I think what really happened, like most companies, they had to ship Windows 8 too soon. It had been talked about for so long that they couldn't hold off another 6 months to a year. Thus the splitting of some features between desktop versus metro.
This is really evident in the list of built in apps it shipped with, every single one of them felt unfinished or unpolished. Quite a lot of them honestly felt to me as if they had been written by summer interns. These went beyond the normal uselessness I see with phone apps. Even marketing interns as well, as the built in apps were all given very bland names; Reader, Mail, Sports.
The start window on 8 lets you reorganize the tiles as you like, add or delete, change their size, etc. If you like the tiles it's not bad, in fact on a Windows phone it's actually pretty nice.
There is also the "all apps" view that shows you a small tile for everything installed, essentially the old start menu but sorted oddly (top to bottom then left to right, scrollable horizontally), and unlike the old start menu none of the sub folders can be collapsed. This feels clumsy to me and it's not nearly as easy to scan through the list of items.
I actually like the flat design, once I shrink down the abnormally large borders. I always felt Windows 7 had too much eye candy. However I am a strong advocate of options, and there should have been an option for display style (aero vs flat vs xp classic). This does cause problems with applications though as they just want one style to stick with.
I prefer the Mac OS look though, removing the borders altogether and keeping things simple, and only the slightest amount of eye candy on the title bar (still not quite flat on Mavericks, but fully flat in Yosemite).
Overall though, after a couple weeks on any new OS the look of the GUI usually fades into the background for me. Anything that doesn't needs to be toned down.
Plus people who often wait 3 years or so after release to upgrade.
I would like it if a product that is still currently on sale by mass market vendors not be declared obsolete. You could still get brand new PCs with Windows 7 on it in 2014 even though Windows 8.1 was out. You can't say that Windows 7 is an old operating system when it's still being sold new.
It's dumb to figure the age of a product based on the first ship date, otherwise Mac OS Yosemite would be considered positively ancient since it's a derivative of an early 1970's OS.
I never put on Classic Shell. My preference was to get Stardock or one of the other $5 start menu/gui fixers. I just never liked the look and feel of classic shell.
However over time I grew to just be content without the start menu. Ok, I'm cheap, I'll admit it. But I pinned a few extra things to the task bar, added a few more desktop icons, and that works fine. Control panel was always convenient to access once you figured out what the trick was. 8.1 made several things easier. The things I miss are just looking through all the stuff I have installed as a hierarchical list and an easier way to shutdown or restart.
Microsoft seems like they've learned their mistake, the Windows 8 VP is fired. They are no longer going to treat the desktop as just a compatibility feature for luddites.
They are adding back a real start menu again, albeit one that will let you get to metro apps as well, but configurable. Ie, Windows 10 on a PC will feel like a PC operating system again. There will be Metro stuff but not forced on you. If a user does have a Metro app they like to use then that app can show up on the desktop as just another window, it won't have to be a full screen thing wasting real estate. Touch screens are absolutely optional. Sounds a lot like they're taking direction from Stardock.
They're also adding multiple virtual desktops, finally. Something we've had with many other GUIs for ages. A way to pop up all apps in a smaller view, something somewhat Mac OS like in a way. Improved command window, finally playing catchup to others. Seems MS is trying to follow the leaders.
From what I can gather reading from people who've seen the previews, anyone who knows Windows 7 will be able to migrate to Windows 10 easily.
Of course it won't all be roses. There's dumb stuff too. But it wont be the touch-screen only interface some like to claim.
You can completely disable the Metro stuff. Generally you can never see it except occasionally when you click wrong when the mouse is positioned wrong, but you can pop back out of that fast. Something to learn of course but if you teach the users how to escape Metro easily then they're less likely to stick around and poke at it. As a corporation you can just refuse to allow them to add their own Microsoft ID so they can't download and install stupid Metro apps. Overall 8.1 I feel is not nearly as bad as everyone claimed, and I went into it expecting the worst. If you know Windows 7 then Windows 8 is the same thing 99% of the time. And windows 8 uses less RAM than 7 overall.
As for XP, it really was crap, especially early on. It was good enough of course, and a massive improvement of Windows 98, although a smaller improvement over 2000. Retrospective views tend to be full of too much nostalgia I think. Windows 7 was much more stable than XP though it had far too much eye candy for my tastes (Windows 8 removes a lot of that). Really Windows 7 is just XP with an aero style UI and better security features and the equivalent of a service pack update.
Just got my mother upgraded from XP to Win7 just this summer. Now no more mainstream support on Win7 either... I did suggest getting Windows 8.1 though, which while it's new and thus potentially confusing, at least will have longer support and next time a new PC is required it won't require yet another relearning. You can configure Windows 8 to be very similar to 7. And it was a lot cheaper to get a computer with win8 than win7. However the local part time computer support person strongly advised to only go with Win7, which meant I had to follow along.
