After working in Win7 for a while, going back to XP was an exercise in frustration... like working with stone knives and bear-skins. Win7 is THAT much better.
Win8 is interesting. Unlike most, I don't think it's a step backwards. It's different. I think there's a lot of harsh judgement because of trying to use Win8 as if it were Win7 (or worse, XP). If you take 30 minutes or so to play around and get used to it, Win8 starts making sense, is more consistent than originally perceived, and has some powerful new features and short-cuts.
But there are admittedly still some significant rough-spots in the Consumer Preview, and I can only hope those are addressed before final releas.
You realize you can remove any tiles from the Start Screen that you want, right? You can customize it, group tiles, make tiles large or small, and re-arrange tiles to your heart's content.
There is a separate "all programs" menu, just like on the old start menu. right-click the start screen to access it.
And of course you have windows search. Either just start typing on the start screen, or you can use the "search" charm in the right-sidebar menu.
So yes, you can pick the program you want from a list. Or you can pin your most used apps in the order you want, in groups you define, at the front of the start screen. You can also "zoom out" on the start screen, and dive right back into a group way to the left, without having to "scroll and scroll". And of course you can directly access the app by search, typing its name.
There is no "Start button" on the taskbar any more.
Use the windows key to go to the start screen, which is the REPLACEMENT for the Start Menu. It uses the Metro design language but it is not, in and of itself, "Metro".
You also don't HAVE to click the desktop tile to get to desktop. You can also click on any desktop application tile to just launch it and you'll be right there in the desktop. And you can continue to click on apps pinned to the task bar (which can now span multiple monitors) to launch additional apps, minimizing the number of times you actually have to go back to the start screen to find and launch a new desktop app.
The Start Screen *IS* your list of apps. Sort it, group it, arrange it, add and remove tiles,... any way you want. You can optimize it to exactly what you want and how you want it.
And the "start menu search" still works the same way as always: just start typing. WinKey + "cmd" + Enter, and voila, you've launched a command window. Just the same as in Win7. Or you can have the command window pinned to your task bar. Or pinned to the start screen. Or as a short-cut on your desktop.
Metro's overhead is hardly onerous (in fact, Metro apps are much more energy efficient).
Beyond that, the Start Screen can be very efficient in an Enterprise situation. You can pin anything to the start screen, including deep links. So your first screen can be tailored to your work-flow, or your tasks... whether you're an administrative assistant, or you're an IT professional.
And the server versions are FULLY scriptable (finally), and scripts can be pinned to the start screen too. As well as reports, documents, folders, whatever.
Okay, the ignorant homophobic slur wasn't necessary and paints you as kind of a clueless rube.
But ignoring that, the start menu is there: It's called The Start Screen. Yes, it looks a LOT different. But each start menu in each Windows release has operated a lot differently. It takes a bit of getting used to. Some things have moved around. It's frustrating to lose the advantage of muscle-memory, but once you give it a chance, a lot of it makes sense "in the new world". And you can stay in the desktop as much as you want.
The Developer Peview UI wasn't complete. It wasn't for consumers or the UI really. There were place-holders and some things just completely missing.
The Consumer Preview changes things and is a lot more consistent and usable. There is much better support for mice and keyboards.
You should try the Consumer Preview, give it a few hours so you can get used to it, check out the right-click menus and keyboard short-cuts, and realize it's not that bad at all.
But yeah, there are some things that are lacking in the "Discoverability" aspect. But hopefully constructive feedback will help polish the remaining rough areas.
The "Start Screen" *is* the new Start Menu. You can arrange it as you wish, group things as you wish, remove anything you don't want to be there. Yes, it looks a lot different... but the old "start menu" had major changes in every major release of Windows since Windows 95.
Also, XP wasn't actually good (clearly you've forgotten all the bitching over the cartoony UI and issues it had with compatibility and especially security)... XP SP2, however, was very good.
And as mentioned, Windows 98 and Windows 98SE are both missing from your list (both good).
Also, Vista SP1 eliminated most of the real problems with Vista.
So yeah, this meme is everywhere, but it really doesn't hold any water, as you really have to cherry-pick in order to make it work. Better to just stop repeating it.
You realize the ribbon is collapsed by default, and you need never use it.
But if you want it, you can expand it and use it.
So... no need to run off to the water-boarding facility... you're not being forced into that.
Meanwhile, Windows Explorer has lots of really good enhancements, from integrated SkyDrive to native support for mounting and burning *.iso files (FINALLY), and a return of the 'up' button to go up a directory level.
So this isn't really something to rant about and get all angry over.
