lot of respects. 

Microsoft is betting that sales of traditional PCs have nowhere to go down, whereas mobile/tablet sales are going to continue exploding. Windows 8 is all about having an answer for tablet + phone.

Whether it's a good answer for tablet + phone is not so obvious.

In some ways, they had no choice. If they had just produced a beautiful tablet OS that didn't run real Windows apps, it would probably have been reviewed positively in the press, and sold about as well as Windows Phone does now.

But as an example of how badly the shark got jumped, just look at how Office works on Arm-based Windows 8 devices. It will be literally the only desktop app that runs. The whole desktop interface has been ported to ARM just for Office. If you want to open a Word doc, you go to the desktop. If you want to do literally anything else, you use Metro. If you have your own desktop app, on Arm, you're out of luck. It won't run.

My Mom's laptop died so I convinced her to buy a Ipad instead of replacing it.  The only thing she uses it for is web browsing and email which it is perfect for.  She has  windows 7 desktop to do any actual typing, excel or major picture manipulation.  Personally I will probably end up going a similar route once windows 8 comes out with a Samsung Tablet or ASUS of some kind that is non ARM.  No way in hell I am going to update my desktop to it though.

Yeah, as a pure tablet interface it looks fantastic, better than iOS.  Being able to "stick" programs to the side while they still run is a nicer multitasking than iOS or Android.  But it's not good for an actual desktop computer with multiple interfaces beyond a touch screen.

Not sure how true that is since the next version of office will be Metro.  They just haven't publically shown it off yet.

I was shopping for some new pcs for the public here, and with our new layout the desktops are really ugly and bulky (backs exposed, wires, etc). Especially when looking at the majority of computers, flat panel iMacs. So I looked over the all-in-one options and was surprised how many touch-screen options there are in that form factor.

A flat panel all-in-one with a 24" touch screen would probably be pretty cool with W8.

Oh god no I don't want to support touchscreens for our public stations. We have enough problems with the 8 touchscreens we have on our self-checkout stations.  :ye_gods:

I personally cannot WAIT till I have to install touchscreens in my computer lab serving 400+ students! May have to install snotrags at each terminal.

I didn't buy any for the public!  :ye_gods:

The bodily fluids mentioned earlier are probably easier to clean off touchscreens than down in keyboards though.

 :ye_gods:

Sure, except of course, that the keyboards aren't going away either. Still, you have a point. TBH, I am pretty sure that my boss will never ever ever approve touchscreens for the lab unless the dean himself threatens him with physical violence. My boss' reaction to Windows 8 was priceless. After a minute of futzing about in the GUI, he looks up to me and says, 'What the fuck do I need all these buttons for?'. Of course, if he had his way, we'd all be using a terminal window and VI.

Actually, the terminal interface to our old catalog was much faster and easier to use than the fourth or fifth iteration of a 'windows' version (it's Java now). Slow, horrible layout and usability and still not compliant with most windows standards (for key shortcuts/cut'n'paste, etc).

Office 15 is more metro-like and is more touch friendly, but is not actually a Metro app. It will run under the desktop only.

Sky, What ILS are you guys using?

Sirsi-Dynix after they bought out DRA. The System folks never evaluated other products, like, say, Polaris, which is headquartered down the road a bit.

Ideal solution is dishwasher safe keyboards.

Oh god Horizon. We just switched from them to Polaris. The Polaris software is much better but my god was their implementation management was total shit.

We're on Unicorn/Workflows/I think they call it Symphony now (every calls it Workflows still).

If any of you happen to have this installed on a 10" netbook, they pushed out a new Intel driver that forces 1024x768 reso support.  Looks kinda akward at first, but at least now I can play around with the new Start menu.

Anyone got the real copy of this yet?  

I'm pleasantly surprised at the pricing of it.  It more closely matches what Apple has done with their OS upgrades.  

Edit:  Nevermind.  Apparently it's a promotional thing so people will adopt before they find out how shitty it is.   :oh_i_see:

I've been using Windows 8 as my primary home and work OS for the last few months (since the RTM came out).  I love it, but the only thing that I use Metro for is the start menu.  Honestly, I find the start menu much easier to quickly find items than on the current start menu with tiny icons.  

Other than that, metro doesn't get in the way at all, and it *feels* much faster in real world usage than windows 7 on the same computer (I used to have to dual boot on my home laptop due to an IE plugin).  

*edit* other than the shitty music and photo viewer.  Those things need to die in a fire and you will need to install some 3rd party stuff for those.

That's good to know.  I'm thinking about upgrading now due to the price incentive.

Not even considering it until Security update 2. Then, ill think about it.

I heard reports that some standard programs aren't even functioning in Windows 8.  No details on what those programs actually *were* though, so that's sort of useless information.  My understanding was something about the tile menus fucking things up.

I just want to stab Microsoft in the eye for releasing yet another fucking version of Internet Explorer I'm going to have to take into account when I create web pages. FUCK YOU, IE 9.

We promise this one obeys web standards! Honest! Even the real ones! (*)

(*) Web Standards are defined as the IE9 Rendering Standards, version 1. Service packs may have other rendering behavior.


We had a web developer quit at my last gig because he got offered a slight pay cut and a contractual promise not to have to code for IE ever again. Took that in a heartbeat.

Honestly, our front-end developers experience more rendering issues with Firefox these days than IE 9

They must not be using HTML5 or CSS3.

Can I blame my Windows 7 desktop blowing the fuck up today on Windows 8 (as opposed to the stupid random power strike at my house)

Maybe not since we have to support IE 8 as well.

I love how Microsoft continues to troll you guys.

Sounds fine with me.

From a gaming perspective, if there a reason to upgrade from 7 to 8?  Performance upgrades or anything?

Benchmarks I've seen suggest the only solid improvement is in boot times, due to the hibernation scheme to reboots it has. Other than that, people report Win 8 seeming faster, but that can always be a product of more crap flitting across your screen constantly, which I can personally attest to having used Windows 8 for two weeks before giving up on it and going back to Win 7 & Linux. There was just too much gui nonsense for my taste.

For games 8 is not any faster than 7, sometimes is slower, and there are occasional compatibility issues. At some point, though, I expect Microsoft will pull a Vista and make some version of DirectX Windows 8-only. Of course non-Microsoft game developers will continue to make their games work with Windows 7 and below just like they did with Vista and DirectX 10.

Several of my Steam games that I haven't played won't work with 8.  I have 7 computers around, however, so it isn't that big of a deal. 

I went ahead and bit the bullet and did it on my home computer.  So far so good.  It reminds me a lot of Gnome's new iteration.  I expect that 8 will not be utilized in business to any level until they can streamline the metro shit out though.

Windows 8 RT (the arm version) is apparently hilariously bad/buggy, and the vaunted ARM-based surface has severe out-of-memory issues just trying to run office. Also typing too fast punches out the one core of the Tegra 3 (a quad-core processor) that it uses so typing lags out. Oy.

Windows 8 is a pooch screw of possibly beyond Vista proportions.

Apparently benchmarks show Windows 8 as equal to or barely faster than windows 7.  Although, that doesn't tell the whole store because as my laptop is dual 7/8 boot 8 definitely *feels* faster than 7 (even outside of booting).

 :awesome_for_real:

Co-worker stumbled upon this video "review" of windows 8 (it's a bit parodical, don't expect a professional and unbiased review in any way, shape or form  :why_so_serious:):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZ1oPDtdhFo

It's a fair review.

I was shopping for fridge-freezers at the weekend and one of the places we were in had some laptops with Windows 8 running on them so I had a play around.

I am technically minded, familiar with multiple OS's and had read lots of reviews describing the difficulties with TIFKAM* and yet I still couldn't get my head around how to use it properly. Releasing this on consumers in this state is a terrible, terrible idea.

*The Interface Formerly Known As Metro.

WinRT everyone

(http://i.minus.com/iRg49jGWxVhaW.gif)

That's why I switched from AppleWriter to AppleWorks when I had my //c. I could easily out type Writer and had to wait for the catch up.

Microsoft doesn't even have a day pass to the Trolling Theme Park that is Apple these days.

I rather enjoyed the image Amazon's been leading with:

(http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/kindle/merch/gw/C1_compare-06_final._V402589423_.jpg)

Microsoft filmed at our offices last week.  Sadly, my ugly mug wasn't shown.  Win8 and our app feedback has been mostly positive so far, but we don't cater to techies, but the very center of middle America.

http://winstoreprod.blob.core.windows.net/media/msft_allrecipes_720p_v2.mp4

I'm not sold on Win 8 for me personally, but our app is really cool.

I'm going to do what I've always done: Not upgrade until something I really want to use absolutely requires it.  I didn't get all my systems onto Win7 until a couple of months ago.  Meanwhile I'm doing more and more on my (Android) tablet and my little Ubuntu box. 

--Dave

I bought the upgrade 'cause it's cheap, but it won't let me do the upgrade.. some random nondescript failure. Some have pointed to the fact that Windows Update or BITS is missing in services - and I am missing BITS. Can't seem to figure out how to repair it though ..

Ah well, no rush.

These days? People have been trolling us since before the interwebs.

My biggest positive for Windows 8, is that when it our customers switch to it and the try running our previous version of our software's interface (that was written in 2003 in MSJava) it will fail. It will fail badly and I will be able to blame Windows 8 entirely. "Nope, sorry, there is no fix. Time to use the up to date version of the software we gave you three years ago you stubborn bitch."

I'm hoping that Steam is serious about their stance of pushing to make their games linux compatible. 

I'm talking about companies trolling users. Apple is the total king of trollery in tech. Microsoft is way too neckbeardy for any of that.

Neckbeardy? Really? The neckbeards haven't been in control in Redmond since the late 90s, and even then the marketdroids were trolling users and employees alike.

Computer games are really the only thing that keeps me on windows these days.  If Valve is able to stimulate the linux gaming market I am perfectly happy to switch to linux in a minute. I will probably end up keeping one computer on windows just to keep my skills current.

Same. I'm sure I can get replacements for literally everything else, it's only games which are still keeping me on windows at this point, and judging by everything I've seen of Win8 so far, there's absolutely nothing in there to tempt me away from Win7. Maybe if I had been on XP or Vista still, but now that I'm on Win7? Nope.

True story: my car feels faster after I change the oil and filters.

Your app actually does look awesome, and makes the surface shine. Well done!

I'm just imagining using it while cooking though...  :why_so_serious:

Must say that actually looks like a nice app I may even eventually get when it comes out for Windows 7  :why_so_serious:

Trust me, I'm right there with you.  I just can't see jumping to Win8 yet, but then again, I've stripped Win7 down to look and act like XP.  I'm a freak like that.

Thanks for the kudos on the app; our people worked really hard on it.  We had a ton of interns come in over the summer that did a lot of the time tracking for the videos to match them up with the step flow.  As the video plays, the recipe steps move forward.  And if you want to go back, just one-touch the step and the video will start from that spot.  It's really genius stuff, and cooking with it is awesome.

The way we're seeing video changing how people interact with our site is awesome.  A year ago, video was available on a handful of recipes; now, we're pushing towards videos AS recipes with text to supplement.  It's changing mindbogglingly fast.

So one of my co-workers got bought one of the surface tablets and dropped it at my desk to play with.  Overall its a decent experience, the metro interface works really well on the touch screen.  How the implemented office is a bit odd with switching to the old school desktop.  Like the .gif posted above I can type faster than Word can keep up with.  Probably the quirkiest thing is how they put applications to sleep rather than close them.  Traditionally when you were done you would x out.  You really do not have that option anymore in the metro interface. 

Physically the surface feels nice and I like it enough I may buy one.  I just wish it was priced closer to the Kindle fire than the Ipad though :). 

In to say kudos on that app as well. I'm in love with allrecipes already, and that just looks like a nice little app.

As for using it while cooking... I use my iPad all the time with cooking. We have a bunch of traditional cookbooks, and I have memorized quite a bit of recipes, but I tend to use my iPad quite a lot.

Seeing some pretty damning reviews (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/df-hardware-surface-rt-review) of the Surface RT.


 :oh_i_see:

Is there coverage of performance on the x86 Surface device?  It's supposed to have relatively a modern Intel CPU, no?  Bus bandwidth alone on the Tegra 3 is going to be rough for windows, performance-wise, and while the GPU is decent for the display size, the A9 is roughly competitive with Atom, which is not exactly overflowing with compute power.

For only $100 price differential, given the confusion (RT not compatible with x86 software, windows store only, etc), and the performance issues, I'm thinking they might have been better off just sticking with x86 for launch.

If there's one thing the entire industry could stand learn from Apple, it's to recognize when something is just not ready and punt it until the next product cycle.  They don't get this right every time, but certainly do more times than not.

x86 surface is still hush hush. 

Windows uber-fanboy Paul Thurrott has published his review of the Surface RT (http://www.winsupersite.com/article/surface-tablet/surface-windows-rt-pc-replacement-144692), and it's pretty harsh. Buried in the review is his take that Intel Clover Trail may be the real future of Windows tablets:

That was a stupid review.  I'm not sure why anyone who is rational would expect the Surface RT to be anything but in its current unpolished state.  It will improve.

Because it's released. When shit is released, it shouldn't be buggy and slow as all get out.

When you release a product into a space where competing products shipped first, yeah, you're going to be judged against what's already there.  Probably worth taking that into account, especially if you're going to claim that the products all your competitors shipped are inferior -- you might look silly.

Kinda like MMOs  :oh_i_see:

Intel says that about every generation of Atom processors. I'll believe it when I actually see it.

You're old.

Er, isn't a review supposed to describe what exists and highlight it's shortcomings as well as it's successes? A review isn't supposed to be a glossing over of reality in the vague hope of future improvements.

I know that's what we've got used to in these days of sponsored deals, product placement, metacritic-dependant bonuses and corporate shills, but that's not a useful state of affairs for the entire concept of reviews.

RT may be unpolished but a lot of people have paid a lot of money in advance for this product and the fact that it's not fit for purpose is fucking disgraceful. But hey, this plus the iPad mini are nothing but good news for Android.   :grin:

I'm kind of having a problem seeing why people would put down money beforehand to get the first version of anything, especially when you know it'll be better (and maybe even cheaper) a while after launch.

Because modern life is rubbish and they're desperately trying to fill the gaping voids in their souls with mindless, slavish consumerism?

 :why_so_serious:

Not enough people live in caves and hide from bears while scavenging for berries.

General query: If I purchase the $40 download from MS' site, will it just be an upgrade copy that requires me to first have Windows 7 installed on the computer before it'll install, or can I do the old "put the install disc of the old software in the drive to verify" thing?

Two words: Miracle Patch.   :why_so_serious:

I wish there was an andriod OS for my desktop.

I think you can just do a fresh install by checking the "install from media" box during install.  I never saw anything about an upgrade or having to put in an install disk.

Didn't w7 upgrade just ask for you to type in your qualifying product's key?  Or was that some other software I am thinking of. 

As far as I am concerned the only thing windows 8 is missing is Ballmer issuing some ridiculous challenge ala bing and the windows phone.  After all if Ballmer doesn't believe in the product why should I?

My Windows 8 upgrade experience so far would even exhaust Picard from all the face palming he'd have to do.

The first annoyance is that the €29 upgrade doesn't come with a downloadable installable image. No, to get an installable image directly it'll cost you €59 and they send you a DVD.

So choosing the €29 upgrade only gets you a program that then checks if you are eligible for upgrading to Windows 8. This is sold to you as if there was some sort of upgrade check and performance check done to make sure you could actually run W8, but as far as I've seen it just checks whether you run a licensed copy or not.

The next hurdle is that the upgrade check app automatically switches to your system language (German in my case). Even if you download the US app from microsoft.com.

This would be great expcet that all of the text input boxes are hard coded to english (US). So none of the special characters work if they are on different keys or selected with different modifiers than on an US keyboard. So no @, no umlauts, no dashes or m-dashes or most of the other special characters. You also cannot copy from or paste into the text boxes so you can't even write down your e-mail address in notepad and copy it to the app.

The only solution is to switch your keyboard layout temporarily to english (US), search for the layout online so that you know which key combinations to press, make absolutely sure that every character you type is really the one you wanted in there (especially annoying with passwords because you only see ****) and then hit submit. At first however you spend an hour googling for a solution to that problem since it's not in the microsoft knowledge base.

Windows then automatically repartitions your HD without asking (great if something, anything goes wrong during that step) and then downloads THE WHOLE FUCKING IMAGE into the newly created system restore partition and then extracts it. When that download is finished about a week later (I sometimes got only 10 kb/s from the microsoft.com servers so it took more than four hours to complete) it then let's you create an install image for DVD (Meh) or USB drives (yay).

This wouldn't work for any of my dozen or so USB drives however (it always failed with a nondescript error) so I chose the DVD image. Creating that image then takes another half hour because the installer actually creates a new iso image from all the files downloaded as an image and already extracted.

After the win installer has downloaded the image, created a recovery partition without asking, extracted the image and then created a new image from the extracted data you have the option of updating the existing installation of XP, Vista or Win 7 or installing from scratch from the newly created install medium.

Updating will only keep your home folder, it is basically a clean install that keeps your user data and preferences (it even says so in the text) so I chose to do a clean install.

Clean install is pretty straightforward and only takes about 20 minutes.

After the utter confusion has worn off and you have actually found out how to start apps and access the preferences or how to get "back" from any app or screen since pretty much everything is different and more obtuse than before you realize that you cannot activate your installation of Windows 8.

This means that you can't change most preferences or even simple things like screen resolution and you cannot access most apps. The system simply tells you that "you need to activate Windows to access that".

