Windows 8

[calapine]

If that start menu is the only change compared to 8.1 then they should call it 8.2, not fucking 10.

Win 8.1 came out in October 2013, 10 is scheduled for "later in the year [2015]" so with a sub-2-year development time it will be Windows 8.2, no matter the actual title.

The internal version numbers are probably more indicative of the underlying code base:

Win NT 4.0 > 4.0
Win 2000    > 5.0
Win XP       > 5.1
Win Vista    > 6.0
Win 7         > 6.1
Win 8         > 6.2
Win 8.1      > 6.3
Win 10       > 6.4

[Lantyssa]

8 has a lot of back-end changes.  And they're mostly good ones, except for the GUI.

[Salamok]

8 has a lot of back-end changes.  And they're mostly good ones, except for the GUI.

and the whole lets port all the cheesy desktop card games to the interwebs so we have something people want in our app store.

[Salamok]

The central office model will die the day after people stop slacking off the minute nobody is watching them.

Even if people stop slacking off it won't die until business owners find some way to make themselves feel sure it's not happening. Maybe if employees consent to webcam monitoring during their work hours at home...

Welcome to the Panopticon

You are looking at this all wrong, the central office model is slowly dying now as the Millennials convince everyone that people will be slacking off no matter where you put them.

[Venkman]

Feh. Don't need millenials for that. But they ARE showing that we can no longer lie about the overlap between office time and getting--work-done time. So many people doing so little work because their managers are from the generation of when they can see you they know you're working.

So the millenials will help us solve it, or our future robot overlords will. And probably not as helpfully...

Oh and yea, don't quite get why this needs to be Windows 10. Maybe stupid parity statement with OSX? Can't imagine anyone making that analogy though...

[Trippy]

It's needs to be Windows 10 cause too many old apps break if the version string is "Windows 9".

[Salamok]

This brings the Windows 10 thing into perspective so over 4000 hits and that's just the public/open source stuff.

[KallDrexx]

I think it's a combination of that with people getting confused between windows 9 and windows 95/98 (cause non-techie idiots).  Also, anyone that is knows just enough to know that they are on Windows 7 might think they are 3 versions out of date instead of just two and might be encouraged to update.

[MahrinSkel]

If that start menu is the only change compared to 8.1 then they should call it 8.2, not fucking 10. 

Even 8 is just 7 with RT (touch screen crap) tacked on and better UEFI support, not much else.  Thankfully, though, they called it 8 rather than 7.1, which would have made it almost impossible to continue buying Windows 7 systems while Microsoft cycles through this shit.

8.1 with Classic Shell is pretty decent, once you find the ways to access all the low-level stuff they buried.  IOW, once you figure out how to make it just like 7, it doesn't suck.

--Dave

[Quinton]

I recently picked up a Surface Pro 3 because I wanted to muck about with digital art stuff and buying a tablet for it seemed less hassle than mucking with external tablets hanging off the desktop gaming machine, etc.

The one thing that's driving me absolutely nuts about 8.1 is that when using non-metro apps (like all the graphics programs I'm using...) you need to have the taskbar visible to get at the pop-up-soft-keyboard button, instead of having the touch keyboard pop up when you select a text field (like metro apps do).  This seems like such an enormous oversight, it's kind of mind blowing that there's no (at least that I can find) workaround...

[Yegolev]

This brings the Windows 10 thing into perspective so over 4000 hits and that's just the public/open source stuff.

Some of those matches are suspect.

[Sky]

and the whole lets port all the cheesy desktop card games to the interwebs so we have something people want in our app store.

Not gonna lie, I play Vegas Cumulative Solitaire like a mofo.

[Salamok]

and the whole lets port all the cheesy desktop card games to the interwebs so we have something people want in our app store.

Not gonna lie, I play Vegas Cumulative Solitaire like a mofo.

I did get a slight chuckle when my 74 year old father got assigned the default gamer tag of starwaif3529 when he went to play freecell, my amusement aside that just ain't right.

[Raph]

The one thing that's driving me absolutely nuts about 8.1 is that when using non-metro apps (like all the graphics programs I'm using...) you need to have the taskbar visible to get at the pop-up-soft-keyboard button, instead of having the touch keyboard pop up when you select a text field (like metro apps do).  This seems like such an enormous oversight, it's kind of mind blowing that there's no (at least that I can find) workaround...

There is a little app you can run that solves this, sorta. It's on tabletpcreview.com's forums. Kinda processor intensive as I recall; it basically continutally polls to see if you are in a text field. I bet if you google "Raph" on that site, it might be in one of the results, because I tried it out and posted about it.

[Hawkbit]

Scott Hanselman walks his wife through the interface of 10 TP.  It's a bit long, because he's trying to get a first user's perspective of the interface.  You can skip through and get a feel for what it looks like.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h7iYPEcyIyE&feature=youtu.be

[Engels]

AKA really basic shit we should have thought of in the first place. $100 more bucks please.

[apocrypha]

Just bought a really cheap Windows 8 tablet, a Linx 8 and, on the one hand, I'm really impressed with the tablet, and on the other hand, really confused by Windows 8.

