Microsoft: Start Menu Returns, Windows Free For Small Device OEMs, Cortana Beta

At Microsoft's BUILD conference today, the company announced that the Start Menu will officially be returning to Windows 8.1. It will combine the Windows 7 Start Menu with a handful of Metro-style tiles. They're also making it so Windows 8 apps can run in windows using the normal desktop environment. In addition to the desktop announcements, Microsoft also talked about big changes for Windows on mobile devices and Internet-of-Things devices. The company will be giving Windows away for free to OEMs making phones and tablets (9" screens and smaller), and for IoT devices that can run it. Microsoft also finally unveiled Cortana, their digital assistant software that's similar to Siri.

Comments

Gee, so only a year of screaming

[msobkow]

So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen. Who knows -- by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[rikkards]

It's because they can't use their usual solution which is "you need to upgrade to the next version"

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[MightyMartian]

A year? People have been telling Microsoft Metro was a catastrophe since they released the public betas.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Mashiki]

What's funny is that if you slapped in your favorite UI replacement, then Win8 became even better than 7. Faster, more stable, and if you're a gamer gave even better performance. Remove that, and it was a huge pain in the ass, so in your post I can't quite figure out the "by 9.x it'll be as useable as 7 again..." there's paid options such as Start8, not paid options such as Classicshell. And really, if you couldn't be bothered to replace the awful UI for something else, that's your own problem.

I will say there are still bugs in it. I just ran across probably the most rare of them regarding SSD's yesterday. Where an open handle which isn't properly closed on shutdown, on a SSD volume can lock a SSD, in turn causing the volume to become corrupt. Needless to say, not impressed by that one.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[TheGratefulNet]

OT: I finally found your moped jesus:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

now that that mystery is solved, all the rest look comparatively simple.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it took long enough for a new CEO to come in.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[i kan reed]

No one has adequately explained to me what these unspecified "improvements" are. Maybe it's not possible to notice the better crops after the excessive heaps of fertilizer Microsoft added to them, but strip metro... and... it's windows 7.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[MBC1977]

Useless to who? There is this thing called "adapt and overcome" that works wonders. Or to put it another way, just because you (and some others) don't like it does not make it useless. I use it interchangeably with the Windows desktop and my output of work has not changed, thanks.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[mwvdlee]

"Product X is great, you just have to replace it's main features with additional products Y and Z".

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[ackthpt]

Bringing back what never should have been taken away - it's the new innovation.

the older innovation was buying up companies which developed technology you were unable to.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

this reminds me of when i tried win8 a year ago. I would get win8 running, it would be good for 2-4 hours, then crash out and the ssd was screwed up so it couldnt boot. On dell support we would walk through getting the drive going again. I would be good for a few hours. Long enough to install the UI changes to get the start menu back and get rid of the weird metro crap, and then ssd would die again. Eventually after the fourth time the support people could not get the drive up and they sent a replacement machine. Fast forward three weeks later and they sent me a machine with windows 7 installed. Still using it right now.

dell said it was the drivers

also no custom ui needed for 7 its usable from install

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[ackthpt]

It's because they can't use their usual solution which is "you need to upgrade to the next version"

The next version is a trap!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

XP start menu had features that 7 does not. try adding your own groups and sub groups of programs, can't do that in 7. In win 7, you have to add a "toolbar" to the task bar. I find this a crazy step backwards. So I so glad that win 8.1 uses the win 7 start menu, goly gee that is just great!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

New CEO, and already actual tangible changes. I'd hate to judge early but I'm pretty sure Satya is the right guy.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[ShakaUVM]

>So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen.

It came out in October 2012, but people have been screaming about it since the pre-release in 2011.

So about the same amount of time it took Blizzard to fix the clusterfuck called Diablo 3, and with the same amounts of fucks given by the general population.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Jane Q. Public]

"A year? People have been telling Microsoft Metro was a catastrophe since they released the public betas."

Even so, they've taken this dubious fall-back position: "Okay, we admit that it sucks and that nobody likes it, so we're going back to the old way. But we're going to keep pushing the obviously failed 'new' way at you anyway."

Because... ??? Honestly, the only reason that comes to mind is that they are incapable of admitting that the whole thing was just plain a bad idea.

But wait! I guess it did accomplish something. It got others in the industry to also adopt eye-burning flat toolbars and icons, containing little pictograms that the brain associates with nothing in particular.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[MightyMartian]

The problem for enterprise environments is that these add-ins are likely not going to be manageable via AD and GPOs, and at least where I am, that makes adoption an iffy process. Much better to have this basic GUI functionality built into the operating system itself.

If the next version of Windows is close enough to Windows 7 for our staff to be comfortable, then we'll lift our organization-wide ban on Windows 8/8.1 workstations. For the moment, however, we continue to purchases Windows 7 Professional workstations and notebooks, and, amusingly enough, our suppliers basically say "And you will be wanting that with Windows 7, right?" They know that Windows 8 has been a bomb in the enterprise market.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Bardez]

And my Mod Points have disappeared. Such sad timing.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[redmid17]

I'm assuming you're too lazy to google

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...
http://usabilitygeek.com/windo...
http://www.techspot.com/review...
http://www.zdnet.com/windows-8...

If you're lazy, you can just read the conclusions. It's not necessarily enough to make me upgrade to 8 (already have 8 on one laptop and 7 on some other devices), but it measurably better in a few areas.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[lgw]

I'm sure Windows 9.5 will be revolutionary, unlike anything we've seen before, and Windows 9.8 will continue to improve on it.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[MBC1977]

No, I'm just saying making a blanket statement that the start screen is "god dammed useless" is quite foolish. If he had said, it didn't work for him, hence its the reason why he didn't like it; I could accept that.

Oh and the only time I talk about sheep is when I'm trying to figure out how to cook a new dish.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft is actually really damn competent at making windows run well. Even since 7 they've made a whole lot of under the hood improvements. Kernel, memory management, better support for modern hardware. SSD optimizations. Graphics system improvements.

It's like Vista. Vista introduced a massive amount of improvements particularly when it came to enterprise management.. But they fucked up hard on on the end use experience. Badly tuned. Ran like shit compared to XP. They fixed it up and released 7. (It really does run like shit. Install fully patched 7 and Vista on the same hardware and you'll be shocked with how much better 7 is)

With 8, for whatever fucking braindead reason, they pushed the Metro UI. Again it's being rejected because they've ignored the end-user experience. 8 runs well but it sucks on the desktop.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[rickb928]

Touchscreens didn't become ubiquitous. Metro Fail.

Film at 11.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Talk to the GNOME...

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Who knows -- by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again.

This is horrible news. It just might save Windows.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry, but if you consider the UI the main feature of an OS, you really don't know anything about computers.

Here's a hint as to how important the UI is to an OS, you can freely replace them with no real affect on the overall system barring resources used by the UI.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Grishnakh]

Notice that something really big happened not too long before this announcement: Steve Ballmer was replaced as CEO. As long as he was at the helm, they held to their strategy of pushing Metro on everyone. Now he's gone, so things are likely to change.

This is really unfortunate IMO. I was hoping they'd double-down on Metro, maybe even eliminate the regular desktop mode. I was really enjoying watching MS stumble under Ballmer's leadership, and the last thing I want to see is them to become highly successful again.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Grishnakh]

Yeah, that's a real ringing endorsement there.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[techno-vampire]

In the Linux world, Product X = Gnome 3. Totally unusable for many people without third-party extensions, yet those same people keep telling everybody how great it is. The only way it makes sense for me in either case (Win 8.x or Gnome 3) is if the advocates are all masochists and think that everybody else likes pointless suffering as much as they do. Personally, I use Linux with Xfce because it does what I want, the way I want without using up excessive RAM or CPU.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Grishnakh]

No, he's not. Ballmer was the right guy. They need to bring him back, so I can enjoy watching him run MS into the ground.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[GrumblyStuff]

Why is this a thing that always has to be explained? It's not just the start screen, it's the pervasive touchscreen controls that do not fit the desktop PC ergonomics. It looks great for a smartphone or tablet but PC? No and their attempts to make some of those controls work with the mouse (ie, charms) is a perpetual annoyance.

Now as for the start screen itself, the act of taking over the whole screen is, at least to me, akin to the Doorway Effect. I don't want a wall of icons; I want text labels in (a few at most) columns ordered alphabetically. You know, like most of my files (sometimes by file type, sometimes by last modified).

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Chas]

"Product X is great, you just have to replace it's main features with additional products Y and Z".

Sound like Apple's MO.

What people who whine about "you should just install Start8 and get over it" miss is this very simple point.

You should not HAVE to. Not for a key piece of UI like the Start menu.

Microsoft's reason for pulling the Start Menu out of Windows amounts to "Because I said so". They can prattle on about how shallow the usage was, the problems it would cause in future adoption, etc, etc. But the main reason is still "We want you to do it THIS WAY now, we don't give a shit that you've been doing it this other way for 20 years."

So people people have been screaming about this now for approximately 2 years (since they removed it from the preview versions).

So business snubbed Windows 8.
Their sales are, comparatively, in the toilet when held up against previous releases.

It's the lightest, nimblest, most stable version yet. It's actually a decent setup for a tablet. And yet users are staying away from it in droves (save for the luddites who just take whatever they get when they buy a months-old, crappy PC off a shelf in a Best Buy). Because they arbitrarily crippled functionality, expecting users to just lap it up and their larger clients to simply absorb the costs of retraining.

Pfft.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

umm thats why its called Kernel8.1 and no fucking windows8.1

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[CronoCloud]

Totally unusable for many people without third-party extensions, yet those same people keep telling everybody how great it is.

once had a little discussion with some Gnome 3 advocates including Rahul Sundaram, either here or on the Fedora Forums about Gnome 3. They'd say install this or that add-on to restore the functionality that was in Gnome2. I said there was a reason that the CDE/Win9x+/XFCE/Gnome2 interface was fairly standard, it's not perfect but it just works to get stuff done and to quit copying mobile interfaces for desktop use.

Then ol Rahul said Gnome 3 wasn't inspired by tablet/mobile interfaces.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Chas]

Good for you.

Most of the rest of us don't browse porn and listen to streaming audio for a living.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[NeverVotedBush]

"Here's a hint as to how important the UI is to an OS, you can freely replace them with no real affect on the overall system barring resources used by the UI."

Without the UI, an OS is just a command line interface which is itself a UI, albeit not a very useful one for a lot of people.

I just recently broke down and installed 8.1 since some software I was needing to run simply would not run under Linux. While some things really run fast and well under 8.1, it is the most obnoxious interface I have ever used. Things that used to be two clicks or even one in XP and still are in Linux now take 8-10 clicks in and out of Metro to do the same thing. It's terrible.

I can navigate around it, but 8.1 gets in the way of everything most people would try to do on a desktop. My desktop doesn't have a touch screen, doesn't need giant fonts, doesn't need all the garish stupid tiles that are just a waste of space and really only a distraction.

Linux is so much better it isn't even funny - Gnome and KDE. Metro is for brain dead point and grunt types who need their chins wiped whenever they smell food.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Prien715]

by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again

Are you kidding? Windows 9X introduced the start menu! Don't you remember The Rolling Stones promo commercial (Start me up)?

I'm more worried about what comes after 9X (probably Me, you know, to compete with all the iProducts).

[Yes I realized there was a dot between 9 and X. Which I took to be the Perl concatenation operator.]

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[aliquis]

That's a silly comment considering Gnome 3 is made to have extensions isn't it?

It would be like saying Irssi is a poor IRC client because some functionality other IRC clients includes in the binary isn't there without additional scripts.

The thing is not everyone will need them, want them, prefer the same things and so on.

So there's nothing wrong with making stuff scriptable and changeable.

If Gnome3 showed nothing than the old diagonally black and white crossed screen with black and white popup menus it could still be good if that was the default and you could add anything you wanted on top.

Personally I haven't used either of Windows 7 or 8 but I doubt I'd have an issue with either and would be able to use both.. Or Gnome3 if I took the time to learn how the user interface worked to begin with. My reaction to Gnome3 atm is somewhat like what I can imagine a Windows user reaction would be with CDE.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[jafac]

As a developer, we're only "allowed" to run 8.x in a lab. Our IT dept doesn't want it on our desktop machines, but we need to run it to test our products, because we have to run the same environment as our users. (if any are even running it).

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[NeverVotedBush]

I see what you did there. That's funny!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[techno-vampire]

So there's nothing wrong with making stuff scriptable and changeable.

True. I have no issues with extensions as such; in fact, I think they're a great idea, just as browser extensions are. One of the many things I have against Gnome 3 is the fact that it's almost impossible to customize without extensions. Now, consider the case of a "Windows refugee" who's just installed Linux for the first time, with Gnome 3. It doesn't look or work the way they expect, and until they learn about extensions and how to install them they can't even do anything about it. Unless somebody either helps them get the vital extensions installed, or helps them replace Gnome 3 with a less user-hostile DE, they're very likely to give up in disgust, go back to Windows and spend the rest of their lives bad-mouthing Linux because they were stuck with a DE that they couldn't work with. Gnome 3 may be good for Linux geeks that know how to beat it into submission, but I'd never (not even hardly ever) inflict it on a beginner.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Hadlock]

It's the WS2012 R2 kernel wrapped with desktop widgets. I'll let you google from there, but the improvements are vast. If you know what you're doing you can hack in WS2012 R2 functionality like file deduplication and NIC teaming in to your 8.1 desktop.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[gtall]

Hear, Hear, but at least Satya is taking advice from Billy G. We can expect more screwups.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's not. Ballmer was the right guy. They need to bring him back, so I can enjoy watching him run MS into the ground.

What's with this idea you are so attached to that Microsoft must fail even when the people causing the problems leave? What is Microsoft if not the people behind it? When they leave what exactly are you clinging to?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Trax3001BBS]

So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen.

I figure they were trying to say they had control.

MS has become insignificant compared to what they were years ago.

Rather than saying take this, learn how, and enjoy it -knowing it was unpopular; they are now having to give the people what they want. I see it as a power play of sorts that didn't end well for them

Themes? No. I gave those up to get a Classic menu. I was given a choice when they were significant.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Adriax]

Just stay away from Windows M, especially after the E service pack.
Luckily the concurrent release of windows 20.00 will give people another, more suitable option.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I always tell people use XFCE or LXDE or if you want to have a great time learning about UI E17(Enlightnement) now then there is always the option of KDE and that is a nice one if you have a relatively new machine.

Never never use Gnome 3.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Grishnakh]

I'm "clinging" to my vision of a world without Windows and other MS software and all the crappiness and lock-in that entails (not to mention the horrid aesthetics brought in with the age of Metro).

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn, he's got some hot disciples. It sure is good to be king.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, I see what you did there. Nice. I will wait till Windows 9.8 SP1

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

This isn't all that much different than what Linux users already do.

Heck - before Linux with SunOS/Solaris we spent hours on newer machines/os's customizing and fixing the shell (because it always shipped broken).

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[BradMajors]

Providing what users ask want. What a brilliant idea!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[just_a_monkey]

He probably can't wait to pay for another bailout. I mean, if some car companies were too big to fail, what is the company that runs all the computers in the world...?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I'm sure /. had TONNES to do with it.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

and i will wait for 2100 when it will be the year of the linux.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Your.Master]

Without the UI, an OS is just a command line interface which is itself a UI, albeit not a very useful one for a lot of people.

And without input drivers, an OS is just a machine that plays back prerecorded video.

The question isn't "is the UI important". It is, and Microsoft fucked up, and are finally getting around to fixing it. The question is, is the UI the main feature of the OS?

It is not, generally. It is, however, the most immediately obvious feature.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

Looking back, you can actually see a timeline of their PR bullshit.

