So instead of having 3 or 4 American conglomerates controlling the media you have just 1. Google.
Or if you are britsh just the BBC anyway.
Remember when we all liked Apple and they were the good guys helping to stop DRM and MS with its predatory pricing? Man, those times have changed once Steve got some real power. Why do you think Google will be any different.
They may even be more evil as having crappy expensive oligopoly that we have today.
Besides the secure boot bit, Windows 7 is UEFI friendly. What you need to do is go into the bios or setup when you first turn it on and disable secure boot and you are good.
Man, if it were not MS being the only C.A. secure boot would be a great standard for Linux, FreeBSD, and WIndows 7.
Just not how it is implemented with MS as the gatekeeper with the private key.
I hate the BIOS. It is 30 years old, archaic, has weird instructions such as do not use more than 1 meg of ram, and many hacks and patches to get around the original 30 year old hacks like the 1 meg limit, etc. ACPI for a fucking decade never quite worked! Linux got blamed because companies like Dell did things a little differently with their ACPI so when the computer went to sleep sound would not work when it came up etc.
Remember the SOYO boards 10 years ago which you had to disable power management before they even booted? What about the 10 year old Dell machines which put everything in IRQ 11? Want to upgrade your video card? Nope conflicts and BSOD. OF course slashdotters blamed XP, but investigation showed the IRQ conflicts were caused by crappy ACPI.
The list goes on and on.
EFI was supposed to fix this and use firmware like everything else modern. I like the secure boot idea and wish you could change the keys so you can sign any OS with a C.A.? Just put in a jumper or a master password. I like the idea of TPM for encryption as well. UEFI was supposed to replace the archaic ancient BIOS. Not supplement it and have MS be the gatekeeper.
To me perhaps a new UEFI where these issues are addressed and intel could perhaps provide a Windows 7 driver too as many of us and corps who need Windows God forbid wont touch Windows 8 or anything else and would like these features.
Linux as a result would be less buggy if everyone played by the same standards.
I learned to program in C and C++ for some elementry courses mind you I am not a professional programmer.
In basic assembly and in C like languages data needs to be stored as characters, integers, or floats. There are different integers you can declare as the bit of the operating system and compiler determine how much data can be stored. a long integer type stores 32-bit data and a long long integer type holds 64-bit data. They can not hold decimals.
That is what the FPU or floating point unit does. It stores floats in its registers and performs operations on them when called. If you try hacks like using multiple integers for different decimal places you end up with mathematical problems. What if an object or function takes in data from a previous computed value? How would that function know how many other integers were used for the pseudo decimal values etc?
So FPUs take care of just things like this this. While true the 486sx did fpu emulation back in the days it really did suck and was unsuitable for anything complex like running Autocad. ARMS have FPUs but they are 15 years behind the GPU and integer counterparts in the SOI as phone users are not doing anything on them like scientific apps. Just playing angry birds.
A real intel or AMD chip is better suited for these situations. But in servers I can see ARM making a difference next as tasks are I/O bound with tons of threads and processes running in parallel
Don't scientific and mathematical apps use floats to store numbers with large amounts of decimals and to perform mathematical operations on them? FPU would be the bottleneck for such applications like Mathmatica or Autocad.
Performance in servers are different. For app servers I would agree. For apache and Java servlets it is not how fast, but how wide your platform is. Meaning more slower cpus that equate to higher performance as these are heavily threaded and i/o bound more than FPU or integer bound.
But I suppose with iscsi, raid, and fibre channel ethernet or FDDI the power savings go back out again.
You're just missing vision. Imagine Ubuntu Phone on an 8 core processor, you could have it run virtual machines and seamlessly switch between Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, IOS... who doesn't want that?
Plus you'd still have enough oomph to run a torrent server, a tor node or just use your phone to mine some bitcoins.
And your phone will be out of battery life by the time you unplug it and show up to work
Of course these applications are FPU based. Last I checked the latest ARM had the performance of a 1997 pentium pro in that area. They do not have lower power consumption for nothing. Phone users do not care about FPU so it is mute, but not in that usage case you have given.
On a server no. I am surprised ARMS have not been in the server room yet as power consumption is the biggest cost and where I/O in SQL latency is the bottleneck and not cpu performance.
The more cores the more virtualization can be had and more threads and processes can be thrown on it.