The tablet is very impressive for under £100. It's only got 1Gb RAM but it's got a 32Gb SSD and a micro-SD slot. I really like the feel and the size of it and it seems to perform pretty well. As an example I've installed Steam on it and I can stream from my main gaming PC to it no problems. Plugging in an OTG USB adapter and a 360 controller works beautifully. Screen is bright and clear, Netflix looks great on it.

Battery life isn't wonderful and the speakers are a bit poo, but it was under £100.

Windows 8 though... is it just me or is it really schizophrenic? As an example, there's 2 versions of IE11 on it. The touch-friendly Metro one is fast and easy to use, but it doesn't support addons at all. So no Adblock or Noscript. But there's also the desktop IE11, which does support addons but ofc has the desktop interface which is a chore to use on a touchscreen tablet. This dichotomy seems to exist with most things. In general it seems that the Metro apps are poorly implemented, largely crippled versions, and using the web interface on the desktop results in a sub-optimal interface for a touchscreen. This is true for YouTube, Reddit, Netflix, LastPass, pretty much everything I've tried on it so far.

You can, of course, resort to Windows atrocious clusterfuck of DPI scaling but that has it's own multitude of problems.

I'm sure I'll get used to Windows 8's bizarre interface but I do wish that they'd made it either a proper desktop interface with good options for touchscreen and smaller devices *or* a completely separate touchscreen OS with proper app support.

[Jeff Kelly]

It's pretty much what you've described that's why it's so despised. You run into the same issues on the desktop just vice versa, i.e that you'd rather want the desktop apps but constantly get the full-screen metro UI instead.

[Phildo]

The IE issue you mention gets even funnier when you realize that the built-in Mail app in metro looks like Outlook, but doesn't sync if you actually have Outlook installed.  I had one client at work who set up their email in Metro, then couldn't find it again because he kept looking in Outlook.

[Engels]

The first rule of Windows, which has been true since at least Windows 95, if not earlier, is that you don't walk, you run as fast as you can to Netscape/Mozilla/Chrome/Whatever as fast as you can as soon as you're up and running. Its nearly as if MS has realized in its despair that they can fuck with IE all they want and it won't really matter.

[apocrypha]

Yeah I've put Firefox on it and synced it up, but it feels slower than IE11 to me. Still, price worth paying for the vastly better usability

[KallDrexx]

I was tempted to get a cheap windows tablet to stream my steam games to.  I ended up going with a bit more expensive Nvidia Shield because I wasn't sure if the cheap windows tablets could decode the video fast enough (and had good enough wifi to handle it).

[Paelos]

I wonder how many people like myself are waiting out Windows 8 for their next laptop purchase?

[MahrinSkel]

I wonder how many people like myself are waiting out Windows 8 for their next laptop purchase?

8.1 with Classic Shell is actually an improvement on Windows 7. IOW, once you strip out all of the Metro UI stuff (and add back your old Start button and menus), it doesn't suck.

--Dave

[Strazos]

Agreed - I have 8.1 on my new system, and the differences/annoyances are pretty minimal. It's perfectly fine as far as general usability.

[apocrypha]

It's 8.1 on this tablet.

8.1 may be an improvement on 8.0 but as a newcomer to 8 in general I'm still baffled by the UI design choices they've made here. I was under the impression that the entire reason for 8 was to try to eke out more of a corner in the tablet market, but this is really not a good touchscreen interface.

That said however, I'm getting used to it, and I am still very impressed with the hardware for the cost.

[NowhereMan]

I've found with 8.1 I've gotten used to it. I've got my favourite programs bunched up in Metro start menu thing and just start typing anything else I want, the search feature picks it up pretty quickly. That said I went home to the UK over Christmas and used my old desktop, after about 2 minutes of reacquainting myself to the Start menu I realised I really did prefer 7's interface.

[MrHat]

Windows 10 free upgrade for pretty much anyone who has built or bought a computer in the last 6 years.

Also, holograms? As usual with VR/aug stuff, the proof is in the pudding.

http://www.microsoft.com/microsoft-hololens/en-us

[Trippy]

It's good to see that Microsoft continues to be wrong about the future of computing.

[Fabricated]

The presentation was fucking shameful.

[Krakrok]

Called it.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/01/21/i-tried-minecraft-with-microsoft-hololens-and-now-i-dont-want-to-work-anymore/

I found a screenshot from Windows 10.

[Yegolev]

You did, indeed.

The thing I chuckled about most is that the 3DS shipped with this functionality.

[eldaec]

Just started using 8.1, is it really impossible to avoid having the programs menu go into full screen without adding a 3rd party patch?

Because I checked and it isn't 1982.

[Chimpy]

No it is not possible.

Windows 10 will fix that.

If you need to get to the control panel or a few other things, right click on the start menu icon in the lower left. I almost never open the start screen, and when I have to, I have pinned all of the programs I need to to the start screen so I don't have to go through the horrible programs screen. My biggest beef is that you can't right click and "run as" on things on the start screen, makes doing things at work that require a different account a bit of a pain.

[Merusk]

Just started using 8.1, is it really impossible to avoid having the programs menu go into full screen without adding a 3rd party patch?

Because I checked and it isn't 1982.

Right it's 2015 and EVERYTHING is a 12"-15" touchscreen.  

[Windows]+[X] is your friend.