There will be some security updates, and that's good. But no bug fixes for annoyances that aren't security related.
Yes but that's a business. In such cases professional tax help makes sense even without special circumstances. But for a simple case of salary w2 plus 1099s, no complex market transactions, then the professional isn't really going to find much that software will find.
One hassle is that every investment transaction is a line to be entered on the tax form. Which means ball point pen won't cut it and you'll need to either print or e-file. And it doesn't take much for thus. Just investing in a fund means you'll have a big slew of transactions at the end of the year. Sometimes lots and lots of things purchased for $20 and sold for $19-$21. And each one of them is another line to be included.
But mutual funds are investment income. A lot of less wealthy people have something similar. All it takes is the ability to save some money for later. A saving's account pays so little interest that it makes a lot more sense to put that money into some funds (stocks, bonds, a mix, an index, whatever). You don't need to be a big financial guy to do this, just head to the bank and make an appointment for the investment desk.
I had a similar problem where I failed to import a whole account worth of investments. Scary letter arrives, I panic, then reread it more slowly, then start dragging out all the paperwork I've ever had (ie, old mutual funds that changed names 3 times over the years), try to figure it all out, etc. Then I found that the numbers I needed (the basis) were actually included far back in the appendix of the forms I got. Fixed it all up and resubmitted.
So after all that panic, I still had TurboTax do my taxes. I still have simple taxes. I don't want to mess with my money, which also includes spending a lot of money for something I can do myself feels like a waste.
So, a thousand dollar refund they caught. So what about all the fees you spent over the years before they caught that? Meanwhile tax software can find problems like that as well, especially if you double check the numbers as you enter them or after importing them to make sure they made sense and that you didn't miss anything.
I've had friends tell me that their CPA gives them software that they have to fill in first. So the CPA isnt doing much at all.
Bur for $500. Yowza, that hurts. Some years there are no sticky bits that happen. When I do get sticky bits then I can sort them out, it just takes time and I'd rather spend my time than $500. The one time the IRA rollover checked the wrong box was a bit scary but I called up the IRS and they just said fill in the tax form with the right box checked instead, so that was actually easy.
A lot of what TurboTax and other software programs do is provide you a lot of the context and not the bare unintelligible forms.
I agree though, if you've got something more complicated than the average wage slave then yes it may be worth it. But what do I have: mortgage which is easy, W2 which is easy, simple interest and dividends and gains which are harder but easily handled by the software and the bank provides all the numbers for importing, and charitable deductions. I don't do individual trades of any sort, no self employment, no rentals, single income, etc. Much of the time filling in the taxes is done by clicking "no" or "skip this section".
Their are a couple features that people want with TurboTax Deluxe: e-file and the interview forms rather than bare forms. So the official Intuit response that you can still fill in the bare forms manually, which won't be accepted by e-file, defeats much of the purpose. Doesn't the TurboTax Basic version also give you all of the bare forms?
They do import carryovers from last years returns!
Now maybe someone thinks it is worth the money so that they can sit on the couch and watch the Kardashians rather than looking up some numbers, but I'd rather spend that $40 on something nice.
He probably hires someone to spell for him. Time is money, so spending that time checking the spelling means money lost!
But the smart part of me does the taxes. The dumb part who is also lazy says "maybe I should pay $250 to a professional in case he can save me an extra $25".
If you get even one number wrong or leave off something, you get an ominous letter from the IRS and you have to correct your form. So if the feds already know all this information, they should just send us a completed tax form for us to either agree with or amend it with deductions. Most of the stuff on the form has already been reported to the IRS; exceptions would be self employment, foreign income, tips, etc.
Ever since the bank started including the basis with their electronic important, it's been somewhat easy. At least half of the time for me is double checking the numbers after they've been imported. And it's my own time anyway. Sure, if I were working during that time I was filling out taxes then it's better to pay someone else, but I don't so I fill it out in my free time.
(time is not money, otherwise people would be charging their children for billable hours, and movie theaters would be paying us)
It's not even about liking or disliking science, it's about hierachy. Every member of congress and the senate has a level of seniority, plus varying amounts of clout. So order them all, then had out the plum jobs to those highest on the list, less interesting jobs to the middle, and the really unimportant stuff to freshmen. Then punish those you don't like with the bad assignments, reward those who brought in lots of funds with better ones, etc. Or course make sure the opposition gets assigned around too but never in numbers that would matter.
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I think what really happened, like most companies, they had to ship Windows 8 too soon. It had been talked about for so long that they couldn't hold off another 6 months to a year. Thus the splitting of some features between desktop versus metro.
