So take Snowden for example. Did he increase or decrease security by pointing out the massive amount of individual tracking the government is doing? More data means 3rd party hackers that get in can get the info too but stopping (even abusive) spying on civilians looking for terrorists and other criminals doesn't increase security just privacy.
True. Performance wise it is a nice OS. I mean more of the "compelling reason to upgrade". Vista fell on its face by needing fairly high end systems (particularly graphics), UAC, and lack of drivers. Win 8 has failed because the typical person I run into either doesn't care about the core new feature: modern apps (neutral) or actively want to work around never having to see them (negative). Your computer might run ~5% faster and have 10 less running services on it than win 7 but if you have to see the stupid start screen every time you try to use it you'll just stick with Win 7.
I suspect by Win 9 timeframe: touch will be much more common place including on desktop hardware (and touchpads), the modern apps interface will be streamlined, and likely MS will have backed off from the modern first approach even more than 8.1 did. All will lead Win 9 to do what Win 7 did for Vista: actually get people to buy new hardware.
They all want to be full screen true. But 8.0 had the 1/3 2/3 view which is still better than iOS let you do. 8.1 added better multi-mon support so you can have a modern app on one screen and your full desktop on the other. The apps can now be arbritary size and up to 3 per screen I think it is.
The default applications were yet more marketing junk: if it didn't come with a Facebook app on the start screen people would say "it can't do facebook, I better get a iPad". Anyways: store apps pre-installed: fluff for casual tablet audience. Store forced as landing page/on the desktop: marketing fluff so they can tell developers there is this huge market their apps can run on vs "the other guys". In actuality desktop/tablet markets are almost completely separate and Windows has ~0% of the one market and ~90% of the other.
The blank view is the default for "normal users". Most people don't know what a service is and even if they do don't know which are safe to stop or not. The #1 use case for task manager is seeing the applications you are running and which is using a lot of system resources. The basic view does that brilliantly. The more detailed view is a half way point between old task manager and process explorer. Get which is busy with disk, which is busy with network etc. Pretty much all I (usually) need to figure out what I need to kill to get my system running nicely again.
I agree with the big fonts though. I think it is trying to move from battleship grey packed group boxes. They are trying (as are pretty much everyone else) trying to use font size, spacing etc to layer a visual hierarchy over the interface. Generally that means everything can't be 10pt font with the margins set to 0.
That was just it I think Vista had its flaws but it was a 1-2year ahead system (ahead in terms of required specs and the drivers appearing). Win 8 might be the same thing (though I suspect a lot of the modern interface will need to be "reimagined" before it catches on). Vista stopped completely sucking right around when Win 7 came out and there was no longer a reason to run it anymore.
2) MS doesn't care one way or another. I know with MSDN and business level agreements you are entitled to the latest (and all preceding) versions. OEM licenses are problem the same. As long as they get their ~$40 they probably don't care.
win 8 = win 9 beta: sort of like Vista was win 7 rushed edition.
I actually don't mind 8.1 with desktop enabled as the login. I installed classic shell and haven't seen the start menu (or needed to) since. The new task manager is nice sort of a middle ground between process explorer and the classic task manager. The file transfer dialog progress indicator is nice too. Just little polishes on top of what Win 7 has. Nothing worthy of going out of your way to upgrade but I wouldn't go out of my way to downgrade either.
Reviewers often are working in similar spaces too. I had a paper that failed review the first couple times because the reviewer wanted more data on a particular area of the project. It didn't affect the main idea of the paper or in any way directly contribute to our argument. The reviewer needed some charts generated because he was working on a similar project and it would help for him to have some other paper that he could reference to get started/justify his paper. So not only low paid work sometimes low paid work for someone who you didn't even know was your boss:)
So you want a new ATM in 2005 you are "half way" through the current generation but the next gen one isn't available yet. MS (or hardware makers) aren't all going to sync on each others schedule. Can you imagine if they did? It is hard enough to get 10 people at work to go out at 12pm exactly and know where they are going without a big long debate. There would always be someone saying "oh don't do it now we have a 100M deal we are trying to close".
That is the pro of FOSS you can pick the latest and greatest distro with the newest shinniest bits at any time you want. The problem is stability in the sense that getting support for an old distro might be hard to find because the ecosystems mentality is "its free, just update to the latest". You might need more people in house managing what goes into your stuff after it ships since it might just not be a simple update manager but hunting down a particular build of a particular component (say OpenSSH) vs (admittedly also a bad idea) blindly trusting windows update to give you what you want.