Activation doesn't work because while the installer let's you do a clean install without updating an existing install, the activation wizard won't let you activate that copy since it wasn't installed over a previous version of windows. I found this out the hard way after spending a whole afternoon downloading and installing and surfing the web for workarounds.

There is a way to remedy that without reinstalling two OSs (your old OS to be eligible for upgrade and the win8 upgrade) I sadly found that solution only after having wiped my disc and starting over from scratch. (Glad I did this in a parallels VM).

I know have a working copy of Windows 8, a system that is utterly confusing to anyone that is used to the XP or Win 7 way of doing things. No start menu. Context menus have fewer options. No one tells you that there ARE smart corners. When you find out you realize that different corners activate diferent functions. When you triggered one of those function you don't know how you get back to the desktop. Some Keybindings no longer work, some keybindings moved to different key combinations.

Explorer and Internet explorer both are still a confusing mess of functions and UI elements. System preferences is still a confusing mess of functions

In short Win 8 is completely unusable or frustrating to use with mouse and keyboard, has changed or removed almost anything people have ever leraned about how to use windows based operating systems and the install or upgrade experience is error prone and takes hours to complete.

Microsoft offers no help, no tutorials, has clearly never tested the process with any system localized to any language other than US english, doesn't list any of the issues I encountered as bugs or offers workarounds and has so far not even fixed any of those issues.

You'll only find solutions to those problems if you can speak english and know how to use google.

Apart from that it offers you nothing that is inherently easier or better, more streamlined or less frustrating than Windows 7. Even worse it forces you to un- and relearn almost anything that you knew about previous versions of the OS so that you can use an OS that is not significantly better than Windows 7.

Maybe it's a beter experience when you use touch-based devices but offering control options for mouse and keyboard almost seems like an afterthought.

For normal PCs with keyboard and mouse I strongly recommend staying with Windows 7.

That's a little over dramatic about the problems with the OS, but they are valid points as to why it's difficult to use.  An instructional tutorial would be great, as would the ability to turn on or off certain features for business purposes.  Some of the parts clearly weren't well thought out.  For example, when searching their webstore there is no "search" area that is clearly and easily visible.  You have to use the "Charms Bar" search function, which is completely idiotic.  But none of these issues are deal killers once you figure things out and do them once. 

I'm not using Windows 8 yet but a couple of days ago I got a spam email from Stardock and they've written a utility to restore the Windows 7 style start button to Windows 8.  It's only 4.99 and it actually looks like it might make Win8 more usable with keyboard and mouse. It's called Start8.

note: I'm not a shill for Stardock but they actually do a pretty good job at little OS utilities like this.  Much better job than they do with their games anyway.

Windows 8 could actually be pretty decent with some GNOME 3 type tweakability. 

I'd rather lean more towards a KDE inspired deal, myself.

I've never liked KDE.  It just seems so clunky. 

Oh man, it's a Linux desktop holy war in the windows 8 thread. Btw, vi > emacs.  :why_so_serious:

That's a holy war?   :awesome_for_real:

Be quiet, apocryphal gnome lover. Cinnamon ftw.

burn, burn! emacs foreva!

Modes are the devil.

The future is here!

Nano.

Pico

Wasn't enough for me to keep using Windows 8. Despite having the start menu "back", it still feels tacked on and unlike the original. Part of that has to do with Metro being so heavily set on using the tile screen.

The thing I don't fathom is this obsession with making everything one way. A PC isn't the same as a tablet, which isn't the same as a phone, so why oh why does MS try  to treat them all like they're nails and the Windows OS is a hammer? It's what's turned me off a ton of FPS games, developers treating two hardware input devices as nails and their game as a hammer.

Is it possible that MS might be in collusion with manufacturers to sell the new (and much more expensive) touch screen PCs?

The most hilarious part of Windows 8, it feels awkward on the Tablets it was designed for as well.  :why_so_serious:

The most disappointing part of Windows 8? There will be no SP2 for Windows 7 because of Windows 8.
They dropped all support, no SP2 will roll out. A fresh install of Windows 7 w/ SP1 requires 400+ updates.
Amazing oversight.

Can you even still buy Windiows 7? The two PCs I'm responsible for at home run Vista and an ancient XP upgrade that I've been moving from computer to computer for years.  Eventually we're going to need to upgrade though. Will I be absolutely forced into Windows 8 at that point?

Heh. Maybe I'll have to somehow hang on 'til Windows 9 comes out.

I picked up Windows 7 last week (finally upgraded from XP due to more games no longer supporting it), so.. still available, here at least. Windows 8 is full of the stuff I abhor. Hell, even my phone isn't touch screen. I'll never use anything that's touchscreen. Probably best to grab it sooner rather than later, however.

Good idea. I'll see if I can get a couple of copies tomorrow.

Edit: Just ordered two copies of Windows 7 this morning.  I'm sure going to feel foolish if Microsoft buckles and adds a "Windows Classic" mode to Windows 8.  :awesome_for_real:

That was fast: DirectX 11.1 Windows 8 only (http://news.cnet.com/8301-10805_3-57548406-75/microsoft-wont-bring-directx-11.1-to-windows-7/)

I doubt that will work any better for Windows 8 than it did for Vista.  I stuck to my XP for years before reluctantly switching to Vista when I bought a new system.  I didn't miss out on any games that I knew of.  I'll install Windows 7 on my next new system and then just wait it out until Windows 9 comes out.

Which means nobody on the planet except for Microsoft devs or people being paid by microsoft will code a game to only use 11.1.  Good luck getting the public to switch for that reason.

This is a bit above my PC knowledge level [that was a disclaimer right there], but I just googled for DirectX 11.1 features and it seems to changes aren't that substantial. So one wont be missing out a lot by not upgrading.

That said, that is a very dickish move by Microsoft. I really hope 8 gets Vista-level bad word of mouth and MS learns a lesson. Probably wont happen though.

Edit: MSDN Direct3D 11.1 feature page (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh404562(v=vs.85).aspx) for anyone who wants to make their own conclusions.

It didn't work for DX10 and Vista, it won't work for DX11.1 and Win8 either. I stuck to XP until either latter half 2010 or 2011, I forget, and even then it was just because I thought the taskbar program pinning was awesome. DX10 had absolutely nothing to do with it, especially since I think DX9 delivers more than sufficient graphics quality for any game out there to be well playable.

As for the features of DX11.1, supposedly the only feature worth even mentioning there, for gamers, was native stereoscopic support.

Yawn.

There's also no GL support on RT.

Head of the Windows unit of Microsoft is suddenly gone. (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/13/us-microsoft-windows-sinofsky-idUSBRE8AC02Z20121113)

Amusing, since OpenGL was the *only* GPU API supported on those chipsets (eg, Tegra 3) before Microsoft started working with them (DX likely involved a bunch of work).

Hidden in there is the pretty cool news that Microsoft will have a woman heading its most important development group.

I do find it super amusing that instead of you know, going all DX12 or whatever for this sudden switch to Windows 8 only, they can't be arsed and just shoehorned it in DX 11.1 without adding anything to warrant it.
IIRC when DX 10 did it back in the Vista days they kept shouting that they did it because they HAD to. They had to you see, anything before Vista just wouldn't handle the awesome of DX10. 10 is one whole number bigger than 9. MASSIVE.

Now they don't even try to hide it.

Not to get in the way of a good Microsoft rant, but the changes in DirectX 10 actually did require Vista due to all the stuff that was dependent on Vista's various driver changes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Display_Driver_Model

I hear you, but on that logic, what changes in 11.1 are things that they can't do in Windows 7 since both 7 and 8 are essentially the same thing, especially since 8 didn't actually ship with 11.1, but is instead getting patched in?  Would it actually kill MS that much to support 7 for a little while longer, since you still have a pretty big chunk of the market STILL on XP and are just now considering the move to 7, let alone 8?

Even though MS says they want to push people to upgrade to 8 faster, I am betting they will cave a bit on 7 support and keep it running longer due to enterprise customers. Shit, they don't even have official support for Server 2012 or Windows 8 in SCCM 2012 and that is their own flagship enterprise endpoint management product.

If their new touch interface is going to be their new interface going forward, without a way to get back a proper interface, then I'm just going to go back to kubuntu or whatever distro is good when it's time to upgrade from Win7 and see if I can't make do with the few games I'll still be playing at that point.

This.  Where I work, we're still rolling out Win7 and that's not being pushed hard either.  It's typically done as part of a refresh.  A lot of that is because of compatibility with various apps that are used around here and the qualifications are pretty stringent, considering we have a ton of FDA and regulatory compliance to follow.  Heck, once of our major projects this year is the MS Office 2010 upgrade, working out compliance and compatibility, etc.  That's not a quicky upgrade going on.  I really, really can't see us changing to anything but Win7 at this point and I highly doubt Win8 is going to be very useful in a corporate setting unless it looks/feels/acts like Win7.

I am anticipating a Final Fantasy XIV level of "oops, we fucked up" and for Windows 9 to be out within a year or so.

The software assurance conspiracy theorists would say that in order for Microsoft to maximize profits they need to wait a bit more than a year to release a true Windows 7 upgrade.

I'll shit if they honestly think that they'll be able to convince any large enterprise shop to go to Win8.

I know a lot of people who work in various enterprise environments and not a single one of them has been running Win7 for more than a year and that's including where I work. We only really rolled out Win7 this last summer and we're still picking off the odd WinXP desktop as they come up for redeployment or salvage.

I had my first call from one of our sales people asking if one of the products we use would work under windows 8.  After I stopped laughing I told him he should talk to the company that sells it and not hold his breath. 

In our environment we are going to be on windows 7 for the next few years.  We only have a few windows xp machines left and no vista ones.  Some of the XP machines will stick around until they die because they are tied to industrial machines and the software only works under xp.....

Most government computers (I'm in National Defence) here in Canada are still using XP.  It's probably the same in the US.  I can't see any government making an investment to switch to 8.

We have machines that have been on 7 for over a year, but we also still have lingering XP machines and a lot of Vista. We don't roll out things en masse, just upgrade to <whatever is newest> when someone gets a new box. I'm sure we'll have Windows 8 in the environment shortly, especially on laptops.

I started to roll out Windows 7 this year, before that we downgraded to XP. I don't see us ever moving to Windows 8. I assume they will have to backtrack on it eventually. It's fine for an entertainment device like a tablet, but it's just not a functional OS for working on a PC.

Sure it is. You don't have to use the Metro interface.

Seriously, I wonder how many people that bitch about it have actually used it for more than a "let's see how shitty this is" glance.

No one here at work that switched to Windows 8 is ever, ever in the metro interface, except for the start menu which has proven for a few of us to be more preferred than the old start menu for various reasons (mostly due to bigger search and button results).  Other then that we are literally never in metro and it's exactly like windows 7 UI wise

I make excuses for Windows 8. But no, seriously. This isn't a case of people hating it to hate it because hating M$ is cool or whatever. You can take that ball and go home.

Windows 8 has a lot of problems. It does. I loved Windows 7 right out of the gate, hated Vista. I owned Vista Ultimate. Kept my beta install of Windows 7 and set to clock to think it was living in a different year for literally years until I finally updated earlier this year with a legit .iso and key from BizSpark

That lovely Metro start has its niceties, but try that with some games running, a handful of weird java open source code GUI tools and 3DS Max running, and then when you accidently hut the start key and that nice Metro Start kills an hour or two of work by freezing up one of them randomly, you get back to us about how nicey nice it is.

Point is, shit is broke. Teething problems this has plenty.

Edit: iPad forum posting bad

So we're all pretty much in agreeance that the rule of "skipping every other Windows release" is still the law of land?

It is frankly spooky how well that law holds. But at least this time around the change isn't nearly as dramatic as it was last time. They have been patching it up quick. Once they finish beta testing on all the consumers I expect we will see one hell of an OS  :grin:

No, we all aren't. I can understand how you could get confused considering there are multiple people saying that Windows 8 isn't bad just a couple posts up from your own though.  :-P

Pretty sure the DoD is all off XP due to IPv6 compliance stuff.

Usually the real law of the land with any windows release is to not bother until the first service pack.

I don't really understand the beef with Windows 8 so far.  It seems very stable and fast.  All they need to do is patch in a way to "opt out" of metro and bring in a start menu of some sort and it will be fine for business use. 

Which I understand they won't do because it's "The Feature" of the release.  Too bad it's also the largest portion of the beef with Windows 8.

Oh, they'll do it once no business anywhere buys it.

They're looking at the way that Android is absolutely dominating the tablet and phone markets, and seeing a day coming where the go-to computing device for personal use is a core unit that happens to make phone calls and gets plugged into other peripherals (like screens, keyboards, etc.) as needed.  People will want a smooth transition between these different modes, and they're hoping that by making their desktop/laptop experience touch-centric, they'll be able to leverage their dominance there.

Not sure it's a good strategy even if the implementation wasn't lacking.  Which it is.

--Dave

There is so much fail oozing from this. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/benzingainsights/2012/11/13/microsoft-surface-sales-are-taking-off/?utm_campaign=techtwittersf&utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social)


Apple has sold 100 million iPads.

Well obviously anything that doesn't equal those numbers is a failure.

I think everyone agrees on that, but they're not going to do that and without it, the interface is a disaster.

See also: what happened to Nokia when they decided to ditch Symbian (yeah yeah I know, but it was still the #1 smartphone OS in terms of sheer volume) entirely and switch over completely to Windows Phone.


edit: at work we're still using Windows XP SP3. Upgrading to W7 or W8 would need us to upgrade our hardware and it'd be expensive as fuck overall... also kinda pointless for the work we're doing (ITsec evaluations and research).

Well obviously not, but Surface is a failure if it doesn't get a significant market share. Because it runs a new operating system built with tablets in mind. There are other companies with significant market share, but they're all using Android. There's no point in Windows 8's UI unless the Surface gains a significant following.

Let me divert you to some excellent Windows 95 tips: http://windows95tips.tumblr.com

To be fair, I think you're allowed to take a few years to build up some market share -- I mean Android certainly took a few years to ramp up to over 1M device activations a day -- even iPhone sales took a while to ramp up to the really crazy numbers (the front end of the growth curve actually looks quite similar to Android, just shifted forward a year or two).

Microsoft is in the weird position of seemingly being unable to decide if it's going to go completely vertical with device manufacturing (Apple model) or rely on many manufacturers (similar to Android and WinCE).  It is awfully particular about how manufacturers build WinPhone devices and how they customize the software (less appealing to OEMs than Android -- fewer ways to differentiate, no matter what Elop says), but it also has given up on guaranteeing upgrades (which it made a lot of noise about early on, comparing to Android, but later discovered that it's actually hard!) for OEM devices.  Kinda feels like a worst of both worlds approach.

On the *other* hand, when Microsoft decides they want to be in a market, they're willing to spend billions of dollars a year, year after year, to get there.  Which sometimes works for them (Xbox), but other times not so much (Bing -- though they haven't given up yet).

They do seem to be flailing around a bit, but they've got a lot of money in the bank, aren't afraid to spend it, and I think it'd be silly to count them out just yet.

The first wave of Android tablets were pretty much all massive failures, no? I mean I was reading all kinds of articles about sales barely over 100k for stuff like the Xoom. If Microsoft only sells a couple million that will be a runaway success comparatively speaking, not a failure at all.

EDIT: And this is one of those things that is just going to take time to break into as well - they have to overcome being 3rd to market and the fact that everyone already owns a bunch of apps for their iOS stuff or their Androids that won't work if they switch platforms, so they'll have to buy their Angry Birds all over again, etc. It is going to take a while even if it is a success, so I would hesitate to forecast gloom and doom based on what happens in the first few months.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/86041/tumblr_mcdibxvx0B1rehruqo1_500.png)

Definitely true -- Android tablet momentum is getting there, but it didn't happen overnight, and there are still gaps.

I think the tablet market may actually be easier for Microsoft to get into than phones -- assuming they either address the performance issues on WinRT or x86 Win8 tablets are competitive, they are the only player that really has their hooks into corporate America (and elsewhere) and has what many consider to be *the* office software solution -- neither Apple nor Google have something that really competes head to head with Office. 

They are pretty good at absorbing and killing former phone market leaders (Nokia) in order to get their sub-2% market share, though.  :why_so_serious:

 :heart: Nokia :heart:

I remember earlier this year around E3 being on a flight home with one of the guys from Microsoft who was working with Nokia to get Windows 8 working it's best on their tablets. It was AMAZING.
He showed me the dev devices he had and it looked super cool. Even had a button to switch between the old desktop/start menu and Metro. And it seemed to work seamlessly then. I had been planning to dump my stocks with Nokia till then, but that made me decide to stick it out a little longer. Up to that point I was worried about Nokia's future due to the still rather recent news then of them going exclusively Windows going forward.

Seeing how well it appeared to be getting implemented, I was rather impressed. Was a bit  :ye_gods: when that feature wasn't around at launch. But as has been pointed out here, flagship feature is Metro. So yeah, they aren't going to hide it. (ok, well maybe, just maybe they might backtrack on that now)

Now this is the point where you all think I am going to go all  :heartbreak: because I've been bashing Windows 8 a bit, and by bashing I mean just pointing out flaws I've noticed and weird design choice and behaviour.
Let me set the record straight. I've no problem with Windows 8, the bits that work good, work good. Just the broken bits are really broken. From such a large company it is a headscratcher for me at times.

For those saying Windows 8 tanked Nokia tho I am kind of at a loss. That statement doesn't jive well with reality. NYSE 6m timeline (https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1352883342075&chddm=49657&chls=IntervalBasedLine&q=NYSE:NOK&ntsp=0&ei=iFyjUPjpI8OBwAPVywE)

Dip was around E3 back in June. But really only on the NYSE, DOW, NASDAQ and S&P 500 are pretty level.