There are times where it's use is not recommended, certainly. But even in those cases, it can lead you to the point that there's a "bad code smell" where methods aren't named well, variables aren't named well, classes aren't named well.
var x = foo(); is definitely less readable.
But var x = new ComplexObject(); is every bit as readable, if not more so, because you don't have a redundant "ComplexObject" in the declaration. You always know exactly what type "x" is. It's also very useful in cases where the return type is a complicated generic. it saves a lot of typing, and is definitely more readable.
Here is a very good discussion on the benefits and uses of "var":
Do you want the society of China or Mexico here? The dramatic air pollution and water pollution of China, or the slums and crime of Mexico?
You DO realize that with our taxes, we buy civilization, right? We buy clean air and water, peaceful neighborhoods, and other basic quality of life.
What we really need to get rid of (after fixing the tax code so that the wealthy are returned to paying their fair share) is all the corporate welfare and tax-breaks for highly profitable businesses, as well as trimming some of the excessive military spending we engage in.
...but the crashiest apps on my iPhone have always been the apps included with the OS. The AppStore crashes on me the most. The Mail app is second. It's very rare that any app that I've downloaded actually crashes on me. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Well, except that over that same time period, we'll be experiencing a reversal of the poles, and the accompaning period of magnetic flux that would make magnetic compasses rather useless.
That's not really the problem. The problem is that one side is claiming there's no data or no agreement, when the objective fact is that there is TONS of data and TONS of agreement.
The side that is on the side of science is tired of having last decades debates over and over and over again because the side against the side of science is just pushing an agenda (protecting the status quo).
Legitimate: Questioning and verifying the science, making sure results are duplicated, etc.
Legitimate: Questinging what policies or procedures should result from the scientific finding (aka "what do do about it" if anything)
Illegitimate: Smearing valid scientific results through ignorant half-understanding or misperceptions, simply because you're a paid lacky of an organization that feels "threatened" by the findings and is scared of what possible formt he solutions might take.
Recently one of the biggest climate-change skeptics, backed with massive funding from climate change denialsts with a huge investment in the status quo and a huge political agenda to push (aka The Koch Brothers) went over all the existing data, brought in new data, and put the entire thing through the scientific wringer (everything from the hockeystick graph, to "heat-island" theories, to solar influence, etc)... and this Climate Change Skeptic came out of it a convert, admitting that Climate Change is REAL.
We need to move beyond constantly questioning whether it's real or not, and get to the "okay, given the scientific findings in this area, what if anything should we do about it, and what are the consequences, pros-and-cons, of any given course of action, including complete inaction?"
There is a legitimate debate to be had there.
But to continue to question whether climate change is "real" is like those continuing to question whether "evolution" is real. Sure, some details almost certainly have yet to be discovered. But you know what? That's science.
Newtonion physics wasn't WRONG. Ensteinian/Relativistic theory just expands what was there and fleshes it out. It didn't throw it in the garbage. For many real-world approximations, Newtonian physics works just fine. For others, Relativity must be taken into account.
Similarly, I'm sure we'll continue to discover more and more about evolution and about climate change and humanity's influence on it. But it's not, at this point, going to completely invalidate all that has come before.
Datacenters mostly. I know our company (a MS shop) will certainly make use of these features whenever they make the move to Windows 8 Server. Which isn't likely for years, but still.
Ultimately they'll release it for boot devices and such. But for the next few years it'll only be really useful in large storage scenarios. I don't know if they're going to release it on "Windows Home Server", but they should: Mirrored Storage Spaces plus the ReFS improvements would be VERY useful in that area. Joe Blow can just plug in a new 1TB drive, and ReFS and Storage Spaces will make use of it, replicating data across drives. A drive goes bad? Just unplug it, and plug in a new one. Hot-swappable, uninterrupted... self-healing.
I've heard anecdotal evidence (so take with a grain of salt) that doing stuff on ReFS is much faster.
Keep in mind this initial release is for servers only, and NOT for boot volumes, so it'll be a while (half a decade or more) before it trickles down into most desktops/laptops.
But more to the point, I didn't see much about what might be NEW with this file system, only what's OLD and being discarded.
Let's see: 32K file name and path limits (instad of 255), on-line recovery from corruption (no more "Check Disk" or offline recovery-rebuild), faster performance, built in recovery of data on failed disks (via Storage Spaces), hot-adding-more-storage to volumes, better control of allocation and localization on the drive, attribute checksums (and auto detection and recovery from "bitrot")....
In this case, I think it's solely driven by iDevices. If the iPhone and iPad were to suddenly tank in the market, I believe you'd see Objective-C usage tank right along with it. Objective-C isn't the reason they're popular. It's just the only choice developers have to code for a popular platform.
