512-bit AVX requires OS support: "The extended registers, SIMD width bit, and opmask registers of AVX-512 are mandatory and all require support from the OS."
The underlying assumption is that women want to be "represented" in this field in the first place. Dread the thought that women might not want to do something enough to make the head count ratios match that of the general population.
Let's face it: the 7-inch and 9-inch displays in the early netbooks were too small, full stop. The small keyboards were somewhat difficult to use even after acclimating to the smaller layout. I have the original Sylvania G netbook which is just an Everex Cloudbook with the touchpad moved to a less stupid location; it is quite hard to type on that thing due to the key size and the 800x480 7-inch screen isn't exactly a spacious work area. (It also had a VIA C7-M 1.2 GHz, a chip notorious for being quite weak when compared to the Intel Atom N230 that went into the first Eee PCs and Acer Aspire Ones, plus a memory limit of 1GB and a 1.8" parallel hard drive. Even with a KingSpec ZIF SSD and an XP install aligned to sector 64 instead of 63 to work with the flash memory better, it struggles hard to even start Firefox...plus it won't boot Windows 7 or later with the default partition layout due to a super inexplicable BIOS bug.)
The 11.6-inch "netbook" of today is the perfect size. The keyboard keys are full-size. The touchpad can be reasonably large. There can be more USB ports. RAM and hard drive upgrades are often possible unless it's one of the Chromebook-based ones with soldered RAM and a 32GB eMMC SSD. The screens are nice and big and always have a minimum resolution width of 1024 pixels, a number which some websites don't even work on without a horizontal scroll bar but which is far better than the 800-pixel screens of the bad old days. They're always thin and light and disposably cheap.
No one in their right mind wants 7-inch netbooks back. Even 9-inch models have squished keyboards and myopia-inducing screens. The 11.6-inch netbook, despite not carrying that label in the marketing literature, is what the market has settled on...and with good reasons for doing so. I can only see a tiny niche market for uncomfortably small netbooks. Let the old tiny netbook remain peacefully in its grave.
Go to Services. Disable "Windows Update" and stop it. Enable it when (if) you ever want to manually run updates or install a program that installs a Windows update as part of the process. Don't forget you did it or you'll eventually run into a problem and forget to enable it long enough to troubleshoot.
I pasted this into Bash and my computer sprouted limbs, walked out of the room, and kicked my dog square in the balls. The part about this that really has me weirded out is that I don't actually own a dog.
Your analogy is faulty. Amps and volts are fundamental forces that apply to everything involved in electronics and cannot be separated from them. Abstract classes are a language-specific feature that does not apply if the languages in use don't offer them in the first place. What is your definition of a "professional programmer?" It sounds like you mean "someone who writes code in certain popular object-oriented languages that support a certain feature."
Ironically, it has been ruled that you must speak to assert your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. I do not have a source to pass along, I just remember seeing that ruling go by one day and thinking "that's kinda stupid." I also don't think that people should have to identify themselves to police simply because police ask, but that doesn't stop it from being a requirement in several states.
Cheaper computers do have significant delays in Win10 Start menu appearance and response. Not everyone owns a brand new or expensive computer. Software developers have a tendency to have expensive high-speed machines on which they do most or all development work. It's not unusual for two software-identical machines to perform very differently if (for example) one has an i7 + huge 7200 RPM hard drive while the other has a Celeron + mediocre 5400 RPM hard drive.
It's easy to forget that one of the "perks of working in IT" is access to good equipment and more knowledge than an average user about how to make a computer not run like crap. I've dealt with thousands of computers owned by non-technical individuals that don't have an IT department guy to ask for help from and there are plenty of them that have serious performance issues even after they've been cleaned up (mostly because of the hardware being cheap and slow as previously mentioned.) Just because you haven't seen or heard of it doesn't mean it isn't a thing.
I found that out in this thread. The point is that the arrows no longer navigate there where before the update they did. They also provide no hint that you must use tab instead. A fundamental rule of good UI design is consistency and this is just one of many violations of that by Microsoft.