The problem is that they significantly lose market share of the feature phone market quarter over quarter as the China OEMs are starting to eat Nokia's lunch.

This has always been Nokia's cash cow because although it yields little margins for profit it was offset by the sheer volume of phones Nokia sold in its heyday. They had 80% of the feature phone market at one time.

The feature phone market however is dying in the developed countries due to the shift to smart phones. In the emerging and developing countries the China OEMs are digging into Nokia's share of the feature phone market.

That leaves the smart phone market and with respect to that the prospects of Nokia look dire.

Nokia currently only has a 4% share of the global smartphone market that's also shrinking quarter over quarter and has for the first time dropped out of the top 5 behind ZTE and HTC.

Going Windows Phone only is a huge gamble for Nokia that so far hasn't paid off at all

Microsoft has created, hyped and then brutally/suddenly killed too many devices and technologies for me to take any risks on purchasing something new from them like a tablet.  The only way I would seriously consider buying one is if it becomes a huge success first, which isn't likely.

As much as I do like Windows 8, I do not think ARM tablets are going to gain much marketshare at all.

I do feel like all the x86 tablet<->laptop convertible systems have a chance to gain marketshare, although I don't know if they would necessarily count towards tablet marketshare.

It's depressing that I have to care about Microsoft's failures now because the alternative is Apple, which is an even shittier company.*

_{*Before anyone says it Linux will never ever in a million fucking years be a viable alternative for the general public. I would put real money on this.}

On the pure tablet, it seems to me that you either need to be better or cheaper than the industry leader. I don't see that Windows 8/surface is either.

de gallo

The whole tablet/touchscreen interface is funny to me, because it's so OBVIOUSLY a transitional technology. It's trying very hard to build UI's for a motion-based (i.e. Kinetic style) interface on a virtual (holographic/cybernetic) "desktop/surface" and that whole idea is in its absolute infancy. I'm quite positive when the Apple geeks came up with the iPhone interface, they were really trying for a Minority Report holographic interface as their end goal and anyone in the design phases of the 3 big players (Apple, Android/Google, Microsoft) who isn't thinking of that long-term is ensuring they will be the RIM/Blackberry.

As such, Windows 8 tablets and Surface are all about having something to sell for a few years while perfecting UI concepts to go to the next step whether that be wearable hardware or cybernetic implants using virtual surfaces or something else entirely.

Look at Windows 8 with that filter and you realize there's another reason it's a piece of shit besides every other Windows systems being pieces of shit. They are pieces of shit because they are innovating concepts for things that don't even exist yet.

All this discussion gets a reset since nobody's mentioned yesterday's announcement that Sinofsky is out at Microsoft.

http://blogs.computerworld.com/windows/21329/sinosfkys-out-and-microsoft-still-faces-tough-pathway-windows-8-adoption

There's rampant speculation about Windows 8 being a failure and causing it, but I think the NPR analysis I heard had a better take on things as it being a combination of reasons.  1) Sinofsky was reportedly very hard line and uncompromising.  Something that can't happen as Windows needs to morph to fit more platforms than the PC in the way Android and iOS has done.  2) He's at a stage in his career where the only way to advance is to leave.

If we see massive changes to Win8, then I'd agree on the failure aspect.  If they instead soldier on and announce a more refined multi-platform OS then clearly it was the latter.

I mentioned it, two days ago.

At any rate it just sounds like he's just an arrogant douchebag that most people hated, they would have fired him earlier but they didn't want it to impact the Windows 8 timeline.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/14/technology/at-microsoft-sinofsky-seen-as-smart-but-abrasive.html

Missed it, apologies!

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/chuckw/archive/2012/11/14/directx-11-1-and-windows-7.aspx

Internet Explorer 10 for Win7.  Also known as: Service Pack 1a w/DirectX 11.1 Lite for Win7

 :why_so_serious:

Oh man, you nailed it.

That sounds very persuasive as theory, but aren't such input methods as mentioned 20+ years away?

Of course not. They were 20 years away 20 years ago, so they're due any moment.

You mean like fusion power and my university degree?  :cry:

One of my friends got hers after 11 years.  You can do it!

(but yes)

Windows 8 is designed for the holographic controller on your jetpack?

Well, makes as much sense as any other reasons I've heard about why it sucks so hard, I suppose.

Very likely - but then I was a bit surprised by the motion controls on the Wii so who the fuck knows?


Actually kind of. It's a research project masquerading as a marketable product - kind of like smartphones with touch displays or tablet computing. Do you really think those devices will be used in their current form 20 years down the line?

That comparison isn't quite valid though. Of course they will change over the time, but smart-phones are very usable and obviously very marketable. PCs changed a lot since MS DOS 4.0 days, that doesn't mean they were a research project.

I don't think that touch screen tech is just a stepping stone to holographic mid-air interfaces. The experience is viscerally so different that I don't think  devs have that in mind when coding for a tablet platform. Never mind that we already have that with the Xbox kinect, WII etc, and that, although cool, isn't really as precise a gui interface as needed for serious business. I would love to see a board meeting with a power point presenter flailing their arms about. That would be awesome.

I'm gonna get yelled at, but I liked playing with the Windows RT tablet at the MS Store here in Seattle. I did not experience the typing slowness in Word that others experienced. I did need a bit of instruction on how to close apps, and get around a bit, but other than the hilariously high price that blocks entry and is gonna drive people in droves to Apple, its a fine device for what it purports to be.

I'm gonna wait on the new 8 Pro version and see if that's better, in terms of power, battery life, display and of course, 3rd party non app-store programs.

I don't think what you say is controversial. Lot's of comments about metro include something to the extent "It's nice on tablet/touchscreen but just doesn't make sense in an office environment/with keyboard&mouse input."

As customer it feel neglected by Windows 8, it seems the focus behind it is entirely on non-PC environments. I remember a quote by some MS dude: "We do not want to be chained to the dying desktop". Which is very worrying as MS is the only source of desktop OSes around. It's not like phones were you can shop around.

Edit: That phone example made me think of something. It's very possible that a company totally misses the direction when it comes to development. See Nokia. Now imagine a world were the entry to phone production were so that Nokia was the world onliest producer. We'd be all using 3310's (and a few freaks with Blackberries(Linux)).

Addendum: That such things are possible history shows. OS/2 2.1 vs MS-DOS 6.0. Both released within a month of each other, but worlds apart.

I'm highly skeptical of anyone saying the desktop is dying, and it is indeed worrisome that that's being talked about at higher levels at MS. We went through this before. MS unlocked the potential for desktops, and that they perceive it as being 'chained' seems very short sighted.  People LIKE having the power to run ArcGIS or CAD from their desktops, not having to rely on some app server in the sky that's paid for through some institutional/corporate licensing.

There's a narrow band of coders/modelers/designers that require the CPU power of a cluster environment, but they've been using that shit for years anyways. I don't think that people are going to flock to a Windows 2013 server cloud cluster for their high end computing needs now.

And that gets in to the guts of it, I think, Engels.  People don't NEED it but good luck getting in to the office environment otherwise.  Microsoft is THE business OS. What hope of entering that market does any other developer have at this point? None.

So instead, you take a different tack.  You enter the market by selling 'cloud' services your customers don't need.  "The PC is dead! Move to the cloud, any old $300 machine with an internet connection can run any program!  No more viruses, overhead costs for IT or hardware costs.  Just a simple monthly fee for access!" 

What bean counter wouldn't buy that idea? 
What software company wouldn't trade 'sell one copy to a client ever x years' for a 'client pays me $x a month for access' model?

So the "pc is dead" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.  MS thinks it's time to move to an interface that supports this cloud idea now before it gets away from them and kills their business OS. Time to explore other options!

You are right they aren't going to flock to Windows 2013 server cloud cluster.  They will instead, as Merusk says, flock to the cloud cluster service being provided by the 3rd party software they are using.

Pretty much the last true foothold desktops have are for content creation.  The user experience of consuming content via phone, ebook, tablet and tv is becoming better, enough so that it is just a matter of time before the desktop is only used as a backup device (if at all) for this.  I would consider myself in the top 5% of computer users and I love my desktop but I use it less every year.

Here in academia we've done a lot of Citrix remote software/desktop shit and the general consensus among the users, IT staff, faculty, and the high level staff is that while it serves a purpose it fucking sucks. Desktops aren't going anywhere, anytime soon. If you do any work that is reasonably processor intensive (i.e. almost everything that isn't office) the cloud is awful and sucks.

The problem is that the bean counters, executives and their personal assistants only use a browser and office.

Don't get me wrong, as a IT dude, I do have a vested interest in desktop support, but its not simply that. To me it all smells a bit like a diffusion of responsibility going on here. Throw it all up in the cloud, knowing full well in the back of your mind that you're giving up control to some nameless people in some data center somewhere that have poor customer service lines of communication, and hope for the best. It'll work great for a while, I'm sure. We have all sorts of hardware redundancies now that mask failures in infrastructure rather well, but in the end, you have a heck of a lot of moving parts that you have no direct control over whatsoever.

If I were a conscientious IT manager of a firm that relies on a 2nd party cloud I'd be a bit apprehensive.

Running desktop apps via citrix is a crap user experience.  I was talking about the complete replacement of desktop apps with web app equivalents.  There isn't a need for your accounting, mail, word processing (not desktop publishing), order/issue tracking, marketing, etc... software to be a desktop application and there are very good reasons for them to be web applications.   I can totally see all of the general office form entry class of applications moving to the web and that + email + word/excel/powerpoint pretty much covers the vast majority of office computer use.  All of the heavy content creation type of apps (desktop publishing, CAD, photoshop, video/audio editing, things that need to be compiled, etc...) are for the technically skilled minority and even some of those are available as web apps.


(edit: aka the majority) and those are the people who don't need a desktop.

Albeit we have more resources and little to no sense of fiscal responsibility where I work but we have created quite a few in-house web apps hosted on our intranet that have eliminated the need for some fairly expensive niche desktop solutions.  The code and maintenance is 100% under our control, web applications != cloud or at least sometimes the cloud is inside your network.

See, although for desktops it spells out the same kinda doomed fate, for me in-house application servers are a different fish altogether. I'd be overjoyed if all I had to do to hook up the new secretary is point to a bookmark in her browser that launched a web-app that's hosted in the downstairs basement. The issue begins when your in-house app is actually hosted on a cluster on a server farm in bucksnort corn country and there's two dudes there manning the phones.

Do they even know what a computer is in Bucksnort?  It's a pretty small town.

Here in the midwest we prefer the term BFE, or Buttfuck Egypt.

Also webapps are 99% trash if Banner, Cognos, Blackboard, etc are any indication. Google Docs is about the best webapp I've used and it's pretty limited. I imagine webapps will improve like anything else but they're not terribly awesome right now.

Dear god, BANNER  :awesome_for_real:

What a god awful combination of Java and ActiveX dependencies.

I enjoyed how we had to support desktops with ancient and wildly unsafe versions of Java we couldn't update until as recently as 3-4 months ago. That was almost as boss as the awful custom-written app one business office used that literally required Firefox 2.something and would work with nothing else.

Hah at least you weren't screwed like we were at work.  We use java applets a ton, mostly for transfering extremely large video files to our servers for processing without the slowness of HTTP.  And since we do a ton of video production we have a lot of macs.

And Apple decided to be the one and only deciders of what goes on their platform, pushed out a security update that fixed a security vulnerability in java applets in Safari.  And by fixed they literally just uninstalled java from the systems......

We have domain Macs and they're awful. Just awful. I know because my primary computer is one. I have a Domain Mac and run an RDP session into my PC desktop for SCCM and the like.

I like Spaces, iTerm, and that's about it. At the time we didn't have an extra monitor and I don't work without at least 2, so I took my one PC monitor and ran it into the Mac. We do have more monitors now and newer PCs...I should just ditch the Mac but eh.

This thread is like Computer Politics.  Cloud is ObamaCare and this is a conservative forum. :why_so_serious:

I'll have a chance to try Win8 in March, I think.  My primary question will be if I can roll it back to W7 if I don't like it.

My feeling is that Windows 8 would be an unmitigated disaster on laptops that aren't equipped with a touch screen.  Using a little trackpad to do the gestures would be terribly irritating and my friends that really hate it so far are trying to use it on laptops. 

Just to give you idea how bad Windows 8 is; most of the biggest changes like full-screen metro apps and gestures and all that were the big features added to OSX Lion and not even the biggest douchebag Apple lover I know likes them in OSX. Most people hate the way full screen apps work in OSX, hate its shitty multiple monitor support, and don't use or like the gestures.

Bucksnort is an actual town (http://maps.google.com/maps?q=bucksnort+tn&hl=en&hnear=Bucksnort&gl=us&t=m&z=15) in Tennessee.

I use BFE as well, though my Bee stands for Bum.

What program are you  guys using to integrate the Macs into the domain? I have been working with centrify a bit and overall it seems fairly straight forward.

Yes. I recently added a second monitor and the menu bar being tied to the main display is a total pita. I do like it for GIMP, but most other things are a hassle.

I'll have to monitor our local apple fanatic and see if he's using any of it.

We use centrify; I don't work the Mac queue so I haven't messed with it much. Getting the Macs on the domain isn't bad, it's just that it's fucking dreadful to actually use it.

We use roaming profiles (which Microsoft pretty much says not to do anymore) because they're so useful, and we handle the roaming profiles in an...interesting manner.

Every user has drive space on their home server (of which there are several; we have thousands of users) which runs solaris; your roaming profile is stored in a folder on that space. So you log in to the domain from any computer, it pulls down your profile from your personal space. It's a Samba share so it works fine with Windows...Macs? Not as good. Basically anything that touches your profile (like changing the main program options in Firefox) will get you a good 30 seconds of beachball.

I mean, it works, but it runs poorly. And hardware won't fix it; it's just the way we have everything set up so your shit properly follows you around campus. Most of our Mac users ask to go self-supported (non-domain), which lets them run off the domain and have administrative access but we only provide redeployment (i.e. reinstalling your OS and providing access to any software we provide) support then.

Thanks for the info!   I do find it more than a little funny that the Samba shares work better in windows than on Mac OS in your situation. 

As  far as my situation goes thankfully these are dedicated machines so no roaming profiles and it is a fairly small group (5 people).  We just want to integrate them into the domain for simplicity sake for printers, file shares etc.  They are all software engineers so the support is thankfully pretty low. 

I imagine domain macs work well in small domains. It's just that if you need to get a little esoteric or support shitloads of users the scalability punches out pretty quick.

I bought a Lenovo Yoga (http://www.lenovo.com/products/us/laptop/ideapad/yoga/yoga-13/) for the office this weekend.  It's really pretty damned awesome. 

Well, our state agency may be on its last hardware update for awhile, the next iteration is likely to be virtual PCs.  *gag*  I only hope IT/development manages to keep decent desktop horsepower.  More and more of our app UI's are being written as Web apps anyway, but Word or Excel on a VM even just running across town with all Gigabit fiber is still a PITA when some clown copies a database backup to/from the same server hardware during the business day.  It's like the good ole days of DOS when you could read faster than the list of files scrolled by when you did a "dir".   :awesome_for_real:

Sadly all our database and web servers are already virtualized (and performance has been great 90% of the time and atrocious the other 10% for mysterious reasons we no longer have the ability to discover or correct), but at least there's little chance of those being moved outside our control and to the cloud.  Given that the Legislature would crucify folks if any data got hacked from the cloud, said folks are not likely to allow the data to be moved out there without said Legislature passing a law mandating it!  But the handwriting is on the wall for the desktops I'm afraid.

That said, our IT vision guy was all for Windows 8 because he liked the idea of its common UI across multiple platforms until last week when he trialed a Windows RT(?) phone.  Now I think it's safe to say we'll be skipping Win 8 unless/until there are some drastic changes.  Development just finished moving to Windows 7, but all our users are still on XP SP3 and we are just starting to think about migrating them to Win 7 anyway.  Surely by the time we get around to considering Win 8 there will be an obviously better alternative out.  :grin:  Unless Microsoft somehow cons somebody with more clout than brains into believing that Win 8 is the only way to virtualize successfully and he drinks the coolaid about how much cheaper the TCO will be per seat.  :ye_gods:  :cry:

This will, of course, happen.

What are you doing about a browser. I'm getting people bitching about websites giving warnings about the old version of IE?

Virtual desktops. Ugh.

IE8 still is supported by most websites I have seen.

But the real answer is to push people to an alternative browser (Firefox with ADBlock installed in our case) as much as possible.

The problem is that there are webapps that don't run well on anything but IE still because welp niche market controlled by bad company. See: Cognos, Banner, Blackboard

Yeah, the local counties have a document management system that's an IE only monstrosity.

internet Explorer in every form is the bane of my fucking existence. Even 9 is a shit shit shitty shit piece of shit shit shit that acts like it's a drunken sailor on shore leave and web display standards are not even remotely hot chicks walking by it on the street.

IE8 is the only officially supported browser.  IE 9, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and I think Safari are reluctantly allowed but you're on your own.  Many of our internal state apps don't work.  Ah, ahem.  I meant to say don't work in anything but I.E. but a period snuck in there somehow!  :wink:  Lot's of stuff based on SAP for example, which surprises me greatly, but it might just be ignorant implementation - we don't use it in our agency.  Most of our public-facing sites don't work in Firefox either, apparently thanks to SharePoint being a skanky bitch although again that might not be a problem if properly implemented.

