Nothing I mentioned is a "workaround." Most of it has been the expected way to get to settings and programs since Windows Vista (and even more so in Windows 7, which many people love), so I don't know why you claim it's a "workaround." It's not any less usable or functional than Windows 7. It's certainly not "less stable" - I don't even know why you'd make that claim. The core OS is far more stable and MUCH faster than any of its predecessors.
The "nightmarishly bad UI" is barely even there when you're working from the desktop, so I don't really get all of the animosity. Some people just hate change, regardless of the value of the changes.
"Things that used to be two clicks or even one in XP and still are in Linux now take 8-10 clicks in and out of Metro to do the same thing."
Then you're doing it wrong. Press Windows key (or Windows+S), type, click or press enter on the one you want. For example, mouse settings - Windows key, type mouse, click one. You can do this with any program or setting. You could do pretty much the same in Win7's start menu, but it's faster in Win8. Even with Windows 7, I've never understand why people think navigating through folders in the Start menu or going through Control panel is faster or easier.
Even better, try Win+X for the "expert menu." When I work on Win7 VMs now, the UI feels slow and awkward to navigate because I can get to a lot of things much faster in Win8.1. And I use it on a quad-monitor development box with no touch.
As for "Metro" - it's not that bad. Stop whining about change. You never have to use it if you don't want to. I use the start screen for pinned tiles that show me stock quotes, weather, calendar, and news. It's handy for that. I snap Xbox Music to the side of one monitor. Otherwise, I don't use modern apps on my dev box. I do use them on my Surface for touch. Either way, I'm not forced to use it and the OS works quite well.
If you are using IE7, temporarily change the pop-up blocker settings to High - it blocks everything, and you just get to the video pages when you click the various links - not one pop-up.
It does not surprise me at all that Sony is at the bottom of the list. I used to work for a company that handled ALL inbound sales calls for Sony VAIO Direct. We sold their computers, notebooks, monitors, digital cameras, and a lot more. The products were cool, but I can't tell you how often we had people calling us because the Support people just flat-out sucked. When we tried to transfer them to Sony's support, they made it very difficult and would give us a hassle about sending customers over. Care to know what the most common response was (according to the customers we talked to) from the support folks? "You need to buy a new motherboard." The motherboards for those systems were mostly-proprietary pieces of crap that Sony charged $500+ for, even on models that were 3+ years old. In most cases, I doubt the problem even was the motherboard, but they really didn't care.
> Stock option discounts will be reduced to 10% from 15%.
Actually, your statement is incorrect. The reduction affects the Employee Stock Purchase Program, which allows employees to contribute a percentage of their salary to a fund that is used every 6 months or so to purchase MSFT stock. The reduction pertains to how much of the employee's salary can be used to purchase stock - instead of 15%, it's now reduced to 10%. I know some employees that aren't happy about it, but it's not like anyone's really getting screwed as part of that particular cutback.
Next time, run Dr. Watson while you're using the machine - it'll tell you why it crashed. Put it in the startup group. You're a computer engineer, not a fool, so start acting like the former and not the latter - learn the tool.
I believe the point is that it *shouldn't* crash so much in the first place. One shouldn't have to have something like "Dr. Watson" just to use their computer for a normal task. I prefer to have a doctor for things that are wrong with me, not my Operating System... I expect my OS to work in the first place.
Hmmm... try doing Start Menu -> Run -> FTP. Hmmm... works just like it does on SunOS, Linux and FreeBSD as far as I could see...
Erm... not even *close* MS's attempt at a *nix-like FTP program is a joke, plain and simple. It doesn't have all of the commands that it should, and the ones it does have hardly ever work properly. I don't consider that a viable alternative to FTP on my Linux box...
MSPaint - on Windows 98, it even saves out as JPEG and GIF, as well as BMP format
You consider MSPaint an image manipulation program? You must not do anything more than flipping your pictures upside-down. Even *simple* image manipulation usually entails more than just flipping images a bit, or saving them to a different format.
Hmmm... I could have done it in about 1 minute... looks like you should go back to school.
No, more likely, you should be the one to do so... people who have little or no experience with anything but Windows often whinge about how much *nix OS's suck because they don't know the real power they can get from their computer. Perhaps if you were used to the efficiency, speed and power that you can get from *nix, you wouldn't be quite so blind, and would be able to see how badly Windows does things. The very reason that us *nix users complain about Windoze quite so often is because we're used to something better. Imagine driving a Pinto when you're used to driving a Corvette/Ferrari/some-nice/fancy-car...
-- Jeffrey Cutting / System Admin - midnightrealm.org
Billions of chromosomes.... I'm not sure that's possible.
I'm assuming that you mean 'billions of genes'.. human beings have only 46 chromosomes - 23 from each parent's cell (the sperm and egg cells are, in fact, the only cells in the human body that only have one set of chromosomes, instead of the normal pair).
Just my little anal correction.. no offense intended.;) -- Jeffrey Cutting / System Admin - midnightrealm.org
Nothing... it was actually only around $20,000, this according to some newspaper articles I've read. That, and I recall some kind of quote from a producer or something about it being about the price of a new Ford Taurus, or something to that effect... nowhere near $40,000, but either way, it's quite impressive what the movie has done on such a low budget.