There were a lot of FUD in the 80s that the US alone had enough bombs to eliminate all life on earth 7x over!
I am curious how much that is true vs things just to scare us according to the millenial generation? Maybe the blast wave but with weapons being 100x more lethal than the ones dropped in Japan I wonder if this could contaminate all the crops for example?
Apparently someone who was not alive or mature yet during the Cold War.
It sounds laughable today, but back then the threat was very scary and real. WWWIII almost happened several times from the Cuban Missile Crises, to faulty radars for NORAD, to this being misinterpreted, to several instances of American fighters from Alaskan accidentally flying into Siberian airspace.
If nuclear war would have happened it would have consisted of several hundred nuclear bombs, radiation, a nuclear winter, and perhaps a new ice age if big enough with dust.
The USSR and its satellite republics owned 1/3 of the world and the influence of communism was growing and spreading which is why Americans got involved in both Korea and Vietnam.
It sounds laughable to the millenial generation probably smirking at this, but as a child we had drills in our schools and TV shows demonstrating what would have happened once the first nuclear launch happened.
Well I have a different opinion and to me I am thrilled with the 3d gpu settings of aero peak, aero snap, and hardware acceleration for things like IE 10 (rendering is not still not up to par as Chrome/FF though but much better for corporate users).
The reason I love it might have to do with being forced to use Vista and hating it with a passion! I tried Windows blinds to customize the colors but each Vista service pack disabled it.
Windows 7 offered me what I wanted and it has security improvements and a resistance to Windows rot. In my mind is a superior OS to XP. No it is not perfect. It is harder to cut and paste a network share address to the title bar and other irritations over XP.
The text part... I do not need it and that is only a problem with a black background. If you have one you can change the default text to white. To me the functionality over the tiny pixels wasted on the edge of each window is well worth so I do not care. I like it and the shadows over the plain non borders over 8's yucky desktop.
So I am biased in that regards after Windows 7 giving me what I wanted Vista to be with WindowsBlinds.
Instant search is a life saver too.
XP is too old to live on and does not offer kernel level sandboxing protection for browsers which is why XP is locked into IE 8, it offers no hardware acceleration for things like text, video sampling bit rates, and other visual effects. It has no ASLR memory scrambling for security. It doesn't scale past 2 - 4 cores well. It has no virtual 64-bit memory making it harder for a hacker to do a peak and poke exploit. The user controls allow administrative users which means malware can get installed.
I wont even go with the driver model and how EFI, thunderbolt, WDDM 1.2/Direct X11 video drivers, and USB 3 are taking over now in this decade.XP deserves to die and is not a good OS for an internet enabled machine in this day and age but that is my preference.
I'd say it is about 60/40 with 40% loving XP and not wanting to change. It is familiar, it was a good os, it was the first OS that never crashed on them like ME and 98SE, and after looking similiar to Vista can you blame them for being afraid of change and assuming it is inferior?
IE 8 works. Word 2003 works. XP works fine and so does their desktop that takes 5 minutes to boot up with 512 megs of ram. Why take the risk?
After upgrading 90% are glad they did... after a month. The whining comments here on slashdot news for conservatives are from those who switched to Linux 10 years ago and run XP in VMs or still run XP at home and do not want to change because of above. I tried to sell the benefits.
It drives me crazy to see such weird comments as I remember slashdot bashing Windows XP as A POS OMG WHO WANTS TO RUN IT!! To best non Linux OS EVER in 10 years.
But if you had a time machine and cut and paste such comments slashdotters would be on the floor laughing in disbelieve. It is 12 years old and it is time to move on Good God.
All your problems are because you emulate the old Windows 95/2000 color scheme and disabled Aero.
Put on Aero and I can customize to my hearts content. I have aero peak, aero snap, I an make clear or not translucent at all. I used to use Windows blinds back in the days of Vista and with Windows 7 I do not need to because the GUI is the best ever made.
I love instant search too which I bet you do not use as your post indicates you use it like XP with a mouse instead of just hitting the Windows key and typing what you are looking for. It is a lifesaver!
You could not pay me to go back to XP! Overall it is identical to XP with a minor update with these wonderful features and not a show stopper or radical like XP to MacOSX or Windows 8.
Really? I plugged a headphone into the headphone jack yesterday and some dialog box popped up asking me if I wanted to use headphones. That never happened before Windows 7.