Other websites? We have a whole layer of bureaucracy dedicated to scanning daily proxy reports on every single web click by every single one of the states ~30000 employees to make sure nobody spends $0.10 of state resources browsing the web for personal use/entertainment (actual enforcement varies by agency but it's all pretty heavy handed).  Your tax dollars being spent profusely to ensure that not a dime is wasted!  But the good news is we probably can't safely go to those newfangled fancy-dancy websites anyway because the proxy hit would get us in trouble.  :why_so_serious:

And yes, virtual desktops. Ugh.

This is our problem.  Also I've got automation scripts that IE 9 breaks and I could never find a work around for.

We're already running Term Server, so we'll see how the virtual desktops go.  I'm sure I'll be in the fetal position over work in a few months.

Banner is the worst as until just recently it was not supported on browsers above IE8 AND it requires java.
:mob:

Sysadmin reacts to Windows 8:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4VtNLl6Ca4

 :grin:

Our sysadmin installed it on a PC next to me at work today, attached it to a big touchscreen HDTV (though he hasn't enabled the touchscreen yet). I played around with it.

WHY? Dear... fucking... God... why? As a desktop OS, this serves no purpose. Using Metro with a mouse is painful and idiotic. Within 10 minutes had found a problem already. Load our company web site in Metro IE10 and the Flash video we have on the home page (not my choice) doesn't work. Flash Player itself doesn't work right. Load the SAME PAGE in IE10 through the desktop, shit works just fine.

Now I'm going to have to test web sites in both IE10 desktop and this shittastic fucking abomination Metro. Like I didn't have enough fucking issues with IE fucking 9.

Fuck you, Microsoft.

Also, Azure doesn't backup.

They really ought to just roll over and DIE.

Times like this make me glad I went in a different direction.  Specifically what I mean is that the OS I understand isn't also used by normal people.  I feel bad for your guys.

It is a bit odd that the most popular OS company is now also producing the most byzantine OS ever.

Well, MS is familiar with Byzantine structures. Just look at their volume licensing programs. No one, even at Microsoft, really seems to know what the fuck is what in that monstrosity.

I'm sticking with Win7 for a good, long while.

I might switch to 8 if Metro mysteriously disappears in a service pack. If not, I'll wait for Windows 9 to be hurried out the door with Metro not-so-mysteriously disappeared.

They're sticking to their guns on Metro in their public-face.  We invested quite a bit developing apps for the platform, and MS was pretty clear that they feel the tablet/Metro style of computing is what they feel the future of computing will be.  I suspect that if they continue forcing this down our throats for the next iteration, we're going to see Linux/Ununtu development skyrocket. 

Metro simply isn't officework friendly. 

Metro might be the future of personal computing, but not for real work.  Although, I adjusted to The Ribbon.

:mob:

It's not like I had a choice there.  OpenOffice?

The ribbon made sense, though. Metro makes sense for tablets etc, it does not make sense for the normal PC.

I have 2 monitors, and it's not uncommon for me to be alternating between 3 or 4 different programs at the same time, all of which I have on-screen at the same time. And my first thought, when reading about how Metro is, was "I don't want this", followed by "well, guess that means linux'll be my next desktop when MS makes 7 suck dicks to 'incentivize' people into moving onto win8."

 :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real: :awesome_for_real:

/shudder

Google Apps is getting there, but it has a ways to go, especially on the spreadsheet app.

OpenOffice is what I switched to, but I really only use the word processor. The Ribbon can burn in hell.

I actually quite like the ribbon. What's pushing us away from Office is licensing.

Yeah, MS product licensing can diaf.

My company holds a lot of secure programming trainings for other companies that depend on every participant using the same VM (to avoid the "oh hey, I have something different at 0x0410000C" problem); we could do this with winxp through an agreement with the MS licensing dudes. Problem is that XP isn't really relevant anymore and we won't be able to get a similar licensing deal for Windows 7/8 (having to basically buy a separate copy every time a VM is deployed isn't going to work, sorry) -- so we'll probably end up having to migrate all of our VMs to Linux instead. I bet it'll be fun.  :oh_i_see:

VDI and a returning to a base snapshot before each class is the answer of the future!

The smart money is buying Linux shares right now. If MS keeps that Metro nonsense 2013 will be the year of the Desktop Linux!

Or the year of touchscreen monitors.

There is a place for the touchscreen implementation.  I think they could have done it without Metro and I still fully expect to have that phased out fairly soon.  I've been using a touchscreen laptop at the office and I'm thinking of getting another because I like it so much. 

And to be fair to Microsoft, Apple's latest offering isn't much better.  It's a resource hogging slog to use on the computers we've installed it on, in stark contrast to the peppiness of the Windows 8 computers that I have on hand.

 

Windows 7 is better though, so apart from being forced there is no reason to upgrade at the moment.

Fuck you. The ribbon makes no sense for any experienced user and caps any user in their ability to learn to use the system more efficiently.

Metro is the same, though I'm not as confident as you guys that it will die.

The ribbon was a different ok way of doing things. It wasn't non-functional. It was just no better than what it replaced and was change for change sake. Or more accurately for the sake of hitting users for an unnecessary upgrade fee.

I just opened up a win 8 instance in virtualbox. God, it's worse than i remembered.

I like the ribbon. vOv

In other news, I notice your Elite-styled avatar. Have you noticed the Limit Theory game that's made by one guy, and is basically shaping up to be a modern version of Elite? He says it even works on Win8, and for some reason he thinks Win8's mega.

Then again, he is 20, so I guess we're getting to see who are old farts by their Win8 reactions. :why_so_serious:

Yeah, not unless you need touchscreen capability (which I did). 

The ribbon is terrible because it did away with tool buttons which were far, far more intuitive and in your face.  Not only that, but it doesn't display all possible functions.  Experienced users will know "Oh, there's a command for this.." others will look at the ribbon and say, "Oh guess I can't do that."  That other programs copied it and then experienced this problem 10x because they had more functions (AutoCAD being the chief example I have) is probably the greatest sin of "the ribbon."

Metro isn't going anywhere, ever, and you can expect more boneheaded ui "INNOVATIONS" from MS in the future.  Sinofsky was replaced (in part since his job was split in two) by the creator of "The Ribbon" and "Metro" when he left.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/11/13/who_is_new_larson_green/

The other big reason the ribbon is such a fucking abomination is the limits it puts on customising your toolbars.

Prior to the ribbon I would explain regularly to my dev teams that MS Excel had best UI in the history of mankind. The reason their users wanted everything to look like excel was that excel was just that good.

Now, not so much.

The ribbon's creation can be laid at the feet of dumb users; it was created because when they would poll enterprise users of Office the biggest requests were for features that were already in Office. People literally didn't move or even extend their toolbars to find buttons or functions, so they made the context-sensitive ribbon that uses more real-estate to display as much as possible.

Personally I like it better but Microsoft never handles major UI overhauls well. They just kinda throw it in there and give you a thumbs up for luck.

Just installed win8 yesterday to replace win7. I like it. I like the new home screen (or whatever it is called) with all your apps right  there and the win7 desktop is just one click away when it's needed. I can see a lot businesses not being interested in it since you'd probably need or want to run it in desktop mode more so not sure what the point would be. For home use it's really nice though. My computer is used for gaming and Internet use and it does all that just fine. Having said that, my copy only cost like $35 so price wasn't an issue. I don't think I'd pay full price to upgrade to it from win7 but I would take it over win7 if I was buying a new computer.

Windows 8 is pretty good evidence that microsoft are scared they missed a paradigm shift (mobile, tablet... effectively casual computing) that could sideline them and break their monopoly. They're fairly confident their desktop monopoly is still solid so they're trying to leverage that to get a foothold. But it looks like they've failed to get much interest and windows tablet sales are miniscule. Apparently they've really burnt any OEM interest in windows tablets by pushing their own hardware, but Microsoft dreams of owning the entirety of the platform and is willing to lose billions for years so they might not even care.

I'll stay on Vista (it just plays games) and hopefully steam for linux will have enough games by the time it reaches end of life. I really won't have any need for Windows after that.

Watching Nokia collapse is pretty impressive though. They used to be such a power-house.

To be fair, the Nokia collapse started back in ~2007 -- basically they were content with their Symbian-based smartphones dominating the market, and reacted WAY too slowly to the iphone / android 'revolution' (they didn't have a viable touchscreen phone until uh 2011?). Sad thing is, the latest Lumia phones aren't bad at all, but... yeah.

Any parallels that may be drawn to Windows 8 are coincidental, I'm sure.  :awesome_for_real:

I was working at Motorola when they were doing their Linux phone, and I'm pretty sure Nokia was part of that industry consortium. They had their own linux devices out as well. But they were companies driven by the process of building diverse handsets to fuel their close relationships with carriers. Motorola thought "thin" handsets were enough to carry them through. And none of them realized it was moving to a single, carrier neutral device that competed on the basis of software and apps.

Microsoft under-estimated this too. That the mobile phone platform was going to become a sufficiently powerful computer for a lot of peoples day to day use. They don't want a software ecosystem in which they are not dominant because that means they have competition both in devices and apps. Plus that growth is coming at the cost of PC's where microsoft still has dominance and which funds all their money-losing divisions like X-box. I tend to think the tablet is going to hit a ceiling, it's not a PC replacement, though it might well be making many people realize they don't need a PC, but Windows 8 is all about trying to leverage their existing monopoly into tablet and phone domination.

Which isn't working out so well.. thank heavens, competition to microsoft is a good thing.

The frustration thing with Win8 is I don't know how to close apps in the background.  I had skype running in the background and I didn't know how to turn it off.  Meh.

Mouse over to left part of screen. Opens up a list of all running apps. Can close them there.

EDIT: Just found out windows key + tab does that too

I bought a i7-3770 machine and Windows 8 was the only option for it. Would have preferred Windows 7. Apparently with Windows 8 Pro you can downgrade it to Windows 7 for free if you want. In any event I installed Classic Shell (http://classicshell.sourceforge.net/) for the Start menu and after that it seems to be the same as Windows 7. The Classic Shell thing auto skips past the Windows 8 start screen.

These frustrating little quirks go away in about a week of using it, once you get used to the gestures and such. 

If that is supported and continues to be available without any major headaches, then I'd have no problem with upgrading to Windows 7 or 8 in the next 2-3 years when I build my next machine.

This (http://www.zdnet.com/microsofts-original-uncompromising-vision-for-windows-8-7000008683/)........

makes me think of


this: 

(http://fronttoback.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/homer_dreamcar.gif)

Just purchased a new PC and specifically sought one with Win 7. I had to take a lesser processor (i5), but at least I didn't have to get Win 8.

I think some of the systems with windows 8 pro (for which I assume you pay a healthy premium) allow you the "advantage" of downgrading to 7 if you jump through some hoops.

Apparently that's where a lot of their "sales" are coming from. Corporate licenses they can downgrade for more windows 7 desktops. Consumer enthusiasm and surface sales seem to be getting a pretty weak response for all the money they've spent promoting it.

Though I also think part of it is that Windows 7 is "good enough" people just don't care in general. Which is not so good for Microsoft when their model is based on one-off box sales for a shrinking (but still huge and lucrative) market. They knew this was coming though. They've wanted to move to a subscription model for ages but the consumer is not remotely interested.

Ahahah you believed Microsoft when they said they were dedicated to a platform. Ask everyone who ever bought a zune about that.

 :awesome_for_real:

Or any Windows Phone.

Not quite sure where to put this, using this thread as it's Mircosoft related:

Microsoft to shut down Messenger on March 15, move users to Skype (http://www.zdnet.com/microsoft-to-shut-down-messenger-on-march-15-move-users-to-skype-7000009574/)

End of MSN Messenger.

man times change.
mine used to be ICQ.
AIM.
Then X-Fire
Then MSN
Currently steamchat.

Guess what'sapp n other mobile shit is replacing MSN pretty soon,..stlll...100 users.

Oh stop that. You make me feel old. :oh_i_see:

I still remember my ICQ number, despite not using it for 10+ years...

First ICQ than
MSN
Skype

Nowadays Trillian (=MSN+Skype+IRC), Whatsapp and Steamchat.

Steamchat is nifty, but not having a log is annoying.

I still use AIM for like 5-6 people.

Other than that I use SteamChat and IRC. Someone made a free fork of XChat (HexChat) so I've switched to that as my IRC client from good old mIRC which sits in the pantheon of "programs everyone used and never ever paid for" next to WinZip and WinRAR.

Question:

Just bought parts for a new system.  Should I use Windows 7 or spend the money for Windows 8?  The system is primarily for working at home (Office Suite and journal writing/reading) and gaming.

Anyone know where I can get a free/cheap copy of Windows 7? 

Windows 7. 8 is a fucking abomination unless you have a touchscreen.

Windows 7. As far as cheap goes if you know anyone that goes to college you can get a discounted copy through college books stores. As far as free well there is always the Internet.

If you still have access to your college email account you can go hit Dreamspark and see what is offered.

I work at a university.  I always have a college email address!

I'll check it out.  Thanks.

Employees of universities typically get a further discount on Microsoft products.  Depending on how lax the bookstores are they do not even track the sales.  I have heard of a couple professors that made decent money on buying software over the years and reselling it.

I can get licenses for Win7/Win8 for $20 a pop as university staff through our online store, but students recently were forced to get their MS software from Dreamspark.

Dreamspark does however have a fuckload of stuff we didn't used to offer. We mostly offered Office, Windows, Visual Studio. Our deal with Microsoft on Dreamspark includes like everything they make under the sun.

Edit: Let me see what I can get right now as staff since I'm thinking about it...

Win 8 Professional, Win 7 Ultimate - $19
Office 2010 - $19
Adobe Suite 6 Master Collection - $575.79
Adobe Suite 6 Design - $200

Then a bunch of Statistics/flowcharting/etc crap only students really need.

I've been half tempted to buy CS6. That's a crazy discount.

I'm half tempted to find the money to get CS6 through you. And might.

Man, Microsoft typically fucks up and lets me register with my terpalum email for shit like this.

Not this time.

:(

I have finally seen a Surface in the wild. A Surface Pro is now incredibly tempting.

Are there any other Intel-based PC tablets with superthin keyboards, with stylus and pressure support, that run all Windows apps?

Remember the battery life on those Lum. Its quoted by MS as "up to 4 hours". Thats scary short.

I can't think of a better way to blow a bunch of money on something totally pointless than to say "Yes, I'd like to purchase a Surface Pro."

It is the actual technological equivalent of burning money.

That's why I am asking i there are others that are comparable.

My current (work-issued) laptop is an inch thick and I avoid using it whenever possible. When I travel for work, I set it on the desk at the office I am visiting and leave it there until I fly out. The iPad has spoiled me for portabilityr, & I would very much like to be able to actually use Windows in that form factor.

I don't own one, but I work with one of our dev units occasionally when customers need help with our apps.  To me, it lost everything I like about the Windows platform, yet didn't quite do enough to make itself different than having an iPad.  I can't see myself coding or working on either unit, though email/browsing and the occasional app would be neat.  It just feels like a step backward in productivity and flexibility for me.  But then again, I'm likely doing it wrong.

What are you doing that you need the windows platform when you aren't at your desk that a regular old $100-$400 tablet can't do?

I would like the win7 ultimate key if it's possible.
How do I paypal u the money?

He can't resell those.

As I recall from complaints on facebook, working with .psd's and .ppt's. Composing/editing, not just viewing

--Dave

Can't see a reason for doing that on anything other than a laptop. Like, at all.

Multiple pounds of weight in my bag, basically.

I suppose an Ultrabook would be just as light, but I'd really like to have the stylus and I haven't seen many Ultrabooks with a stylus.

profound.... SADNESS.

Lawl?

Oh shit, this means that the surface is bound to be a huge success right?  On a Microsoft related side bar I have been working through learning Microsoft MVC and for the first time I can recall MS feels like they are headed in the right direction with a web development tool, that viewstate shit needed to die in a bad way.

Unfortunately it's true. Like I said though; if you have a usable university email account you can always try to hit Dreamspark and see if your campus has some sort of deal with MS. I think they imply that they try to see if you're staff or if you're enrolled currently, but I call bullshit on that since it can't be automated.

We have a couple Samsung Ativ tablets coming with windows 8 pro for work.  I am not holding my breath on them being anything spectacular.  The battery life is supposed to be around 4 hours with a I5 processor.   I think we are still a generation away before the power / battery life is good enough for me.

FWIW Consumer Reports has a lot of nice things to say about the Surface, pretty much low app availability was the only knock. (Well, and that it was a little heavy for a tablet.)

I have no interest in Win 8, so no ulterior motives here, but isn't it possible to set up a fake university account? Or use someone's who has no desire to buy Windows? Or enroll into some free clases for a student-pass (that's great for the ego too, so much better than being a waitress!).

Just asking! :grin:

If you're going to be shady about it why wouldn't you just, uh, acquire it via the Internet instead of going to all that hassle?

Well borrowing someone's uni account and purchasing a cheap legit license for something that they'll never use is shady, but at least in the end you have a legit license and not one subject to randomly being turned off or loaded with Russian trojans.

Shit, if you're going to get Windows off of the net you'd be better off getting Mint or some other easy to use Linux distro.

I just had to install a copy of this so that I can reproduce IE 10 errors and wow do I hate it, thankfully it's just sitting on a VM and I don't have to actually use the damn thing.  Trying to do the most basic actions was like pulling teeth.  Everything you need to actually get to is hidden under the pretense of a "clean" UI, which it still doesn't manage to achieve.

I will definitely skip this iteration, if any game comes out that requires a Windows 8 only version of direct X I won't be playing it.

