Hmm… As a programmer in a small IS department for county government, I’m gonna guess that sys admin will be very slow to adopt win8. We still have people on XP. I’ve win7 on my work and personal machines and am not very happy with it.
Search for a file? Good luck. Overall, file management sucks.
IE 9 security is bizarre, and seems to exist to just be troublesome and annoying. I have one person, ONE that IE does not work on the website that I’m working on. Can’t reload IE without rebuilding the machine. Works in Chrome and FireFox just fine. Hangs IE.
I guess I don’t understand why Microsoft things they’re smarter than anyone else and that touch screens are better in a desktop environment than a mouse and a keyboard. I work as an insurance adjuster, and everyone has dual monitors full of programs ranging from terminal emulators running command line Cobol programs to web based applications. I just can’t imagine everyone switching to a touch screen here just because Microsoft says so. An people are still buying a lot of PCs for home use too.
I Like win8 so far, and the situation your describing above, reminds me of when I bought a brand new laptop years ago and I barely managed to get a device with XP media when everything else had vista.
As far as I am concerned, 7 is basically the third variant of Vista, one thats done right in my opinion, so its not that young of an OS. Since my current computer is not a production computer that my job depends on, I seen no reason not to upgrade to 8, especially since the price was only 16 bucks. When it goes retail, the price point is supposed to be just under 200 bucks.
It feels like one of my linux installs, that makes me poke under the hood for how stuff gets done and the like, but I can understand how folks are a bit testy in just wanting a turn key OS with no learning curve. My guess is that MS will bring out a service pack to 8, that brings classic back, if only for businesses that are upgrading and dont want the bubble gum interface.
the point is not that you sit there with “gorilla arm.” The point is that it’s easier to make a touch interface usable with a keyboard and mouse than it is to make a kb&mouse interface work with touch.
chances are they’ll be primarily using the Desktop anyway, so little will change for them.
When I took my first CAD class way back in 19 and 81 one of our workstations used a lightpen for input. Some of the students remarked on how easy it was to use. The teacher said, “Sure. Now imagine holding your arm like that for eight hours.” They saw the light.
Anyway, the first rule of CAD, developed in response to salesmen needing to poke at things, is, “Don’t touch my screen. You will leave greasy fingerprints all over it.”
Actually, it’s, “Don’t touch my screen or I will kill you.” Salesmen don’t understand more complex explanations.
Just confirming what jz said. Minecraft runs just fine on my windows 8 computer, for example. There are no restrictions for desktop software that buddha_dave is going on about.
That’s VAIO Gate. It can be uninstalled or turned off. oh, and:
she doesn’t need to “buy” anything. just borrow a Windows disc of the same version that came with the PC (e.g. Home Premium) and install it using the product key on the PC.
that’s why the Desktop isn’t going away. I’m sure MS is well aware that there are tons of applications out there which aren’t and will never be appropriate for a touch interface.
This is what leads to my animosity. The MS Office Ribbon fits this description perfectly. It’s a fetid piece of purposeless redesign. It would be one thing if “marketing-driven” meant they went out and designed a product based on people’s needs and desires (beyond paying lip service to their ‘research’). Instead, the design process is driven by the marketing department’s focus on securing revenue streams.
Whether you like it or not, the Office Ribbon interface had clear design goals that had nothing to do with marketing. The previous UI was a shit pile of nested menus, dialogs with mounds of tabs, completely non-discoverable. The only difference was you got used to it.
Don’t bet on MicroSoft being aware of anything. Or, if they are aware of it, they simply don’t care.
Unlike other businesses, software producers put out new products just because they can, not because the public wants them. In other industries, marketers use focus groups and surveys to decide whether a product is worth developing. But software companies do not bother with asking the client anything..They have a staff of programmers who have to be fed, and they will market the new version, no matter what stupid changes the programmers decided to add.
Example:
In Internet Explorer 8, if I want to find a certain text on the screen, there is a simple click “find on this page”.
In IE9, there is no such option. But 9 is a new version, therefore it has to be better, right?
Obviously, it is better to have to scroll through 200 lines of text instead of using that stupid old version 8 which let you jump directly to the spot you want.. . Yeah.
No time to search, but when the Ribbon came out that article (and others like it) were torn to shreds. The falshoods reside in MS’s fictional story of the Ribbon’s development.
Nope, that’s how Microsoft and Autodesk, two near-monopolies, roll. They figured out that by creating a subscription service they could have the money roll in regularly. However, they realized that corporations would need to see regular “improvements” in the products to open their wallets, so they provide them. The changes are rarely anything helpful or desired by the users, but those aren’t the people who sign the purchase orders. All most users want, frankly, is software that works the exact same way today as it did yesterday because most users, and I know this is a revelation to some of the more technical among us, don’t give a shit about NEW! and just want to get their fucking jobs done with minimal hassle then go home.
Holy 1978! That is a Control-Key command! And an undocumented one in Chrome (everything is undocumented in Chrome), though not in IE.
No matter how often they say it, the start screen is not a replacement for the start menu… in fact, they could easily coexist and improve each other (for example, you could keep only the programs with complicated nesting structure in the start menu list, simplifying both, and you could keep only your very few most used programs pinned to start menu which is still faster than using start screen).
Microsoft kept pinning to taskbar (which clutters up your organization of programs you are using), desktop shortcuts (which you can’t see when using a program), and added unblockable pop-ups that jump out at you in a totally unrelated program when the cursor moves certain places.
All of those things they kept/added perform similar tasks as the start menu, but worse. So the questions isn’t “why did they replace the start menu with a start screen” it is “why didn’t they keep the start menu, add the start screen too, and not force these other stupid, archaic options on us with no ability to customize.”
Remember that those same “most users” have a tendency to be ignorant, even though the new is (sometimes, anyway) genuinely better. To some degree, if most users weren’t forced to update, we’d still be using Windows 3.1. Or punch cards!
On the other hand, Windows 8 scared me for how it seems to be contributing to the existance of locked UEFI bios.