Yeah XP users astound me. The troubleshooters are amazing too and fix things instead of show screenshots like they do in XP.
I really do not understand why someone who financial means would prefer XP? I can see being poor and having an older system that already works but many will put up with the pain trying to get XP drivers in their new icore7 extremes and I just shake my head.
I love just plugging in a printer too and even on the network Windows 7 just takes care of things with no input. Just click on homegroup and 30 seconds later the driver is automatically installed.
With the exception of WIndows 95 not really from the users point of view. I remember usenet users begging how to turn off the start menu and get program manager and file manager of Windows 3.11 back! But they were in the minority.
XP looks identical except for colors from 98 for the clueless user who has no idea what happened under the hood with the upgrade. Windows 7 has an orb instead of a button that says start and is blueish and clear with aero. But works the same way. Just the same room with a different application of paint from the users point of view.
Not hard to change really unless you do not have time nor budget or some 10 year old scanner or something. It is not resistance to change at this point but a budget of priorities after the worst economy in 70 years and corporations slashing all their staff for temps since 2008 created low wage jobs and uncertainty.
Advantages for LibreOffice: - No ribbon - You can open multiple windows. So you can see two documents at the same time. - Better regex support in Calc - Logical print preview in LibreOffice shows you what will be printed. Office will not show you an accurate print preview, if, for instance, you are trying to 'print selection' - Did I mention NO RIBBON!
I'm sure Office has some advantages, ubiquity comes to mind. But every iteration that comes out seems to make the UI worse. And, I know I'm not the only one with this opinion. I liked Windows 7 compared with XP. I am not adverse to change. I am adverse to stupid change.
Ribbon I can preview the changes by just having my mouse over each tile without even clicking. It is wonderful as I can customize things so easily. Regex? I am not using Unix text files and needed to setup a batch processing job to sort and use a bunch of different utilities to do an admin job.
I hate menus now! They suck. They bury things badly and waste time. It only took me a week to get used to the ribbon in Office 2007 and best of all with keyboard shortcuts you never have to use the mouse. Office 2003 has terrible keyboard shortcuts besides just the basics and you need to sort through endless menus to find a special function.
Don't be so afraid of change. Yes, the ribbon is superior unlike Metro as studies have proven it. Windows 7 is not a big deal over XP regardless of what some gray hairs say. I can do print previews just fine in office 2010. I like the preview of the changes when I move the cursor and the extra functionality shown and no more nested fucking menus!
Once you spend a week in this decade using it your mind will be set too and Libre Office and 2003 will be painful afterwards.
Libre Office does not have the features I mentioned. I wanted to make something look nice on my resume. The tools to do so were not there are very primitive compared to MS Word. Just a fact. With the ribbon you can preview changes and have 20+ titles with different effects, styles, fonts, and lines for my name.
Libre Office is about where Word 4.2 and Word 5.0 are for Windows 3.1.
Sure I can do basic documents with it but everyone else in the business word is making artful documents and changes and I can't have my documents look like crap on their computers because of different implementations of ooxml.
I have noticed though Windows 8 is going through an annual update and my hunch is they are trying to avoid another XP again...
Well, insofar as they're trying to avoid another XP, as a OS that people are attached to and are uncomfortable moving away from, they're doing an awfully good job. I don't foresee people becoming attached to Windows 8 no matter how long they use it.
You say that now in 2013 where it is alien for someone used to the old way. My guess is towards 2019 if MS decided to give up on Metro and go back to a Windows 7 style UI the Windows 8 people would come screaming and crying because by that point they will be used to it.
Maybe I am wrong. I had someone in Facebook accuse me of being old and resistant to change after I reviewed Windows 8.1 and said how terrible and useless it was. I find it inefficient but maybe it is because my brain couldn't handle it?
But XP to Windows 7 is not that radical which I find confusing. So you have an orb instead of a button that says start. Big fucking whomp and oh things are translucent now. That is not radical in my opinion and people change cars all the time too and are happy. Not saying... oh my POS works just fine screw this shiny new car with the fresh car smell!!... weird.
Did you really need that much of a time to adjust from Windows 95/98 to XP?
If you must run MS and win32 software give Windows 7 a try?