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Nothing I mentioned is a "workaround." Most of it has been the expected way to get to settings and programs since Windows Vista (and even more so in Windows 7, which many people love), so I don't know why you claim it's a "workaround." It's not any less usable or functional than Windows 7. It's certainly not "less stable" - I don't even know why you'd make that claim. The core OS is far more stable and MUCH faster than any of its predecessors.
The "nightmarishly bad UI" is barely even there when you're working from the desktop, so I don't really get all of the animosity. Some people just hate change, regardless of the value of the changes.
"Things that used to be two clicks or even one in XP and still are in Linux now take 8-10 clicks in and out of Metro to do the same thing."
Then you're doing it wrong. Press Windows key (or Windows+S), type, click or press enter on the one you want. For example, mouse settings - Windows key, type mouse, click one. You can do this with any program or setting. You could do pretty much the same in Win7's start menu, but it's faster in Win8. Even with Windows 7, I've never understand why people think navigating through folders in the Start menu or going through Control panel is faster or easier.
Even better, try Win+X for the "expert menu." When I work on Win7 VMs now, the UI feels slow and awkward to navigate because I can get to a lot of things much faster in Win8.1. And I use it on a quad-monitor development box with no touch.
As for "Metro" - it's not that bad. Stop whining about change. You never have to use it if you don't want to. I use the start screen for pinned tiles that show me stock quotes, weather, calendar, and news. It's handy for that. I snap Xbox Music to the side of one monitor. Otherwise, I don't use modern apps on my dev box. I do use them on my Surface for touch. Either way, I'm not forced to use it and the OS works quite well.
If you are using IE7, temporarily change the pop-up blocker settings to High - it blocks everything, and you just get to the video pages when you click the various links - not one pop-up.
It does not surprise me at all that Sony is at the bottom of the list. I used to work for a company that handled ALL inbound sales calls for Sony VAIO Direct. We sold their computers, notebooks, monitors, digital cameras, and a lot more. The products were cool, but I can't tell you how often we had people calling us because the Support people just flat-out sucked. When we tried to transfer them to Sony's support, they made it very difficult and would give us a hassle about sending customers over. Care to know what the most common response was (according to the customers we talked to) from the support folks? "You need to buy a new motherboard." The motherboards for those systems were mostly-proprietary pieces of crap that Sony charged $500+ for, even on models that were 3+ years old. In most cases, I doubt the problem even was the motherboard, but they really didn't care.
> Stock option discounts will be reduced to 10% from 15%.
Actually, your statement is incorrect. The reduction affects the Employee Stock Purchase Program, which allows employees to contribute a percentage of their salary to a fund that is used every 6 months or so to purchase MSFT stock. The reduction pertains to how much of the employee's salary can be used to purchase stock - instead of 15%, it's now reduced to 10%. I know some employees that aren't happy about it, but it's not like anyone's really getting screwed as part of that particular cutback.
Next time, run Dr. Watson while you're using the machine - it'll tell you why it crashed. Put it in the startup group. You're a computer engineer, not a fool, so start acting like the former and not the latter - learn the tool.
I believe the point is that it *shouldn't* crash so much in the first place. One shouldn't have to have something like "Dr. Watson" just to use their computer for a normal task. I prefer to have a doctor for things that are wrong with me, not my Operating System ... I expect my OS to work in the first place.
Hmmm... try doing Start Menu -> Run -> FTP. Hmmm... works just like it does on SunOS, Linux and FreeBSD as far as I could see...
Erm ... not even *close* MS's attempt at a *nix-like FTP program is a joke, plain and simple. It doesn't have all of the commands that it should, and the ones it does have hardly ever work properly. I don't consider that a viable alternative to FTP on my Linux box ...
MSPaint - on Windows 98, it even saves out as JPEG and GIF, as well as BMP format
You consider MSPaint an image manipulation program? You must not do anything more than flipping your pictures upside-down. Even *simple* image manipulation usually entails more than just flipping images a bit, or saving them to a different format.
Hmmm... I could have done it in about 1 minute... looks like you should go back to school.
No, more likely, you should be the one to do so ... people who have little or no experience with anything but Windows often whinge about how much *nix OS's suck because they don't know the real power they can get from their computer. Perhaps if you were used to the efficiency, speed and power that you can get from *nix, you wouldn't be quite so blind, and would be able to see how badly Windows does things. The very reason that us *nix users complain about Windoze quite so often is because we're used to something better. Imagine driving a Pinto when you're used to driving a Corvette/Ferrari/some-nice/fancy-car ...
-- Jeffrey Cutting / System Admin - midnightrealm.org
Billions of chromosomes.... I'm not sure that's possible.
.. human beings have only 46 chromosomes - 23 from each parent's cell (the sperm and egg cells are, in fact, the only cells in the human body that only have one set of chromosomes, instead of the normal pair).
.. no offense intended. ;)
I'm assuming that you mean 'billions of genes'
Just my little anal correction
-- Jeffrey Cutting / System Admin - midnightrealm.org
Note: Pokemon is a product, Nintendo is the company ... ;)
J
-- Jeffrey Cutting / System Admin - midnightrealm.org
Nothing ... it was actually only around $20,000, this according to some newspaper articles I've read. That, and I recall some kind of quote from a producer or something about it being about the price of a new Ford Taurus, or something to that effect ... nowhere near $40,000, but either way, it's quite impressive what the movie has done on such a low budget.