* pull a disappearing act. This would probably involve my house and/or vehicle blowing up. This may or may not coincidentially coincide with me cooking dinner on the gas stove or filling up fuel. The 'escape' part is the secret spy stuff we won't talk about, because that's secret and the hardest part. The secret part is that it's really not that difficult - they just have to be thrown off your trail long enough to think you're still close enough to find or catch. Being presumed dead works well for having them stay still and look for your remains. * hit up as many banks and ATMs as possible for cash while they're still looking for you. Ideally, have an accomplice do it for you, contacted in a clandestine fashion. * place as many covert monitoring devices on or near the people monitoring me as possible. * disappear. Possibly somewhere in the woods, possibly to a cafe in Europe - who knows? That's the point. If I tell anyone, I'm not below the radar. Ideally, give every indication that I have no intention of returning. * Wait until they're least expecting it (hopefully you made a thorough disappearing act), and kill them all like in the opening scenes of Commando.
Avoid causing them, or avoid them outright? Because those are two drastically different things.
The first assumes the following: * we are not only capable but responsible for climatic changes, despite the energy requirement calculations required for such volumetric changes not even being remotely possible using existing technology * the claims and panic about CFCs before they were banned was not only justified, but technically correct (both of which have been repeatedly shown to be false)
Avoiding climatic warming brought on by the sun is more tenable than reversing what you're thinking is possible, because reality would have to be other than it is, first.
I've had to do it 4 times on a single Windows 7 install (virtualized, hardware upgrade, hardware upgrade, migration), and god knows how many times I've had to do it on Windows Server 2003 while virtualizing. Kinda a common (irritating) thing to have to do.
There was no DRM on XP, not unless you're referring to Windows authentication. There were (and still are) legitimate gripes about that: it's absurd that I have to call Microsoft for authentication when (not if) the authentication app fails.
The "FUD" you're referring to was (and still is) legitimate agitation amongst community members (and professionals) who don't want to have to put up with the shit Microsoft's pushing, because it makes our lives more difficult. You'll recall there wasn't much bitching or moaning when Windows 7 came out - it was almost universally appreciated as Something Better. Why? Because the amount of cockamamie bullshit was markedly lower than with either XP or Vista.
People are dishing on Windows 8 because it sucks. Do you have any idea how many non-geeks think that, having simply seen pictures of it? They think it's ugly. Then you let them try it and they think it's confusing and difficult to use. We do not want the support burden and increased cost (time/money/whatever) of having to deal with it. For my family, I will be moving them 100% to Linux before I let them touch W8, if they want support.
It isn't. Specifically, it uses a shim to provide LDAP/Krb functionality. It's not part of the default feature set, and it's implemented poorly and insecurely. The only way to securely use it is to replicate to something else on a back channel and then provide auth through that channel instead.
It has a lot of nice features not natively available in an ldap/krb install, and serves much the same functionality, but LDAP/Kerberos it is not.
Also, W7 can't authenticate against an existing kerberos/ldap system without the use of Samba as an intermediary.
I've noticed that Windows 7 performs very, very poorly on SMB/CIFS file transfer if it's copying to or from Samba. Is that what you're running into? In general, it seems like MS releases a new 'breaks Samba compatibility and/or utility' patch which effects nothing else every couple months.
XP x64 is about the worst Windows OS regarding drivers. It's also about as stable as 98. Why on earth would you use it? It was abandoned by Microsoft even before Vista was released, or so it seems.
From the "Large Enterprise" point of view the only reason "Windows 7 is the Next Windows XP" is because Microsoft is going to stop supporting Windows XP. They don't need anything Windows 7 or 8 provides. All they care is that Windows XP keeps running the applications they need.
Eh, they need some things, they just don't know it.
* more secure RDP * more stable * more secure in general * better management ability through AD GPO
As for moving the goal posts, you really are absolutely correct. It's why they're ditching.NET and moving to HTML/Javascript - because it's their implementation engine only which would need to be emulated/copied, and that can't be done nearly as effectively as just an API. That, and.NET has made some tremendous inroads on Linux and the like via Mono, which seems to get more functional by the day. By moving to whatever they're using now, they're effectively making Mono and WINE both 'legacy' apps. There will be no possibility of running future Windows applications on a Mac or Linux.