Oh, here comes another stuck-up arrogant jackass techno-weenie. We can all tell by the "you need to educate yourself" horseshit. Third party drivers and filesystem filters eh? Oh, well guess what? Those aren't an issue on my system because I know how to see them. I'm a sysadmin and a multi-platform programmer, not a moron that can't find the "any" key.
None of those things matter when you can't walk into a store, buy a new computer, and have things feel AT LEAST as fast as they were on Windows 7. It's like selling someone a car that has variable valve timing and a turbocharger, yet doesn't have the pep of the car it's replacing. Features under the hood don't generally matter to users. A good example of something I've had trouble with that makes all those technical improvements look irrelevant is that Windows 10 often refuses to safely eject my external hard drives even when I've gone into Process Explorer and force-closed all file handles that are locking the drive. I have to run sync and unplug or shut the entire computer down. Frankly, I don't give a shit about ASLR, DEP, memory allocation guards, etc. when such a fundamental user-visible problem is interfering with my workflow and no one at Microsoft has bothered to fixed it. I have no such problems on Windows 7.
I, for one, am not an "anti-MS troll" which is an ad hominem fallacy and a non-argument anyway. I am a programmer who understands that a computer is nothing more than a tool used to assist in accomplishing the goals of its users. Every platform available has problems, but the ability to work around those problems makes them livable. Not ejecting USB hard drives is not something with a workaround; the filesystem is marked as dirty and has to be checked on each subsequent use, plus there is an increased risk of data loss. There is absolutely no excuse for this problem existing in Windows 10. Forums are full of people with the same issue. As usual, Microsoft's Indian paste-a-canned-script tech support people have no solutions other than "please kindly try a clean boot, please kindly try system restore, please kindly reinstall everything on your goddamned computer."
In fairness to Microsoft, the schizophrenic nature of Windows 8+ is because a lot of software relies on the "legacy" Windows framework. For example, if you have a touchpad and want to change the palm rejection sensitivity, that's under a tab in the classic Mouse control panel; the Windows 10 Settings for a touchpad doesn't seem to have a universal control for this yet, so you have to use the vendor-specific legacy control panel tab to change it. A lot of stuff has gone missing from specific control panels and has not come back in Settings and that's a big problem; a prime example that really pisses me off is the ability to switch Public and Private network types, where I'm currently having to go to the Settings panel for networks and drop into the HomeGroup panel to be able to pop out the control and change the network to a Private type.
Apologies; I'm getting things off my chest to some extent. I know about the key combo; I do the same (I just type a backslash which does the same thing, and WIN + E also opens an Explorer window.) The problem is that nothing tells you that you can do any of this stuff; you have to accidentally trigger it, take a shitty guess, be told by a random comment on the Internet, or go searching online to find out how to do it and wade through a thousand Microsoft "Please kindly clean boot your computer to see if this fixes the issue" type garbage posts to find what you want to know.
Please substantiate your claim of "infinitely more useful" with specifics. You have failed to do so everywhere else I have asked, so I don't expect you to start rationally backing your apparent fanboyism now, but there's always hope.
Thank you. That is helpful. It also illustrates my point: how was I supposed to know that without you, Anonymous Coward #9805234894 on random Internet site I complained at, telling me about it? Every Win10 version prior just required an up arrow; the inconsistency from Microsoft is absurd. (I really do appreciate the info though.)
I hate to break this to you, bro, but "accidentally trigger it to find out it's there and hope you can figure out what you did to trigger it in the first place" is not one of the core tenets of a functional user interface design. What was your point, exactly? YOU knowing it's there and how it works doesn't help anyone else to find and understand it.
It doesn't need correction; it needs clarification: there will always be people who are resistant to change regardless of the merits of that change. I'm in general agreement with you. Change is always a balancing act. The benefits of the change must significantly outweigh the pain that it will cause, otherwise the change will be worse than the status quo no matter how much more enlightened the changers think their ideas are.
The Program Manager to Start menu change is an example of a change with a great enough benefit to overshadow the complaints of people who just happen to be used to whizzing around in Program Manager: it provides a drill-down hierarchy that is easy to understand and scales far better than program groups ever could, and it has excellent discoverability (an extremely important factor when making a significant change to how an interface works!)