1. "Here, the new Metro! It's shiny and cool, and you'll be so much more productive!"
2. "The new Metro is great! Really, it is! If for some odd reason you don't instantly fall in love with it, it only means that you haven't tried it!"
3. "Metro is good! And the only people who don't like it yet are those that didn't give it a chance and try it for a while."
4. "Metro is really useful, trust us! You just need to give it a try and use it for a while and get used to it. Honestly, once you're used to it you'll wonder how you could live without it."
5. "Ok, for the time being you can switch back to old style, but you'll see that you'll do it less and less frequently and you'll eventually embrace Metro, most applications will only be useful in Metro anyway!"
6. "Well, it seems that at least for now we have to allow using "old style" for more apps, because there are still those luddites that can't accept change. But you WILL find Metro useful at some point in the future, maybe the time isn't right yet!"
7. "Ok, ok... the world is not ready yet for Metro it seems."

Still waiting for the "Ok, ok... we admit, we tried to fix something that wasn't broken and realized that looking for a problem with a solution nobody wants is the wrong way 'round."

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[RaceProUK]

If MS disappeared overnight, someone else would take its place. All that would happen is one devil being replaced by another.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[AudioEfex]

Hey, at least it's better than digging-our-heels-in-screw-the-users-we-know-better Apple. I applaud them for making this change, it may actually get me to reinstall Windows 8. I don't have a touch screen on my desk, and I don't want one (who wants to constantly be reaching up instead of tiny mouse flicks), but at least Microsoft has the balls to admit they were wrong and are undoing it. Unlike Apple, which fucks up your interface, everything about how you use their OS (iOS7 = I'll never purchase another Apple phone again) and tells you to like it or to fuck off, no you can't choose the background of your notepad because we know better than you what you should like.

When I think back to 20 years ago when Microsoft was the big bad and Apple was the almost "holistic" alternative, it's amazing how a few extremely successful products can change the perception of a company. Steve Jobs died a lonely but very very rich asshole who folks struggled to say a kind word about beyond his "design expertise" (did you hear one person say anything actually NICE about him? I actually sought out articles about his death looking and I couldn't find a single one) and here is DR. Evil himself Bill gates running around the globe giving away billions of dollars and actually improving the quality of life for people all over the planet, not just giving a gee-cool-slickly designed device or two to middle-to-upperclass folks who have the luxury of being able to afford a smartphone and it's service so we can feed our endless consumption appetite.

Who ever knew Microsoft would end up being the "good" sibling.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

Adapt and overcome? So every time the maker of my OS decides I need to change my working habits I have to bend over, hand him the lube and hope that he uses it?

I rarely, if ever, see my desktop, unless my computer just recently booted (something that happens once every other week or so). Usually, it is covered with some windows. I also have an average of 10-20 applications running. Why? Because the desktop doesn't hold anything I need. There is exactly zero reason for me to start programs using the desktop. I have not only far too many applications installed to clutter the desktop with them, but finding the app I need on the desktop takes longer than finding it in an alphabetically sorted start menu. Yes, I could order my desktop. But what for, if it's done for me in the start menu?

Now explain to me how the heck I should "adapt and overcome" to Metro in a way that is more productive and contributes less overhead. Go ahead.

There are certain work styles that simply cannot be "adapted" to Metro sensibly.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

well every second upgrade is atleast.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Gnome 3 was inspired by UI designers doing field tests and getting hard data about how people interact with computers. Having a choice doesn't help the majority, only the elite who have been trained to think like they do.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[RabidReindeer]

With 8, for whatever fucking braindead reason, they pushed the Metro UI. Again it's being rejected because they've ignored the end-user experience. 8 runs well but it sucks on the desktop.

I think the braindead reason is simply that when you're selling an OS version, it has to offer something different than the version that it's supposed to replace. Otherwise people won't see the point in throwing away their old computers just to get something even more bloated than the OS they have now.

We currently don't have a whole lot of really new hardware features that desperately need a new OS to use. So the alternative is to change the UI, even if it means that people will complain about it. And hope that eventually, they stop complaining.

Unfortunately, the current trend in desktop UI design seems to be to make desktops be like tablets, whether it makes sense or not, and to remove popular features because it's prettier without them.

Windows isn't the only OS out there that's gone this route recently. But since Windows doesn't do plug-replaceable desktops, and since they charge money for this gobbler, they're getting even more heat that other systems have.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[budgenator]

you've got low standards.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[gnupun]

So it only took about a year of screaming from the users and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and brought back the MENU instead of that god damned useless start screen

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but can anyone explain how the start menu is better than metro app grid? To launch an app from the start menu takes 4 or more clicks:

Start menu --> programs --> scroll through all programs and click on program group --> launch actual program

Furthermore, all the above steps requires the user working with tiny 12 point font menus.

Now compare this with metro app launching:

Start menu --> scroll until you find your app --> click to start app.

Step 2 (scrolling) can be eliminated if you place all your favorite programs in the first page. So why is the start menu better?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[jcutting]

"Things that used to be two clicks or even one in XP and still are in Linux now take 8-10 clicks in and out of Metro to do the same thing."

Then you're doing it wrong. Press Windows key (or Windows+S), type, click or press enter on the one you want. For example, mouse settings - Windows key, type mouse, click one. You can do this with any program or setting. You could do pretty much the same in Win7's start menu, but it's faster in Win8. Even with Windows 7, I've never understand why people think navigating through folders in the Start menu or going through Control panel is faster or easier.

Even better, try Win+X for the "expert menu." When I work on Win7 VMs now, the UI feels slow and awkward to navigate because I can get to a lot of things much faster in Win8.1. And I use it on a quad-monitor development box with no touch.

As for "Metro" - it's not that bad. Stop whining about change. You never have to use it if you don't want to. I use the start screen for pinned tiles that show me stock quotes, weather, calendar, and news. It's handy for that. I snap Xbox Music to the side of one monitor. Otherwise, I don't use modern apps on my dev box. I do use them on my Surface for touch. Either way, I'm not forced to use it and the OS works quite well.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

I would think most computer-literate people (which I thought would be the people here though they seem to be screaming the loudest) that are using a keyboard/mouse would be using search rather than scrolling/browsing menus. Whether it's OS X or Windows I find search to be the most efficient way to launch programs. I can understand some of the indoctrinated Windows users struggling with the removal of the start menu (it's a product of the mainstream computing era of Win 95-7) but I certainly wouldn't think many others would have a problem with it, it didn't exist pre-95 and doesn't on other platforms (even though there are some start menu -style implementations on some Linux distros).

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[budgenator]

In windows the UI is pretty tightly integrated with the kernel so yeah it's a main feature; in Linux the UI is interchangeable. I've gotten used to the UI better after getting an android phone, amazing what you can get used to; but why do they keep screwing with the control panel?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Somebody Is Using My]

I think the braindead reason is simply that when you're selling an OS version, it has to offer something different than the version that it's supposed to replace. Otherwise people won't see the point in throwing away their old computers just to get something even more bloated than the OS they have now.

Except people do not buy new computers for the OS; the operating system is just something that comes with the computer. People would still be buying new computers at more or less the same rate if they came with Windows XP.

Yes, new operating systems need to be updated so they can take advantage of hardware improvements (SSD drives, USB3, etc), and to fix known security issues. They should also feature improvements and extra features to put the OS more in line with how people actually use their computes (for instance, adding cloud storage or better syncing with mobile devices). But it has been repeatedly shown - with Metro, Unity, Vista and probably a dozen other examples - that changing the interface solely to market your product is going to backfire big-time unless there are some very obvious advantages (MacOS versus DOS, for instance). And Metro lacked those advantages.

Worse, Microsoft was repeatedly warned of this mistake and chose to ignore it. It focused on form over function and barring an excellent marketing team - which Microsoft has never had - it was inevitable that they would fail in their transition.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

They need to get rid of Metro and bring back Aero as well. Metro has the ugliest GUI look since of the last 20 years.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

You're in the minority, deal with it.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

So set it up to work the way you want. When clicking the start menu did you really worry about what was on the rest of the screen?

This whole blow up by everyone is fucking comical to say the least.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Grishnakh]

Maybe, maybe not. Even if Apple took over 90% of the market, at least we'd never have to be subject to the Win32 API any more. And given the free and open availability of Linux and the *BSDs, any new "devils" would probably simply build on those, just as Apple did, rather than inventing a whole new monstrosity.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[CFBMoo1]

I wish I could mod you all the way to Redmond with insightful points.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[mjwx]

Still waiting for the "Ok, ok... we admit, we tried to fix something that wasn't broken and realized that looking for a problem with a solution nobody wants is the wrong way 'round."

They may not be fixing it at all.

What I read basically said, we're putting Metro into a start menu which I can only assume was followed by the sound of maniacal cackling.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 9.8 SP1 would almost be like a second Second Edition.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

you've got low standards.

Perhaps, but at least a few of them aren't half bad. Besides, have you heard Type O Negative's song "Christian Woman"?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

Because... ??? Honestly, the only reason that comes to mind is that they are incapable of admitting that the whole thing was just plain a bad idea.

Well the traditional Windows 7 UI is a royal pain in the ass to use on touchscreen devices so you need an interface more tailored to touchscreens which the modern UI is good at. Their only issue was making it the default on desktops.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

What people who whine about "you should just install Start8 and get over it" miss is this very simple point.

You should not HAVE to.

And that attitude is precisely why Linux has failed on the desktop!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Looking back, you can actually see a timeline of their PR bullshit.

You missed one key event:
8. "Oh shit! Some dumbass company in Germany named Metro AG already has the name Metro. Somebody in legal done fucked up. Now we gotta change the name of this thing."

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

The whole thing was not a bad idea for tablets. And having tablet-centric touch UI side by side with desktop UI makes sense for all those convertibles.

The problem was that Metro was shoved onto desktop/mouse users. Now that it's being fixed, this makes sense. What makes even more sense is Metro apps being able to run in regular floating, resizable windows - this means that you can write an app with a single codebase that runs on any Windows device in any form factor, including ARM varieties and phones (and yes, it is possible to dynamically adapt UI to the platform). Which means that people will now actually write those apps, because they will have the entire market of existing Windows desktop users to target.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

Now explain to me how the heck I should "adapt and overcome" to Metro in a way that is more productive and contributes less overhead. Go ahead.

I'm not about to suggest a solution to you because obviously you're tied to the start menu, I can only suggest you never try to use OS X or many Linux distributions, you'd be in for a shock.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

Why do you believe that MS under Satya will retain the lock-in? One very noticeable thing that came up shortly after he came to the helm was a renewed talk about F/OSS, both using it and shipping it. Heck, I didn't think I'd ever live to see the time when a Microsoft lawyer would use the words "copyleft" and "cool" next to each other in a single sentence, and yet it happened a week ago.

Things change.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

Satya is the right guy. He's an engineer, not a salesman. He knows how things actually work, and not just inside the little (in modern realities) Microsoft bubble.

(case in point: he knows what node.js is - not as a buzzword, but the actual tech details)

There's one more thing. Not many people seem to have been paying attention to what other changes there have been under Satya, but one noticeable change is the skyrocketing rise of Scott Guthrie. Why this matters? Well, Scott is the guy who, for the last 7 years or so, has been heavily pushing for F/OSS inside Microsoft. In particular, open sourcing ASP.NET MVC was his testbed project, and all the other .NET bits that went F/OSS after that were also under his guidance. Oh, and jQuery.

And now this guy is being rapidly promoted - first stepping in to take Satya's place as the latter goes CEO, then becoming an executive VP of Cloud+Enterprise. Now this is the division that's basically responsible for the entire MS server-side stack - SQL, Exchange, Azure etc - but also all the developer tools. I'll let you draw the conclusions from that.

Oh, and one other telling thing was the recent renaming of Windows Azure to Microsoft Azure, with the justification of "we do more than just Windows there, and don't want Linux users to feel unwelcome". This sort of casual dismissal of the Windows brand was unthinkable mere months ago.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

Try to buy a non-touchscreen laptop these days.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[semilemon]

I agree. The main complaint I seem to hear is that it takes up the entire screen. I don't find it that big of a deal, but if you do, just use Win+S. Then you get a bar that only takes up a portion of the desktop and allows you to search for whatever you are looking for, just like the old start menu.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Fairly - but not quite. Tere is an internal Microsoft project called "MinWin" which is the NT Kernel and some associated programs (NT Executive etc) running without the GUI. (Not to be confused with Server Core, of course.)

It's internal to Microsoft but apparently all currently released versions of Windows are elaborations on it, as the project let them clean up the Kernel and ensure there weren't any dependencies they didn't know about (e.g., kernel depending on some Win32 subsystem or worse.)

Wiki

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Still waiting for the "Ok, ok... we admit, we tried to fix something that wasn't broken and realized that looking for a problem with a solution nobody wants is the wrong way 'round."

That isn't really true. The Windows Desktop is pretty shit on touch devices, MS' repeated attempts to cram the start menu onto mobile phones and PDAs proved that. Metro was trying to create a decent touch UI (It failed at that due to terrible form over function design choices in something that is aesthetically utilitarian which makes my head hurt).

The problem is that they tried to replace the desktop UI on the desktop. Why the fuck would a touch-centric UI be good with a keyboard and mouse? Marketing, market penetration, and fuck the users apparently.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Blaskowicz]

As opposed to taking time customizing the Start screen?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Blaskowicz]

Tip : install Classic Shell in Windows 7, it's needed there too.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Blaskowicz]

It is hard to do horizontal scrolling, and the interface is non standard. It takes all screen, which a huge area to read on a low end desktop 1080p monitor. Features are seemingly hidden - the little arrow or its purpose is hard to discover. Lack of buttons to click on - why not have buttons that do what the magical shortcuts do? Search feature to compensate for the difficulty of launching stuff the regular way - Windows 7 was a bit like that already, having implemented the worst iteration of the start menu.

Good old start menu is alphabetically arranged (or right-click and sort), can be navigated by hovering the mouse so no need for four clicks, and is keyboard navigable as well. The good ones even allow you to add folders to it such as an 'apps' folder which contain software you care about and a 'games' folder that launches games very quickly (with command line options or via a .bat file if needed)

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Blaskowicz]

Search doesn't even make sense if you don't know what's installed on the computer or don't remember every detail of what you have installed or not installed, or removed. Using the menu is also the default thing on major linux desktop environments : gnome 2, mate, xfce, lxde, even mere window managers like Openbox have a menu.

Maybe search is more useful on a laptop where the built-in pointing device is inferior to a mouse. As a desktop user on a desktop PC I find it more of a hassle, it slows the PC down a bit too. If I know the program's name I can use an auto-completing runbox anyway, from either alt-f2 or a shortcut on a panel.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[gonz]

> So it only took about a year of screaming from the users
> and slashdotters before Microsquishy paid attention and
> brought back the MENU instead of that god damned
> useless start screen.

No, what it took was a new CEO. Don't flatter yourself. What you have observed is merely the surface of a significant shift that is happening. The fact that these effects are already visible in the first 6 months is pretty telling.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

This pattern of behaviour is also known as "bending over" or in more civilized terms "caving in".

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck the start menu. Rightclick in the corner is the better startmenu anyway.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[jones_supa]

What do you mean? It's extremely easy.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[shutdown -p now]

If you buy online, sure. In brick & mortar stores, the vast majority of laptops that I see on display have touchscreens.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

The "fix" I meant WAS Metro. Not that Metro was going to be fixed. They "fixed" Windows with Metro.

Not entirely wrong, if you ask me. Of course, only if you use "fixed" in the veterinary sense...

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

Then do what other companies did: Make one UI for lap/desktops, and one for touch tools. Why the heck did MS, the company that gave us ... how many? 20? ... different versions of a single OS earlier, think that it's a spiffy idea to give us a "one size fits all" version?

That reminds me of an old German proverb "Zu wenig und zu viel ist aller Narren Ziel" (too much and too little is the goal of every fool).

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

I noticed.

MacOS is a nightmare for me. Great for my dad, no doubt about that, but I'd probably hang myself before long if I was forced to use it.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[sslayer]

Tell that to BETA!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, sure, it's faster and more stable and has better performance....

If by that you mean slower, less stable, and has worse performance.

Because it is. It's an all-round piece of shit, with no redeeming qualities. I've removed it from several machines and upgraded it to Windoze 7 (still a steaming piece of shit compared to Mac OS X, but by far the best OS Micro$loth has ever released) and those machines boot significantly faster and perform significantly better once you get Windoze 8 off of them.