Windows 7 is the first Microsoft OS I've not disliked substantially. In fact, it's the first Windows which doesn't have any glaring shortcomings, and is better in every way than the two previous releases.
How's that for a glowing endorsement?
* Windows 95 was unstable as hell and had constant problems (memory leaks, instability, glitchy UI, didn't work well with protected mode DOS applications or games). But the hardware support and, importantly, better GUI, somewhat made up for this. I could still drop to DOS (or some semblance of it) for games and what have you. * Windows 98 was more-or-less a facelift to 95. Performance was a bit better (though it was more bloated, too), it was much more stable, and compatibility was better in many regards. Most games no longer needed DOS. * Windows 2000 was a huge performance improvement over 98. Stability was astronomically better. But! games didn't run nearly as well, and they still hadn't fixed many of the visual/GUI glitches dating back to 95. The 2D/3D display systems often fought with each other and older games were often difficult to get working properly. TCP/IP finally became useful. * ME isn't worth mentioning. It was a bag of dicks. * XP was more stable than 2000 and seemed to take less memory over time. It didn't need the "reinstall every 3 months" fix that every previous version of Windows did - it could go 5 or 6 months, maybe even 7 if you were really careful. There were still many, many networking related (TCP, NETBIOS/CIFS/SMB) issues. * Vista is/was a lumbering piece of junk. Everything performed worse than XP unless you had well over 2GB of RAM, and then only most things were worse. Everything was inconsistent, and finding anything in the control panel was a huge pain. * Windows 7 fixed pretty much all of the performance issues in Vista, and then some. Performance was/is roughly on par with XP regarding memory use, and disk access and display performance are suitable again. Compatibility is better than Vista. Reinstalls due to the system dicking itself seem to be largely gone; malware and self-dicking seem to be the only criteria for a reinstall. The UI and location of important applets is more consistent, clean, and glitch-free. Proper multiuser is finally implemented to a suitable degree, and aside from the constant stream of 'required updates' which break compatibility with non-MS products (specifically, Samba), networking is markedly improved as well. It was the first version of Windows to not regularly need an ethernet driver disk after initial install, and the driver installation framework was greatly improved. It was also the first Windows in almost a decade to catch up with Linux in terms of visual finesse and hardware detection lack-of-headache. * W8 is slightly faster on the visual end in and of itself, but it's slower in pretty much every other regard. It takes longer (in absolute terms) to do pretty much everything. Even though I personally run almost everything full screen, the 'full screen only' mode, with the associated "can't get back to where you just were working" nature of it makes it unusable. Server 2012 is markedly better, and if I'm forced to I'll end up using that with the classicshell, but for god's sake W8 is a mess.
The biggest improvement in W7 over Vista isn't visual, though they did a hell of a lot of spit and polish on that. It's the reduced disk access requirements. Whatever they did, it's night and day.
The thing is, Windows 7 was a genuine improvement over not only Windows Vista, but Windows XP (on hardware which supported it).
It ran faster, took less time to boot, and generally abused the hard drive less. If you had 1GB of RAM, the only sound advice for a Windows user was "use Windows 7". Hell, a year or so later, W7 came shipped on very low end Atoms with 1GB of RAM; that wouldn't have even been possible with Vista, and those machines would not have sold nearly as well with XP.
After all by SP2 they had worked most of the bugs out of Vista but you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet
1) That was literally years after Vista was out. 2) SP2 ran even worse on the first two generations of hardware sold by OEMs as "Vista Compatible" machines which shipped with Intel graphics and 1GB (or less, sometimes) of RAM. 3) Vista SP2 came out 5 months before Windows 7's RTM. Guess what? Due to how openly available W7 beta and RTM images were at the time, there were more people running it than SP2. 4) Vista never overcame the performance issues endemic to it due to hard drive access and indexing. 5) The UI is still markedly slower than both XP and W7. 6) There is not a single Vista machine out there which would not benefit from W7 in performance, decreases in bugs/stability, and support.