Meanwhile, something like C# is actually pleasurable, and I think would see increasing usage even if WP7 tanks (heck, it's barely a blip in usage as it is right now). C# in some form or another is available on non-MS platforms too, and is used there. Obviously MS drives C# adoption with the popularity of their Windows platform, but I think there's a subtle difference in that C# is really nice... (you have MANY options when coding for Windows). Objective-C is just the only choice.
You can still install Windows Server with a full GUI. Better, you can install it without a GUI on dozens of machines, and administer them all from a full GUI on an admin machine.
And terms of PowerShell, you can easily see and copy the powershell script for any GUI command you issue, so you can "do it in the GUI" and then copy/paste the script to script it out and autmoate it.
OEMs can set up the 'reset' to include their crapware. And most likely will.
However, users like yourself can uninstall all that crapware once, then take a new snaphot just the way you like it, with just the tweaks and apps you like, and THAT will become the new 'fresh' install image. So at least it's just pain once, and not every single time.
And after SPs and tons of updates, you can re-snapshot so you don't have to re-apply all those as well.
Virtually every console has been backwards compatable when initially released. And for good sound economic reasons: It takes up to a year, even more, to build a big software library for a new platform... and it won't even do THAT if people don't buy it, and people won't buy it if there are only half a dozen decent games for it.
They can (and do) jettison the backwards compatibility during a refresh at some point in the lifecycle, but it would be almost insane if they didn't take advantage of the huge library of games already out there as a hook to get people to buy the new generation (or upgrade to it).
Even worse, imagine if they came out with an XBox that couldn't run any games but new games written specifically for it (launching with, say, six games total, which wouldn't be an unrealistic number)... and the competition (PS4) launced with full backwards compatibility. They'd completely lose that competition.
Slashdot Mirror
It works in Vista and Win7, but not XP.
After working in Win7 for a while, going back to XP was an exercise in frustration... like working with stone knives and bear-skins. Win7 is THAT much better.
Win8 is interesting. Unlike most, I don't think it's a step backwards. It's different. I think there's a lot of harsh judgement because of trying to use Win8 as if it were Win7 (or worse, XP). If you take 30 minutes or so to play around and get used to it, Win8 starts making sense, is more consistent than originally perceived, and has some powerful new features and short-cuts.
But there are admittedly still some significant rough-spots in the Consumer Preview, and I can only hope those are addressed before final releas.
You realize you can remove any tiles from the Start Screen that you want, right? You can customize it, group tiles, make tiles large or small, and re-arrange tiles to your heart's content.
There is a separate "all programs" menu, just like on the old start menu. right-click the start screen to access it.
And of course you have windows search. Either just start typing on the start screen, or you can use the "search" charm in the right-sidebar menu.
So yes, you can pick the program you want from a list. Or you can pin your most used apps in the order you want, in groups you define, at the front of the start screen. You can also "zoom out" on the start screen, and dive right back into a group way to the left, without having to "scroll and scroll". And of course you can directly access the app by search, typing its name.
There is no "Start button" on the taskbar any more.
Use the windows key to go to the start screen, which is the REPLACEMENT for the Start Menu. It uses the Metro design language but it is not, in and of itself, "Metro".
You also don't HAVE to click the desktop tile to get to desktop. You can also click on any desktop application tile to just launch it and you'll be right there in the desktop. And you can continue to click on apps pinned to the task bar (which can now span multiple monitors) to launch additional apps, minimizing the number of times you actually have to go back to the start screen to find and launch a new desktop app.
The Start Screen *IS* your list of apps. Sort it, group it, arrange it, add and remove tiles, ... any way you want. You can optimize it to exactly what you want and how you want it.
And the "start menu search" still works the same way as always: just start typing. WinKey + "cmd" + Enter, and voila, you've launched a command window. Just the same as in Win7. Or you can have the command window pinned to your task bar. Or pinned to the start screen. Or as a short-cut on your desktop.
You have options.
Well... no.
Metro's overhead is hardly onerous (in fact, Metro apps are much more energy efficient).
Beyond that, the Start Screen can be very efficient in an Enterprise situation. You can pin anything to the start screen, including deep links. So your first screen can be tailored to your work-flow, or your tasks... whether you're an administrative assistant, or you're an IT professional.
And the server versions are FULLY scriptable (finally), and scripts can be pinned to the start screen too. As well as reports, documents, folders, whatever.
I just don't think you're thinking it through.
Okay, the ignorant homophobic slur wasn't necessary and paints you as kind of a clueless rube.