I have no idea why all these morons keep claiming 8 is faster. It's not. It's slower.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, except that it IS that bad.

Change for its own sake has negative value. And this is change for its own sake. It's less usable, it's less stable, it's less functional, and the workarounds you describe are just that - workarounds. You claim to like this steaming piece of shit, but you're simply describing your workarounds for the nightmarishly bad new UI.

Why do you defend something you admit you have to work around?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that and just as Linux was getting really useable, the idiots developing Gnome made a massive effort to make it less useable, in the guise of making it better on touchscreen computers that NOBODY had.

Oh, wait, that's EXACTLY what M$ did.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[NickFortune]

And really, if you couldn't be bothered to replace the awful UI for something else, that's your own problem.

You know, that makes you sound a lot like a Linux fanboy: "All you have you have to do is recompile the kernel. And if you can't be bothered to change something as simple as a desktop environment, then there's no hope for you."

I always thought Linux was supposed to be bad because users couldn't be expected to have that knowledge and that windows was supposed to be better because that sort of hackery was generally unnecessary.

Funny how times change :)

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[the_arrow]

Who knows -- by 9.x maybe it'll even be as usable as 7 again.

Well it will seem pretty innovative when they release version 9.5, but the big mainstay will be version 9.8 second edition.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Mashiki]

You know, that makes you sound a lot like a Linux fanboy

If I was a fanboy, I'd be telling you that there was nothing wrong with metro. And you were simply too incompetent to use the "improved UI."

What I find funny is the moderation, as much as /. has changed...mod trolls haven't.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

The kernel version is 6.3.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Spacelord]

A touch screen on a PC or laptop is a solution looking for a problem. It makes sense on mobile devices, because you don't have the luxury of decent input devices there, but a mouse and keyboard will always be superior if you have them available.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Except:

1) The "elite" are the most involved and most productive with their computers;

2) The "elite" tend to be involved in deploying stuff for others;

3) Researching a set of things which are "most popular" doesn't mean that a system which selects only those popular things will please anyone at all, because each person will choose a mixture of more popular and less popular things;

4) The meta-game always changes - the only way any system can progress is by giving its users choice and adapting to the choices they make over time. Concentrating on a snapshot in time promotes stagnation.

tl;dr This is what happens when a bunch of grad school kids who have designed a couple of research experiments try to apply skills way beyond their abilities.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[eclectro]

'm sure Windows 9.5 will be revolutionary, unlike anything we've seen before, and Windows 9.8 will continue to improve on it.

Imagine all the improvements that Windows 2000 will bring!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[AmiMoJo]

3. "Metro is good! And the only people who don't like it yet are those that didn't give it a chance and try it for a while."

I think that one might actually be true though. I was forced to use it for a while (couldn't install a classic start menu like I did at home) and well, it actually works quite well on a desktop.

You build up memory of where things are, without having to hunt through multiple level menus. It's easier to organize than the start menu too. Whenever you install something it inevitably puts a load of pointless crap on the start menu - documentation, links to the manufacturer's home page etc, as well as the actual program icon. You can clean it all up manually, but metro just hides most of it and makes it easier to delete stuff you don't want.

Grouping things physically is a nice alternative to sub-menus and allows you to see everything at once, rather than hiding it so you have to carefully position the mouse just to see what is inside. Scrolling with the mouse wheel or touch pad is fast.

Okay, metro apps suck, but you can just ignore them. For my main development PC I'd still want the start menu, but for most general purpose computers metro is absolutely fine and even a slight improvement. Keep in mind that many people access their apps and documents not via the start menu but via the carpet of icons on their desktop, not unlike the metro tiles.

Oh well, there goes my karma.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[AmiMoJo]

Most users seem to use their desktop to organize and launch programs. That's why they introduced the "aero peak" function in Vista, to let people get at their desktop without minimizing each window individually. Metro is just a logical extension of that, and in that context is actually more convenient because it doesn't make you minimize every other window.

The mistake was taking away the start menu for those who wanted it.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[RabidReindeer]

Except people do not buy new computers for the OS; the operating system is just something that comes with the computer. People would still be buying new computers at more or less the same rate if they came with Windows XP.

Technically true, but most companies of any size have a depreciation plan for their systems. So they combine the task of upgrading hardware with the task of upgrading OS's. Especially since Windows isn't very friendly to upgrade-in-place even if the hardware can handle the newer release.

For a long time, there really were compelling reasons to get new versions of Windows. DVD support, USB. Wireless networking. uPnP. More security. These are major things that needed a major change in the OS. I don't know that an SSD is enough different from the general hard drive architecture that it requires that much of a change and I'm even less certain in the case of USB3. Linux formally started USB3 support on a minor release, and even Windows can gain it by installing a third-party driver.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is why they should have left Win 8 looking like Win 7, and modified Windows Phone to run on tablets instead.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

And I'm concluding you are too lazy to make an argument.

Not googling your argument for you is not us being lazy, it's you failing to make one. And no, I'm not clicking on a bunch of links to see what arguments you seem to have found either, a lot of which are probably just the usual Windows fanboy magazines.

Bring out YOUR arguments. So far you have none.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

He did not accuse you of sounding like a Windows fanboy, but like a Linux fanboy.

And you are right, that's exactly what Windows fanboys are saying.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

It wasn't.

GNOME-Shell came out of the aborted netbook era.

GNOME-Shell insisted on the user using the keyboard (the mouse equivalents were painful), and insisted on applications all be full screen. All of which made sense on a netbook with there small, low resolution screens and inadequate area for a decent trackpad, combined with small amounts of memory that made running multiple programs at once problematic.

But by the time GNOME 3 was released the world has moved on, the netbook was dead. So GNOME has been twisting themselves into a pretzel trying to convert the netbook design into a tablet design with little success because none of the basics of the design were designed for use by stubby fingers.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[BitZtream]

The start menu doesn't take my focus away from the document I'm working in, and allows me to see what I was just doing which may be useful when trying to find something on the start menu.

The start page is jarring and screws your mind over by completely changing context, throwing up stupid colored squares that are about an order of magnitude larger than they need to be, even the smallest tiles severely limit what can be on screen.

The start page crap is the epitome of inefficient, thoughtless design.

You can place your favorite apps right on the main start menu as well, so that argument is retarded.

Everything the start page does, it does worse than the start menu in Windows 7.

Things you claim are an advantage of the start page are in fact no different than they are on the start menu so you're going to need to come up with a better argument.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[redmid17]

I'm not the original poster. I'm not the person who was asking for proof. I'm a third party.
The fact you're too stupid or too lazy to *look* at the URLs to figure out the source of tests says a lot.
Pick a metric you would want to see improved over Windows 7 and you will probably hit one that Win 8 succeeded at improving.
There's a reason why you have zero mods and this post is at +5

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista / Server 2008 suffered two fundamental flaws when first launched. Disk throughput and networking via SMB protocol. The performance was atrocious even when stepping down SMB a version to support the older XP clients. Secondly, how the OS handled applying Windows Updates. In some cases, you install 40+ updates, and it fails. It now has to reboot, roll back, and reboot again. At worst, it corrupts the transaction log file and the OS is hosed from ever being able to receive updates again. It was rare, but at least XP and Windows 7 had a method of fixing it. Difficult, but technically salvageable. They may have been solved in Vista after the last service pack or so of updates, but I've since transitioned everything over to 2008 R2 (Windows 7) and newer.

Vista suffered systemic problems, and might even still to this day. I'll let those that continue to use it chime in.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Belial6]

No, a touch screen on a PC is a solution that is WAY overdue. A touch screen that replaces a mouse and keyboard is a solution looking for a problem. On laptop/desktop, a touch screen should be a third input device.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[david_thornley]

Maybe on a laptop. Definitely not on my desktop. The monitors are roughly at arm's reach, which means I'm going to be extending my arm fully to do something with touch. Bad idea.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[david_thornley]

I've seen a lot of good and bad comments about Windows 8. I remember seeing precisely one negative comment that didn't relate to the UI.

If it had been possible to use W8 just like it was W7, it would have been a great success. What it would not have done is force everybody to use the touch-ready interface; apparently somebody at Microsoft thought it was better to make people use it and resent it rather than be able to avoid it.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, Windows 7 start menu "broke" when you tried to customize it in a non-english version. The new start screen was a relief for me for this reason. The start menu of the XP was much better in this sense.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Where there is wet pussy, there is no such thing as low standards.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Belial6]

Do you really have that much trouble lifting your arm and extending it to arms length? I guess that is what the 'accessability features' are for.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

$next_version=cake

The $next_version is a lie!

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[tsqr]

Unlike many Slashdotters, I have no problem with people who actually like the Metro interface. I personally don't like it at all, but to each his own, right? Now, having said that...

You build up memory of where things are, without having to hunt through multiple level menus.

I have already built up memory of where things are, even though they're several levels down in nested menus. I don't want to build up new memories when the old ones serve the purpose.

You can clean it all up manually, but metro just hides most of it and makes it easier to delete stuff you don't want.

I prefer that my operating system not hide things like documentation, etc. from me. If I don't want something, I'll delete it. But I'd rather know it's there to be deleted, than to be blissfully unaware that it's lurking in the shadows, silently consuming disk space.

Grouping things physically is a nice alternative to sub-menus and allows you to see everything at once

My initial reaction to the Metro Start Page was, "Oh, crap -- they've reincarnated the Win 3.x Program Manager!" You have a nice, low-six-digit user ID. Have you considered the possibility that you're merely enjoying a bit of nostalgia?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[david_thornley]

Not necessarily the same thing.

Look at mobile. We have a similar situation, although Apple has a much larger presence there than in the desktop/laptop OS area. There are multiple Android vendors, and they don't have to provide the exact same version.

If Linux became popular, and distros agreed on enough things (like .rpm vs. .deb), then we could have a Linux-dominated desktop/laptop area with multiple OSes competing.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

The actual problem is that they took one good step (ditch the star menu) and fucked it up with a bunch of poorly thought out additions (hot corners for acess to critical features, active tiles, unintuitive tile sorting, etc.)

They also didn't do enough to call attention to the workflow they intended you to use (start typing the name of what you want in the search bar and click the tile for that thing when you see it).

The end result is users yelling about the first thing they notice (missing start menu) rather than the more subtle actual problems.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

The default behavior of showing you every installed program and then (optionally) filtering based on a search query makes a lot of sense, and appears to be the core paradigm of the metro start screen.

The problem as it often is with Microsoft products is the implementation. For a better implementation check out the "launch pad" in Apple's OSX.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

Search doesn't even make sense if you don't know what's installed on the computer or don't remember every detail of what you have installed or not installed, or removed.

Then what are you doing? If you are trying to clean up your PC then on windows I believe it's Add/Remove Programs and if you don't know what you're looking for then what are you even trying to do? Alternatively you could open the start menu folder which has all the links to the start screen items if you really wanted to browse them in an explorer type view. How often are you having this problem?

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

A touch screen on a PC or laptop is a solution looking for a problem.

When it's a wacom digitizer and you can use pen input as well as touch using it in a tablet form factor (surface, transformer, convertible) then it's pretty damn useful.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

This is really the reason Windows continues to dominate the desktop and laptop space, so many users are indoctrinated into the Windows way of doing things having been introduced to computing post-95 that competing solutions would need to imitate to be useful and if you're only going to imitate then why would users change.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

If Linux became popular, and distros agreed on enough things

oh thanks for that! it gave me a good laugh :)

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize that the start menu is nothing but a directory in your user folder, right? You don't have to do that on the start menu itself.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

Really though, it would probably be Oracle.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Anonymous Coward]

I switched your gas and brake pedals, and moved the ignition to the passenger side. Adapt and overcome.

Why is this trash still modded up? Fixing what aint broken is a big problem in the software world.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[lsatenstein]

Looking back, you can actually see a timeline of their PR bullshit.

1. "Here, the new Metro! It's shiny and cool, and you'll be so much more productive!"
2. "The new Metro is great! Really, it is! If for some odd reason you don't instantly fall in love with it, it only means that you haven't tried it!"
3. "Metro is good! And the only people who don't like it yet are those that didn't give it a chance and try it for a while."
4. "Metro is really useful, trust us! You just need to give it a try and use it for a while and get used to it. Honestly, once you're used to it you'll wonder how you could live without it."
5. "Ok, for the time being you can switch back to old style, but you'll see that you'll do it less and less frequently and you'll eventually embrace Metro, most applications will only be useful in Metro anyway!"
6. "Well, it seems that at least for now we have to allow using "old style" for more apps, because there are still those luddites that can't accept change. But you WILL find Metro useful at some point in the future, maybe the time isn't right yet!"
7. "Ok, ok... the world is not ready yet for Metro it seems."

Still waiting for the "Ok, ok... we admit, we tried to fix something that wasn't broken and realized that looking for a problem with a solution nobody wants is the wrong way 'round."

===
This is a bail the boat guys, The desktop and laptop manufacturers want to put android on their devices and via dual boot, give the user the option of Android/Linux or Windows. We've got to plug the hole in the boat. Keep on bailing guys, while we negotiate with the hardware guys.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[NickFortune]

If I was a fanboy, I'd be telling you that there was nothing wrong with metro. And you were simply too incompetent to use the "improved UI."

Heh. The linux community has it's fair share of those, too, sad to say :)

I just find it funny (and I'm not pointing a finger at you here) how the same people can view something as a damning indictment in one context and a saving grace in another. I've thought this for a while, it was just your post brought it to mind.

Ummm... "mod trolls?"

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Lumpy]

Because they are morons and charging for it.

Make Windows 8.1 100% free and adoption will skyrocket, they would have had a larger user base and had a lot easier time forcing the tiles crap down everyone's throat as the tolerance to it would have been a lot better. If it's Free, people bitch less and tolerate more, Look at Ubuntu... Still using the stupid Unity.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[GrumblyStuff]

It certainly does feel like a desktop replacement with some livetiles replacing the previous widgets and system tray notifications but with that in mind, it's odd that they left the original desktop and this solution to prevent needing to minimize programs came with full screen or splitscreen only apps.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[david_thornley]

Okay, try this. Whenever you're going to use the mouse, stick your arm out in front of you and make precise movements with your fingers on the screen. Keep that up for a couple of hours. The phenomenon you're experiencing is "gorilla arm", and it's been known since light pens were first used in the 60s.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Belial6]

Why would anyone do that? Actually, why would you even respond with that comment, since no one has suggested anything even close to that being done. Your comment makes about as much sense as someone dismissing mice because it takes to long to type out a letter with one.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

Well, embrace-extend-extinguish works both ways, doesn't it?

Yes, it's very possible to improve on Windows. MS apparently doesn't know how (Windows 8 is proof if any was needed), but there are quite a few ideas that Linux and yes, even MacOS showed that do improve the experience considerably. The one redeeming feature of that Mac Laptop my dad has is that multi-finger thing the touchpad supports, that's quite nifty.

Good ideas happen outside the world of Windows, and (again, citing Win8) apparently they now ONLY happen outside the Windows world. And while people don't like radical changes, they enjoy subtle improvements.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[ohieaux]

I've had my Lenovo Yoga Pro 2 for a few months now and I find that I have to remind myself it has a touch screen. There have been zero cases where I needed the touch screen. Maybe if I was stuck in Metro, but Classic Shell has allowed me to never see that. I cannot figure out why a 3200x1800 screen should only allow one application.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

Well, embrace-extend-extinguish works both ways, doesn't it?

Huh? That doesn't really make any sense in this context, that was about taking an existing standard and adding proprietary extensions to it.

Yes, it's very possible to improve on Windows. MS apparently doesn't know how (Windows 8 is proof if any was needed), but there are quite a few ideas that Linux and yes, even MacOS showed that do improve the experience considerably.

On the Mac, yes but I haven't seen much on the Linux side of things, Ubuntu hasn't really been an improvement - Gnome 3 and Unity have been disasters - and KDE has been pretty static.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[Opportunist]

Ok, allow me to spell it out.