Regarding Windows 8, it fails a crucial test. It does nothing better than Windows 7 does. Microsoft would have been well served to 'refactor' W7 and/or explorer and shipped that as W8, including proper package management alone (with or without their content delivery system). Proper package management, like they were claiming they'd have in the next release of Windows - 6 years ago - would have been enough to not only lead to corporate adoption but speed it. Having dual mode UI (for small screens and/or visually impaired people) would have been a huge win for them on top of that, and there'd have been no
I mean, seriously. Explorer has not had a basic change in functionality since pre-2000. I can understand why they'd want to redo it. Doing a full rewrite of the UI, but making it more customizeable (ie modal, or whatever they wanted) could've been great for everyone. People would've had more options for how they wanted to use their computer. It could have even enabled the mythical "one device is everything and docks wherever" concept many of us have wanted for years: dock your phone at work, it becomes a full desktop, undock it and it's a phone again, and when the day is over, you can undock and take your running browser tabs, etc. home with you.
Maybe I'm over simplifying it, but it seems to me that win32 is a fairly limited set of GUI visual calls. Abstract those window elements and states and make them modal, classing the display functionality. The default class would be the way things are with W7; you could then optionally have any number of other GUI looks and feels, either pre-defined by MS or by a 3rd party (optionally - probably not the direction MS wants to go since they're trying to identity brand the fuck out of Windows now). Changing mode shouldn't have been that hard -a fter all, Windows reloads all visual elements every time you change fonts, resolutions, or windowing elements as it is.
In that light, "Metro"/Standard/Modern or w/e they're calling it, wouldn't have been so bad. In fact, it might have even been nice, as long as the applications themselves were not modal.
Instead, they took a more amateur approach and did something which would've been embarrassing for Apple to do 12 years ago when they designed OS X.
I don't care if they collected statistics on every single Windows user in the US. It wouldn't matter - the premise presented by the statistics which say "people don't use the Start Menu" is invalid.
It doesn't matter if 99% of the population doesn't use it 99% of the time. It's there, and it has a utility. There is still 1 out of 100 people who use it frequently, and the 99% still use it on occasion.
Case in point: I am a keyboard junkie. Windows is a 'toy' OS for me; I run games on it and run it in VMs for the purpose of work applications. I don't uncheck the 'statistics' button (though maybe I should) when doing an install. Yet, I don't think I use the 'start' bar but once or twice a day, if that. I'll hit 'start' and type what I want, and that's the extent of it. Otherwise, the file manager, etc. will remain open at all times for days on end.
What I don't use is the Desktop. But it doesn't matter, because some people do. That's the beauty of a well designed desktop environment - people use it differently. It's why KDE is popular, and it's why
Microsoft should take Windows 9x-XP as a clue. Yes, its basic operation was the only game in town for over a decade: start menu, task bar, task switcher, desktop, 3 buttons at the top of each window, multiple paths to the same functionality with no more than ~3 clicks to any single feature. They completely abandoned that concept, even though it's got to be the most heavily emulated UI out there. They threw that all to the wind with Windows 8, which isn't familiar or comfortable to anyone.
They've already done the hard work to make W8 a 'Windows-like' OS again.
Here's how it works.
* Release OS #1. Public response is, "well this is marginally better in some regards and not a dick in the eye like the last release." * Release updates. Make it slower and consume more resources (though improving stability.) * Release OS #2 after much fanfare. Public response is, "omg my eye". Public holds onto old OS as much as possible. * Hardware support and utility updates to OS #1 slow to a trickle and become spotty. People bemoan having to possibly move to OS #2. * Microsoft releases OS #2 mk2, this time without a lot of the quickly thrown together crap they laid on top of the useful bits. They bolt on some extra things which are unappealing to people. * Public responds, "yay, this is awesome. No more dicks! I" Public puts up with the balls resting on their chin, because at least they're not being skullfucked anymore. * Microsoft is happy, because they got their new framework, API, DRM, or distribution system implemented with people asking for it.
That may not be the intent, but it's usually how it plays out. "Every other major release is usable."
Unfortunately, the 'shared core' is not the 'core'. The core is very much the UI they're shoving on everyone, for every form factor.
How difficult would it have been to keep the old UI and migrate to the new as an option on the desktop? Why abandon.NET (the best general purpose, works-on-everything toolkit available)? There are so many reasons why they've botched this it's not even worth listing them all.