Given that supposedly the current win8 only DX has features which game developers don't really need, I don't think that'll be a major problem.

I'm forcing myself to use this at work, but with a decent machine; Core2Duo with 4 gigs of ram and dedicated video card. Its not utter shite with decent hardware. I can't imagine running it in VM Ware tho.

Considering the latest news say Windows 8 currently has a 1.72% share of the desktop OS market I don't see Win8-only games happening any time soon.

Also, and only tangentially related, Outlook 2013 can't do IMAP worth a damn. Just a caveat emptor. Stick to 2010.

If you're using straight up IMAP boxes just use Thunderbird or whatever.

Tell that to the entire staff at my uni department who's been using Outlook since the early oughts. Over the years I've converted two people to Thunderbird out of 16 or so. The rest of them look at me like I've asked them to paint Warhammer figurines.

The OMG WHITE EVERYWHERE color scheme in 2013 would bother me more than shitty IMAP compatibility, to be honest.

The way we do this is that we don't give them a choice. If you chose an IMAP account on our own servers over an exchange account on the university's exchange server, you're not using Outlook to IMAP to it because we're not going to support it when it doesn't fucking work right.

The only difference I'm aware of in Outlook 2013 IMAP is that you can't download only headers. What issues are you seeing?

Now that we are on a unified Exchange infrastructure for all faculty and staff for campus no one wants to go back to anything else. The sheer joy for everyone in being able to use the meeting maker to schedule a meeting and have it work trumps everything. Even with the teething problems and goofups with the move to Lync no one wants to ever go back to the centrex lines either. You can pry Lync from their cold, dead hands.

That's pretty slick, really.  Lync to bother someone via IM, then "let me show you my desktop" and sometimes "let me call you AND YELL AT YOU".

We do the same thing with WebEx Connect, which would also be directly integrated with our phones if we could get the money pried free to put in Cisco VOIP.

Our business offices use Lync and seem to like it. Sharepoint is the other big thing that everyone seems to want to have, but to be honest like 90% of the things that have sharepoints really really don't need a sharepoint and the functionality (along with time) is wasted.

Yeah, Sharepoint is really powerful but 99% of what people do with it, they could do in a Google Site without paying for all the extra power they're not using.

We use a lot of different web conferencing tools at work.
WebEx - neat for holding remote training sessions with the mini webcams, different color markers for 'writing on the screen', etc. Haven't really used it outside of that context.
GotoMeeting - probably the best one so far, except for the entire subscription bit.
Lync 2010 - one of our partners holds conferences over these. Slow and bulky as fuck, and the plugin to share the desktop doesn't work on our teleconference laptops. We just send the presentations to the partner, and have them share it / change slides when needed. Has a certain charm  :why_so_serious:

As for sharepoint, the only thing we use it for is real-time collaborative editing of word documents (which is pretty important when you have 3-4 people working on the same research paper or security evaluation report). I don't think there's any other way to do that, is there? (edit: anything with the word 'cloud' in it is not an option due to confidentiality / NDAs)

I thought Office 2010 Professional Plus is supposed to have the collaborative functions built-in, but I have not seen that work in practice yet. (Maybe it is that you need Sharepoint + Professional Plus to get that functionality?)

We use sharepoint as an a wiki, but we also didn't have to deal with the hassle of setting it up since all of our company's stuff is through a Office 365 subscription.

The new sharepoint actually isn't bad for a wiki.

I probably need to qualify anything I say about our stuff by pointing out that I work for the largest IT corp in the world.  Anyway, it's just peachy to me when everything is part of the same suite/manufacturer.  I'd expect that interoperability of various MS components will be some amount easier than if we were using disparate products.  Example, rooms.hp.com works very great, but lately whenever I ask if someone wants me to set up a virtual room they usually say "just use Lync to share desktop"... and they are right.  Using HPVR with Outlook requires a tool installed into Outlook, and if that decides to be shitty, I'll have a tougher time working that out.  Of course not everyone has Lync, and HPVR runs in a browser.

Doesn't the lync attendant run in a browser (with silverlight)?

Or (in our case) it doesn't.  :awesome_for_real:

Google Docs is IMO even better for the real-time collaboration stuff if you can get past needing to use Office specifically (fine for Word, not fine for Excel) but if cloud is a dirty word for you then obviously it won't work. They can't match Excel yet and won't for years though, so Excel services in Sharepoint is pretty unmatched in that respect.

Possibly but I've never had to think about it.  If I'm sharing with clients I just use a HP virtual room, and I have my own teleconference line.  My new laptop will likely do PC-VOIP but also haven't tried that, even in Lync.

Of course Excel is the main problem with Google Docs/Drive.  For Word it doesn't matter because the main function is easy enough: make readable document.  What also is terrible is the Drive spreadsheet on mobile.  Yeesh.  I suppose those who use other things like PowerPoint and Project and Visio will have similar concerns.

It's funny how the word cloud is so mutable.  I described my early design thoughts on changing the backup infrastructure shell scripts to "cloud-based" and got some smiles and nods.  The word "cloud" is like IT ketchup.

And for that reason alone I loathe and despise the term.

5 years ago one application was "a hosted application". We released a new version of another piece software using the same way of structuring it as the application hosted 5 years ago. Suddenly, it's "in the cloud". :mob:

My favorite was a web site host who claimed their service was better because it was "in the cloud."

:facepalm:

I offer secure web hosting for $100/mo.  It's safe because it doesn't rely on that cloud technology. :oh_i_see:

I like where this thread is going.  Of course, I've learned to stop worrying.

And carry a towel.

Windows 8 nerd rage (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTYet-qf1jo).

The tech market is just a disaster at the moment. Ultra-books are basically macbook air clones and way too expensive, and they don't need touch. Microsoft is using it's monopoly power to push windows 8 but a tablet is pretty much either casual computing or a big brother to the mobile phone. A tiny fraction of these people want office on their tablet. Meanwhile the OS makes no sense for the areas where microsoft is used. And they've done a pretty good job of annoying the OEM's even though it's unlikely those people will find a spine and do anything about it like foster alternatives.

The desktop market is as much in contraction because there is no convincing need to upgrade. The ageing consoles are holding back games, software is being driven by the mobile market making existing desktops more than powerful enough, intel is focused on mobile chips not desktop progression and windows 8 is a desktop downgrade. Microsoft is massively discounting it (apparently the price rises substantially soon) and still no one cares. They'll sell a lot of copies because they have a monopoly position on desktops and have stopped selling windows 7 but that's not a virtue of the product.

I had someone bring a PC into my office today complaining it was "slow." I have no idea what they did with it, but when I booted it and looked at the specs, my first thought was "I raided in EQ2 with this exact chip, wtf you can't run Word on it?!"

Well the old joke there were two sorts of applications that chew up all the ram and every CPU cycle, high end games and the new version of word (barring the tiny niche that actually do grind a PC doing real work).

But I'm not sure office++ is really motivating people. I get the feeling it ran out of features people care about some time ago.

So I have had a windows 8 pro tablet sitting on my desk for a bit over a week now at work. (samsung Ativ smart pc pro) All said and done its not a bad piece of hardware. It has a I5 processor so there is decent speed.  Battery life is not great but we knew this when we bought them. Roughly 4 hours on average office user use.  The bezel is a bit big and if the screen went from edge to edge it would be a lot nicer looking. Office 2010 is not very nice on a touch screen and office 2013 is not looking much better.

That being said Windows 8 is just awkward to use even on a tablet. However I can see where Microsoft is going assuming they stick with it. My wish is a tablet with 12 hours minimum battery life that has as much power as any desktop machine with half the weight of the Ativ and no active cooling (the fan gets loud!). Plug it into a docking station at work so I can use my big monitors, keyboard, mouse to do actual work. Then I can take it home or to a meeting and use it as a tablet. Will that ever happen? Maybe but its going to be a few years down the road.

It's a ultrabook with the guts in the screen and a detachable hinge. It will suit the people who want to pay a lot of money to run office on a platform not designed for that sort of thing (and even less convenient since it's heavier and more resource intensive) without the style and integrated eco-system that made the ipad popular.

Actually in our case we are looking at using tablets on the manufacturing floor for our QA people. Our applications require a full computer and carrying a ultrabook around and being forced into using a keyboard isn't a great idea. We will probably end up with the toughpads that panasonic makes but we wanted to see if windows 8 made sense.(which it doesn't, at least not yet). As far as the ipad goes we have tried them but it just will not work for our situation.  Keep in mind we are not a home user which something like a Ipad or a Nexus tablet makes more sense for.

I thought it was something like that. Microsoft still has a solid monopoly and eco-system lock in on the corporate market and can extend that to mobile data terminals. There's people making those already though a surface tablet seems way overkill for a data collection device, but microsoft can make the alternatives difficult if it chooses to.

But with Windows 8 they really wanted the domestic market and the "flash" of exciting gear. Otherwise they end up being like IBM. Boring gear you are mandated to use at work but not nearly as interesting as what you use at home. And long term that makes them vulnerable.

Ye gods. I was just told to order 8 laptops for our training lab and it seems the options are 'shitty processor, shitty OS or both'.

Dammit. I just got a working model for win7, you sheepfuckers.

You can still buy laptops with windows 7.  All of Dell's business grade laptops should still give you windows 7 as a option. No idea what your budget is though and if you are in the low end range you may be out of luck.

Ok so I finally decided to take a look at Windows 8, by way of torturing the wife with a new laptop (good) with Win8 on it (not so good). Until this very moment I wasn't interested in it so had avoided this thread. I'm going to start thumbing through, but I need to get this off my chest first:

What. The. Fuck.

The basic settings accessible through metro make the fucking iPhone settings menu look like the space shuttle. I can't even figure out how to connect to a network that has SSID broadcast off. And forget trying to find the MAC address. And fucking wifi keeps flickering in and out of connection with no indication on what's failing in the basic interface. They obfuscated the desktop mode, but that's the only place all that shit still exists!

And that was all before I realized the Mail program doesn't support POP3, used by every fucking ISP ever. At one point I had all her emails (she refuses to ditch the email box from our ISP) route through gmail. Then I said fuck it and put on MS Office 2007 so she could have Exchange.

I finally just set up everything so she could use desktop mode fulltime, with the caveat that there's no longer a start button but instead start "tiles". Which she'll never need because I put all her shit in the desktop task bar.

So I think I know what they're thinking: proprietary UI we can own and then we can MTX people for deeper features (like those stupid-ass netbooks with basic Win7 that charge you for shit like wanting to change the background image), and get kickbacks from all the geeksquad calls.

The problem is that MS is no Apple. Not that Apple is any better at intuitive design (and Jobs' fixaction on skeuromorphic design really sucked). But what Apple has is a loyal fanbase willing to suck down change, even change only for the sake of change.

MS does not have that. They have an audience grugglingly conceding the computers are cheaper when it comes bundled with shovelware and a stupid UI.

I swear, their OSes are like Star Trek movies: every other one sucks.

I told her we'd give it a week. If she hates it, I'm nuking it from orbit and putting on Win7. Or return it and drop an extra $300 for an Air.

Classic Shell with "skip Metro" checked.

What do you have if you do this?  Seems there is a lot of complaining about the OS in general, so would this alleviate the complaints, leaving us with Win7.1?  I'm in no hurry to update, so far no one has forced me, but you never know.

Yeah, I thought there was no way to do that sort of thing. Was I mistaken or is this something from a recent patch?

Classic Shell is a free app, not part of Windows.

Yes, it makes it Windows 7.1.  I have to deploy 8 for my end-users, so I'm okay with it being functionally the same.  I do NOT want to have to teach them how to use 8.

Had an opportunity to get Windows 8 Pro for free, so took it. Bought Stardocks' Start8 for 4.99$ (similar to Classic Shell, but more features)

Start8 provides a startmenu, allows to boot directly into the desktop and to disable the charm corners. I activated all options and haven't seen metro ever again.

I like how Win8 was so bad it turned Stardock into a company producing a legitimately useful product instead of stuff for people to skin their OS into an ugly anime monstrosity.

Thanks!

Going to grab that. Wish I read this when you posted it. Woulda been a good April Fools joke. Now it's just a mundane problem solver  :-)

Interesting facts about the Windows 8 'store'.  (http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/5-reasons-why-the-windows-8-store-is-a-complete-mess/)Can be barely called a 'store'. More of a front for shovelware and the dregs of the internet. Makes Android Marketplace look like a place to take your mother-in-law.

The Windows 8 store sounds like an awesome place for a developer to make some cash. Little to no competition and no one minding the store for the win.

I will still never, ever, ever give them any more money.

I'm hoping Win7 is the last windows I'll ever buy.  With Valve trying to lead the Linux Gaming Revolution now, I may just switch over.

Have you tried installing, say, Team Fortress 2 on Linux? It isn't exactly a walk in the park for an amateur Linux user. I have, and my conclusion is that unless you have the absolutely most vanilla Linux install, with only one monitor, a known video card, etc, you're going to run into all sorts of trouble. Not to mention that TF2 on Linux looks like absolute shit and runs worse.

Yeah the 'Linux gaming revolution' stuff is *years* away.

The Linux gaming revolution will literally never ever happen.

(http://media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lwxswadR6N1qlfwzk.gif)

As much as I want Linux to be a viable gaming platform, I just installed kubuntu 12.10 on my gaming rig. What I experienced there was unlike what I've experienced any other time I've tried to fiddle with linux (I used kubuntu back at work 3-5 years ago or something): I could open up the KDE variant of the start menu, but I couldn't select anything within that, with the mouse. Keyboard worked. Same with any and all programs I started up.

Apart from that, uh, minor issue, everything worked much more smoothly compared to the previous time I used it (the problems were mostly X-related, with me having to fix the configuration and installing updated ATI-drivers etc). But I've no idea why that problem happened, and unlike the other problems I've had in linux, I've no idea what to do to fix this.

LIEZ! 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 is the year of linux on the desktop!

Holy shit, windows 8 is like a bad infection, it just doesn't go away. I have to use it for a class I have so I used my student copy on an extra hard drive I had installed. For years I have had multiple versions of windows on different drives and the option to boot from any of them has been clean and easy to use. 8 does some shit to windows 7 even though its on another drive so that windows 7 wont boot and I just get a blank black screen with a mouse courser. I had to physically disconnect the drive with 8 on it before it would let me boot into 7 successfully again.

Also holy shit, windows 8 is a gigantic steaming pile of shit.

It's like they took Windows 7 and decided to merge it with Vista and ME.

(http://www.extremetech.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/desktop-market-share.jpg)

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/149762-four-months-in-windows-8-adoption-is-almost-at-a-standstill

It's a disaster. Plain and simple. Not only is it not getting adopted current users, they actively speak out against it. Windows is having to cut prices by 75% to even get manufacturers to put it on their machines, and it's murdering sales. If I was a retailer, I wouldn't want to carry the things. It's a waste.

It's very much building for a market they want instead of the one they have.  Only instead of 200k customers, they had most of the desktop market.

And it's all because of two stupid things they took out that can bed added back through freeware.  Morons.

What was the second thing? I can only think of the Start button (which you linked to a freeware thing earlier in thread, which has been awesome, thanks!)

Two weeks in and my wife spends all of her time in desktop mode. Easy when you only need five programs in the taskbar, including Minecraft for the kids (and, well, me).

Paelos' chart matches every other one I've seen too. I'm quite sure MS is not a fan of this. I wouldn't be surprised if whatever yutz pushed for metro isn't even there anymore.

The Metro start instead of a desktop makes a huge barrier due to first impressions.

Pretty sure that yutz is Steve Ballmer.

Then those are the metrics he deserves  :grin:

Ah. Yea. That was the first few hours of my pain. She just doesn't ever shut it off so largely remains in desktop mode.

Until, apparently, and as I just found out, you want to open images. Those images won't open in a Picture Viewer window. They'll dump you back in the stupid Metro UI until you fiddle with changes to make it stop.

I would accept metro and the charms stuff if there was some compelling reason under the hood to upgrade. As is, it seems like it's Windows 7 with a shittier UI. I'm failing to see the technological advances here, and MS doesn't seem to really be running out the amazing leaps forward to try and convert the techies. And I'm pretty much offended at the rumors (facts?) that the new DirectX will be Win8 only in order to push sales, not for any technical reason.

Well, .iso files can be now mounted natively in Explorer, without the need of a programme like Clone CD.
The programme search that opens when you press "Win-Button" has been somewhat improved over Windows 7.
The Taskmanager looks nicer.

Thats about it.

Same with Server 2012.  Interesting bug in 2012 which I haven't tried to duplicate yet, nor really want to, but I'm going to need to see if it happen in Win 8...

We make a ton of recordings.  WAV format, so we convert them to MP3 to save space.  It involved a DEL command.  No biggie.  Except it seems that 2012 will remove the file but not deallocate the space.  Guess what happens when your 100 GB disk has 90 GB of full non-existent files?

Have you poked it with process explorer or handle? I haven't mucked with 2012 yet, but it sounds like the open file handles issue random linux apps can have where the pointer is deleted, but someone still technically has the file open so the space is never freed.

Honest question, have we seen a lot of advances in any facet of computing since Windows 7 came out? Other than moving shit to small devices (which I don't really consider a technological leap) I'm failing to think of much.

Linux has been making it's own desktop advances, but they're not revolutionary to anyone but linux.

Most of the tech advancements I've seen in the past few years have been virtualization based, and a steady migration of data storage to online sources. Very few major alterations. Even Win7 wasn't that much of a jump from Vista's post patch experience. Vista only sucked on release, it was kinda decent towards the end.