MS will let you run it for 3 days before an activation. Some hated the fisher price colors of XP back in 2001, but could disable them (myself included.) after 48 hours I was set for the next stagnant decade.
Windows 7 aero is gorgeous and it is so nice to have jump lists and aero previews. You can move Windows side by side so much easier by draging them when you want to have 2 documents opened. Wifi, printers, and everything is easier to setup and drivers are automatically downloaded. It is much more secure, the wizards in the troubleshooter actually fix things rather than take screen shots, etc.
I could go on and on. It really is not that radically different from XP and it has no Windows rot which is a god send! Of course there is always linux and if your cpu supports virtualization you can use virtualbox to run a copy of XP if you wish if you want to go that route too.
I have noticed though Windows 8 is going through an annual update and my hunch is they are trying to avoid another XP again where people will start getting used to constantly upgrading and not have their brains used to reflexes of one browser version and one OS version and app version for a good portion of their lives. Instead of viewing their tool as a computer. They view it as XP which is part of the problem.
Well customers do not pay them to play golf or eat caviar in jets. They pay for products that R&D need to design and make. But the lifestyle is more important than long term value for the shareholders these days.
Yes, I am cynical towards upper management as many of us have seen it all and these guys have golden parachutes so when competitors deliver the death knell they saw the writting in the previous quarter and already jumped off to the next company for an even higher salary.
When do not want to leave XP or IE 8 and even when I show them the benefits after the upgrade most start coming around to acceptance that is was time to change rather than be happy. Some were of course.
For grown ups I would be furious if I had to use LibreOffce too over MS office. Outside of slashdot it most certainly is not equal unless you are doing simple things. I tried to print something on another computer with it and all the margins were messed up. I could not change title's and preview changes before selecting them. Everything was hidden in a menu and after 4 minutes I wanted to pull my hair out before just downloading Word viewer instead.
LibraOffice has years to play catchup unfortunately just like the Gimp is no Adobe PS. But again fine for kids typing a paper in middle school or highschool.
Slashdot Mirror
So instead of having 3 or 4 American conglomerates controlling the media you have just 1. Google.
Or if you are britsh just the BBC anyway.
Remember when we all liked Apple and they were the good guys helping to stop DRM and MS with its predatory pricing? Man, those times have changed once Steve got some real power. Why do you think Google will be any different.
They may even be more evil as having crappy expensive oligopoly that we have today.
Yes.
Besides the secure boot bit, Windows 7 is UEFI friendly. What you need to do is go into the bios or setup when you first turn it on and disable secure boot and you are good.
Man, if it were not MS being the only C.A. secure boot would be a great standard for Linux, FreeBSD, and WIndows 7.
Just not how it is implemented with MS as the gatekeeper with the private key.
I hate the BIOS. It is 30 years old, archaic, has weird instructions such as do not use more than 1 meg of ram, and many hacks and patches to get around the original 30 year old hacks like the 1 meg limit, etc. ACPI for a fucking decade never quite worked! Linux got blamed because companies like Dell did things a little differently with their ACPI so when the computer went to sleep sound would not work when it came up etc.
Remember the SOYO boards 10 years ago which you had to disable power management before they even booted? What about the 10 year old Dell machines which put everything in IRQ 11? Want to upgrade your video card? Nope conflicts and BSOD. OF course slashdotters blamed XP, but investigation showed the IRQ conflicts were caused by crappy ACPI.
The list goes on and on.
EFI was supposed to fix this and use firmware like everything else modern. I like the secure boot idea and wish you could change the keys so you can sign any OS with a C.A.? Just put in a jumper or a master password. I like the idea of TPM for encryption as well. UEFI was supposed to replace the archaic ancient BIOS. Not supplement it and have MS be the gatekeeper.
To me perhaps a new UEFI where these issues are addressed and intel could perhaps provide a Windows 7 driver too as many of us and corps who need Windows God forbid wont touch Windows 8 or anything else and would like these features.
Linux as a result would be less buggy if everyone played by the same standards.
I learned to program in C and C++ for some elementry courses mind you I am not a professional programmer.
In basic assembly and in C like languages data needs to be stored as characters, integers, or floats. There are different integers you can declare as the bit of the operating system and compiler determine how much data can be stored. a long integer type stores 32-bit data and a long long integer type holds 64-bit data. They can not hold decimals.