At the very least, they should've taken an approach similar to what Apple did when moving to OS X. Instead, they went that far, and then they stepped - no, jumped - over the precipice Apple was precariously standing on.
But the coming generation is exposed to computing via smartphone first.
Correction: they've been exposed to electronic consumption via the smartphone, first.
Saying they've been 'exposed to computing' due to their smartphone is kind of like saying i've been exposed to the banking industry because I know how to operate an ATM.
What happened to "computing" equating with "able to operate more than a word processor, basic PIM, and email client"? We used to have a word for people who traditionally did that kind of 'computing' task: secretary. The people who did the 'real work' need a slightly broader toolset. Things like:
* media production tools * software production tools * engineering tools * system administrator tools * medical tools
Sure, there can be a great deal of 'dumbing down' in a lot of fields for specific things, and that's fine. But the people who do more than one or two tasks at a time (concurrently)? Yeah, we're going to need something better than what W8 has to offer.
For them, the desktop-as-smartphone will be no big deal, it will feel natural.
And, like the GUI people before them who were unable to replicate the more complex, advanced tasks of the CLI people, the DUI (Dumb User Interface) people will be unable to perform the same tasks as people performing GUI tasks.
(Meanwhile, CLI people will end up looking increasingly like gods.)
Ironically, the Awesome window manager will tile just as you desire (but better). It's been my preferred window manager now for, oh shit, 4 years now?
The 'tiling' in W7 is a joke.
No, it's not available for Windows, but you might be able to get kvm or the like to operate transparently and grant per-window manipulation to the host.
You're possibly correct, but not because they'll be abandoning the PC; the PC is going away. Windows 8 and later will basically be turning software delivery on Windows into another Microsoft console platform. The platform is being locked down, and it will essentially become a Microsoft Store backed console. It's a big part of the reason why Valve is looking at Linux now with great interest.
You realize that even if it were an average of 10% being false, that's an incredibly large number, right?
Assume for a second that even half of those result in a public trial. That's unlikely - these things always get public attention. Generalizing a bit here, but for one out of 10 women who are supposedly raped, there is one man (and possibly his family) who has his life completely destroyed by a false rape accusation. That almost seems to "balance" the cosmic scales a bit (if such a thing could be balanced).
The false accuser should be prosecuted for the life-rape s/he performed. But that doesn't happen, it's just written off.
No dependency tracking - true, but the base install contains everything you need for a pretty substantial install. And if you're installing servers and working machine rather than desktops, you probably don't need to touch anything.
Until there's a vulnerability in something you installed and you then need to upgrade. Then you're pretty well fucked and are going to likely end up with a mess of broken dependenies and/or substantial downtime while you upgrade.
That's not exactly how it works, and it doesn't cost nearly that much for them to put bandwidth into the tower.
Locations with 100 or so customers rarely have much more than just network roaming or, basically, EDGE. Sometimes there's no data in the area, just cellular. For instance, ATT has been selling big in my area (150k 'metro' area) but the outlying areas really don't have much more than basic cellular service due to population density.
Keep in mind, 100 users means an income of $5k/month minimum. That's about maybe 30 families, and a very rural location indeed.
What a surprise: administrators can read your email.
This is not a surprise. So can managers. They can do a lot more than that, too, like send email from you. We're trained to not do this, of course - just as users are trained to not use work resources for personal use to avoid the possibility of a personal privacy breech. This is not a very big request, and it's violation has obvious consequences brought on by your own actions.
People have two basic choices: use work things which can be monitored, or use personal things which can not be (by work) - and deal with the consequences of having your data lost and devices hacked, and us not caring.
The problem is that investigations like this are often enough to effectively end the wrongly accused's life, alienating the accused from his friends and family and likely leading to loss of employment. This is more true with small localities, and most certainly true when the person accused is a tradesman or someone who makes a living on his name (sales, business owners, etc.).
The investigations need to be more private. This kind of thing needs to be approached responsibly. "Local businessman accused of rape" should not be in the papers, ever.
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* pull a disappearing act. This would probably involve my house and/or vehicle blowing up. This may or may not coincidentially coincide with me cooking dinner on the gas stove or filling up fuel. The 'escape' part is the secret spy stuff we won't talk about, because that's secret and the hardest part. The secret part is that it's really not that difficult - they just have to be thrown off your trail long enough to think you're still close enough to find or catch. Being presumed dead works well for having them stay still and look for your remains.