But ignoring that, the start menu is there: It's called The Start Screen. Yes, it looks a LOT different. But each start menu in each Windows release has operated a lot differently. It takes a bit of getting used to. Some things have moved around. It's frustrating to lose the advantage of muscle-memory, but once you give it a chance, a lot of it makes sense "in the new world". And you can stay in the desktop as much as you want.
The Developer Peview UI wasn't complete. It wasn't for consumers or the UI really. There were place-holders and some things just completely missing.
The Consumer Preview changes things and is a lot more consistent and usable. There is much better support for mice and keyboards.
You should try the Consumer Preview, give it a few hours so you can get used to it, check out the right-click menus and keyboard short-cuts, and realize it's not that bad at all.
But yeah, there are some things that are lacking in the "Discoverability" aspect. But hopefully constructive feedback will help polish the remaining rough areas.
No, the start menu isn't gone.
The "Start Screen" *is* the new Start Menu. You can arrange it as you wish, group things as you wish, remove anything you don't want to be there. Yes, it looks a lot different... but the old "start menu" had major changes in every major release of Windows since Windows 95.
Also, XP wasn't actually good (clearly you've forgotten all the bitching over the cartoony UI and issues it had with compatibility and especially security)... XP SP2, however, was very good.
And as mentioned, Windows 98 and Windows 98SE are both missing from your list (both good).
Also, Vista SP1 eliminated most of the real problems with Vista.
So yeah, this meme is everywhere, but it really doesn't hold any water, as you really have to cherry-pick in order to make it work. Better to just stop repeating it.
You realize the ribbon is collapsed by default, and you need never use it.
But if you want it, you can expand it and use it.
So... no need to run off to the water-boarding facility... you're not being forced into that.
Meanwhile, Windows Explorer has lots of really good enhancements, from integrated SkyDrive to native support for mounting and burning *.iso files (FINALLY), and a return of the 'up' button to go up a directory level.
So this isn't really something to rant about and get all angry over.
Prohibiting use of "var" is gross over-kill.
There are times where it's use is not recommended, certainly. But even in those cases, it can lead you to the point that there's a "bad code smell" where methods aren't named well, variables aren't named well, classes aren't named well.
var x = foo(); is definitely less readable.
But var x = new ComplexObject(); is every bit as readable, if not more so, because you don't have a redundant "ComplexObject" in the declaration. You always know exactly what type "x" is. It's also very useful in cases where the return type is a complicated generic. it saves a lot of typing, and is definitely more readable.
Here is a very good discussion on the benefits and uses of "var":
http://resharper.blogspot.com/2008/03/varification-using-implicitly-typed.html
Do you want the society of China or Mexico here? The dramatic air pollution and water pollution of China, or the slums and crime of Mexico?
You DO realize that with our taxes, we buy civilization, right? We buy clean air and water, peaceful neighborhoods, and other basic quality of life.
What we really need to get rid of (after fixing the tax code so that the wealthy are returned to paying their fair share) is all the corporate welfare and tax-breaks for highly profitable businesses, as well as trimming some of the excessive military spending we engage in.
...but the crashiest apps on my iPhone have always been the apps included with the OS. The AppStore crashes on me the most. The Mail app is second. It's very rare that any app that I've downloaded actually crashes on me. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Not a trend, just a data point.
Well, except that over that same time period, we'll be experiencing a reversal of the poles, and the accompaning period of magnetic flux that would make magnetic compasses rather useless.
That's not really the problem. The problem is that one side is claiming there's no data or no agreement, when the objective fact is that there is TONS of data and TONS of agreement.
The side that is on the side of science is tired of having last decades debates over and over and over again because the side against the side of science is just pushing an agenda (protecting the status quo).
Legitimate: Questioning and verifying the science, making sure results are duplicated, etc.
Legitimate: Questinging what policies or procedures should result from the scientific finding (aka "what do do about it" if anything)
Illegitimate: Smearing valid scientific results through ignorant half-understanding or misperceptions, simply because you're a paid lacky of an organization that feels "threatened" by the findings and is scared of what possible formt he solutions might take.
Recently one of the biggest climate-change skeptics, backed with massive funding from climate change denialsts with a huge investment in the status quo and a huge political agenda to push (aka The Koch Brothers) went over all the existing data, brought in new data, and put the entire thing through the scientific wringer (everything from the hockeystick graph, to "heat-island" theories, to solar influence, etc)... and this Climate Change Skeptic came out of it a convert, admitting that Climate Change is REAL.
We need to move beyond constantly questioning whether it's real or not, and get to the "okay, given the scientific findings in this area, what if anything should we do about it, and what are the consequences, pros-and-cons, of any given course of action, including complete inaction?"