Except that the hardware drivers were probably written for windows by developers with windows desktops. That is often the case. So "porting the JVM" probably never came into it. Put a full PC in the box and your drivers don't need to be rewritten (or you have to hire developers that know something different) is probably more like it.
True but ~50M XBox 360's is a couple quarters of iPhone sales. Relative market size the only thing MS has to compare with iOS or Android is windows. Consoles or windows phone are just relatively a niche market.
I meant more emulation as a way of porting modern apps over. ex: you need Adobe Creative Suite on your Surface/other ARM based device, corporate stuff developed for desktops in the office just work on your shiny new mixed use device. No recompile. Apple did this during the switchover from Power but I think part of it was that by the time they switched power was pretty limited performance wise (incremental improvements had been delayed for some reason if I recall) and they were going from a chip with really bad performance for video (integer math sucked on Power?) to one that was fine for video where as the emulation on ARM of x86 would be going the opposite way.
They have tried compatibility modes with IE and windows. I always seem to have an app kicking around that just refuses to play nice even in compatibility mode though (corporate VPN clients are usually the culprit). Emulation also would have helped out with the ARM features. Performance might suck with today's chips to emulate x86 on ARM but what about 3-5 years from now? Then the must have corp software (which has a lifespan of decades) could be running on shinny new tablets. Maybe intel/amd will come out with a successful x86 compatible very low energy chip but until then... win 8+ is dead on an ARM device as a laptop replacement.
Accept if the lifespan is 22-25 months those 800M units in 2012 have all broke and a big part of the 850M 2013 sales would have been replacements. No doubt at some point Android or iOS will pass Windows but I don't think that will mean that people will stop working with windows devices. They'll just have a tablet, a cellphone or two etc that are running something else.
What annoys me most about this trend is the applification of everything. I don't need "an app for that". I need an app for that, and that and that. I use Office because I can't be bothered giving the free options a try every couple years to see if they've caught up (and I can be sure that what I learn to do at home will work at work vs learn Open Office tricks then relearn the same thing on a different platform). The problem is the trend of very small task apps making you have dozens of applications all for one particular piece of your organizational/communication puzzle. All slightly different UI choices, storing data in different proprietary formats, generally not communicating to one another well etc. I don't want to be bothered finding all the sub parts of a particular problem then investigating apps that fit that niche (and even worse since the app developers might have partitioned the domain differently than my desired workflow). Give me a suite that does a large subset of my problem. You probably won't see that on iOS or Android any time soon.
It is also a world where you are either expected to give away your app or make such small money that 90% of people can't live off of their development work for apps alone (saw a talk recently that estimated something like the average iOS app makes $8500/yr, that is great if I can pound that out in a month but not enough for me to bother continued support other than because I really dig the project). Not to mention the distribution is hugely scewed by the few huge successes that the median developer is making $1000.
Agreed. Ultimately we develop the software our management tells us to (not a MS employee just speaking generally). We can argue our case for change we can vote with our feet or we can stay put. That's our choices. MS gets a bad wrap quite frankly usually from a bunch of people that consider a big product 100 employees and 10,000 customers. The scale of MS is just frightening, every single misstep or even hesitation and people pounce all over them. They started with a rather cobbled together system and are stuck with it because of the insistence of doing all they can to have backwards compatibility. This assumption of backwards compatibility screws them over when they try to get new markets (ex. tablets) and when ever they enter a new market they are always (perhaps rightly) under huge scrutiny as trying to "use there monopolistic power to own the market for X". At any rate MS's missteps aren't necessarily the engineers fault there is a whole ecosystem and huge external pressures forcing them to act the way they do in a business sense. Engineering/product feature schedules are just along for the ride a lot I think.
I'm wondering if "The people who use this research don’t have any say in what is being saved or tossed aside" should be read: "those old foggies that insist on paper copies of journals rather than electronic". They exist, at least they did in the early 2000's when I did RA work. Forcing people to learn electronic tools will help them find a much wider range of the relevant material far quicker.
Also another complaint: "The people who use this research don’t have any say in what is being saved or tossed aside": do these people pay the storage bills? If not are they okay taking a truck load each and storing it in their garage? If not they should shut up. Thought should be considered when discarding data. The scientists generally didn't pay for the research and if those that did (largely the government) decides that "A study in the jiggly of the jelly" is no longer worthy of keeping that's fine it is theirs (they paid for it).