This is really evident in the list of built in apps it shipped with, every single one of them felt unfinished or unpolished. Quite a lot of them honestly felt to me as if they had been written by summer interns. These went beyond the normal uselessness I see with phone apps. Even marketing interns as well, as the built in apps were all given very bland names; Reader, Mail, Sports.
The start window on 8 lets you reorganize the tiles as you like, add or delete, change their size, etc. If you like the tiles it's not bad, in fact on a Windows phone it's actually pretty nice.
There is also the "all apps" view that shows you a small tile for everything installed, essentially the old start menu but sorted oddly (top to bottom then left to right, scrollable horizontally), and unlike the old start menu none of the sub folders can be collapsed. This feels clumsy to me and it's not nearly as easy to scan through the list of items.
8.1 has a start-like button that's just link to a menu. 10 is supposed to have a functional start button.
I actually like the flat design, once I shrink down the abnormally large borders. I always felt Windows 7 had too much eye candy. However I am a strong advocate of options, and there should have been an option for display style (aero vs flat vs xp classic). This does cause problems with applications though as they just want one style to stick with.
I prefer the Mac OS look though, removing the borders altogether and keeping things simple, and only the slightest amount of eye candy on the title bar (still not quite flat on Mavericks, but fully flat in Yosemite).
Overall though, after a couple weeks on any new OS the look of the GUI usually fades into the background for me. Anything that doesn't needs to be toned down.
Plus people who often wait 3 years or so after release to upgrade.
I would like it if a product that is still currently on sale by mass market vendors not be declared obsolete. You could still get brand new PCs with Windows 7 on it in 2014 even though Windows 8.1 was out. You can't say that Windows 7 is an old operating system when it's still being sold new.
It's dumb to figure the age of a product based on the first ship date, otherwise Mac OS Yosemite would be considered positively ancient since it's a derivative of an early 1970's OS.
That sounds like a plugin though, I doubt Microsoft added SVN support to their explorer on their own.
I've never seen any prompts to launch a program wthout classic shell. What feature is this, other than UAC for something I downloaded?
I never put on Classic Shell. My preference was to get Stardock or one of the other $5 start menu/gui fixers. I just never liked the look and feel of classic shell.
However over time I grew to just be content without the start menu. Ok, I'm cheap, I'll admit it. But I pinned a few extra things to the task bar, added a few more desktop icons, and that works fine. Control panel was always convenient to access once you figured out what the trick was. 8.1 made several things easier. The things I miss are just looking through all the stuff I have installed as a hierarchical list and an easier way to shutdown or restart.
Microsoft seems like they've learned their mistake, the Windows 8 VP is fired. They are no longer going to treat the desktop as just a compatibility feature for luddites.
They are adding back a real start menu again, albeit one that will let you get to metro apps as well, but configurable. Ie, Windows 10 on a PC will feel like a PC operating system again. There will be Metro stuff but not forced on you. If a user does have a Metro app they like to use then that app can show up on the desktop as just another window, it won't have to be a full screen thing wasting real estate. Touch screens are absolutely optional. Sounds a lot like they're taking direction from Stardock.
They're also adding multiple virtual desktops, finally. Something we've had with many other GUIs for ages. A way to pop up all apps in a smaller view, something somewhat Mac OS like in a way. Improved command window, finally playing catchup to others. Seems MS is trying to follow the leaders.
From what I can gather reading from people who've seen the previews, anyone who knows Windows 7 will be able to migrate to Windows 10 easily.
Of course it won't all be roses. There's dumb stuff too. But it wont be the touch-screen only interface some like to claim.
It explains why the badger is so angry.
You can completely disable the Metro stuff. Generally you can never see it except occasionally when you click wrong when the mouse is positioned wrong, but you can pop back out of that fast. Something to learn of course but if you teach the users how to escape Metro easily then they're less likely to stick around and poke at it. As a corporation you can just refuse to allow them to add their own Microsoft ID so they can't download and install stupid Metro apps. Overall 8.1 I feel is not nearly as bad as everyone claimed, and I went into it expecting the worst. If you know Windows 7 then Windows 8 is the same thing 99% of the time. And windows 8 uses less RAM than 7 overall.
As for XP, it really was crap, especially early on. It was good enough of course, and a massive improvement of Windows 98, although a smaller improvement over 2000. Retrospective views tend to be full of too much nostalgia I think. Windows 7 was much more stable than XP though it had far too much eye candy for my tastes (Windows 8 removes a lot of that). Really Windows 7 is just XP with an aero style UI and better security features and the equivalent of a service pack update.
Yup, I agree, but Microsoft says no.