Embrace: Imitate Windows
Extend: Put new features onto your OS that elevate it past Windows but are backwards incompatible.
Extinguish: Make people rely on those new features so they can't simply switch back to Windows.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[exomondo]

Yeah that's a nice theory, people have been trying to do that for decades with nothing even close to success and not much on the horizon either. I was thinking you were suggesting something in the realm of possibility. Even if it looks like Windows without being blocked it still wouldn't be widely compatible with Windows and even then after that you have to improve upon it in an unspecified way and make those improvements significantly compelling and prevent them from being implemented in Windows.

Re:Gee, so only a year of screaming

[jcutting]

Nothing I mentioned is a "workaround." Most of it has been the expected way to get to settings and programs since Windows Vista (and even more so in Windows 7, which many people love), so I don't know why you claim it's a "workaround." It's not any less usable or functional than Windows 7. It's certainly not "less stable" - I don't even know why you'd make that claim. The core OS is far more stable and MUCH faster than any of its predecessors.

The "nightmarishly bad UI" is barely even there when you're working from the desktop, so I don't really get all of the animosity. Some people just hate change, regardless of the value of the changes.

April Fools was yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft listens to end users?!

Re:April Fools was yesterday

[gewalker]

I thought it more laughable the parent suggested that MS listened to slashdotters

Re:April Fools was yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Your troll-fu is weak.

I miss bobabooey explaining to OOG The Open Source Caveman how he could prevent subluxations by putting meept in his HOSTS file.

Re:April Fools was yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot has at least one user who thinks Bill Gates is personally stalking him for making so many Insightful posts.

Re:April Fools was yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. Good trolls don't enrage. They make your brain hurt and give you doubts about the nature of humanity itself.

Re:April Fools was yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

No, not really, if they did they would have done this as soon as they heard the complains...
...this is a response to rapidly falling sales.

Re:April Fools was yesterday

[efitton]

True. But I had more faith in falling sales fixing the interface than I ever do of GNOME fixing its interface; or KDE bringing Kasbar back.

Re:April Fools was yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

And it only took firing the entire staff that brought you windows 8.... Oh and replacing the CEO.

April Fools Motherfuckers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft PR department running a day late.

Re:April Fools Motherfuckers!

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft PR department running a day late.

Damn Exchange and its Daylight Saving Time calendar bugs...

Positive Sign

[maz2331]

This looks like a great sign that Microsoft may finally be recovering from the terrible case of recto-cranial inversion that Ballmer had inflicted on the company for so long. At least we can have some hope of it.

Desperation?

[ilsaloving]

Wow, this just smacks of all kinds of desperation. It's amazing how badly Microsoft fails when they're not allowed to stack the deck in their favour.

Although I'm curious about Cortana. If they make her/him/it sound like GladOS, I would have to seriously reconsider my position. :3

Re:Desperation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fear not, it's a generic blue circle, with a generic voice. They didn't even bother getting/mimicking the voice actress for the video-game AI construct it's named for.

And in good MS fashion, the bot's entire presentation was prerecorded and the presenter's carefully rehearsed to make it look like it was happening in real time. I swear, they couldn't be more artificial even if they were 100% synthetic.

It'll be a couple years until Ballmer's influence is completely gone, but as of now the company still reeks of stuffy old men trying to be 'with it' and 'hip' to 'jive' with today's young adults and their Ex-boxes and their iThingies and their BlueLaser diskettes.

Re:Desperation?

[ilsaloving]

Why was this marked troll?

How is it not desperation when Microsoft has to start giving away their flagship mobile OS because no one wants it?

Or that they're FINALLY bringing back something resembling a proper desktop UI instead of their ridiculous fisher-price ATM interface that they had forced on people, and in the process added insult to injury on an already flagging computer market.

The only truly interesting/innovative idea in that whole announcement is Cordana, which actually sounds pretty cool, assuming that it lives up to Microsoft's hype. And we all know how completely untrustworthy Microsoft's hype-machine is.

Re:Desperation?

[exomondo]

How is it not desperation when Microsoft has to start giving away their flagship mobile OS because no one wants it?

It's not necessarily desperation to realise that licensing costs are a barrier to entry and to find alternate ways to cover costs.

Or that they're FINALLY bringing back something resembling a proper desktop UI instead of their ridiculous fisher-price ATM interface that they had forced on people, and in the process added insult to injury on an already flagging computer market.

Ok let's be serious, the only thing they really brought back was the start menu. If that's what you consider necessary to being a desktop UI then you probably haven't had much experience with computers outside Windows 95 - 7, the desktop paradigm was broadly used long before anything resembling the start menu came into existence. I use a computer to use applications and none of the applications I use have this modern UI (probably because it didn't exist prior to Windows 8) so as far as my work was concerned I didn't notice much difference with Windows 8, the biggest change was the absence of the start menu though I mostly use OS X and Linux so even on Windows I tended not to use the start menu anyway.

Re:Desperation?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm glad they didn't get the voice actress from the game. That woman has THE MOST grating, irritating voice I have ever heard. Every single time Cortana would open her mouth in the game, I just wanted to punch the screen.

Re:Desperation?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is it not desperation when Microsoft has to start giving away their flagship mobile OS because no one wants it?

because it portrays desperation as bad, with mobile they are adapting to the market and with desktop they are giving users what they asked for and both of those are *good* things! desperation brings out the best in people and companies, just look at Apple: once a failing computer company on the brink of bankruptcy and is now a global behemoth!

Re:Desperation?

[Opportunist]

What happens to MS today feels a little bit like what happened to IBM in the 80s/90s: An (evil) empire that thought it could simply snap its fingers and the industry would roll over and beg for scraps from them. And for the longest time it was like that, for both of them. IBM was the big player in IT from 50s to 80s. You could simply not ignore IBM during those years. The saying was "buy IBM. Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM".

Then IBM relied on that position, not noticing or not wanting to notice that others muscled into their market and, worse, that the market changed. For too long, IBM ignored the PC market. They were firmly entrenched in the server/client market where dumb terminals ruled the world. PCs simply didn't fit into this and were not what IBM wanted. They ignored it long enough for others to build a market share and when IBM tried to muscle in with their usual "you can't pass us" attitude, they had to learn that, indeed, you CAN pass them.

Today, they're no longer the "one big authority" on computers. They still make quite important and big computer systems, but they're far from being impossible to ignore (unless you need one of the systems that they excel in).

MS will probably go the same way. From the company you simply cannot do without if you plan to do anything on a PC they will eventually turn into an important, but by far not the only, player in the field.

And, frankly, I can only hope that this happens sooner than later. Take a look at the leaps and bounds the computer industry took after IBM didn't hold it in its fist anymore.

Re:Desperation?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why:

It's amazing how badly Microsoft fails when they're not allowed to stack the deck in their favour.

I grant you, other's like MightyMartian should also be flagged as trolls, but Linux zealots are the majority here on Slashdot and nto every post can be moderated appropriately.

Digital Assistant software

[slapout]

"Microsoft also finally unveiled Cortana, their digital assistant software that's similar to Siri."

As opposed to Clippy, their digital assistant software that's similar to Jar Jar Binks.

Re:Digital Assistant software

[gewalker]

Actually, this is the one thing I actually care about. A little competition in the digital assistant marketplace can only be a good this. The number of deep pockets able to compete here must be pretty limited, and the state of the art can definitely use some improvement. Matters not if MS version is better or not as long as it is decent it will be some additional competition.

Re:Digital Assistant software

[The123king]

That's a really unfair analogy. Jar Jar Binks was never that annoying.

Re:Digital Assistant software

[Windwraith]

I...I disagree. He was terribly obnoxious, specially dubbed in another language. Not to mention extremely ugly and out of place.

Re:Digital Assistant software

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you talking about Clippy or Jar Jar Binks?

Re:Digital Assistant software

[mrchaotica]

At least Jar Jar didn't steal focus when you were in the middle of trying to type something!

Re:Digital Assistant software

[jeffmflanagan]

>As opposed to Clippy, their digital assistant software that's similar to Jar Jar Binks
You win the Internet today.

Cnet reports that Digital assistant Cortana does sound like Jen Taylor. If true, This could win me over to Microsoft Phone.

I'm happy with my Andriod devices, but if MS can succeed in bringing Cortana into the real world that's going to appeal strongly to people who enjoyed the Halo series.

Re:Digital Assistant software

[jrumney]

The number of deep pockets able to compete here must be pretty limited

Judging by the number of personal assistant apps that became available for Android within days of Siri being announced, I'm not sure that deep pockets are all that necessary.

Re:Digital Assistant software

[slapout]

True. But he did steal focus when you were in the middle of trying to watch a movie.

Re:Digital Assistant software

[Wolfrider]

--I'm with you 99%. A real-life Cortana with Jen as the voice would be a great thing to see... But it prolly still wouldn't inspire me to use it.

What about 2012R2???

[fullmetal55]

PLEASE PLEASE TAKE THE DAMN TILE INTERFACE AWAY FROM YOUR SERVER OS!!!!

It's useless! it's painful! I curse myself whenever I hit the start button!

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

You silly rabbit. Servers run linux.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use PowerShell and stop whining.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Good Christ yes. I shouldn't have to choose between straight Power-shell and a useless cartoon-like GUI. I need to get in, tweak the settings and GFO. I doesnt need to be pretty. Just functional.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think the conservatives that run Microsoft will really do that? No, they're pushing their Republican agenda. There is no way they're going to change. Those people are anti-change thus the name conservative. They are, by definition, not going to change it.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[yuhong]

I think it will get this too given that it is basically the server version of Win8.1.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[MightyMartian]

If I'm going to use a shell-based operating system, I'll use one of the *nixes. Powershell is a bloated monster and is most definitely not an advertisement for Windows Server.

For the moment I do all my server, AD and Exchange admin on my Windows 7 workstation. What fills me with dread is the eventuality at the Group Police Management app will become partially useless as Microsoft continues monkeying around with ADMX formats. This seems to be a favorite tactic, to cripple management tools of older versions of Windows so you're forced to either remote into the newer servers or upgrade your workstation OS.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

In theory you should be running core installations on your servers.

In practice that has a few problems:
Powershell is powerful but doing some things requires you to too look up a lot of damn obscure cmdlets.
Some things are quite clearly still designed to use the GUI tools.
Most 3rd party software shits itself if you try to install it in a server core environment.
You can use the GUI tools remotely and it's 99% seamless.. But on server 2012 and later you can only run the tools from Windows 8 (Or 8.1 for 2012 R2) - And who the fuck wants to run 8 on their desktop?

Re:What about 2012R2???

[MightyMartian]

We're running one DC and our Exchange server on Server 2012, and I haven't had any problems with the AD and Exchange management tools yet. Maybe there are some features that are unsupported, by the big ones I use; DNS, DHCP, AD Computers and Users, GP Management, Event Viewer and Exchange console seem to work alright.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Simulant]

Yep 2012 mostly works as well as 2008R2 but the Metro interface is highly inappropriate and the new GUI tools waste a huge amount of screen real estate. Also I'd avoid storage spaces. I lost a bunch of data from a single drive failure in what was supposedly a highly redundant configuration. It should not have happened....

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol, only Windows Server 2012R2 is superior to Linux in just about every way imaginable.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to convince the upper morons... err managment.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[MightyMartian]

And look, more pro-MS shills get mod points. Well, I've got karma to burn mate, so do your worst.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[rahvin112]

Only if you are a fool.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

WTF?

Re:What about 2012R2???

[exomondo]

Powershell is a bloated monster and is most definitely not an advertisement for Windows Server.

How is that? I'm not a server admin and I haven't really had any experience with PowerShell - I've written a lot of Bash though :) - but I'm just interested.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Shut up, you stupid cunt.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

You're one of Slashdot's nastiest trolls, and here you are calling people "shills" because they aren't riding on the Anti-MS bandwagon. It'll say this as plainly as I can: GO FUCK YOURSELF.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Well when you say things like "If I'm going to use a shell-based operating system, I'll use one of the *nixes." that just shows you're an incompetent system administrator that for some reason requires a GUI and requires the start menu (since the start screen is easily avoided unless you need the functionality of the start menu), sorry but no system admin is *that* stupid so you're obviously trolling.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[bmo]

It's funny how nearly all, to a one, who are mad at you are "anonymous cowards"

If their opinion mattered, they'd have at least an alias to reply to.

Guys, Martian isn't a troll. He's been just saying something that nearly all of us with two brain cells to rub together have been saying about a touch interface on a DESKTOP operating system.

You want to point at the screen so much? Go retrofit a light-pen for your XP laptop.

Morons.

--
BMO

Re:What about 2012R2???

[mjwx]

We're running one DC and our Exchange server on Server 2012, and I haven't had any problems with the AD and Exchange management tools yet. Maybe there are some features that are unsupported, by the big ones I use; DNS, DHCP, AD Computers and Users, GP Management, Event Viewer and Exchange console seem to work alright.

No, we're serious. No problems whatsoever.

Sysadmins always talk to their guns when they clean them. Nothing unusual there.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Show me a Linux box running Microsoft SQL Server outside of a VM and I'll show you lots of money.

Show me one running that plus a natively integrated version of .Net and I'll double it.

Show me one with all of that plus a mod for Apache that lets you use that native .Net code and I'll give you my left nut (slightly used).

Silly rabbit, you thought everyone only used firewalls, fileshares, and SMTP servers with no additional integrations or convenience.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you elaborate on how your storage solution was misconfigured?

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Blaskowicz]

No real experience apart from trying quick stuff like getting the list of running processes..
It just seems rather useless and unfathomable as an end user shell for everyday common use, the way cmd.exe and bash can be used by beginners and even computer illiterate people learning the command line.
It seems made for writing admin scripts instead, replacing .vbs, similar role to using perl scripts to administrate unix machines.
It's just alien and hard and you don't know why you would use unless you're a professional Windows admin.. It's here on Windows XP, 7 and later but no one ever use it.. If you want to ping stuff and run short sequences of commands etc. there's still old cmd and batch, so why care?

Re:What about 2012R2???

[jez9999]

It's a shame; I wish more businesses would go down the Postgres/Mono/MonoDevelop route, but generally they'll always go down the all-Microsoft route with .NET development.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Lifyre]

Is it because for a company that can't employ a full time server guy (much less a server team) it is usually a more effective use of money?

I really really want to like linux especially with games starting to make the plunge but in the decade or so of using it on and off it has always seemed to need more hands on TLC during setup and maintenance than Windows. This could be my lack of dedicated experience time on it certainly but I don't think that's the whole story.

There are some things that are HUGE for linux (at least some distros) like having an all in one update solution like repositories and generally being more stable in between maintenance windows but it honestly doesn't seem to be a big enough improvement these days to warrant the additional headaches for most people.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[Anonymous Coward]

The GUI was an afterthought to the server. You're SUPPOSED to be using PowerShell. In fact, the GUI commands are nothing more then triggers for scripting and executing PS in the background. They're souring the milk for Windows Sysadmins on purpose. Get used to the PS CLI now. Soon, there wont be a GUI.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[benjymouse]

Martian feel threatened by PowerShell. So he is spreading CUD.

PowerShell is an amazing shell. As a shell, its core is even simpler and more consistent than any of the *sh shells. Yet, it is based object models and is designed to be hosted by applications, not just a command line. The commands (cmdlets) are self-discoverable through metadata, meaning that parameter help etch can all be generated from the actual command itself rather than rely on authored text.

Re:What about 2012R2???

[exomondo]

I wouldn't think people who aren't professional admins would have shelled out for a server version of Windows (which is the topic of this thread).

Re:"Free" Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously why would you use something as bloated as Windows

Because we know that the current iteration of Android is svelte, lean and mean...

Finally!

[K. S. Kyosuke]

I've heard people saying that Linux is something that nobody wants even for free. It's nice to see that Linux has finally caught up with Windows! Or the other way around. Whatever.

Dockability

[tepples]

Seriously why would you use something as bloated as Windows for a mobile or embedded device?

So that the device can do double duty. It can act as a tablet by itself, or it can be docked to an external keyboard and monitor and act as a basic desktop computer. At least this is what Canonical promised for "Ubuntu for Android".