There is a legitimate debate to be had there.
But to continue to question whether climate change is "real" is like those continuing to question whether "evolution" is real. Sure, some details almost certainly have yet to be discovered. But you know what? That's science.
Newtonion physics wasn't WRONG. Ensteinian/Relativistic theory just expands what was there and fleshes it out. It didn't throw it in the garbage. For many real-world approximations, Newtonian physics works just fine. For others, Relativity must be taken into account.
Similarly, I'm sure we'll continue to discover more and more about evolution and about climate change and humanity's influence on it. But it's not, at this point, going to completely invalidate all that has come before.
Datacenters mostly. I know our company (a MS shop) will certainly make use of these features whenever they make the move to Windows 8 Server. Which isn't likely for years, but still.
Ultimately they'll release it for boot devices and such. But for the next few years it'll only be really useful in large storage scenarios. I don't know if they're going to release it on "Windows Home Server", but they should: Mirrored Storage Spaces plus the ReFS improvements would be VERY useful in that area. Joe Blow can just plug in a new 1TB drive, and ReFS and Storage Spaces will make use of it, replicating data across drives. A drive goes bad? Just unplug it, and plug in a new one. Hot-swappable, uninterrupted... self-healing.
I've heard anecdotal evidence (so take with a grain of salt) that doing stuff on ReFS is much faster.
Keep in mind this initial release is for servers only, and NOT for boot volumes, so it'll be a while (half a decade or more) before it trickles down into most desktops/laptops.
But more to the point, I didn't see much about what might be NEW with this file system, only what's OLD and being discarded.
Let's see: 32K file name and path limits (instad of 255), on-line recovery from corruption (no more "Check Disk" or offline recovery-rebuild), faster performance, built in recovery of data on failed disks (via Storage Spaces), hot-adding-more-storage to volumes, better control of allocation and localization on the drive, attribute checksums (and auto detection and recovery from "bitrot")....
Did you RTFA at all?
You need to RTFA. The grandparent was a spoof. ReFS doesn't support compression. Or short-names. etc.
You and I are on different ends then... I honestly can't stand Objective-C. I can't even really tell you why. It just grates everytime I see it.
In this case, I think it's solely driven by iDevices. If the iPhone and iPad were to suddenly tank in the market, I believe you'd see Objective-C usage tank right along with it. Objective-C isn't the reason they're popular. It's just the only choice developers have to code for a popular platform.
Meanwhile, something like C# is actually pleasurable, and I think would see increasing usage even if WP7 tanks (heck, it's barely a blip in usage as it is right now). C# in some form or another is available on non-MS platforms too, and is used there. Obviously MS drives C# adoption with the popularity of their Windows platform, but I think there's a subtle difference in that C# is really nice... (you have MANY options when coding for Windows). Objective-C is just the only choice.
They aren't "losing the GUI".
They're eliminating the REQUIREMENT of the GUI.
You can still install Windows Server with a full GUI. Better, you can install it without a GUI on dozens of machines, and administer them all from a full GUI on an admin machine.
And terms of PowerShell, you can easily see and copy the powershell script for any GUI command you issue, so you can "do it in the GUI" and then copy/paste the script to script it out and autmoate it.
I'm not seeing where the downside is here.
OEMs can set up the 'reset' to include their crapware. And most likely will.
However, users like yourself can uninstall all that crapware once, then take a new snaphot just the way you like it, with just the tweaks and apps you like, and THAT will become the new 'fresh' install image. So at least it's just pain once, and not every single time.
And after SPs and tons of updates, you can re-snapshot so you don't have to re-apply all those as well.
Look at the picture of a Whopper on the menu board.
Then order one, and look at what you get.
They don't look anything alike.
I'd pay good money for what that picture represents. If they had a picture up there of what they actually served, I doubt anyone would order it.
I.E. only complies with standards seemingly by random chance.
This would seem to be untrue of IE9. It has gaps, but not random ones, and what is there complies with standards pretty well.
Virtually every console has been backwards compatable when initially released. And for good sound economic reasons: It takes up to a year, even more, to build a big software library for a new platform... and it won't even do THAT if people don't buy it, and people won't buy it if there are only half a dozen decent games for it.
They can (and do) jettison the backwards compatibility during a refresh at some point in the lifecycle, but it would be almost insane if they didn't take advantage of the huge library of games already out there as a hook to get people to buy the new generation (or upgrade to it).
Even worse, imagine if they came out with an XBox that couldn't run any games but new games written specifically for it (launching with, say, six games total, which wouldn't be an unrealistic number)... and the competition (PS4) launced with full backwards compatibility. They'd completely lose that competition.