* hit up as many banks and ATMs as possible for cash while they're still looking for you. Ideally, have an accomplice do it for you, contacted in a clandestine fashion.
* place as many covert monitoring devices on or near the people monitoring me as possible.
* disappear. Possibly somewhere in the woods, possibly to a cafe in Europe - who knows? That's the point. If I tell anyone, I'm not below the radar. Ideally, give every indication that I have no intention of returning.
* Wait until they're least expecting it (hopefully you made a thorough disappearing act), and kill them all like in the opening scenes of Commando.
Avoid causing them, or avoid them outright? Because those are two drastically different things.
The first assumes the following:
* we are not only capable but responsible for climatic changes, despite the energy requirement calculations required for such volumetric changes not even being remotely possible using existing technology
* the claims and panic about CFCs before they were banned was not only justified, but technically correct (both of which have been repeatedly shown to be false)
Avoiding climatic warming brought on by the sun is more tenable than reversing what you're thinking is possible, because reality would have to be other than it is, first.
I've had to do it 4 times on a single Windows 7 install (virtualized, hardware upgrade, hardware upgrade, migration), and god knows how many times I've had to do it on Windows Server 2003 while virtualizing. Kinda a common (irritating) thing to have to do.
Are you serious?
There was no DRM on XP, not unless you're referring to Windows authentication. There were (and still are) legitimate gripes about that: it's absurd that I have to call Microsoft for authentication when (not if) the authentication app fails.
The "FUD" you're referring to was (and still is) legitimate agitation amongst community members (and professionals) who don't want to have to put up with the shit Microsoft's pushing, because it makes our lives more difficult. You'll recall there wasn't much bitching or moaning when Windows 7 came out - it was almost universally appreciated as Something Better. Why? Because the amount of cockamamie bullshit was markedly lower than with either XP or Vista.
People are dishing on Windows 8 because it sucks. Do you have any idea how many non-geeks think that, having simply seen pictures of it? They think it's ugly. Then you let them try it and they think it's confusing and difficult to use. We do not want the support burden and increased cost (time/money/whatever) of having to deal with it. For my family, I will be moving them 100% to Linux before I let them touch W8, if they want support.
It isn't. Specifically, it uses a shim to provide LDAP/Krb functionality. It's not part of the default feature set, and it's implemented poorly and insecurely. The only way to securely use it is to replicate to something else on a back channel and then provide auth through that channel instead.
It has a lot of nice features not natively available in an ldap/krb install, and serves much the same functionality, but LDAP/Kerberos it is not.
Also, W7 can't authenticate against an existing kerberos/ldap system without the use of Samba as an intermediary.
I've noticed that Windows 7 performs very, very poorly on SMB/CIFS file transfer if it's copying to or from Samba. Is that what you're running into? In general, it seems like MS releases a new 'breaks Samba compatibility and/or utility' patch which effects nothing else every couple months.
W7 to W7, W7 to 2k8, etc. all work very well.
XP x64 is about the worst Windows OS regarding drivers. It's also about as stable as 98. Why on earth would you use it? It was abandoned by Microsoft even before Vista was released, or so it seems.
From the "Large Enterprise" point of view the only reason "Windows 7 is the Next Windows XP" is because Microsoft is going to stop supporting Windows XP. They don't need anything Windows 7 or 8 provides. All they care is that Windows XP keeps running the applications they need.
Eh, they need some things, they just don't know it.
* more secure RDP
* more stable
* more secure in general
* better management ability through AD GPO
As for moving the goal posts, you really are absolutely correct. It's why they're ditching .NET and moving to HTML/Javascript - because it's their implementation engine only which would need to be emulated/copied, and that can't be done nearly as effectively as just an API. That, and .NET has made some tremendous inroads on Linux and the like via Mono, which seems to get more functional by the day. By moving to whatever they're using now, they're effectively making Mono and WINE both 'legacy' apps. There will be no possibility of running future Windows applications on a Mac or Linux.