The Windows 8 Start screen is the ultimate example of a terrible change and a complete lack of regard for the most basic requirements of a good user interface design. Taking over the entire screen eliminates all points of reference. No scrollability hints, no borders around anything, awful contrast between UI elements, and abstract monochrome icons that are difficult to understand at first glance (which ironically is half the point of an icon in the first place.) The Start button changing to an invisible "hot corner" is difficult to remember for a new and elderly users. The charm bar suffers the same problem with its hot corners, plus its behavior lacks consistency; if you use a hot corner to pop it out, it'll vanish if your pointer slides away from it by a single pixel, but hitting WIN+C makes it stick around until you click away from it, and the Settings panel within the charm bar is so terrible and inconsistent that I don't think we have time for me to discuss it.
All of these changes were a solution in search of a problem and were done despite extremely loud protests from inexperienced and expert users alike. Of course, some people liked the changes, though I have yet to find anyone who liked the changes in Win8 that could explain the things they liked other than how it was new and different and referencing nebulous aesthetic concepts like "clean looking." The reality is that basic UI design concepts were chucked out the window in favor of trend-chasing and building a corporate image of "forward-thinking-ness." The changes in Win8 rendered vast chunks of all Windows users' existing skill sets useless, but the only benefits brought to the table were "it's easier to use on a touchscreen device, something that the vast majority of computers don't even have!" and "we made it boot faster...sometimes!"
Alas, there are fools that actually believe that newness in technical stuff is a merit like it is in car buying, as if Start is a set of tires that will wear out. If they were to all be struck dead right now, nothing found stored on their computers post-mortem would be of any value to society. It's easy to not care about the crappy Windows interface changes when all you do with the machine is masturbate to online pornography and bang out moronic condescending comments on Internet forums. All these idiots care about is "where's the blue E? And where do I type Redtube dot com? And what is that midget doing to that unicorn?" and that some computer dude somewhere told them that they can hold the power button for five seconds to turn the computer off when they're done.
Oh man, what a well-reasoned argument you have there. I could never possibly argue with such an enormous set of totally not fallacious and logically sound points.:^)
Notably, I have already "learned something new" as I have been using Windows 10 for quite some time already, so on that note you may feel free to shove your condescending manner where the sun doesn't shine. The onus is on you to prove that your beloved new shiny interface is better than the one it replaced because you made the original claim of superiority. You have refused to back that claim with specific points, so we can safely assume you don't have any points to raise in favor of your position. However, my position is easily defended, so I will gladly do so now...not for you, but for other readers that are actually interested in a discussion on this subject.
Windows 7's Start menu consists of two columns. The left column contains frequently used and user-pinned programs, with optional sub-menus to open recent documents and perform common tasks associated with that program. Windows 10 has replaced this with pinned tiles and a "frequently used" section at the top of the full program list. The sub-menus for common tasks and recent documents are completely gone. Recent documents are now accessed via File Explorer and the view of these files cannot be grouped by associated program at all.
Pinned tiles take up a large amount of screen space and are the most distant items from the Start button, increasing the amount of movement needed to reach the desired application. This is worse on low-resolution screens since less pinned tiles can be shown and the user may have to scroll in addition to moving the mouse over more distance. While the tile target size is somewhat larger than a pinned Start program in "large icons" display mode, the extra distance and two-dimensional layout cancels out the benefits of the larger target due to requiring a longer (and therefore less accurate) motion to reach.
Windows 7's Start menu has a customizable right-hand column which comes with these (mostly sensible) defaults: User's home folder, Documents, Pictures, Music, Games, Computer, Control Panel, Devices and Printers, Default Programs. The lack of the Downloads shortcut by default is problematic, but the ability to add it exists in an intuitive location. The utility of some options is highly debatable but since they're fully customizable the user can choose new defaults that are more sensible to them. Regardless of what programs (the left column) a user might want to use, all but the most novice users will inevitably need to reach their home folders, the Control Panel, and internal, optical, and external storage media under Computer (aka This PC on Win8+) on a regular basis. Windows 10's Start menu does not provide any of these as first-level shortcuts. Windows 10 provides by def
Please explain what it is about the Windows 10 Start menu that is "SO MUCH BETTER than the old style." Be specific about the FUNCTIONAL elements, not a simple aesthetic appreciation which is not what is being discussed. For example, in what ways is the new Start menu:
More discoverable (new features can be found without someone telling you they exist)?