That is what the FPU or floating point unit does. It stores floats in its registers and performs operations on them when called. If you try hacks like using multiple integers for different decimal places you end up with mathematical problems. What if an object or function takes in data from a previous computed value? How would that function know how many other integers were used for the pseudo decimal values etc?
So FPUs take care of just things like this this. While true the 486sx did fpu emulation back in the days it really did suck and was unsuitable for anything complex like running Autocad. ARMS have FPUs but they are 15 years behind the GPU and integer counterparts in the SOI as phone users are not doing anything on them like scientific apps. Just playing angry birds.
A real intel or AMD chip is better suited for these situations. But in servers I can see ARM making a difference next as tasks are I/O bound with tons of threads and processes running in parallel
Don't scientific and mathematical apps use floats to store numbers with large amounts of decimals and to perform mathematical operations on them? FPU would be the bottleneck for such applications like Mathmatica or Autocad.
Performance in servers are different. For app servers I would agree. For apache and Java servlets it is not how fast, but how wide your platform is. Meaning more slower cpus that equate to higher performance as these are heavily threaded and i/o bound more than FPU or integer bound.
But I suppose with iscsi, raid, and fibre channel ethernet or FDDI the power savings go back out again.
You're just missing vision. Imagine Ubuntu Phone on an 8 core processor, you could have it run virtual machines and seamlessly switch between Android, Windows Phone, BlackBerry, IOS... who doesn't want that?
Plus you'd still have enough oomph to run a torrent server, a tor node or just use your phone to mine some bitcoins.
And your phone will be out of battery life by the time you unplug it and show up to work
Of course these applications are FPU based. Last I checked the latest ARM had the performance of a 1997 pentium pro in that area. They do not have lower power consumption for nothing. Phone users do not care about FPU so it is mute, but not in that usage case you have given.
On a phone yes.
On a server no. I am surprised ARMS have not been in the server room yet as power consumption is the biggest cost and where I/O in SQL latency is the bottleneck and not cpu performance.
The more cores the more virtualization can be had and more threads and processes can be thrown on it.
There were a lot of FUD in the 80s that the US alone had enough bombs to eliminate all life on earth 7x over!
I am curious how much that is true vs things just to scare us according to the millenial generation? Maybe the blast wave but with weapons being 100x more lethal than the ones dropped in Japan I wonder if this could contaminate all the crops for example?
Apparently someone who was not alive or mature yet during the Cold War.
It sounds laughable today, but back then the threat was very scary and real. WWWIII almost happened several times from the Cuban Missile Crises, to faulty radars for NORAD, to this being misinterpreted, to several instances of American fighters from Alaskan accidentally flying into Siberian airspace.
If nuclear war would have happened it would have consisted of several hundred nuclear bombs, radiation, a nuclear winter, and perhaps a new ice age if big enough with dust.
The USSR and its satellite republics owned 1/3 of the world and the influence of communism was growing and spreading which is why Americans got involved in both Korea and Vietnam.
It sounds laughable to the millenial generation probably smirking at this, but as a child we had drills in our schools and TV shows demonstrating what would have happened once the first nuclear launch happened.
Still less restrictive than a Windows Surface
Well I have a different opinion and to me I am thrilled with the 3d gpu settings of aero peak, aero snap, and hardware acceleration for things like IE 10 (rendering is not still not up to par as Chrome/FF though but much better for corporate users).
The reason I love it might have to do with being forced to use Vista and hating it with a passion! I tried Windows blinds to customize the colors but each Vista service pack disabled it.
Windows 7 offered me what I wanted and it has security improvements and a resistance to Windows rot. In my mind is a superior OS to XP. No it is not perfect. It is harder to cut and paste a network share address to the title bar and other irritations over XP.
The text part ... I do not need it and that is only a problem with a black background. If you have one you can change the default text to white. To me the functionality over the tiny pixels wasted on the edge of each window is well worth so I do not care. I like it and the shadows over the plain non borders over 8's yucky desktop.
So I am biased in that regards after Windows 7 giving me what I wanted Vista to be with WindowsBlinds.
Instant search is a life saver too.