Re:Dockability

[Anonymous Coward]

Good luck to find drivers for that crappy hardware... the only embedded operating system of any importance is Linux. MS will notice how futile her pricing strategy is without decent TCP/IP stack, without source code to the device drivers, without stability and without the certainty that the policy or support will be there forever.

Re:Dockability

[Blaskowicz]

Shit tons of embedded device with a user facing or operator facing display run on Windows XP embedded. They do have that market already.

Re:"Free" Windows

[dougmc]

Windows on a phone works pretty well -- I picked up a Nokia 520 because it was $40 and why not, and it's actually quite decent.

The tiles based interface works quite well for a small device like that. I certainly don't like it on a PC with a big screen (or two), but for a little screen it works quite well.

In fact, the only real problem I had with the OS is that there aren't many apps available compared to iOS and Android.

Cortana

[SpaceManFlip]

Cortana was Master Chief's AI companion (the big space marine carrier's AI computer) in the original Halo game. I still hate that Microsoft bought Bungie, and now they're going to milk the shit out of that IP by naming the rip-off of Siri Cortana. I grew up playing the Marathon series on Mac, and when I first played Halo I saw that all the same stuff was there, just fleshed out into awesome 3D so I was like "yay Bungie" and then Microshit shit all over Halo 2 with their Vista "DirectX 10 required" lies etc. Halo 2 worked well on XP with the Vista checks removed. /ramble

Re:Cortana

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to just look that up to get why a few boys in the audience were overly enthused. It's from a video game, got it.

Isn't the presenter a little too old for a haircut like that? He looks ridiculous.

Re:Cortana

[Anonymous Coward]

Playing Halo 2 on a PC like 3 years after the game came out on xbox, great plan you got there chief. It's hard to claim someone shit all over something by releasing a shoddy port that was going to sell at most a couple thousand copies versus the what, 4 million on launch day for xbox?

Re:Cortana

[operagost]

Could be worse. Imagine if they had purchased Ion Storm. Your assistant could be Superfly Johnson. CAN'T LEAVE WITHOUT YOUR BUDDY SUPERFLY!

Re:Cortana

[SpaceManFlip]

Halo was originally developed on the Mac, then bought, then ported to console, then ported to PC, then ported to back to Mac. it started as a computer game, and the best graphics/playability are always on the computer (mac or pc) due to mouse aim precision, resolution, etc etc. Consoles are for children.

Re:Cortana

[SuricouRaven]

Getting Halo 2 working on Windows now is a nightmare. It's heavily tied into that 'Games for Windows LIVE' rubbish that didn't work then and works less now, and depends on a ton of support libraries abandoned after Vista. I managed to do it, but it took hours of hunting down various obscure patches. One of which Microsoft describes on their knowledge base, but doesn't make available publicly - you need to contact their telephone support and ask them to mail you a copy.

And one day it'll be impossible. The game uses a mandatory online serial validation. The servers are still up for now, but when they go down (And it can't be much longer, with the multiplayer metaservers recently shut down) it'll become impossible to play legitimate copies of the game at all.

Still, there will always be the cracked pirate editions!

Re:Cortana

[Immerman]

Perhaps Shodan would be more appropriate?

Re:Cortana

[CronoCloud]

and the best graphics/playability are always on the computer (mac or pc) due to mouse aim precision, resolution, etc etc.

There are these things called USB ports, consoles have had them since 2000 for a reason.

Consoles are for children./quote

in Eastern Europe, and the Second/Third World perhaps. But not in the US, Canada, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the UK. In those places the majority of console players are adults, and has been since the 90's and the PSone. And those are the markets that matter, because they actually PAY for games, unlike Eastern Europe and the Second/Third World.

Re:Cortana

[jafac]

lol; I saw the demo (halo 1) on on my dual G5 PPC. Talk about a disappointment.

Re:Cortana

[Alaska Jack]

SuricouRaven -- what do you recommend as far as the best place to find instructions for doing this?

lllll AJ

Re:Cortana

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes and like two games in the entire history of consoles has ever supported a keyboard and mouse.

Re:Cortana

[CronoCloud]

More than 2, I have several within 10 feet of me that support one or the other, or both.

Every PS3 game that uses the standard PS3 text input widget for any reason supports USB keyboard for text input.

Re:Cortana

[Anonymous Coward]

The game uses a mandatory online serial validation. The servers are still up for now, but when they go down (And it can't be much longer, with the multiplayer metaservers recently shut down) it'll become impossible to play legitimate copies of the game at all.

Speaking of that, how likely is it that in 5.977 more days Windows XP's legit servers will be brought offline?
Been waiting more than a decade to show people that MS' choice to compound cumbersome CD keys with modem activation would be a pain even for legit users. 5.9754 days... Man, I've had this JS for years. Kinda sad to see it come to a head.

Re:Cortana

[VortexCortex]

Playing Halo 2 on a PC like 3 years after the game came out on xbox, great plan you got there chief. It's hard to claim someone shit all over something by releasing a shoddy port that was going to sell at most a couple thousand copies versus the what, 4 million on launch day for xbox?

Playing Halo 2 on a PC like 3 years after the game came out on xbox, great plan you got there chief.

Remember when they killed the servers for Halo2 on XBL to make us start playing Halo3? No? Ah, you must have been playing via PC instead of Xbox.

Re:Cortana

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me, 3 console games support keyboard and mouse.

Re:Cortana

[CronoCloud]

I can name 6 PS2 games off the top of my head that support both.

Unreal Tournament
FFXI
Deus Ex
Dirge of Cerberus
Half Life.
EQOA

There's more besides these.

Re:Cortana

[Anonymous Coward]

I stopped playing the Halo series after Halo 2. Seemingly half-way through the game the story stopped and you got the "to be continued in Halo 3..." WTF? That was half a game! Fuck you, MS.

Re:Cortana

[SuricouRaven]

Not here.

Re:Cortana

[Anonymous Coward]

Halo worked because it was a consolized shooter. Everything about it was streamlined to the way consoles work, from the difficulty to the 2 weapons to easy access grenade spamming. If it remained on the PC it would have remained an RTS game targeted to PC aspies.

Re:Cortana

[Lifyre]

So mostly PC ports?

Re:Cortana

[CronoCloud]

Which is what you would expect, right? And the sort of games Slashdotters mention when talking about how much they love their keyboards and mice for gaming.

The truth is, I don't know how many console games have mouse/keyboard support because I haven't even tested all of mine. Support is often not listed on the game box or documentation, the PS2 port of Deus Ex is an example of that. Doesn't mention it at all. Support also sometimes exists where you don't expect it, the PSN Gauntlet II port is one, you can play it with a keyboard.

So what about server 2012 first release?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all us fools who installed server 2012, and can't upgrade to 2012 R2 without paying another 1400 bucks? Are we going to get screwed without even a start button for the next 5 years that we run these servers?

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we going to get screwed without even a start button for the next 5 years that we run these servers?

If you need a start button to run a server, you're doing it wrong.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[Pentium100]

What about Terminal Services? It may be a server, but it may be used by lots of regular users like a mainframe was used in the past instead of running IIS, Exchange or something like that.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[yuhong]

Don't forget lack of IE11 too. At least they are willing to support these users for the full 10 years unlike Win8.0, and yes this distinction is artificial too.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[Darinbob]

Even worse if you need a touch screen interface to run a server.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[DaHat]

What about all us fools who installed server 2012, and can't upgrade to 2012 R2 without paying another 1400 bucks?

What makes you think you can't upgrade to 2012 R2 without paying $1400?

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a totally separate OS, look it up. If you purchased software assurance for a hefty fee, you can upgrade for free. You will have to totally reinstall windows though. For those of us who buy OEM for small business customers, they would have to buy a whole new copy of 2012R2. OK, so maybe it's more like "only" $800 since I think you can still use your 2012 client access licenses. Factor in 3 or 4 hours of labor to complete the upgrade, and well, you get the idea.

It's definitely not anything like the 8.0 to 8.1 upgrade, if that's what you're thinking.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever set up your licensing screwed up.

We purchased Server 2012 and were able to upgrade to 2012R2 on day-one without paying a cent.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[DaHat]

I am aware that 2012 R2 is a distinct SKU from 2012 and that unlike 8.1 it is not available through the built in store.

That doesn't automatically mean that there is a cost to upgrade.

Software assurance, volume licensing, many options exist to get the next version effectively for 'free'... it just depends on how the original version was acquired, and a surprising number of server licenses are not licensed as one offs, but instead of something larger.

Of course the other side of the coin is the question of "do I really need R2"? And the answer for many is surprisingly no, even though there is quite a bit of goodness inside. Heck, I've a server running 2012 which I've not yet seen reason to upgrade yet as for the time being, it is doing exactly what it was built to do, host a good # of VMs.

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[JustNiz]

>> Are we going to get screwed without even a start button for the next 5 years that we run these servers?

Nope. Just install Linux on them. Have whatever desktop you want, or none at all.
What are you thinking running Windows as a server in the first place?

Re:So what about server 2012 first release?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can always hope for touch optimized management tools for the Metro. With little hope and change of management processes you can believe in, all is well, except that greasy tablet on the server rack, often failing with a colored screen. ;)

Cortana

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome name. So, will she be able to stop Windows users from wiping out all sentient life in the galaxy?

Re:"Free" Windows

[Ravaldy]

Nothing is free. Don't be fooled.

The price here is adherence to their ways and commitment to their platform. This worked for SQL Express, it surely will work for the OS. The fact is nobody yet offers a STABLE package that easily installs on almost any computer with little to no configuration. I just did a bunch of Ubuntu installs (which I consider to be the best installer package out there for a Linux distro) and it wasn't easy for every single PC I installed it.

At the end of the day they will either sell MS Office licenses, user licenses (Domain) or other services as part of their OS. It's no different than HP selling you a printer at cost and making a fortune on toner.

As for bloatware, stop buying pre-packaged computers with 85 pre-installed trial versions of software. A clean install of Windows is not bloated.

Re:Big deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

You could care less, so I guess that means you already care?

Re:"Free" Windows

[squiggleslash]

Seriously why would you use something as bloated as Windows for a mobile or embedded device?

Because desktop operating systems aren't much bigger than they were 10 years ago, yet modern mobile devices are pretty much as powerful as a large proportion of PCs were five years ago. The major issue with running Windows 7 on the Atom-based notebooks I've seen was screensize, not speed.

Yes, Apple and Google have both released mobile operating systems with substantially different userlands to their desktop cousins, but in Google's case that appears to be because of a different, non-Unix, vision they have for mobile devices, and Apple, of course, was stuck originally with a very poorly powered phone that was, in some ways, the Mac 128k to their desktop's Lisa. Both systems were developed when phones were considerably underpowered compared to how they are today. It's not clear to be that Apple or Google would have followed the path they took if they were to design a phone operating system today.

Clean laptops

[tepples]

As for bloatware, stop buying pre-packaged computers with 85 pre-installed trial versions of software.

Desktop users can build their own. But can you give some tips on how to buy a Windows laptop without trialware? Or should one just buy a MacBook and a copy of Windows to run in VirtualBox?

Re:Clean laptops

[Chas]

If you're looking for a gaming machine, don't buy Compaq/HP or Dell/Alienware. They load so much crap in there it isn't even funny.

If you're looking for a general use laptop, stick with the business lines for anyone save HP/Compaq (who still loads gobs trialware/demoware crap).

Re:Clean laptops

[donaldm]

If you're looking for a gaming machine, don't buy Compaq/HP or Dell/Alienware. They load so much crap in there it isn't even funny.

I think serious gamers actually build their own machine and somehow "get" a version of MS Windows to install as their OS :)

If you're looking for a general use laptop, stick with the business lines for anyone save HP/Compaq (who still loads gobs trialware/demoware crap).

True, however business lines are usually much more expensive so the average person will put up with the rubbish or if they have some knowledge remove the crap, which is really not that difficult.

Personally I have never had an issue with HP machines and I have two working laptops that are 5.5 and 3.5 years old respectively that are running perfectly with Fedora 20 although originally I actually removed the pre-installed OS (MS Vista and Win 7 respectively) and installed the particular version of Fedora at the time I purchased each laptop.

Re:Clean laptops

[Anonymous Coward]

I just installed a new copy of Win7 over the laptop's Win8 install, and added device drivers later.

Re:Clean laptops

[Chas]

If you're looking for a gaming machine, don't buy Compaq/HP or Dell/Alienware. They load so much crap in there it isn't even funny.

I think serious gamers actually build their own machine and somehow "get" a version of MS Windows to install as their OS :)

Explain to me again how "serious gamers actually build their own machine" for laptops *points to the subject line of the post*.

Last I checked, pretty much NOBODY builds their own laptop.

If you're looking for a general use laptop, stick with the business lines for anyone save HP/Compaq (who still loads gobs trialware/demoware crap).

True, however business lines are usually much more expensive so the average person will put up with the rubbish or if they have some knowledge remove the crap, which is really not that difficult.

Personally I have never had an issue with HP machines and I have two working laptops that are 5.5 and 3.5 years old respectively that are running perfectly with Fedora 20 although originally I actually removed the pre-installed OS (MS Vista and Win 7 respectively) and installed the particular version of Fedora at the time I purchased each laptop.

Actually if you look at someplace like Dell, the price is negligible or non-existent (Because they're selling you the same machine.) In the few cases where it's different it's the difference between the Windows: Home version and the Windows: Pro version.

Re:Clean laptops

[Ravaldy]

There is an uninstall for the software you know. If you cant uninstall a program then you probably have no clue what bloat ware is anyway. Some Asus laptops now gives you the option to install or not install the software on first boot up.

And you can't blame the OS maker for their distributors installing bloat ware.

Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[QuasiEvil]

Now, could they get rid of the flat, huge, ugly UI elements (window borders, buttons, etc.) and go back to the reasonable look of Vista or 7? Sheesh, honestly the hideous ugliness of it was the most irritating thing about 8 for me, as the tile interface and start menu problems could be fixed with a few add-ons.

Re:Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[Anonymous Coward]

They made the desktop unappealing on purpose. If you like "shiny" you're supposed to switch to the metro apps and interface.

Re:Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[Darinbob]

I like the flat look. But they were very boneheaded and removed the ability to change the border width! You can still do it from the registry though, shrink it down to the minimum width and it looks pretty nice to me. I'd rather have 0 border ala macos, but it's better than the default. I never liked the rounded stuff in windows xp, and the glossy aero stuff in windows 7 just made it even worse. Simpler is better, and there's no good reason to add visual eye candy to something that's not related to the task at hand.

Re:Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[JDG1980]

They made the desktop unappealing on purpose. If you like "shiny" you're supposed to switch to the metro apps and interface.

The Metro apps are just as flat and dull. It's really a widespread design trend. Designers consider it to be moving away from "skeuomorphism". I consider it to be the UI equivalent of the Brutalist architectural style (those bare concrete box buildings from the 70s).

Re:Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't tell you how much I hate it when styling options are removed and somehow that is portrayed as a feature.. The border width is fucking asinine. The idea that you have to edit the registry to change it is goddamn stupid too.

It looks like these moves Microsoft is doing are a step in the right direction.. I still wish Microsoft would collapse in on itself - for the good of computing in general.

Re:Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[norite]

I hate all this flat, bland look as well, most especially with websites. Makes you stop and wonder what's actually clickable or not, also the icons don't resemble familiar things. Makes no sense, why do they make it a challenge for people to figure things out. I also hate how they don't put borders around things, so images etc. just bleed into the page. It's messy and ugly, and things aren't broken into sections; it's simply not pleasing to the eye. Couple that with extra large super size light grey fonts on a blinding white background....It looks absolutely, completely ghastly. Whitespace wasteland.
It's why I love KDE interface so much...the icons are lovely, and it has some DEPTH, plus it's beautiful to look at.
This whole minimalist, flat bullshit reminds me of mullets....they looked god awful back then, even more laughable now. In 5 years, folks will be looking back and going OMG, did we really design stuff like that?

Re:Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[Anonymous Coward]

"skeuomorphism" is emulating physical objects in a non-physical environment. e.g. you click "next page" and an animation plays of a page flipping over to the other side instead of just switching pages. Also, using knobs and sliders instead of spinners.

skeuomorphic design is the refusal to take advantage of the virtual space involving doing things which are useful but physically impossible (e.g. pressing a button to toggle translucency so you can see the things behind other things).