Better organized?
Faster to use for experienced users?
Providing better keyboard shortcut functionality?
Integrating better features that help the user's workflow?
I always see people like you going "it's new therefore it's awesome and the only people that have a problem with it are aged-out old people that can't adapt to new stuff" but I have not once seen a single person with this attitude explain their position in detail. I am of the opinion that this is because people with this attitude either don't do much with a computer in the first place (a browser icon and a file manager is all you need to satisfy you) or fall into the same elitist fanboy class that some Mac users paint themselves as, considering "new" to be a valid measurement of the value of a tool. "Just get on board and stop whining" makes you sound like such a person.
Please get back to me with your specific functional arguments in favor of the Windows 10 Start menu over the Windows 7 Start menu. If you have valid arguments for the changes you feel are so superior, it would be quite helpful to the discussion for you to contribute them.
It's reminiscent of how carburetor mechanics hated fuel injection and OBD-II when they started shipping in cars, but both are objectively superior systems and are easier to work on once you have the basic tools needed to query the computer because the computer can tell you what it sees going wrong and avoid tons of unnecessary effort, only in this analogy you're a dealer mechanic who works on locked-down cars with tons of non-user-serviceable stuff going "cars the user can't work on are newer than those old unlocked cars people could fix themselves, therefore they're certainly better than cars that users could work on!" Please feel free to prove me wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
512-bit AVX requires OS support: "The extended registers, SIMD width bit, and opmask registers of AVX-512 are mandatory and all require support from the OS."
My AMD FX-9590 system is whispering to me that you're posting a few years late ;-)
That's because men in porn are giant dicks.
The underlying assumption is that women want to be "represented" in this field in the first place. Dread the thought that women might not want to do something enough to make the head count ratios match that of the general population.
Let's face it: the 7-inch and 9-inch displays in the early netbooks were too small, full stop. The small keyboards were somewhat difficult to use even after acclimating to the smaller layout. I have the original Sylvania G netbook which is just an Everex Cloudbook with the touchpad moved to a less stupid location; it is quite hard to type on that thing due to the key size and the 800x480 7-inch screen isn't exactly a spacious work area. (It also had a VIA C7-M 1.2 GHz, a chip notorious for being quite weak when compared to the Intel Atom N230 that went into the first Eee PCs and Acer Aspire Ones, plus a memory limit of 1GB and a 1.8" parallel hard drive. Even with a KingSpec ZIF SSD and an XP install aligned to sector 64 instead of 63 to work with the flash memory better, it struggles hard to even start Firefox...plus it won't boot Windows 7 or later with the default partition layout due to a super inexplicable BIOS bug.)
The 11.6-inch "netbook" of today is the perfect size. The keyboard keys are full-size. The touchpad can be reasonably large. There can be more USB ports. RAM and hard drive upgrades are often possible unless it's one of the Chromebook-based ones with soldered RAM and a 32GB eMMC SSD. The screens are nice and big and always have a minimum resolution width of 1024 pixels, a number which some websites don't even work on without a horizontal scroll bar but which is far better than the 800-pixel screens of the bad old days. They're always thin and light and disposably cheap.
No one in their right mind wants 7-inch netbooks back. Even 9-inch models have squished keyboards and myopia-inducing screens. The 11.6-inch netbook, despite not carrying that label in the marketing literature, is what the market has settled on...and with good reasons for doing so. I can only see a tiny niche market for uncomfortably small netbooks. Let the old tiny netbook remain peacefully in its grave.
Go to Services. Disable "Windows Update" and stop it. Enable it when (if) you ever want to manually run updates or install a program that installs a Windows update as part of the process. Don't forget you did it or you'll eventually run into a problem and forget to enable it long enough to troubleshoot.
I pasted this into Bash and my computer sprouted limbs, walked out of the room, and kicked my dog square in the balls. The part about this that really has me weirded out is that I don't actually own a dog.