Windows 7 is the first Microsoft OS I've not disliked substantially. In fact, it's the first Windows which doesn't have any glaring shortcomings, and is better in every way than the two previous releases.
How's that for a glowing endorsement?
* Windows 95 was unstable as hell and had constant problems (memory leaks, instability, glitchy UI, didn't work well with protected mode DOS applications or games). But the hardware support and, importantly, better GUI, somewhat made up for this. I could still drop to DOS (or some semblance of it) for games and what have you.
* Windows 98 was more-or-less a facelift to 95. Performance was a bit better (though it was more bloated, too), it was much more stable, and compatibility was better in many regards. Most games no longer needed DOS.
* Windows 2000 was a huge performance improvement over 98. Stability was astronomically better. But! games didn't run nearly as well, and they still hadn't fixed many of the visual/GUI glitches dating back to 95. The 2D/3D display systems often fought with each other and older games were often difficult to get working properly. TCP/IP finally became useful.
* ME isn't worth mentioning. It was a bag of dicks.
* XP was more stable than 2000 and seemed to take less memory over time. It didn't need the "reinstall every 3 months" fix that every previous version of Windows did - it could go 5 or 6 months, maybe even 7 if you were really careful. There were still many, many networking related (TCP, NETBIOS/CIFS/SMB) issues.
* Vista is/was a lumbering piece of junk. Everything performed worse than XP unless you had well over 2GB of RAM, and then only most things were worse. Everything was inconsistent, and finding anything in the control panel was a huge pain.
* Windows 7 fixed pretty much all of the performance issues in Vista, and then some. Performance was/is roughly on par with XP regarding memory use, and disk access and display performance are suitable again. Compatibility is better than Vista. Reinstalls due to the system dicking itself seem to be largely gone; malware and self-dicking seem to be the only criteria for a reinstall. The UI and location of important applets is more consistent, clean, and glitch-free. Proper multiuser is finally implemented to a suitable degree, and aside from the constant stream of 'required updates' which break compatibility with non-MS products (specifically, Samba), networking is markedly improved as well. It was the first version of Windows to not regularly need an ethernet driver disk after initial install, and the driver installation framework was greatly improved. It was also the first Windows in almost a decade to catch up with Linux in terms of visual finesse and hardware detection lack-of-headache.
* W8 is slightly faster on the visual end in and of itself, but it's slower in pretty much every other regard. It takes longer (in absolute terms) to do pretty much everything. Even though I personally run almost everything full screen, the 'full screen only' mode, with the associated "can't get back to where you just were working" nature of it makes it unusable. Server 2012 is markedly better, and if I'm forced to I'll end up using that with the classicshell, but for god's sake W8 is a mess.
The biggest improvement in W7 over Vista isn't visual, though they did a hell of a lot of spit and polish on that. It's the reduced disk access requirements. Whatever they did, it's night and day.
The thing is, Windows 7 was a genuine improvement over not only Windows Vista, but Windows XP (on hardware which supported it).
It ran faster, took less time to boot, and generally abused the hard drive less. If you had 1GB of RAM, the only sound advice for a Windows user was "use Windows 7". Hell, a year or so later, W7 came shipped on very low end Atoms with 1GB of RAM; that wouldn't have even been possible with Vista, and those machines would not have sold nearly as well with XP.
After all by SP2 they had worked most of the bugs out of Vista but you still can't get most people to even think of taking Vista on a bet
1) That was literally years after Vista was out.
2) SP2 ran even worse on the first two generations of hardware sold by OEMs as "Vista Compatible" machines which shipped with Intel graphics and 1GB (or less, sometimes) of RAM.
3) Vista SP2 came out 5 months before Windows 7's RTM. Guess what? Due to how openly available W7 beta and RTM images were at the time, there were more people running it than SP2.
4) Vista never overcame the performance issues endemic to it due to hard drive access and indexing.
5) The UI is still markedly slower than both XP and W7.
6) There is not a single Vista machine out there which would not benefit from W7 in performance, decreases in bugs/stability, and support.