XP is too old to live on and does not offer kernel level sandboxing protection for browsers which is why XP is locked into IE 8, it offers no hardware acceleration for things like text, video sampling bit rates, and other visual effects. It has no ASLR memory scrambling for security. It doesn't scale past 2 - 4 cores well. It has no virtual 64-bit memory making it harder for a hacker to do a peak and poke exploit. The user controls allow administrative users which means malware can get installed.
I wont even go with the driver model and how EFI, thunderbolt, WDDM 1.2/Direct X11 video drivers, and USB 3 are taking over now in this decade.XP deserves to die and is not a good OS for an internet enabled machine in this day and age but that is my preference.
Unless you mean an XP UI over a 7/8 kernel?
I work with desktop support.
I'd say it is about 60/40 with 40% loving XP and not wanting to change. It is familiar, it was a good os, it was the first OS that never crashed on them like ME and 98SE, and after looking similiar to Vista can you blame them for being afraid of change and assuming it is inferior?
IE 8 works. Word 2003 works. XP works fine and so does their desktop that takes 5 minutes to boot up with 512 megs of ram. Why take the risk?
After upgrading 90% are glad they did ... after a month. The whining comments here on slashdot news for conservatives are from those who switched to Linux 10 years ago and run XP in VMs or still run XP at home and do not want to change because of above. I tried to sell the benefits.
It drives me crazy to see such weird comments as I remember slashdot bashing Windows XP as A POS OMG WHO WANTS TO RUN IT!! To best non Linux OS EVER in 10 years.
But if you had a time machine and cut and paste such comments slashdotters would be on the floor laughing in disbelieve. It is 12 years old and it is time to move on Good God.
All your problems are because you emulate the old Windows 95/2000 color scheme and disabled Aero.
Put on Aero and I can customize to my hearts content. I have aero peak, aero snap, I an make clear or not translucent at all. I used to use Windows blinds back in the days of Vista and with Windows 7 I do not need to because the GUI is the best ever made.
I love instant search too which I bet you do not use as your post indicates you use it like XP with a mouse instead of just hitting the Windows key and typing what you are looking for. It is a lifesaver!
You could not pay me to go back to XP!
Overall it is identical to XP with a minor update with these wonderful features and not a show stopper or radical like XP to MacOSX or Windows 8.
Really? I plugged a headphone into the headphone jack yesterday and some dialog box popped up asking me if I wanted to use headphones. That never happened before Windows 7.
Yeah XP users astound me. The troubleshooters are amazing too and fix things instead of show screenshots like they do in XP.
I really do not understand why someone who financial means would prefer XP? I can see being poor and having an older system that already works but many will put up with the pain trying to get XP drivers in their new icore7 extremes and I just shake my head.
I love just plugging in a printer too and even on the network Windows 7 just takes care of things with no input. Just click on homegroup and 30 seconds later the driver is automatically installed.
No Sherlock!
Women love Linux. This is why we run it and mod our machines. To get chicks!!
With the exception of WIndows 95 not really from the users point of view. I remember usenet users begging how to turn off the start menu and get program manager and file manager of Windows 3.11 back! But they were in the minority.
XP looks identical except for colors from 98 for the clueless user who has no idea what happened under the hood with the upgrade. Windows 7 has an orb instead of a button that says start and is blueish and clear with aero. But works the same way. Just the same room with a different application of paint from the users point of view.
Not hard to change really unless you do not have time nor budget or some 10 year old scanner or something. It is not resistance to change at this point but a budget of priorities after the worst economy in 70 years and corporations slashing all their staff for temps since 2008 created low wage jobs and uncertainty.
Advantages for LibreOffice:
- No ribbon
- You can open multiple windows. So you can see two documents at the same time.
- Better regex support in Calc
- Logical print preview in LibreOffice shows you what will be printed. Office will not show you an accurate print preview, if, for instance, you are trying to 'print selection'
- Did I mention NO RIBBON!
I'm sure Office has some advantages, ubiquity comes to mind. But every iteration that comes out seems to make the UI worse. And, I know I'm not the only one with this opinion. I liked Windows 7 compared with XP. I am not adverse to change. I am adverse to stupid change.
Ribbon I can preview the changes by just having my mouse over each tile without even clicking. It is wonderful as I can customize things so easily. Regex? I am not using Unix text files and needed to setup a batch processing job to sort and use a bunch of different utilities to do an admin job.