Your analogy is faulty. Amps and volts are fundamental forces that apply to everything involved in electronics and cannot be separated from them. Abstract classes are a language-specific feature that does not apply if the languages in use don't offer them in the first place. What is your definition of a "professional programmer?" It sounds like you mean "someone who writes code in certain popular object-oriented languages that support a certain feature."
Does C have abstract classes? Does assembly? If not, does that mean all programmers in those languages are incompetent, by your logic?
I would mod this up into the sky if I had the points to do it, if for no other reason than the great link.
Ironically, it has been ruled that you must speak to assert your Fifth Amendment right to remain silent. I do not have a source to pass along, I just remember seeing that ruling go by one day and thinking "that's kinda stupid." I also don't think that people should have to identify themselves to police simply because police ask, but that doesn't stop it from being a requirement in several states.
Cheaper computers do have significant delays in Win10 Start menu appearance and response. Not everyone owns a brand new or expensive computer. Software developers have a tendency to have expensive high-speed machines on which they do most or all development work. It's not unusual for two software-identical machines to perform very differently if (for example) one has an i7 + huge 7200 RPM hard drive while the other has a Celeron + mediocre 5400 RPM hard drive.
It's easy to forget that one of the "perks of working in IT" is access to good equipment and more knowledge than an average user about how to make a computer not run like crap. I've dealt with thousands of computers owned by non-technical individuals that don't have an IT department guy to ask for help from and there are plenty of them that have serious performance issues even after they've been cleaned up (mostly because of the hardware being cheap and slow as previously mentioned.) Just because you haven't seen or heard of it doesn't mean it isn't a thing.
I found that out in this thread. The point is that the arrows no longer navigate there where before the update they did. They also provide no hint that you must use tab instead. A fundamental rule of good UI design is consistency and this is just one of many violations of that by Microsoft.
Oh, here comes another stuck-up arrogant jackass techno-weenie. We can all tell by the "you need to educate yourself" horseshit. Third party drivers and filesystem filters eh? Oh, well guess what? Those aren't an issue on my system because I know how to see them. I'm a sysadmin and a multi-platform programmer, not a moron that can't find the "any" key.
:^)
This is a widely reported problem.
Feel free to take your condescending attitude and spaces before exclamation points and shove it all forcefully up your asshole.
None of those things matter when you can't walk into a store, buy a new computer, and have things feel AT LEAST as fast as they were on Windows 7. It's like selling someone a car that has variable valve timing and a turbocharger, yet doesn't have the pep of the car it's replacing. Features under the hood don't generally matter to users. A good example of something I've had trouble with that makes all those technical improvements look irrelevant is that Windows 10 often refuses to safely eject my external hard drives even when I've gone into Process Explorer and force-closed all file handles that are locking the drive. I have to run sync and unplug or shut the entire computer down. Frankly, I don't give a shit about ASLR, DEP, memory allocation guards, etc. when such a fundamental user-visible problem is interfering with my workflow and no one at Microsoft has bothered to fixed it. I have no such problems on Windows 7.
I, for one, am not an "anti-MS troll" which is an ad hominem fallacy and a non-argument anyway. I am a programmer who understands that a computer is nothing more than a tool used to assist in accomplishing the goals of its users. Every platform available has problems, but the ability to work around those problems makes them livable. Not ejecting USB hard drives is not something with a workaround; the filesystem is marked as dirty and has to be checked on each subsequent use, plus there is an increased risk of data loss. There is absolutely no excuse for this problem existing in Windows 10. Forums are full of people with the same issue. As usual, Microsoft's Indian paste-a-canned-script tech support people have no solutions other than "please kindly try a clean boot, please kindly try system restore, please kindly reinstall everything on your goddamned computer."
Cortana was busy getting a pedicure and didn't have time for my grey-beard plebian ass.