Even then, if I'm going to shell out cash for an OS, I kind of expect some form of notable improvement. Ubuntu can get away with it's tiny moves from version to version because it's free.

:nda:  :awesome_for_real:

Then we'll skip it, like we did with Vista (and that version of DirectX had a lot more to attract developer interest).  Game developers aren't in the business of promoting Windows upgrades.  We push hardware upgrades, but there the relationship is reversed (hardware vendors kiss our ass and shower us with free hardware to push the envelope).

Microsoft?  We build for what the installed base is, and just as it was never there for Vista, it won't be there for Win8.

--Dave

I'm gonna be a contrarian and say

- Windows isn't going anywhere for a long long time.

- Many of the basic ideas in Win8 are good. (Lots of the implementation needs work).

- Windows needs to embrace mobile.

The fact that Win8 can be "mostly fixed" with some freeware is indicative that it isn't that broken. It mostly feels like an alpha. It'll probably get fixed. Frankly, what most needed to happen was a way for standard menu bars and scroll bars and the rest to become touch-friendly. Metro isn't that, but a lot of the design language is.

Win RT, on the other hand, is a complete waste.  :grin:

Can we stop saying any company needs to "embrace" mobile.

Everyone is embracing it.

They're mostly doing a shit job.

Raph, you just like being able to finally draw on a computer like it was a sketch pad.  And Metro is a decent touch UI.  It's a shitty mouse UI, and forcing it on everyone to create cross-platform mobile systems cloud synergy, or whatever buzzword salad was in the bong-water in Redmond when they made that call, is proving to be a fuckup of incredible proportions.  

It might have been excusable if they could still believe people would just accept whatever OS was most current when they bought a system, but when people proved willing to pay a premium to downgrade from Vista, they lost that excuse.

Win8 is built on the belief that people need a common interface for both mobile and desktop.  And they don't need it, or want it.  "Embracing Mobile" doesn't mean trying to make the computer I sit down at and use for hours at a time work like the one I pull out of my pocket and swipe at with one thumb for thirty seconds.

--Dave

EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I still believe that the day is coming when the computer I carry in my pocket is my primary computing device.  But it will operate in different metaphors, different UI's, when it's plugged into a full size monitor and keyboard than when I'm swiping at it with my thumb.

The only two things MS is going to accomplish with forcing Metro on normal PCs is
1) making win8 irrelevant, or
2) do the same thing to programs as the consoles have done for games (FPS games in particular).

It feels like we have hit a wall the last years. I have been looking at new PCs latley (mostly window shopping, cant afford an upgrade), and CPU wise nothing is going on.

My i7 920 @ 3,6 Ghz was bought in early 2009 and there is still nothing that requires me to upgrade. CPUs used to be obsolete after 2 years, nowadays it's 10% more IPC every generation and maybe 100 Mhz more. Thats for intel. AMD is lagging - literally - years behind.

It's just sad.

While the clock frequency hasn't increased much the last few years, the number of cores have, and I'd bet that you'd start noticing the lack of power of old CPUs when the new generation of consoles are released and start getting utilized properly.

Through half a dozen reboots and enabling and disabling the drive?  I through a battery of tools at it.  One set says there is 13GB on the disk, the other says it's got the full 100 GB.  All say only 2.7 GB free.  Move and copy within an explorer window works, so it seems to only be issuing a delete command through the command line.  As I said though, I haven't done detailed tests.  I was too pissed and too tired to bother.

Another interesting quirk is that I had a program which needed an earlier version of .NET.  2012 brought the VM to its knees throwing a dozen errors containing hundreds of MBs of data every second.

PS - Fuck Microsoft's KMS implementation.  Make a real goddamn interface already if you want us to manage an always on key server.  (And what the fuck needing a Win 7 or 8 instance to issues Win 8 keys?  Why the FUCK can't I use 2008 or 2012 for what should be a server function?)

This upgrade has been nothing but headaches, and each time it's about a server upgrade just "not working" because MS has to fuck about with things every damn iteration.  I won't even get into the consultant whom my boss "had a good feeling about".  I'm about ready to torch my server room and start from scratch.  Fuck business continuity.

Are you sending the delete commands from CMD or PowerShell? Curious to see if it works from PowerShell but not the other.

Stuff like that is why my boss won't go to 2012 for anything until at least SP1. Shit, we are just now pushing towards 2008 R2 (2008 Enterprise for 32bit legacy) as our standard. We still have production machines running windows 2000  :ye_gods:

It's built on the belief by MS they need to own a common UI across multiple devices. I'm sure they think "but Apple did it". Except, well, Apple didn't and won't because they're not lacking in design or common sense skills.

MS will never admit they were wrong about Metro for PC, but they will hastily release something that does to 8 what they did to Vista. They're not in a commanding role anymore. Retailers are offering downgrade services for the remaining hardware makers not caught up. Software developers aren't pulled along by 8. Web developers treated IE10 as just another minor edge case, though theoretically IE10 on Win7 could change that. The Surface isn't selling any better than Windows Mobile devices, and people are so used to bitching about their console/settop box UIs that just nobody can even make the excuse that metro worked well on Xbox (which it doesn't but there people have zero choice).

Design failure they probably knew about a year and a half ago but were too far down the path of business inertia they couldn't change direction.

Computing power in our pocket is already here. Except the devices are designes mostly for consumption. Content creators can create on them, but only very specific things. Until what we consume moves beyond 2D games and movies, I don't see us needing much of a paradigm shift of the creation tools that exist.

CMD.  I wrote an AutoIt script to do all the conversion.  (The old process used a BAT file.  They're more or less the same, but the new script has a bit more error checking and convenience features, like generating an HTML file so our quality control person can search that instead of the thousands of mp3 we record each day.)

Maybe it can be done, but as I said, I didn't do any testing to reproduce or see if I could get around it yet.  It's taken me since Friday to calm down enough to do my bitching here today.

It just occurred to me why MS didn't learn a lesson from Vista, and won't from this.  They don't need to.  People who don't like Win8, what are they going to do?

--Dave

Not buy it and wait until Win9, like we did with Vista, and ME. And also, bitch about it on the internet.

Or pay extra to get Win7 instead.  My point is that Microsoft has reached a point of market dominance that makes them immune to the normal rules of tech companies.  They can completely screw the pooch in ways that would sink any normal company, and it won't hit their bottom line at all.  They have to reach a level of arrogance in their invincibility where they're not even trying anymore before it opens up the possibility of a disruptive innovator.

--Dave

This is assuming they'll swallow their pride and fix what's wrong with win8. Hopefully they will, because my last experience with Kubuntu wasn't what it was 3 years ago, where while it was a bit of work to get working, at least the problems made sense and seemed fixable.

(and rest of rant)

Yes, I agree with all that!


No, no... it's built on the belief that people need a common OS for desktop and mobile. The biggest problem with it is that it has two UIs that are poorly integrated.


It does in the sense of being able to open the same files, use the same software, and move your stuff back and forth. Or connect to the multiple decades worth of software that are impossible to replace or do without that fill multiple industries.


And once again we agree. :)

Enterprise will make them.

Raph, one of us sucks at this "being a contrarian" thing.

The synthesis is that Win8 was probably a good strategic decisiosn but the implementation sucks donkey balls.  The new cross-platform metaphors should have been phased in more subtly, allowing desktop users to keep doing what they were doing while offering mobile users some value-added that might draw people to Windows on the phone, and tablets splitting the difference.  Win8 is really a tablet OS from a UI POV, and the market isn't ready to make the tablet the default computer system (if they ever are, about the only major computer tasks that tablets are better for are websurfing from the couch and drawing).

Microsoft has been pushing the tablet form factor since Bill Gates stole it from Go Computers back in the 80's.  Here they are, almost at the finish line, and they still find a way to muck it up.

--Dave

Buy a tablet.

Your argument held until about two years ago. Desktop sales have tanked. Laptops are declining. The usual way MS forced adoption on users was through OEM and corporate proxies. Like WinXP before it, Win7 is more than fine enough for corporations for the next two years at least.

I disagree.

• First, this would hold if Windows Mobile had any prayer of being competitive (it's current "on the rise" comes from cannabalizing Blackberries  :oh_i_see:).
• Second, the metro end user UX would matter if people commonly thought of their Xbox in the same breath as their PC or laptop.
• Third, people aren't unifying their desk/laptop with their phone (or console) outside of the geek set who has already done it through the usual set of software-based baling wire and duct tape.

Does the average consumer need to ensure their Excel doc works on their phone, tablet, desktop and Xbox? No. Are there some who do? Yep. And they already have solutions that they're not going to replace until their work IT forces them to. And IT is not going to force them to with this POS. They'll wait the afforementioned year or two.

MS a year to make positive noise to fix this, or they'll be writing down a whole lot of zeroes on Win8 capital.

How many desktop sales aren't happening because there's no need to to keep up with today's games, since the limiting factor when designing games these days are 8 years old and has 1/64th the memory and god knows how little computing power compared to my mediocre i7 and is limited to 720p maximum?

Most of our "PC" games are either console ports, or built with engines that are primarily aimed at consoles and just happen to be able to compile for Windows (because of the 360).  We broke the upgrade escalator.  We keep the video card upgrades going with raw poly counts and texture density, but CPU and memory, we haven't done anything to push those in 10 years.  Hell, how many games are there that can even use *two* cores?

--Dave

My main desktop is still a Q9450 processor with 8GB of RAM and whatever 3 year old graphics card a user here sent me (name withheld).

It still runs nearly everything at maximum, except Crysis. But I don't play bad games, so whatever.

I don't think this is a discussion about the power of computers, or at least it shouldn't be.

The only reason "the power of computers" is brought up is because where I used to upgrade once every year, maybe twice, I now upgrade once every 3 years, and I'm sure I could've continued to use my already-3 year old q2quad with the gf285 the 1-2 years since I upgraded as well, if only the 285 hadn't died in a manner consistent with a motherboard frying itself. The desktop market simply "died" because there's no need to continually buy new hardware.

Desktop computing died because computing moved to laptops and gaming moved to consoles, both consumer preference and ability to generate revenue. And then smartphones and then tablets started handing both their shirts.

This relates because MS deluded themselves into thinking it was the early 2000s and they could do whatever they want because they own the computers and users.

They're wrong. But unlike 2007, they're now wrong in an age where people are moving to consuming content on tablets which they have no competitive presence in, after smartphones which they never will, and neither of which have games driven solely by how many more voxels can be added each year. With them follows that developers will stick with what works well.

tl;dr: MS is fighting the last war.

That ship has sailed. Close to a 9:10 ratio of the companies/universities I know the future software maintenance plans of are skipping Win8, and a smaller portion of those are telling their users that they're not going to get a single bit of support if they try to use their employer provided upgrade cash (in offices where people are given autonomy in purchasing their own mobile equipment) to buy anything with Win8. The university I work for is adding knowledge base articles for doing basic stuff (setting up the VPN, connecting to our campus wireless, etc) but in my shop we're telling any faculty/grad student who comes to us with a university purchased laptop/device that we're not even going to entertain a request for help if it runs Win8/RT.

The only current game I know of on PC that really takes advantage of multiple cores is Battlefield 3, which can use 4+, and actually greatly benefits from it.

Also I laugh at anyone who says that desktops are dead or will be dead in any reasonably short timeframe. Sorry, no one does real work on a tablet. I don't consider reading/answering email "real work" either (also email is for olds). No researcher, no business office user, no student, no professor here is going to be doing their actual work on a tablet. I don't see that changing in a lot of offices either.

My office still uses XP.

I am finally moving my last few users to 7. We actually bought a few 8 tablets and really the hardware, battery, OS is just not there. However with the start button apps that are popping up I could probably get away with it if I really had to(which I won't). Not holding my breath on 9 but traditionally Microsoft has "fixed" the issues in the next version.

Desktops are a interesting discussion, in our office environment 7 year old machines do anything we want. The only program that is driving any kind of push forward performance wise is Solidworks which is more GPU  than processor dependent. In the computer market I think we have just reached saturation point for desktops and people only replace them when they die. There is very few new technologies that are forcing upgrades.
In a few years we are probably going to hit that point with the Ipads and tablets of the world. I know very few users that actually upgrade their tablets.

Sure they may hand them down to the kids but they are not replacing them unless they are broken. I just do not see the long term growth unless they figure out a way to obsolete the machines somehow. The last few generations really did not bring anything new to the table and with the Retina screens you are getting close to the best screens you can use. Its becoming more and more gimmicky things to help drive the sales.

Notice what all of the tablets have in common?  You can't easily replace the batteries.  After 2-4 years, you'll only be able to use them 'tethered', which will be even more inconvenient than a laptop in the same condition.

--Dave

Yea but the batteries are a issue on all electronic devices. That in of itself will not keep the current massive growth in tablets going. Once you reach saturation point then you get into a similar situation as desktops. You are just replacing things when they die. If you look at Apples growth plan they are really expanding overseas to try to keep the growth going. Similar things with Samsung and many of the Chinese manufacturers. I guess my point is once everyone gets one what is the driver for a new one? You will always have the apple fanatics that want a new one but in reality that is a small percentage of actual users. There will always be new gadgets (see the smart watch rumors) that will drive electronics so its not like the cycle will end but you never know what will be next.

This is why Microsoft better be a bit less arrogant. This wasn't true even 4 years ago, but it sure as fuck is now:

That's been happening for YEARS. Back in 1999 I was told to buy a mac by my university. I didn't, because working on MacOS makes me feel less productive. Still does. But that's besides the point - I don't think Microsoft cares about the "Had To Spend My Parents Money/Scholarship Money on a Computer and Got an Overpriced Mac" market. Especially since, you know, they don't make hardware.

Edit: Yes, I'm aware they make some hardware, but they don't make laptops/desktops in house. Ain't no college kid, I don't care how white they are, gonna get any work done on a fucking tablet.

I kinda chalk this up to every generation being dumber than the previous one. If you took that picture here I work you'd see something similar but you'd also see an equal number of shitty Beats headphones.

One of my best friends has been on an embarrassing whirlwind of dating and girlfriends who last a month and he finally broke down and told me he doesn't think he can date anyone younger than him now (he's very recently 30), since anyone he dated in their mid-20's seems to have terminal ADD and can't not look at their phone every 2 minutes. Guess I should be happy my tastes have turned to women my age.

Yea, it seems to be a very sharp divide too.  I'm old enough not to have grown up with cell phones, but not by that much.  But people just 4-5 years younger than me have had them their entire lives it seems.  On the other hand, I don't know that the younger generation is dumber, so much as just has developed a different set of skills.  They seem to be pretty good at dealing with high volumes of low information things (like tweets, texts, etc), but have a lot more difficulty with things even as long as a newspaper article.

Four or five weeks ago I called Dell to ask if I could get a Windows 7 laptop (for my son's birthday in May) then so I did not have to get Windows 8.  I was told that all their machines were Windows 8 already.  I hung up.  After catching up on this thread (mostly) I went to Dell's website today to look at Laptops again. By Jove! You can select Windows 7 or Windows 8 for any laptop.

Ouch.

You probably could with a keyboard, but then you might as well have a Macbook Air.

We're trying to implement iPad use in the office and it's just so cumbersome.  First off, non-tech people just don't get it any more than they do with computers.  Second, non-tech people have had years of fucking stuff up on computers, so they are a little more savvy with a keyboard and mouse. 

I'm not anticipating a full fledged transition to tablets without a better user interface than a touch screen alone.

I wish we had an Airbus to Microsoft's Boeing.

I'd be totally ok with the EU (or anyone else, except the Chinese or Apple) taking up a few hundred million € of taxpayer money and creating an open-sourced, consumer friendly, security-focused, linux-based NewOS.  Which is than adopted by agencys and university/schools and licensed free to OEM PC sellers, thus insuring swift adoption.

I dream too much.  :oh_i_see:

Or an alternate reality in which IBM's awesome OS/2 never got abandoned and is still here thriving and offering an alternative to the Windows world.

Yep, I'm pricing them now, and retailers who told me at Christmas that I couldn't get a Windows 7 machine are suddenly opening up to the idea. Gee, I wonder how their holiday sales looked?  :grin:

True but that doesn't mean the desktop doesn't fade into being just power-user only equipment outside of work. I look at my kids and their friends and they all make do with old hand me down laptops (my daughter uses a 7 year old MacBook that I gave to her when I got a new one, 2 iterations ago for me). They wouldn't even pay for internet except for NetFlix and having the tablet(s) connected, making do with cell phone plan for texting / emailing / and even web browsing.

And on the other end, the elderly gravitate to more simplistic tablet computing experience. My mom rarely ever touches her desktop anymore since she got an iPad (but now retired, spends most of her time playing single player (puzzles) and multiplayer (dozens and dozens of ongoing Words with Friends games as well as some others) Facebook games.

You might see that more often, on a smaller scale, now that Microsoft has gone off the deep end.

Ah, good old Apple hate. Never goes out of style.

Heh. Mac has dominated the college scene since we were calling the internet "VAX"  :awesome_for_real:

The real issue isn't batteries, it's that there's no such thing as "upgrade" at all. Sure, consumers don't upgrade laptops any more than they did desktops. But the difference is that tablets are theoretically priced at CE device levels so consumers don't mind replacing them faster than they'd replace a laptop.

Which is delusional bunk. Want an iPad Apple will support? $500 every 2 1/2 years. Or you can buy a laptop for the same amount and get 5 years out of it easy, 7 if you stretch it. No idea on Android tablets, but I would bet if Amazon is serious about non e-readers, they'll follow suit. And MS? Heck, I'm surprised they haven't dropped support already.