True to both. $1 for what they are is a lot (that said if it means you get sex that night it is money well spent:)). Both sides need to be reasonable: you shouldn't just hand out money like people are entitled to it (you do with health insurance and unemployment insurance because it is something they paid for so they ARE entitled to it), and the flip side is you need to allow people the freedom to deal with their problems they any way that is legally allowed to them (including ready access to birth control, sex ed, abortion, adoption services, legal aid to force the fathers to help out etc).
So it is punishing them by not giving them a hand out they aren't entitled too? I'm confused. You do understand the difference between actions and inaction right? Well no one is required to act on their behalf to give them something they aren't entitled too. The criteria that decides what they currently get was pulled out of a hat not something handed down on stone tablets. There is no reason why that criteria can't change to include not putting yourself in a worse situation where you need more assistance.
Again it is a matter of responsibility. I've literally never had sex without a condom (not married) and I won't do so. Birth control isn't 100% but every friend I had that got/got someone else pregnant it was "we thought we'd get away with it just this once" and I have several in that situation. There are things you can do besides vaginal intercourse if you can't afford birthcontrol/happen to be caught without any when needed.
The point is you aren't punishing anyone. You aren't taking away THEIR money you are refusing to give them YOUR money should they not met your requirements. With the my sister analogy: she chose to break the rules of our agreement so she would be responsible for the consequences it has on her children. You aren't punishing people by refusing to help them regardless of how they've gotten themselves into the mess or whether or not they have made reasonable efforts to improve their situation.
A child still suffers if their parent commits a crime and goes away to jail. What's your point? Bad parents give their children bad childhoods. Not enforcing rationality on those expecting handouts because someone else might suffer is itself not rational. The parent isn't universally entitled to the money from the government nor is the government responsible should they chose to do something that results in those handouts going away and ends up hurting the children as collateral damage.
How is it punishment to have conditions on what you can do if you want to receive hand outs? If my sister asks for my help paying her rent she damn well better not go and move into a more expensive apartment.
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So take Snowden for example. Did he increase or decrease security by pointing out the massive amount of individual tracking the government is doing? More data means 3rd party hackers that get in can get the info too but stopping (even abusive) spying on civilians looking for terrorists and other criminals doesn't increase security just privacy.
True. Performance wise it is a nice OS. I mean more of the "compelling reason to upgrade". Vista fell on its face by needing fairly high end systems (particularly graphics), UAC, and lack of drivers. Win 8 has failed because the typical person I run into either doesn't care about the core new feature: modern apps (neutral) or actively want to work around never having to see them (negative). Your computer might run ~5% faster and have 10 less running services on it than win 7 but if you have to see the stupid start screen every time you try to use it you'll just stick with Win 7.
I suspect by Win 9 timeframe: touch will be much more common place including on desktop hardware (and touchpads), the modern apps interface will be streamlined, and likely MS will have backed off from the modern first approach even more than 8.1 did. All will lead Win 9 to do what Win 7 did for Vista: actually get people to buy new hardware.
They all want to be full screen true. But 8.0 had the 1/3 2/3 view which is still better than iOS let you do. 8.1 added better multi-mon support so you can have a modern app on one screen and your full desktop on the other. The apps can now be arbritary size and up to 3 per screen I think it is.
The default applications were yet more marketing junk: if it didn't come with a Facebook app on the start screen people would say "it can't do facebook, I better get a iPad". Anyways: store apps pre-installed: fluff for casual tablet audience. Store forced as landing page/on the desktop: marketing fluff so they can tell developers there is this huge market their apps can run on vs "the other guys". In actuality desktop/tablet markets are almost completely separate and Windows has ~0% of the one market and ~90% of the other.
The blank view is the default for "normal users". Most people don't know what a service is and even if they do don't know which are safe to stop or not. The #1 use case for task manager is seeing the applications you are running and which is using a lot of system resources. The basic view does that brilliantly. The more detailed view is a half way point between old task manager and process explorer. Get which is busy with disk, which is busy with network etc. Pretty much all I (usually) need to figure out what I need to kill to get my system running nicely again.
I agree with the big fonts though. I think it is trying to move from battleship grey packed group boxes. They are trying (as are pretty much everyone else) trying to use font size, spacing etc to layer a visual hierarchy over the interface. Generally that means everything can't be 10pt font with the margins set to 0.