Things being bland, flat and generally shit looking is just a design fad. Designers go through fads every few years where a particular design method is "hip". The previous design fad was the "shiny" fad inspired by Apple's gel buttons and scrollbars, etc. Vista and 7 were part of that fad which is why everything is shiny; 8 is on the new fad bandwagon which is why it looks like crap. I hope this fad will not last particularly long.

Re:Die, die, die, flat UI elements

[dloflin]

> I consider it to be the UI equivalent of the Brutalist architectural style (those bare concrete box buildings from the 70s).

I've been calling it the "Crayon Style". I consider it condescending...it's like MS decided we were all children (or old) and needed the "simpler" look to better use our computers. I prefer a more sculpted look - if that's "skeuomorphic" then fine, give me skeuomorphic.

not long before they are back to paying vendors

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, paying vendors to use the OS to gain market share but the payments will be in the form of things like paying to put a sticker on the box and/or a logo on web pages and boxes. I'd heard that to 'compete' with Palm this is what they did with Windows CE to get vendors to limit their Palm products and promote Microsoft. So it won't be long before we hear of deals like this. But then again, they are now competing with their own suppliers so who knows how many will bite that worm on the barbed hook.

You're a day late.

[The123king]

April Fools was yesterday.

"Digital Assistant"

[FuzzNugget]

Oh god, it's clippy 2.0

Re:"Digital Assistant"

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

No, its Bob 3.0.
I'd wait for Bob 3.11 myself.

Re:"Digital Assistant"

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually it's neither as this actually looks somewhat promising.

Re:Big deal.

[Darinbob]

Not everybody is a power user.

Re:"Free" Windows

[mwvdlee]

Microsoft already does what everybody thinks Google may do in the future.

We're still talking about email snooping, right?

Could barely care less

[tepples]

In a context like this, "I could care less" means "I could barely care less".

Re:Could barely care less

[Anonymous Coward]

In a context like this, "I could care less" means "I could barely care less".

In every context, "I could care less," means, "Me fail English? That unpossible!"

Re:Could barely care less

[Anonymous Coward]

The Oxford English Dictionary recognizes the phrase as a US colloquialism. Instead of getting all bent out of shape over informal language, maybe you should suck it up and get behind it's usage.

Looks fine, but

[chuckugly]

Looks fine, but I never have seen the big deal. For me, if you're spending a lot of quality time interacting with the start menu, you're probably doing things wrong. I acknowledge that a lot of people do it wrong though. Again, for me, I use applications software like Visual Studio, Eclipse, cmd, Word, Filezilla, WinMerge, and so on, and those things are pinned to my taskbar. For everything else I hit [win] and type the name. Very similar to what I did in Windows versions that had a start menu, and hopefully what I will be able to keep doing. The big pain with Win8.x for me is that I have to change the file associations to be non-modern applications as I *DO* find the modern apps completely useless on a PC. Letting them run in a desktop window will help with this I guess.

Re:Looks fine, but

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't see the problem, because you work on your own computer, and customize it to act the way you want. When you work on computers for OTHER people, like many of us on slashdot, it becomes a problem. When you've had to do some of the things you mention 40 or 50 times, for 20 different people, it starts to become irritating. When every single computer is in shitty default settings when you unbox it, you start to wonder if the people who designed the software have ever used it in a production environment.

Re:Big deal.

[jbmartin6]

Me neither! I think all this whining is very childish. So sorry champ that the world asked you to use your brain and try something new...

Re:"Free" Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

No Joke. The timeclock where I work uses some sick form embedded windows, and it takes nearly a full 2 minutes to clock in, and almost 4 minutes to clock out. Time saver it is not.

Re:"Free" Windows

[CastrTroy]

Same thing goes on my Surface2. The Windows 8 interface really shines on a touch screen device. It's also worth pointing out that you don't need as many apps on Surface as you would on an iPad, because it has a lot of functionality built in. Getting videos to play off my shared folder on the main PC was a piece of cake with Surface. With iPad, it was a royal pain, and it still doesn't work well with certain videos.

If you could get a 9 inch tablet for that ran full windows, you could have a very portable computer that you could just plug into full size monitor, keyboard and mouse, and use it as a full desktop. You wouldn't need any cloud services like drop box because you could literally bring your whole desktop computer with you wherever you go. This is the main point of the Surface Pro that most people seem to forget. You have this ultraportable machine about the same size as an ipad, but that you can hook up standard peripherals to and make it work as a full fledged desktop. The Surface Pro is a little outside most people's budgets, but the ASUS Transformer Book T100 is a little cheaper, and can still run most desktop apps.

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

It was crap from the off. There is no reason to apologize for the uselessness that came with windows 8.

This still creates a coverage gap for a lot of us

[istartedi]

This still creates a coverage gap for XP users. If 8.1 had a sane UI today, I'd go XP-to-8.1. It's just an announcement though. With XP support going tits up in just a few days, there's no way to fill the gap without doing something transitional that you might want to throw away in a few months.

They're doing it wrong

[laffer1]

This should have been part of 8.1 from the beginning. I just got used to the start screen and now it's going back?

This should be 8.2 or 9.0 instead of a patch against 8.1.

Re:They're doing it wrong

[roc97007]

> This should have been part of 8.1 from the beginning. I just got used to the start screen and now it's going back?

I suspect you will be able to ignore the start menu and continue to use the start screen if you wish.

> This should be 8.2 or 9.0 instead of a patch against 8.1.

It should have been a patch against 8.0. Hell, it should have been a patch against 8.0 Beta 1.

Re:They're doing it wrong

[cbhacking]

The "Start menu + tiles" thing is not, so far as I know, part of W8.1u1 (because "Windows 8.1 Update" is too damn long). It may be part of a forthcoming W8.1u2, but it's more likely going to be a Win8.2 or Win9 kind of deal. The main W8.1u1 features are the mouse improvements in Metro (context menus at the cursor on right-click instead of an app bar at the bottom of the screen, app title bars with minimize and close buttons on Metro apps when the mouse is bumped against the top of the screen).

If I'm wrong (possible, as I haven't followed very closely and TFA wasn't clear) then eh... what the heck does it matter whether it's called "Windows 8.1 Update" or "Windows 9"? Besides, I am *quite* sure they will still have the option of using the Start screen for those who prefer it (yes, such people exist, mostly tablet users).

Re:They're doing it wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

You are complaining you aren't made to buy another licence?

Too little too late....

[erp_consultant]

With the decline in laptop/PC sales and the increase in tablet/cellphone sales I suspect that many have simply left Microsoft behind. For a lot of people a phone and/or tablet does everything they need. So they could care less about MS and Windows 8. They have moved on to Apple or Google or whatever.

Maybe Windows 9 will bring this but here is what MS needs to do:

1) Those stupid tiles don't work well for a desktop or laptop. Leave the Windows 7 interface as is. People like it the way it is. No need to make any changes.
2) Allow users to load different "skins" like you can on Linux or Android. Metro interface for tablets/phones, Win 7 for desktops. Don't like the one you have? Restart, choose new skin, done.
3) Open source the GUI and allow others to create their own GUI's and sell them in the MS App store. Or give them away. Whatever..just give people choices.

Re:Too little too late....

[Missing.Matter]

2) Allow users to load different "skins" like you can on Linux or Android. Metro interface for tablets/phones, Win 7 for desktops. Don't like the one you have? Restart, choose new skin, done. 3) Open source the GUI and allow others to create their own GUI's and sell them in the MS App store. Or give them away. Whatever..just give people choices.

These last two have been possible since at least Windows XP. Windows allows you to replace the shell with whatever you want. This is the whole idea behind Classic Shell: http://classicshell.net/

Re:Too little too late....

[Anonymous Coward]

in win98 you could set win311 progman.exe as the shell so that features was the for a long time

Re:Too little too late....

[Anonymous Coward]

That was already possible with Windows 3.1 (probably even earlier). There was a INI file where you could replace progman.exe with something different.

You have been asleep for a 10 years

[tuppe666]

I've heard people saying that Linux is something that nobody wants even for free. It's nice to see that Linux has finally caught up with Windows! Or the other way around. Whatever.

I don't think you really understand the irony...Microsoft *partners* are prepared to *pay* Microsoft to run Linux instead of windows.

“It’s not like Android’s free,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. “You do have to license patents.”

FYI Apple is doing quite nicely too

Re:Big deal.

[kaiser423]

Why haven't you used the start menu? I used it dozens of times a day. Press the window button, type "mspaint" or "notepad" and hit enter. Or type the first word or two in the document you want and hit enter blind. I never *looked* at the Start Menu, but used it extensively. Now on 8 when I try to do the same thing the whole screen changes, crap pops up everywhere and it appears less accurate and more likely to just search the internet or something. It's really jarring from basically being able to Win key + type what I want and hit enter and have it show up somewhere. Now it's a couple of full screen UI redraws and changes and much much slower.

Re:Big deal.

[yakovlev]

It's interesting,because my opinion on those two is the exact opposite.

I couldn't care less about boot to desktop. That's a single button click when I boot the machine.

However, I use the start menu quite often. It provides a hierarchically sorted list of every program I have installed on the system. I use that about once a week to once a month. It also provides a list of my most recently used programs. I could move those to the taskbar (and sometimes do) but sometimes these change and I don't want them semi-permanently taking up space on the taskbar.

There are three things that are really bad about windows 8. I've ordered them from worst to least bad.

1.) The charms bar is torture on a desktop. You have to go to the top right of the screen, then go halfway down the screen in a narrow strip to actually click on something. If your mouse moves outside that narrow strip for even a moment, the charms bar disappears and you have to do it again. "Thank you, sir, may I have another?"

2.) The start menu was removed, because it is rarely used. This was just not thinking. The start menu has become big and clunky... that's also become it's purpose. We have new and better methods to access frequently used programs, but the start menu continues to be useful for those infrequently used programs. A hierarchical list is certainly better than displaying them all in a flat grid of live tiles.

3.) Metro programs can't run in a window. This makes them inconvenient for multitasking, which is common for desktop users but not for tablet users.

Re:Big deal.

[Missing.Matter]

You can search on Windows 8.1 from a side pane that doesn't obscure the whole screen. Win+S.

Metro

[ledow]

So.... all that Metro shit that you forced on us, and we said was shit, turns out it's no good after all, then?

Sorry, but I always feel a pang of embarrassment on MS's behalf whenever some free utility actually does a BETTER job than the "official Microsoft way".

Even free no one wants it.

[Anonymous Coward]

EOM

IoT

[sexconker]

Stop trying to make the "internet of things" happen.
Fuck your shitty marketing terms. Fuck them from "1 MB = 1,000,000 bytes" to "* as a Service" to "Cloud" to "Business Solutions" to "Internet of Things" to the next shitty fucking thing you come up with and decide to market, require job applicants to have experience with, etc.

If you can't describe a service or product with concrete terminology then you're selling a bag of marketing fluff and I will not be giving you money for it. Until you can actually tell me what you're selling and why it's useful please SHUT THE FUCK UP.

I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[Anonymous Coward]

My only concern is that with MIcrosoft bringing the start menu back, companies are going to start ignoring Linux again.

I believe that Windows 8 really helped the Linux ecosystem. Look at Steam, for example.

Re:I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[roc97007]

Oh, wait until Windows 9. They'll screw it up royally and Ubuntu will get interesting again.

Re:I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[Anonymous Coward]

If not, then Windows 10 (Windows One?) will probably be a piece of crap.

Re:I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[roc97007]

Exactly. Microsoft can be depended upon to create periodic opportunities for Linux. :-)

Re:I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, please explain how Unity is such a superior interface compared to Windows 8. At least Windows 8 is somewhat configurable.

Re:I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[jones_supa]

Desktop Linux never exploits those opportunities properly.

Re:I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[roc97007]

Good point.

Re:I will still use Linux, like I have for years.

[roc97007]

Oh, please explain how Unity is such a superior interface compared to Windows 8. At least Windows 8 is somewhat configurable.

Ok, let me enumerate the ways in which Unity is superior to Windows 8.

(1) Unity can be easily replaced with a competing desktop.

(2) ... never mind, (1) was sufficient.

Re:This still creates a coverage gap for a lot of

[JDG1980]

This still creates a coverage gap for XP users. If 8.1 had a sane UI today, I'd go XP-to-8.1. It's just an announcement though. With XP support going tits up in just a few days, there's no way to fill the gap without doing something transitional that you might want to throw away in a few months.

Just upgrade to Windows 7. It's a proven solution and it has extended support (security patches) up until mid-2020.

Windows 9 looks like it's going to fix the worst suckage of Win8, but I don't see it as being a "must-have" any time soon.

Re:"Free" Windows

[Ol Olsoc]

Same thing goes on my Surface2. The Windows 8 interface really shines on a touch screen device.

My wife has a touchescreen laptop running Windows 8. Did you mean "shines" as "kinda works okay"?

It's also worth pointing out that you don't need as many apps on Surface as you would on an iPad, because it has a lot of functionality built in.

Finally - a Microsoft fan who has made an argument that having less apps is better. Well played!

Getting videos to play off my shared folder on the main PC was a piece of cake with Surface. With iPad, it was a royal pain, and it still doesn't work well with certain videos.

I know, and Macs and their stupid one button mice too!

If you could get a 9 inch tablet for that ran full windows, you could have a very portable computer that you could just plug into full size monitor, keyboard and mouse, and use it as a full desktop.

That's heading in the wrong direction,

This is the main point of the Surface Pro that most people seem to forget. You have this ultraportable machine about the same size as an ipad, but that you can hook up standard peripherals to and make it work as a full fledged desktop. The Surface Pro is a little outside most people's budgets, but the ASUS Transformer Book T100 is a little cheaper, and can still run most desktop apps.

Umm, no. Nothing to forget - more like Do Not Want. I have a 10 inch tablet sitting in my living room it's fun to play games on, or go to the imdb to see who that familiar looking actor was in some movie or other. Love it - can't live without it (it's an Android hacked touchpad) But there is absolutely no way I''d ever think of using it as a real computer, even if it was a Surface pro or T100. My real computer has 2 27 inch screens and full sized everything. It has a huge amount of peripherals attached - two printers, 2 external storage drives, USB to serial port, and a HF transceiver.

Even though I don't expect everyone to hace so much crap attached to their computer, I'm a big believer in having the best tool for the purpose. That's the big reason why th eSurfae Pro doesn't appeal to me. Aside from running that abomination OS, it is kind of like an old El Camino. Not much of a car, not much of a pickup.

Listening

[future assassin]

Oh they'll just recycle the Windows 7 tv ads where they supposedly listened to the person in the commercial as the connected to the "cloud".

You know what this means?

[roc97007]

Ballmer is gone.

Wait, we already knew that.

Well, anyway, his lack of presence is already starting to be felt.

Re:You know what this means?

[jones_supa]

It is indeed possible that Satya Nadella did what had to be done.

Not only that

[Elusive_Cure]

In XP i could grab the quickstart bar, drag it on the top, fill it with app shortcuts and autohide it, something that i have missed in 7 and replaced it with VAIOGATE.

Short sighted

[chronoglass]

really wish M$ hadn't let the users mess things up from the beginning.
how hard could it REALLY be to emulate "windows" for non metro apps.. instead they let neckbeards drag them back into the "i'm used to doing it this way!!!111!! vwaaaahhh!" type of development and design.

Re:This still creates a coverage gap for a lot of

[roc97007]

Even if this patch came out today, there'd still most likely be a coverage gap as Microsoft delivered something that's not quite what the users wanted, ate additional crow, and released a second patch that asymptotically approached something actually usable. My advice: Go with Windows 7. It's perfectly useable, and gives you a migration path to whatever next version of Windows actually works properly.

fool me twice...

[roc97007]

Ok, this is good news, but -- no offense -- I'll believe it when I actually push the start button with a mouse on a commercial release and see a usable start menu. We've been told before that "the start button is back" and it was a horrible joke.