Regarding Windows 8, it fails a crucial test. It does nothing better than Windows 7 does. Microsoft would have been well served to 'refactor' W7 and/or explorer and shipped that as W8, including proper package management alone (with or without their content delivery system). Proper package management, like they were claiming they'd have in the next release of Windows - 6 years ago - would have been enough to not only lead to corporate adoption but speed it. Having dual mode UI (for small screens and/or visually impaired people) would have been a huge win for them on top of that, and there'd have been no
I mean, seriously. Explorer has not had a basic change in functionality since pre-2000. I can understand why they'd want to redo it. Doing a full rewrite of the UI, but making it more customizeable (ie modal, or whatever they wanted) could've been great for everyone. People would've had more options for how they wanted to use their computer. It could have even enabled the mythical "one device is everything and docks wherever" concept many of us have wanted for years: dock your phone at work, it becomes a full desktop, undock it and it's a phone again, and when the day is over, you can undock and take your running browser tabs, etc. home with you.
Maybe I'm over simplifying it, but it seems to me that win32 is a fairly limited set of GUI visual calls. Abstract those window elements and states and make them modal, classing the display functionality. The default class would be the way things are with W7; you could then optionally have any number of other GUI looks and feels, either pre-defined by MS or by a 3rd party (optionally - probably not the direction MS wants to go since they're trying to identity brand the fuck out of Windows now). Changing mode shouldn't have been that hard -a fter all, Windows reloads all visual elements every time you change fonts, resolutions, or windowing elements as it is.
In that light, "Metro"/Standard/Modern or w/e they're calling it, wouldn't have been so bad. In fact, it might have even been nice, as long as the applications themselves were not modal.
Instead, they took a more amateur approach and did something which would've been embarrassing for Apple to do 12 years ago when they designed OS X.
I don't care if they collected statistics on every single Windows user in the US. It wouldn't matter - the premise presented by the statistics which say "people don't use the Start Menu" is invalid.
It doesn't matter if 99% of the population doesn't use it 99% of the time. It's there, and it has a utility. There is still 1 out of 100 people who use it frequently, and the 99% still use it on occasion.
Case in point: I am a keyboard junkie. Windows is a 'toy' OS for me; I run games on it and run it in VMs for the purpose of work applications. I don't uncheck the 'statistics' button (though maybe I should) when doing an install. Yet, I don't think I use the 'start' bar but once or twice a day, if that. I'll hit 'start' and type what I want, and that's the extent of it. Otherwise, the file manager, etc. will remain open at all times for days on end.
What I don't use is the Desktop. But it doesn't matter, because some people do. That's the beauty of a well designed desktop environment - people use it differently. It's why KDE is popular, and it's why
Microsoft should take Windows 9x-XP as a clue. Yes, its basic operation was the only game in town for over a decade: start menu, task bar, task switcher, desktop, 3 buttons at the top of each window, multiple paths to the same functionality with no more than ~3 clicks to any single feature. They completely abandoned that concept, even though it's got to be the most heavily emulated UI out there. They threw that all to the wind with Windows 8, which isn't familiar or comfortable to anyone.
They've already done the hard work to make W8 a 'Windows-like' OS again.
Here's how it works.
* Release OS #1. Public response is, "well this is marginally better in some regards and not a dick in the eye like the last release."
* Release updates. Make it slower and consume more resources (though improving stability.)
* Release OS #2 after much fanfare. Public response is, "omg my eye". Public holds onto old OS as much as possible.
* Hardware support and utility updates to OS #1 slow to a trickle and become spotty. People bemoan having to possibly move to OS #2.
* Microsoft releases OS #2 mk2, this time without a lot of the quickly thrown together crap they laid on top of the useful bits. They bolt on some extra things which are unappealing to people.
* Public responds, "yay, this is awesome. No more dicks! I" Public puts up with the balls resting on their chin, because at least they're not being skullfucked anymore.
* Microsoft is happy, because they got their new framework, API, DRM, or distribution system implemented with people asking for it.
That may not be the intent, but it's usually how it plays out. "Every other major release is usable."
We get it.
Unfortunately, the 'shared core' is not the 'core'. The core is very much the UI they're shoving on everyone, for every form factor.
How difficult would it have been to keep the old UI and migrate to the new as an option on the desktop? Why abandon .NET (the best general purpose, works-on-everything toolkit available)? There are so many reasons why they've botched this it's not even worth listing them all.