That was just it I think Vista had its flaws but it was a 1-2year ahead system (ahead in terms of required specs and the drivers appearing). Win 8 might be the same thing (though I suspect a lot of the modern interface will need to be "reimagined" before it catches on). Vista stopped completely sucking right around when Win 7 came out and there was no longer a reason to run it anymore.
2) MS doesn't care one way or another. I know with MSDN and business level agreements you are entitled to the latest (and all preceding) versions. OEM licenses are problem the same. As long as they get their ~$40 they probably don't care.
win 8 = win 9 beta: sort of like Vista was win 7 rushed edition.
I actually don't mind 8.1 with desktop enabled as the login. I installed classic shell and haven't seen the start menu (or needed to) since. The new task manager is nice sort of a middle ground between process explorer and the classic task manager. The file transfer dialog progress indicator is nice too. Just little polishes on top of what Win 7 has. Nothing worthy of going out of your way to upgrade but I wouldn't go out of my way to downgrade either.
Reviewers often are working in similar spaces too. I had a paper that failed review the first couple times because the reviewer wanted more data on a particular area of the project. It didn't affect the main idea of the paper or in any way directly contribute to our argument. The reviewer needed some charts generated because he was working on a similar project and it would help for him to have some other paper that he could reference to get started/justify his paper. So not only low paid work sometimes low paid work for someone who you didn't even know was your boss :)
Yes: I don't like discussing my personal shortcomings with total strangers.
Oh snap :)
So you want a new ATM in 2005 you are "half way" through the current generation but the next gen one isn't available yet. MS (or hardware makers) aren't all going to sync on each others schedule. Can you imagine if they did? It is hard enough to get 10 people at work to go out at 12pm exactly and know where they are going without a big long debate. There would always be someone saying "oh don't do it now we have a 100M deal we are trying to close".
That is the pro of FOSS you can pick the latest and greatest distro with the newest shinniest bits at any time you want. The problem is stability in the sense that getting support for an old distro might be hard to find because the ecosystems mentality is "its free, just update to the latest". You might need more people in house managing what goes into your stuff after it ships since it might just not be a simple update manager but hunting down a particular build of a particular component (say OpenSSH) vs (admittedly also a bad idea) blindly trusting windows update to give you what you want.
Except that the hardware drivers were probably written for windows by developers with windows desktops. That is often the case. So "porting the JVM" probably never came into it. Put a full PC in the box and your drivers don't need to be rewritten (or you have to hire developers that know something different) is probably more like it.
True but ~50M XBox 360's is a couple quarters of iPhone sales. Relative market size the only thing MS has to compare with iOS or Android is windows. Consoles or windows phone are just relatively a niche market.
I meant more emulation as a way of porting modern apps over. ex: you need Adobe Creative Suite on your Surface/other ARM based device, corporate stuff developed for desktops in the office just work on your shiny new mixed use device. No recompile. Apple did this during the switchover from Power but I think part of it was that by the time they switched power was pretty limited performance wise (incremental improvements had been delayed for some reason if I recall) and they were going from a chip with really bad performance for video (integer math sucked on Power?) to one that was fine for video where as the emulation on ARM of x86 would be going the opposite way.
They have tried compatibility modes with IE and windows. I always seem to have an app kicking around that just refuses to play nice even in compatibility mode though (corporate VPN clients are usually the culprit). Emulation also would have helped out with the ARM features. Performance might suck with today's chips to emulate x86 on ARM but what about 3-5 years from now? Then the must have corp software (which has a lifespan of decades) could be running on shinny new tablets. Maybe intel/amd will come out with a successful x86 compatible very low energy chip but until then ... win 8+ is dead on an ARM device as a laptop replacement.
Accept if the lifespan is 22-25 months those 800M units in 2012 have all broke and a big part of the 850M 2013 sales would have been replacements. No doubt at some point Android or iOS will pass Windows but I don't think that will mean that people will stop working with windows devices. They'll just have a tablet, a cellphone or two etc that are running something else.