I spent $850 on my iPad. I will not buy another one, nor any other tablet. Whatever my company doesn't give me I can more than live without until something interesting happens on them again. More than happy to watch Netflix on my iPhone if my iPad finally kicks.

If you think that apple sales are limited to AV geeks and wealthy college students, you may want to think again. Six years ago we had one, out of 30 or so, professors using a mac at my engineering school. Fast forward to today, and its at least 7, including the chair of the department, who exclusively use a mac. This is despite the fact that tons of engineering software has to be run in Windows because there is no mac correlate. They simply have us boot camp their laptops or have a grad student run the windows stuff. They are tired of the security anxiety and the complexity and just want to get on with it. Also, even for older proffs macs have a 'cool' quality that Windows has lost long long ago.

Don't get me wrong, it'll all end in tears, but this -is- happening.

My 96 year old grandmother has an Ipad and follows my blog.

Just saying.

My grandmother would curse your grandmother for using blackmagic.  :why_so_serious:

The vast majority of Apple's revenue and unit sales are CE devices. Then laptops, and a rounding error of desktops. Their installed base as percentage of total computers out there hasn't actually changed all that much over the years. It's not just AV geeks and wealthy college students. But it's not like they've skyrocketed from the 9% position they had 10 years ago on the backs of Mac OSX users.

My own primary device is a Mac with MS Office in VM ware. Goddamn thing hard locks once a day and unlike actual protected memory, there isn't an equivalent Task Manager keystroke to recover from. I mostly live in VMware except for Adobe stuff.

What's cursing then, green magic?

Half a bottle of moonshine I think.

Supporting Apple's stuff has only increased my belief that Macs are overpriced garbage for bitch idiots.

I work at a fairly enormous engineering university and the rate of Macbook Pro purchases has gone up, but we still only have a small handful of Mac Desktop users and that's mostly limited to the odd business office person or prof who doesn't do research anymore. The fact that the majority of our engineering software doesn't have a Mac version is a killer, and some of our Mac diehards have complained to our vendors about it.

Best response we got from one of our vendors: "No one does real work on a Mac."

I'll bet that didn't piss anyone off, at all. :grin: :awesome_for_real:

I grow hoarse telling this to the engineering students that come in asking me to install software X on the computer lab machines because they all own macs. I tell them that they should have bought a computer for engineering work.

And its mostly the girl engies that are driving this madness.

Unfortunately, the ability to instantly ssh from terminal to a unix machines makes some engies think that they -are- getting a serious machine. I tell them that if by 'serious' they mean that they don't have to spend the 3 minutes it takes to install X-Win-32 with xforward on their Windows PC and then ya sure, they are dead serious.

Yeah, the response wasn't good. Then most of those people bought optiplexes so they could use said vendor's software since for some reason none of our Mac users want to bootcamp.

My favorite cry is, "But they have a Mac version of Matlab! Why isn't anything else available!?".

Like outside of I think Matlab, TecPlot (nevermind you're just running effectively the *nix version via X11), and some AutoDesk stuff (which is scrub-tier compared to the stuff most people here use) I don't think a single one of our more used engineering programs have a native Mac port. Yeah, you can run a lot on clusters but for doing work on your own PC? Nope.

FFS just use PuTTY (or SecureCRT which we provide free) and XMing/Cygwin-X if you're going to just SSH all the time and save some money. You don't need a $2600 tricked out iMac to SSH into a cluster, so don't be mad if the Dean (or your adviser if you're a grad student) doesn't feel like spending the money. If you want your dumb Mac shit, spend your own funds.

I have 3 Mac users and they are all electrical engineers. The hoops they jump through to make some of their software is funny to watch. Being engineer types they just will not ask for help from us IT / IS types. Thankfully nothing else in our company runs on OS X so I highly doubt we will have many more popping up. We have quite a few Iphone users but I honestly don't care to much about them. We just force them to setup their own Itunes account if they want any kind of apps so to us its just a glorified email checking device to us.

My practice management software is mac based.  It's fucking awesome to deal with.  The lack of software development in my industry is really staggering.  There should be more that you can do with iPads, but nobody is even trying, really.  It's all remote desktop stuff, which sucks to deal with.  I'm assuming it's the same way in the rest of the business world.  People are either thinking:  a)  this shit works, why fuck with it (XP) or b) this iPad is fucking awesome, now what the hell do I do with it?.

Most doctors I deal with run some variant of Quickbooks to manage their day-to-day stuff.

Sorry, the lack of a *real* Unix terminal makes for not a "serious" machine. PuTTY, Cygwin, SecureCRT, Hummingbird (or whatever it's morphed into now) is not the equivalent of a real *nix session.  

Yes, there is esoteric and/or specialized software that is Win-only. OTOH, there is a preponderance of *nix/Mac software (one example: things like Scrivener and typesetting tools without suitable Win counterparts) without available or inadequate equivalents on the Windows platform.

The irrational Mac hate in this thread is beyond stupefying.

And if you need Windows there are VMs and/or Boot Camp.

I don't think you are aware of the extent to which engineering software is Windows/Unix only. This is not esoteric. I'm referring to stuff like ArcGIS, SAP2000, MSC Marc/Mentat and Abaqus to name a few off the top of my head. They don't have Mac equivalents and these are widely used across many many fields. From GeoTech to hydrology for ArcGIS, from podiatry to aeronautics for Abaqus.

Nevermind that nearly every single small program designed for a specific engineering use, be it water chlorinization solvers to road construction budget calculators are all Windows based.

Yes, we all know that Mac is great for typesetting, and movies, and audio.

We're talking about the fact that DESPITE the fact that Windows dominates the scientific market, Apple is gaining a foothold in a place it has no business in BECAUSE Microsoft are being such horrible asshats about their OS.

This isn't about Apple hate; quite the contrary, its about how MS is fumbling about with its dick while Apple's already slipping it to the sexy engineering grad with all sorts of false promises, simply because it -just works- and is simple (for the most part)

Yep.  And Quickbooks for Mac sucks ass.  Although I'm a big fan of Quickbooks online now, which works like a champ on any OS.

What industry do you work in?

Yes, I forced one of my lawyer clients off of it because his partner used QB on Win7. I told him he should stop doing the books, period. In the end, they got a good bookkeeper who runs QB on her own PC.

I would deem engineering software as *specialized*.

And Apple is just as zealous focusing on CE user v. power user, ignoring them just as Microsoft -- from rumors of Mac Pro demise to entire focus on iPad / iPhone / iMac / Macbook. Completely oblivious to the audio / video / programmer geeks that fueled the Mac resurgence in the last decade.

It seems they both are lusting over the touchscreen to the detriment of *serious* computing needs.

But then that market is tiny compared to the unwashed masses slobbering over new tablets and smartphones.

Further up on this thread, Darniq claimed that Mac user base really had not grown. I think that a faulty assumption and it gave me impetus to check server logs and analytics for sites I manage, both personal and organizational -- even for conservative non-profit, with elderly visitor set tilt, Mac users account for nearly 1 in 7 visitors, MS is barely above 50%, and iOS & Android together make up nearly a third. On my most frequented personal site (a Tumblr blog with ~50K followers), Mac users make up over a third, with Windows just a few points higher (the rest mobile/tablet users, with a 2% Linux too :))

The workplace might be outfitted with a lot of Windows boxes but off-work use is heavily tablet/phone and/or laptop.

Web developer for nonprofit + contract software development.

Mix of machines here, and there is specialized software that runs on Win only here too, but long term arc for it is all going to be web app bound.

Uhhh, scrivener is available for Windows, and last time I checked actual bigboy writing/documentation was done in latex of which there are a shitzillion editors/etc for.

Also I spent the last 2 years using both a Mac and PC at work (Mac as primary computer, with an RDP session to a headless PC for SCCM). I got rid of the Mac a couple months ago finally since it pissed me off.

I dunno man, engineering encompasses everything from chemical to mechanical engineering and like 99% of that shit is Windows only. Also last desktop OS numbers put OSX right at the 7.5ish % they've been at for years (XP/Win7 making up most of the rest, with Win8/Linux at some insignificant percentage).

Also, I think the Mac Pro is going to get an update and actually be made in the US! I vaguely recall hearing that after Apple mentioned opening up manufacturing here.

Scrivener on Windows (unless this has been now remedied) missing features of Mac version, plus buggy and crashy.

Yes :) bigboy writing/doc in LaTeX but doing it in Windows is just like running Cygwin (or PuTTY) instead a real *nix terminal.

I can only assume that this is a troll. Right?

And if I wanted to run any operating system I can think of, including mac os x, I'll just download virtualbox and install macosx on a VM there. In fact, I'm doing that right now just to run kdevelop.

So why would I pay extra money to do the exact same thing, only on a mac? Is the hardware any better? Are the dealers any less assy? Is there more things I want to run on OS X which isn't available on windows, than vice versa?

Real pros write their latex in Notepad (or notepad++).  :drill:

Totally amazed at the number of Scrivener users here. Windows version is usable as long as you format in the editor, not through the compiler. I don't have crashing problems though.

Notepad++

Real pros use VMS VAX.

I would imagine that it's going to get to the point that corporations will just buck up and have a Linux OS drummed up to suit their needs.  Windows 8 in anything but business friendly.

As for basic business stuff, I'm surprised that Mac hasn't caught on more.  As you see more cloud stuff (like Quickbooks online) I imagine that the OS won't really matter.  But yeah, many of these windows programs are quite specialized for a particular industry.  I can't imagine those folks switching, and why would they?  There's no reason as long as XP and Windows 7 are available to license from MS (and I'm assuming that they will be for quite a while). 

On a side note, my computer that I put Windows 8 on crapped out on me.  Had to put Windows 7 back on.  Soooo sad. 

Traditionally the business software (be it accounting, inventory, hr) has been written for windows. There is a transition now to more web based products but it is a extremely slow cycle and you are right in a few years it really will not matter. Penetration into corporate america  has been a bit tough with the Mac OS X because there are no real native enterprise level tools built in. You have to use 3rd party software to make it live in that environment. A big part of that is Apples target market is consumers rather than businesses. Personally I always look for the right tool for the job. I can care less what a user uses if it makes sense.

On a side note I have been hearing about a refresh of the mac pro desktops for years with nothing every coming to light. I really do not blame apple or others focusing on the consumer market because for hardware it is MASSIVE compared to  how many desktops are at businesses. I would probably buy one if it was decently priced although I will probably end up with a mac mini at home just for something to play with to keep up with the software changes.

This is where the Surface has its killer app. We'll see if people catch on.


XP hasn't been available from MS for years and went off mainstream support in 2009. Extended support (meaning security hotfixes and any paid support contracts still lingering around) expires next year, and will not be extended further.

If there's one thing that windows does well it's enterprise environments. Apple has completely given up that battleground, which is another reason you'll never see it gain traction in anything but tiny companies, and why in large companies the only mac users are spergs with enough control to demand their own hardware setups. Macs aren't even really the best audio/video editing platform anymore.

Theoretically. But they're up against the "tablet = media consumption" impression, and MS does not have the consumer loyalty, and probably doesn't have the focus nor attention span, to change that impression alone. Which is a shame for them because they're really the only one with a vested interested to change it. Google is all set and Apple has never focused on content creation (they've always provided frameworks for others to provide that).

Only if you deem Photoshop and Illustrator "specialized" too :-) Which they are, but it's worth noting. In fact, about the only software suite out there I can think of that isn't specialized to some specific field is Word :wink:

My assertion is from sales numbers and revenue. Apple's CE devices formed something a halo effect over their MacBooks. And the percentage of Macs out there has increased in part because Windows-machine purchases took a bit of a dive last year. By some reports I saw, they are up to 13% market share, which is close to your 1 in 7. But that's more to do with tablets than MacBooks, which is still a win for Apple because iPad still dominates tablets.

I don't hate Macs. But I don't love them either. They're just a tool like all the others we need.

Not so much (http://tabtimes.com/analysis/ittech-tablet-industry/2013/04/07/why-google-has-already-won-tablet-race)  Good chance they'll trail Android by the end of this year, virtually certain they will by the end of next.  It's the Jesus Phone all over again, Apple gets there first and builds the market, but then loses market share because of high prices and inflexible hardware capabilities.

I was having this argument just the other day, about how the iPad wasn't a computer but my cheap ass Coby tablet (running Android, of course) was.  Because I can write a program *for* the Coby *on* the Coby, where I have to use a Mac to run an emulation environment to do the same for iOS, then beg Apple to give it permission to run on anyone else's.  He pointed out that hammering out code on a soft keyboard sucks, I said: "Yes, but I can just plug in a USB keyboard for that.  Where's the USB port on an iPad again?"

Apple is for "Artists" and computer illiterates that want to show off how creative and individual they are by buying products that are all exactly alike, and mostly can't be used to create anything.

--Dave

EDIT: For that matter, if you're an actual artist who wants to really *draw* on a tablet like it was a sketch-pad with a pressure-sensitive stylus, you can't do that on an iPad.  But you can on an Android (not with the best software support, admittedly), and you can very well on a Win8 tablet.  Apple is not a technology company, they're in the fashion business.

As usual, people underestimate the value of macs(im including iPads, iPhones, etc) just being enjoyable to use for the average person.  My mother, for example HATED the whole smart phone thing until she picked up an iPhone and then she suddenly was on board.  She also bought an iPad later on.  Its simple, easy, enjoyable.

Then again, Apple isn't really targeting the type of people who post about the relatively usefulness of tablets on internet forums.

Yup.

Moneyshot: "Apple is for "Artists" and computer illiterates that want to show off how creative and individual they are by buying products that are all exactly alike, and mostly can't be used to create anything."

I guess that makes me either an "Artist" or a computer illiterate.

Which one is it?

I don't underestimate it: History shows it's worth about an 8% market share.  This 'average person' who likes Apple products for their ease of use seems to be a very narrow slice out of the middle of the bell curve.

And Surly: Could you rebuild your computer from a pile of parts, and is that guaranteed to be an Apple?  If the answer is "yes", then you're not stupid, you're just a poseur.  See, *this* is what fans my dislike for Apple from simple dislike and disinterest to actual white-hot hatred: The fact that people *identify* with the brand.

Once upon a time, there were things that a Mac was actually more useful for.  And once upon a time, you could say that Apples really were easier to use.  Neither has been true for a long time, but the worshipers kneeling at the Genius Bar still repeat the catechism.

--Dave

It just seems like such a fucking tired debate to be honest.  I used to get worked up over this sort of shit, but I just can't bring myself to get this worked up over which laptop or tablet someone buys.  I'm out.

I'm bored, there's only so long we can all agree about how Win8 sucks, and poking Mac cultists is always good for a giggle.

--Dave

When I am bored I go into the Apple store at the mall, and pretend to be all interested and excited, and right before I commit to buying something, I ask if I can get a list of compatible PC games so I can see all off the amazing games I will be able to play. Then I ask how well media management will function if I am not interested in using or installing iTunes. It's always good for a laugh when the sales guy says, "Why wouldn't you want to use iTunes?"

Apple employees are just as brand hypnotized as any of their customers.

The only thing you prove by being an apple customer is that having money does not guarantee good sense when purchasing technology. :why_so_serious:

And? Their argument is based on units sold (which is a shoe-in for Android; see above) and vague promise about the vague promise of the coming panacea of mobile ad revenue, which has been the panacea since right after PC display ad revenue started to tank (typical supply problem, because there's so much of it). Further, none of that matters if a sufficient mass of device owners (or OS adopters so we can talk at the higher level of iOS vs 15 flavors of Android) aren't using the things like the not-quite-computers Apple promised but doesn't actually need to live up to while Google absolutely does but can't for the same reasons Apple doesn't.

It's inevitable Apple will lose it's dominance even at the critical level of end users using the actual devices after purchasing them. And it's possible that Google will hand them their hats. But I'm not making that bet. And, something will need to radically change in the next two months for any of this to happen this year. Something a lot more than stupid PR campaigns for an ongoing string of forgetable devices that inspire no loyalty because the entire not-Apple industry save Samsung can't generate any of it. And even Samsung slipped hard.

I get that it's fun to poke at Apple enthusiasts, especially nowadays when Apple is the Orwellian company they launched their first major campaign against.  But not everything they do is wrong. As long as there is a world where the hardware, platform, ecosystem and end user monetization all need to happen, it's going to take a lot more than "we own contextual ads based on search results, a fake Facebook and crappy AR goggles" to take down cross-industry well-integrated companies like Apple. If I were a betting man, I'd go with Amazon over Google.

The answer is yes. And I'm neither stupid or a poseur.

There are other possibilities. But keep trying to pigeonhole Mac users.

I just want them to stop preaching at me when they try to send me tax documents with a tablet or phone. Or that I ask them to send things in an excel format.

(This is about 3% of clients, and they still complain we should have a mac on site to deal with these issues, and we're a firm of 10 people).

Ahh, you're no fun.  Okay, if you insist on having an actual conversation, why do you use a Mac?

--Dave

Most tech startups are run on Macs. Based on the job listings for tech startups I read through on a regular basis I would say probably 75% of the tech startups here in the SF Bay Area are mainly, if not exclusively, on Macs. There are a few reasons for this.

1. Mac OS X is the best Unix desktop environment to do Unix development on and most tech startups that have servers run them on Linux and while Mac OS X is not Linux (it's FreeBSD-based in terms of compatibility) it's close enough for most server development work to run seamlessly between both environments. Even some die-hard Linux developers have given up on the Linux desktop environment (which seems to be regressing rather than getting better) and are switching to Mac OS X.

2. In the mobile app market iOS is still where the money is, despite Android's market share, and you have to use Mac OS X to develop for iOS.