At the very least, they should've taken an approach similar to what Apple did when moving to OS X. Instead, they went that far, and then they stepped - no, jumped - over the precipice Apple was precariously standing on.
But the coming generation is exposed to computing via smartphone first.
Correction: they've been exposed to electronic consumption via the smartphone, first.
Saying they've been 'exposed to computing' due to their smartphone is kind of like saying i've been exposed to the banking industry because I know how to operate an ATM.
What happened to "computing" equating with "able to operate more than a word processor, basic PIM, and email client"? We used to have a word for people who traditionally did that kind of 'computing' task: secretary. The people who did the 'real work' need a slightly broader toolset. Things like:
* media production tools
* software production tools
* engineering tools
* system administrator tools
* medical tools
Sure, there can be a great deal of 'dumbing down' in a lot of fields for specific things, and that's fine. But the people who do more than one or two tasks at a time (concurrently)? Yeah, we're going to need something better than what W8 has to offer.
For them, the desktop-as-smartphone will be no big deal, it will feel natural.
And, like the GUI people before them who were unable to replicate the more complex, advanced tasks of the CLI people, the DUI (Dumb User Interface) people will be unable to perform the same tasks as people performing GUI tasks.
(Meanwhile, CLI people will end up looking increasingly like gods.)
Ironically, the Awesome window manager will tile just as you desire (but better). It's been my preferred window manager now for, oh shit, 4 years now?
The 'tiling' in W7 is a joke.
No, it's not available for Windows, but you might be able to get kvm or the like to operate transparently and grant per-window manipulation to the host.
You're possibly correct, but not because they'll be abandoning the PC; the PC is going away. Windows 8 and later will basically be turning software delivery on Windows into another Microsoft console platform. The platform is being locked down, and it will essentially become a Microsoft Store backed console. It's a big part of the reason why Valve is looking at Linux now with great interest.
This is the first time I'm hearing of the game.
Their numbers have got to be bogus.
You realize that even if it were an average of 10% being false, that's an incredibly large number, right?
Assume for a second that even half of those result in a public trial. That's unlikely - these things always get public attention. Generalizing a bit here, but for one out of 10 women who are supposedly raped, there is one man (and possibly his family) who has his life completely destroyed by a false rape accusation. That almost seems to "balance" the cosmic scales a bit (if such a thing could be balanced).
The false accuser should be prosecuted for the life-rape s/he performed. But that doesn't happen, it's just written off.
No dependency tracking - true, but the base install contains everything you need for a pretty substantial install. And if you're installing servers and working machine rather than desktops, you probably don't need to touch anything.
Until there's a vulnerability in something you installed and you then need to upgrade. Then you're pretty well fucked and are going to likely end up with a mess of broken dependenies and/or substantial downtime while you upgrade.
That's not exactly how it works, and it doesn't cost nearly that much for them to put bandwidth into the tower.
Locations with 100 or so customers rarely have much more than just network roaming or, basically, EDGE. Sometimes there's no data in the area, just cellular. For instance, ATT has been selling big in my area (150k 'metro' area) but the outlying areas really don't have much more than basic cellular service due to population density.
Keep in mind, 100 users means an income of $5k/month minimum. That's about maybe 30 families, and a very rural location indeed.
What a surprise: administrators can read your email.
This is not a surprise. So can managers. They can do a lot more than that, too, like send email from you. We're trained to not do this, of course - just as users are trained to not use work resources for personal use to avoid the possibility of a personal privacy breech. This is not a very big request, and it's violation has obvious consequences brought on by your own actions.
People have two basic choices: use work things which can be monitored, or use personal things which can not be (by work) - and deal with the consequences of having your data lost and devices hacked, and us not caring.
Yes. You want to force a woman who has been raped to go through a traumatizing 9 months gestation and to bring up a baby she didn't want or ask for.
I never said I did. I don't.
The problem is that investigations like this are often enough to effectively end the wrongly accused's life, alienating the accused from his friends and family and likely leading to loss of employment. This is more true with small localities, and most certainly true when the person accused is a tradesman or someone who makes a living on his name (sales, business owners, etc.).
The investigations need to be more private. This kind of thing needs to be approached responsibly. "Local businessman accused of rape" should not be in the papers, ever.