What annoys me most about this trend is the applification of everything. I don't need "an app for that". I need an app for that, and that and that. I use Office because I can't be bothered giving the free options a try every couple years to see if they've caught up (and I can be sure that what I learn to do at home will work at work vs learn Open Office tricks then relearn the same thing on a different platform). The problem is the trend of very small task apps making you have dozens of applications all for one particular piece of your organizational/communication puzzle. All slightly different UI choices, storing data in different proprietary formats, generally not communicating to one another well etc. I don't want to be bothered finding all the sub parts of a particular problem then investigating apps that fit that niche (and even worse since the app developers might have partitioned the domain differently than my desired workflow). Give me a suite that does a large subset of my problem. You probably won't see that on iOS or Android any time soon.
It is also a world where you are either expected to give away your app or make such small money that 90% of people can't live off of their development work for apps alone (saw a talk recently that estimated something like the average iOS app makes $8500/yr, that is great if I can pound that out in a month but not enough for me to bother continued support other than because I really dig the project). Not to mention the distribution is hugely scewed by the few huge successes that the median developer is making $1000.
Agreed. Ultimately we develop the software our management tells us to (not a MS employee just speaking generally). We can argue our case for change we can vote with our feet or we can stay put. That's our choices. MS gets a bad wrap quite frankly usually from a bunch of people that consider a big product 100 employees and 10,000 customers. The scale of MS is just frightening, every single misstep or even hesitation and people pounce all over them. They started with a rather cobbled together system and are stuck with it because of the insistence of doing all they can to have backwards compatibility. This assumption of backwards compatibility screws them over when they try to get new markets (ex. tablets) and when ever they enter a new market they are always (perhaps rightly) under huge scrutiny as trying to "use there monopolistic power to own the market for X". At any rate MS's missteps aren't necessarily the engineers fault there is a whole ecosystem and huge external pressures forcing them to act the way they do in a business sense. Engineering/product feature schedules are just along for the ride a lot I think.
I'm wondering if "The people who use this research don’t have any say in what is being saved or tossed aside" should be read: "those old foggies that insist on paper copies of journals rather than electronic". They exist, at least they did in the early 2000's when I did RA work. Forcing people to learn electronic tools will help them find a much wider range of the relevant material far quicker.
Also another complaint: "The people who use this research don’t have any say in what is being saved or tossed aside": do these people pay the storage bills? If not are they okay taking a truck load each and storing it in their garage? If not they should shut up. Thought should be considered when discarding data. The scientists generally didn't pay for the research and if those that did (largely the government) decides that "A study in the jiggly of the jelly" is no longer worthy of keeping that's fine it is theirs (they paid for it).
True to both. $1 for what they are is a lot (that said if it means you get sex that night it is money well spent :)). Both sides need to be reasonable: you shouldn't just hand out money like people are entitled to it (you do with health insurance and unemployment insurance because it is something they paid for so they ARE entitled to it), and the flip side is you need to allow people the freedom to deal with their problems they any way that is legally allowed to them (including ready access to birth control, sex ed, abortion, adoption services, legal aid to force the fathers to help out etc).
So it is punishing them by not giving them a hand out they aren't entitled too? I'm confused. You do understand the difference between actions and inaction right? Well no one is required to act on their behalf to give them something they aren't entitled too. The criteria that decides what they currently get was pulled out of a hat not something handed down on stone tablets. There is no reason why that criteria can't change to include not putting yourself in a worse situation where you need more assistance.
Again it is a matter of responsibility. I've literally never had sex without a condom (not married) and I won't do so. Birth control isn't 100% but every friend I had that got/got someone else pregnant it was "we thought we'd get away with it just this once" and I have several in that situation. There are things you can do besides vaginal intercourse if you can't afford birthcontrol/happen to be caught without any when needed.
Oh so people are entitled to a welfare check. Where's mine?
The point is you aren't punishing anyone. You aren't taking away THEIR money you are refusing to give them YOUR money should they not met your requirements. With the my sister analogy: she chose to break the rules of our agreement so she would be responsible for the consequences it has on her children. You aren't punishing people by refusing to help them regardless of how they've gotten themselves into the mess or whether or not they have made reasonable efforts to improve their situation.
A child still suffers if their parent commits a crime and goes away to jail. What's your point? Bad parents give their children bad childhoods. Not enforcing rationality on those expecting handouts because someone else might suffer is itself not rational. The parent isn't universally entitled to the money from the government nor is the government responsible should they chose to do something that results in those handouts going away and ends up hurting the children as collateral damage.
How is it punishment to have conditions on what you can do if you want to receive hand outs? If my sister asks for my help paying her rent she damn well better not go and move into a more expensive apartment.