I also want to see automatic boot into desktop on machines without a touchscreen, and a way to LOCK it into desktop, with none of that random switching-to-metro carp. These are not negotiable.

Bad Management

[enter to exit]

Metro should show some intelligence in how it open apps.

Ideally, if the user opens a metro app from the Desktop, it should be windowed. If it's opened from the Metro Screen it should be full screen.

Metro is a fine interface for touch devices. It looks good and works well. However it fails miserably when you're trying to use it in conjunction with the desktop. MS should go whole hog and create a Metro only tablet.

A lot of the blame for Win8 can be shouldered on Steven Sinofsky, who by all accounts thought himself as a cross between Steve Jobs and Napoleon. He was given free reign over Win8 due to his perceived success with MS Office (and the ribbon interface).

If you follow the MS news, you'll find constant suggestions that he treated the windows division as his fiefdom (and windows phone as a competitor, refusing even the most basic coordination) and that not only did he refuse to include a start menu in Win8 as a transitional step (up to that point, MS has usually offered a way to go back to the old behavior for at least one windows version) he intentionally introduced architectural changes to make it harder for MS to implement one in the future. You'll notice he was fired shortly after without much remorse by anyone.

Re:Bad Management

[Anonymous Coward]

Bingo
Steven Sinofsky (and a few of his crew) indeed was the problem, it's taken a year after booting his ass to get things back on a reasonable track.

Re:Bad Management

[Rudisaurus]

A lot of the blame for Win8 can be shouldered on Steven Sinofsky, who by all accounts thought himself as a cross between Steve Jobs and Napoleon. He was given free reign over Win8 due to his perceived success with MS Office (and the ribbon interface).

Yeah, everyone loves that.

What about Aero?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate the harshness of the New UI...too many sharp corners...I've gotten quite attached to my softer, gentler UI in Windows 7.

Little by little

[Dega704]

Unfortunately, it looks like they crammed the start menu full of those blasted tiles instead of the useful things users will be expecting. I have used this interface on Windows 8 and Server 2012 and I have tried to give it a chance, I really have; but at the end of the day it is just a nuisance that squirrels away the things I need to get to into the most awkward places. Hopefully by Windows 9 they will finally stop forcing fisher price tablet bullcrap on desktop users altogether. I would be happy if they just got rid of that worthless "charms bar".

Re:Little by little

[Anonymous Coward]

XP was often called "FP" [for fisher-price] because of its use of color

Re:Big deal.

[cbhacking]

1) What do you *need* "charms" for on the desktop? You are, I presume, using desktop apps (which don't interact with the Charms bar at all). For things like Settings - even the "Metro" Settings, if for some reason you want those - you can reach them using Start (more on that in a sec). Oh, and FYI, Win+C will display the Charms bar without any stupid mouse shenanigans. I believe you can turn off the hot corner entirely, if you want to.

2) Wrong, the Start menu was removed because they wanted to present the Live Tiles interface and the menu didn't have enough room for that (interesting that Win8 update 2 or Win9 or whatever they end up calling it will have a Windows Phone-like width of tiles as an option on an actual menu...). As for "better methods" that would primarily be Start search, which is much faster than using the mouse. It also generally works a lot *better* with rarely-used programs (or settings, or files, or direct links to settings pages you didn't even know were possible to link directly to...) than hierarchical menus do. Start search has been built into Windows since Vista (2006). They fucked it up a bit in Win8 (still worked for programs, but extra keypresses were needed for files or settings) but fixed it in Win8.1.

3) Assuming you use "Metro" programs at all (eww...) then yes, this is a problem (and is being fixed in an upcoming version). If you're like me, and prefer to just use Win8 as a more efficient Win7 with better multi-monitor support and the ability to run Hyper-V, this isn't really a problem. Aside from games (which I'd want to have running full-screen anyhow), the Win8 apps are worthless on a desktop.

So is shadow copy still gone

[NotSoHeavyD3]

Or will they bring that back as well?

Re:This still creates a coverage gap for a lot of

[cbhacking]

You can easily get the 8.1 preview right now. It doesn't have all the new stuff linked in the TFAs, but it has a lot. Alternatively, just use Win8.x like you would Win7. If you're so hidebound you can't learn to launch programs by typing (way, *way* faster than using a mouse, but hey, people are dumb) then install one of the several Start menu replacements, including at least one F/OSS one. Avoid the crappy Metro apps and use the desktop as you would have done before.

Win8 UI was a trick to kill Linux Desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, GNOME desktop is getting too good and might be able to replace Windows so lets release a brain dead UI for PCs and then once the Linux minions fracture to bits trying to reinvent the PC interface we will will bring back the tried and true PC interface.

Asp.net

[Anonymous Coward]

Some people want to run asp.net applications.

Win8 is deeply weird

[MyNicknameSucks]

Background from a UI designer at MS: http://www.reddit.com/r/micros...

Metro was designed for, paraphrasing pwnies, your mom so she could watch her favourite cat videos without getting bogged down in the OS. So ... it's really good at single- and double-tasking, less good if you juggle multiple windows, and kinda' confusing if you run a mix of Metro and standard desktop apps. Metro's downright nasty to use with a mouse, but works great with touch (at least once you grok that swiping from the edges makes stuff happen) and keyboard shortcuts (type to search is nice).

But what kills me is how hard it is to just use one UI or the other, even after significant tweaking. Win8, as far as I can tell, always defaults to Metro apps, even if launched from the desktop and there's an equivalent (or more powerful) desktop app available. Many settings are only found in Metro. File associations, even for file types that casual users are unlikely to use, like .CR2 (a RAW image type) are associated with Metro apps. And the default programs app doesn't even list all of the file types that the desktop pic viewer can handle; you have to set image types like .CR2 through Explorer. Seriously? Weird choice, that.

The flip side, of course, is that if you want to do something other than media consumption you get bumped into the desktop. Somehow, I think it's telling that Office 365 is not a suite of applications for Metro. And that most of the apps in the store seem more ... well ... tablet- and phone-oriented than desktop-oriented. MS doesn't want people to work in Metro, but never really had the stones to say it bluntly.

For my part, I got so pissed off at Metro on my desktop PC that I installed Start8 and another app that opens Metro apps in a desktop window so that, if Windows decides once again that a 22", full screen, four function calculator is really what I need when I'm trying to double-check some math for an email ... I won't have to deal with Metro.

And, hell, if I want to kick back and surf or play a stupid game, I'm going to grab a tablet or smart phone ... not use my PC.

And ... you know what? I set up a new PC for my mom a few months ago. I didn't want to deal with tech support for Metro on her PC (no touch screen, and didn't want to bother with teaching her keyboard shortcuts or deal with her chucking her mouse through her monitor when she can't find the hot spot to switch apps). But ... she's like ... the target audience for Metro. There is a giant bullseye on her head. She is the casual PC user defined and distilled down to its most basic. And I couldn't face down the prospect of explaining charms to turn off her PC (or how to open the charms bar). Or how to switch apps with a mouse.

On the other hand, I do like the idea of MS finally adding some new functionality to the desktop. Even if I'm unlikely to give 2 shits about live tiles in the start menu (seriously, given how much MS knows about me from 20+ years' worth of product registrations, configurations, IP addresses, and that MSDN sub a few years ago, you'd figure they could get at least the country right for the default locations for the weather, sports and news apps -- I deleted them because I couldn't be bothered to configure them).

And yet ... Win8 is fast. Stable. Runs on the same hardware Vista did.

It's kinda' weird, ya' know?

Re:Win8 is deeply weird

[JustNiz]

>> And, hell, if I want to kick back and surf or play a stupid game, I'm going to grab a tablet or smart phone ... not use my PC.

What if you want to play something more substantial than Angry Birds, such as Crysis or Skyrim? That is where phones or tablets just don't cut it on any level.

News for nerds? Stuff that matters?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nerds don't use mickeysquishy, and this stuff doesn't matter. Tell me about Linux, tell me about Arduino, Raspberry PI, supercomputers, advancements in technology. This is another product from a company that changes the UI and calls it 'advanced development'. Call me when they do something real.

Re:"Free" Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously why would you use something as bloated as Windows for a mobile or embedded device?

Because windows phone isnt "bloated", thats why. It actually does run really well on even low end devices. Old embedded windows systems based on windows ce is a different story but the entire architecture has changed since those days.

Re:"Free" Windows

[GreatDrok]

"Windows on a phone works pretty well"

Windows on a phone is crap - did you ever try the Compaq iPaq? That basically had the same UI as desktop Windows and it was shocking. Windows on a phone is a disaster. The thing they call Windows Phone 8 doesn't have windows. The name is non-sense. Branding gone mad. MS has problems all over the shop - calling their software by simplistic idiot names, then using the branding all over a range of incompatible systems. Worse, was the attempt to pull it all together again by using the same UI on different form factors and buggered up their entire market. The tile interface does indeed work well on a phone or tablet. But tiles are not windows, so why the heck call it Windows? Maddening, and by association with the desktop OS that actually does have Windows and which people only bought to run software they liked but then to find that software doesn't run on this Windows but does on that Windows the confusion is legendary.

MS has confused their entire market. They've bullied their partners, abused their customers, crapped on the history of lessons learned from other platforms and produced multiple generations of OS that still feel deeply embedded in old world thinking while desperately trying to retain their controlling position. And thank goodness for that. All the missteps, crap products that alienated customers and the general dislike they garnered they have lost control. They have to play by the wider set of rules now or die. Anyone who ties themselves to being an all MS shop today is nuts, you have to be cross platform and support a wide range of tools and especially mobile. The poor slaves tied to a desk tapping away at Word documents are a dying breed and MS doesn't really know what to do about it. The desktop is not the location for real work and what they've tried to do to redefine real work to fit their vision hasn't worked. Real work moved away from them and we're not coming back.

Re:"Free" Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

I picked up a Nokia 520 because it was $40

This is why your country is trillions of dollars in debt. You truly think downpayment equals price.

Re:"Free" Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Getting videos to play off my shared folder on the main PC was a piece of cake with Surface. With iPad, it was a royal pain, and it still doesn't work well with certain videos.

I know, and Macs and their stupid one button mice too!

non-sequiter, not sure what you're getting at here.

That's heading in the wrong direction,

Why? Because *you* don't want to do it? Many would argue that having to sync your portable system to your desktop when you leave the house or pushing everything to cloud storage instead of local is heading in the wrong direction too.

My real computer has 2 27 inch screens and full sized everything. It has a huge amount of peripherals attached - two printers, 2 external storage drives, USB to serial port, and a HF transceiver.

How does that preclude use of the Surface Pro 2? I have multimonitors attached to a displayport hub and everything else attached to a USB hub so I just plug those into the Surface when I want to use it as a desktop, the great thing is I do the exact same thing when I want to use my Macbook Pro with those peripherals. So my systems are portable but get the advantages of a desktop when I get home.

Re:Big deal.

[yakovlev]

1.) The charms bar is badly designed. I'll give you that this pain is attenuated by the fact that you don't need it for most desktop usage. I hate the hot corner (I hit it when changing monitors) but I'm not convinced I can safely disable this feature completely. (And I'm not confident that I'll remember the keyboard shortcut, especially if I never use it.)

2.) I read a Windows 8 developer blog that specifically said something like "we redesigned the start menu because our runtime data indicated that with Windows 7 people rarely use it." I'll accept that this is only partially true, but that doesn't really change my argument. Start search is one of the many "better ways" but sometimes I don't remember the name of a program, and having the menus is the reminder. The start menu is most useful for programs that I may not have used in months.

3.) I agree, avoid metro apps where possible. I don't typically run windows 8, but weren't some of the system apps (like media player) replaced with metro apps? I thought I remembered metro periodically popping up when doing various things, but it's been a while so I can't remember what those things were.

MS has become insignificant, to what they were.

[Trax3001BBS]

Giving away an OS (ala Android) must hurt them badly, it goes against everything M$ holds dear.

I've never used Siri, but I can't see much difference from what I've heard about it and Goggle Voice. M$ creating a Siri killer is a half truth and one made by an Apple user.

A rooted (jail broken) phone/tablet allows a HOSTS file letting one block (for one) shout-outs to Apple, and M$, every time you use a feature, they go to great lengths to prevent this. Google tells you how to root their's.

Say what you will, Goggle has given us a lot. You allow tracking for their services; most here use their free DNS, so shouldn't be a problem.

Re:MS has become insignificant, to what they were.

[gronofer]

Sure, not only will they be giving away the OS, but they'll be missing out on all the patent royalties that they extort from manufacturers of Android devices. I guess they are hoping that the benefits from possible future market share will outweigh current profits.

Re:MS has become insignificant, to what they were.

[Trax3001BBS]

Sure, not only will they be giving away the OS, but they'll be missing out on all the patent royalties that they extort from manufacturers of Android devices. I guess they are hoping that the benefits from possible future market share will outweigh current profits.

How much Microsoft receives from Android? I keep that for reference myself, just what I printed out as a PDF is now a 404

"In April of 2010 HTC settled with Microsoft and would pay the company a license fee for every Android device it makes. Speculation has it that Microsoft gets about $5 for every Android device HTC makes. But evidence points that Microsoft is aiming at milking HTC for $7.5 - $12.50 per Android device."

Links from the PDF
Microsoft collects license fees on 50% of Android devices, tells Google to “wake up”
http://arstechnica.com/informa...

The Microsoft/Android war: Which patents are at stake?
http://ineedinfonow.wordpress....

The see into the future article: why-microsoft-will-dominate-the-smartphone-space-its-android-os-cash-cow
http://seekingalpha.com/articl...
Pay to read site (second page)

Another relevant article
HTC Is Paying Microsoft $5 For Every Android Phone
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

Yes in the end Microsoft will be a patent troll.

Re:This still creates a coverage gap for a lot of

[Blakey Rat]

What stopped you from upgrading to Windows 7 anytime in literally the last 4 years? ... for that matter, what's stopping you from upgrading to Windows 7 tomorrow?

Defining what is and is not a "tablet?"

[Guppy06]

I've grown attached to my ten inch Android tablet. I'd be willing to wipe it and try installing free Windows on it myself, but between having to be under 9 inches and being OEM only, I'm not about to buy a whole new tablet, especially not in a form factor that's too small for my purposes, just so that I can run Windows.

Too little, too late, in both senses of the word "little."

Digital Assistant software

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats just being dishonest, Clippy was NOWHERE near as annoying as JJB

Free Windows for phones?

[viperidaenz]

Does that mean they'll stop charging Android manufacturers patent license fees, since they've defined the value of all of their technology as $0.00 for phones and tablets?

Re:"Free" Windows

[RaceProUK]

The thing they call Windows Phone 8 doesn't have windows

And Macintoshes don't have waterproof coats. And it doesn't matter - it's the power of the brand that matters.

Be glad they left Windows Explorer

[aberglas]

Why did they do it? Because the Ipod/phone/pad makes money, and some senior MBA pointed at one and said "I want dat, make it do that so we can make money too. Just like that one.". Design process over.

But Ipod/phone/pads do not have an accessible generic file system. Every type of object is treated differently, be it sound, documents etc. So I think we should feel grateful that Windows 8 still has a Windows Explorer!

Remember, these are the people that thought that an "App" must always run full screen, even on a large modern monitor! So I reckon the accessible file system will go sooner than later.

Re:"Free" Windows

[exomondo]

"Windows on a phone works pretty well"

Windows on a phone is crap - did you ever try the Compaq iPaq?

You do realize you are comparing completely different operating systems with different core and UI and completely different hardware with over a decade between them and different input mechanisms don't you? I don't see how you expect to draw any meaningful conclusion comparing a 14 year old iPaq to a 1 year old Nokia 520 when they have virtually nothing in common apart from the word "Windows" being part of the title of their operating system.

Re:"Free" Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing they call Windows Phone 8 doesn't have windows.

And did you know the thing they call OSX Lion isn't a Lion?! Heaven forbid! Oh it's "maddening" that Apple would sell me OSX Lion and it not be a Lion!!!

Probably the only one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody else get nausea from the windows 8 desktop and metro? The other windows 7 and linux distros I'm fine with but there is something about the way it renders or something about the gui in 8 that makes me ill.