Just got my mother upgraded from XP to Win7 just this summer. Now no more mainstream support on Win7 either... I did suggest getting Windows 8.1 though, which while it's new and thus potentially confusing, at least will have longer support and next time a new PC is required it won't require yet another relearning. You can configure Windows 8 to be very similar to 7. And it was a lot cheaper to get a computer with win8 than win7. However the local part time computer support person strongly advised to only go with Win7, which meant I had to follow along.
There will be some security updates, and that's good. But no bug fixes for annoyances that aren't security related.
Yes but that's a business. In such cases professional tax help makes sense even without special circumstances. But for a simple case of salary w2 plus 1099s, no complex market transactions, then the professional isn't really going to find much that software will find.
Sorry, "import".
One hassle is that every investment transaction is a line to be entered on the tax form. Which means ball point pen won't cut it and you'll need to either print or e-file. And it doesn't take much for thus. Just investing in a fund means you'll have a big slew of transactions at the end of the year. Sometimes lots and lots of things purchased for $20 and sold for $19-$21. And each one of them is another line to be included.
But mutual funds are investment income. A lot of less wealthy people have something similar. All it takes is the ability to save some money for later. A saving's account pays so little interest that it makes a lot more sense to put that money into some funds (stocks, bonds, a mix, an index, whatever). You don't need to be a big financial guy to do this, just head to the bank and make an appointment for the investment desk.
How do people making $20K afford someone to do their taxes?
I had a similar problem where I failed to import a whole account worth of investments. Scary letter arrives, I panic, then reread it more slowly, then start dragging out all the paperwork I've ever had (ie, old mutual funds that changed names 3 times over the years), try to figure it all out, etc. Then I found that the numbers I needed (the basis) were actually included far back in the appendix of the forms I got. Fixed it all up and resubmitted.
So after all that panic, I still had TurboTax do my taxes. I still have simple taxes. I don't want to mess with my money, which also includes spending a lot of money for something I can do myself feels like a waste.
So, a thousand dollar refund they caught. So what about all the fees you spent over the years before they caught that? Meanwhile tax software can find problems like that as well, especially if you double check the numbers as you enter them or after importing them to make sure they made sense and that you didn't miss anything.
I've had friends tell me that their CPA gives them software that they have to fill in first. So the CPA isnt doing much at all.
Bur for $500. Yowza, that hurts. Some years there are no sticky bits that happen. When I do get sticky bits then I can sort them out, it just takes time and I'd rather spend my time than $500. The one time the IRA rollover checked the wrong box was a bit scary but I called up the IRS and they just said fill in the tax form with the right box checked instead, so that was actually easy.
A lot of what TurboTax and other software programs do is provide you a lot of the context and not the bare unintelligible forms.
I agree though, if you've got something more complicated than the average wage slave then yes it may be worth it. But what do I have: mortgage which is easy, W2 which is easy, simple interest and dividends and gains which are harder but easily handled by the software and the bank provides all the numbers for importing, and charitable deductions. I don't do individual trades of any sort, no self employment, no rentals, single income, etc. Much of the time filling in the taxes is done by clicking "no" or "skip this section".
Their are a couple features that people want with TurboTax Deluxe: e-file and the interview forms rather than bare forms. So the official Intuit response that you can still fill in the bare forms manually, which won't be accepted by e-file, defeats much of the purpose. Doesn't the TurboTax Basic version also give you all of the bare forms?
They do import carryovers from last years returns!
Now maybe someone thinks it is worth the money so that they can sit on the couch and watch the Kardashians rather than looking up some numbers, but I'd rather spend that $40 on something nice.
He probably hires someone to spell for him. Time is money, so spending that time checking the spelling means money lost!
But the smart part of me does the taxes. The dumb part who is also lazy says "maybe I should pay $250 to a professional in case he can save me an extra $25".
If you get even one number wrong or leave off something, you get an ominous letter from the IRS and you have to correct your form. So if the feds already know all this information, they should just send us a completed tax form for us to either agree with or amend it with deductions. Most of the stuff on the form has already been reported to the IRS; exceptions would be self employment, foreign income, tips, etc.
Ever since the bank started including the basis with their electronic important, it's been somewhat easy. At least half of the time for me is double checking the numbers after they've been imported. And it's my own time anyway. Sure, if I were working during that time I was filling out taxes then it's better to pay someone else, but I don't so I fill it out in my free time.
(time is not money, otherwise people would be charging their children for billable hours, and movie theaters would be paying us)
It's not even about liking or disliking science, it's about hierachy. Every member of congress and the senate has a level of seniority, plus varying amounts of clout. So order them all, then had out the plum jobs to those highest on the list, less interesting jobs to the middle, and the really unimportant stuff to freshmen. Then punish those you don't like with the bad assignments, reward those who brought in lots of funds with better ones, etc. Or course make sure the opposition gets assigned around too but never in numbers that would matter.