3. Graphic designers that work for tech startups still predominately use Macs so that's another large group of people that use Mac OS X.

4. And tech startup marketing people are all about style over substance :why_so_serious: so they use Macs too.

That just leaves Finance and Legal as the departments that still cling to Windows machines.

If you go to a Web or Mobile tech conference they look almost the same as that picture above where maybe 80% of the people have MacBooks of some type, 15% will have PC laptops but are running Linux and 5% will be on PC laptops running Windows.

Surli's an Apple employee, why wouldn't he defend them?  Silly people, if you're going to poke the man at least have the facts straight and don't just call him out on being a "Mac Fanboi."

They're used by 2/3 of our graphic department. So the poke about, "can't actually create anything" is false unless somehow I missed out on the "we're hemorrhaging money" bit at the last corporate meeting.

The local Universities have switched-over to only supporting them for the mandated laptops.  Why?  Well the professors bitching about having to spend the first 1/2 to 2/3 of class time getting people in to the network has a lot to do with it.  Apple's discount/ subsidy program for education is the other.

Are they generally under-built and overpriced? That's always been my opinion but they are still more intuitive and easier to service than Windows OS' from my experience.  I'll confess that's about 5 years out of date but I don't see you techies in here bitching about supporting them like I do bitching about supporting Windows.   Fuck your Linux in the ear, when it becomes a viable business platform (vs support platform) we can talk. Until then it's a small sector of the market and inconsequential to anyone but geeks who like to think they matter on the 'net.

Aww Merusk busted up my fun.  :awesome_for_real:

Just to add to Trippy's wee list :  Lots of things these days are cloudified, which really helps macs get in there.  The amount of Cloud Solutions I've had to put on Macs over the past year has been staggering.

Linux as a desktop environment is complete fucking trash and the most friendly distro (Ubuntu) managed to regress into a pile of unusable shit with Unity. That and there's all the very basic things that Linux still can't nail with 100% certainty like OSX or Windows can (like uh, sound and wireless support).

OSX honestly I've dealt with for about a year and a half now at work as my main machine until very recently, and the best thing I can say about it is that I really liked spaces and iTerm. The dock is a shitty taskbar, multi-monitor support is somehow worse than windows, most of the features added in Lion suck especially full-screen apps (which are present and just as useless in Win8), and personally I dislike mission control.

Wait, I liked the "natural scrolling" on the magic mouse, which is a terrible mouse outside of that. The mac keyboard is such trash I literally threw it away for a cheapo dell keyboard that someone didn't want with their new optiplex.

And we've established Win8 is terrible.

Computers suck.

Most of the people I know who use any *nix which isn't mac os x as a desktop (including me) is using kde (i.e. kubuntu, not ubuntu), because Gnome as a WM has degenerated for years.

I know of 1 friend who uses Gnome, and he's considering switching over to KDE.

Most tech startups are poseurs.

The whole mac/windows nerd fight should really be about which one you hate less these days.  They are both annoying, crash more often than their previous versions and get in the God damn way instead of trying to be invisible.

I don't like macs but I hate Windows 8.  I don't know what I'm going to do if Microsoft doesn't rip out all the suck in the next Windows.  I can't buy a mac when they over charge that much, I'd feel like a sucker.  I can see myself three years from now gently sobbing as I resort to installing some version of linux for work type stuff and then a partition of the oldest supported windows release to play games on.

I'm considering buying a server and throwing VMs on it.  For home.  Then I can have my Windows, Linux, or what-have-yous as I need them.

Not sure how well that will work for gaming though.

I have that in the garage.  It works very well.  I also have a games machine, because it doesn't work for that.

At this point I pretty much have equal hate for all OS's. I do laugh a lot at the mac vs windows vs linux vs android vs whatever else fights though.

Back to the windows 8 discussion I will say that windows 8 works pretty good as a drawing medium. Pair it with a decent stylus and it is pretty fun. Only drawback is there is not much software that really utilizes it and while OneNote is pretty cool (evernote also) it really doesn't take advantage of the potential of the hardware.

As far as the windows blue release (is it 8.1?) I think its going to be a glorified service pack so we are probably another year away from any kind of major overhaul / fix.

For 99% of the consumer world Linux Mint or Ubuntu would work just fine.  And it does have the fact that it is free going for it.

You are out of your God damned mind.

My Apple hate comes not from the products or the company, but from the people I meet that use and purchase the products. While I am sure that there are exceptions to every rule, nearly every apple customer I have ever met has been a raging twat hole of a human being.

Why?  Turn it on, surf the net, download porn.  What else do people do on the internet?

What an ignorant statement.

OS X not OS nirvana by any stretch, but most developers (non-PC-gaming though which is ultimately destined for "the cloud" and excluding specialized applications) are sporting Macs --- even Linus Torvalds, Linux creator, uses a Mac for his go-to machine, Rob Pike (http://rob.pike.usesthis.com/), John Resig (http://john.resig.usesthis.com/) (creator of jQuery), etc.… …go watch some Google Developer videos, and look at all the Macbooks… …yeah there's a few Linux/Win users sprinkled about. So your label of "computer illiterate" makes more of an expression about you…

Don't know if you're just donning a troll hat but this the long arc now -- to "the cloud", SaaS for all but specialized software (like developer tools, A/V stuff that still better on local client though). It's why MS answered with Win8 -- tap tap tap is where the consumer market is headed.

You're right, Naum.  I think it's tough for people that are immersed in computers for work to dissociate themselves from what they do to see the big picture.  iPads and Surfaces are where we'll be in 5 years, for the average Joe, with a plug in monitor and keyboard to make it easier to use at home.  There are a lot of kinks to work out in the system, but the days of a dedicated PC at home are probably dead for most folks. 

But this is what makes Microsoft's decision to go full on Windows 8 so confusing.  It will be adopted by business/industry only grudgingly, and even then probably only at gunpoint.  OSX and IOS seem to be much more business friendly when looking at the two options, although using the Apple app store as a business is a bit wonky. 

Windows 7 was and is excellent.

I'm a huge Mac fan, and I like Windows 7 quite a bit better than Lion and Mountain Lion for usability, speed and stability. 

Best OS I have ever used and if MS didn't have it's head so far up it's ass in regards to web development (or even the internet in general) I would still be using it.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/85916/trollercoaster.jpg)

Android is Linux.... :evil:

:oh_i_see:

/true

That's the whole premise of Chrome OS -- all you need is a web browser. That's what 90-95% of what users do -- browse the web, edit documents, play FB games, read & send email. No storage needed, everything stashed in the cloud.

No, not going to be able to play Bioshock Infinite on it but eventually "the cloud" and thin client is going to be the endgame for gaming as well as most apps (except tools and building the apps).

I'd maybe agree if Ubuntu hadn't, last I checked, moved all the shit around to annoying places.  I have a shitty and tiny laptop which I didn't want to to to reinstall WinXP on, and Ubuntu would have worked great but it's annoying to use.

I haven't used Mint but I can't see how anyone that is interested in producing a linux for home use has grown up enough to create one that "just works".  I'd like to be wrong because I have a use for it.

Mint is pretty goddamned easy to use, really. 

And Ubuntu moved things to funny places for you, but for other people it is probably pretty intuitive.  And I don't mean that as a slight to you, I mean that you are a person that uses a computer every day for a living and is used to things being in a certain place.  Ubuntu is also, like Microsoft, positioning itself to be a tablet platform.  That is why Mint is so appealing.  Shit, even my wife can use Mint, which is saying something.

[citation needed]

I use my little Coby tablet 90% of the time these days, and after the last time my experiments borked it and I had to restore it to factory defaults, I haven't installed any apps except Facebook and Feedly (which just shells the chrome browser, essentially).  Every once in a while I use the calculator, other that that it's all web in one way or another.

Of course, if I need to play with code, spreadsheets, or anything more data-intensive, I use the laptop.  But most people wouldn't need that.

--Dave

Mint is as close to just working as Linux currently gets.  My 3 year old laptop's only issue was an annoying system beep at the login screen which was easily enough solved after a quick google.  My new HTPC also only had 1 issue with mint to troubleshoot (no sound over HDMI) after having several with Ubuntu (fucking eject button on the DVD drive).  My only real complaints with Mint are that the 32 bit version defaults to only using a single core of your CPU and you have to patch in support for more (64 bit doesn't have this issue) and the damn num lock key not behaving according to the bios settings (which is an issue with every version of Linux I have tried).

Also, using the Cinnamon desktop manager in Mint would most likely solve your gripe with the desktop.  Unfortunately I have yet to find a windows 7 style start bar for Cinnamon that is worth a shit and getting wobbly windows to work in Cinnamon isn't trivial ;(

7 was and is the best version of 'doze I've ever used.

I recently had someone who wanted to buy a notebook to do nothing but browse the web and facebook. Had her sold on the Chromebook until she heard it didn't run Windows programs, then that was the end. I'm 99.9% sure this person will never install anything on their laptop (well adware and viruses), but like someone who commutes down a highway alone buying an Chevy Suburban "just in case" they need to go off roading with 6 passengers, she wasn't willing to give the option of doing more with it.

Windows 8 should have been perfect for this type of consumer. They retain their desktop options, but can just sit down with a tablet. Unfortunately, the lack of a dedicated desktop mode poisoned the thing.

American consumers ALWAYS overbuy on features. Even if you never use that timer on the coffee pot, you still want to know you COULD and damn you for saying I don't need it.

We live a lifestyle of fantasy and self-delusion so we don't murder every motherfucker we come across.

I'll try Mint before I accuse anyone of being a nerd that can't see the normal users for the whargarrbll.  However if it doesn't work....!

Have.......... have you ever met a consumer/citizen from another country?

I have to say, a coffee maker with a timer is one of the best things I've ever bought.

I won't. Even Mint is still firmly in hobbyist/professional land. Why? Drivers, drivers, drivers.

I'll confess I'm basing most of that on automobiles.  The amount of features we demand on vehicles vs the rest of the world? Hilarious.

I was on Windows 2000 until Windows 7 came out. I will be on Windows 7 until Windows 14 comes out.

This. All of it.

Nah, they'll skip the monitor and keyboard part. People might think they want a lot more than they actually need. But when they make a context-sensitive decision about a CE device, traditionally most don't go for any of the addon accroutrements. This is one reason tablets have worked so well, consoles worked so well, laptops worked so well, etc. Heck, even PC gamers are getting tired of constantly tweaking with their various drivers. Out of the box or not at all.

I've been wondering: how much of Windows 8 is the stupid Metro UI vs under the hood fundamentals? Like, was Windows 7 just Vista with a better desktop such that Windows 9 is just Windows 8 without metro?

They want a unified experience across their business, in a pretend like-Apple move that Apple doesn't even do. But they'll need to fix that quick unless Xbox 720 sets the world on fire and only works with Surface Pro as a controller.

Ouch (http://mobilebeta.reuters.com/quarterly-personal-computer-sales-decline).

Sigh I saw that report and apparently those are not reported figures from the computer companies. Apparently Gartner came out with totally opposite figures for the Apple sales. So take it and Gartner's reports with a grain of salt.

Yea their numbers are suspect. HP did report (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hp-reports-first-quarter-2013-results-2013-02-21) 14% decline in Notebook sales (5% increase in Desktops though), Lenovo seems to be doing fine (http://news.lenovo.com/article_display.cfm?article_id=1665) (prob won't hear more until 4/30), and I ignored the Apple numbers because they are independent of impact on Windows 8.

Could just be analysts feeding the narrative started last summer than Win8 was a bet MS would lose, second tier numbers guys who want the halo of rightness of "I told you so".

But ultimately, I don't think there's any way to spin any of the numbers into a Win8-is-successful conversation. So it's really just a question of degree of failing :-)

Hmm, what drivers did you have particular difficulty with? Because although there is a bit of a learning curve with graphics drivers for ANY linux distro, I didn't find Mint to be particularly bad; in fact, I'd say easier to get the multi display set up quite easily by comparison to other experiences.

My point is not that I have trouble with drivers; my point is my mom would.

Your mom would probably buy a pre-made computer if she didn't have you to dick around with it, hopefully one with all the needed drivers already there and ready to rock.

By multi you mean 2 right?  Unless you are using nearly identical graphics cards (compatible with the same driver at least), eyefinity or some cludgy external converter it is damn near impossible to get Linux to support more than 2 monitors.  Compared to Windows where you can throw pretty much anything you want in your box and it just works (as long as your PSU can power it).

This was my thought when I installed Ubuntu onto my old laptop recently. It works fine for me, but it would completely floor my mother. I'm perfectly competent with computers, but I found Ubuntu to be an inconvenient mess to use. Trying to install pretty much anything was a colossal hassle. The notion that linux as it is packaged right now would fly with the majority of consumers is complete fiction; android sure, but not ubuntu.

Fuck it.  Back on target-

PC sales post biggest drop ever in single quarter.  Windows 8 to blame. (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS24065413#.UWbLYJBDvXR) 

Darniaq posted that above,

I think that IDC took the wrong take away from those figures and honestly like some others have said Microsoft doesn't give a crap about the existing PC market. They see the future as touch and they are going to deal with short term pain to try to make it in that market.

Outfits like IDC and Gartner has the tendency to pull their figures out of their asses and are wrong a lot. Gartner for example is famous saying that Netbooks were going to be a massive market when they effectively have died off. This report is going to generate a bunch of views (which they are looking for its how they make money).

BZZZT.  No tinkering.  Needs to work immediately after the install completes, otherwise you're still in linux-whargarrbbl land.

On the other hand, it's tough finding a HP machine that has a Win7 option.  Obviously this is due to agreements between hardware manufacturers and MS, but when I go looking for laptops/desktops for consumer use (and I recently have) I see the limited and more expensive Win7 options and decide maybe I want to wait a bit for this dumbassery to blow over.

Most of the arguments seem to center around being able to install a linux version onto a computer, which can certainly be difficult.  I have had pretty good luck with desktops, but laptops, in particular some wireless networking cards, have been a bit of a bitch.  Seriously though, for most folks the idea of buying a computer and putting an OS on it is fairly intimidating, even if Windows is usually (but certainly not always) easy to set up.  A pre-loaded version of Linux would work fine for most folks. 

Until they buy a new device and plug it in and it doesn't magically work.

Like what?  Camera?

Aside from video drivers, Ubuntu's pretty solid on the plug and play front so far. The main issue is lack of vendor buy in, so your brand new toy may not work because nobody's seen it yet.

The main video driver problem we have around the office is that the nvidia-current driver package is and always has been shit because it doesn't list the kernel source as a dependency, so it happily installs while erroring all the while that it can't actually do anything because there's no source package. All it needs is to require the damned headers and source and apt would fucking handle it.

Or an MP3 player, or a printer, or a USB headset, or any number of other things. You plug something into a Windows box and for the most part, it just works. Even that is pushing the limit for a lot of people in complexity. Having to figure out what a driver is, where to get it, and how to install/configure it? Forget it.

And yes, some flavors of Linux/unix are getting better at it. They're not at Mom level though, not close.

I'm really only asking that I not have to fuck with it once I get it installed.  Even that is an impossible request.

Why should they have to do that?

Why can't they just tap a button on the "device" and have it propagate though "the cloud" or even the WiFi network?

Yes, I understand for more sophisticated users, not a viable solution, but for Mom and Grandma, it's a better UX model (if it works :)).

With all the Windows 8 hate in here, maybe this video will cheer you all up  :awesome_for_real:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KPQNP1Z1s

Somewhere, some marketing cunt got paid for that.

 :oh_i_see:

Hell, you don't get that with Windows.  Mac is pretty good about it, but not perfect.

I still don't get the way they try showing "business apps" for tablets in commercials. Last one I remember showed someone clicking and dragging a bar graph to move the bar up - cool, I can use my tablet to ignore the data and just adjust my charts all willy nilly! This commercial above shows me how I can use a pen to draw big circles or check marks on a graph! That can be my new way of approving projects!

 :uhrr:

I like the first one with the angry dancing school girls better.

I do get it with Windows because people other than myself understand how it works.  I'm not talking about my own redneck-Shodan system(s) here.

Obviously those are the most productive business-people in the world.

I'd never even sit for an interview in that place.

I still think most of you are hemming and hawing over Linux based on some perception of what Linux was 5-10 years ago.  Seriously most shit just works in LMDE 64-bit (even hot detection of PnP devices), the only Linuxy things you will probably encounter during install are the drive partitioning and dealing with the package manager to install apps, just think of the package manager as an app store that you can bypass whenever you want.  

If you do want to take an hour out of your day and have some spare hardware laying about just download 64-bit LMDE w/Cinnamon (http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=102) and follow this partitioning guide (http://www.linuxbsdos.com/2012/04/25/manual-disk-partitioning-guide-for-linux-mint-debian/), if you do need help just prefix any google queries with LMDE and if you can't find an answer there try prefixing your query with Debian.

I will say I haven't owned an nVidia card in quite some time so all of my experience is either with AMD or integrated graphics (Intel HD3000 was fine).

Shit if you want to play with a webserver I'll even post a guide on how to spin up, secure and configure the full LAMP stack in less than 30 minutes.  Being a checklisty sort of fellow + not being 100 percent confident in my Linux skills I generally create fairly thorough checklists for every build I do.

If your goal is to set up and configure a system, then just not have it break, Linux is far superior to Windows in this regard, very little malware, virtually no virus issues and just choosing not to update the thing make it superior to windows.  The problems are almost always encountered when you need to modify your machine (aka installing/updating software and major hardware).

I swear it's like some of you have never had to help a person with a computer problem, EVER.