I hate menus now! They suck. They bury things badly and waste time. It only took me a week to get used to the ribbon in Office 2007 and best of all with keyboard shortcuts you never have to use the mouse. Office 2003 has terrible keyboard shortcuts besides just the basics and you need to sort through endless menus to find a special function.
Don't be so afraid of change. Yes, the ribbon is superior unlike Metro as studies have proven it. Windows 7 is not a big deal over XP regardless of what some gray hairs say. I can do print previews just fine in office 2010. I like the preview of the changes when I move the cursor and the extra functionality shown and no more nested fucking menus!
Once you spend a week in this decade using it your mind will be set too and Libre Office and 2003 will be painful afterwards.
Libre Office does not have the features I mentioned. I wanted to make something look nice on my resume. The tools to do so were not there are very primitive compared to MS Word. Just a fact. With the ribbon you can preview changes and have 20+ titles with different effects, styles, fonts, and lines for my name.
Libre Office is about where Word 4.2 and Word 5.0 are for Windows 3.1.
Sure I can do basic documents with it but everyone else in the business word is making artful documents and changes and I can't have my documents look like crap on their computers because of different implementations of ooxml.
I have noticed though Windows 8 is going through an annual update and my hunch is they are trying to avoid another XP again...
Well, insofar as they're trying to avoid another XP, as a OS that people are attached to and are uncomfortable moving away from, they're doing an awfully good job. I don't foresee people becoming attached to Windows 8 no matter how long they use it.
You say that now in 2013 where it is alien for someone used to the old way. My guess is towards 2019 if MS decided to give up on Metro and go back to a Windows 7 style UI the Windows 8 people would come screaming and crying because by that point they will be used to it.
Maybe I am wrong. I had someone in Facebook accuse me of being old and resistant to change after I reviewed Windows 8.1 and said how terrible and useless it was. I find it inefficient but maybe it is because my brain couldn't handle it?
But XP to Windows 7 is not that radical which I find confusing. So you have an orb instead of a button that says start. Big fucking whomp and oh things are translucent now. That is not radical in my opinion and people change cars all the time too and are happy. Not saying ... oh my POS works just fine screw this shiny new car with the fresh car smell!! ... weird.
Did you really need that much of a time to adjust from Windows 95/98 to XP?
If you must run MS and win32 software give Windows 7 a try?
MS will let you run it for 3 days before an activation. Some hated the fisher price colors of XP back in 2001, but could disable them (myself included.) after 48 hours I was set for the next stagnant decade.
Windows 7 aero is gorgeous and it is so nice to have jump lists and aero previews. You can move Windows side by side so much easier by draging them when you want to have 2 documents opened. Wifi, printers, and everything is easier to setup and drivers are automatically downloaded. It is much more secure, the wizards in the troubleshooter actually fix things rather than take screen shots, etc.
I could go on and on. It really is not that radically different from XP and it has no Windows rot which is a god send! Of course there is always linux and if your cpu supports virtualization you can use virtualbox to run a copy of XP if you wish if you want to go that route too.
They did refine it.
It is called Windows 7.
I have noticed though Windows 8 is going through an annual update and my hunch is they are trying to avoid another XP again where people will start getting used to constantly upgrading and not have their brains used to reflexes of one browser version and one OS version and app version for a good portion of their lives. Instead of viewing their tool as a computer. They view it as XP which is part of the problem.
Well customers do not pay them to play golf or eat caviar in jets. They pay for products that R&D need to design and make. But the lifestyle is more important than long term value for the shareholders these days.
Yes, I am cynical towards upper management as many of us have seen it all and these guys have golden parachutes so when competitors deliver the death knell they saw the writting in the previous quarter and already jumped off to the next company for an even higher salary.
News at 11!
When do not want to leave XP or IE 8 and even when I show them the benefits after the upgrade most start coming around to acceptance that is was time to change rather than be happy. Some were of course.
For grown ups I would be furious if I had to use LibreOffce too over MS office. Outside of slashdot it most certainly is not equal unless you are doing simple things. I tried to print something on another computer with it and all the margins were messed up. I could not change title's and preview changes before selecting them. Everything was hidden in a menu and after 4 minutes I wanted to pull my hair out before just downloading Word viewer instead.
LibraOffice has years to play catchup unfortunately just like the Gimp is no Adobe PS. But again fine for kids typing a paper in middle school or highschool.