In fairness to Microsoft, the schizophrenic nature of Windows 8+ is because a lot of software relies on the "legacy" Windows framework. For example, if you have a touchpad and want to change the palm rejection sensitivity, that's under a tab in the classic Mouse control panel; the Windows 10 Settings for a touchpad doesn't seem to have a universal control for this yet, so you have to use the vendor-specific legacy control panel tab to change it. A lot of stuff has gone missing from specific control panels and has not come back in Settings and that's a big problem; a prime example that really pisses me off is the ability to switch Public and Private network types, where I'm currently having to go to the Settings panel for networks and drop into the HomeGroup panel to be able to pop out the control and change the network to a Private type.
Apologies; I'm getting things off my chest to some extent. I know about the key combo; I do the same (I just type a backslash which does the same thing, and WIN + E also opens an Explorer window.) The problem is that nothing tells you that you can do any of this stuff; you have to accidentally trigger it, take a shitty guess, be told by a random comment on the Internet, or go searching online to find out how to do it and wade through a thousand Microsoft "Please kindly clean boot your computer to see if this fixes the issue" type garbage posts to find what you want to know.
Please substantiate your claim of "infinitely more useful" with specifics. You have failed to do so everywhere else I have asked, so I don't expect you to start rationally backing your apparent fanboyism now, but there's always hope.
Thank you. That is helpful. It also illustrates my point: how was I supposed to know that without you, Anonymous Coward #9805234894 on random Internet site I complained at, telling me about it? Every Win10 version prior just required an up arrow; the inconsistency from Microsoft is absurd. (I really do appreciate the info though.)
I hate to break this to you, bro, but "accidentally trigger it to find out it's there and hope you can figure out what you did to trigger it in the first place" is not one of the core tenets of a functional user interface design. What was your point, exactly? YOU knowing it's there and how it works doesn't help anyone else to find and understand it.
It doesn't need correction; it needs clarification: there will always be people who are resistant to change regardless of the merits of that change. I'm in general agreement with you. Change is always a balancing act. The benefits of the change must significantly outweigh the pain that it will cause, otherwise the change will be worse than the status quo no matter how much more enlightened the changers think their ideas are.
The Program Manager to Start menu change is an example of a change with a great enough benefit to overshadow the complaints of people who just happen to be used to whizzing around in Program Manager: it provides a drill-down hierarchy that is easy to understand and scales far better than program groups ever could, and it has excellent discoverability (an extremely important factor when making a significant change to how an interface works!)
The Windows 8 Start screen is the ultimate example of a terrible change and a complete lack of regard for the most basic requirements of a good user interface design. Taking over the entire screen eliminates all points of reference. No scrollability hints, no borders around anything, awful contrast between UI elements, and abstract monochrome icons that are difficult to understand at first glance (which ironically is half the point of an icon in the first place.) The Start button changing to an invisible "hot corner" is difficult to remember for a new and elderly users. The charm bar suffers the same problem with its hot corners, plus its behavior lacks consistency; if you use a hot corner to pop it out, it'll vanish if your pointer slides away from it by a single pixel, but hitting WIN+C makes it stick around until you click away from it, and the Settings panel within the charm bar is so terrible and inconsistent that I don't think we have time for me to discuss it.
All of these changes were a solution in search of a problem and were done despite extremely loud protests from inexperienced and expert users alike. Of course, some people liked the changes, though I have yet to find anyone who liked the changes in Win8 that could explain the things they liked other than how it was new and different and referencing nebulous aesthetic concepts like "clean looking." The reality is that basic UI design concepts were chucked out the window in favor of trend-chasing and building a corporate image of "forward-thinking-ness." The changes in Win8 rendered vast chunks of all Windows users' existing skill sets useless, but the only benefits brought to the table were "it's easier to use on a touchscreen device, something that the vast majority of computers don't even have!" and "we made it boot faster...sometimes!"
Alas, there are fools that actually believe that newness in technical stuff is a merit like it is in car buying, as if Start is a set of tires that will wear out. If they were to all be struck dead right now, nothing found stored on their computers post-mortem would be of any value to society. It's easy to not care about the crappy Windows interface changes when all you do with the machine is masturbate to online pornography and bang out moronic condescending comments on Internet forums. All these idiots care about is "where's the blue E? And where do I type Redtube dot com? And what is that midget doing to that unicorn?" and that some computer dude somewhere told them that they can hold the power button for five seconds to turn the computer off when they're done.