Fix for Border Width

[WheezyJoe]

Just trying to be helpful, there's a site winaero.com that has a bunch of tweak apps for Windows, and one of them called Tiny Window Borders does exactly what you want.

That's the amazing thing about Windows... you think they screwed something up? Chances are, a google search will show a lot of people agree with you, and one or two (or in the case of the Start menu, a whole lot of people) have done the work to develop a fix.

Now, me personally, I think the flat look is horrible. Seven's Aero Glass transparency wasn't all that great, but drop-shadows, rounded edges, and get-out-of-my-way color schemes actually make a difference in my productivity. To each his own, and if you're cool with flat candy-bright, cheers to you. But it sucks that Microsoft removed a means to look like 7 if you wanted to. Thanks to 8, I'm forced to go third-party-themes, taking my chances with patching system files and all.

Re:Fix for Border Width

[Darinbob]

I did the border with the registry since no one had workarounds online for it yet that I could find. And it still requires at least a 1 width border padding, which is just slightly too big for my taste.

I don't like the candy colors, but that's only on the metro side. The desktop kept the subdued windows 7 colors I had. I agree that it was nice windows 7 had a "classic" view for those who wanted something more like XP, and odd that they didn't have something similar in W8.

Re:"Free" Windows

[GreatDrok]

"You do realize you are comparing completely different operating systems with different core and UI and completely different hardware with over a decade between them and different input mechanisms don't you?"

Of course I do - that's why I was pointing out that there are no windows in windows phone 8. Earlier attempts at putting Windows such as CE/Mobile or whatever on a phone such as the Compaq iPaq tried to reproduce the Windows UI with the start menu, task bar and so on. It was awful. I think the tiles on Windows Phone 8 actually work pretty well but there are no windows. It doesn't look like Windows. On the other hand, it does in that they totally broke Windows itself to nail this UI onto their desktop platform which does have Windows. I can see Windows RT being called Windows because it does at least have the traditional desktop although in a limited form, but on a phone it has none of that.

The other point I made was that MS has this stupid habit of calling its applications by names that describe it (Word for uh, word processing, Windows for GUI based on windowing and many many more) but when the tool no longer does that thing such as Windows Phone which doesn't have Windows then the name makes no sense. They should have come up with a different name like they did for Xbox which while technically also the Windows kernel, isn't called Windows. Then again, they stuffed that up too by nailing the tiled UI onto the 360 as well. Crazy times.

Re:"Free" Windows

[GreatDrok]

"And Macintoshes don't have waterproof coats. And it doesn't matter - it's the power of the brand that matters."

Apple is at least a brand people aspire to. MS' problem is seeing Windows on something isn't the easy route to market share it may have been in the past. They've diluted the brand, made it a shitty brand especially with what they've done with Windows 8. Brands only have positive power when people feel good about it but Windows as a brand is something people are shying away from. Even the Microsoft brand itself doesn't have the power it once had. You can't stay on top forever.

Re:"Free" Windows

[exomondo]

Earlier attempts at putting Windows such as CE/Mobile or whatever on a phone such as the Compaq iPaq tried to reproduce the Windows UI with the start menu, task bar and so on. It was awful. I think the tiles on Windows Phone 8 actually work pretty well but there are no windows. It doesn't look like Windows.

That's just branding, he was obviously referring to Windows Phone since he called out specifically the Nokia 520 which has Windows Phone and that OS does not have windows (as in the UI paradigm). Not to mention he said "Windows on a phone works pretty well", again clearly referring to the operating system rather than the UI paradigm.

Re:"Free" Windows

[GreatDrok]

Look, I'm not disagreeing that the OS called Windows Phone 8 works well on a phone. The problem is it has no real relationship to the Windows operating system that users relate to. It doesn't use 'windows' and they nailed the phone/tablet UI onto desktop which is kind of the reverse of what they did with previous phone attempts and why I specifically mentioned the Compaq iPaq which really looked like a little Windows desktop with the start button and everything. Rather like the tablets running Windows that MS was pushing in the early 2000's. MS was always going to run afoul of having names that were so descriptive. You can see why they did it initially because when Windows was a GUI shell that ran on top of DOS it made sense to call it as such. But taking such a commodity word also makes them have to keep adding 'Microsoft' in front in order to maintain trademarks. As a trademark using such a common name is dumb. More to the point, tainting the brand as they keep doing by slapping it all over everything they do makes it difficult for users to understand why their Windows apps don't run on Windows Phone or their shiny new Windows tablet. Apple didn't make this senseless mistake and while the underpinnings of OS X and iOS are very similar in the same way that Windows Phone and Windows 8 are they realised that the GUI is what people see. MS tried to force their dominance in the desktop into the phone space by using the Windows name on something that didn't look like Windows, and then to just rub salt in the wound, drag that non-Windows UI across to desktop Windows and piss everybody off. I'm sure they could have paid someone with sufficient skill to come up with an attractive name for the tablet/phone OS they developed. Anything but Windows. Then again, even when they try it stinks up the room (Zune squirting?) but seriously hasn't the Windows brand suffered enough? Or should I say the Microsoft Windows brand since they can't have a trademark on such a common word, especially when it was already in use to describe the GUI windows before MS even developed Windows 1.0.

maybe trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem, their on the way out. They are trying to outdo Apple, [no I'm not a fan of either company] and any attempt they make towards hand held devices is being seen as another attempt to monopolize.

They said they will make Ungreat.1 free to OEMS, obviously an attempt to get OEM's to cut deals/contracts with them, to try and force out Linux. There will be stipulations in those deals that they create desktops/laptops with Windows only. Whether those companies will get to create "Linux" only machines is something I am curious to see.

You have Apple, and Android. They do what people want. If the Linux community can get it sh** together and stop the inner fighting they have an opportunity to finally take hold, and take off, it seems anytime they have that chance they sabotage it, killing any progress.

Windows is full of bells and whistles that really have no purpose. They seem to be building their software to entertain and amuse themselves. XP was a success because it was simple. Except for the crap that people had to put up with, failures/reinstalls to do updates, blatant back doors, lack of overall security.

Re:maybe trolling

[Anonymous Coward]

There will be stipulations in those deals that they create desktops/laptops with Windows only. Whether those companies will get to create "Linux" only machines is something I am curious to see.

This isn't the 90s anymore, the biggest Windows licensees already create Linux laptops, desktops and smartphones in the form of ChromeOS, Android and (a lot less commonly) Ubuntu. Though many have tried desktop Linux distributions they have been given a massive "Do Not Want" by consumers but on the other hand they do want Android which is why they produce a lot of Android devices. If Microsoft had the power you fantasize about them having then Android tablets and ChromeOS laptops would not come from any of the big players.

If the Linux community can get it sh** together and stop the inner fighting they have an opportunity to finally take hold, and take off, it seems anytime they have that chance they sabotage it, killing any progress.

That won't happen, what DE should they use? What audio system? What compositor? etc. Even though it is easy to circumvent the issues that create all the criticism for Windows 8 we have seen consumers (and the geeks on this site) demonstrate that they dont want to have to customize anything and that is why linux wont take hold in a desktop capacity but why it has succeeded on smartphones.

Re:"Free" Windows

[Anonymous Coward]

Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 8 and Tablet 10 will be coming out soon, to replace the Tablet 2. Runs full Windows not WinRT.
Ups the game to 64bit CPU and more RAM.No good for workstation tasks, but plug it into a docking station and it's good enough for many basic Office worker activities, plus has the mobile/tablet option, and is getting closer to that disposable price point.

Re:Big deal.

[GrBear]

3.) Metro programs can't run in a window. This makes them inconvenient for multitasking, which is common for desktop users but not for tablet users.

Wait, what?

You should tell that to Stardock..

http://www.stardock.com/produc...

Cygwin and KDE

[flyingfsck]

I've been wondering whether Cygwin with KDE will run on Win8.1. It may be a Windows Killer App.

Re:"Free" Windows

[exomondo]

Ok so what you're saying is that when he said:
"Windows on a phone works pretty well -- I picked up a Nokia 520 because it was $40 and why not, and it's actually quite decent." Here
you were confused about what he meant by "Windows", personally I thought it was pretty obvious he meant Windows Phone but ok.

Re:This still creates a coverage gap for a lot of

[istartedi]

What stopped you from upgrading to Windows 7 anytime in literally the last 4 years? ... for that matter, what's stopping you from upgrading to Windows 7 tomorrow?

Money, and not wanting to spend it unless I have to. And before anybody says "switch to Linux", no, there is stuff I want that only runs on Windows. It's not just the OS; I'll need new hardware. The hardware would probably make it to the ripe old age of 10 if they didn't EOL the OS. No combination of hardware + software has ever been this stable for this long. It's just... sad to see it go...

Re:"Free" Windows

[dougmc]

did you ever try the Compaq iPaq?

Yes, I did.

It's been a long time, but I remember the interface being OK, but the hardware being what was wonky -- things wouldn't work after going to sleep and resuming, for example.

The Windows phone I have is way, way more functional than that thing ever was, however.

Re:"Free" Windows

[dougmc]

The problem is it has no real relationship to the Windows operating system that users relate to.

Actually, it does.

The Windows 8 "metro" UI is very similar to what the Windows phone uses (and that's the term they use, so it's why I used it.) And it gets a *lot* of flack on a desktop, and rightfully so -- as you said, it doesn't do windows (the ui feature) at all and each app is full screen. Which is great on a phone, but kind of silly when you've got a 23" monitor or two and all the app is doing is telling you the time.

But other than the Metro UI, Windows 8 is very like Windows 7, and indeed ... Windows 8 on a PC is likely acceptable for somebody familiar with Windows 7 if you install Classic Shell and never go into the Metro UI stuff.

Now, perhaps the government shouldn't have given Microsoft a trademark on that word, but that's not Microsoft's fault, and the PTO gives out lots of trademarks on generic words.

But if your biggest complaint about Windows 8 and the Windows phone OS is that Microsoft should have picked a better name ... that's high praise, indeed. Most others have much more significant complaints than the *name*.

actually...

[Anonymous Coward]

people were screaming when teh beta came out in 2010 that the metro UI was an abomination, so its been closer to 4 years.

*cough*

[Anonymous Coward]

You will have to totally reinstall windows though

Bullshit. You can upgrade to 2012R2 via 2012 from 2008 R2. Previous OS too, if you installed as x64.

hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

Win8 is fast, stable, etc. But with 8.1 i have had it suddenly and randomly go to 100% disk IO and lock up. For over an hour at a time (I have given up waiting, and power cycled). Regularly, like 2x per day. I'm not sure why, it doesn't log anything relevant but i suspect it was after a Windows update - i'd been running 8.1 for 3 months with no issues.

Hardware checks out fine, was running 8 without issue previously and have rolled back to 8 and the issues have disappeared. Gigabyte H87 mobo, core i5-4430, 8 GB ram, seagate 2 TB drive, nvidia gt760. all pretty standard/common hardware... no malware, all the box does is run steam.

Classic Shell

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like it will still be crap.

As long as it doesn't stop me from using CLASSIC SHELL for a Start Menu, I don't care.

I set it like XP, ignore all the "program files" section, and sort it with my own folders. Has worked great for years.

http://www.classicshell.net/

8.1

[arctor]

No way, fooled me once. I'm still not upgrading.

8.0 - 8.1, all of my games stopped working. Mouse issues. (apart from games, why use win?)

Re:News for nerds? Stuff that matters?

[jones_supa]

Well, Microsoft bringing the Start Menu back is quite huge news, so of course it has to be reported. But anyway, if you want front page news of your favorite topics, the only way is to submit them, or vote up articles submitted by others in the firehose.

Re:Big deal.

[cbhacking]

For what it's worth, Charms work great on a tablet; in fact, that bar is the easiest way to open Start, as well as being easy access to the Metro features. It is, however, somewhere between nearly useless and purely aggravating on a desktop, yes.

If I literally don't remember any of the words in the shortcut name, or the executable name, or enough of the letters that *start* any word in the program name, then I suppose you have a point. That is an... exceedingly rare scenario for me, though, despite both having a terrible memory for minutiae (I try to make the effort to memorize keyboard shortcuts, but I don't always succeed) and a wide, constantly-changing range of software I use. Maybe I'm better at remembering (or guessing)program names than I thought? in any case, I haven't had to do that in well over a year; I don't specifically recall the last time.

Windows Media Player and the (terrible) Windows Photo Viewer are still installed on Win8 (RT has Photo Viewer but not WPM, oddly). It's easy enough to reset the file associations to use them. For that matter, I *think* it prompts you to do so the first time you open such a file (with a pop-up toast in the corner). You can also, of course, use third party software (say, VLC and Irfanview) which have the ability to take the file associations for known file types if you want them to.

Re:"Free" Windows

[dunkelfalke]

I have used phones with Windows Mobile for years. I actually liked them a lot. This kind of an interface is just fine with a resistive touchscreen and a stylus.

patents vs. licences

[bakedbread]

So Microsoft thinks they can charge for Android, but not for Windows Phone. I think I would challenge that as a competition regulator.

Re:"Free" Windows

[bluegutang]

If you could get a 9 inch tablet for that ran full windows, you could have a very portable computer that you could just plug into full size monitor, keyboard and mouse, and use it as a full desktop.

Or you could use a regular laptop the same way.

Optional?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope its optional. I prefer my task bar without the start button and was saddened when they forced it on me. I quite like the new menu. I hope it can stay as an option.

With my friends it seems to be a mix. There are those, like most of slashdot who outright refuse to go near the thing and havn't ever used it for more then a few minutes. Then there are those who quite like it, myself included.

Re:"Free" Windows

[BitZtream]

Right because you have a regular laptop thats as light and portable as a surface tablet ...

Pull your head out of your ass, even the best ultra books don't compare. The MacBook Air is as close as it gets and its not close enough.

Personally, I want my phone to do double as a desktop when docked so I don't have to carry a tablet either.

Sorry Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

I do not want a single Metro tile on my Windows OS, especially not having it taint my Desktop.

If this is your idea of 'getting more eyeballs/mindshare for Metro so the users will be more inclined to buy Windows phones and tablets', be prepared for disappointment.

No Metro, no Charms bar, no Lock screen, and no 'sign up for a Microsoft account today!' prompting at every turn. Then, and only then, may Windows 8 be a success.

As it stands now, Windows users will continue to cling onto their WinXP and Win7, while some others defect to Macs or Linux.

Better luck for Windows 9.

"If you start me up..."

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0AJM6HMYjM

The Start button. Still 100% valid.

Metro Is Ugly!

[Anonymous Coward]

Metro is so ugly, heck Windows 95 UI is better looking than the garish unpleasantness of Metro. If Windows 8.1 had the option turning metro off and restoring Aero it would make the UI soooo much more better looking. But the return of the start menu is a step in the right direction.

Beta sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a laptop yesterday. Less than half of the laptops in the store had touchscreens, and none of the 'enthusiast' models did.

Of course, the first thing I did after I got it home was pull out the Windows 8 drive, toss it back in the box and install an SSD with Linux. Thanks to the 'ulttrabook' fad, one thing that has become hard is finding laptops which don't require you to remove sixteen screws and then unclip the entire base to get to the drive.

Uninstallation can be a PITA

[tepples]

There is an uninstall for the software you know.

I'm aware of that. It's just that "Programs and Features" can't queue uninstallers to run; instead it says something to the effect of "Please wait for one uninstaller to finish before starting another." That and a lot of the uninstallers demand a reboot afterward. Some even have CAPTCHAs, such as Norton.

Free Windows for the Internet of Things?

[userw014]

I'm worried that having Windows being free but not open sourced for "small devices" will lead to even more irresponsibly designed and supported devices by embedded device manufacturers. (As everyone ought to know it's pretty bad now.)

On the other hand, Microsoft's definition of a "small device" means that my 3,859lb Ford CMax Energi with My Ford Touch powered by Microsoft might qualify because the touch screen is smaller than 9". Ford, on the other hand, seems to want to move away from Microsoft given the difficulties it has had with MFT - so perhaps Microsoft is trying to convince Ford to stay.