Oh man, what a well-reasoned argument you have there. I could never possibly argue with such an enormous set of totally not fallacious and logically sound points. :^)
Notably, I have already "learned something new" as I have been using Windows 10 for quite some time already, so on that note you may feel free to shove your condescending manner where the sun doesn't shine. The onus is on you to prove that your beloved new shiny interface is better than the one it replaced because you made the original claim of superiority. You have refused to back that claim with specific points, so we can safely assume you don't have any points to raise in favor of your position. However, my position is easily defended, so I will gladly do so now...not for you, but for other readers that are actually interested in a discussion on this subject.
Windows 7's Start menu consists of two columns. The left column contains frequently used and user-pinned programs, with optional sub-menus to open recent documents and perform common tasks associated with that program. Windows 10 has replaced this with pinned tiles and a "frequently used" section at the top of the full program list. The sub-menus for common tasks and recent documents are completely gone. Recent documents are now accessed via File Explorer and the view of these files cannot be grouped by associated program at all.
Pinned tiles take up a large amount of screen space and are the most distant items from the Start button, increasing the amount of movement needed to reach the desired application. This is worse on low-resolution screens since less pinned tiles can be shown and the user may have to scroll in addition to moving the mouse over more distance. While the tile target size is somewhat larger than a pinned Start program in "large icons" display mode, the extra distance and two-dimensional layout cancels out the benefits of the larger target due to requiring a longer (and therefore less accurate) motion to reach.
Pinned and frequently used programs on Windows 7's Start menu can be changed from to "use small icons," increasing the density of what can be pinned there without reducing target size horizontally. Pinned tiles reduced to the equivalent size are reduced in both dimensions and lose their text labels completely, reducing target size to 1/4 (requiring more focus from the user to accurately hit) and forcing reliance on the icon alone to quickly select the desired application. Icons are hard to get right and only enhance usability under specific conditions and "A user’s understanding of an icon is based on previous experience. Due to the absence of a standard usage for most icons, text labels are necessary to communicate the meaning and reduce ambiguity." Hovering over the tile will reveal the label via a tooltip, but this is not sufficient as each tile would have to be hovered over by the user to read all of them whereas displaying text labels for everything enables the user to scan quickly for the name they're interested in.
Windows 7's Start menu has a customizable right-hand column which comes with these (mostly sensible) defaults: User's home folder, Documents, Pictures, Music, Games, Computer, Control Panel, Devices and Printers, Default Programs. The lack of the Downloads shortcut by default is problematic, but the ability to add it exists in an intuitive location. The utility of some options is highly debatable but since they're fully customizable the user can choose new defaults that are more sensible to them. Regardless of what programs (the left column) a user might want to use, all but the most novice users will inevitably need to reach their home folders, the Control Panel, and internal, optical, and external storage media under Computer (aka This PC on Win8+) on a regular basis. Windows 10's Start menu does not provide any of these as first-level shortcuts. Windows 10 provides by def
I always see people like you going "it's new therefore it's awesome and the only people that have a problem with it are aged-out old people that can't adapt to new stuff" but I have not once seen a single person with this attitude explain their position in detail. I am of the opinion that this is because people with this attitude either don't do much with a computer in the first place (a browser icon and a file manager is all you need to satisfy you) or fall into the same elitist fanboy class that some Mac users paint themselves as, considering "new" to be a valid measurement of the value of a tool. "Just get on board and stop whining" makes you sound like such a person.
Please get back to me with your specific functional arguments in favor of the Windows 10 Start menu over the Windows 7 Start menu. If you have valid arguments for the changes you feel are so superior, it would be quite helpful to the discussion for you to contribute them.
It's reminiscent of how carburetor mechanics hated fuel injection and OBD-II when they started shipping in cars, but both are objectively superior systems and are easier to work on once you have the basic tools needed to query the computer because the computer can tell you what it sees going wrong and avoid tons of unnecessary effort, only in this analogy you're a dealer mechanic who works on locked-down cars with tons of non-user-serviceable stuff going "cars the user can't work on are newer than those old unlocked cars people could fix themselves, therefore they're certainly better than cars that users could work on!" Please feel free to prove me wrong.